"Can you be there?" I asked.
"With bells on," she said.
Chapter 18
"Hm," said the eminent Dr. Willem van de Graaf.
The remark was wholly in character. A stringy, puckered old man, dry as ashes, his taciturnity had been a joke among my fellow students at Berkeley. Not his expertise, however. He had taken part in a colloquium on the Early Netherlandish School, and whenever a few sequential sentences could be wrenched out of him, he had bowled us over with the depth and specificity of his knowledge. Since then he and I had been friends of a sort, and I had turned to him more than once for help.
We were leaning over a table in the basement of the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, having just gotten Ugo's Uytewael out of its carton and unwrapped it.
"What do you think?" I asked when he straightened up after a few minutes.
He repeated his earlier opinion: "Hm."
I asked what he thought about the black material encrusting the edges.
It was called cañamograss, I was tersely informed. It was typical of Catalan panels, less so of those from the north. The fibrous material in it was usually hemp. It was unusual for it to be so lavishly applied. As to whether it was too soft to be four hundred years old, he preferred to reserve judgment until some tests could be applied.
I pressed him. What about the picture itself?
What did I think was wrong with it? he wanted to know.
"I'm not sure if anything is. I don't know Uytewael that well, but the colors seem flat to me. The whole thing seems . . . well, insipid, pedestrian. Not up to his standards."
"Not up to his standards. Did you ever hear what the painter Max Lieberman had to say about us poor art historians?"
I shook my head. Laconic he might be, but all the same van de Graaf had a sizable store of obscure but pithy quotations.
" 'Let us honor the art historians,' " he quoted. " 'It is they who will later purify our oeuvre by rejecting less successful works as "certainly not by the artist's own hand." ' "
He cackled and I laughed along with him. "All the same, I'm just not comfortable with it, Willem."
He leaned over it again. His nose wrinkled. "Don't I smell copaiba balsam? Has someone been working on it?"
"It was just cleaned. 'Touched up,' according to Ugo. I'm not sure just what that means, but I don't think that's what hurt the colors. According to Ugo, the guy is an expert."
"Ah, but you know what Max Doerner said about experts."
I didn't, of course.
"'There are no experts in the field of picture restoration,'" van de Graaf said. "'There are only students.'" He tucked in his chin, folded his arms, laid a forefinger vertically along his upper lip, and continued to peer at the painting with lidded eyes. "Hm," he said.
We were back where we started. "What now?" I asked.
"Now? As soon as you give me some peace, I'll take this in back and see what I see."
"Will you be able to tell me anything today? At least whether or not there are two panels glued together under all the gunk?"
He hunched his shoulders. "Today, tomorrow, next week. It can't be hurried."
He meant he couldn't be hurried, but I'd known that when I'd come. Still, there wasn't any particular rush, no reason the painting couldn't be left with him and shipped later.
"I'll call you, then," I said.
He was already heading for the double swinging doors to the work area, holding the picture in front of him, studying it intently.
"Hm," he replied.
I went upstairs to the museum's public galleries. Anne would be there by now.
If anyone ever asks me, not that anyone is likely to, what the finest small art museum in Europe is, I will unhesitatingly name the Mauritshuis. There isn't a second-rate piece of work in the place. Not one. Every painting, every object, is a jewel. It's like the Wallace Collection in London or the Frick in New York: a limited but superb collection in an elegant old town house. Walking through the building would be a pleasure even without the pictures. And with them, one can see them all—really see them—and be done in under two hours, still fresh and appreciative. Try that in the Louvre.
I had arranged with Anne to meet in one of the second- floor galleries, but at the foot of the staircase I hesitated, suddenly apprehensive. Our recent telephone conversations had been exuberant and happy, filled with laughter. But now, in retrospect—and faced with actually meeting her—I'd begun to wonder if there hadn't been something counterfeit about them; an edgy, forced glitter stemming more from the awkwardness of not having talked for so long than from anything else.
What were we going to say to each other now? When you came down to it, what had we actually said on the telephone? That we were looking forward to seeing each other. That was what second cousins said, or business acquaintances who meet at a convention once a year. Were we—was I—trying to drag out past its allotted time something that wasn't there anymore? How did I know that Anne didn't intend this as a civilized farewell, the final tying up of a few troublesome strings before she went on with her life?
I turned away from the staircase, chewing my lip. This was no way to approach things. I needed to calm myself down, compose my thoughts. Fortunately, I had a tranquilizer at hand. No, I don't carry around a handy vial of Valium. But I was standing in a gallery full of eighteenth-century Dutch paintings, and if browsing for a while in that lovely, peaceful, orderly world didn't unruffle me, nothing would. I took a slow breath and began to wander through the small ground-floor rooms.
And within a minute or two, I thought I could feel it working. With a few monumental exceptions, Dutch artists painted little to raise the blood pressure or inflame the spirits. Nobody ever got overexcited looking at Still Life with Turkey Pie or Cheese Seller's Stall at Dordrecht. Josef Capek described Dutch art as the work of seated artists for sedentary burghers. Just the thing for the fevered mind. Knee-deep in metaphor, of course, but only the scholars worried about that nowadays.
I went slowly, stopping only twice, once to pay homage to Vermeer's View of Delft, the wonderful townscape that revolutionized the painted depiction of light. And then again, before his simpler Girl with a Blue Turban, which has no particular claim to fame other than its being so achingly beautiful. If that didn't soothe me, I decided, I wasn't going to get soothed. So at last I made for the stairs, looking back over my shoulder at the Girl.
Her limpid brown eyes, you will be interested to learn, followed me every inch of the way.
Anne had her back to me when I saw her. She was standing in front of a picture of a cow, her face turned up to look at it. Her honey-colored hair was darker than I remembered it, and a little shorter; her shoulders more delicate. She was in civilian clothes—a belted jumpsuit, fashionably baggy at the hips and tight at the ankles, with a jacket over her arm. She looked absolutely terrific. My confidence level, such as it was, ratcheted down another notch.
I came up behind her, my heart in my mouth. "Hi there, Captain."
She turned. "Dr. Norgren, I presume."
"Sorry I'm late."
"Oh, that's all right. You look wonderful."
"So do you—just great."
From that fatuous beginning things got worse. We walked through the museum, hardly seeing it, both of us timid, skating clumsily around each other, searching for something riskless to talk about. How was my flight? What had her meeting been about? How had I liked Sicily? Had she had any interesting assignments lately? Had her brother-in-law recovered from his kidney-stone operation? Had she—