I followed her to her extensive kitchen, and sat in the window nook that overlooked the tile rooftops of the lower city while she finished chopping up the vegetables for a large salad.
“Do you know this painting’s history?” Freya asked, looking up from a dissected head of lettuce.
I shook my head. “Up until now the thing has not been of overwhelming interest to me.”
“A confession of faulty aesthetics. The work was photographed at the original exhibit in 1895; Durand-Ruel photo 5828 L8451. All of the information appended to the photo fits our painting—same name, size, signature location. Then for a century it disappeared. Odd. But it turned out to have been in the estate of an Evans family, in Aylesbury, England. When the family had some conservation work done on one corner it returned to public knowledge, and was photographed for a dozen books of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries. After that it slipped back into obscurity, but it is as well documented as any of the series belonging to private estates.”
“Exactly my point,” I said. “How could such a history be forged?”
As Freya mixed the salad she smiled. “I sat and thought about that for quite some time myself. But consider it freshly, Nathaniel. How do we know what we know of the past?”
“Well,” I said, somewhat at a loss. “From data banks, I suppose. And books—documents—historians—”
“From historians!” She laughed. She provided us both with bowls and sat across from me. As I filled mine she said, “So we want to know something of the past. We go to our library and sit at its terminal. We call up general reference works, or a bibliographic index, and we choose, if we want, books that we would like to have in our hands. We type in the appropriate code, our printer prints up the appropriate book, and the volume slides out of the computer into our waiting grasp.” She paused to fork down several mouthfuls of salad. “So we learn about the past using computer programs. And a clever programmer, you see, can change a program. It would be possible to insert extra pages into these old books on Monet, and thus add the forged painting to the record of the past.”
I paused, a cherry tomato hovering before my mouth. “But—”
“I searched for an original of any of these books containing photos of our painting,” Freya said. “I called all over Mercury, and to several incunabulists in libraries on Earth— you wouldn’t believe the phone bill I’ve run up. But the initial printings of these art volumes were very small, and although first editions probably remain somewhere, they are not to be found. Certainly there are no first editions of these books on Mercury, and none immediately locatable on Earth. It began to seem a very unlikely coincidence, as if these volumes contained pictures of our painting precisely because they existed only in the data banks, and thus could be altered without discovery.”
She attended to her salad, and we finished eating in silence. All the while my mind was spinning furiously, and when we were done I said, “What about the original exhibit photo?”
She nodded, pleased with me. “That, apparently, is genuine. But the Durand-Ruel photos include four or five of paintings that have never been seen since. In that sense the Rouen cathedral series is a good one for a faker; from the first it has never been clear how many cathedrals Monet painted. The usual number given is thirty-two, but there are more in the Durand-Ruel list, and a faker could examine the list and use one of the lost items as a prescription for his fake. Providing a later history with the aid of these obscure art books would result in a fairly complete pedigree.”
“But could such an addition to the data banks be made?”
“It would be easiest done on Earth,” Freya said. “But there is no close security guarding the banks containing old art books. No one expects them to be tampered with.”
“It’s astonishing,” I said with a wave of my fork, “it is baroque, it is byzantine in its ingenuity!”
“Yes,” she said. “Beautiful, in a way.”
“However,” I pointed out to her, “you have no proof— only this perhaps over-complex theory. You have found no first edition of a book to confirm that the computer-generated volumes add Heidi’s painting, and you have found no physical anachronism in the painting itself.”
Gloomily she clicked her fork against her empty salad bowl, then rose to refill it. “It is a problem,” she admitted. “Also, I have been working on the assumption that Sandor Musgrave discovered evidence of the forgery. But I can’t find it.”
Never let it be said that Nathaniel Sebastian has not performed a vital role in Freya Grindavik’s great feats of detection. I was the first to notice the anachronism of sensibility in Heidi’s painting; and now I had a truly inspired idea. “He was pointing to the patio!” I exclaimed. “Musgrave, in his last moment, struggled to point to the patio!”
“I had observed that,” Freya said, unimpressed.
“But Heidi’s patio—you know—it is formed out of blocks of the Dover cliffs! And thus Musgrave indicated England! Is it not possible? The Monet was owned by Englishmen until Heidi purchased it—perhaps Musgrave meant to convey that the original owners were the forgers!”
Freya’s mouth hung open in surprise, and her left eye was squinted shut. I leaped from the window nook in triumph. “I’ve solved it! I’ve solved a mystery at last!”
Freya looked up at me and laughed.
“Come now, Freya, you must admit I have given you the vital clue.”
She stood up, suddenly all business. “Yes, yes, indeed you have. Now out with you Nathaniel, I have work to do.”
“So I did give you the vital clue?” I asked. “Musgrave was indicating the English owners?”
As she ushered me to her door Freya laughed. “As a detective your intuition is matched only by your confidence. Now leave me to work, and I will be in contact with you soon, I assure you.” And with that she urged me into the street, and I was left to consider the case alone.
Freya was true to her word, and only two days after our crucial luncheon she knocked on the door of my town villa. “Come along,” she said. “I’ve asked Arnold Ohman for an appointment; I want to ask him some questions about the Evans family. The city is passing the Monet museum, however, and he asked us to meet him out there.”
I readied myself quickly, and we proceeded to North Station. We arrived just in time lo step across the gap between the two platforms, and then we were on the motionless deck of one of the outlying stations that Terminator is always passing. There we rented a car and sped west, paralleling the dozen massive cylindrical rails along which the city slides. Soon we had left Terminator behind, and when we were seventy or eighty kilometers onto the nightside of Mercury we turned to the north, to Monet Crater.
Terminator’s tracks lie very close to the thirtieth degree of Latitude, in the Northern hemisphere, and Monet Crater is not far from them. We crossed Shakespeare Planitia rapidly, passing between craters named after the great artists, writers, and composers of Earth’s glorious past: traversing a low pass between Brahms and Verdi, looking down at where Degas had crashed into the Brontës. “I think I understand why a modern artist on Mercury might turn to forgery,” Freya said. “We are dwarfed by the past as we are by this landscape.”
“But it is still a crime,” I insisted “If it were done often, we would not be able to distinguish the authentic from the fake.”
Freya did not reply.
I drove our car up a short rise, and we entered the submercurial garage of the Monet museum, which is set deep in the southern rim of the immense crater named after the artist. One long wall of the museum is a window facing out over the crater floor, so that the central knot of peaks is visible, and the curving inner wall of the crater defines the horizon in the murky distance. Shutters slid down to protect these windows from the heat of Mercury’s long day, but now they were open and the black wasteland of the planet formed a strange backdrop to the colorful paintings that filled the long rooms of the museum.