Chapter 2
The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. . . . It is not physically there at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic.
—Philip Guston (1913-1980), Canadian painter
If art is but illusion, why is art forgery a crime?—Georges LeFleur
“Did you get lost
again?”
Perched on ten-foot scaffolding in front of a half-circular lunette mural, my assistant Mary Grae held three paintbrushes in one hand and a smeared paint palette in the other, and cradled a cell phone to her ear with her shoulder. She interrupted her phone conversation to shout at me as I walked through the Chapel of the Madonna’s carved stone Gothic archway.
“You said you’d be right back! I was totally freaking out!”
“Keep it down, Mare,” I said, cringing as her voice bounced off the tiled floor and stained glass ceiling. For some reason—I’m sure a physicist could explain it, though I’d probably get bored halfway through—sound was magnified within the columbarium’s alcoves but became lost or distorted around corners. Thus the tinkling of the garden fountains could be heard throughout the cloisters, but Mary and I had once gotten separated and couldn’t find each other even though it turned out we were in chambers only a few yards apart.
Mary snapped her cell phone shut, set down her paint and brushes, and scampered down the scaffolding, landing light as a cat. “You left me here surrounded by dead people!”
“They’re not dead people,” I corrected. “They’re ashes. A bone fragment or two at the most.”
“Eeeeew. But they used to be people, right? And they’re dead now, right?”
Busted on a technicality. The rooms of the columbarium were lined with thousands of small compartments that, to an apartment-dweller like me, resembled nothing so much as glass-fronted mailboxes. Each compartment held urns or decorative containers—some were ornamented ceramic vases, others were bronze cast in the shape of a book, as in “the story of one’s life”—that stored the cremains. Here and there larger and more richly decorated “feature niches,” glassed in on two sides, created windows between the alcoves.
The labyrinthine floor plan of the Chapel of the Chimes Columbarium had been designed to create a series of intimate spaces, each unique and elaborately adorned, to allow family and friends to visit their lost loved ones and reminisce in solitude. Alcoves and passageways branched off into more alcoves and passageways, some opening onto cloistered hallways or courtyard gardens, others leading to dead ends. When I first started working here I spent twenty minutes at the beginning of each painting session wandering around, turning this way and that, ducking down one blind alley after another until stumbling, seemingly at random, upon the Chapel of the Madonna, where Mary and I were restoring two water-damaged lunettes. I now had the route memorized, and only took a wrong turn when distracted.
“This place is creepy,” Mary said, pawing through her backpack until she found a foil-wrapped burrito.
“This place is beautiful. It’s also a great commission. And you shouldn’t eat in here.”
“That manager guy, Troy Whoozits, said I could.”
“His name’s Roy, not Troy, and he only said that because he thinks you’re cute.”
She shrugged. “He’s kinda creepy too.”
“No, he’s not,” I said, wondering why I was arguing. The columbarium’s manager, Roy Cogswell, was kind of creepy. “Let’s take your burrito into the garden, okay?”
Our footsteps tapped down the tiled halls until we reached a courtyard garden complete with a gurgling fountain, miniature palm trees, and a birdcage with two sleeping canaries. Three stories above us stars twinkled through the retractable glass roof. On nice days you could sit by the fountain, listen to the birds sing, enjoy a pleasant breeze from above, and imagine yourself in a sunny courtyard in the south of Spain.
Until you remembered all those “cremains.”
Sinking onto a marble bench, Mary unwrapped her whole-wheat vegetarian burrito and took a healthy bite. My assistant’s outfit tonight consisted of a short black skirt over ripped black jeans, a black lace camisole topped by a ripped see-through gauze tunic, a black-and-silver studded leather belt with silver chains, and black fingerless gloves. The sole exception to Mary’s monochromatic look was her long blond hair, which hung loose down her back, and her bright blue eyes, outlined with a thick line of kohl.
Mary was nearly six feet tall, wore heavy motorcycle boots, and could kick some serious butt. Yet this Goth girl was afraid of cemeteries.
“I have got to get over this,” she mumbled around a mouthful of beans and cheese. “It’s so embarrassing. My friends think it’s totally fly I’m working here, but it scares the snot out of me.”
