A Nearly Perfect Copy: A Novel Page 19

  She read up on Canaletto by candlelight, having trouble focusing after the carafe of wine. Whenever she caught herself thinking about the clinic, she corralled herself. She was afraid that if she let her guard down everyone in Paris would see the nakedness of her desire. She ordered a decaf coffee and a tarte tatin for dessert. Then, like someone had flipped a power switch, her jet lag caught up with her. She paid the bill with a Visa card, which the waiter ran through a handheld machine tableside, printing out her receipt immediately. When he pulled her chair out as she stood up, she had the feeling that, like Ronan, she didn’t exist here, that she might disappear on the way to her hotel and it would be like she had never been here at all. She checked that the hair and tooth were still where she left them in the room safe before donning her eyeshade and falling asleep.

  Augustus Klinman was not the man she supposed he’d be. She was expecting a typical Englishman—thinning hair, scarecrow body stuffed into an ill-fitting, obviously expensive suit. Instead, when the man approached her in the lobby of the George V hotel and extended his hand, she was faced with a hairy-knuckled, hirsute, overweight, well-tailored surprise, though she had the expensive suit right. He shook her hand like an American, forcefully.

  “Ms. Howells,” he said.

  “Mr. Klinman.” She allowed her arm to be pumped.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you,” he said. “Won’t you come upstairs?”

  The elevator attendant looked at his gloved hands discreetly. Oddly, Colette had not asked to accompany her to see the drawings. That saved Elm the trouble of explaining that she wanted to see them on her own, that is, without Colette. The less she saw Colette the better.

  Klinman had taken a suite on one of the upper floors. It was decorated in what Elm recognized as an attempt at Empire-style homage to Josephine and Napoleon. Heavy velvet curtains were tied back to offer a view of the Eiffel Tower, or part of it; the city was covered in its typical fog. Some of the objets decorating the room, while not fantastic examples, were period-correct, Elm knew. On the coffee table near the sofa, a small, covered urn sat uselessly, throwing shadows from the lamp on the glass. Bronze winged figures perched on marble-plated pedestals, and cherubic babies frolicked on painted canvases.

  Klinman offered her a drink. Though it was only noon, Elm accepted a glass of wine. She was nervous and had the paranoid thought that she was being drawn into some sort of trap. She had even left a note in her hotel room saying where she was going. Having Klinman appear opposite her expectations didn’t help. She crossed and uncrossed her legs. The sofa was too deep; she couldn’t get comfortable.

  “So,” he said. “I appreciate that you came all the way to Paris to meet with me.”

  “My pleasure,” she said. “I had other business, and Colette had such good things to say about you.”

  “I am sorry that I could not receive you in my office, but it’s undergoing renovations. And the French take their time with these things.”

  Elm smiled politely.

  “I am originally German, Ms. Howells. My family is Jewish; we narrowly missed Auschwitz.”

  “I’m sorry,” Elm said. The wine was too sweet, but she had another sip. Why was he telling her this?

  “That is why I am able to do what I do. There are individuals in England and in Germany who will still only do business with those whom they trust.”

  “I don’t blame them,” Elm said. “There are a lot of unscrupulous people out there.” She smiled, but Klinman remained deadly serious.

  “People have wondered, sometimes. Out of jealousy? Innate suspicion? I don’t know. But I can tell you that these drawings are new to the market.”

  Elm’s eyebrows rose in surprise. New to the market? Most deceased artists’ catalogues raisonnés were long complete. It was rare that another drawing would be added to the oeuvre. Several at once would be strange.

  “May I take a look?” she asked.

  He nodded and took back the wineglass, placing it on the bar. He handed her a pair of gloves, donned a pair himself, and zipped open a case Elm had not noticed behind the chair. She got up and hurriedly drew the gauze undercurtains so the light would not damage the drawings.

  She approached the table, the whirr of excitement building. She loved this part of the job, the sense of discovery that accompanied looking at truly fine art. And she wouldn’t lie: she loved the power. She determined what was authentic or fake, important or disposable, decorative or museum-worthy.

  He laid the first drawing on the table. A typical Canaletto veduta, it showed a palazzo in architectural detail, with some extra flourishes that were clearly added by the artist, who often moved or added obstacles to suit his compositions. She noticed the gently swaying shadows and how the woman who was standing in front of the palazzo holding a basket mimicked that curve. The clouds were in a light wash, slightly sepia-toned, either from age or from original intent. She held it up gingerly. The watermark was appropriate. She couldn’t remember the firm off the top of her head, but she was sure she’d seen it before. The paper was handmade, the grains haphazard and the remnants of the pulp visible. Occasional wormholes dotted the page, with some mold spots. Period paper, then.

  Her heart began to beat quicker. She could hear her own breathing. Maybe she was excited to be holding such an important piece of work. But that couldn’t be it. She had held much more important works, works that held significance for her personally, without such an extreme reaction. Maybe she was anxious about tomorrow.

