Aaron Elkins - A Deceptive Clarity

The next day was more of the same: codeine, soup, and sleep. But Monday I was better, managing to work for a few hours at learning the ropes with Corporal Jessick, and spending the rest of the morning with Harry, tediously trying to construct pictures of No-neck and Skull-face with Photofit, a jigsaw-puzzle-like set of thousands of photographs of eyebrows, noses, and chins. None of them seemed ugly enough.

The afternoon brought a setback of sorts. While I was dozing after lunch the telephone rang.

"Chris, I've been calling you for days\"

Rita Dooling. Calling with more offers and counteroffers and counter-counteroffers. My head started aching again the moment I heard her voice.

"I know, Rita," I lied, with sinking heart. "I've been trying to get through to you." What traitor had given her my number at Columbia House?

"Sure, I just bet you have. You probably went all the way to Europe just to get away from me. Well, what do you say?"

'To what?"

'To nine-and-three-quarters percent of your book," Rita said mildly. She was used to dealing with me.

"Oh yeah, that's right." I lay down on my back with the telephone cradled against my ear. "Well, I've given it a lot of thought, a lot of thought, and I can't see it. In the first place, I just don't want to be bothered with figuring out nine-and-three-quarters percent on every royalty check-"

"Uh, it's not just the royalty checks. She figures she ought to get nine-and-three-quarters percent of your advance too-the one you got last April. Five hundred, she says it was, so that comes to forty-eight dollars and seventy-five cents."

"Jesus Christ, Rita."

"Look, I'm just passing on what her attorney told me. You know I'm on your side, Chris."

"I know."

"Still, if it was me, I'd give it to her," she said, generous as ever. "And if you don't want to do the figuring, why don't you ask your publisher to send the nine and three quarters directly to her?"

Because I'd be embarrassed to, that's why. "I'll tell you what," I said. "Let's put that aside for the moment-"

"I've been hearing that for a year and a half. If you want my honest opinion, Christopher, you're treading water. You don't want Bev back, but you can't face letting go and admitting ten years of marriage are just time down the drain. You've got mixed-up feelings of loyalty and guilt, and your self-concept has been so traumatized-"

"Rita, I'm going to have to introduce you to my friend Louis one of these days."

"I know your friend Louis. We talk about you a lot."

"Wonderful. Now, I was going to say: About this business of her getting the car and me getting poor old Murphy-"

"Oh, that's past history, forget that. She's mellowed on that one. She says she's happy to see you keep them both."

"If."

"Well, of course 'if'. What she suggests-and I'll tell you honestly, if I were you, I'd go for it-is that you sell the house-"

"Sell the house," I echoed hollowly.

"-and split the proceeds fifty-fifty with her, but with a guaranteed fifteen thou up front in cash. Do that and she'll forget about the car."

"And Murph, no doubt."

"Well, no. That is, not exactly. She says that if you want Murphy-"

"Uh, Rita, I have to go now. My beeper just buzzed; I mean beeped."

"You have a beeper?"

"Right. Yes. Can't talk now. Emergency. Gotta run. Call you soon. 'Bye."

I left the telephone off the hook, pulled the blinds, took two more codeine, and went numbly back to bed for the rest of the day.

On Tuesday I woke up late, feeling good again, my trusty subconscious having wedged Rita's call into the furthest, dimmest corner of my mind. Plenty of time to deal with that later. With great pleasure I tossed the remaining codeine tablets into the wastepaper basket and went downstairs for a hefty lunch of hamburger and fries. After that I took care of a few chores in the office and then went to the Clipper Room to see what headway I could make on the "minor problem" of Peter's forgery.

While I'd been on my back, Earl Flittner and crew had been busy. The Plundered Past was very nearly ready for public viewing. Most of the partitions, smelling of glue and freshly sawed wood, were in place, and some of the pictures were already hung. The others were leaning against the walls. Flittner was up on a ladder doing something with the lights, and two men I didn't know-Anne's people, I supposed-were on their knees by the entrance, installing what must have been an intrusion-detection system.

Before I got down to thinking about forgeries, I wandered around the exhibit simply for the pleasure of looking at the paintings. I respectfully admired some I hadn't seen before: a swirling, vertiginous Wind and Snow of Turner's; a serene, early self-portrait by Durer, the first major artist to be fascinated with his own image.

Others I greeted happily, like the old acquaintances they were, either from photographs or from seeing them in museums to which Bolzano had lent them: Piero della Francesca's softly glowing Madonna and Child, with a lively dwarf of a bambino as charmingly repulsive as only a fifteenth-century artist could make an infant; and Gainsborough's sedate Henry Colchester and His Family, who peered coolly out of their frame at me, complacent and incurious, as if they never doubted that they were solid flesh and blood, and blue blood at that, but they weren't quite sure what I might be.

The show wasn't big enough for the conventional arrangement into little bays and rooms (Mannerism and the High Renaissance, Seventeenth-Century Minor Dutch Masters, etc.). Instead they were simply hung chronologically, well separated, each painting with an informational plaque at its side. The only exceptions to this staid progression were an inconspicuous alcove near the exit, where the copies of the twelve still-missing paintings were modestly hung (with the sad exception of the "Michelangelo"), and a dramatic three-sided bay, draped with green silk brocade, which was the centerpiece of the room and of the exhibition. Here three paintings were dramatically displayed: the newly discovered cache from Hallstatt. I had kept this for last on purpose, saving it the way a kid puts off the best part of dinner.

They were superb. A florid, frenzied Rape of the Sabines by Rubens, one of many versions, looked less like a rape than a good party that had gotten a little out of hand, but the composition was awesome, and the flesh tones, with liberal applications of his brightest, blushingest rapine pink, were marvelous. The Titian was sensual and robust too-a sexy Venus and the Lute Player. There are also several versions of this painting, and this was one of the best, broadly painted with a grand and sure-handed disregard for detail.

And then, seemingly from a different universe, the Vermeer. Of all painters, with the possible exception of Rembrandt, it is Vermeer who strikes the deepest chord in me. But Rembrandts are plentiful; there are hundreds of paintings, etchings, drawings. In all the world, however, there are only thirty undisputed Vermeers, with another dozen arguables-forty-two at the outside-and this, of course, was one I had never seen before. Bolzano had actually owned two Vermeers, the only private collector who did. Both had been taken for Hitler's museum in Linz by the fuhrer's designated art-looting unit, the ERR, but the other, A Woman Peeling Apples, had never been recovered. A fine copy hung with the rest of the copies in the cheerless corner by the exit.

But the other one, thank God, was back in this world, right in front of me, and I stood looking at it for a long time. When you look at a Vermeer, even after a Durer or a Piero, it's as if you've been seeing things through badly focused binoculars and someone just turned the knob; everything is gemlike, focused, sharper than reality itself.