The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Page 13

  “What kind of clients?”

  “From the general auditory clues of conversation, these seemed to be legitimate restoration deals. She has this nifty little portfolio of the paintings she’s restored in a binder. I like binders. You know the kind with plastic sleeves?”

  “Yes, I know them. So you have no hard proof?”

  “Not currently. But I watched her paint in her kitchen through the zoom lens of my Pentax. She gets up before it’s light and paints in a man’s shirt. I even walked onto the Gowanus Expressway, risking personal injury and a citation, so I could peer into her squalid little apartment at eye level. They should call these apartments furnished kitchenettes if you ask my opinion. You can cook while sitting on the edge of your Murphy bed. Who was Murphy, anyhow, and why the hell does he get a bed named after him?”

  Marty studies the photograph of the woman standing framed behind a window. She is slender and pale, with unbrushed honey-blond hair that reaches her shoulders. Her eyes are downcast, a paintbrush in one hand. She’s wearing a powder-blue oxford, open to the third button, her collarbone and neck exposed in the early light. The angle of her head conceals her face—the camera registers her forehead and a crown of unruly hair. There’s something hapless and slovenly about her appearance that doesn’t gel with Marty’s sense of a successful art forger. The calculation, the precise mixing of pigments, the requisite nerve and pluck—these are all missing from the scene. This looks like a woman in her midtwenties who has trouble remembering to bathe. He tells Red that he’ll send the final retainer payment and that he should await further instructions.

  Red says, “One more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I could hear that she’s got an accent of some kind, though I’m not prepared to narrow it down beyond South African, British, or Australian. Boston is also not out of the equation.”

  “You’re a real linguist, Red,” Marty says. “I’ll be in touch.”

  He hangs up the phone and looks out his window. The new office has a view that faces south, across the skyline of Midtown. On a clear day, he has a straight shot at the Empire State Building. It’s late afternoon and he can see the light glinting off the limestone and granite, the way it flares when it catches on the vertical strips of stainless steel. He thinks of cliff faces and Mohawk Indians, all those Quebecois ironworkers who came down to build the city its icon. His little reverie is interrupted when Gretchen buzzes in with a reminder about his final meeting of the day.

  * * *

  After work, Marty walks eight blocks to the athletic club where he plays squash once a week. Because the game is mocked among his racquetball-playing colleagues, he’s had to look outside the firm to find fellow enthusiasts. Marty got the game from a British expat uncle and the other men inherited the sport by similar means—athletic European fathers and zealous Anglophiles with resting heart rates in the low fifties. Like his ham radio buddies, most of whom he’s never met in person, these men tend to rub against the grain of convention. They drive difficult imported cars with tight gearboxes, smoke Dunhill cigarettes that one of them brings back duty-free from Paris twice a year, and carry allegiances to outspoken ideas. Marty knows he should be driving a Ford and drinking American beer, but instead he drinks Irish porters and stouts and drives a Citroën DS-19 that spends half its life with the mechanic. Because he didn’t fight in Korea or World War II, these frivolous, unpatriotic habits sometimes weigh on him.

  There are four of them in the core group and they play a round robin each week to determine the overall winner. Invariably, Frederic Kriel, a Swiss-German auctioneer who’s the sales director of European art for Sotheby’s, trounces them all. He’s tall and leonine, impeccably dressed in handmade shirts, and arrives each week in the locker room wearing kidskin driving moccasins. Marty unabashedly copies his clothes and accessories—Frederic is a barometer of elegant, masculine style. Out on the court, he unleashes a savage serve, an uncanny straight drive into the back corners, and a legendary kill shot they call the Luftwaffe. When Marty loses to Kriel by five or six points he likes to say that he’s been Luftwaffered or Himmlered. Frederic is a gracious winner and takes these jibes well. He’s the right amount of Swiss and German, Marty thinks, so as not to evoke a crushing defeat at the hands of an Aryan prince of the Third Reich. His eyes are a cold alpine blue, flecked with mica, and they put Marty in mind of the ice at the bottom of a Scotch glass.

