“Why?” I asked. I was watching Baldassare obliterate my painting with what I presumed was the finest seventeenth-century flake white.
“Because of the provenance. Our curator here has just discovered that a painting worth perhaps a quarter of a million euros is now worth no more than twenty thousand. This happens in museums all the time. Sometimes they continue to hang the painting with a revised attribution, school of so-and-so, for example. Sometimes they sell it. Salinas decided that the painting should be sold. Now, he conspires to commit a little fraud of his own, this naughty man, with the connivance of his superiors at the museum, of course. Suppose that he puts the painting on the market discreetly as a Jacopo Bassano. Americans love old masters, and one of them is sure to want this one. So Salinas calls our friend Mark Slade.”
“Who else?”
“Yes, and if an American can be gulled, so much the better. Who likes Americans nowadays? Perhaps you have noticed this, eh? Yes, very sad. And Mark is a good choice in another way. He specializes in very private sales to rich Yankees by museums in need of cash. All museums have too many pictures to show, second-rate pieces cluttering the basement, and they don’t like going to the auction houses because they don’t want to be accused of selling off the national patrimony or the endowed collection of some rich fool. So discretion is very important.”
Baldassare had by this time sprayed the surface of the Bassano with a clear substance. He carefully flipped it over facedown on a large plate of thin glass, a few inches larger on all sides than the painting, and reweighted it. Now he brushed the back of the canvas with a chemical whose scent I did not recognize but that had to be some kind of sophisticated solvent. Then we waited.
I wandered out of the glare and found that they’d supplied the forgery headquarters with a number of leather lounge chairs, a low table, and a large cooler full of beer and cold tapas. The furniture was all brand-new, down to the price stickers, and the refreshments were first class. I recalled what Krebs had said about the investment of his silent partners: someone was spending money without stint on this one.
Baldassare laid out the spread of food and drink and then dragged one of the chairs into the shadows and lay down. Krebs and Salinas were conversing quietly in Spanish, a conversation to which I was clearly not invited, and it was equally clear that Baldassare did not want to chat with me. I brought out my sketchbook and drew the scene, a less dramatic version of Vulcan’s Forge by Velázquez, and wondered what would happen if the cops burst in instead of Apollo.
Which didn’t happen. After a couple of hours a little alarm buzzed on Baldassare’s watch and we all got up to check out the tables. Baldassare and Salinas donned surgical gloves, and with steel spatulas the two men slowly pried the old canvas up from the paint layer of the Bassano. It took a while. Except for brief exchanges between the two men at work, all was silent. When the canvas was at last peeled away I could see only the bottom layer of the underpainting-the image was facedown on the glass sheet. Baldassare picked this up by its edges, rotated it, and then, with painstaking care, let it down on the damp layer of flake white covering the forgery. Jesus and the startled fishermen shone out through the glass. He then clamped the edges of the two glass sheets together with small steel clips.
“What do you think?” Krebs asked Baldassare.
“It’s good. I will squirt some solvent in there to release the glass over the top painting, then a few days in the oven, a little chemical treatment, a little wash, and you will have a wonderful sandwich. Then we take the bottom glass off and I’ll nail it to the original Bassano stretchers. Not more than four or five days.”
Handshakes all around, and we left Baldassare in the loft. In the street there was a car waiting for Salinas. When he’d gone and I was in our car with Krebs, I asked him, “So what’s the plan now?”
“The next phase is moving our painting to market, obviously. Salinas will call Mark. He will show him the painting as a genuine Jacopo of flawless provenance. Mark will ask for an X-ray analysis. In the presence of witnesses, Salinas will object.
“But he did X-ray it.”
“Yes, but with a single, highly corruptible technician. There is no record of this X-ray and the technician will not talk. To resume: Salinas will have explained to his management that he did not X-ray it because his curatorial eye told him it was probably a Luca forgery, but as long as this was mere suspicion he had decided to see if he could get a Bassano price out of it. His objection to having it X-rayed will be on record.”
“I’m not getting this,” I said. “Salinas knows the fake Bassano is a Velázquez. His superiors think it’s just a fake Bassano, and that they’re ripping off a stupid American by charging him the full Bassano price. So why does Slotsky go along with not doing an X-ray after he’s made a big deal about asking for one?”
“Oh, he relents, I’m afraid. After the argument, he apologizes to Salinas for doubting the word of a Spanish gentleman and writes out a check for the full Bassano price on the spot. This is also a much-witnessed transaction. The museum board laughs all the way to the bank. Obviously, once he has taken possession and has it back in the States, he decides to X-ray it, again with reliable witnesses, and discovers the hidden Velázquez. This is announced to the world, the process of technical and curatorial examination confirms the authenticity of the work and we go to auction. The Liria is furious of course, but what can they do except fire poor Salinas?”
“Wait a minute-auction? You told me this was going to be one of your discreet sales to a billionaire.”
He smiled and shrugged. “I lied. No, that is not exactly true. Frankly, I had not expected the work to be so very good, and so I assumed that a private sale would have been required. But not for our Venus, no, this one will go through the rooms to the highest bidder.”
On the following day I got up early and went down to the lobby of the hotel. We usually breakfast off room service, but today I didn’t feel like eating with Krebs and his two boys, so I said I wanted to eat early and hit the museums. The three big ones-the Prado, the Reina Sophía, and the Thyssen-are within walking distance of the hotel, and I wanted to look at pictures that were probably not all fakes. Krebs waved me off and said, “Franco will go with you. We are going out at two this afternoon.”
“Where to?”
“You’ll see,” he said. “There are some people who want to meet you.”
“What people?”
He smiled and exchanged a glance with Franco. “Have a nice time at the museum,” he said with a dismissive wave.
We went to the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum, which was the nearest. It’s the collection of a Dutch-born Swiss citizen with a Hungarian title who lived most of his life in Spain and was one of the great art collectors of the last century. He liked German expressionists and picked a lot of them up cheap in the thirties when the Nazis (whom his cousin Fritz was helping to finance) cleaned them out of German galleries as degenerate. A nice small collection of post-impressionists and the lesser impressionists and a handful of old masters, among which I was happy to see a Luca Giordano that he broke down and signed with his own name. It’s a Judgment of Solomon. There’s the great king got up in gilded breastplates and blond, just like Alexander the Great-funny, he doesn’t look Jewish-and there are the two contentious women and the executioner holding the live baby uncomfortably by one foot, while he reaches for his sword. It’s a little Rubensy and a little Rembrandty, a typical piece of late-Baroque wallpaper, beautifully drawn, but the expressions are waxworks and the paint surface dreary. The only exception is over to the left, the face of a little dwarf, a marvelous grotesque portrait that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Goya capriccio. The Bassano forgery was a lot better as a painting, the poor bastard.