I

Madera was heavy. I grabbed him by the armpits and went backwards down the stairs to the laboratory. His feet bounced from tread to tread in a staccato rhythm that matched my own unsteady descent, thumping and banging around the narrow stairwell. Our shadows danced on the walls. Blood was still flowing, all sticky, seeping from the soaking wet towel, rapidly forming drips on the silk lapels, then disappearing into the folds of the jacket, like trails of slightly glinting snot side-tracked by the slightest roughness in the fabric, sometimes accumulating into drops that fell to the floor and exploded into star-shaped stains. I let him slump at the bottom of the stairs, right next to the laboratory door, and then went back up to fetch the razor and to mop up the bloodstains before Otto returned. But Otto came in by the other door at almost the same time as I did. He looked at me uncomprehendingly. I beat a retreat, ran down the stairs, and shut myself in the laboratory. I padlocked the door and jammed the wardrobe up against it. He came down a few minutes later, tried to force the door open, to no avail, then went back upstairs, dragging Madera behind him. I reinforced the door with the easel. He called out to me. He fired at the door twice with his revolver.

You see, maybe you told yourself it would be easy. Nobody in the house, no-one round and about. If Otto hadn’t come back so soon, where would you be? You don’t know, you’re here. In the same laboratory as ever, and nothing’s changed, or almost nothing. Madera is dead. So what? You are still in the same underground studio, it’s just a bit less tidy and bit less clean. The same light of day seeps through the basement window. The Condottiere, crucified on his easel …

He had looked all around. It was the same office – the same glass table-top, the same telephone, the same calendar on its chromeplated steel base. It still had the stark orderliness and uncluttered iciness of an intentionally cold style, with strictly matching colours – dark green carpet, mauve leather armchairs, light brown wall covering – giving a sense of discreet impersonality with its large metal filing cabinets … But all of a sudden the flabby mass of Madera’s body seemed grotesque, like a wrong note, something incoherent, anachronistic … He’d slipped off his chair and was lying on his back with his eyes half closed and his slightly parted lips stuck in an expression of idiotic stupor enhanced by the dull gleam of a gold tooth. Blood streamed from his cut throat in thick spurts and trickled onto the floor, gradually soaking into the carpet, making an ill-defined, blackish stain that grew ever larger around his head, around his face whose whiteness had long seemed rather fishy, a warm, living, animal stain slowly taking possession of the room, as if the walls were already soaked through with it, as if the orderliness and strictness had already been overturned, abolished, pillaged, as if nothing more existed beyond the radiating stain and the obscene and ridiculous heap on the floor, the corpse, fulfilled, multiplied, made infinite …

Why? Why had he said that sentence: “I don’t think that’ll be a problem”? He tries to recall the precise tone of Madera’s voice, the timbre that had taken him by surprise the first time he’d heard it, that slight lisp, its faintly hesitant intonation, the almost imperceptible limp in his words, as if he were stumbling – almost tripping – as if he were permanently afraid of making a mistake. I don’t think. What nationality? Spanish? South American? Accent? Put on? Tricky. No. Simpler than that: he rolled his rs in the back of his throat. Or perhaps he was just a bit hoarse? He can see him coming towards him with outstretched hand: “Gaspard – that’s what I should call you, isn’t it? – I’m truly delighted to make your acquaintance.” So what? It didn’t mean much to him. What was he doing here? What did the man want of him? Rufus hadn’t warned him …

People always make mistakes. They think things will work out, will go on as per normal. But you never can tell. It’s so easy to delude yourself. What do you want, then? An oil painting? You want a top-of-the-range Renaissance piece? Can do. Why not a Portrait of a Young Man, for instance …

A flabby, slightly over-handsome face. His tie. “Rufus has told me a lot about you.” So what? Big deal! You should have paid attention, you should have been wary … A man you didn’t know from Adam or Eve … But you rushed headlong to accept the opportunity. It was too easy. And now. Well, now …

This is where it had got him. He did the sums in his head: all that had been spent setting up the laboratory, including the cost of materials and reproductions – photographs, enlargements, X-ray images, images seen through Wood’s lamp and with side-illumination – and the spotlights, the tour of European art galleries, upkeep … a fantastic outlay for a farcical conclusion … But what was comical about his idiotic incarceration? He was at his desk as if nothing had happened … That was yesterday … But upstairs there was Madera’s corpse in a puddle of blood … and Otto’s heavy footsteps as he paced up and down keeping guard. All that to get to this! Where would he be now if … He thinks of the sunny Balearic Islands – it would have taken just a wave of his hand a year and half before – Geneviève would be at his side … the beach, the setting sun … a picture postcard scene … Is this where it all comes to a full stop?

Now he recalled every move he’d made. He’d just lit a cigarette, he was standing with one hand on the table, with his weight on one hip. He was looking at the Portrait of a Man. Then he’d stubbed out his cigarette quickly and his left hand had swept over the table, stopped, gripped a piece of cloth, and crumpled it tight – an old handkerchief used as a brush-rag. Everything was hazy. He was putting ever more of his weight onto the table without letting the Condottiere out of his sight. Days and days of useless effort? It was as if his weariness had given way to the anger rising in him, step by certain step. He was crushing the fabric in his hand and his nails had scored the wooden table-top. He had pulled himself up, gone to his work bench, rummaged among his tools …

A black sheath made of hardened leather. An ebony handle. A shining blade. He had raised it to the light and checked the cutting edge. What had he been thinking of? He’d felt as if there was nothing in the world apart from that anger and that weariness … He’d flopped into the armchair, put his head in his hands, with the razor scarcely a few inches from his eyes, set off clearly and sharply by the dangerously smooth surface of the Condottiere’s doublet. A single movement and then curtains … One thrust would be enough … His arm raised, the glint of the blade … a single movement … he would approach slowly and the carpet would muffle the sound of his steps, he would steal up on Madera from behind …

A quarter of an hour had gone by, maybe. Why did he have an impression of distant gestures? Had he forgotten? Where was he? He’d been upstairs. He’d come back down. Madera was dead. Otto was keeping guard. What now? Otto was going to phone Rufus, Rufus would come. And then? What if Otto couldn’t get hold of Rufus? Where was Rufus? That’s what it all hung on. On this stupid what-if. If Rufus came, he would die, and if Otto didn’t get hold of Rufus, he would live. How much longer? Otto had a weapon. The skylight was too high and too small. Would Otto fall asleep? Does a man on guard need to sleep? …

He was going to die. The thought of it comforted him like a promise. He was alive, he was going to be dead. Then what? Leonardo is dead, Antonello is dead, and I’m not feeling too well myself. A stupid death. A victim of circumstance. Struck down by bad luck, a wrong move, a mistake. Convicted in absentia. By unanimous decision with one abstention – which one? – he was sentenced to die like a rat in a cellar, under a dozen unfeeling eyes – the side lights and X-ray lamps purchased at outrageous prices from the laboratory at the Louvre – sentenced to death for murder by virtue of that good old moral legend of the eye, the tooth and the turn of the wheel – Achilles’ wheel – death is the beginning of the life of the mind – sentenced to die because of a combination of circumstances, an incoherent conjunction of trivial events … Across the globe there were wires and submarine cables … Hello, Paris, this is Dreux, hold the line, we’re connecting to Dampierre. Hello, Dampierre, Paris calling. You can talk now. Who could have imagined those peaceable operators with their earpieces becoming implacable executioners? … Hello, Monsieur Koenig, Otto speaking, Madera has just died …

In the dark of night the Porsche will leap forward with its headlights spitting fire like dragons. There will be no accident. In the middle of the night they will come and get him …

And then? What the hell does it matter to you? They’ll come and get you. Next? Slump into an armchair and stare long and hard until death overtakes into the eyes of the tall joker with the shiv, the ineffable Condottiere. Responsible or not responsible? Guilty or not guilty? I’m not guilty, you’ll scream when they drag you up to the guillotine. We’ll soon see about that, says the executioner. And down the blade comes with a clunk. Curtains. Self-evident justice. Isn’t that obvious? Isn’t it normal? Why should there be any other way out?

He’d been standing a bit like an idiot right in the middle of the salon when he saw her come into the hallway and then hesitate at the door, presumably because she had just noticed his presence, before turning firmly towards Rufus with Juliette in her wake (the latter seeming somewhat overwhelmed by events) – What did he do? He’d not stirred. He’d taken advantage of the fact that he was in relative shadow, as far from the flaming hearth as he was from the lamps at the bar, to keep quite still. Impassive. The one thing not to do. The last thing he should have done. Not the slightest movement. The reflex of dignity. What did dignity have to do with it? The best way to turn something that, an instant before, might still have seemed a mere misunderstanding into an insurmountable obstacle. Why had he suddenly turned to stone? Since he’d been expecting her for an hour or more while nonetheless pretending to get Rufus and Juliette to confirm that she wasn’t coming, it was downright hypocritical of him to pretend to be surprised and stand stock still like a circus dog! Was he nailed or screwed to the floor? His strange posture in the middle of the room with a glass in his hand, dignified and attentive, draped in his dignity, striving to mislead by adopting the stiff and abstracted pose of a drunk, but not being very good at it he paid more attention to his own heartbeat, not daring to look anywhere, not daring even to finish his drink. He could have said something, or shouted, or screamed. He could have gone up to her. He might have done anything he chose. But he didn’t. Not a twitch. He didn’t even frown, blink, or breathe in.

His arm raised, the glint of the blade. He’d collapsed in a heap, drowning in his own blood. Stout, flabby, a healthy complexion. Then flopping down the stairs in his stained shirt and a bloody towel round his neck, like a slowly deflating red balloon …

You know nothing. You thought you were a champion. You thought it had happened. Your heady moment to have the world in your arms. You’re a dolt, you can barely draw a circle, you’re a wimp. What’s happened serves you right. That’ll teach you how big your boots are! What did it all add up to? Took yourself for an Antonello, did you? But you’re barely good enough to make a proper gesso duro. We thought we were the greatest forger auf der Erde, did we? We thought it would be kind of fun to make a real period piece, a cute little Renaissance portrait, did we? So we said to ourselves why not let’s have a go mate it’s better than twiddling thumbs. Indeed it is. But a wee Condottiere can’t be pinned down just like that. The other guy had been around for a while. He knew how things stacked up. Had a few tricks up his sleeve. But you’re as witless as a day-old chick with cotton wool between its ears, and you’ve got no experience either. A nothingburger.

