The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

  “How could I forget?”

  Beside her on the table she’s stacked a small pile of travel brochures. The trip is a river cruise along the Seine, stopping at villages and towns in Normandy. Marty would rather take the train somewhere, through the Alps or across Spain, stopping at the Alhambra, but he’s not about to complicate things between them. She opens a glossy brochure and reads some highlights between mouthfuls.

  “On day three we stop at Vernon and travel into the town of Giverny, where Monet lived from 1883 until his death in 1926. Doesn’t that sound fun?” she says.

  A Kodachrome image of the iconic water garden with its lilies and Japanese bridge flashes through Marty’s mind and he thinks there must be better ways to spend eight days and several thousand dollars. He says, “Wonderful,” choking down another bite of Stroganoff. When she’s immersed in the brochure again, Marty puts another piece of beef in his mouth before pulling it back out under the cover of his napkin. He drops his hand beside his chair with the chunk of meat and feels Carraway’s muzzle nudging it from his fingertips.

  He empties a third of his plate in this fashion while Rachel steps him through the itinerary. He can feel his mind fogging over, so he takes a sip of ice water to brace himself back to attention. He stares at the painting above her head, a dour Flemish school portrait of a man holding his hat. Like so many of his father’s paintings, it’s dulled by age and in desperate need of cleaning. Jacob de Groot believed that cleaning paintings ruined their rustic appeal and diminished their power. There’s part of him that wants to tell Rachel that he’s got a solid lead with the private investigator, but there’s a stronger part that’s protective of this new information. For a month after they discovered the robbery, when the police and insurance investigators came through the house, she asked for regular updates, but now she’s lost interest. He’ll tell her once he knows something definitive.

  Bringing his gaze back to Rachel, he says, “Impressionists from a slow-moving river, what could be better?”

  “You hate the Impressionists,” she says, laughing slightly.

  “Not all of them.”

  “You once said to me, and I quote, ‘Monet makes me feel like I’m queasy and squinting outside on a hot day.’”

  “Did I actually say that?”

  “At this very table, my love.”

  “Well, maybe I’ve changed my tune. And what better place to do it than in his old stomping grounds.”

  “Well, I appreciate you being flexible with this trip. I just think it’ll be nice to get away from the city for a bit.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” he says, cutting a green bean into a dozen tiny pieces.

  Rachel goes back to the brochures, which have been dog-eared and underlined. It strikes him that she’s eager to make a fresh start, to leave the wreckage of two miscarriages behind her. In theory, they could try again, but they made an unspoken pact after the second time, a silent agreement to never subject themselves to the brutal forces of nature again. He feels a surge of tenderness toward her as she turns the pages of northern France, the way she’s willed herself back from the brink of despair. For several years he stood to lose her; she was drifting down hallways with sad, sun-bleached novels in her hands. Not really thinking it through, he says, “If you ever wanted to, I would adopt. A whole tribe of them if you wanted.”

  She looks up from her dinner plate, startled for a moment but then softening. She holds the brochure very still and smiles faintly. “I know you would. I just don’t think that’s right for us. For me.”

  He reaches over and touches the back of her hand. “Of course.”

  * * *

  After dinner, Marty goes into the library to smoke a cigar and drink some Scotch behind his father’s old desk. Like the paintings and the apartment itself, this was handed down, a sprawling ship captain’s desk with heavy walnut legs and brass fixtures. It’s a throwback to the Dutch bloodline, the shipping merchants and traders. His father’s personal effects are still strewn throughout the desk, as if Jacob de Groot were away on one of his extended business jaunts instead of dead for decades. An old appointment diary, opera tickets, a pair of eyeglasses, medical scissors, typewriter ribbon canisters, a leather dice shaker. There are pullout panels and secret compartments, a recess at the back for navigational charts where a life insurance policy and a roll of cash still remains untouched. Marty’s added his own effects over the years, his embossed stationery and cigar boxes, an old mouthpiece from a trumpet, but he still feels like he’s sharing the desk with his father.

