Aaron Elkins: A Deceptive Clarity

In museum circles I had often seen and quailed under that doubtful look when I was introduced as San Francisco's curator of Renaissance and baroque. And even under Gadney's inoffensive scrutiny, I confess to a small stab of insecurity. Way down deep, you see, I'm not so sure that I really am a bona-fide art curator, and not just a fraud who's picked up the jargon. Art, after all, doesn't have a lot you can hang your hat on, and there are times when I know I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. (I'm still waiting for someone to explain neoplastic constructivism to me, for example, and I've lectured on the damn thing!) Never have I heard my self-assured colleagues confess such uncertainties, and in my dark hours I sometimes wonder if they-the Peters, the Tonys-were simply bom to the field and I was not.

I murmured something noncommittal to Gadney as we walked through the lobby, and then asked Robey the question I'd asked Harry Gucci in the hospital.

"Did they get away with anything from the storage room?"

"Nope, everything's accounted for, thanks to you. You broke in on them before they got properly started. The only thing damaged was that picture they heaved through the door. Aside from your nose, of course. But we can repair that." He smiled sympathetically. "The picture, I mean."

I nodded ruefully. "That's good, anyway. But about that drawing

…" I turned to Gadney. "Something has been bothering the hell out of me. Down there, in the basement, when I said that Michelangelo was a forgery, you said-I thought you said-that of course it was."

"Of course I did."

"I don't understand. Why 'of course'? And how did you know about it?"

"How did I-" He stared at me in bland astonishment. "You don't know? I put the entire episode down to your understandably confused state of mind at the time. I assumed you knew all about the copies."

There was a discreet hint of reproach, as if I'd failed to do my homework. "Along with the twenty genuine works of art, signor Bolzano has lent us twelve copies of pieces that were looted from his collection by the Nazis but have never been recovered. The idea is to publicize them, you see, in hopes that they might be recognized, and that information on where they really are might turn up. The Michelangelo sketch is one of them."

I had, as a matter of fact, done my homework, and I knew about the copies. But that didn't explain it. Anyway, I didn't like abandoning the idea that I'd already solved Peter's mysterious puzzle.

"Yes," I said, "but this wasn't just a copy; this was a forgery-an original pencil drawing, with the paper smoked and crisped to look old-all very expertly done." I shook my head firmly. "No, this was a painstaking fake, a forgery-done to mislead."

It was Robey, with his disconcerting tendency to wander abstractedly in and out of conversations, who replied as we turned left down a curving corridor. "I don't know about all that, but I think we can be pretty sure it's not in the show to mislead anyone. Don't you know about Bolzano, Chris?"

I did, of course; quite a bit, although I'd never met him. The venerable Claudio Bolzano was a celebrated art connoisseur, a welcome buyer at Sotheby and Christie's, with a vast collection ofOld Masters and moderns on the walls of his villa in Florence and on loan to the great public galleries of Europe. Why he should have anything to do with a forged Michelangelo I had no idea, and I said so.

"Because," Gadney said, "after the war he began to despair of ever recovering all that the Nazis had taken, and he replaced many of them with copies. In some cases he bought existing copies, some of them several hundred years old-"

"And very possibly painted as forgeries," I persisted.

"Originally, possibly so, but now openly acknowledged as copies. He also commissioned a number of modem copies, I believe. There were photographs available, of course, so it wasn't difficult. What he wanted, naturally, were good copies, as near to the originals as possible. And that's just what he has."

"All right, but I still don't get the point."

"Neither do I," murmured Robey, ambling along beside us, "when it comes right down to it."

"You don't?" Gadney said to both of us. He lifted his tweedy shoulders in a faint shrug as we stopped before a closed door. "I believe I do. It's simply that he wanted to be surrounded by his beloved art pieces. If he couldn't have the real ones, he wanted to have the next best thing. I think I can understand his motivation."

I wasn't sure that I did. Knowledgeable art collectors do not generally go out and buy copies of The Night Watch or View of Toledo, no matter how much they covet the originals. For a serious collector to surround himself with copies would be like a serious dog lover surrounding himself with the stuffed carcasses of his pets. Superficially they might look the same, but they aren't very satisfying in the long run.

"Well, Chris," Robey said, reaching for the door handle, "time for you to meet the rest of the team."

"Gird thy loins," I thought I heard Gadney mutter as we went in.

Whatever else he might be, Mark Robey was a calm and orderly man who took things as they came. "I know the break-in is on everyone's mind," he announced dreamily, seated at the head of a folding table and gazing through the tall French doors at the bare trees and wintry courtyard behind Columbia House, "but let's just start with our agenda as Egad prepared it. Someone from OSI should be along in a while and we can talk about the break-in then. What's the first item, Egad?"

"Reception protocol," Gadney said promptly.

And so, under Robey's equable, absentminded leadership, we spent an hour on who should and who shouldn't be invited to the preview reception two weeks away, much as we might have done at the San Francisco County Museum under similar circumstances. There was little for me to contribute, so I spent the time sipping strong, fragrant German coffee and learning about my new colleagues.

There were two of them besides Robey and Gadney, and I would be lying if I didn't admit that one of them got most of my attention. This was a vibrant, extremely attractive woman of twenty-eight or twenty-nine who had something cogent or interesting-usually both-to say whenever she opened her mouth, which is not easy when the subject is reception protocol. She also had lovely, intelligent eyes that were as close to violet as eyes can be, glorious honey-colored hair, a healthy toothpaste-ad smile, and a pair of silver captain's bars on each blue-clad shoulder.

I had no ready stereotype for female air-force captains, but if I had, it wouldn't have been anything like Anne Greene. Robey had introduced her as having been lent by the Air Force to serve as "my adjutant and our intra-command liaison," and I had said, "Ah," as if I'd known what it meant.

The other person was Earl Flittner, a large, untidy civilian who was the show's technical director. With a small staff to assist him, he was responsible for physical details- exhibition layout, lighting, temperature and humidity, and so on-and for packing and unpacking. This may sound like semiskilled labor, but it isn't. It's esoteric, highly technical work. Crating and shipping thirty-five million dollars' worth of fragile, irreplaceable works of art is not the same thing as wrapping a box of brownies to send to Aunt Vivian. Moreover, the skill and taste of the technical director have made or broken many a show.

Flittner was one of the best, on loan from the National Gallery. I had met him a couple of years before when he had accompanied a show of High Renaissance wood sculpture to San Francisco, but he'd been surly and contentious from the start, and I had stayed out of his way. Now, when Robey introduced us, he said bluntly that he didn't remember me at all (which didn't make me like him a whole lot more), and he sat restlessly through the meeting, smoking cigarette after cigarette, not saying much, merely twisting his long mouth from time to time in a sour expression that sometimes seemed to indicate impatience with Robey's running of the meeting, sometimes dissatisfaction with the exhibition as a whole, and sometimes a universal and undiscriminating misanthropy.