Something murky. What was murky? Something he still couldn’t understand. A connection, a link. A link in the chain. Altenberg, Geneva, Split, Sarajevo, Belgrade. Then Paris. Then Rufus. Then Madera? Meanwhile? The evening of the reception, or the day before, or the day after. At first, nothing. Nothing to report. Days dragged on. Then came facts, a story, a fate, a caricature of fate. To end with this obviousness, this bloody heap, Madera’s corpse, and blood trickling between the feet of the chair …

Escape, of course, but why? What’s in the way? Some plaster, some bricks, not much stone, and then some packed earth. How many feet? A man-sized hole, just beneath the level of the basement window. How many hours? The same image crosses your mind like a sudden and brutal slap: Rufus bursting into the studio to find you right here, slumped on your bed surrounded by cigarette butts, half hidden in a cloud of smoke … Otto had made a call. Was Rufus out? What would he be doing in his hotel room at four in the afternoon? Otto will call again this evening … You’ve still got a chance. A few hours … Enough time to get the right tools …

Wherever it may be, one day a telephone will crackle and a far distant voice will come through, there’ll be the sound of footsteps, the knock on your door, three soft taps, there’ll be a hand on your shoulder, somewhere, sometime, in the metro, on a beach, in the street, at a station. A day, a month, a year will have gone by, hundreds or thousands of miles will have been travelled, and someone will suddenly hail you, come up to you, will meet your gaze for an instant and then vanish. Night train. Empty compartment. Fuzzy images. You’ll be lying on your bunk, no way out. Who will get you first – Rufus, or the police? One and then the other? A fine piece of melodrama, an avenging finger pointed at you – that’s him we’ve got him keep it up lads go to it – then banner headlines in huge type. In court today. Read all about it. Eight columns wide. Headless corpse found in alley. You shall show my head to the people. Second by second. The carriage shudders over the fish-plates. Every sixty feet? Every thirty feet? You’re fleeing. Fleeing at 120 kilometres an hour. You’re in an empty train rushing along at 120 kilometres an hour. You’re sitting in a facing seat by the window. Wan lights flicker now and then on the other side of the cold pane. Where are you going? Genoa, Rome, Munich. Anywhere. What are you running away from? The whole world knows you are on the run, you’re standing still, the moon on the horizon is keeping up with you. Anywhere as long as it’s out of this world. You won’t make it.

He was cold. The cigarette he’d tossed on the floor was burning itself out. A wisp of smoke rose vertically almost to meet his eye, then broke into irregular whorls that wobbled for a few seconds and then dispersed as if blown by an invisible puff from nowhere, maybe a draught from the window.

Truth. Nothing but the. I killed Madera. I killed Anatole. I killed Anatole Madera. The killer of Anatole Madera was me. I did murder. Murdered Anatole Madera. Everyone murdered Madera. Madera is a man. Man is mortal. Madera is mortal. Madera is dead. Madera had to die. Madera was going to die. All I did was speed things up a bit. He was under sentence. He was ill. His doctor reckoned he had only a few years of life left. If you can call that a life. My word, did he live in pain. He wasn’t feeling very well that afternoon. He had a lot on his mind. If I hadn’t done anything maybe he would have died in any case. He would have gone out like a candle just by blowing himself out. He would have committed suicide …

“I don’t think that’ll be a problem.” What did he know about it, in the first place, and why had he said it? The surroundings in that lounge, the potential effect of the lighting, the bar, the fire in the hearth. They both had a glass in their hands. And at a stroke the whole world, his whole world, materialised around him. After a long period of solitude the past suddenly became present, he was abruptly immersed in all that was most familiar to him, reduced to the dimensions of a lounge: everyone was there in the off-kilter lighting made of jagged leaps of reddish flames in the hearth and the excessively muted, over-intimate and artificial glow from the bar. Jérôme. Rufus and Juliette, Mila. Anna and Nicolas. And Geneviève. And Madera, supremely detestable, with teeth that gleamed when he smiled. Winter suit. A ballroom dancer’s black-and-white shoes. At that point perhaps he should have been wary, should have thought calmly and methodically to try to understand what it all meant, what was henceforth impossible. He could see the full, stark, unaltered story of his last twelve years just by looking in those eight smiling faces. Coincidences or plots? Did he need to go beyond the smiles, further than twelve years back? To find a chink in the wall, a logical connection. An equation: there had been this, then there was that. To make the world coherent once again, or for the first time, a reassuring world, so much more reassuring than all this flux and vagueness. When was that? When was it supposed to be? Was it one evening in the abominable heat of Sarajevo, in loneliness all the more absurd for being accepted? An afternoon looking at the Condottiere? There would be a sign, and he could already see the complicated workings of a machine set in motion: a switch clicks, a needle points, a filament breaks, and valves open … Would that do the trick? Had it done the trick? The oldest story in the world. His arm raised, the glint of a blade. Was that all it took for Madera to collapse with his throat slit?

Now I’m lying on this bed, I haven’t shifted for maybe an hour. I’m not expecting anything. But I do want to live. Everybody wants to live. All the same I do maybe have enough time left to get up, get to work, dig a hole, and escape. Couldn’t be easier. Couldn’t be harder. What’s difficult about it … ? Otto is now on the other side of the door and pacing up and down. He might have got through to Rufus, he might have told him …

Might you be a coward? You are going to die. To die or tomorrow. You’re going to die very slowly. From fear. Thou shalt rot. To be scraped off the floor with a teaspoon, swept up, vacuumed away and disposed of in the waste. You like that. It amuses you.

You’d like to look in the mirror and make faces. You’d like to wait until it’s all over without lifting a finger, without doing a thing, you’d like it to be just a bad dream so you can rewind and go back a day, a month or a year. You wait. He hangs around outside your door. He’s stupid and obedient, that’s fine. Good dog. Guard dog. You could try to bribe him. You go up to the door and raise your voice. Herr Otto Schnabel, would you like to earn ten thousand dollars for nothing? My dear dear Otto, ten thousand dollars, all yours. Ten thousand dollars and three cents? Ten thousand times ten thousand. A billion dollars? A big pack of chewing gum. An alien outfit with all the accessories. A machine gun with dum-dum bullets. A stuffed elephant. Come on, Otto, show some willing. Make a gesture. You want an ottomobile. An ottomatic. A nelly copter. You want a nellycopter. Without propellors. A nellyjet.

You. You, the world’s greatest art forger. The grinning joker, inside art. You think that’s funny. You think waiting is a hoot. You’ve had enough, you’re fed up with it. At the end of your tether. What about tomorrow? And the day after? And the day after that? And the day after the day after? You can’t build the world from enlargements. You can’t conquer the world with side-angle lighting. You can’t lay out the world on a restored panel. You took a gamble and you lost. So what?

Aware of your own misery. And the runner-up is: Winckler, Gaspard, for his remarkable rendition of The Swan. Wearing gown, toga, and a crown of laurels, you grumble and grouse as you climb the four steps to the podium …

He stares at a blank spot on the wall. Tomorrow, tomorrow perhaps. Tomorrow dawn, or death. Or life. Or both, or neither, an intermediate state, a status quo. Why don’t you drop in on me in my purgatory, the other side of no man’s land …

Go looking. Go and look, of course. Look for light, for daylight on the other side. The other side of the mountain … The always fatal outcome of repetitious movements of the hand, the same skilfully adjusted dose of colour, the same trap set once again beyond overweening ambition? To strive for a chef d’œuvre. The ambition of Tintoretto and Titian resuscitated, risen from the ashes. Monumental ambition? Monumental mistake. Antonellus Messaneus me pinxit. Without the look, the certainty, or the confidence. A tin-pot portrait of a man. A mere princeling, a pasty-faced cad, a hairless and miserly coward. A Condottiere who’d taken the wrong turn, a miserable bit-part actor who’d not had time to learn his lines. And what about him? What was he doing mixed up in that – he, the one and only, the prince of forgers and forger of princes, with his fine nose and his eagle eye, his poison voice and magic hand. He who thought he could draw on the purest spring and summon from his ultra-modern easel the supreme quintessence of Italian art and the indisputable apogee of the Renaissance? Was he master of the universe? Meister Gaspard Winckler! Why shouldn’t you laugh out loud? Señor Gaspard Winkleropoulos, alias El Greco. The world in his right hand. A walking art gallery!

You’ve killed a man, you have, don’t you see. You committed murder. You think it’s easy. Well, it’s not. You think that committing murder has a meaning. Well, it doesn’t. You think it’s easy to paint a Condottiere. Well, it’s not. Nothing is easy. Nothing is quick. Everything is wrong. You could not but get it wrong. You could only ever end up like this. Caught in your own trap, by your own folly, by your own lies …

*

My future all of a sudden is laid out before me in time and space. Just these few yards still to cross. Just these few hours still to get through. It all comes down to this. This is where it all comes to a halt, where it all comes to a stop. It’s the edge and the threshold. It has to be crossed, and then anything can happen. The minute I get through the wall of this room maybe everything will begin to have a meaning again: my past, my present and my future. But first thousands upon thousands of meaningless gestures have to be performed one by one. Raise the arm, lower the arm. Until the earth shakes. Until the wall bursts and night shines forth in starry splendour. It’s simple. The simplest thing in the world. Raise the arm, arm raised, like …

Gather your strength, try to summon it all up for a single push so as to begin living again, take this first step and be something other than a man lying on a bed playing at being dead in his own grave, the man you’re staring at as if he were somebody else. Why is it so easy? Why is it so hard? You don’t move. What’s the point of having a conscience? You killed a man. That’s serious. Very. Not a thing you should do. Madera hadn’t hurt you. Why did you kill Madera? No motives. He was fat and alive, he puffed like a sea-lion, he was ugly, he was heavy, he wandered around the laboratory, dangerously, right behind you, saying nothing, not looking at you; he hovered around the easel with his hands behind his back and his lips slightly parted, wheezing from asthma; he would go away and slam the door and you could hear his steps echoing in the stairwell, under the arch, and for a long time after that as you got back to painting with slightly unsteady hands, feeling outraged without knowing why, almost in a panic from the presence of that man, that mass of breathless fat that prowled around for a few minutes and disappeared and then returned just as hostile and mistrustful, making you feel as flustered as a schoolboy who’d been caught out, caught red-handed, sitting too far back in your chair, your brush hanging idly in your hand and an absent look on your face, looking at that never-endingly unfinished portrait of another evil and aggressive visage as if it were the most obvious symbol of the whole adventure. Was that the reason why Madera died? Was that also the reason why you killed him?