“ ‘Fly’?”
“It means ‘off the hook,’ or ‘cool’ in Old Fogey.”
Only eight years separated my assistant and me, but the cultural divide was huge. I had spent a good part of my formative years learning art forgery from my grandfather in Paris, Brussels, and Rome. I could rattle off recipes for crackle glazes and sixteenth-century egg tempera, recite the dates that various pigments and canvas linens had been introduced in Florence versus Amsterdam, and expound ad nauseam on the relative merits of seccatives, turpentine, and rabbit-skin glue.
Mary, in contrast, had grown up in America’s heartland. She spent her childhood piercing her body in odd places, dying her hair colors never seen in nature, and experimenting with innovative ways to outrage her staid elders. The day Mary turned eighteen she hitchhiked to San Francisco, where her native shrewdness helped her to survive on the streets until she joined a band and moved in with the drummer. I often called upon Mary to translate contemporary slang and modern mores.
“I only need you for a few more nights. Then you can go back to avoiding cemeteries and mausoleums,” I said. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Americans are the most talented people in the world at pretending death doesn’t exist.”
“Thanks, but I’m Goth, Annie. I have to conquer this,” she sighed. “It’s not, ya know, consistent. Dried mango?”
I took a piece and munched. Consistency was low on my list of Things to Fret About. I spent my time worrying about staving off creditors, figuring out how to input numbers into my new cell phone, and wondering if exposure to toxic lead white oil paint would turn me into one of those artists who thought smearing cow dung on parking meters was “public art.”
“So how are you going to conquer your fear?” I asked.
“I’ve been giving that some thought. I know there’s nothing out there, not really. I just need to prove it to myself. So I decided to spend a few nights in the cemetery.”
“You’re going to what?”
“I said—”
“I heard you. Are you nuts?”
“What could possibly go wrong? There’s nobody real there, right?”
Nobody but grave-robbing ghouls, I thought with a shudder. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell Mary about tonight’s encounter, but given her current state of mind I feared the chance of confronting a green-faced goblin would make her all the more gung ho.
“It’s against the rules to be in the cemetery at night. Besides, they lock the gates at sundown. How would you get in?” I didn’t mention that my master key to the columbarium also opened the cemetery gates.
Mary rolled her eyes, shoved the last bite of burrito into her mouth, and gazed at me as if I were the dimmest bulb in the chandelier. “Hell-o-o? Climb over the wall?”
I am a woman of considerable imagination, but scaling a ten-foot wall to spend a night in a cemetery would never have occurred to me, and not just because I was decidedly less athletic than my twenty-four-year-old assistant. I had spent a memorable, miserable seventeenth birthday in a Parisian jail, and most of my adult life had been focused on distancing myself from my grandfather Georges LeFleur’s world of felonious forgers. I was still recovering from an incident last Thanksgiving when, through almost no fault of my own, I had been busted for smuggling drugs. I gave the police a wide berth these days.
“Mary, the cemetery people don’t want strangers traipsing around the grounds at night. You never know what could happen.”
“You’re such a wuss, Annie.”
“I am not a wuss!”
“Yes, you are. But that’s one of the things I love about you.”
“Mary, I’m serious—”
“Fear not, dear friend and employer,” she said, gathering the foil wrapper and napkins to sort for the recycling bin. “I’ll bring Dante with me.” Dante was Mary’s very large, very scary-looking boyfriend.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“All right. But for the record, I think it’s a bad idea.”
“So noted, Ms. Law-and-Order.”
Now, that made me smile. “Be sure to bring a sleeping bag. It gets cold in Oakland at night.”
“I’ll put it on the list, right after vino and smokes,” Mary said.
“Garlic and a crucifix.”
“A squirt gun filled with holy water.”
“A revolver with silver bullets. And don’t forget the wooden stakes.”
“Would a paintbrush work?”
“Just don’t use the Russian sable. A hog’s hair brush ought to be good enough for your average ghoul.”
We laughed and retraced our steps to the Chapel of the Madonna, picked up our palettes, and settled in to work.
