Feint of Art:: An Annie Kincaid Mystery

Chapter 1

The clever art forger has one decided advantage in any sticky legal situation: collectors, dealers, and museums do not wish to advertise their gullibility.

—Georges LeFleur, "Gentleman’s

Disagreement," unfinished manuscript,

Reflections of a World-Class Art Forger

Our eyes met. I tried to keep a poker face. I failed.

"Ah, hell," Ernst swore softly.

So don’t tell anyone it’s a fake. Who would know? My voice echoed in the nearly empty vault.

I will not be party to a fraud, he snapped. There was a sheen developing on Ernst’s elegant brow, which I noted with guilty pleasure. It was kind of fun to see an ex-boyfriend sweat. Especially one who had dumped me so unceremoniously.

Besides, Ernst added, "you knew."

I could be wrong, I lied.

He shook his head and sighed. You’re never wrong about forgery. I had my doubts anyway. That’s why I asked you to meet me here tonight.

That’s why he begged me to meet him at the Brock Museum in the middle of the night, to be more precise. I wasn’t exactly welcome during regular business hours.

In that case, I suggest you keep my name out of it when you go to the board. It won’t help your case if I’m associated with this, I said, turning my attention back to the exquisite fake of Caravaggio’s The Magi. I had to bite my tongue to refrain from praising the forger’s skill in capturing the artist’s unique blend of dramatic shading and rich, almost luminous colors. Upstanding art types usually found it hard to appreciate this kind of talent.

And Ernst Pettigrew was as upstanding as they came. The glamour boy of museum curators, Ernst had twinkling blue eyes, a charming European accent, and a sleek BMW convertible. As nurturing of the fine art in his care as he was of the egos of wealthy benefactors, he had won the coveted position of head curator at San Francisco’s Brock Museum last year at the tender age of thirty-five.

Ernst and I enjoyed a brief fling six years ago, when I was happily working as one of the Brock’s lowly, underpaid restoration interns and he had just arrived from Austria to catalogue the museum’s substantial European art collection. He had broken off our nascent affair when I was outed by an old rival as having once been accused of art forgery. My assurances that the charges had been settled out of court placated no one at the Brock, including Ernst. Although I’d been upset by Ernst’s lack of faith, what hurt the most was his public denunciation of me over a mediocre Waldorf salad and a watery iced tea at the annual Brock Frock Talk fashion show fund-raiser.

One does not know true humiliation until one has been shunned by the Ladies Who Lunch.

Ernst was now living in a plush condo in the Marina and dating an emaciated model named Quiana. I knew this because in moments of weakness and self-loathing, I read the San Francisco Chronicle’s society pages.

Now my damning assessment of the Caravaggio resting on the easel before me might well mean that Ernst’s career was finished. No matter how you looked at it, fifteen million dollars was a lot of money to spend on a fake. And knowing the way museums such as the Brock reacted to these kinds of expensive mistakes, I was certain Ernst’s vilification would be even more public than my own. I didn’t wish that kind of professional humiliation on anyone, scummy ex-boyfriend or not.

You could try to spread the blame, I suggested. Didn’t Sebastian run the usual tests to authenticate the age of the canvas and types of paint used? Dr. Sebastian Pitts was the overrated and undertalented art authenticator who had ruined my chances in the legitimate art restoration field by digging up those old forgery charges. I would happily help Ernst feed Pitts to the Brock lions.

Nodding distractedly, Ernst walked out of the vault, past a long bank of archival storage drawers, and wordlessly smashed his fist through the wall.

I gawked at the gaping hole, impressed by both his temper and his strength.

Who painted it? Ernst demanded, the color mounting in his face as he struggled for control.

How should I know? I lied again. Of course I knew. How could I not?

Part of learning how to perpetrate fraud is learning how to recognize it. However, just as it takes true artistic talent to be a world-class forger, the ability to identify another artist’s signature style is more inborn than acquired. And to my grandfather’s delight, I had a real flair for aesthetic profiling.