  She studied the lines. The drawing had Canaletto’s sure hand, his talent for perspective that wasn’t exactly as nature (or man) built monuments, but made sense to the naked eye. She took Klinman’s proffered loupe and looked more closely at the wormholes. The ink hadn’t bled into them, meaning that the holes were made after the drawing was complete, not before. Otherwise excellent fakes often had this telltale sign; the forger had drawn over the old paper, but the ink had betrayed him.

  Mentally, she classified where in Canaletto’s oeuvre this work might fall. She recognized the street in Rome from her stay there in graduate school. It was not exactly as she remembered it, but that was possibly a fault of her memory, or of Canaletto’s. Sure enough, faintly underneath the ink lines she saw the barest remnants of chalk and red pencil where he had sketched the outlines before returning to his studio.

  Elm considered, watching the curtains sway with the forced air blown out beneath them. It could be from one of Canaletto’s atelier. By the end of his life, he had quite a production line going. But the scene was from a veduta earlier in his life, when he was still sketching primarily on commission. And it wasn’t a pastiche. Too often, imitators of a master (whether forgers or hobbyists) amalgamated all of a master’s styles into one piece, the visual equivalent of overembellishing a lie. This piece had remarkable restraint. It had to be a Canaletto. And yet …

  She put the picture down, willing her face not to betray any emotion. She felt the barest pinch of a headache, the constriction of her lungs. Her head told her that this was an authentic work. She had been trained by both the academy and personal experience to be an expert. She needed four hands to list the reasons this was definitely a Canaletto original and didn’t have a single reason to doubt herself except that her body seemed to be signaling her to trust instinct over reason.

  “Hmmm,” she said, noncommittally. “The others?”

  “Another Canaletto,” he said. It was from the same papermaker, which made sense. It showed a bit of water, a rare Canaletto subject, a gondola in the distant background, rowed by just the suggestion of a gondolier.

  He stood by her, a respectful distance, his hands clasped in front of him, rocking on his toes. He looked at the ground so as not to make her nervous. He did everything a dealer was supposed to do.

  When he showed her the Piranesi, the word no rose up in her like a belch. She managed to quell it before it escaped her lips. An odd reaction to what was by all accounts a beautiful drawing.

  Wh
at, she asked herself, was that voice responding to? She realized it was responding to her assumption that this drawing was by Piranesi. Her reptilian brain was telling her that her first impression had been not quite right. It was this inner voice, this eye, that made Elm a superior attributer. Unfortunately, attribution was only half of a department head’s job. She forced herself to focus. The paper and materials were period-appropriate, no mass-produced postindustrial concoctions. The intricacy of the drawing suggested that it was a finished work, as opposed to a sketch for a copperplate engraving. However, the scene was one she recognized from View of the Arch of Constantine which meant it would most likely have been rendered as a practice for a definitive later work. But Piranesi was famous for etching straight onto the plate, drawing on his draftsman skills and prodigious memory for the details. It was not inconceivable that he would sketch out his plans for an etching beforehand, but all the extant studies attributed to Piranesi were crude outlines, lacking the inspiration and aestheticism of the finished product.

  Similarly, its unity of style disturbed her. Piranesi’s theories on the development of human civilization and pastiche’s important role in that development, especially in the artistic realm, were well publicized. He liked to mash up various line strengths, tones, improvisations, and impressions. This drawing adhered to a rather rigorous Baroque temperament. She would have to examine it further against a previously authenticated Piranesi, or against a facsimile of View of the Arch of Constantine, but if she had to decide right now, she would say it belonged to one of Piranesi’s followers, his École, or an acolyte. This uncertainty would not stop her from placing the piece in the auction, but it would be reflected in how the drawing was listed in the catalog and in its final price. This should not be listed as Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

  “And now for the Hiverains.”

  She hovered over the first drawing, let a holistic impression fill her before focusing on any detail. It was a Connois, undoubtedly. A sketch, unsigned. Sketches came in four versions, Elm always thought. Important artist, important sketch, like, say, a study for a Rembrandt self-portrait; important artist, uninteresting sketch, like Tintoretto’s doodles, or ten incomplete versions of a hand by Rembrandt; fascinating sketches by arguably more minor artists, or artists in the atelier; and dogs’ heads by no one you’ve ever heard of. Interestingly, the first and third sold best at auction. No one wanted an anatomy lesson to hang on their living room wall, even if it was by Fra Lippo Lippi.

  She picked up the paper carefully and held it up to the wan light. It had the right texture for nineteenth-century paper, pulpy and uneven, meaty. This first sketch impressed her. Connois was an artist’s artist, but this was beautiful, a work of art that stood among the best examples of Les Hiverains. It was a close study of a woman’s face. Elm examined the lines, following the artist’s hand in the process of laying the ink on the page. The lines were fluid, graceful. Even the thatching in the background was smooth and consistent. The woman’s face was complicated: one of her eyes was smaller; in the other one, a cataract was just beginning to form. Her nose had a broken bump, while her hair peeked out from her scarf. The lines radiating from the corners of her eyes betrayed a lifetime spent outdoors.

