So I dropped by her home near Plaza Dubrovnik one evening, to rouse her from her irresponsible indifference. When she answered the door there were paint smudges on her face and hands.
“Freya,” I scolded her. “How could you take up an entirely new hobby when there is a case to be solved?”
“Generously I allow you entrance after such a false accusation,” she said. “But you will have to eat your words.”
She led me downstairs to her basement laboratory, which extended the entire length and breadth of her villa. There on a big white-topped table lay Heidi Van Seegeren’s Monet, looking like the three—dimensional geologic map of some minerally blessed country.
“What’s this?” I exclaimed. “Why is this here?”
“I believe it is a fake,” she said shortly, returning to a computer console.
“Wait a moment!” I cried. On the table around the painting were rolls of recording chart paper, lab notebooks, and what looked like black-and-white photos of the painting. “What do you mean?”
After tapping at the console she turned to me. “I mean, I believe it’s a fake.”
“But I thought art forgery was extinct. It is too easy to discover a fake.”
“Ha!” She waved a finger at me angrily. “You pick a bad time to say so. It is a common opinion, of course, but not necessarily true.”
I regarded the canvas more closely. “What makes you think this a fake? I thought it was judged a masterpiece of its period.”
“Something you said first caused me to question it,” she said. “You mentioned that the painting seemed to have been created by an artist familiar with the light of Terminator. This seemed true to me, and it caused mc to reflect that one of the classic signs of a fake was anachronistic sensibility—that is to say, the forger injects into his vision of the past some element of his time that is so much a part of his sensibility that he cannot perceive it. Thus the Victorians faked Renaissance faces with a sentimentality that only they could not immediately see.”
“I see.” I nodded sagely. “It did seem that cathedral had been struck with Solday light, didn’t it.”
“Yes. The trouble is, I have been able to find no sign of forgery in the physical properties of the painting.” She shook her head. “And after three weeks of uninterrupted chemical analysis, that is beginning to worry me.”
“But Freya,” I said, as something occurred to me. ‘Does all this have a bearing on the Musgrave murder?”
“I think so,” she replied. “And if not, it is certainly more interesting. But I believe it does.”
I nodded. “So what, exactly, have you found?”
She smiled ironically. “You truly want to know? Well. The best test for anachronisms is the polonium 210, radium 226 equilibrium—”
“Please, Freya. No jargon.”
“Jargon!” She raised an eyebrow to scorn me. “There is no such thing. Intelligence is like mold in a petri dish—as it eats ever deeper into the agar of reality, language has to expand with it to describe what has been digested. Each specialty provides the new vocabulary for its area of feeding and gets accused of fabricating jargon by those who know no better. I’m surprised to bear such nonsense from you. Or perhaps not.”
“Very well,” I said, hands up. “Still, you must communicate your meaning to me.”
“I shall. First I analyzed the canvas. The material and its weave match the characteristics of the canvas made by the factory outside Paris that provided Monet throughout the painting of the Rouen cathedral series. Both the fabric and the glue appear very old, though there is no precise dating technique for them. And there was no trace of solvents that might have been used to strip paint off a genuine canvas of the period.
“I then turned to the paint. Follow so far?” she asked sharply. “Paint?”
“You may proceed without further sarcasm, unless unable to control yourself.”
“The palette of an artist as famous as Monet has been studied in detail, so that we know he preferred cadmium yellow to chromium yellow or Naples yellow, that he tended to use Prussian blue rather than cobalt blue, and so on.” She tapped the flecks of blue at the base of the cathedral. “Prussian blue.”
“You’ve taken paint off the canvas?”
“How else test it? But I took very small samples, I assure you. Whatever the truth concerning the work, it remains a masterpiece, and I would not mar it. Besides, most of my tests were on the white paint, of which there is a great quantity, as you can see.”
“Why the white paint?” I leaned over to stare more closely at the canvas.
“Because lead white is one of the best dating tools we have. The manufacturing methods used to make it changed frequently around Monet’s time, and each change in method altered the chemical composition of the paint. After 1870, for instance, the cheaper zinc white was used to adulterate lead white, so there should be over one percent zinc in Monet’s lead white.”
“And is that what you found?”
“Yes. The atomic absorption spectrum showed—” She dug around in the pile of chart paper on the table— “Well, take my word for it—”
“I will.”
“Nearly twelve percent. And the silver content for late nineteenth century lead white should be around four parts per million, the copper content about sixty parts per million. So it is with this paint. There is no insoluble antimony component, as there would be if the paint had been manufactured after 194.0. The X-ray diffraction pattern”—she unrolled a length of chart paper and showed me where three sharp peaks in a row had been penned by the machine—”is exactly right, and there is the proper balance of polonium 210 and radium 226. That’s very important, by the way, because when lead white is manufactured the radioactive balance of some of its elements is upset, and it takes a good three hundred years for them to decay back to equilibrium. And this paint is indeed back to that equilibrium.”
“So the paints are Monet’s,” I concluded. “Doesn’t that prove the work authentic?”
“Perhaps,” Freya admitted. “But as I was doing all this analysis, it occurred to me that a modern forger has just as much information concerning Monet’s palette as I do. With a modern laboratory it would be possible to use such information as a recipe, so to speak, and then to synthesize paints that would match the recipe exactly. Even the radioactively decayed lead white could be arranged, by avoiding the procedures that disrupt the radioactive balance in the first place!”
“Wouldn’t that be terrifically complicated?”
Freya stared at me. “Obviously, Nathaniel, we are dealing with a very very meticulous faker here. But how else could it be done, in this day and age? Why else do it at all? The complete faker must take care to anticipate every test available, and then in a modern laboratory create the appropriate results for every one of them. It’s admirable!”
“Assuming there ever was such a forger,” I said dubiously. “It seems to me that what you have actually done here is prove the painting genuine.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But even with these paints made by recipe, as you call them, the faker would still have to paint the painting!”
“Exactly. Conceive the painting, and execute it. It becomes very impressive, I confess.” She walked around the table to look at the work from the correct angle. “I do believe this is one of the best of the Rouen cathedral series— astonishing, that a forger would be capable of it.”
“That brings up another matter,” I said “Doesn’t this work have a five-hundred-year-old pedigree? How could a whole history have been provided for it?”
“Good question. But I believe I have discovered the way. Let’s go upstairs—you interrupted my preparations for lunch, and I’m hungry.”