  The other two players are Will Turner, a surgeon, and Boyd Curry, a copywriter for a Madison Avenue ad agency. For months, Marty has been telling them of the unfolding story around the forgery and they have listened attentively and offered counsel. The group likes to ponder difficult problems, from national security to whether or not Ezra Pound should have been released from the nuthouse to the potential indiscretions that come with attending out-of-town conferences. They pride themselves on giving thoughtful advice. Because they all share a love of a marginalized sport, they often favor offbeat solutions over conventional wisdom.

  Tonight, after Frederic has demoralized them all, they sit in the club lounge with imported beers in green bottles and a bowl of Spanish almonds. Except for Frederic, who’s unmarried, they’re supposed to be going home for dinner, to their respective wives, but they’re flirting with the menu and the waitress. “A Bryn Mawr graduate with a ponytail” keeps making forays to entice them to the full dinner menu, but so far they have stuck to their guns. Unlike the basement level, where the neglected squash courts resemble concrete bunkers with flaking white paint, the club lounge is rarefied with mahogany and dead member portraits and plush leather booths. Presidents have dined here and swum in the pool with its skylight and tessellated tiles. Marty wants to ask for advice about what to do with the latest information, with the name Eleanor Shipley, but he can’t find a way into the conversation. At the end of the second beer, Boyd has floated a question about professional anxiety dreams. He likes to formalize their conversations, provide a theme or a hypothetical—who would win in a made-up presidential race, which animal, panther or jaguar, would vanquish the other beast in a battle to the death or an open-country sprint? Tonight, he’s asked “What’s the worst dream you have about work?”

  “Recurring?” Will clarifies.

  “Could be,” Boyd answers.

  Frederic says, “Mine is always the same. I am standing behind the rostrum at Sotheby’s and the house is full. A few employees are on the line with London buyers over at the phone bank. The next painting comes out and my vision begins to blur. It’s supposed to be seventeenth century, but it looks modern and abstract. I look down at my notebook, which is supposed to contain the names of who’s expected to bid and where the money is sitting, but every page is blank. I don’t even know what the painting is, so how can I sell it? I just stand there until eventually one of the staffers says that they have a phone call for me. Everyone in the audience puts their paddles down and they watch me as I cross the room and take the phone.”

  “Who’s calling?” Marty asks.

  “It’s just breathing on the line, but somehow I know it’s the dead artist. He’s so saddened by what he’s just witnessed.”

  They pause a moment, sip their beers empathetically.

  Will studies the head of his racquet, adjusting the catgut strings into parallel rows. “I have these little rituals on the day of a big surgery,” he says. “I trim my fingernails and listen to a Verdi opera in my office. Sometimes I read a few pages from Huck Finn. Then I go into the OR and greet everyone by name. If I haven’t met a nurse I always ask her name and where she went to school. In my dream I am standing next to Harry Truman in scrubs and he’s telling me, right as I sew up the patient, that I’ve left some gauze inside the abdominal cavity. We stand there arguing and eventually I open the patient back up and pull out a little wad of scarlet gauze.”

  “That’s terrifying,” Marty says. “My anxiety dreams are run-of-the-mill. Patent attorneys dream about filing the wrong paperwork or missing a deadline. I
t’s the saddest thing in the world. I used to wake up in a cold sweat before I made partner. I saw myself wheeling one of those coffee carts down the hallways at work and delivering mail. My boss sometimes pissed in the coffeepot in that particular dream.”

  Boyd says, “I’m no Freudian but these are all very revealing, gents. In my dream I’m watching television and one of my ads comes on but it’s in a different language. It sounds like Swahili or pidgin and so I hit the side of the TV set as if that will correct the language of transmission. The thing starts buzzing and warping but eventually the picture comes in and there are scenes of the Midwest scrolling by.”

  “What’s happened to your advertisement?” asks Frederic.

  “Sucked out the back of the tube. Every time I hit the set the scenery changes—a little wooden farmhouse and a red barn and a scratch of dirt with a tethered horse. And then I realize it’s my childhood being depicted, back to the farm in Illinois and the horseshit town where I grew up.”