Imprisoned, obviously. As in the Belgrade studio, long before. What was he waiting for in order to return? What was he really after? He had read Geneviève’s letter. “It seems to me sometimes that I understand you completely, absolutely, from top to bottom. I have to say that’s a pity, and also that I hope I’m wrong: if I am wrong then you must come back very quickly, as quickly as you can; if you put it off, then it can only mean I’m right, and you’d have to admit that everything that might have brought us together has lost all meaning.” That last sentence had made his eyes prickle as he sought desperately, for the fourth, fifth and eighth time to tell Geneviève why he was not yet able to go back to Paris. He crossed out words, crumpled up the paper and threw it away, started again … “You have to wait three more days, because one of the specialists from the Commission has just discovered in the National Library in Sarajevo a virtually unknown manuscript about Roman remains in the lower part of Split, in close proximity to the site of the eastern wall of Diocletian’s Palace, which suggests very strongly that excavations were undertaken on the site in 1908 with no results, and that is very serious …”

Very serious. His eyes wandered desolately from one canvas to the other. Dear Geneviève. I cannot come back yet because. You’ll have to wait another day or two. You have to carry on waiting because. He recalled that in that exact moment when the crossed-out words – the tiny, utterly futile sentences he could not manage to put together because the whole was just as meaningless as the parts – jumped out at him like a swarm of poisonous sea-lice, in that same exact moment when out of his too-empty studio came the implacable, ironical and fleeting image of a prison, that same moment when as the crumpled sheets piled up on the floor there came to him the painful awareness of a blatant deception – the discovery of that disastrous manuscript was a grotesque invention – at that exact same moment his gaze wandered beyond the wide-open window to a place four hundred metres away on the other side of Bezistan, beneath the friendly, warm-looking great red star of Borba that lit up the dark night, where the supposed consolation of a good booze-up awaited him in the press bar, the only place open so late. Could it be? Was it only now that this memory took on its full meaning, or had he been fully aware of it at the time? Had he deliberately agreed to seek refuge in a straightforward binge that would prevent him facing up to that letter for twelve hours or more? He’d picked up the phone, gone through his address book to find the right person to wake at 4.00 a.m. to go with him, lead him in his desperate quest for slivovitz, he’d found a suitable friend, an Italian journalist who might be at his hotel, he’d called the hotel …

His hands more than his memory recalled the movements that one by one, in apparently incorruptible and anonymous innocence had begun to dismantle, undermine and demolish the impressive construction of his sanctuary. 2-3-0-1-9 Hotel Moskva, someone gabbled. Molim. Donnez-moi Mr Bartolomea Spolverini. Please could you call up Mr Spolverini. Bitte ich will sprechen zu Herr Spolverini. Certainly, sir. Clunks and clicks. Ringing in the far distance, the sound of footsteps, orders given curtly. Certainly, sir. The far-off, spiteful voice pregnant with innocent danger. Waiting. Second by second. Kilometres of cable weaving all round the earth … Dear Geneviève. Dear Geneviève I? I am going to drink instead of packing and catching the plane. Full stop. Tomorrow he will be dead drunk lying fully dressed in an unmade bed among Streten’s canvases, instead of being at Orly on a bright September day. Dear Geneviève. Paris, France. Waiting. Hands on the receiver, one of them gripping the earpiece, the other just touching it, held like a loudspeaker as if to mask the vileness of the conversation he was about to have, to hide the weakness under the words, the frankly excessive dismay, the self-confessed powerlessness, in all its tergiversation, to fabricate anything beyond a fictitious treasure … What’s the point of being aware?

He didn’t know much about real life. His fingers brought forth only ghosts. Maybe that was all he was good for. Age-old techniques that served no purpose, that referred only to themselves. Magic fingers. The relationship between the skills of a Roman jeweller, the knowledge of a Renaissance painter, the brush-stroke of an Impressionist and the patiently learned capacity to judge what substance to use, what preparation was required, what agility to develop – that relationship was merely a matter of technique. His fingers knew. His eyes took in the work, divined its fundamental dynamic, split it down to its tiniest elements, and translated them into what for him were internalised words such as a more or less liquid binding agent, a medium, a backing material. He worked like a well-oiled machine. He knew how to lead the eye astray. He had the art of combination. He had read da Vinci and Vasari and Ziloty and the Libro dell’Arte; he knew the rules of the Golden Ratio; he understood – and knew how to create – balance and internal coherence in a painting. He knew which brushes to use, which oils, which hues. He knew all the glazes, supports, additives, varnishes. So what? He was a first-class craftsman. Out of three paintings by Vermeer, van Meegeren could create a fourth. Dossena did the same with sculpture; Joni Icilio and Jérôme likewise. But that wasn’t what he’d been after. From the Antonellos in Antwerp, London, Venice, Munich, Vienna, Paris, Padua, Frankfurt, Bergamo. Genoa, Milan, Naples, Dresden, Florence and Berlin could have arisen with admirable obviousness a new Condottiere rescued from oblivion by an amazing find unearthed in some abandoned monastery or castle by Rufus, Nicolas, Madera or another one of their associates. But that wasn’t what he wanted, was it?

What was the illusion he had cherished? That he would be able to cap an untarnished career by carrying off what no forger before him had dared attempt: to create an authentic masterwork of the past, to recover in palpable and tangible form, after a dozen years’ intense labour, something far above the technical tricks and devices of his trade such as mere mastery of gesso duro or monochrome painting – to recover the explosive triumph, the perpetual reconquista, the overwhelming dynamism that was the Renaissance. Why was that what he’d been after? Why had he failed?

What remained was the feeling of an absurd undertaking. What remained was the bitterness of failure; what remained was a corpse. A life that had suddenly collapsed, and memories that were ghosts. What remained was a wrecked life, irreparable misunderstanding, a void, a desperate plea …

Now you’re on your own and you’re rotting in your cellar. You’re cold. You can’t make sense of it anymore. You’ve no idea what happened. You’ve no idea how it happened. But the one who’s alive is you, here, in this same place, you at the end of twelve years of a featureless existence, an existence pregnant with nothing. Every month, every year you dumped your packet of masterpieces. And then? Then nothing … And then Madera died …

Arm raised, the glint of the blade. All it took was a gesture. But first he had had to get the razor out of its sheath, check its condition, fold it in his palm so he could use it, leave the laboratory, climb the stairs one by one. One after another. Slowly. At each step the aim became more precise. What was he thinking about? Why was he thinking? He was perfectly aware: he was climbing the stairs to go and slit Anatole’s throat, the throat of the late Anatole Madera. The thick fat throat of Anatole Madera. His left hand would be wide open to provide a better grip as he applied it firmly and speedily to the forehead and pulled it backwards, and his right hand would slit the man’s throat with a single thrust. Blood would spurt. Madera would collapse. Madera would be dead.

He had done all those things. First in the half-light each hand had put a glove on its partner, rubber gloves similar to medical ones, which he sometimes used when working clay. He had done all that. Step by step. One two three. Four. Five six. With frequent stops. To get his breath back. To wait. And all that while – what was the point? – a voice spoke to him from the back of his neck, from his head, from his big toe. It never stopped talking. Step by step. Seven eight nine ten. Let it go again. What was his conscience going on about? What was his guardian angel rattling on about? Gordian angel. Step by step. Come on lad don’t let it get you down. You’re right you’re wrong. Freedom or death. Tread by tread. Step by step. Rather be the slicer than the slice. Step by step. One step for Ma. One step for De. One step for Ra. One step for You. One step for Shall. One step for Kill one step for Ma one step for De one step for Ra. You Shall Kill Ma De Ra. You shall kill Madera. Ma De Ra. Almost as if neon signs were going on inside his head, flashing then vanishing, and, as if as he gradually drew nearer to his goal, the oak door, the padded door, the door ajar on whose other side everything would begin and end just as it had all begun and ended when a year and half before behind that same door the little Christ by Bernardino dei Conti had emerged from an unsuspected drawer, as if the entire set-up that he had glimpsed for a few seconds had now come back to him in its fear, anxiety, anger, despair, greed, boldness, courage, madness, and certainty, as if all of that had coalesced and was fleeing at phenomenal speed towards that thick, red neck with its fleshy folds touching the white silk shirt that like an irresistible magnet invited, demanded the unspeakable gesture, the incision of the glinting blade that would set off a pulsing cataract of blood and with it the chaos of a revolt that had been kept hidden for too long.

No, there had been nothing to it. Just one dead man. Beyond a forced smile, an arbitrary tensing of the jaw, a hat out of kilter. Beyond a maybe poorly inspired brooch in the strict organisation of the painting: the inaccessible and terrifying Mr Condottiere had hovered over that paltry anxiety …

Over there and far away, the recovered delirium is once again seething. Seething thickly on the terra firma of certainties. Dura mater, pia mater. Arachnoid. Did his conscience remember in order to protect itself? Gaspard the forger. What sense was there in his crazy desire to jump over the inevitable flowing river of time to recreate the radiant mug – yellow and translucent, like a good candle – of that ruffian? But it was all logical; it seemed that some particular event had intervened at every moment in his life to undermine the false calm he had thought he enjoyed day by day: meeting Mila had trained him for unhappiness; meeting Geneviève had built the walls of his prison; the death of Madera was the final conclusion, the obvious and necessary apotheosis. Where was the surprise? He had been trapped. To paint the look in the eyes of a condottiere, he would have had to look in the same direction as he had, if only for an instant. It was so obvious that what had attracted him had been this immediate image of triumph, the complete opposite of what he was himself! Even his most Herculean labours could not prevent what had to be from coming into being: in the shadow of the Condottiere, all he could attain was the image of his own failure.

What did it matter, anyway? There’s nothing for you to face up to yet. Death, if you will, but death doesn’t mean much in the end. What you have behind you is this muddled story, your own story: the story of an idiot, to put it bluntly, not without a modicum of sensitivity, not devoid of a love of fine things, not entirely lacking in taste – but an idiot nonetheless. Behind you lies Madera’s corpse, an impressive number of more or less serious failures, a kind of disillusionment, and a few hundred successes you can’t claim as your own because you took great pains to ascribe them to other artists. Behind you are masks. In you there is nothing. A desire to carry on living. A wish to die. A feeling of emptiness and an arrant failure to understand. So what?