The half-moon “lunettes” we were restoring were painted in the manner of the early Renaissance, featuring a bevy of angels surrounding a flock of wooly lambs. In the background a da Vinci-style landscape with a curving river, a rise of sandy bluffs, and a faraway medieval town were crowned by an azure sky with wispy clouds and soaring birds.
The murals had been painted on canvas and attached with strong wallpaper adhesive. Water leaking through the plaster had detached the canvas in spots, trapping the moisture and creating an ideal environment for mold and decay. Mary and I had begun by laboriously removing the canvas from the walls, taking care not to stretch the weave. We dug out the damaged plaster, applied a stucco patch, and sealed the area with a water-impermeable shellac primer. Next we removed the adhesive from the backs of the murals. This was the trickiest step, and I was relieved to discover that the lunettes had been applied with “milk glue,” which was not uncommon in old installations. The casein in milk curds is made into glue and used in many household paints. Although the milk glue rendered the canvas vulnerable to decay, it was easy to strip off with water and a mild soap.
Parts of the canvas of both murals were unsalvageable, and so, using a sharp-edged razor, we had cut along the natural divisions of the painting so that when we patched the holes with new canvas and repainted, the seams would be invisible. In areas where the paint had bubbled up or flaked off but the canvas remained intact, we scraped off all shreds of the old paint. We next glued the lunettes back onto the walls, allowing the heavy-duty wallpaper paste to dry thoroughly. The prep work completed, Mary and I started applying the underpainting. Only then could we move on to the fun part: filling in the areas where the original paint and gold gilt were stained, faded, or had flaked off altogether.
While we painted I told Mary the romantic legend of La Fornarina. She insisted on referring to the woman in the painting as “Fornie,” but otherwise was enraptured by the tale. I was about to recite an excerpt from Honore de Balzac’s nineteenth-century poem about the love affair between Raphael and his model when Dante called to announce he was out front to drive Mary back to San Francisco. She packed up her supplies and bid me a cheerful good-bye. I was a little sleepy but wanted to put the finishing touches on the background before calling it a night. Dabbing the tip of my paintbrush in a blend of lead white, oxide of chromium, and sap-green oil paints, I concentrated on applying the tiniest highlights to the background trees.
One of the challenges every artist faced was resisting the lure to do too much. Whenever I was tempted to overpaint, I remembered the cautionary tale of my college friend Gerald the Mad Sculptor. Gerald had worked two jobs for six months to afford a five-foot-tall, two-foot-wide block of black marble for his first major sculpture. Excited at finally being able to sculpt, he had holed up in his studio and commenced carving. By the time he put down his chisel a month later the black marble was only eighteen inches high and as big around as his stringy thigh.
In art, as in life, it was important to know when to quit.
After filling in a few shadows and highlights, I covered my palette with plastic wrap to keep the paint from drying out or skimming over. Then I rinsed my brushes in solvent, wiped my palette brush clean, and recapped the paint tubes and jars of mineral spirits. Time to check out La Fornarina. I studied the floor map Cindy Tanaka had given me to locate the Alcove of the Allegories, then shoved the map into the bib pocket of my overalls and headed to the bathroom to wash my paintbrushes. I walked down the Romanesque cloister along the east side of the building, made my way down three small flights of tiled stairs to the tiered gardens patterned on the Alhambra, and passed through successive alcoves known as the Chapels of Slumber, Serenity, and Spirit.
Following the twists and turns of the mazelike corridors, I pondered Cindy Tanaka’s odd request. La Fornarina, Italian for “the little baker girl,” was not just a Raphael—one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance—it was arguably the Raphael. By far the most personal of Raphael’s exquisite portraits, La Fornarina depicted a young woman with almond-shaped eyes, alabaster skin, a forthright expression, and a seductive smile. Clad in a bejeweled turban and a gauzy cloth that she hugged to her rounded belly, the nearly nude woman gazed boldly at the viewer, her right hand touching her left breast. Art historians tripped over their bow ties to insist that the gesture owed more to classical Roman sculptural conventions than to lewd intent, as if Raphael’s desire for his subject would lessen the painting’s beauty. Because no great artist ever painted with lewd intent, I thought.