  “There’s no way that’s an actual dream,” Marty says.

  “Tell that to my superego.”

  “I think it would be your id,” Frederic says matter-of-factly.

  Marty raises his beer bottle in the air. “I’d like to motion to change the subject.”

  Boyd says, “Unless it’s about an Angus steak so rare it has a pulse, I don’t want to hear it. I’m hungry enough to eat the leather hide off this booth. When that classics major comes back here I’m going to order food. How old do you think she is anyway?”

  “We made a pact to our wives—snacks only,” Marty says.

  Boyd says, “Read history: pacts are designed to be broken.”

  “Well, while you’re sitting with that moral dilemma, I have an update on the missing painting.”

  Frederic says, “Go on.”

  “As you all know, I retained this slob of a private detective who lives in a houseboat over on the Jersey side of the Hudson. Anyway, after months of digging around and eating hot dogs on street corners, he finally delivered me a name and some photographs. Apparently an art restorer who might also be the forger behind the painting that’s now sitting on the floor in my study.” Marty digs through his pockets and places the business card on the table.

  Boyd says, “Were we expecting this? A woman art restoration expert?”

  “I don’t know what we were expecting,” Marty says.

  Will picks up the business card, studies it under the blown-glass wall sconce, and hands it to Frederic. Marty notices how perfectly manicured Kriel’s fingernails are as he turns the card over and then waves it in the air. Frederic says, “This is very nice paper. It has heft.”

  “That was my thought as well,” says Marty.

  “Are we saying the quality of the paper suggests a legitimate enterprise?” Will asks.

  “No, we’re not saying that quite yet,” answers Frederic. “So what are your next steps?”

  Marty puts a few almonds in his mouth and chews meditatively. “Well, I suppose the right thing to do is to give the name to the police or the insurance firm. But part of me wants to know who this woman is before I hand her over.”

  “And why would you want to know that?” asks Will. “If a burglar comes into your home and steals everything in sight do you want to read his memoirs?”

  “I would,” offers Boyd.

  “The other thing,” Marty says, “is that I have this sneaking suspicion that my life has only gotten better since the painting was stolen. I feel stronger somehow.”

  “Your squash game hasn’t gotten any better,” says Boyd, smiling. “I just had an epiphany—I’m ordering a steak. The iron levels go down in my blood and I get mean-spirited. A steak at this point is for the sake of my fellow humanity.”

  The waitress eyes the table again and Boyd waves her over. She smiles and begins to make her way across the room.

  “Are you saying the stolen painting is cursed?” Will asks.

  “That sounds melodramatic,” says Marty. “Although none of its previous owners lived past the age of sixty.”

  “That’s because they were living in a malarial swamp called the Netherlands and didn’t have flushing toilets,” says Boyd.

  “I mean since then,” adds Marty.

  Frederic says, “We’ve all read The Picture of Dorian Gray, Marty, so you’re not the first to imagine that a painting has supernatural powers. Every time I auction off Renaissance art I think that I’m going to burn in hell or that I’m getting secret, coded messages from God. Let me tell you something … it’s oil and pigment on scraps of linen or hide and sunlight passing through prisms of color. What we’re trying to buy, when we buy art, is ourselves. So if you ask me, part of you was stolen with that painting and you should feel outraged. And, of course, if you no longer want the painting after it’s retrieved, Sotheby’s would be only too happy to auction it for you.”

  Marty says, “I was thinking I might flush her out. Call her up and pretend to engage her as an art consultant or something.”

  “That would be foolish and risky,” says Will.

  “I think that’s an interesting idea,” says Boyd. “Like that waitress, you have my full and undivided attention.”

  Marty says, “I might have to use a false name. She might know who I am.”

  “Or know what you look like,” says Will.

  Boyd is glued to the approaching waitress, but he says, “Yes, but what’s the worst thing that can happen?”

  “I don’t know. She leaves the country with his three-hundred-year-old painting,” Will says.