  The talk of assumed names at the club made him remember something he’s kept since he and Rachel were first married. Inside the top drawer, along with his correspondence, he finds a list of names written on hotel stationery. They’d been in Europe on their honeymoon, eating their way through France and then taking the train overnight to Barcelona, where they lay marooned on a blanket at the beach for a week. They made love every day in their hotel room with a balcony, he remembers, quietly during the siesta hours, their bodies rimed with salt, the sound of the street vendors making it feel slightly illicit. One afternoon he took a long bath with the windows flung open above Las Ramblas and jotted down all the names he fancied for children. Girls: Martha, Susan, Elizabeth, Genevieve, Stella. Boys: Harold, Claude, Franklin. He reads the names now under the desk lamp, feeling nostalgic but also wondering what the hell he was thinking with the name Claude, which seems to have a pouting and bookish sting to it. Claude is the name of a man who walks out of rooms in the middle of arguments. He’d continued to carry the list for years, folded inside his breast pocket, waiting for the right occasion to review it. But he never showed it to Rachel, because it somehow itemized their loss, gave it a tangible form. These were all the children they would never have. He puts the list away and leans back in his chair to blow smoke up at the ceiling.

  The forgery leans against the bookshelves opposite. By lamplight and at this distance, he can’t detect any differences from the original, the image that floats through his memory. He’s made a point not to study it closely during daylight, afraid that he’ll see a clear sign of fabrication—an implausible passage of brushwork—and therefore a suggestion of his own gullibility. It’s only a little after eight, but Rachel has gone to bed with the dog and her travel brochures. He takes the heavyweight business card out of his pocket. On a piece of blotting paper he writes down Jake Alpert so he won’t forget, drains his Scotch, then picks up the phone on his desk and dials the number. It rings nine times before a woman answers, sounding slightly annoyed and out of breath.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m looking for Eleanor Shipley.”

  “This is Ellie.”

  “Ah, yes, sorry to trouble you so late, I got your name—” He pauses, begins again. “My name is Jake Alpert and I’m looking to retain an art consultant and restoration expert. Is that something you do?”

  There is a slight delay and he thinks he can hear water running in a sink. “It’s not a terrific time,” she says. “I just jumped out of the shower and I’m dripping wet. Can I call you tomorrow?”

  “Yes, of course. Again, my apologies. It’s hard for me to talk at my office.”

  “I can call you back wherever you like.”

  Marty thinks about how the small lie of Jake Alpert has had a cascade effect. Since he never answers his own phone, he could never give out his home or office number.

  The silence unravels.

  She says, “Listen, if you hold on a sec, I’ll go dry off and we can talk for a minute.”

  “If it’s not an imposition.”

  The sound of the phone being put down on a table or counter. He tries to listen to the ambient sounds of her apartment, but all he hears is the water being turned off. There’s something oddly intimate about being on hold while she towels off. A different woman would have insisted he call back during business hours, but then it occurs to him that she’s used to calls during the night, that she might operate in a world
without appointment diaries and switchboard operators. When she comes back, her voice is steady and composed.

  “Mr. Alpert, are you still there?”

  “I am indeed.” He places her accent as Australian and wonders how he could have hired the only tone-deaf private investigator in all the five boroughs.

  “So what can I help you with?”

  “Well, I’m in the process of building out my father’s art collection, filling in holes and whatnot, and I need a good pair of eyes. There’s some cleaning and restoring, but I’d also like some help with some new purchases. I was thinking Flemish and Dutch school, seventeenth century. Do you have any experience in that area? My father was Dutch, so I had an early introduction to the lowlands.”

  “I’m writing my dissertation on the Golden Age, at Columbia. I’m focusing on Holland, but I also know my way around Flanders. It’s nice to hear of a collector who sees the potential.”

  “Perhaps we can set up an appointment to meet and discuss possibilities.”

  “That would be fine. Who recommended me, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  Marty keeps a pull of cigar smoke in his mouth and considers. “That’s a good question. Could it have been a professor of yours that I met at a dinner party? I remember an abundance of tweed.”