Everything you do has a price, you should know that. You should have picked that up, to your own cost. Every word you utter, every thought you turn over in your mind has a necessary consequence. Nothing comes for free. Everything has to be paid for and the cost is often high. Laughter, mockery, messing up won’t get you anywhere. You still have to get up and look around and stop this stupid game. What have you got to lose? What’s at stake? Another hour will go by. Then twelve. The door will be knocked down. That’s what you’re pondering in your little head. The door will be knocked down. They’ll come and get you. They’ll take you to prison. You’re not scared. You can easily envisage a cell not so different from the one you’re in, only maybe a bit smaller. With a harder bed, darker walls. Some graffiti, to while away the time. Dates, or notches, or grids to mark the days? … Robinson Crusoe’s calendar. 34,089 in clink, or something of that kind. And then?

Would you like to go on living? Say yes. Yes, and yes again. The pleasure of walking in the sun, the pleasure of walking in the rain, the pleasure of travelling, of eating. And swimming. Hearing the sound of a train? All you have to do is dig for a few metres. Earth and sod, brick and stone, cement and plaster. You’ll be able to unlodge a stone. Will you manage to avoid Otto, to slip noiselessly through the lawns in the grounds, to get through the electric fence? Will you manage to get back on the road? You can flee in life, you can flee in death. And then? You’re making a bet …

He looks at his watch. Murky light seeps through the ivycluttered basement window. Millions and millions of kilometres weaving all around the planet. Heads or tails. He gets up. He strides around the laboratory. Where is the chink, the invisible pivot? Open Sesame? Which stone will swing open? He glances all round the room. There’ll be a narrow passage, dripping corridors, stairs, steel ladders, a whole underground route stretching out for miles, a labyrinth of dark passageways, a knot of abandoned cuttings, a long march strewn with obstacles and countless side-tracks marked by tiny signs, leading, beyond the mines and quarries, to the transfigured reality of a clearing in the woods, to the marvellous presence of a rain-drenched night, to the discovery of an intense and radiant sky.

Scrap by scrap. His chisel grazes the mortar: a sharp, accurate blow from his hammer and a shard of cement flies off from the dense layer surrounding each block of masonry. At each effort, each blow, the way out begins to open, the route becomes clearer, an exit looms, still far away but nonetheless present …

With every inch you dig out you question the world. Why and for whom are you fighting? What hope do you still have? You think you understand. You think you know. But what next? How will you live tomorrow? In a few hours you will be free and you know it; the mere repetition of the same movement will save you: you aim your chisel, raise your arm, bring it down, do it again. And then?

Perhaps you will dig down into your life just as you are digging your way to salvation? Go back to square one and start again. Understand. Two or three times in the course of your life it was necessary for you to make a choice, and you probably made the wrong one, and now it is perhaps possible for you to avoid making mistakes about yourself, not to repent but to accept yourself, to concentrate on only the essential facts, to rub out … With stylet, scalpel, graving tool or indeed a chisel … Scrape, thrust, up-end … Get rid of and blank out what had been, what had been lousy, what had been wrecked and ruined. Shattered. Stitch by stitch, step by step, undo everything he had done, everything he had believed … And then repeat the movement for ever more, start over again and again: set the chisel in place, hit it with the hammer, even if it seemed pointless and absurd, even if he ended up not knowing what he was digging for.

In a few hours he would be out. And then? He would avoid Otto, he would kill him if necessary, he would tidy himself up a bit, then go on to the road and stop a car or a lorry. He would get back to Paris. And then?

This is where everything stops and everything begins. The swing of the arm is so simple. In two or three hours the loosened stones would swing round, crash onto your trestle, roll onto the cement floor. All you’ll have to deal with then is a layer of compacted soil. In four hours. In time and space your future is suddenly inscribed …

That resistance. That peculiar resistance of the world and yourself. Like in Altenberg, long ago. That fresh snow that had frozen over. Like corrugated iron. He was walking on an empty slope with his skis on his shoulder; the snow seemed able to bear his weight, it stood up to him, then suddenly collapsed, and he sank into it up to his thighs. He’d barely been able to put on his skis and go back down, very fast. He slid along, barely touching the ground, he managed not to get lost and not to fall in. It was an odd memory. Wasn’t it the case that all he had done for years was to glide over the surface of things? That resistance, that simulacrum of resistance. He had never gone any further. Not for Rufus, not for Geneviève, not for Jérôme. Not for anybody. Not even for himself. Were they alive? Were they anything other than nameless, rootless, and unmoored beings? As if he had been living in a wandering world. A world of ghosts. And yet, on some occasions, on the evening of the party, which he felt all of a sudden like a fearsome threat, as if he’d been abruptly summoned to appear in court, taken apart and stripped bare without mercy and then pinned to the wall, he had felt splashed by the existence of other people, with fear and then an understanding that was immediate, intuitive, spontaneous and irrefutable. That sharp burst of their existence. Maybe that crust on the snow that was hard only on the surface was cracking and collapsing – beneath what weight? – and was dragging him down, invading him … That was such a long way from the well-guarded, closed world he had set about building, his citadel of stucco and imitation marble, his strictly limited empire of the ersatz, the home of useless alchemical tricks.

His hands could bring Vermeer or Pisanello back to life, just as he could revive Greek craftsmen, Roman goldsmiths, Celtic coppersmiths, or Kyrgys silversmiths. But so what? People said bravo, they looked after him, paid him, congratulated him, treated him like a star. And then? What remained? What had he done? What you did at Split …

In a cellar in the lower town a treasure hoard was born: earthenware and sandstone pots, vats and amphoras stuffed full of jewels and coins, sesterces, silver denarii, bracelets, pins, cameos, huge silver brooches, all higgledy-piggledy and deeply buried – a disparate, extravagant hoard that matched quite miraculously what might well have been the treasure-chest of a lord of the Late Empire, a high dignitary of the state stuck in this far-away province that was still Roman but already invaded by barbarians, if only in the mixed origins of the people in his entourage, who one day had been expelled with his followers from the palace by yet another invasion and pursued in an endless retreat towards Styria, or Illyria, or Gallia Cisalpina or else towards the east, up-river, towards Macedonia or the Carpathians, leaving people and goods where they were, and, in a constantly nurtured hope of returning, hiding in a cellar an impressive mound of gold, silver, and precious stones that formed the unambiguous insignia of a thousand years’ domination …

And then? Had he been aware that what he had been seeking once again was his own image? Had he known that what he had summoned up, what he had snatched out of the past, what he had projected onto the four dripping, damp, dark walls of the cellar in Split was his own face, his own attitude, his own ambiguity? A treasure was hidden inside. A year of painstaking research, months of solitary labour. A few hundred metres from the bluest sea in the world, with his tiny forge, his gold and silver leaf, his unsorted precious stones, his wooden and brass mallets, working in an untanned leather apron just as, long before, a slave-smith had worked, a man who might have been a cowherd from Transylvania or a Greek shepherd, a tiny dot in a mile-long horde, driven by cold or hunger, or by wolves that had been attracted from their lairs in Latvia or Cappadocia by the Empire’s alleged garden of Eden, the great ship of peace reigning over the world and by the unbounded horizon of Mare Nostrum but which nonetheless was ineluctably peeling away and caving in under the sheer weight of its own coherence – this cowherd or shepherd, dragged against his will into a useless adventure, by sudden turns horseman, foot-soldier, prisoner of war, and slave, extracting from iron, bronze and gold not just the angry pride of freedom lost, but the unspoken longing for the glimpse he had had of peace.

But what had come of his own effort, of his slow and blinkered striving, his indefatigable energy, the four months he had spent in a cellar working twelve to fifteen hours a day? What reassurance? What certainty? He had worked in torrid heat, almost naked but for his apron, surrounded by a never-ending swarm of flies, leaving his workbench only when darkness fell, not seeing a soul apart from a vague acquaintance of Nicolas who brought him his food twice a day. Why and for whom had he slaved away? Geneviève had asked him not to leave, he had refused; later, she asked him to come back, and he had refused again. Was his love no stronger than that? He had obstinately tried to convince her, claiming in complete bad faith that it was just a question of a week or two, seeing all the work he’d put in, the paperwork that had been assembled, the money that had been put up, the negotiations that Nicolas and Rufus were conducting …

And now you’re digging crumb by crumb. Unpredictable geometry of the rock being tackled. No order, no logic: just the continuity of the hammering you’re giving it. Your arm hurts. Your head is buzzing. Do you want to go on? Why do you ask? You mustn’t stop. You’ll collapse from fatigue, your chisel will slip from your hand, you won’t hit hard enough. You have to exhaust yourself. Like an animal. You must not pause to recover. Don’t ask any more questions. Or else don’t answer them. Why is that suddenly reassuring? The width of the chisel, the accuracy of your hammering, those shards cluttering up the plank and the trestle, those stones which are coming apart, millimetre by millimetre. In a few hours you’ll be sliding through the wet grass like a worm. Shirtless, shoeless, kneeling at the top of the scaffolding with your head almost touching the ceiling, bathed in sweat, you hammer away like a deaf man on the rough, off-white surface of the mortar and each blow echoes inside you with a longdrawn-out, strident intensity, with an obsessive rhythm …

Months and months, all that pointless effort? As if he had such powerfully rooted habits, or rather, a stubborn wish to go on; whatever the cost, to go to the very limits of his own misery, his own weakness. A decision taken once and for all to be entirely and only that absence, that hollow, that mould, the duplicator, false creator and mechanical agent of works of the past. Those clever hands, that precise knowledge of what erosion means to paint, his skill and craft. What did he want? Guilty or not guilty …

Sometimes, in spite of himself, his hands, his neck, shoulders and ankles shook, seized up, got cramp. He pressed on with clenched teeth, sometimes making a rough whistling sound, absorbed in his struggle, as if he were no longer capable of stopping, as if all his life had migrated to the flat, shiny blade of the chisel with which he was pummelling the mortar like a machine, had migrated into his painful, overdone, ever more tense movements and which with every second, with every minute, were loosening, unfixing the stone that would become a new door open onto the night.

