The piece needs a cleaning. You’d expect that after seventy years in a farmhouse. I can’t see any damage to the canvas itself or to the paint surface, though the harsh light makes it hard to tell. But there’s no doubt about the subject, no possibility that this is a study or some similar woman in one of Sargent’s recycled poses.
Dorotea stares back at me. She’s saying, took you long enough.
Carson stabs a finger over her shoulder, toward Tovorovsky’s Dorotea. “What. The fuck. Is that?”
I pull the portrait’s top toward me so I can look at the back. There are three labels, all in German: one from a framer in Vienna, another from Otto Scheunebrunner, and a sticker with “WK Jan ’45”. Nothing in Russian. A handwritten dedication, in Italian, signed by John Sargent.
I gently set Dorotea back against the next painting. “That back there is a copy.”
“How do you know? Maybe this’ the copy.”
“No. The forger had access to the original, but he didn’t copy the back. He missed Sargent’s dedication to the DeVillardis, or ignored it. This one’s the original.”
A copy. We stole a copy. All that effort and stress and expense and risk, and we stole a copy. Miranda getting racked up in the car crash. Julie almost being caught by the British cops. Me and Carson almost getting caught… how many times? For a copy.
Tovorovsky bought or took a copy from the Hermitage or wherever.
Did he know?
Carson whispers, “Now what?”
Good question. “We put everything back and go.”
She points at the Dorotea we brought with us. The copy. “What about that?”
I shrug. “Take it with us.”
My brain’s racing around in circles, trying to catch the random thoughts pinging through my head. If Tovorovsky knew, was this all a setup to dump the fake and get real money for it? When did he figure it out? If he didn’t know, was it because nobody bothered to authenticate it, or because nobody could tell the difference?
The upside: we don’t have to plant Dorotea’s portrait here because she’s been here all along.
Carson flashes her red light in my face. “Wake up. We’re outta here.”
We put back the tarps (I guess these canvases were too big for sheets) the way we found them. Carson rearranges the dust to cover up what we disturbed. We tiptoe out, lock the door. Carson goes to lock the other door while I start downstairs. It’s only marginally easier than going up. When I reach the landing, I set down fake Dorotea to give my shoulders a break. There’s another pause in the wind outside. It’s quiet for a few moments.
I hear a muted scratch downstairs. Then another.
I risk a peek around the wall to the ground floor.
Ute’s door is open.
A soft bump behind me makes me swivel. Carson just stepped onto the first stair. I grab my flashlight and shine it at her, then hold up my hand to signal “stop.”
I try to stop breathing, which isn’t hard. My heart’s trying to bust out of my rib cage. Okay, she can’t see us, but don’t blind people get superhero hearing to make up for not seeing? Did we make something squeak upstairs? Did we whisper too loud?
Another peek. I see a vague human shadow in the dark, just outside Ute’s door. It’s moving, but I can’t tell what it’s doing.
“Hallo? Wer ist da?” It’s Ute.
The wind picks up again. The house groans and creaks.
Ute approaches the stairs. She stands at the foot, not moving. Is she listening? Is she chasing a random noise, or does she know she’s not alone?
She turns. “Sie sind hier nicht willkommen.”
I glance back at Carson. She’s creeping down the stairs using the wind for cover.
Ute shuffles toward the front of the house. I can’t hear her footsteps anymore, and she disappears once she passes the staircase.
“Mutti?”
Wait. Mommy? Does she think this place is haunted?
Is it?
“Mutti? Bist du das?”
This is creepy. It’s also a little sad. She lost her mom almost twenty years ago. She never married, maybe never had a boyfriend, doesn’t know any relatives. She pays people (or, the Austrian government does) to take care of her. And she’s alone in dark that lasts forever.
I never want to be like that. Never.
Her shadow drifts back to her bedroom door. Ute stands there for what seems like a long time, listening to the wind or her mother’s ghost or my heart banging away. “Hallo? Hallo?”
She fades into her room and shuts the door behind her.
I can feel Carson behind me, a big, warm presence a couple inches away. As usual in these kinds of situations, having her there brings down my heart rate a couple notches.
There’s music. Something classical and complicated-sounding with a choir and orchestra. For a moment I wonder if this is like the ballroom in the Haunted Mansion, but it’s coming from behind Ute’s door. The radio, or a CD. I doubt it’s Pandora.
Carson whispers, “Go.”
We make it down the stairs without raising an alarm.
The last thing I hear from Ute’s radio before we go out into the falling snow is the choir singing “Hallelujah.”