  “That hardly narrows it down.”

  They both laugh at this and he considers it a small victory.

  “You’re Australian?”

  “Thank you for not saying Boston.”

  “Not a thing like it. Where are you from?”

  “Sydney. But I spent a few years in London before I came here. I switched from conservation to art history. Do you know the Courtauld Institute in London?”

  “Of course,” he says, though he’s not sure he does. He pauses a moment and says, “Thornton and Morrell are holding an Old Masters auction this Thursday afternoon and I have my eye on something. Perhaps we could meet before the auction and if things work out you could come along as my trusted advisor.”

  “That sounds fine.”

  “I’ll send a car for you at four sharp. What’s your address?”

  “Oh, that’s not necessary. I can take the train or a bus.”

  “I insist.”

  He hears some clicking and thinks she might be twirling the phone cord. “All right.”

  She gives him the address and he writes it down.

  “Good night, then, Mr. Alpert. Thank you for calling. I look forward to meeting you.”

  “Please, Ellie, call me Jake.”

  “Very well, I will.”

  He puts down the receiver and realizes he hasn’t taken his eyes off the forgery the whole time they’ve talked. The light is so diffuse that the shadows register as watery outlines, barely discernible against the faintly blue ice and snow. He thinks of her painting something that is so close to being transparent, one remove from not being there at all, and for a moment feels nothing but admiration.

  Amsterdam

  MAY 1637

  Pieter de Groot attends an estate auction being held by the local Guild of St. Luke. He’s in town on business, but the delays at the shipyard have kept him casting about for distractions for three days. It’s barely dawn when he wends along the Kalverstraat, looking for the address advertised on the handbill. The night watch is returning home with their dogs and rattles while the lamplighters refill tiny pots of oil on the hog-backed canal bridges. The wooden house, when he finds it, is hemmed in by alleyways of painting studios, blacksmiths, and two dubious-looking taverns named the Thirsty Cat and the Lion’s Tale.

  Inside the house, it’s a rummage of dim rooms, all set at different levels. A wiry man introduces himself as Theophilus Tromp, guild servant, and directs him up a steep flight of darkened stairs. A group of speculators and bidders has already assembled in a room that’s been set up for the auction, lined with furniture, wedding souvenirs, linens, and unframed paintings. The canvases have been organized thematically, propped against easels or along one wall—seascapes to the left, landscapes in the middle, and still lifes to the right. The buyers quietly mill among the objects. Some of the other men start conferring and strategizing and it becomes apparent that many of them know each other, that auction alliances have been forged on previous occasions. Pieter wonders if anyone will chase after the tulip still lifes. After tulipomania afflicted the provinces for several years, the whole thing went bust in February. During the boom years, when every tailor and glassblower dabbled in the short-term market for bulbs, Pieter had been one of the few Dutchmen who never fell victim to the mania. A ship is something I can understand, he would tell people, the formation of rib and hull, the combined logic of prow and sail. On principle, he has never invested in anything he can’t explain to his wife and children. Betting on a flower’s future blooming always seemed to him like betting on the motion of clouds.

  He has his eye on a particular seascape—a ship tossed in a squall, besieged by foam-crested waves. On the horizon a fissure of sunlight breaks through the brooding clouds and to Pieter it suggests everlasting salvation. These seamen will not drown. The ocean is leaden and tinged with green—he’s seen those foreboding waters in the middle of the Atlantic, back in his days as ship’s carpenter. When the auctioneer appears he has the bearing of a functionary—myopic and with a sheath of papers in his inky grip. He insists on auctioning off the household items first and starts up with his droning, mercantile voice. Just to be sportsmanlike, Pieter bids on a rack with three canes. His house outside Rotterdam is set on acreage, and when guests come for the weekend they always admire his Malacca walking cane. One of the other bidders ends up with most of the pans and saucers, perhaps as gifts for a new wife starting a household. Before the auctioneer moves to the paintings, one of the other bidders says, “None of the canvases are signed.”

