“Perhaps you will be called in to supervise the cleaning. That would be rather good, wouldn’t it?”
“I should certainly enjoy it.”
“You know, some of these are so good I almost covet them for myself. You have really made it seem as if some uncommonly clever, and quite unknown and unrecognized, portraitists of authentic German style had been at work among the rich merchants of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in these parts. The one thing you have not been able to disguise is your talent, Meister.”
“You are very kind.”
“Look at this one. The Fuggers’ jester. Unquestionably this is one of the Fools whom we know the Fuggers always kept in their entourage after they became Counts, but which one? Do you think it could be Drollig Hansel, the favourite of Count Hans? Look at him. What a face!”
“Poor wretch,” said the Countess; “to be born a dwarf and kept as a Fool. Still, I suppose it was better than being a dwarf whom nobody kept.”
“This one will certainly delight our friends when they see it,” said Prince Max.
“I am sorry, but that one is not included with the others,” said Saraceni.
“Not included! But it’s the pick of the lot! Why is it not included!”
“Because it is not a touched-up genuine picture. It is wholly and simply a fabrication, made by our young friend Corniche. I have been teaching him the technique of this sort of painting, and as an exercise I left him to produce something solely on his own responsibility, to show how well he had mastered the art.”
“But it is superb!”
“Yes. A superb fake.”
“Well—but could anybody spot it?”
“Not without a scientific examination. The panel is old and quite genuine, and it is covered in leather as old as itself. The colours are correct, made in the true manner. The technique is impeccable, except that it is rather too good for a wholly unknown painter. And this ingenious scoundrel Corniche has even seen that the craquelure incorporates some authentic dust. I don’t suppose one observer in a thousand would have any doubt about it.”
“Oh, but Meister—that observer would surely spot the old Fugger Firmenzeichen, the pitchfork and circle, that can just barely be perceived in the upper left-hand corner. He would pride himself on having spotted it and guessed what it is, although it is almost obscured.”
“Yes. But it is a fake, my dear Max.”
“Perhaps in the substance. Certainly not in the spirit. Consider, Meister: this is not imitating any known painter’s work—that would be a fake, of course. No, this is simply a little picture in a sixteenth-century manner. Now what makes it different from these others?”
“Only the fact that it has been done in the past month.”
“Oh, that is almost Lutheran pernickety morality! That is an unworthy servitude to chronology. Cousin, what do you say? Isn’t it a little gem?”
“I say it speaks of the dull, inescapable misery of being a dwarf, of having to make oneself ridiculous in order to be tolerated, of feeling that God has not used you well. If it makes me feel these things so strongly, it is certainly a picture of unusual quality. I should like to see it make the journey with the others.”
“Of course, cousin. Just the sort of good sense I should expect from you. Come on, Tancred, relent.”
“If you say so. The greatest risk is yours.”
“Let me worry about the risk. Is everything ready for the journey, cousin?”
“The six big hogsheads are in the old granary.”
“Then let us get to work at once.”
Francis, Max, the Countess, and Saraceni spent the next three hours wrapping the panels—eighteen of them, including the picture of the jester—in oiled paper, after which they were sewn into packages of oiled silk and the seams caulked with tar Saraceni heated on the brazier. To the silken packages a number of small lead weights were attached. Then they carried them to the old granary, where there were no workmen because of the holiday, and there they removed the tops from the six hogsheads, and carefully sank the packages in the white wine they contained—fifty-two gallons to a barrel. When Prince Max tapped the last top back into place, eighteen pictures had been drowned, snug and dry in their casings, and were ready to travel to England, to the warehouses of a highly respected London wine-merchant. It was a good morning’s work, and even the Countess relaxed some of her usual reserve, and invited the conspirators to take Madeira with her in her private room, where Francis had never been before.
“I feel a splendid glow of achievement,” said Prince Max, sniffing at his glass. “I am rejoicing in the breadth and ingenuity of our cleverness. I am wondering if I shall be able to resist pinching the little Fugger Jester for myself. But no—that would be unprofessional. He must go with the others. You know, it seems to me to be damn funny that our friend Francis has not said a word—not a single word—about what we have done with his picture.”
“I had a good reason for keeping quiet,” said Francis. “But I would certainly like to know what is going on, if that is permissible. The Meister has quelled me so completely during the past four months that I don’t feel that I have any right to ask questions. I suppose that is what apprenticeship means. Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. But I’d like to know a little, if I may.”
“Tancred, what an old tyrant you must be,” said Prince Max. “Cousin, do you think we should explain, just a little?”
“Yes, I do. Though I doubt your ability to explain, or do anything else, just a little, Max. But Mr. Cornish is now in—you shall say in what—farther than he knows, and it would be ill-usage not to tell him what he is letting himself in for.”
“Here it is, my dear Cornish. You know that our Führer is a great connoisseur of art? Understandable, as he was himself a painter in his young days, before his mighty destiny declared itself. Because of his determination that the full glory of the German Volk should be made plain to the whole world, as well as to the Volk itself, he wishes to acquire and bring back to Germany whatever German works of art are owned abroad. Repatriation of our heritage, he calls it. That will take some doing, of course. There was a great dispersal of German religious art during the Reformation. Who wanted that ridiculous stuff? Certainly not the Lutherans. But much of it found its way to other countries, and travelled even further toward America, from which it probably will not return. But what is in Europe may be persuaded to return. There was another great dispersal of German art during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when every young sprig who made the Grand Tour felt obliged to take a few pretty things home with him, and not all of those pretty things were acquired in Italy. Some fine Gothic things went from here. The Führer wants to get it all together, the first-rate and the second-rate—not that the Führer would regard anything authentically German as second-rate—and he is planning a great Führermuseum in Linz to house it.”
“But surely Linz is in Austria?”
“Yes, and not a great distance from the Führer’s birthplace. By the time the pictures have been assembled, Austria will be glad to have the Führermuseum. Austria is ripe for the picking. Are you beginning to catch on?”
“Yes, but does the Führer really want the kind of thing the Meister and I have been working on? That’s very small potatoes, surely? And why send it to England? Why not offer it here?”
“Well—that is a complicated story. First, the Führer wants everything that is German; when it has been acquired, somebody will sort the good from the mediocre. And I may say that you and dear Tancred have lifted these pictures above mediocrity. They are bürger-portraits of considerable interest. How intelligent, how German they look now! Second, the Führer, or I should say his agents, are ready to make deals with foreign dealers. They like to do swaps. For a German picture, a picture of roughly corresponding worth that is not German but now hangs in a German gallery may be exchanged. The Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin and the Alte Pinakothek in Munich have already—under the gentle persuasion of the Führer’s artistic advisers—swapped a Ducio di Buoninsegna, a Raphael, some Fra Lippo Lippis, and God knows what else for German paintings that could be made available. There are scores of them in England, you know.”