A Nearly Perfect Copy: A Novel Page 16

  At Ambrosine, the ubiquitous Cy Twombly was showing. In the window hung a colossal canvas. It was several shades of pale blue, from cyan to titanium to cadet, each seamlessly integrated with white swirls descending the canvas like streaming tears. Something looked strange to Gabriel—the light reflecting off the window?—but then he realized the painting was done in acrylics. He nearly laughed out loud. Acrylics were the fingerpaints of the art world, the medium of Sunday river painters and rich American art vacationers. Of course, when someone as great as Twombly used them, they were ironic, but to everyone else they were cheap, easily manipulated, and somehow too shiny and artificial. They looked ephemeral compared to the aristocratic authority of oils, with their distinct linseed smell and blunted peaks. You had to really layer on acrylics to get them to have the texture of oils. Of course, Gabriel did not fail to notice the discreet red dot in the lower-right-hand corner of the description. Someone had bought this shit.

  Inside the gallery an improbably androgynous assistant sat behind a long glass desk bereft of anything other than a keyboard. He/she was peering down into the table, and it took a minute for Gabriel to realize the monitor was embedded in the glass. He cleared his throat.

  The androgyne made no sign of acknowledgment. Gabriel cleared his throat again, louder.

  “May I help you, monsieur?” There was a long pause between you and monsieur, emphasizing that the asker was not sure if he deserved the honorific.

  “I’m looking for Lise Girard.”

  The man—Gabriel now saw an Adam’s apple—waved his hand in a gesture of incomprehension or dismissal.

  “We are not a missing persons bureau,” the man said. He swept his hair out of his eyes with one hand.

  “I’m not looking for her,” Gabriel said. He had chosen the wrong word. “I have … an appointment.” He wondered how much jail time he would do for slashing a Twombly canvas. Or slashing a supercilious Ambrosine intern.

  Without altering his scowl, the intern picked up a thin silver phone from under the desk. He could hear it ring in the bowels of the gallery. Lise came out, clicking fast in her high heels. She wore a pencil skirt, and he could see, even though she was thin, the traces of her three pregnancies in her belly.

  “Thanks, Claude,” she said, motioning Gabriel to follow her into a small, windowless office. It was crowded with catalogs, all up the walls and stacked on the floor.

  “What’s in there?” She pointed to his makeshift portfolio.

  “Nothing,” Gabriel said. “Something I’m delivering.”

  “For Rosenzweig? Can I see? What is it?”

  “I don’t want to unpack it.”

  “Come on,” Lise said. She reached around him to grab the briefcase from his hand. “Show me. I’ll have one of the peons wrap it back up better than this Naugahyde folder.”

  Before he could protest, she had the briefcase in her hands and, gloves on, was unzipping it. She placed the disastrous drawing on a flat table in her office, the only noncovered surface, and inhaled. She tilted a lamp to shine the light directly on the drawing and leaned so that her face was inches away from the page, examining the ink.

  Gabriel sucked in his breath. He was sure she was debating how best to put the delicate question. It was obviously drawn in his own hand, inexpertly at that. He let himself smile a bit as he enjoyed her obvious discomfort, imagining her mind spinning through the possibilities: Édouard had been duped; Gabriel had been duped, had tried to fake a drawing.

  When she straightened up, she was not smiling. “Amazing,” she said. “It’s fascinating to see the changes from sketch to painting, isn’t it? I mean, I recognize the theme, the composition, certain elements, from … what’s that one Connois called? With the market?”

  Lise paused. Gabriel did not answer her. He was shocked. Did she really not see that the sketch was a fake? Was she so gullible or superficial that she didn’t see the hesitation in the lines, the disproportion in the figures? Or did people really expect so little of sketches that they were willing to assume any mistakes would be smoothed over in oil paint? Maybe she was teasing him, trying to see if he would correct her. “Víspera de Fiesta,” he said, finally.

  “The other one,” she said. “With the old woman.”

  “La Vieja? There’s no old woman in this one.”