It was inconceivable that the original La Fornarina was hanging in the columbarium, labeled a copy. Famous paintings might be disguised as reproductions to fool customs officials, but in general it was the other way around: a fake was painted to conceal the fact that an original had been sold or stolen, to commit insurance fraud, or to dupe greedy or gullible collectors. Only when a painting was assessed for insurance purposes or for sale might its origins be discovered, and, if the forger were sufficiently talented, the truth might never be revealed. The best forgeries—the kind by artists such as my grandfather—were themselves works of art. One of the art world’s dirty little secrets was that museums regularly bought and exhibited forgeries; indeed, experts estimated that as many as forty percent of museum paintings could be fakes. San Francisco’s own Brock Museum displayed my grandfather’s copy of the great Caravaggio masterpiece, The Magi.
But the odds of a genuine Raphael hanging in Oakland’s Chapel of the Chimes Columbarium were roughly akin to the odds of da Vinci’s Last Supper decorating the men’s room of the 12th Street Greyhound Station. What could possibly have given Cindy such an idea?
Turning the corner into the California room, I spotted the tiny bathroom door at the end of a narrow corridor. After washing out my brushes and using the bathroom, I would follow the Hall of the Cherubim to the Corridor of the Saints and take a look at the copy of La Fornarina. Then I could go home and climb into be—
“Annie.”
Letting out a shriek, I leapt in the air before collapsing onto a low garden wall opposite a statue of the angel Gabriel. I ducked my head between my knees and concentrated on breathing as black spots danced before my eyes.
“How I’ve missed you,” said a deep, amused voice.
I tilted my head to peer up at the man I knew as Michael X. Johnson. The last time I had seen him he was being dragged off to jail. Apparently he had managed to talk his way out of a well-deserved prison sentence.
No surprise there.
Michael and I met a year ago, yet I had no idea what his real name was, where he lived, how old he was, or what he looked like naked—though my imagination had taken a good run at that one. I did know he was a no-good thieving scoundrel, and one hell of a fine kisser.
“Go away,” I said, my voice muffled by my denim-clad legs. “I hate you.”
He laughed and collected the scattered paintbrushes I had dropped.
I sat up and glowered at him. “Why can’t you call on the telephone, like a normal person? Why do you have to pop out of thin air and scare the you-know-what out of me?”
“And miss your reaction?” Handing me the brushes, he sank onto the bench and stretched out his long legs. Michael’s devilish grin revealed straight white teeth and made his eyes crinkle adorably. His broad shoulders were clad in an aged brown leather bomber jacket, his snowy white shirt was open at the throat, and a pair of faded Levi’s hugged his narrow hips and muscled thighs. Wavy dark brown hair brushed the top of his collar. As if this were not enough, his long-lashed eyes were as green as the beer at a North Beach pub on St. Paddy’s Day.
Each time I saw Michael he was sexier than the time before. How was that possible? I wondered, irritated by his abundance of masculine pulchritude. Must be a trompe l’oeil—a trick of the eye.
“I only scream when you’re around,” I grumbled.
“Oh, I doubt that. How’ve you been, Annie?” he asked, his eyes roaming over my overalls with a hint of lust and a glint of amusement.
Why did I always look so awful when Michael dropped in? Maybe I’d sinned in a previous life and the Fates were feeling vengeful. That would explain a lot.
“I’m fine. What are you doing here in the middle of the night? Are you after the—”
I caught myself. The columbarium had many valuable artifacts, such as the carved Roman birdbaths, the tables inlaid with precious stones, antique religious texts, and a superb collection of American portrait miniatures. But these relics would not attract Michael X. Johnson, art thief extraordinaire. He specialized in big-ticket items, art so expensive it would give Bill Gates sticker shock. Could Cindy Tanaka’s wild suggestion be true? Why else would Michael be snooping around a columbarium in the middle of the night?
Relax, Annie, I chided myself. It was a coincidence, nothing more.
“Am I looking for the what?”
“Nothing.”
“Annie, I do believe you’re fibbing.”
“Go away.” I glared at him.
“I just got here.”
“Go away anyway.”
“Okay,” he said, standing up.