We should get her outta here.

I started at the sound of Dupont’s raspy baritone. Under the spell of the fake Caravaggio I had forgotten that after sneaking me into the building, Dupont, the night custodian, had remained in the corridor as a look-out. My heart pounded. The Brock Museum was spooky in the dead of night. It was spooky in the broad of day, too. Belatedly, I wondered why I had agreed to this midnight assignation in the first place.

Ernst nodded curtly at the stooped, balding janitor, then turned back to me. Let me secure the Caravaggio in the vault, he said. We have to talk.

What is there to talk about?

He gave me a pained look.

Oh, all right, I said with a sigh. Normally I wouldn’t indulge an ex-boyfriend like this, but Ernst was staring down the barrel of professional suicide. I glanced at the workroom clock, the one with large black numbers and a ticking second hand that always reminded me of elementary school. 12:30 A.M. I need coffee, I said. Meet me at Grounds for Suspicion, on Fillmore. Twenty minutes?

Ernst nodded distractedly, staring at his pricey but worthless Caravaggio.

Dupont led the way out of the workroom and through the marble-floored galleries of the European art collection, his grim countenance betraying only his customary dissatisfaction with life. The custodian’s crowded key ring clanked loudly as he unlocked a metal maintenance door tucked behind a gleaming white statue of Apollo. This sculpture was also a forgery, and not a very good one at that, but since it had been sculpted in 137 A.D., nobody was complaining. Funny how bad art plus a millennium or two added up to big money.

I followed Dupont into a labyrinth of relentlessly beige and gray utility corridors. We snaked our way past endless banks of archival drawers and storage lockers, our footsteps ringing on the linoleum, the unnatural silence broken by the occasional hiss of steam pipes. Despite the still-tender humiliation of my unceremonious dismissal six years ago, I breathed a sigh of relief that I was no longer trapped here in the Brock’s vast grid of tunnels, just another timid art mouse in a dead-end maze.

At last we reached the exit to the rear employee parking lot. Dupont tapped in a security code and held the door open for me.

Thanks, Dupont, I said brightly. Nice chatting with you!

He grunted.

The door slammed shut behind me.

I fled.

Yo! Skinny latte, half the moo! the pierced and tattooed barrista sang out.

Grounds for Suspicion Café was no more than a five-minute drive from the Brock and, open until two in the morning, it was a hangout for serious caffeine addicts. I ordered a nonfat latte easy on the milk, splurged on a chocolate chip cookie, and settled into what used to be my favorite spot by the greasy front window. When I worked at the museum, a group of us would come here to sip expensive coffee and debate the artistic merits of Cubism versus Expressionism. I regularly scandalized my colleagues by disdaining anything painted later than Picasso’s Blue Period. I mean, really—even as a teenager, Picasso had demonstrated the talent of a Rembrandt, yet he became famous for a few squiggled lines and splashes of color. That was art?

Tonight there were five or six people haunting the café, most, by the look of them, angry young artists and angry young students: sleep-deprived, disgruntled, and dressed tip to toe in black.

I, too, was an artist, frequently sleep-deprived, occasionally disgruntled, and—I glanced down at my jeans, T-shirt, and jacket—yup, dressed in black. But I was not angry. I was my own boss, and my decorative painting business, True/Faux Studios, was finally enjoying the patronage of a steady clientele.

It hadn’t been easy. Following my banishment from the Brock, I briefly considered a career as an adult phone sex operator (for eight dollars an hour and no benefits? no way), flirted with returning to a career of crime (with the possibility of ending up in a Parisian jail cell? no thanks), but instead wound up working a series of dead-end office jobs, surfing cable TV, and generally feeling like a loser. On the afternoon of my twenty-eighth birthday I was watching TV in bed, working my way through yet another pint of Double Fudge Chunk ice cream, when I saw an appallingly perky woman named Kitty apply a simple painting technique to a blank wall. Her efforts resulted in a moderately interesting mottled effect, but a wildly pleased studio audience.

