An exceedingly fat French woman brushed against him as he walked. Elata stopped, gave her a nasty look — but she was oblivious, chattering to her almost equally rotund companion about the uselessness—inutile—of art. Elata spoke little French, and that word specifically might be interpreted as edging toward “vanity” rather than uselessness, but he had an ear for such conversations. He had heard them all his life, beginning at his own dinner table when he’d expressed his desire at age eight to become an artist.
Which, despite everything, he had become. If a forger might be considered an artist.
The human brain’s ability to draw fine distinctions cannot be overstated, especially in the gray realm of morality and ethics. Elata’s mind was particularly supple; it had no great difficulty justifying his actions. First and foremost, there was the need to survive; he had to eat. If he had come quite a distance from the days when he was truly starving — as the Rolex and privately tailored sports coat he wore over his jeans attested — that distance was not so great as to dim the memory.
His second justification was that he was actually an artist. As such, he not only understood what the masters he imitated were doing, he extended it. Copying them had become part of his art, part of the great tradition of master and student that many of them had followed during their own apprenticeship. He learned their style and technique, then addressed himself to subjects as they would have. He did not copy paintings directly. If, when he was finished, others believed that the work on his easel had been done by the master himself, that was irrelevant to him. Elata himself never passed the paintings off as anything other than his own. And as far as he knew, those who sold them did not either.
That this knowledge was a product of willful ignorance made no difference to him morally, even if it might make such baubles as the Rolex possible.
And then there was the final justification, the grand and undebatable one — art itself. For art transcended all. It transcended da Vinci as surely as it transcended Marc Elata. It transcended Picasso, it transcended Elata’s present employer and greatest patron, Gabriel Morgan. It endured and would endure, even if every work in this museum were burned tomorrow.
Elata shuddered and turned abruptly, afraid that he had somehow inadvertently shared his thoughts with the rest of the room. But he had not. The tourists continued to wander through like cows grazing in a field.
He glanced at his watch. Still another three hours to kill.
Elata had not come to Paris to prepare himself for another round of paintings. His job was quite different — Morgan had hired him to detect a forgery rather than produce one.
Elata had done this sort of thing before. He had examined a Giotto supposedly passed down from the Nazis, steering Morgan away because of a tint under one of the eyes — a careless trick in an otherwise competent job. He had stuck to his opinion despite the arguments of two academic authenticators; in the end, Morgan had listened to him and passed on the painting, though not without regret. The painting had subsequently surfaced in an Australian collection, where a fresh and rather destructive laboratory analysis of it had denounced it as a fake — a careless piece of priming gave it away.
From that point on, Morgan insisted on Elata viewing every important piece he bought. Or so Morgan claimed, though Elata suspected that he did not. But the fact that he said so increased the pressure; the forger turned authenticator feared greatly making a mistake. Morgan no doubt considered this as big an incentive as his sizable fees.
Morgan did not rely on psychology or money alone. He made sure his expert was supplied with the proper tools to aid his judgment. In this case, he had arranged for Elata to receive a small piece of paper containing a sketch and swatch of paint. The fact that this piece of paper — a letter by Picasso, exceedingly rare because it contained a description and rough sketch as well as a dab of paint — belonged not to Morgan but to the Musée Picasso was of no consequence to Elata’s conscience, though it necessitated certain physical arrangements, this trip to Paris the primary one.
Elata folded and unfolded his arms, moving through the Louvre gallery. He had hoped looking at the paintings would consume some of his nervous energy, but it was no use. He was due at the Musée Picasso at precisely 2:10; he did not wish to arrive early and inadvertently draw attention to himself, but he had difficulty throttling his energy. He was not a patient man. He could not pretend to be a patient man. As a painter he attacked, he sprinted, he moved at the speed of thought; it could be an asset in art, but in life it made for rising blood pressure and insatiable boredom. It took his attention from the de Vries sculpture of Mercury and Psyche as he passed down the steps and out through the halls into the courtyard and park, helplessly propelled by his surging adrenaline.
“Deux,” said the voice in her ear. Then it repeated itself in English for her benefit. “Two in position.”
Nessa Lear watched from across the street, her vision partly obscured by wandering crowds, as their subject continued through the Tuileries garden toward Avenue du Gl. Lemonier. The American was tall, and the dark, well-cut jacket he habitually wore over a gray T-shirt and acid-washed jeans made him easy to keep track of. The fact that he seemed not to know he was being followed or even suspect it made things even easier.
Of course, it was also possible he was not planning on doing anything worth being followed for. “Doigts,” the French teammates on her Interpol task force called him. “Fingers.” They had given the name to Monsieur Elata for the incredible adroitness and adaptability of his painting strokes, for they believed he was responsible for forgeries ranging from a Rembrandt sketch to an early Matisse study. But the American had never been positively linked to the works — many of which were not even positively identified as forgeries. Elata had arrived in Paris yesterday afternoon, and had so far done nothing any other tourist would have done. He had sped through D’Orsay in the day yesterday, and Notre Dame in the evening, just as he had rushed through the Louvre today. Assuming the French had no law demanding that museum visits be of a certain duration (they might), he had done nothing wrong.
“Un moment. Merde,” cursed one of the team members. Nessa leaned around a stopped truck and peered toward the park. Elata had stopped at a vendor and was buying a sandwich. The tail had to continue past. Nessa would have to take over.
She moved forward. She’d been on the job officially less than a week, not counting the skimpy orientation period, and so didn’t know much of Paris yet, but that made her seem like the perfect tourist; acting lost would not be difficult, and she wouldn’t have to work hard at mispronouncing her French.
Elata wolfed the jambon—actually, a ham with cheese on a small French roll — then walked down in the direction of the Jardin du Luxembourg. He still had more than two hours to kill. He thought of going up to Montmartre, but had been warned by Morgan, absolutely warned, not to go near the Feu Gallery, where he had deposited several works during his last visit some months before.
So what was he to do? He stopped for a moment in the park, rubbing the heel of his boot against the yellow pebbles. He gave his eye over to the forms and colors passing by him — thick weaves of wool and puffed nylons, blue wedges, and green tweed. It was warm for March, but still it was March; if it had been May perhaps, he might have feasted on the figures. But late winter dulled the forms; there was nothing to divert him.