Trachtman leaned back a little in his chair, as if he was about to enjoy a good meal.
“Frans Hermenszoon,” he said, “had he lived, would have been as widely known today as Rembrandt or Vermeer, with whom he was contemporary. He was in many ways an exemplar of the best of everything in seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Use of light, and meticulous realism, and an understated commentary on human, by which he would have meant Dutch, existence. Lady with a Finch, for instance, in its stillness and beauty and meticulous realism, seems permanent. Yet, of course, we know that the bird will fly off any moment. So with human life, Hermenszoon seems to suggest.”
“He died young?” I asked, just to avoid passivity.
“Not yet thirty,” Trachtman said. “Stabbed through the eye, apparently in a drunken brawl.”
“Like Christopher Marlowe,” I said.
“My, my,” Trachtman said. “You do know more than you let on.”
“I live alone,” I said. “I read a lot.”
“No wife?” Trachtman said.
“No,” I said. “Though I have kept intimate company with the girl of my dreams for most of my adult life.”
“But not married?”
“No.”
“Why?” Trachtman said.
“I don’t know.”
“It is good to have someone,” Trachtman said. “I’m glad you do.”
“How many paintings are there by Hermenszoon?” I said.
“In his lifetime there were perhaps eight. To the best of our knowledge, only Lady with a Finch survives.”
“How do you know there used to be eight?”
“Transaction records, diaries, letters,” Trachtman said. “Usual sources.”
“So being the one and only makes it even more valuable than it otherwise might be?”
“The painting is a great work of art,” Trachtman said. “It’s priceless.”
“And its pricelessness is enhanced by its singularity,” I said.
Trachtman smiled.
“Well put,” he said.
“Is there a history?”
“Certainly,” Trachtman said. “It remained in the Hermenszoon family something like two hundred years, then was acquired by a wealthy Jewish family in Amsterdam named Herzberg. It remained in the Herzberg family until 1940, when Judah Herzberg and his entire family were arrested by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz. The Nazis also confiscated the vast and priceless art collection that the family had maintained. After the war, some of the paintings were recovered and identified with the Herzberg family by a special unit of the U.S. military established to deal with stolen art. But the entire family had perished in Auschwitz, except a son, Isaac, who would have been about nine when he arrived in Auschwitz. No one could find the boy, who in 1945 would have been fourteen. He had disappeared into the tidal wave of refugees, many of them homeless, which inundated Europe at the time.”
“What happened to the paintings,” I said, “when they couldn’t find anyone to return them to?”
“They were kept in a sort of holding facility and distributed to museums or sold to private collectors. The army took surprisingly good care of them, being, you know, military men. But inevitably some just re-disappeared.”
“Ever hear of the Herzberg Foundation?” I said.
“No,” Trachtman said. “I haven’t. What is it?”
“Just a name,” I said. “Came up in discussion. Probably a coincidence.”
“If it had to do with seventeenth-century Dutch painting,” Trachtman said, “I would know of it.”
“Of course,” I said. “Did the Hammond Museum get the painting from the army?”
“In 1949,” Trachtman said.
“They never found the Herzberg kid?”
“There have been several claimants,” Trachtman said. “But none has been able to prove his lineage.”
“Hard to do if your entire family is wiped out and you’re in a death camp for five years.”
“Very hard,” Trachtman said.
We were silent for a moment.
“When was he last heard of?” I said.
“He is on a list of surviving prisoners released from Auschwitz by the Russians,” Trachtman said. “That would date to 1945. We have no further record.”
“So he could have died six months later,” I said.
“Could,” Trachtman said.
“Or he could be alive and living in Zanzibar,” I said.
“Could,” Trachtman said.
I nodded.
“Tell me what you can about Ashton Prince,” I said.
36
A woman came into Trachtman’s office with some coffee and cookies on a small tray.
Trachtman introduced her.
“My assistant, Ibby Moser,” he said. “Say hello to Mr. Spenser, Ibby.”
She said hello and put the tray down.
“Ibby’s cookies are amazing,” Trachtman said. “Try one.” I took one and ate half of it. It was peanut butter.
“Amazing,” I said.
We all smiled, and Ibby left.
“A mid-afternoon ritual,” Trachtman said. “Every day. I never know what kind of cookies it will be.”
“Nice ritual,” I said. “Ashton Prince?”
“Ashton is odd,” Trachtman said. “On the one hand, he is a first-rate scholar of low-country realism. An expert.”
“As expert as you?” I said.
“His expertise may not be as broad,” Trachtman said. “I am a bit of a generalist. But in his areas of specialization, it is deeper. He is . . . or was, I suppose I should say . . . the greatest authority I know of, far greater than I, on Franz Hermenszoon.”
“Doesn’t matter what tense you use,” I said. “We both know he’s dead.”
Trachtman smiled.
“I like to be precise,” he said. “There was also an odd sort of collateral specialty. . . . He was unsurpassed in the identification of forgeries in the art of the period.”
“Which is to say Dutch art in the time of Rembrandt,” I said.
“More or less,” Trachtman said.
“You said that on the one hand he was what you’ve just described,” I said. “How about the other hand?”
Trachtman smiled and shook his head.
“This will be, I suppose, a bit subjective,” he said.
“Many things are,” I said.
He nodded.
“There was something deeply fraudulent about Ashton,” he said. “I didn’t know him well, but we had met at conferences and such, and I knew his work. But there was something . . . artificial about him. As if he were, oh, I don’t know, performing. Like someone in a drama whose acting shows through.”
“I think actors call that ‘indicating.’”
“Really,” Trachtman said. “Are you a theater buff?”
“No, but I have a friend who is a performer.”
“You appear to be one on whom nothing is lost,” Trachtman said.
“Though often wasted,” I said. “Do you know anything about his personal life?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing. That’s part of it. Look at you. I’ve never met you before. We’ve talked for perhaps half an hour. And I know that you are unmarried and live alone, but you are in a committed relationship with a woman of whom you are quite fond, and you have a dog.”
“We share a dog,” I said.
“I knew nothing of Ashton,” Trachtman said. “He dressed like some sort of caricature of an art professor. He had a fluty accent, as if he had gone to an upper-class English boarding school.”
“I know,” I said. “I spent time with him. Do you know if Ashton Prince is his real name?”
“As far as I know,” Trachtman said. “But if it weren’t, I wouldn’t be startled. He seems just like the kind of man that would change his name . . . and Ashton Prince is the kind of name he’d change it to.”
“Anything else about him bothers you?” I said.
“Walford,” Trachtman said. “He stayed, for God’s sake, at Walford.”
“Not a good thing?” I said.
“Walford is all right,” he said. “But it is not a first-rate art department, neither in composition nor history. It does not value artistic scholarship in the way that, say, Yale would. Or Brown. Prince was not as free as he might have been someplace else to do scholarship. He had no research support. He always had classes to teach.”