Right then and there I had an epiphany: if the art world shunned me, so be it. I would offer my talents to a more appreciative audience, those creative souls seeking to add unique touches to their cookie-cutter homes and businesses.

My studio specialized in fake—sorry, faux—finishes. I was a natural. I made new surfaces look old, wood look like marble, and plaster look like wood. Gradually I branched out into murals, portraits, and even antique reproductions, always taking pains to ensure that they could not possibly be passed off as Old Masters. Now, at the age of thirty-one, I was the owner of a reasonably successful business, meaning that most months I brought in enough to support myself and to pay my assistant, Mary. It wasn’t a lot, but I managed to keep my head above water.

As long as I dog-paddled furiously.

The bell on the café door tinkled. A rumpled, fiftyish man with a bad case of bed head entered, wearing blue-and-white-striped pajamas and clutching a yapping bichon frise under one arm. He ordered hot chocolate for himself and steamed milk for Snowball, my bestest fwend in the whole world. The barrista replied, He want a scone with that?

No sign of Ernst. I sighed. Patience was not among my virtues.

Bored with people-watching, I picked up one of San Francisco’s many free newspapers and skimmed the cover story about a local art dealer and bon vivant who had suddenly dropped out of sight. Whether his disappearance was the result of design or foul play, no one seemed to know, but the paper hinted broadly that something nefarious was afoot.

I had to smile. People loved to think of the art world as a mysterious and potentially dangerous milieu. The artistic life was fulfilling, rewarding, and a whole lot of fun, but in my experience, at least, it was distinguished less by drama than by long hours, low pay, and plenty of grunt work. Provided, of course, that I stayed away from my grandfather’s world of fakes, frauds, and felons.

Speaking of which . . . I pondered the fake Caravaggio. A number of intriguing questions presented themselves. What had happened to the real one? Was there a real one? A fundamental challenge in the art world was establishing a work’s provenance: documenting when it was created, where, by whom, who had owned it, and what had happened to it over the years. A painting without a provenance was a painting whose authenticity was in doubt, precisely because of talented forgers such as my grandfather.

The Brock’s new masterpiece, The Magi, painted in 1597 by the eccentric Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, was one such enigma. In 1637 the painting disappeared from the home of a Florentine nobleman and its whereabouts remained unknown for more than three hundred years. The Magi’s sudden reappearance last year on the gallery walls of a flamboyant New York City art collector, Roland Yablonski, was little short of miraculous, and had been the talk of the art world. The Italian government initiated a lawsuit to repatriate the masterpiece, but after a lengthy international court battle, Yablonski’s claim was upheld, whereupon he promptly sold The Magi to the Brock Museum for an amount rumored to be in excess of fifteen million dollars. With its penchant for understatement, the Brock had immediately announced that its newest masterpiece would be unveiled in March at a gala reception, to which the City’s movers and shakers had already received gilt-edged invitations.

Mine had apparently been lost in the mail.

Thinking about the Brock made my head ache, so I flipped through the paper until I found my favorite column, Advice from the Sexpert. I was pondering the existence of what the Sexpert called furries—people who liked to have sex while dressed in full-body animal costumes—and trying not to conjure a mental image of that when I heard the barrista call out, Last round. Glancing up, I saw that Snowball and his human friend had departed and only two of the Angry Ones remained. The ticking hands of the Elvis clock over the register indicated that forty minutes had passed.

Had I been stood up?

Outside, Fillmore Street was shrouded in darkness. The night was full of the sounds of the city. A faraway garbage truck labored noisily. A diminutive man in a baseball cap shouted what sounded like abuse in an unidentified Asian language. Sirens screamed in the distance. The keening of a car alarm was abruptly silenced.

More sirens.

A lot of sirens.