“Wait!”
“I thought you wanted me to go.”
“I’ll see you out,” I said, unwilling to allow him to roam the columbarium unescorted. Not that throwing him out would slow him down. He’d broken in once, he could do it again.
Michael smiled. “Feeling better?”
“Right as rain,” I said and stood, only a little wobbly. “I just have to use the bathroom.”
“Of course.”
“On second thought, it can wait.” In my mind’s eye I saw Michael locking me in the toilet while he stole whatever he’d come for, leaving me to face the authorities without even a decent lie at my disposal. Talk about getting caught with your pants down. “Come with me.”
“I’d follow you anywhere, my love.”
I snorted.
“Aren’t you curious as to why I’m here?” he asked.
“I know why you’re here.”
“I don’t think you do.”
“Maybe I don’t care.”
“Are you sure?”
Our eyes held for a moment and I tried not to recall the touch of his lips. My heart remembered and sped up, the traitorous thing.
“Okay, pal, time for you to run along.” I grabbed his arm and pulled him down the hallway to the Chapel of Brotherhood. From there it would be a quick jog over to the Gregorian Garden, through the Cloister of Contentment, past the Garden of Enchantment, then a quick left and a right to the Main Cloister and the exit. I hoped.
“Interesting place,” he commented, gazing about as we walked. “Quite lovely, in fact. A bit of a maze, though, isn’t it? Do you ever get lost?”
“Nope.”
“Really.” The suppressed humor in his voice made my blood boil.
“My mind is like a global positioning system,” I bragged, though this was not even remotely true.
“So I guess that means we’ve been going in circles on purpose?”
“We haven’t been going in—” I halted as we emerged in the Gregorian Garden for the second time. “What I mean is, this isn’t the same place. It just looks like it.”
“Ah,” he said with a nod.
I stomped off, Michael in tow. He launched into a long-winded tale about encountering a ghost while attempting to steal—“to liberate,” he insisted—a Gainsborough painting from a castle on the coast of Ireland. “It was a knight, complete with armor. I don’t know how they fought in those things. This guy could scarcely walk. Then again, he was dead. . . .”
I listened with half an ear as I tried to remember where the exit was. As Michael droned on, we snaked through the twists and turns of the narrow hallways, went up and down stairs, and arrived once again at the Gregorian Garden.
“I’m enjoying our stroll,” Michael murmured as I stopped short, confused but unwilling to admit it to Mr. I’m-So-Cool-Even-Ghosts-Don’t-Scare-Me. “But could I make a suggestion?”
“What.”
“I believe the exit’s that way.” He pointed in the opposite direction.
“I knew that.” I yanked him by the elbow in the direction he had suggested.
“Excuse me?”
“Keep walking.”
“It’s always so special spending quality time with you, Annie.”
I ignored him.
“I ran into your assistant as she was leaving. Such an interesting fashion sense, that one. She’s a Goth, isn’t she? Anyway,” he continued, “she said something about someone called Fornie, and—”
“Oh, for the love of—” I cut myself off, afraid that swearing in the presence of religious icons and human remains would double my no doubt lengthy sentence in purgatory. “I can’t believe she told you—”
“Relax, Annie. Haven’t you heard? I’m no longer in the business.”
I snorted.
“Seriously.”
I snorted again, and spotted the Main Cloister through the Gothic arches ahead of us.
“Why do you never believe me?”
“Because you’re a liar. And a cheat.”
“Not anymore. At least, not as much. I’ve gone legit.”
“Oh, please.” I unlocked the carved walnut front door and pushed Michael into the cool spring night. “A leopard doesn’t change its spots. How did you get in here, anyway?”
Michael nodded at the alarm box above the door. “Pretty rinky-dink system.”
“That thing? That’s just for show,” I fabricated as I led him down the circular flagstone drive. Michael had no doubt disarmed his first burglar alarm the day he mastered potty training. The columbarium’s ancient system would slow him down for a minute or two, tops. “I turn on the state-of-the-art system and release the guard dogs when I leave. We call them the Hounds from Hell.”
“You’re a terrible liar, Annie,” Michael said as we reached the sidewalk.