The bedazzlement of life. From deep down in his consciousness rise the snows of Altenberg, the banners floating over the Olympic piste, the huzzahs of the crowd. And then the same fatigue and that feeling of peace. How beautiful he found those first steps towards conquest, the horizon suddenly coming into view after a long night’s march. A small party of four or five men, barely a rope. Sunrise near the top of the Jungfrau. The suddenly revealed view of the Alps, on the other side of the mountain. The watershed. As if it had all hung on the suddenly friendly and familiar presence of the sun. Near. Because it was cold or because they’d had to walk a long way to see it? Because his climb had been nothing more than the desperate call of that radiance …

Why not understand? And why should he have forgotten? Then one by one the masks had come: meeting Jérôme, getting settled in Geneva. An absurd memory. Altenberg and its too fresh snow, a thousand slivers of light, the proud accumulation of layers beneath the apparent protection of the iced-over surface that glinted in the sunlight. Altenberg, whose traces lay in him like ski-tracks: parallel headlong lines accompanied by a quincunx pattern of roundels, slightly inclined towards the direction of travel, made by ski-sticks scraping their steel tips visibly if minutely, and more or less deeply, on the snow.

Those vanishing, intertwining tracks, still sharp or else half rubbed out, each of which compacted the snow, solidified the ground, made it less and less fragile, less and less deceptive, just as – in the present – memories rose up in him, intertwined and vanished, strengthening his approach, and, like those pistes that were too hard for him to tackle, leaving immaculate, hostile landscapes of virgin snow on the north slope, offering wide open spaces that were waiting for him. Every instant, now, beyond the snow, beyond his memories, the paltry image of his own death rose up, the image of his fate, of his ridiculous saga, and the sickening grimaces of the masks. Twenty years had gone by. A hundred forged paintings, or more …

And here you are, at the present time, with your life in your hands, wallowing neck-high in your own story, and more lost in your memories than you ever were before. A tear wells up, you’re so touched by your own weakness. But you know very well that things did not happen like that. What’s the use of complaining? You wanted to be what you were. You were what you wanted to be. You accepted your fate, whole and entire, not because you were obliged to accept something, not as a victim, but definitely because the way you structured your life, your work, your entertainment, remained the most likely way to provide you with satisfaction. It was you who followed Jérôme, it wasn’t Jérôme who led you astray …

But what difference did that make today? Yes, it had all been messed up. Yes, he had messed it all up. He had accepted the world in its easiest manifestation. He had intended to lie. He had lied. He had made lying his business. And then? He had wanted to run away and it was too late …

At an altitude of three thousand metres between Belgrade and Paris, maybe over Basel or Zurich, perhaps above Altenberg, the salutary decision he had mulled over for too long had at last been made to have done with forgeries and go away with Geneviève. They would have gone to the Balearics first, then to the United States. He would have earned a living as a restorer. But he had not alerted Geneviève … He had not answered her last letter, which he had had for ten days. When the plane made a stop at Geneva, he had sent a telegram. But when he reached Orly, only Rufus and Juliette were waiting for him, and they took him back to their place where there was a cocktail party going on, where he had hooked up with Jérôme. Then with Anna, Mila and Nicolas. Then Madera. Then Geneviève …

She had left straight away. He hadn’t spoken to her. Had Gaspard been nailed or screwed to the floor? He had not seen her since. Sixteen or eighteen months later, that telephone call, in the middle of the night …

She had not answered. She must have woken up with a start. Then understood. Who could be calling her at that hour? Then waited. Then decided quite quickly that she would not get up, that she would not pick up, and then she must have listened, maybe counting the rings, and got up all the same, then hesitated, switched the lights on, edged closer to the telephone, hesitated again, mesmerised by the ringing, hesitated yet again, then put out her arm, brought her hand towards the receiver, unable to decide whether to pick up or cut the caller off … Perhaps he had not waited long enough, perhaps he’d let himself get swallowed up by the regular sequence of rings, as if each of them merely emphasised the futility of this final attempt. Ring. Silence. Those tinny crackles on the line, over there, on the other side of Paris, here, right in his ear. How his patience and pointless obstinacy must have reassured her … Sometimes I feel I understand you, completely, inside out … What would have happened if she had picked up, if she had answered, if she had agreed to see him again? How long would it have been until he went back to Dampierre? Was he free? Was he a prisoner?

Sixteen or eighteen months later, at night, that telephone call. That crazy call. That automatic, almost automatic gesture, like so many others after all, following on from those dozens and dozens of numbers, dozens and dozens of letters on the dial. Counted out one by one. Always with that same anxiety. And the same impatient desire for a dialogue wrested from space, recreating, in a bizarre coherence, that universe of wires and networked lines, those thousands of faithful and impassive operators in headsets, those kilometres of cable weaving all round the globe, not so much in his mind the eternal muttering of time and history as the soothing web of a potential release, simply connected to the refusal or the acceptance of one’s self, of one’s fate, of one’s destiny, the last bastion of one’s freedom, those simple movements taken on board one by one, corresponding, beyond the electronic precision of the combined circuitry, to what could have been his definitive, immediate, indisputable victory over the world … B–A–B–1–5–6–3 – Everything became possible again, for the second time, one more time, beyond the clumsiness of the action, simply because at Rue d’Assas Geneviève had woken up, Geneviève had heard. But she was not the person he should have called.

He had driven from Gstaad to Lausanne then flew in a taxi-plane from Lausanne to Paris, and another taxi from Orly to Avenue de Lamballe. He had arrived at three in the morning. He had put his case in the hall. He had taken off his coat. He had gone up to the telephone. He had wanted to call Rufus first to explain why he’d left. Then Madera, to say that he was not going to go on, that he didn’t want to be a forger anymore. But the number he had dialled – why? – was Geneviève’s …

Was it really for her sake that you left Gstaad? Answer, no lying now: what were you after? You waited a long time. At each unanswered ring the world collapsed anew. Whole continents smashed to smithereens. Torrents of lava. Tidal waves. What was left? She had not answered. You hung up. You took off your jacket. You loosened your necktie. You looked at the time. You went to the kitchen. You drank a glass of water … You lay down, you woke up, you called Rufus in Gstaad. You got dressed …

He had taken a taxi to Gare Montparnasse. Another taxi from Dreux to Dampierre. Otto had opened the door, and he had not looked surprised. Madera had seen him in his study. He had told the older man that he’d had enough rest and had come back to finish the Portrait of a Man, and that he would have it completed in a week. He had gone down to the laboratory. He had taken off the piece of canvas that protected the panel. He had looked at the Condottiere …

You did all of those things, you lived all of those moments. Do you remember? That was three days ago. Everything was possible, you remember, you wanted it. You were waiting and at each ring you swore you would hang up after the next one, and still you waited, and you promised yourself that she only had to pick up, even if she cut you off straight away without saying anything to you, for you to call Madera. But she kept you hanging on to the end. She didn’t lift a finger. Nor did you. It was so simple. A mere telephone call …

Hello, I want Dampierre 15, in the Eure-et-Loire. Hello. You can talk now. This is Winckler. Good morning, sir. Good morning, Otto, can I speak to Madera, please. Certainly, sir, one moment, sir. Those kilometres of wires weaving all around the globe their soothing web of a potential release. Madera I’m not coming back I’ll never come back. You can all get stuffed, you and your clique. Click. Clunk.

Was there nothing? Nothing but his admitted weakness. The counter-truth of a dead end. What to do? Where to go? Carry on. Why carry on? Carry on for whom? Why accept? What difference could it possibly make whether she picked up the phone or not? What difference could it possibly make that he had decided to complete the Condottiere? What difference could it possibly make if the Dampierre studio, after the studio at Place du Cirque, after the one in Gstaad and the one in Split and the one before that in Paris, had become a prison, the vicious circle of his contradictions, the eloquent symbol of his pointless life?

Pointless. Now he had said it. In Geneva, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Paris, London, Tangier, Belgrade, Lucerne, Split, Dampierre, Trieste, Berlin, Rio, The Hague, Athens, Algiers, Naples, Cremona, Zurich, Brussels – what had he done? What image would he leave in the whole wide world?

Which framework would he walk out on? None. The void. And yet at all times a way out had been available. And yet at all times he had thought he could say no …

That was wrong, wasn’t it? You could not say no. You never did say no. All you could say was yes. They had you on a leash and you were free to follow them. You couldn’t make any demands. You couldn’t do anything except what you were doing – making coins, faking reliquaries and statuettes, turning urns and pastiches of shams …

Twelve years. Twelve times three hundred and sixty-five days. Twelve years in the course of which he had been shut in basements, attics, strongrooms, empty workshops, abandoned houses, barns, caves, disused mineshafts and set up, thought up, worked out and carried off alone and on his own one hundred and twenty or thirty fake paintings, A whole gallery. From Giotto to Modigliani. From Fra Angelico to Braque. A gallery without any soul or guts …

Gaspard the forger. Gaspard Theotokópoulos alias El Greco. Gaspard da Messina. Gaspard Solario, Gaspard Bellini, Gaspard Ghirlandaio. Gaspard de Goya y Lucientes. Gaspard Botticelli. Gaspard Chardin, Gaspard Cranach the Elder. Gaspard Holbein, Gaspard Memling, Gaspard Metsys, Gaspard Master of Flemalle. Gaspard Vivarini, Gaspard Anonymous French School, Gaspard Corot, Gaspard Van Gogh, Gaspard Raphael Sanzio, Gaspard de Toulouse-Lautrec, Gaspard de Puccio alias Pisanello …

Gaspard the forger. The smith-slave. Gaspard the forger. Why a forger? How a forger? Since when a forger? He hadn’t always been a forger …

Becalmed. Day in day out. Then the hours that started ticking away, putting their full weight on him. And then those deeds, those events, that adventure, story, fate – a caricature of a fate. A useless gesture, or a step in the right direction? In its unspeakable spontaneity, Madera’s death was perhaps the first action of the demiurge emerging from chaos.