Where the hell was Ernst?

I fumbled through my bag until I found my tattered address book, an ancient one full of arrows and cross-cuts. My father kept trying to talk me into getting a Personal Data Assistant, but I resisted, believing that the solution to my lack of organization probably involved therapy, not another electronic gadget. Since I could scarcely remember to write numbers down on something that stood a reasonable chance of not being run through the washing machine, I figured the odds of my remembering to input data into a PDA were somewhere between zero and zilch.

Fishing around in my bag some more, I found four quarters, a dime, and a Canadian nickel. I owned a cell phone but usually forgot to bring it with me, or else neglected to recharge it, which meant that most of the time I didn’t have it when I needed it, or if I did have it, it didn’t work. Hoping that Ernst was better about these things, I went to the pay phone and called his cellular. Five rings and voice mail. I dialed the Brock’s switchboard and punched in Ernst’s office extension. Maybe he had decided to finish up some paperwork and fallen asleep at his desk. Or something.

No answer.

The sirens were now so close that the barrista and the remaining Angry Ones were crowding the front window, trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on and speculating with poorly concealed delight about what might be happening.

I could join them and speculate. I could waste more money calling Ernst. Or better yet, I could drive back to the museum and investigate.

A few minutes later everything looked peaceful as I approached the Brock’s imposing granite façade. But when I turned the corner to park near the rear employee entrance I counted a dozen police cars, a paramedic unit, two fire trucks, and an ambulance, all with lights flashing. This was not a good sign.

My heart pounding in my chest, I stashed my truck on a side street and hurried back to the museum on foot. Half the neighborhood had poured out of their elegant houses, attracted by the noise and excitement, and were milling about in their nightclothes, chattering and craning their necks for a better look. A handful of uniformed police were setting up a barricade and politely asking the well-heeled crowd to Step back. Just please step back. I automatically avoided the officers and tried to look innocent. Lessons learned in childhood run deep.

The museum’s rear door banged open and the crowd fell silent. A stretcher rolled out. On the stretcher was a body bag. In the body bag appeared to be a body. The paramedics loaded it into the ambulance and drove away, lights on but sirens off. No need to hurry.

I swallowed hard. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Maybe some total stranger had had a heart attack. Or a stroke. Or choked to death on a peanut chewy. I once had a close call with a peanut chewy.

I spotted the tall, broad form of Carlos Jimenez, a security guard whom I’d met my first week at the Brock, when he had intervened to protect a malfunctioning soda machine from my wrath. We had commiserated about the slave wages we both received, and Carlos showed me how to get a free soda by jimmying the change slot. Our friendship was cemented by an exchange of confidences concerning our mutual disdain for the museum’s moneyed matriarch, the insectlike Agnes Brock.

Carlos! I called out. "Qué pasa?"

Annie! What are you doing here? Carlos came over to the barricade.

I was . . . just having a drink nearby and heard the commotion. What’s going on?

Carlos’ wide, dark face looked bleak. He glanced around to see if anyone was eavesdropping, but the throng’s attention was riveted on the museum’s rear door, as if awaiting the start of Act II.

There’s been a murder, he whispered.

"What? Who?"

Well, geez, Annie, I hate to be the one to tell you this . . . Carlos hesitated.

"Who?" I demanded.

Stan, Carlos whispered.

Stan? Who the heck was Stan?

Stan, you know Stan, Annie, Carlos said gently. The janitor.

You mean Dupont? His first name is Stan?

He nodded.

I was both relieved and appalled. Relieved that Ernst was alive but appalled that Dupont was not, especially when I recalled my flippancy to him earlier this evening. What had my parting remark been? Nice chatting with you? Had that been his last nonlethal human interaction? Remorse washed over me. This was why it was important not to be a smart-aleck. I had always known Miss Manners had her reasons.

What happened? I asked.

Dunno. I was on a break. By the time I got back the cops were already here.