  “Yes, but”—Lise grabbed a pencil and pointed the nonsharpened end at the paper—“see the triangular composition, with the kiosk pole as the top. And then the inverted triangle just below it with the barrels and the hay bales? Classic Connois, isn’t it?”

  Gabriel nodded. Now that she made the point he could see how other Connois paintings must have influenced him. And even a little Canaletto in the exaggerated pleats. Lise didn’t see his hodgepodge of styles?

  “It’s so great to deal in older drawings. Sometimes I get so fed up with contemporary posing, you know?” She picked up the phone and pressed the intercom. “Hi, can you send someone to my office to wrap something?” To Gabriel she said, “Are you insured for this sort of thing?”

  He shook his head, as much in wonder as in answer. She really believed this was a Connois sketch? He had always respected Lise, her eye. She babbled, yes, but in between volleys of nothingness she often had insightful opinions about work. If he had her fooled, maybe he hadn’t done such a bad job after all. Or maybe a bad job was good enough.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you the goods.”

  They began in the showroom of the all-white gallery. The paintings were so large that only one fit per wall. In a small room off the main hall was a second show, a cartoonist who collaged pieces of glossy magazines. The characters depicted life in French slums, with old women calling out obscene swears and young men smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. They stared in silence. Finally, Lise spoke.

  “It’s funny,” she continued, “working for Ambrosine, I thought I would get really jaded, you know, like I wouldn’t care anymore about art.”

  “But …” he provided.

  “But, I kind of enjoy it more, spending time with it. Like, take Damien Hirst. I get him. Finally. I see what all the fuss is about.”

  Gabriel fought the urge to cackle. Of all the contemporary posers who seemed to have charmed the establishment, Damien Hirst seemed the most vile, mercenary, talentless of the bunch. His vivisections, rotting inartistically; the pomp with which he unveiled each readymade was laughable. And the aestheticism of the influence of mortality? Really, were people still painting ideas? Inserting themselves into their artwork? Gabriel abhorred the cult of personality surrounding contemporary art. But he couldn’t say this. Not to Lise. Not in French. He was slightly amazed that he had never seen her willingness to be a part of the masses before, her desire for acceptance into the canon.

  His package came back wrapped expertly and nondescriptly, separate from the briefcase, which now looked even cheaper in comparison.

  As if to confirm his condemnation of her bobo ways, she ended their awkward silence by saying, “Shit. I have to go pick up the little one from the crèche. Walk with me? It’s just over the Seine.”

  Gabriel had a quick flash of reverie of being in Lise’s all-white apartment, children hanging off him like rats in some horror movie. What if that had been his life? He would have fucking committed suicide.

  “I can’t,” Gabriel said. “The client is waiting.”

  Lise kissed him on both cheeks and headed off toward the Île St.-Louis. Gabriel was actually traveling that way as well, but he set off in the opposite direction. He’d had enough of the art establishment, with its poor taste and gullibility, for one day.

  When Gabriel rang Klinman’s bell, the portière eyed him suspiciously. Gabriel held up the package, signifying official business, trying to exude more confidence than he felt. Why did it matter what the building’s caretaker thought? It reminded him of the failure he was carrying. He did not look forward to having to explain to Klinman what happened.

  Inside the apartment, Klinman wa
s sharing a coffee with a man Gabriel didn’t know. When he came in, Klinman rose, but the man remained seated. Beneath his pants, which had a large, purposefully tailored cuff, Gabriel could see the outlines of sock garters. The man, though obviously in his early fifties, had a full head of chestnut hair cut and styled in the manner more suitable for the 1940s than for today. In fact, his whole demeanor, the gentle manner with which he held his coffee cup, his wide-legged yet demure seated position, suggested another era.

  The air in the room was charged. Klinman was tense; Gabriel could tell by the tight pull of his shoulders, the creases around his smile. “Gabriel, hello. Mr. Schnell”—he turned to the seated man, pulling Gabriel to him—“this is the young man I was telling you about.” He introduced them in German: “Gabriel, Mr. Tobias Schnell.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Gabriel said in French.

