Lorenzo's Adam's apple jounced, and the tip of his droopy nose turned a shade bluer. He looked beseechingly at me. I had no idea what was in the air between them, and said something safe.
"I think there's something to be said for the idea."
Lorenzo was so relieved his breath whistled, but it wasn't the answer Bolzano wanted.
"I don't!" he said, so emphatically that the dog started. "I see no purpose in it. It was a childish fancy ever to buy them. I should have disposed of them long ago."
"I must disagree, Father," Lorenzo ventured in timorous rebellion. I say that if an object is beautiful, why shouldn't it give pleasure for its own sake? From a purely aesthetic point of view, why should it make any difference whether it was painted in 1680 in the throes of divine inspiration-ah-ha-ha-or copied three hundred years later, with every stroke faithfully reproduced?" His shiny eyes brightened. "Not more than thirty minutes ago, even the learned Christopher was deceived by our copy of the young woman at her clavichord."
Bolzano looked at me with something close to disappointment. "Is this true?"
"Well, momentarily," I admitted.
"And why should he not be?" Lorenzo said, gaining momentum. "It's a wonderful painting in its own right: every line laid on razor-sharp; the pearl earring a small masterpiece of its own, portrayed with a delicate precision that might fool Vermeer himself."
"Do you agree, signore?" Bolzano asked me dryly.
"Not entirely, no." I was still unsure of where I was treading, or on whose toes.
But he wouldn't be put off. "Do you agree that the painting my son describes so eloquently might fool Vermeer himself?"
I was being tested, then, and I thought I'd better prove myself, even at the cost of some face for Lorenzo. "No," I said, "not the way he described it. Vermeer's precision is a brilliant illusion. There are no lines, no outlines. Those pearl earrings that seem so perfect and pearl-like-seen up close they're just three or four formless dabs of paint. Everything in a Vermeer is fuzzy-"
"What?" Lorenzo's eyebrows shot up to the vicinity of where his hairline had once been. "Fuzzy? Vermeer? Christopher, I cannot believe-"
"Of course fuzzy!" Bolzano snapped. "Vermeer was the most painterly of painters-more so even than Rembrandt, Velazquez-not some mere linear drudge like Bronzino or-"
"Not linear?" echoed Lorenzo, who seemed stunned a lot of the time. "Vermeer?"
"The forms themselves are anything but precise, Lorenzo," I said, heading off a less gentle response from his father. "When you look at a Vermeer, it's your mind that sorts things out, not your eye. It's not so different from your own subjectivist-"
"Ha," Bolzano muttered.
"But the texture," Lorenzo persisted, "the clarity…"
"But that's just what makes him so great," I said. "It's all a magical illusion, a deceptive clarity-"
"Ah." Bolzano nodded his bullet head with approval. "A magical, deceptive clarity. Well said, Christopher Norgren." He looked sharply at his son and shifted to brisk, rapid Italian. "And this magic, Lorenzo, this magic flourishes only with that 'divine inspiration' you sneer so superiorly at, and which makes a work of art a living thing. An imitation is lifeless, no matter how wonderful it seems at first, and the longer one lives with a bogus painting the more hateful it becomes."
"Surely, Father, you don't seriously suggest-"
"Whereas the longer one lives with a work of art conceived and executed in the grip of"-a bristling glance at poor Lorenzo-"'divine inspiration,' the more one can sense in it the vital flame, the genius, that created it." He turned to me. "Do you agree, signore?"
"Yes, I do. But if you feel this way, why did you include the copies in the show?"
"Why?" he grumbled, returning to English. "Ask the professor of subjectivist art criticism."
Lorenzo's Adam's apple jiggled all the way up, down, and back up his neck. "When it came time for the final arrangements, you see, my father was seriously ill-"
A gallstone operation," Bolzano observed petulantly, "not a mental attack. I had my faculties; you could have consulted me."
"-and I was acting for him-power of attorney, you call it? And when Colonel Robey suggested it might be an excellent idea to exhibit copies of some of the pictures that are still missing-to publicize them and perhaps lead to their recovery-I agreed with him. I still do." He looked at his father and actually managed to stare him down. "Anything is possible. Who can tell?"
"From that standpoint, I think it is a good idea," I said quietly to Bolzano. "It could very well turn up some leads."
He shrugged and then sighed good-humoredly. "It begins to look as if I am not going to win any battles today. My opposition is too unified. Signor Norgren"-he gestured at my brandy snifter-"do you know what you're drinking?"
"Cognac?" I said. "It's extremely good."
This made him clap his hands. "No, and you're not the first to be fooled. It's a good old Italian product: Vecchia Romagna. He tapped his thigh. "You know, I'm going to have some, too."
"Father!" Lorenzo began, but was silenced by a look.
"This battle I win."
When the bowed servant brought us all fresh brandies, Bolzano drank with pleasure, licked his lips, and looked sharply at me. "Something is on your mind?"
Something was. "Sir, you said you were ill at the time the final arrangements were made. Does that mean you weren't here when the paintings were crated?"
"I was in the hospital. Lorenzo was here to attend to it." There was one more disgusted look at his son; Lorenzo might have won the battle of the copies, but he wasn't getting much pleasure from it.
"So you oversaw the actual packing?" I asked Lorenzo.
"Of course. I was in the gallery for two entire days."
"Who did the crating? Your own workmen?"
"No, yours. Signor Flittner's."
"Then Earl was here?"
"Naturally. Also signor van Cortlandt."
"The entire time?"
"Do you mean the entire time of the packing? Yes, as he should have been," He was looking at me with a puzzled frown.
"And did you actually see the crates closed up?"
He slowly nodded his head.
Bolzano, tucked into his corner of the couch, had been studying me for some moments. "Signore, what are all these questions?"
I had decided a while back that I was going to tell him about the forgery. Peter's idea that the revelation might be more of a shock than he could stand I dismissed. Bolzano had obviously come a long way since his operation. More than that, he was clearly not the sort of man to shock easily.
"Sir, I think there's a forgery in The Plundered Past."
"Christopher!" Lorenzo murmured reprovingly, and turned with an anxious look toward his father.
But Bolzano lived up to my expectations. He sat motionless, still studying me, his right hand slowly stroking the left side of his jaw, his dark eyes luminous and steady.
"Explain yourself," he said calmly.
"Peter told me the day he died." And for what seemed like the tenth time in the last few days I described the conversation at Kranzler's.
Bolzano listened, stone still. Then he picked up his snifter, drank once, twice, and placed it firmly on the white plastic table in front of him. "It doesn't sound like Peter," he said slowly. "Like signor van Cortlandt. Do you realize the significance of a forgery in the Bolzano collection? Why would he keep it to himself? Why not tell you which one? Why not tell me?"
"Father!" Lorenzo exclaimed. "You don't mean to say you give credence-"
Bolzano waved him down with a flap of the hand. "Credence? To Peter? Of course I do."
"But-but how-"
"I don't know how, Lorenzo. I think that's what your friend is trying to establish with his not-so-subtle questions."
"Yes," I said.
"And what have you established?"