“I happen to be an excellent liar,” I said, miffed. If I did one thing well, it was lie. I’d had a lifetime of practice. “You’re just a suspicious person. Must be the crooked company you keep.”
“How is your grandfather?”
“Fine, thanks. Leave him alone.” Georges and Michael had worked together on a number of projects over the years—a world-class art forger and a world-class art thief made for a profitable alliance—and I tried not to think about the prison sentences they would receive if the authorities ever caught up with the dynamic duo. “Listen, Michael. If anything goes missing from this place, anything at all, I’m coming after you. I swear I will.”
Michael cocked his head, his green eyes searching my face. “What would I want from a columbarium, Annie? I already have a fireplace full of ashes.”
“That’s sick. Where’s your car?”
The last time I’d hung out with Michael he’d been driving an elegant champagne Lexus. The time before that it had been a snazzy red Jeep. I wondered what it would be this time. A ’59 Thunderbird? A brand-new Corvette? A monstrous Humvee?
He gestured at a dented, ten-year-old white Ford pickup truck.
“You’re driving a truck?” I loved my own truck because it was handy for hauling ladders and tubs of paint, inexpensive to run, and even cheaper to insure. Michael didn’t need the cargo space and could afford to drive the best. Had he fallen on hard times? More likely he was working on a scam I wouldn’t figure out until the cops came a-knocking.
“I like trucks,” said Michael. “Bolsters my image as a manly man.”
“How did you know where to find me, anyway?”
“I dropped by your studio today. Mary said the columbarium was not to be missed.”
“There’s a public tour the first Saturday of each month.”
“She thought you might give me a private tour.”
“She thought wrong.” I leaned against the fender and crossed my arms over my chest. “I find it hard to believe Mary was such a chatterbox.”
Michael chuckled. “I suspect she entertains romantic notions about the two of us.”
“Yeah, well, Mary’s dating a Samoan wrestler named Dante who’s never even read The Divine Comedy.”
“I suppose you’ve read it in the original?”
“I would if my name were Dante.”
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” he said with a slow smile and a quizzical look. “I don’t see the connection between a Samoan wrestler and The Divine Comedy.”
“I’m just saying Mary’s view of romance is different from mine.”
“I imagine most definitions of romance are different from yours, sweetheart,” Michael said, grinning now. “Speaking of romance, I dropped by your studio after meeting with your boyfriend.”
“Josh? What business do you have with Josh?”
“Who’s Josh?”
“You said you had a meeting with my boyfriend, Josh.”
“I met with Frank DeBenton, of DeBenton Secure Transport. Remember him? I have to say I’m surprised at you, two-timing good ol’ Frank.”
“Frank’s my landlord, not my boyfriend.”
“Oh? You two seemed rather, shall we say, cozy the last time I saw you. So, tell me about this Josh person. Wait a minute—don’t tell me he’s Mr. Muscles?”
Last fall I had made the mistake of mentioning Josh, stud muffin extraordinaire, to Michael. It seemed he had remembered.
“Josh is a kind, decent person.”
“Bored already, huh? Well, these things happen.”
“You know what? Just go away,” I said, irked at Michael’s unerring instinct for pushing my buttons. Josh was out of town for a few weeks, and without his sweet smile and beautiful body clouding my mental processes I was rethinking our relationship. He was a great guy, but I was starting to wonder if I represented Josh’s Walk on the Wild Side. Worse yet, I feared he might be my Walk on the Mild Side.
However, I wasn’t about to admit that to a no-good thieving scoundrel. “You are the least qualified person in the world to give romantic advice.”
“Cold, but true.” Michael handed me a business card, kissed me lightly on the lips, and opened the truck door. “À bientôt, chérie. Don’t forget to unleash the pooches of perdition before you leave.”
I watched the taillights disappear into the darkness and glanced at the card in my paint-stained hand.
MICHAEL X. JOHNSON, ESQ.
FINE ART SECURITY ANALYSIS
& DISCREET RETRIEVAL SERVICES
“WE SKULK SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO”
WWW.ARTRETRIEVAL.COM
No way, I thought. No. Freaking. Way.