  The waitress finally arrives and Boyd orders a steak, rare, and a baked potato. He deliberates over the menu, enunciating his words, asking about the soup of the day and the seasonal vegetables. The other men look on with moral outrage. The waitress is wearing a black vest that gives her a certain authority, despite her age. She asks the others what they would like to order, the sound of certainty in her voice. One by one they fold. Marty orders the porterhouse and another beer. There’s a moment of quiet defeat.

  “How about this?” Will says. “When my wife files for divorce because I don’t eat her lasagna tonight how about I just put Boyd’s name on the decree.”

  They all laugh and sip their beers.

  Frederic picks the thread back up: “Here’s what you do. You know the auction house over on Fifty-Seventh, Thornton and Morrell?”

  Marty nods.

  “They’re having an Old Masters auction next week and they’ve got everything out on display. You invite this supposed art restoration expert to meet you there. You see what she knows about that period, start asking probing questions. You decide whether it seems plausible.”

  “Do I use a false name?”

  “Why not have some fun with it?” says Boyd. “A little undercover operation, some recon. We need to think of a really good name. And if on the off chance she acts cagey when she sees you then you know the jig is up and she knows your face. You abort the mission if that happens. This is sounding like Hitchcock. I like it.”

  “You should be writing cheap novels,” Will says, “not 7-Up commercials.”

  “Why wouldn’t I bring her to Sotheby’s?” asks Marty.

  “If it ever came out that I let a potential forger into the auction house they would send me to the basement archive and change my name to Clause. We call those people down there archive monkeys.”

  “But you’re fine with me taking her to a competitor?”

  “Thornton and Morrell are a niche market.”

  Boyd says, “I’ve got a fake name for you! Oliver Kitwell.”

  “Sounds like a London barrister,” says Frederic.

  “Sam Iris,” Boyd counters.

  “An eye doctor from Connecticut.”

  Marty says, “I’ve always wanted to be called Jake. My father’s name was Jacob. How about Jake Alpert? The last name still has a Dutch ring to it and I might convince her I’m building out a family collection.”

  Will says, “I sti
ll think you should just call the cops or the insurance investigators. What happens if they find out you had information and never passed it along?”

  Boyd replies: “This is why I want you to operate if I ever have an aneurysm, Will, because you think of every contingency. I’d like to have my capillaries in your hands.” Boyd looks around the room. “Now, if my steak doesn’t get here pretty soon I’m going to have the aforementioned aneurysm.”

  Marty laughs and drains his beer. The conversation takes a new turn and he quietly mutters, “Jake Alpert, Jake Alpert,” letting it play out in his mouth.

  * * *

  When Marty arrives home, his harrowing vision is realized—Hester has made a full meal and Rachel is carrying the dinner plates from the kitchen. With Carraway scampering for attention at his feet, he pours two glasses of wine and sits down at the table. Overcompensating, he says, “I’m famished.”

  Rachel smiles and whisks her napkin into her lap. “Hester made beef Stroganoff and green beans.”

  Within the hour, Marty has eaten a steak the size of his terrier. Hester appears with the laden plates and the thought of more beef, mixed with cream, puts pressure on the back of his throat.

  Rachel begins to tell him about her day chasing birds in the park. Recently she joined a social club, an offshoot of the Aid Society, and they meet once a week for book club, bird-watching in Central Park, or a cultural field trip of some kind. With binoculars around their necks and fastened sunhats, they try to spot warblers or migrating chickadees—Marty has no idea what—before sitting by the azalea pond to drink a thermos of English Breakfast tea. They’re all women, as far as Marty can tell, led by a British expat in corduroys who’s married to a federal judge. As ridiculous as this outing sounds to Marty, he’s so grateful that Rachel is back among the living and finding distraction.

  “Did you discover a new species out there today?” Marty asks.

  “Don’t be dismissive,” she says. “The park is on a major migration route.” She gives a little shake of the head. “In the afternoon I went to the travel agent. Do you remember we talked about the river cruise in the spring?”