  Perhaps it was the years of practice she’d had in searching out every face for the familiar features of Ronan. Perhaps she was simply well trained in her profession. She thought she recognized the woman in the drawing. It was the same woman who appeared in Indira’s Connois with the uneven eyes; most artists would correct a defect like that when drawing, either consciously or for aesthetics’ sake. But Connois had not. How strange, that this woman would appear suddenly in two previously unknown pieces of art. It was possibly simply a coincidence; Elm could think of explanations, but the fact that she had to make excuses for the art set off warning bells.

  Attempting to maintain her poker face, she looked at the other two drawings. Now she was certain; they were too perfect. The watermarks were all different, which would be surprising considering that artists usually found a paper they liked and stuck with it. Also, they were all “typical” Connois scenes, the dry landscapes, the marketplaces, the wild dogs and peasants. Too typical. Connois drew these every day. It was hard to imagine that he would need to sketch them out in such detail at this point in his career. Composition, yes; new elements, yes; but a barking dog would have been second nature.

  The artist, whoever he or she was, must have seen Indira’s Mercat when the auction was announced. The image appeared widely in all the art blogs. He must have taken that as inspiration. By the time she came to the little girl with a dog she’d seen in PDF form, her suspicions were impossible to dismiss. These were most likely forgeries. The question was, did Klinman know, or was he being duped? Did he draw these himself, or was there a separate artist in on the scam?

  She tried to maintain her composure. “What are the provenances like?” she asked.

  “These were in the families of German Jews with trading and import concerns,” he said. “Never sold. They were stolen during the war. The descendants finally got them back when the court case was settled in England last year. Now there are too many descendants to split them up, so they are taking them to market.”

  Elm turned the first drawing over. There was no mark indicating it had ever been sold at auction, but there was a faint pencil inscription, “Exhibit C,” in the lower-right-hand corner.

  “I could verify this?”

  “Of course, Madame,” he said. “They were among items recovered from a cave outside Berlin. The suit was brought by many families. I don’t believe the results were made public. The German government likes to keep these things quiet—they make a big fanfare about reparations, but they don’t disclose the details.”

  “A cave?” Elm asked.

  “Archivally controlled of course. The Nazis were barbaric only when it came to humans. With art they were as careful as surgeons. And, of course, there was jewelry and objets too. The Jewish community was not poor. I myself had the opportunity to examine many of the items—I was a plaintiff in the case, though I probably shouldn’t disclose that. These are not my drawings, rest assured. In fact, none of the valuables recovered belonged to my family, as far as we could ascertain, but the take was really quite beautiful.”

  Elm wasn’t sure exactly of the appropriate response. Should she apologize? Express sympathy? She asked to examine the paperwork, and he handed her a binder, each document in a plastic protective sheath. Sworn, notarized statements from German and Austrian Jews. Narratives of discovery: a hidden safe, the opening of a vault in Switzerland, the death of an old man posing as a Gentile. A blurry photograph of a Weimar Republic family around a dinner table in front of what may or may not have been the third sketch of women digging on the beach. Certificates of authenticity from the experts at Sotheby’s in London and the curator of drawings from the Louvre, a man Elm had met over the years. Maybe not sufficient for a museum acquisition, but enough for an auction, or a private sale.

  Elm looked at Klinman. He met her gaze. She tried to imagine what he might look like if he were actively deceiving her, but he was inscrutable, open, inviting her questions and smiling around the eyes hopefully, a bit desperately, as if he needed her to take these drawings off his hands, a burden that he was tired of shouldering. He was an excellent actor. She was shocked by his audacity, and too afraid to call him on it in this strange, secluded hotel room.

  “Your sellers are anonymous?”

  “They do not have the means with which to insure these drawings at the moment. It’s best if their names are not available.”

  That made sense. Many people didn’t want others to know what kind of treasures they were keeping in their modest two-bedroom flats. The art may be worth a fortune, but it doesn’t help pay rent or put food on the table until it goes to auction.

  Elm should just accept them, she thought. No one else would suspect their origins; no one else had the eye. She should be thrilled. She should be
exhilarated. The next auction would go well; Greer would be happy; she’d prove she deserved her position. But something felt wrong. Why was it, she wondered, that sensations were always felt in your torso? Occasionally knees knocked and palms sweated, but everything else felt like a punch to the stomach, a knife in the belly, a tug at the heart.

  “Let me make a few phone calls,” she said. “I’ll let you know soon.” She would send him an e-mail in a day or two, thanking him politely but saying that she didn’t think they were right for the house at this time, and wishing him luck in his endeavors.

  “Please do,” Klinman said. “Some of my clients are very old, and need medical help as well as closure, as you Americans say.”

  The hallway was brightly lit in contrast with the darkened room, and Elm had to blink when she stepped out. Klinman shut the door behind her softly, barely allowing it to click.

  The inside of the Mercedes was upholstered in white leather, which Elm found ostentatious until it melted around her body as she sat in it. The backseat contained a folder of information to thumb through while the uniformed driver twisted and curved his way out of Paris. He barely spoke to her, only asking if the temperature was all right, and if she wanted music or silence, which increased her nervousness. Then he told her to look at her feet for the cooler if she wanted water while en route. It would take them about forty-five minutes, he said. He did not ask her if it was her first time in Paris, or comment on how lucky she was with the weather.