Night is falling. Rufus has not come. You’re in with a chance. You just have to keep out of Otto’s way. Otto is an idiot. Your arm hurts. Doesn’t matter, keep going, the blocks are more than halfway to coming loose. You’ve had enough. I know. Who cares. Tell yourself it’s exercise. Some kind of a match. A time-trial. Tell yourself you’re carving a bas-relief. Tell yourself you’d be better off anywhere except this cellar. You’re not convinced. Who cares. One more time who cares. You mustn’t say who cares. Never look a gift-horse. It takes two Constables to catch a Whistler. Remember, that’s your motto. Don’t give up now. You’re too close to the finish. Even so: you could carry on, or you could wait. Right? You try to overcome your own opposition. Of course you won’t. Sure you will. I know you. You know yourself. Nonetheless. How many times have you hit the chisel with the hammer? A hundred thousand times? A million? Two hundred and fifty? You don’t know? That’s a good sign … Listen here: you and me pal, we’re gonna do a bunk, right? Jump the fence? That’ll give Rufus a nasty surprise …

To die not to die. What did that mean, free or not free, guilty or not guilty? What would that so strictly, so definitively disastrous arc look like such that he would end up being able to describe it? Madera was dead. Why? What was the more important? Where had it all started? The party at Rufus’s place? The night at the studio in Belgrade? The sudden return from Gstaad? Meeting Jérôme? Meeting Mila? Meeting Geneviève? Or was it the night he had spent drinking in this very basement? What was left of his whole life? Where had it begun? What was the logic?

Gaspard Winckler, trained at the École du Louvre, holding a diploma in Painting Conservation from New York University and the Metropolitan Museum, New York, Honorary Technical Consultant at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Geneva, restoration expert at the Koenig Gallery, Geneva. So what? A notorious counterfeiter in his spare time. A forger more than he should have been. So what? He had been born, grown up and become a forger. How can you be a forger? You are the forger … Why become a forger? Did he need money? No. Had he been blackmailed? Hardly. Did he like it? So-so.

So hard to explain. At the time, could he have imagined anything else? He was walking the streets of Berne. It was wartime. He was seventeen. Idle and wealthy. And Jérôme arose. The attraction of mystery. An adventure. A clever and elegant Arsène Lupin. On his endless vacation, surrounded by extremely wealthy old ladies from England, canny hotel-keepers and retired diplomats, amidst postcard-pretty scenery – snow, mountain peaks, fine chocolate and high-class cigarettes – what could be better than that infallible painter? I’m a painter too but that’s very good my lad. And then? The sudden discovery of something difficult. The sudden awareness that he had never known anything, that he had never understood what the act of painting meant, that he had only been making desultory use of a fairly good “hand” to keep boredom at bay, and the certainty that he could learn and become knowledgeable, one day. By immersing himself entirely in study and research, under Jérôme’s patient but firm supervision. And then? Then by copying, pastiching, copying, imitating, reproducing, tracing, dissecting, five times, ten times a hundred times, every detail of Metsys’s Banker and his Wife: mirror, books, coins, scales, box, hats, faces, hands. And then …

Too good to be true, too easy. When did the whole business start to wobble? When did your story come unstuck? So, so irresponsible … I was seventeen, of course. But when I was twenty-five, twentyseven, thirty, thirty-three? Could he get his mind round it? What is the point of having a conscience? What’s awareness for? It’s a word. A word like any other. Conscious of what? The walls of the prison closed in on him at speed. Nothing more to say. One fake. Another fake. Gaspard the forger …

Then came Mila. First bedazzlement. First slight, small and harmless. Simulated remorse. A tiny misunderstanding. For the first time in his life he had a sudden urge, just like that, to stop playing a game. To be himself. What did that mean? A rut is a rut. Gaspard the forger. Gaspard Winckler, supplier of a full range of forgeries. Anything by anybody of any period …

Loving a woman, was that being himself? Did he love her? For many years love had meant using confidential visiting cards that Rufus gave him (he got them from Madera, but he only knew about that much later on). Anonymous encounters. And that was that. A need for slightly more spontaneous affection, for something rather less mechanical, a little less sordid. It was of no consequence. That was the way it was. He had met Mila at Nicolas’s place. She’d become his mistress. Because of the colour of the dress she was wearing that day, or else because she had begun to smile. He could not remember. What did it matter? It was something like an interval. A few nights that were different from the others. The morning after, with pitiless logic, with pitiless idiocy, there he was at the Louvre, at the same time as always, in the Roman Antiquities section, with Nicolas, preparing the Hoard of Split. It spoke for itself. It had not even occurred to him that, without it making the slightest difference to anything, he could perfectly easily have given himself a week off. Was that natural? Guilty or not guilty …

When he had come into the room she was already there, seated on the arm of an enormous armchair close up to the fireplace, leaning slightly forward, talking to Jérôme. It was fairly odd. It had never occurred to him that she might know Jérôme. She turned to look at him, said nothing, didn’t even smile or nod. He went a little closer. She stood up very naturally, and went to the other end of the room, where the bar was. A neutral attitude? Or was her indifference carefully calculated? What difference could it make? Doesn’t matter. Things like that happen to everyone. You didn’t love her, that’s all. Or she didn’t love you. But that’s not the issue. Why did you feel guilty for a few seconds or minutes or days? You were indifferent. You didn’t make the slightest effort. You would have liked to make an effort …

Strange. You think you’re free. Then, at a stroke … No. Where did freedom begin? Where did it end? Free to fake? What an oddity. A little Giottino. The Adoration of the Magi. Melchior, Balthazar. Gaspard. Have another go. And so it goes on. And it soon becomes essential, and there’s nothing in the world besides that persistence and that patience, that obsession with exactness in respect of anything. Cézanne. Gauguin. The world recedes … And there he is already pinned up on the wall: Gaspard Winckler the Forger. Pinned down like a butterfly. Gasparus Wincklerianus. Wholly, fundamentally, explicitly, absolutely and completely defined. Sometimes I feel I understand you, completely, inside out … A forger, and what else besides? Just a forger. Joni Icilio the Forger, Jérôme Quentin the Forger, Gaspard Winckler the Forger. The forger with his auger. The drill of death, and passing time.

Time goes on and the masonry wobbles. In a few minutes this block – and the whole world around it, the world attached to it – will pivot and open the way. What about Rufus? Can you see him at the wheel of his Porsche screaming down the road, piercing the sky with his headlamps, the needle hovering around 120? Rufus worried, agitated, devastated …

One more try. And then? Your future written in stone. You’ll never be a forger again. The one sure thing you require. You may live happily or unhappily, you may be rich or poor. Who cares. The world on your plate tomorrow? Just that one promise, never to lose yourself again, never to be taken in by your own game. Will you be able to keep the promise? Are you keeping it right now?

You’ve no idea. You don’t yet have an idea. You’ve never been alive. Your hands and your eyes. The slave-smith, the Kyrgyz or Visigoth coppersmith in his cowherd’s apron. Your hands summon forth a forgotten caravan. You are dying in the midst of sightless corpses – the empty, bulging eyes of Roman statues – amidst masterpieces and trinkets, masked shamans waving painted fetishes and the resurrected enigmas of medieval sculpture. Look at them, they’re all there, they’re crowding in on you: El Greco, Caravaggio, Memling, Antonello. Silently, untouchably, inaccessibly, they are dancing all around you …

Yes. Jérôme as well, long ago. Alone and forgotten in his little house outside Annemasse. Died of hunger or loneliness among his art books and canvases. Died on a November day. He had not seen him for more than six months. He had paid him only one brief and shameful visit, not knowing what to say, scared and in a panic at the sight of his rapid decline, his foreseeable decline, at the suddenly intolerable sight of his trembling hands and the atrocious punishment of poor sight. Jérôme was unable to work anymore. He took slow steps around his untended garden, he wandered around his stillempty living room, twiddling his thick metal-framed glasses, which in his time of glory he would only wear to inspect a detail, claiming with a degree of pride that he only used them as a magnifying glass, and which made him look like Chardin but which he now had to wear almost permanently, changing their position on his nose to glance at a book he obviously knew already, and which like all his books dealt exclusively with the aesthetics or the techniques of painting, and he would then shut it again immediately, as if such subjects had become taboo, as if everything that by force of habit had been his whole life no longer existed, and could only set off a bout of searing nostalgia that he constantly denied and yet just as constantly rekindled with fear and trembling in the awful, futile illusion of recovery.

His wrinkled and calloused hands lay on the arm of the chair and sometimes shook a little. He would tense them abruptly, digging his nails into the upholstery. “I am very glad to see you, Gaspard. It’s been quite a time, hasn’t it?” The banality of the expression, its indifference, the mechanical way it was said. It was in Paris, the night of the party, his last time in Paris. And also the last time he’d spoken to him. Rufus was leaving next morning for Geneva and would drop him off at Annemasse …

Now he loitered on the streets and in the empty rooms of his villa. He was sixty-two. He looked eighty. He had been a pupil of Joni Icilio. He had had a truly distinguished career. One da Vinci, seven Van Goghs, two Rubens, two Goyas, two Rembrandts and two Bellinis. Fifty-odd Corots, a dozen Renoirs, thirty or more Degas, exported in bulk to South America and Australia in 1930 and 1940, a number of Metsys and Memlings and whole cartloads of Sisleys and Jongkinds, done between 1920 and 1925 at the start of his association with Rufus and Madera. Until 1955 he had worked twelve hours a day and often more, accumulating knowledge, techniques and tricks of the trade, and with every artist achieving indisputable perfection, often with startling speed. Then he had stopped and hung around Place du Cirque, giving advice, setting things up, making bibliographies, collecting documentation, as if he were still trying at whatever cost to make himself useful, and gradually, without saying anything at first, stopping completely, and as if he could not envisage carrying on living in idleness while remaining in the very place where he had spent his working life, confessing to Rufus (who had not dared bring up the subject himself) that he wished “to end his days” in peace and quiet, and so settled with obviously simulated delight and a sad little smile on his face in the detached house that Rufus had bought him at Annemasse, only a few hundred metres from the gates of Geneva, and there, with a sour housekeeper, a decent pension and a precious library, begun to experience the appallingly slow agony of living a life that was no longer any use. Two years. Seven hundred and thirty days. Seven hundred and thirty days of boredom only too rarely relieved by a visitor or a trip. A few days in Paris, Venice or Florence, and then he was on his own once again, alone with his oddly gentle pain, a kind of vaguely nostalgic, vaguely anaesthetising comprehension of the self, among his books and paintings, alone in his sparsely furnished living room and, beyond that, a small street lined with identical houses, a silent and empty little street. All his life he had lived in the ceaseless jostle of Rue Rousseau and Place du Cirque or else in Paris, in Rue Cadet, in a small studio on the seventh floor of a block of apartments. A livid, scrawny little street. A clean little suburban street? A cramped living room that he had not summoned up the courage to organise, as if he had been convinced that it was not worth the trouble, as if he had wanted to prove every minute of the day that he was already dead and living in his grave, in these alien and altogether unknown and indifferent surroundings where he was obliged nonetheless to walk and look and see every day …

On 17 November 1958, Rufus had called Dampierre: Jérôme was dying. That same evening, Otto drove him to Orly and he landed in Geneva. There was a chilly drizzle. When they reached Annemasse Jérôme was already dead. A doctor and the housekeeper were standing by his bed. An extraordinary jumble of open books, reproductions and unfolded lithographs was strewn around the bedroom, surrounding him like battle colours …

Do you recall? You bent down and picked up a book that had fallen close by Jérôme. Do you recall? Let four captains bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;… and, for his passage, the soldiers’ music and the rites of war speak loudly for him …

The funeral march echoes for a long time in the burdened memory. Jérôme had wandered around the corridors of his house, going from room to room like a shadow, resting his head against the windows, staring at the narrow street. That was in November. A fine drizzle was falling. He paced back and forth, went up to his bookcase, opened his portfolios, took out thousands of sketches, removed the protective tissue paper from the prints, remembering, resuscitating each story, each detail, each one of the difficulties he’d faced and overcome. Then what?