  The man nodded. He scratched his small chin and Gabriel spotted his large, jeweled watch. “Gabriel, you’ve fetched the sketch from my apartment, have you?” Klinman asked.

  “Monsieur speaks French?” Gabriel asked.

  “I understand,” Schnell said.

  Gabriel pursed his lips. He had no idea who this man was, but he needed to tell Klinman that the Connois sketch was an utter failure that should never see the light of day. “Mr. Klinman,” Gabriel started. “May I see you alone for a minute before I show the sketch?”

  “I think Mr. Schnell is in a hurry,” Klinman said, looking nervously over at the man, who seemed to have settled deeper into his chair. He did not look like a man with pressing obligations.

  “There’s a small problem,” Gabriel said. “With the sketch.”

  “Not a serious one, I hope,” Klinman said, smiling.

  “It doesn’t really look like a Connois,” Gabriel said. “Not exactly.”

  Klinman laughed. “I think that’s for the expert to decide, don’t you?” He turned to Schnell and said something rapidly in German. The man laughed also, at Gabriel’s expense, he suspected.

  Fine. Fuck it. He had tried to warn Klinman. He unwrapped the adeptly packaged drawing and arranged it on the easel that had been set up for this purpose.

  Now Schnell rose. He put down his coffee cup and took a plastic capsule out of his breast pocket. He removed a folded pair of reading glasses and stepped toward the drawing, moving his head in circles around the drawing as if stretching his neck. In a couple of places, a shoulder that Gabriel hadn’t gotten quite right, a chicken whose neck seemed too long for its body, he paused and stared, his eyeballs flashing back and forth. Then he focused on the signature.

  Gabriel had started out by signing the drawing because it was the part he felt most confident with. He had practiced Connois’s signature so many times that it was almost as natural as his own signature, and nearly indistinguishable from the master’s. Signing got him in the mood to paint as someone else. Like a method actor, he found he was a better mimic when he inhabited the character of the artist he was imitating. To draw like Connois he had to be Connois, and the physical statement of that was signing a drawing that hadn’t yet been started, but was somehow, in a trick of time, looping itself, already complete.

  Klinman gripped Gabriel by the shoulder, his fingers digging into the bones. Gabriel didn’t dare ask him to stop.

  “He is right,” Schnell said finally in French, breaking the silence. “This is not Connois.”

  Gabriel didn’t dare look at Klinman; instead he stared at his shoes, tried to line up the toes even with the edge of the wooden floor slats.

  The man continued in German, and Gabriel lost the thread, hearing only the French cognates: “signature … École … paper …” Klinman’s grip on his shoulder relaxed, and when Gabriel dared to look up, he was smiling genuinely.

  “Did you understand that?” he asked.

  “No,” Gabriel admitted.

  “Mr. Schnell said—”

  “Tobias,” said the man, who was now all courtesy and warmth.

  Klinman bowed his head in thanks. He gestured to Schnell, clearly not comfortable referring to him by his first name: “—said that the drawing was indeed not by Connois’s hand, but that the style is very like his, the period is appropriate, and the signature undoubtedly the master’s. He concludes, then, that the drawing is by one of the school of the Hiverains, and attributes it to a disciple, signed by the teacher Connois himself. Herr Schnell—Tobias”—he emphasized the first name—“is the foremost German authority on nineteenth-century French schools.”

  Gabriel was shocked. This hesitant piece of shit was going to be accepted into the pantheon of drawings? He felt he should really say something, admit that the work was by his own hand and not one of the master’s pupils. But what should he say? That Klinman was a liar? That the so-called expert was an idiot? That some scrawny starving artist with a chip on his shoulder knew the real score? Don’t be an idiot, he told himself. It’s not like Klinman and he were fooling some unsuspecting neophyte. This man, who was supposed to be an authority, couldn’t even recognize a terrible fake. Gabriel had no obligation to divulge the truth, he decided.