  The guild servant nods carefully, deliberating over his words. “Although masters are licensed to sign their works and run workshops, paintings cannot be sold outside guild statutes.”

  From the back of the room Pieter says, “Are we to assume the painter left behind some debts with the guild?”

  The servant looks at the space in front of him, purses his lips slightly, then glances at the auctioneer, who springs into action, riffling through his papers and summoning another mercantile chant. The bidding begins with the flower paintings. Surprisingly, a manservant attending the auction on his employer’s behalf buys the whole lot of them. A crown of tulips dazed by sunshine, a vivid arrangement in the splendor of a drawing room—they might as well be portraits of demons for all Pieter cares. When the bidding starts on the seascapes Pieter comes out quickly, raising his hand in ten-guilder increments. A grizzled-looking adversary with a clay pipe rises up against him and from the look of the man’s ravaged face Pieter suspects he’s a retired sea captain, a querulous pensioner who still wakes for first watch. Pieter ups his bid and buys the painting for much more than it deserves. The retired captain pulls on his pipe, avoiding eye contact, and settles for a grim scene of a beached leviathan, its blackened hide ravaged by villagers carrying axes and pails of fat. By the time all the paintings have been sold an hour has passed and the day has grown warm outside the attic. The closed room is stifling, smelling of tobacco and varnished canvas. The auctioneer places the goods of sale into separate piles, each with a corresponding bidder’s name, and wraps the paintings in lengths of muslin for carrying out into the street. Pieter goes in search of fresh air.

  He finds a back room set behind the main attic space. From the look of things it had been the artist’s workroom. It faces the street with a large shuttered window that he opens, swinging it out beneath the bell gable and the beam hoist. He guesses the room was once used for hauling and storing provisions, and it now looks as if the artist has just left to fetch something. A small city of bottles and stone bowls occupies a table, an assortment of scrapers, trowels, and brushes rising from an earthenware jar. A shelf is lined with pigments, oils, and spirits. Beneath the window
Pieter notices a canvas covered with a drop cloth. His first thought is that the guild member has siphoned off something for himself, some little gem that is far superior to everything else in the next room. But when he removes the cover and takes in the scene he wonders if the painting is destined for the guild archives so as to avoid scandal.

  He angles the picture to study it in the light of the window, but in the harshness of sunlight the surface recedes and flashes iridescent. Pieter brings the canvas back down and props it against one wall. He stands there for several minutes, riveted by the uneasiness of the scene. He’s never thought much about paintings or what they mean. He knows of Rembrandt and the craftsmen of Delft, has heard stories about portrait artists being summoned behind palace walls. Up until this moment, though, he has always thought of painters in the same light as stonemasons or engravers, craftsmen who ply a trade. This painting is entirely different, a scene so ethereal that it flinches in the full light of day. The boy waving from the ice with the dog at his heels, his scarf nothing more than a yellow crinkle, a shaving of lemon rind. The barefoot girl with her pale hand against the birch, leaning toward the skaters; the light on the horizon that is somehow both serene and ominous. Looking at the painting makes Pieter think of those wintry afternoons when as a boy he waited for dusk to settle over the house and for the first tallow candles to be lit. His father would become quiet and speculative and tell stories about dead relatives. The smell of supper would kindle from the stewpot in the flames of the hearth. The painting contains all this. It is about the moment before nightfall, about waiting to cross over.

  He imagines the painting framed above his desk back in Rotterdam, sees it presiding over one wall during contract negotiations. He pictures shipwrights and underwriters staring up at that scene, stupefied into submission. There’s a commotion next door and he becomes aware that he’s been missing for some time. He covers the painting and puts it back where he found it. When he walks out into the hallway, many of the bidders are descending the narrow stairs with their spoils, the guild servant directing them from the landing below. Pieter enters the room and lingers by the auctioneer as the other men bundle up their supplies. He waits for the last man to leave and begins to organize his cane rack and painting. The auctioneer is entering spidery figures into a ledger and double counting the money.