“I’m not agreeing to anything of the sort. Wait here a moment and I’ll show you something.”
He got up and left me staring at his empty chair. After a short while he returned, holding what looked like a leather-bound photo album. He handed it to me and I opened it. Every right-hand page held a color photograph of a painting affixed to the thick black paper with old-fashioned corner mounts, and on each facing page was pasted a typed provenance, in German. There were twenty-eight in alclass="underline" several Rembrandts, a Vermeer, two Franz Hals, and the rest good-quality Dutch masters of the seventeenth century, with two exceptions. One was a Breughel of a skating party on a canal, and the other was the van der Goes altarpiece I’d seen in Krebs’s office that time. Besides that, all of them were unfamiliar to me.
“What is this?” I asked him.
“Well, you’ll recall the story I told you of the van that was consumed in Dresden. These were the paintings in that van.”
“Except for the van der Goes.”
“Yes, that had been removed and placed in the other van for reasons now obscure. But these paintings in the album are assuredly gone. Now, you may have noticed during your tour of this house a small door in the cellar that is always locked. Behind it is a bricked-up well. It was bricked up in 1948. Now, suppose I wished to remove the bricks for some reason and hired a respectable firm of builders to do the job, and suppose that behind the bricks we found all these paintings. Wouldn’t that be wonderful!”
It took me a few seconds to get it, and it was so absurd that I had to laugh. “You want me to forge twenty-seven paintings.”
He laughed too. “Yes. Marvelous, isn’t it?”
“But you’d never be able to sell them. The Schloss family and the international authorities-”
He waved his hand. “No, no, not a public sale. I’ve explained this to you. There is an immense private market for high-value paintings. To dispose of these would be quite easy, once news of the discovery was made available to a particular subset of the market. People have been wondering about the lost Schloss paintings since the war, and of course it is known that my father had access to them. They would sell like pancakes.”
“That’s an interesting offer,” I said.
“Isn’t it? And of course it would more than fund your own work and any expenses you might have in connection with your son’s treatment.”
“Yes, that,” I said, and thought of Lotte and my old pal Mark, and how they’d both contributed to the plot. I said, “I’m curious. How did you rope Mark and Lotte into this thing?”
“Speaking hypothetically, you mean?”
“If it makes you happy.”
“Then it was money, of course. Mark will realize a colossal commission from the Velázquez. And he does not seem to like you very much. He was quite gleeful to be, as he put it, fucking with your head.”
“And Lotte. Doesn’t she like me either?”
“On the contrary, she loves you very much. She agreed to help us so as to blast you forever out of your ridiculous and miserable existence as a commercial artist and also to obtain adequate medical care for your son, which you were never going to be able to do. There is no deeper love than this, you know, than to surrender the loved one so that he can become what he was meant to be.”
“I was meant to be an insane forger?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, Wilmot. Yes, you are insane, as planned. I mean to say, you imagine you are Diego Velázquez! What could be more clear evidence of madness than that? It is textbook diagnosis. You have long fits of amnesia during which you believe you have painted old masters. And so forth.”
For a long moment I stared at him, literally gaping. It was like a movie, a bad melodrama in which the villain explains to the helpless James Bond how he’s going to blow up the city. But Krebs wasn’t looking villainous at all, no malicious glee, just a concerned and paternal expression like Dad has when he breaks it to little Virginia that there’s no Santa.
There was no juice of outrage in me. I managed to say, “That’s pretty fucking arrogant, Krebs, to do that to someone, don’t you think?”
“Well, yes, I am an arrogant bastard. It is my nature and of course our national vice as well. But consider, Wilmot, that you have always been crazy, and with no help from me. When we started this you were a neurotically constricted artist incapable of doing decent work and slaving for workman’s wages producing shit for advertising or whatever. For an artist of your capability, that is the true insanity. Now, on the other hand, you have money and freedom to do what you like.”
“As long as what I like is forging paintings for you.”
“It will not take up too much of your time, I think. You no longer have the excuse of having to struggle to support your family, and you will have to face the white canvas without that crutch. You can paint for yourself. Perhaps you will flourish as never before, and perhaps not. I hope for the former, of course. Maybe you will be the one to rescue easel painting for another thousand years.”
“Oh, yeah, lay that on me!” I said, and then we both smiled. I couldn’t help it.
“And another thing,” he said. “I think that also in your heart of hearts you do not despise this idea of forgery. You wished to add beauty to the world, and the art establishment has no taste for it anymore; this is a way to do it and also to give them one in the eye. And this is my desire too. The Schloss paintings, which were destroyed through my father’s doing and the wickedness of my country, will live again. And no one will ever know the difference.”
“You could give them back to the Schloss family.”
“I could. And perhaps I will-some of them. But, you know, I have my expenses, and patronage is a costly proposition. I must keep Charles Wilmot happy, after all.”
“You must. I notice you’ve abandoned the pretense that I was a successful figurative painter with a Whitney retrospective.”
“I haven’t abandoned anything,” he said. “It’s you who are unfortunately incapable of keeping your story straight, or even of recalling what has been said to you from one minute to the next. For example, I have no idea what you think we have just been discussing. I myself recall a conversation about the watercolors of Winslow Homer.”
I stared at him for a second, and then I had to laugh; it just came bubbling up from inside me and it went on for a long time. He was absolutely right. We might have been discussing anything. My clever pasteup might not even exist. In fact, after I had finished wiping my eyes and caught my breath, I found that it had somehow vanished from the table. And where was that tiny implant? Who knew?
“I am happy you are amused,” he said, and I thought he was just a little uneasy when he said it. I mean, he wanted me crazy, but not that crazy.
“Yeah, now I know why they always depict madmen as laughing. You know, Werner, this is a pleasant spot, but I think I’ll take my lunatic ass back to New York. Unless I’m still a prisoner.”
“You’ve never been a prisoner, except of yourself. What will you do in New York?”
“Oh, you know, tie up my affairs. Take a look at that painting you say I didn’t do.”
“You didn’t. Salinas discovered the lost Velázquez in the bowels of the Alba’s vast holdings, don’t ask me how. All of Mark’s machinations with it were merely to help Salinas smuggle it out of Spain. It truly had a fake Bassano painted on top of it. Perhaps Leonora Fortunati herself had this done to protect herself and her famous lover. As you have yourself described to me.”
“It makes a good story anyway. Werner, don’t you ever tell the truth?”
“I always tell the truth, after a fashion,” he said, and stood and shook my hand. “I’ll be in touch,” he said, and walked back into the house.