What about Ernst Pettigrew?

What about him?

Is he—isn’t he here?

Carlos looked at me oddly. Why would Ernst be here? It’s the middle of the night.

A uniformed cop with a pronounced paunch called out to Carlos, saving me from having to answer. I decided it was time to vamoose.

Then I hesitated. Although the very thought of talking to the police made me want to hyperventilate, I realized I should tell them what I knew about the evening’s events. It was my civic duty. A man was dead. True, I had never liked Dupont—Stan—whatever—but that didn’t mean it was okay for somebody to kill him.

I took a step forward and stopped. I didn’t really know anything relevant. Dupont had been fine when I left him. Plus, I wasn’t supposed to have been in the museum in the first place. How would I explain why I had been at the Brock at midnight without bringing up Ernst, the forged Caravaggio, and my own dubious past?

Still . . . Dupont was dead. And it seemed a little too coincidental that his murder had occurred on the heels of my having confirmed to Ernst Pettigrew that a massive art fraud had been committed. Had Dupont discovered the fraud and been killed to ensure his silence? That seemed far-fetched, not to mention illogical. Dupont didn’t know about art. Dupont knew about cleaning. And . . . keys. Dupont knew about keys.

I considered the facts as I knew them. Fact One: Ernst Pettigrew was about to lose everything he’d worked for because The Magi was a fake. Fact Two: Stan Dupont was dead. Fact Three: Ernst was missing. So: what did Facts One, Two, and Three add up to? Had Dupont orchestrated some scheme to steal the original Caravaggio and replace it with the fake? Had Ernst stumbled across the scheme and struck out, enraged, killing Dupont? Get a grip, Annie, I scolded myself. Ernst was a lousy boyfriend, but he wasn’t a murderer.

Clearly I wasn’t ready to talk to the police. But I felt the need to do something constructive. Like what? Like . . . talking to the man who had forged The Magi.

I had recognized the artistic signature immediately: it was my grandfather’s old friend and rival Anton Woznikowicz. Spelled just like it sounded. We had worked together years ago, Anton and Georges and I, just one big, happy, art-forging family. But in the past few years I had tried to cut off contact with Anton—and the rest of my grandfather’s circle—in an effort to keep True/Faux Studios entirely legitimate. I knew from bitter experience that this world had a way of sneaking up and biting me on the butt when I least expected it.

Anton was a gifted artist, though not of Georges’ caliber. But like Georges, he was likely to vanish the minute the police started poking around. And on top of everything else, I was worried about the old guy. If someone had been murdered in connection with his forged Caravaggio, Anton himself could be in danger. I hurried back to my truck, fired up the engine, and headed across the City to Noë Valley.

Unless I was gravely mistaken, I was about to be bitten on the butt.

Chapter 2

Why is the imitation of nature more sacred than the imitation of art? Are Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Delacroix to be reviled? For each learned his trade by copying the masters who had come before, just as their students learned the trade by copying them. If the imitation provides as much pleasure as the original, who is to say it is less worthy?

—Georges LeFleur, "Real or Fake:

Who Decides?" unfinished manuscript,

Reflections of a World-Class Art Forger

I had embraced the Californian habit, sometimes called Zen navigation, of starting to drive before I’d fully decided where I was going. Tonight was no exception. I was in gear, with the truck in motion, before it occurred to me that I was heading out in search of an art forger who might be connected to this evening’s homicide, at two in the morning, in a city of nearly three-quarters of a million people.

What was wrong with this picture?

I was not famous for my common sense, but this seemed like a bad idea even to me. I had burned up all my stored caffeine at the scene of the murder, and a sudden wave of fatigue washed over me. I had also spent a long, hard day at the studio. Time to pack it in. I turned the truck around and headed east for the Bay Bridge, Oakland, and home.

Twenty minutes later I was trudging up three flights of stairs to my apartment, stepping lightly to avoid the squeaky spots so as not to awaken my neighbors. I sighed with relief as I entered my own little slice of heaven.