  The men conversed in German while Gabriel studied his drawing again. He supposed, in the strong but diffuse lighting, the lines seemed more graceful. The men concluded their conversation, which ended with a discussion of dates, or times. Tobias Schnell ignored him; he shook Klinman’s hand in that stiff Germanic way before Klinman walked him to the door.

  When he returned, Klinman was grinning. “Well, that went well!”

  “What was that?” Gabriel asked.

  “We have placed your work in an auction.”

  “I don’t understand.” Gabriel sat down.

  “There’s nothing to understand. That man is an authority.”

  “And he’s putting it in an auction as authentic?”

  “It is authentic, Gabriel,” Klinman said patiently. “It’s an original work in the style of Connois. That’s exactly what the expert determined it to be. The picture doesn’t lie. What he sees in it is his business.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Don’t suppose, be sure.” Klinman began to pace in front of the drawing. “Think about it, Gabriel. What is the real value of this piece? Some pulped rags, a little ink. Its value is subjective, as all aesthetics are. Why should it be valueless if one person drew it and worth millions if another did? The picture didn’t change.”

  “I did a terrible job,” Gabriel said softly.

  “There’s room for improvement, yes. Don’t be so glum. You’ll make us a lot of money with your talents.”

  “How much money?”

  “Ah, now we get down to business,” Klinman said. “How does five thousand euros sound?”

  “I want thirty-five percent,” Gabriel said.

  “It might not sell for years. It may never sell at all. No, you should be recompensed now. And please don’t give me that look. I found the paper and the expert. How about seventy-five hundred? It will be in cash.”

  “I want ten thousand.”

  “You drive a hard bargain,” Klinman said, extending his hand for Gabriel to shake. “Shall we go to dinner?”

  Gabriel nodded glumly. He still felt irrationally guilty. Everything Klinman had said made sense. Hadn’t people overlooked him just because he was Spanish? Because he didn’t know how to manipulate the right people? Art should be judged on its own merits, but that wasn’t the world they lived in. Hadn’t being on the planet for forty-two years taught him anything? But he had just earned ten thousand euros, more than he’d ever made on all his art put together. Ten thousand euros was several months of salary at Rosenzweig’s gallery.

  He followed Klinman out the door, past the still-disapproving eye of the portière, who scowled equally at Klinman. Maybe that was just her default expression.

  He called Colette to see if she wanted to join them, but there was no answer. In the restaurant, a nice bistro on the Rue des Ecouffes, Klinman ordered them a bottle of wine, and the menu fixe.
When their salads came—frisée with lardons for Gabriel, a pâté terrine for Klinman—Gabriel finally asked him: “Where will you say you got the drawing from?”

  “That,” he said, wiping his mouth, “requires a story, which I will tell you over coffee.”

  After their main course, Klinman sat back and pulled a cigarette from his breast pocket. “My story …” He paused to drop a sugar cube into his cappuccino. Then he lit his cigarette, puffing occasionally as he spoke. “I’m German. And Jewish. My family escaped just before the war was starting, through Switzerland to Italy, then on a boat to China. I was born in China and we lived there for four years. When the visa came for England we settled in Leeds. That’s where I grew up. Did Colette tell you all this? No?

  “My parents’ passion was art. Their apartment had paintings and drawings hung so closely together they said it looked like a frame store rather than a living room. When the war started they hid their art with friends, they buried it in vaults or tried to trade it for favors. Others had their art seized by the Nazis.

  “Some of it was kept by the local families, impossible to claim after the war ended. Some of it was taken by looters. Some the Nazis hung in regional offices. At one point, they even found canvases that Goering tried to hide in a cave. Barbarians.”

  Klinman paused for a long inhalation. He held the smoke inside his cheeks, savoring it. Gabriel was not sure if he was referring to the Nazis’ callous disregard for human life or to their ignorant neglect of art. He thought he could see where this line of argument would take them.

  “In short, there is a lot of art out there that is still floating about, waiting to be reclaimed.”

  Gabriel said, “So you fake the provenances.”