More thoughts crowded their way in; more links, more possibilities. Hypotheses sprang from hypotheses, like a crossword puzzle being filled out every which way at once.
The telephone rang the instant I put it down.
"Chris, is that you? It's Lloyd.'
"Lloyd?" I was still tracing out the crossword puzzle.
"As in 'Lloyd from the Seattle Art Museum'? Your place of employment? Lloyd, the director's faithful administrative assistant—the director who, I might add, has been seriously concerned about you since you failed to arrive on your scheduled flight, and has had me searching hither and—"
"Oh, God, I forgot to call, didn't I? Look, I'm back in Bologna—"
"No, really? Do you mean, Bologna, Italy?"
I sighed. This was Lloyd's typical mode of conversation, and I was generally up to it. But not now. "Lloyd, I'm sorry. Something important came up. Is Tony in? I have to talk to him."
"I'm not sure. Just a minute." There was a pause for muffled conversation. "Chris? I'm afraid our leader is out, but Calvin Boyer is just pulsing to speak with you. Hold on, he's going to his desk."
A few seconds later Calvin came on to the line, pulsing. "Chris—hey, did you hear about Mike Blusher?"
It took me a moment to respond. The talk with van de Graaf was still rumbling around my mind "No, what now?"
"They arrested him, can you believe it?"
That cleared my head. "You bet I can," I said with enthusiasm. "For what, fraud?"
"You got it. The FBI was in here talking to us about it this morning. They got him in a sting. He's selling the Terbrugghen all over the place. There are four of them, at least. They nailed him with a fake Uruguayan. This guy from Oman—"
"Wait a minute, will you, Calvin? Slow down. What's a fake Uruguayan?"
"Well, a real Uruguayan. You know, an Uruguayan- American. He was supposed to be a millionaire from Montevideo or someplace, but he's really an FBI agent. Capisce?"
"No," I said irritably. "Slow down, will you?"
"All right, pay attention, don't interrupt." There was a pause and a slurp; his afternoon Coke, straight from the can. Then, more slowly, if not that much more coherently, he explained. In the end, after many questions and explications, a more or less intelligible story emerged.
A week earlier, an Omani hotel magnate and novice art collector, Mr. al-Ghazali, who was in New York for several days of auctions at Sotheby's, had gone to the New York Police Department to express certain reservations about a purchase he had tentatively agreed to make—not from Sotheby's, but from a Mr. Michael Blusher, who was also there for the auctions.
According to Mr. al-Ghazali, he had recognized Blusher at a cocktail party at the Central Park South condominium of a Manhattan art dealer and had approached him on the terrace to congratulate him on the spectacular discovery of the Terbrugghen. Blusher had asked him if he collected Old Masters, and al-Ghazali had replied laughingly that he was thinking about it inasmuch as the Impressionists and the Modems seemed to be priced beyond reach. They had then each gone on to talk with other people, but as the party was winding down, Blusher had suggested they have dinner together.
Afterward, over truite fraîche grillée at Lutece, Blusher had revealed that he was interested in quietly selling the painting to a discreet buyer. He had come on strong—"like a yacht salesman," al-Ghazali disapprovingly said later—but the Omani's interest had been aroused all the same and they had talked price. Blusher had asked $850,000, al-Ghazali had offered $300,000, and they had settled on $425,000, contingent on al-Ghazali's later examination of the painting in Seattle.
Blusher, too, had a condition: that the sale not receive any publicity, at least for the time being. The only reason he was letting the painting go, he had explained, was that he was in a financial hole, and if word of it got out, others would guess the reason, something that would do his business no good. Al-Ghazali had accepted the condition, and they had shaken hands on it over the soufflé au Grand Marnier.
But later the Omani began to have second thoughts. He was new to collecting and unsure of himself, and the hard sell hadn't sat well with him. Nor had the secrecy, the emphasis on discretion. The following evening, at another party, he had chatted with a South Korean newspaper publisher who, like al-Ghazali, was in New York for his first major auction. The Korean had astonished him by saying that Blusher had offered him the Terbrugghen over lunch. The Korean, in fact, was under the impression that his own conditional offer of $330,000 had been accepted.
Stung by this evidence of bad faith (and very likely by the lower price the Korean had gotten), al-Ghazali went to the police. He was referred to an art-squad detective who in turn contacted the FBI's white-collar crime squad, which had already been following Blusher's much-publicized art adventures with skepticism if not outright suspicion.
"Ha," I said on hearing this.
"What?"
"I said ha. They weren't the only ones. Didn't I say all along he was pulling something?"
"Did you?" Calvin said. "I don't remember that."
"Go ahead, Calvin."
The FBI had quickly gone into action. A few days after Blusher returned to Seattle, he was approached by a Portland art dealer claiming to be an intermediary for a rich Uruguayan interested in making some, ah, discreet art purchase, preferably without the usual bothersome and time-consuming forms and declarations.
Blusher had leaped slavering for the bait. The mysterious Uruguayan had been shown the Terbrugghen, with the over-painted "van Eyck" now removed, and a price of $400,000 had been agreed upon. The Uruguayan, who preferred to deal in cash (Blusher had cheerfully agreed to this), would return with the money the next day.
Instead, a team of FBI agents and Seattle Police Department detectives had arrived at Venezia with both a search warrant and an arrest warrant. In a closet next to Blusher's office they had found the Terbrugghen. Within an hour they'd uncovered three identical copies. "Exact duplicates, front and back," was the way they put it in their report.
At first, Blusher had claimed that they were all part of his legitimate authentic-simulated-masterpiece business. Then he had changed his mind and gone to a modified version of his mistaken-shipment-from-Italy story. Then he had decided that he wanted to talk to a lawyer, after all, and had said no more.
I sighed with satisfaction. It was just as I'd thought. The panel on which Blusher's Terbrugghen was painted had, of course, come from Ugo's picture, the back of which had been sawed off and replaced with an imitation. The Terbrugghen had then been forged directly on the genuine panel, which would have been a little thinner than before, but so what? Old panels were hardly uniform in thickness. Then, to spice up the eventual "discovery," the Terbrugghen had been painted over with the van Eyck.
Blusher, after gulling me into suggesting that he have it X-rayed, had taken it to the university. There, Eleanor Freeman had been startled to see (in a shadowy radiographic exposure) what looked very much like a Hendrik Terbrugghen painting underneath the fake van Eyck. Who could blame her for leaping to the conclusion that she'd found a lost masterpiece? As Tony had said: "Why the hell would anyone paint a first-class forgery, then cover it up with another one so nobody could see it? That's crazy."
Not so crazy, it seemed.
"So he had three copies of the original made," I said slowly, "maybe even more, and he was selling them off as the original at three or four hundred thousand dollars apiece. He makes over a million dollars, and the joke is that even the original was a fake to begin with."
"Some joke," Calvin said.
After he hung up I kicked off my shoes, lay back on the bed with my hands clasped behind my neck, and closed my eyes. I was beat, too, but my mind was buzzing.