My home was the top floor, formerly the maid’s quarters, of a once-stately Victorian built in 1869 for a wealthy merchant. The plumbing and electrical systems were suspect, but rent was cheap, moldings were ornate, and if you stood on the toilet you could glimpse San Francisco Bay from the bathroom window. The place was a lot like me: a bit quirky, occasionally contrary, but with lots of character. Also like me, it had a good foundation but needed some aesthetic work.

I locked the dead bolt, slung my bag on the hat tree, shuffled down the short hallway to my bedroom, changed into an oversized T-shirt, and crawled into bed. The events of the night were sinking in, and I needed to think. I knew I had to talk to the police, and soon. But old loyalties ran deep, and I wanted to keep Anton Woznikowicz out of the picture if at all possible. I also hoped to make sure he was safe from whoever had killed Dupont—that is, if the killing was even connected to the forgery. And Anton might be able to give me the most important information of all: who had commissioned a forgery of The Magi, and why.

I had to admit that Ernst’s sudden disappearance left me feeling more than a little unsettled. We had once savored good wine, laughed until we snorted over the asking price for the splattered art of Jackson Pollock, and talked late into the night about everything from Austrian architecture to zinc white oil color. I could not imagine Ernst being involved with anything criminal. Then again, I never would have thought him capable of punching his fist through a wall.

As I was finally dropping off to sleep, I realized that two thirty in the morning was the perfect time to call Europe, which was eight hours ahead of California. Switching on the bedside lamp, I put a call through to Amsterdam, the last known whereabouts of my rogue of a grandfather, Georges LeFleur.

Anton had been my grandfather’s protégé and closest friend until their affection was tested by a dispute over a beautiful woman named Gina, a Persian cat named Mina, and a fake Bernini statue. Now avowed enemies, Georges and Anton kept careful tabs on one another, in what I presumed was an enduring professional and personal rivalry. It seemed likely that Georges would know something about The Magi and the situation at the Brock, or would at least know where to find the Polish forger. I knew Anton had a studio in San Francisco, but after finishing a big commission like The Magi he might well have taken an extended vacation to a country without extradition treaties.

No one answered my first call to Amsterdam, but I left a message with the pleasant but guarded woman who answered when I phoned Milan. I tried a few other possibilities, first in Barcelona and, finally, in Paris, the city that had long ago captured my grandfather’s heart. None of the numerous gallery owners, artists, or self-described FOGs—Friends of Georges or, as I preferred, Forgery’s Old Guard—would admit to knowing his whereabouts. But that was typical; it was understood that they would pass the word along. My grandfather would call me when he was good and ready, and not one moment sooner. I switched off the light, slipped back under the covers, and fell fast asleep.

I awoke the next morning in a funk. Under the best of circumstances I wasn’t a morning person, but today my grumpiness was worsened by a short night of fitful slumber. On top of everything else, I stumbled into the kitchen only to discover that I was out of coffee.

I recognized that compared to war, famine, or being murdered at the Brock, running out of coffee probably didn’t qualify as a catastrophe. But those were not my choices. I was confronted with a morning sans coffee, and I didn’t have time to stop at a café. An interior designer was coming by the studio to pick up a project this afternoon and I had a stack of paperwork waiting for me. I also hoped to track down Ernst, assure myself that he was safe, and demand a logical explanation for last night’s events. Then I needed to either find Anton—or speak to the police. I might need some time for wrestling with my conscience over the latter.

I skipped the shower, pulled on a navy blue T-shirt and a pair of paint-splattered overalls, slipped into some socks and my trusty Birkenstocks, and hit the road. As I queued up to cross the Oakland Bay Bridge, I fiddled with the radio, hoping to glean information about last night’s murder. Dupont’s death rated only a fleeting mention, but the radio did say that the Brock had reported nothing missing.

That