He must have walked for a long time in the stunted little garden. Dusk had fallen. It was cold. He had gone back up to his room. He had gone back down to the living room. The housekeeper had served his dinner. He had not touched it. He had pushed his plate away with a gesture of great weariness …

Do you recall? You left for Paris the following morning. You came back here. Jérôme was dead. He was your master. He was a forger. You were a forger and you would die as well. One day you too would rot away in a deserted house. You went down to the laboratory. Here. You drew back the canvas drape protecting the Condottiere. You’d been working on it for a year …

Then one day you started drinking, straight from the bottle. Madera found you in the small hours, dead drunk and half strangled by your necktie. He said nothing. He did not ask any questions. He called Rufus on the telephone. Rufus came to get you. He took you to Gstaad. You spent three days with him and went skiing. You remembered Altenberg. But you couldn’t even remember what had made you so happy. You got back to Paris in the middle of the night. You called Geneviève. She didn’t answer. You went back to Dampierre … That was three days ago.

A few more blows of the hammer. Five four three. Two? One. Five more. Cuckoo! Watch the little birdie. Open Sesame. Over and out. Solemn Overture. Music by Johann Sebastian Bach. Fugue. One more go, with a bit more energy, and bingo, you’ve caught the ashlar like it was just a rugby ball. So that’s that. Take a breather? You wipe your hands like a true stonemason. One stone. Another stone. And now. A hole in the wall. There’s a bit of earth in front of you, all dirty and grey. The tiniest trickle of dusky light. Very poetic. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t in a right mess. No point in thinking Otto has gone back to his usual routine, or that by some miracle he’s suddenly become as deaf as a doorpost. Therefore he has heard you. Therefore he knows roughly where the tunnel is. He is out there. If you stick your neck out you’ll see him right in front of you. He’ll tell you very sweetly, “Meester Gazpa, get ze fock pack in ze lap.” So your tunnywunnel is useless. You don’t give a damn. You’ll find another way out. One way or t’other …

You get off your pedestal. You walk around the laboratory. Otto, my Otto, where art thou? Do you not see Milord Koenig coming down the lane? Did you get through to the aforementioned Switzerman? Did he tell you he would be with you forthwith? Are you expecting him at this very instant?

Very funny. Side-splitting. You look at your watch. It’s a quarter to seven. There’s still no reason why Rufus should be at his hotel at this time. Otto must have left a message … All you can do is carry on with your gamble. If Otto is on his own when you are completely ready to emerge, then you should be able to get away with it. For instance, if he’s waiting for you at the exit from the tunnel, you could escape via the door. Clever. But like the man says it’s not that clever. If Otto’s waiting at the hole in the ground, he’ll already have barricaded the door. And how will you know whether he’s here or there? See? You’ll put your mind to that later. At the moment what matters is finishing your tunnel. But Mr Otto Schnabel must not see it, otherwise he’ll set a trap to catch you. So?

Your imagination is soaring, is it, dear sir? So let’s have a look. Deeds follow words. Take a sufficiently wide and long plank, easily found among the panels used as try-outs for the Condottiere. Scrabble around until you find two large nails. They are found. Drive them into the masonry with the mallet you see before you, set just a little further apart than the width of the plank. Bend aforementioned nails. Slide plank between them. Push. The plank hits the soil, the nails hold it in place like pegs. Dig out the soil that’s just underneath. As you dig, the plank advances. And the tunnel, thanks to man’s genius, is now sheltered by just a thin layer of soil – as long as you’ve reckoned it right – supported by the plank. Otto sees nothing. And when you’ve decided it’s time to emerge, you retract the plank. The soil collapses. An ocean of light floods into the room. A gaping hole appears.

An hour will go by. And in an hour’s time? Mr Gaspard Winckler, you are free. A feeling he will never have known, something unlike anything else … He’ll be lost in his freedom. He’ll drown in it. He’ll walk the roads. He’ll be a vagrant. He’ll be totally bewildered …

What do you look like as you do it? You raise your arm, you bring it down, you drag a small amount of soil and a bit of mud towards you, you push the plank forward an inch, you slide along, you wriggle about like an earthworm, like a snake in the grass. What do you look like, half naked, with something like a cake-slicer in your hand, making mud pies like a boy on a beach. An uncomfortable position. It’s hot. You must be very dirty. What a busy day you’ve had! Do you remember Jérôme? Do you remember Rufus? Do you remember Madera? Do you remember Geneviève? Mila? Nicolas? Do you remember Split, Geneva, Paris? Do you remember Giottino, Memling, Cranach, Botticelli, Antonello? Do you remember the Three Magi, the Madonnas and Child, the Christ the Kings, the Resurrections, Donors, Princes, Princesses, Fools and Retinue, the Bremen Burghers, the Knights of the Sepulchre, the Déjeuners sur L’Herbe, the Bridges near Blois, the Three Peaches on a Table, the Boats at Saint-Omer? Do you remember the Masonic chests, the totems, the Upper Volta wood carvings, the Jamaican Three Pence Brown, or the sesterces of Diocletian? Do you remember Gstaad and Altenberg? Do you remember your life?

His hands and his eyes. Anything by anybody from any period. All his own work. All of it, but nothing else. Gaspard the forger. Italian specialities. That dead crowd that had been robbed and betrayed. Cleaned out. Gaspard the forger. Roll up, roll up, the whole world is on show. Admire. The man who knows it all. The only person who managed to copy the Mona Lisa’s smile, to unravel the secrets of the Incas, to learn the forgotten techniques of Aurignacian man. Come and see the history of art in one volume. Gaspard the forger. Gaspard Winckler. Period media and backing. Works on commission …

The rest would be lost in a guffaw. Forger. Faussaire. Fausse ère: wrong period. Bad times. Storm on the way. A forger’s forger. Necrophagist …

Any answer? Anything certain? Anything obvious? No. Not yet. Not even an acceptable fact. Not quite a done deal. It’s as if having been a prisoner for years in an underground cell far from light and life – in the cellars of Split and Sarajevo, and the studio at Dampierre – he’d been getting ready for his escape for months, years, centuries, ages, by means of a tunnel, a passage through the earth, and that the coming moment would be the drawn-out unfolding of his own body in damp clay, dirt, fatigue, discouragement, obstinacy, and cramp. Then a hoarse breathing sound. Despair. For hours and hours perhaps. Then a layer of sod collapses, the sky appears, grass, wind, night …

Something that will not necessarily be called freedom, just something alive, a tiny bit more alive; something that will not quite be courage, but will no longer be cowardice. Potential at a stroke, because at a stroke age-old barriers will fall. Something that would be his, and only his, that would come only from him and would be his business and nobody else’s. Himself, without the others: no more Jérôme, no more Rufus, no more Madera …

Because failure was born one day in acute and precise selfawareness from overweening ambition, because the Condottiere turned out to be nothing more than a bounder, a disarmed horseman, a sad country squire lacking all strength, the world had suddenly lost all meaning. What had he been expecting? What had he been trying to do? Had he never been free? Had he had to go through Jérôme dying and Geneviève leaving, had he had to see the Condottiere turn into a failure and see Madera die before he noticed? Did he know that? Could he see that? What had begun? What was more important? Did his conscience remember only to protect itself …

One by one your memories are wasting away. What? Who started it? Who joined in the game? Who put his head in the sand so as not to see what was going on?

The failure of the Condottiere, the death of Madera. Same thing? The same outpouring of hatred and madness …

He has reached the end of his plank. Everything is ready. One shove, and the earth will fall in. The way will be clear …

But Otto will be standing there, a few centimetres or a few metres away from you, and he’ll be ready to fire, not to kill you, for sure, but to stop you getting away. You wonder what to do. If Otto is somewhere near the tunnel exit, he is sure to have secured all the doors. He can’t not be at the tunnel exit, since he can’t not have heard you digging. If you dig a tunnel it’s to get away through it, so he’ll be standing guard outside it. But as he’s by no means so stupid as not to imagine there might be a trap, he will have bolted the door of Madera’s study, at the top of the stairs. Suppose you went up to that door, taking down the barricade you’ve set up to secure the lower door, and made as much noise as possible in doing so? He’ll come back in. And while he’s on his way back inside the house, whoosh! You go back down at top speed, pull out the plank and off you go. No? No. There’s not enough time. It’s not precise enough. Let’s think it through again. Point one: Otto is at the tunnel exit, or rather, because he doesn’t know exactly where it is he’s relied on the sound and having worked out that the tunnel is being dug under this wall has taken up position a few metres away so as to be able to watch the whole length of the wall. Otto must be near the tunnel. You have to bet that Otto is near the tunnel. Point two: Otto’s looking out for you. He’s expecting you to emerge from the tunnel, he’s shut off the other exits, and he won’t budge for all the gold in Peru. Point three: you have to make him budge. It all boils down to that. You have to get Otto to budge. You’ve reached the age of thirty-three and the only issue on your plate – and if anything is a crucial issue, this is it – is to cause the man known as Otto Schnabel, age fifty, weight 80 kg, indeterminate nationality, formerly butler to Anatole Madera, to change his position for a few seconds, but a few minutes would be better. Yes. But how. You could call him. But he wouldn’t respond. You could put a white sheet over your head and emerge and he might think it was a ghost, you’d go hoo! hoo! he’d panic and take to his heels and you’d been home and dry. But you’re way off there. How? Come on. You can batter down the first door. But what if he’s blockaded the garden gate? He’ll hear you, he’ll rush in and shoot you in the legs. He’ll get you …

Can you feel the seconds ticking away, the minutes trickling past? Have you got your mind on it properly, Gaspard Winckler? You’ve got your grey matter up to speed, haven’t you? Dura mater, pia mater, etcetera. Have you got the answer? You’ve got it. It’s very simple …

Let’s go over it again. Let’s keep it short and logical. Order, precision, method. You are about to carry off your greatest coup.

