Aaron Elkins - A Deceptive Clarity

I knew the painting from photographs, and I'd even devoted several pages to it in my book on Vermeer. Young Woman at the Clavichord, done in Delft in 1665 or 1666. The remarkable, transparent light came, as usual, from a window on the left. The woman was, as always, static, cool, sweetly remote, arranged like a still life with her clavichord in front of simple furniture on a black-and-white-tiled floor.

I checked to make sure Flittner was looking the other way, then stretched out a forefinger, as gently as God reaching to Adam on the Sistine ceiling, and touched her wrist. It was an offense for which I would have mercilessly put before a firing squad any hapless visitor caught doing it in the San Francisco County Museum of Art. I did it judgmentally, thoughtfully, as if I were making an arcane assessment of texture or brushstroke, but this was only in case Flittner should look around. Actually, my reasons were the same as any gawking tourist's: the awed desire to "connect" across the centuries with the great Vermeer. Here, where his brush, possibly his very fingers, touched, I now touched, so that our paths crossed in space if not in time.

I don't do this very often. I certainly don't think it's the sort of thing a curator ought to do, and I never heard another curator confess even to the desire (of course, neither have I), but it gives me a deep, soul-filling pleasure, never more than when it's Vermeer to whom I reach out. I touched the pearls around her throat, like droplets of pure light-

"How's it going, Chris?"

To say I almost jumped out of my skin would be overstating it, so let's just say I gave a guilty start.

"Harry! Whew! Is that why you wear those rubber soles? So you can sneak up on innocent people?"

He cackled delightedly. "What were you doing, anyway?"

"Doing? What was I doing? Well, I was just, uh, moistening my finger and, uh, clearing things up a little." When he didn't laugh in my face, I took courage and went on.

"Wetting old varnish lets you see through it more clearly, and when you're checking the authenticity of the painting, the first thing you want to do is get a good look at the signature. Most of the decent fakes floating around are old, you see, and they weren't painted as forgeries in the first place; they got to be forgeries when someone changed the original signature of some competent but unknown artist of the time and substituted a more famous one; Vermeer's, for example. Sometimes a close look can show you the signs of doctoring."

That was a long answer to a simple question and Harry looked quizzically up at me, a finger curled in the hair behind his ear. "Is that right? That's interesting. But you were rubbing the middle, weren't you? Artists don't sign in the middle of a picture. Or do they?"

"I wasn't rubbing it," I said, to set the record straight. "I was touching it. Very lightiy. Anyway, painters sign anywhere: on an arch, on a piece of furniture, over a doorway, on a bracelet, on a blank wall. Vermeer frequently signed in the middle of a picture." All true enough, generally speaking, but where was the signature on Young Woman at the Clavichord? I hadn't found the damn thing yet.

"Oh, I see. So tell me, did you find anything suspicious?"

Was I being interrogated, or was he just curious? I couldn't tell. He had a self-effacing way of asking questions that was meek but insistent, and a way of listening that was both intense and amicable, as if he might be probing for something but also happened to find what you were saying of genuine and extraordinary interest. A handy manner for a cop.

"No," I said, still trying to find Vermeer's name, "nothing that's caught my eye so far."

Harry studied the painting and chewed on the inside of his cheek. "You know, I don't know much about art-I mean, I know what I like, but that's about it-but now that I look at it, I think I might have been just a little suspicious about this signature."

"Oh? Really?" By now I wished dearly that I'd had the nerve in the first place to admit that I had been pawing the Vermeer for the love of it, but I was in too deep. "Why is that?" I asked. I still didn't even know where the hell the signature was.

"Because," he said blandly, "somebody else signed it."

Fortunately, I located the signature just as he mentioned it. It was roughly in the middle, all right, on the rim of an oval mirror. And Harry was right. It was not the usual "IV Meer," or any of the monograms with which Vermeer sometimes signed his work. It read, quite clearly, "Pieter de Hoogh."

Harry was grinning at me, pleased with himself. "Now how about telling me what the hell is going on around here?"

"Going on? Nothing. And as a matter of fact, that signature confirms its being a genuine Vermeer. In a paradoxical. way, of course."

"It does?" The tone wasn't so much one of skepticism as of pleasurable anticipation: Now how the heck is this fast-talking Ph. D. going to con his way through this?

But I was telling the truth. "Well, it's only in the last century or so that Vermeer's been considered one of the great painters. A hundred years ago his name would have been the one you scraped off a painting and replaced with a better-known one if you wanted to get a good price: Peter de Hooch's, for example. Or Terborch's, or Metsu's."

"Is that right? I never heard of those guys."

"Tastes change. As a matter of fact, Vermeer's most famous painting- The Artist in His Studio, in Vienna-still has a faked de Hooch signature on it. Even so, it brought only about ten dollars in the early 1800s."

"No kidding," he said with every indication of authentic interest. "Boy, there's a lot to learn, isn't there?" He had come in wearing a huge quilted parka that engulfed him like a great puffy tent. Now he took it off and tossed it onto a chair. Underneath was the familiar worn cardigan. "You almost made me forget what I came in to ask. What's your impression of Earl Flittner?"

"My impression?"

"You think he could be involved with the break-in?"

I had continued to look absently at the painting. Now I turned slowly to face him. "You're kidding."

"Well, I was just thinking about all those things he said at the meeting the other day-how the show is all propaganda, that stuff. You think the guy is anti-American, a Communist, maybe?"

Well-conditioned liberal that I am, I bristled at this evidence of the narrow, chauvinistic military mind at work. I had come to expect more of Harry. "Just because he expressed some honest opinions doesn't make the guy an enemy of the republic, you know. Why ask me, anyway?"

"Well, I understand you knew him in the States. What about pro-Nazi feelings?"

"Nazi feelings? I can't believe you're serious."

"Well, I'm not, exactiy," he said, unoffended. "I'm just, you know, exploring avenues." He smiled. Under the heavy wool of the sweater his thin shoulders moved in a faint shrug. "So you don't think he has any leanings like that?"

"All I know about him," I said hotly, "is that he's the best-" I stopped. Why in the world was I standing up so righteously for Earl Flittner? I relaxed and laughed. "What he has," I said, "are curmudgeonly leanings. The guy just naturally likes to go against the grain. He's sent in some crank letters to The Artist and Artforum that are classics."

Harry smiled. "But not curmudgeonly enough to steal paintings?"

"Not as far as I know."

"Well, I had a little more than that to go on." His shrewd eyes watched me to see if I had any idea of what he meant. I didn't. "Like what?"

But I wasn't in his confidence yet. "Things. You know." He turned briskly to the Vermeer. "Chris, what made you think this one might not be authentic in the first place?"

"Peter told me; that is, he said one of them is a fake." I told him about the conversation at Kranzler's. Harry listened intently, then made me repeat it while he made desultory notes in his little spiral-bound notebook.