What’s the one thing that would make Otto shift himself? Rufus. Rufus, obviously. Rufus is not here. But Otto is expecting Rufus. Let’s suppose Rufus goes back to his hotel. The concierge will certainly tell him that someone called Otto Schnabel has called several times. And left a message. Come to Dampierre fast. Obviously Otto hasn’t said: Madera has just been murdered. That’s not the kind of thing you say out loud. What does Rufus do? He calls Otto. What’s Otto doing now? He’s keeping watch on you while waiting for Rufus to call back. So? So you take the phone and set it up on the workbench. Then you get a travelling bag and stuff into it the keys to your apartment, money, your electric shaver, a shirt, tie and sweater. You place it all on the workbench. You take the bag with you; as soon as you’re out you’ll clean off the dust and mud that’ll be more or less all over you. Do you remember the route? Is everything clear in your mind? What have you forgotten? Check. Your papers? Cigarettes? Matches? You go back down. You go back up. You take a long deep breath. Are you in a panic? You are not in a panic …

Wind up the phone. Dring dring dring. You have to trust that Otto is outside at the tunnel exit otherwise he will have heard the office telephone going click as you make the call … Good afternoon, operator, this is Dampierre 15 on the line. I don’t think my phone is working properly. One of my friends insists he called me three or four times this morning – he got here by car this afternoon – but I didn’t hear anything … Can you call me back in ten seconds’ time? Ten seconds, alright. Yes, operator, Dampierre 15. Madera is the name. Thank you, operator, speak to you soon.

Ten seconds. You hang up. Your heart is beating. You look at your wristwatch. Nine. Heads or tails? Eight. What are you betting on it working? My kingdom for a. Seven. Six. If logic is in charge then it has to work. Four. But then. I killed. Three. Madera. Two. Now time speeds up. Go in a flash. Zero. It’s ringing. Far far far away. He’s heard it. He’s running. He’s sure it’s Rufus. Give him time to turn the corner. One. Two three. Take away the plank. Pick up your bag. Put your head out. There you are. There you are. There you are! Run! One two three four five metres. Thank you and goodbye. Ten eleven twelve. Slide under the fence. There you are. Don’t come a cropper in the grass. Run. Say hello to the Eiffel Tower for me. Don’t look round don’t look round don’t look round.

But now everything was dropping and slipping away from him, perhaps as a rebound from a hope that had been nurtured for too long. The life that for a moment he had thought he held in his hands, that compact, dense sum of collected memories, his quest, had shattered into a million pieces, into self-directing meteorites, each with its own life from now on, maybe still connected to his own but ruled by mysterious laws whose constants he did not know. Once again memories sharpened and then suddenly exploded and split up into a myriad impressions, into fragments of life it would have been fruitless to try to make sense of, give direction to, or separate from each other. Splinters and shreds. As if the landscape of his past life had just suffered a cataclysm. As if he no longer had the world in his arms. Did not yet have the world in his arms. He had entered a new era.

This deep chaos was like the chords played by an orchestra before the conductor mounts the podium, with each instrument practising the first bars of its own part, tuning strings, reeds, valves, trying out scales, testing chords as if to underscore the inorganic caterwaul out of which, very soon, because they will all be under the direction of a conductor who will assert his presence, because they will go back to and follow the coherence of the composer’s score, there will spring, in reimposed silence and with the house lights down, the living work itself, the voluntary burst of the trumpets and horns, the plenitude of the quartet and the rhythm that the timpani extract from time and turn into a tempo. If that were so, if that should turn out to be so, then, because he would finally have plumbed the lowest depth of his own madness, his acknowledgement of chaos would finally give birth to a firm grasp of himself and of the world in all its splendour and strength. Has he won? Not yet. He’s free and on an empty road. He’s walking on without knowing where he’s going. It’s dark. It’s just before eight o’clock. Madera is dead. In the laboratory, in a corner, the absurd, abandoned, already dusty Portrait of a Man is scowling. A useless gesture or a step in the right direction? He does not know. He nods his head. He is cold …

You’re going to walk to Châteauneuf. You’ll get a taxi to take you on to Dreux. You won’t catch a train. Too big a risk that you’ll bump right into Otto waiting for you at the station. You’ll look for a lorry driver willing to give you a lift to Paris. You’ll be in Paris tonight. What then? You’ll see. You don’t know. Are you scared?

For years on end the dead weight of days going by. A story as old as the hills? Your arm raised … Day after day, and then this business, this fate, this caricature of a destiny … The end. Avoidable, or unavoidable? Then what? Then nothing. Not enough time to think. Not enough time even to know. You wanted to live. You are living. You wanted to leave. You got out. Madera is dead and Rufus is miles away. So what? Now you’re on your own in the middle of the night. What’s the point of consciousness? Were you happy, Gaspard Winckler? Are you happy? Will you be happy? Night looks like nothing on earth. You’re walking by the side of the road. You’re flagging down the few cars that go past. They’re not stopping. How long will you go on walking? Are you going to die in the ditch? Are you going to lie down in the middle of the road in the hope that a grey Porsche, hunting you down at 120 kilometres per hour, will run you over without even noticing? Where is Rufus? Has he got back to his hotel? Mr Rufus Koenig likes to go to bed early. But he’s not going to get a lot of shut-eye tonight …

You’re getting on my nerves, Gaspard Winckler. You weren’t much good except at forgeries. Now you’re free, what are you going to be able do? What kind of nonsense? It worries you. You’d like to understand. There’s nothing to understand. It’s too cold to think. You’ll think about it tomorrow. Or never. You’ll find out, one day …

In the half-light, to begin with, he had used each hand to put the glove on the other. He had done all he had planned … He had gone up the stairs, step by step. He had pushed the door open in silence. The thick carpet had muffled the noise of his feet. With his left hand he had grabbed Madera by the neck and pulled his head back while his right hand, the one that had been gripping the razor for some time already – a little too tightly – thrust it forward and in an insanely rapid slash slit the neck that presented itself to him, a thick neck with fleshy folds overhanging the white silk shirt. And blood spurted out as if from an abscess that had burst. Open anthrax. Blood streaming out, covering everything in a thick pulsing stream, coating the desk, the calendar, the white telephone, the glass panel, the carpet, the armchair. Blood, black and warm, as alive as a snake or a squid, trickling between the chair legs. And a sudden burst of joy, like a cannon shot, a joy bursting out like a drumroll, like a trumpet encore. That total, radiant, crazy feeling of joy. Incomprehensible. So comprehensible.

So comprehensible … Isn’t that right, Gaspard Winckler?

Foundering brutally at full steam, as if the whole world or, if not the world, then the moderately sickening universe of the room were plunging into the void, the laboratory, that immense and empty studio, re-emerged as another kind of prison: a microcosm featuring contradictions drawn, quartered and individually displayed on a wall, as if, in fine, those evil, clunky reproductions of the Condottiere on the high, sheer walls, those reduplicated images of a face of triumph and control, were, on reflection, ill-matched by the living image of failure on the unfinished panel set on its special easel with its four corners protected by a triple sheath of cotton wool, rag cloth and metal angle-piece at the carefully contrived focal point of six small spotlights: it didn’t show unity restored, the mastery of the world or inalterable permanence, but instead, a mere frozen flash – as if catching sight of itself in a moment of clarity – portraying the fundamental anguish of blind force, the sourness of cruel might, and doubt. It made it seem that Antonello da Messina had wanted, in total disregard of the most obvious law of history and four hundred years before time, to express in their incomplete fullness all the anguished contradictions of consciousness. Every contradiction under the sun seemed to have settled into the mirror of the face portrayed, but they were just absurd, insignificant contradictions precisely because they were expressed through techniques that should have only ever been adequate to portray unambiguous certainties. The painting did not show a warlord looking beyond the portraitist towards the world with all the irony, cruelty and impassiveness of a mind at one with itself; it did not reveal a painter who had summoned up in palpable form and structure above and beyond his model the eternal, rational stability of a Renaissance: it was the double, triple, quadruple game of a fake artist pastiching his own pastiche, but by transcending pastiche and reaching out beyond his subject and beyond his own intellectual grasp and ambition, finding only the murky ambiguity of his own self. Impassiveness had turned into panic, the relaxed firmness of the muscles had come out as lockjaw, the look of confidence had become arrogance and the firmness of the mouth now expressed revenge. Every detail was no longer an integral element of an irreducibly transcendent totality, but just a flimsy and fleeting trace of a man’s will strained to breaking point, a will that was itself rendered untrue by its development, wearing ever thinner as the superficial impression of completeness gave way to distorting elements which by virtue of their power and ambiguity undermined, point by point, the apparent harmony of the ensemble. This was not an artist grasping the world and his own self in a single glance; it was the somewhat haphazard and decidedly murky back-and-forth of a constructed ambiguity, of a hoax, of a crude piece of fakery, where the artist was just a minor demon of truth made uncertain, the clumsy demiurge of a structure so fragile that hardly had it emerged from chaos than it sank back into it with all the inhuman force of suffered defeats, half-intentional mistakes, and self-consciously broken bounds. All the meticulous hierarchy of the lighting, the admirable layout of the planes, the superb implementation of technique – the glues and plaster used for the gesso duro, the mixing dishes, the herbs and soils, the spatulas and brushes, the rags, preparatory drawings and trial canvases, the pencil sketches, charcoal sketches, pastel paints, caulks, oils, glazes, eyeshades, magnifying glasses, and arm-supports – were only symptoms of the project’s futility. From the centre of the painted panel shone forth sacrilegious self-satisfaction. In the now empty laboratory the failure had been entire.