Hang on St. Christopher (The Sean Duffy #8)

7. The Art Forger

CHAPTER 7

THE ART FORGER

Chilly living room floor. Embers long dead in the fire. Whisky bottle mercifully still more than two-thirds full.

In the sleeping bag, I caterpillared my way to the stereo. You can’t really start a day with Arvo Part. Many have tried, and many a classical DJ has been fired. (At least, I hope they have.)

I flipped through the classical records, but nothing struck my fancy.

“Time for a classic,” I muttered to the cat, who, of course, was in Scotland.

I thumbed through my meager collection of twelve inches (the better part of which was also in Scotland) and stuck in “Blue Monday,” which would see me through the coffee- and toast-making processes and maybe a run out to the shed and back to roll a thin joint.

Coffee, toast, marmalade, raincoat, shed, Mrs. Campbell taking her washing in out of the rain.

“Hello, Mr. Duffy.”

“Morning, Mrs. C.”

“This is your fourth day in a row,” she observed.

“Yeah, I’ve been temporarily seconded back into CID for the duration of a particular investigation.”

“Aye the murder on the Belfast Road. Your man, the painter.”

“Yes,” I said. Mrs. C., as always, was very well informed.

“And no, uhm, Mrs. Duffy with you this time?” she asked, knowing very well that Beth and I were not married.

“No, Beth’s staying in Scotland with Emma and the cat.”

“I hope that there’s not trouble in paradise?” she asked.

She unconsciously fixed a loose strand of her still brilliant copper locks back behind an ear. She was a good-looking woman, was Mrs. C, aging well despite the seven kids and the bathtub-gin habit.

“Nothing like that. Everything’s fine. Just sorting out a wee joyriding case while Sergeant Lawson is on his holidays.”

“If you say so,” she said skeptically, carrying the washing in.

I went back inside and ate a slice of Veda bread with butter and lemon curd. If you’ve never eaten toasted Ormeau Veda bread with Dromona butter and homemade lemon curd, do not despair, because this is the breakfast food that you will be served in heaven.

The rain began, and I listened to it for a while and thought of dead kings.

I found a sheet of paper and wrote:

Barefoot Magnus

by the river

the water flowing backward

I am carried

on the familiar current

to the memory place

where Magnus Barefoot

King of Norway

Earl of Orkney

Lord of the Isles

was ambushed by the Ulstermen

finishing thus the Viking Age

in revenge for Bangor

and Lindisfarne

and the slaughter and the slaves.

Red Magnus, scourge of Europe

from the Russian steppe to Iceland

dead in a sheugh in darkest Ulster

his back arrowed like a hedgehog

his head lofted high on a poleaxe

and then was Magnus buried with honor on a hill

near Saint Patrick

by the River Quoile

for we, men of Ulster, so flawed in many ways

are proficient in ending things.

Not bad for a dilettante. More work required. Obviously.

I slunk into the living room with my coffee, turned on the TV, and immediately muted it again when the news came on. I went to the record player and put on REM’s Out of Time , a terrific little album with only one dud on side 2. I had heard ominous talk at the HMV in Glasgow that REM had released Out of Time only as a novelty LP and that from now on their music would be available only in CD format. Which meant, of course, that I would never buy it.

“I keep telling everyone CDs are a fad,” I said to the same invisible cat I had talked to earlier.

I finished my breakfast, had a shave, dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans, and called Crabbie. He wasn’t going to like what I had to say, but I needed him.

“Hello,” he said.

“It’s me.”

“What’s up, Sean?”

“You’ve got to come in to work this morning, mate.”

“I have farm business.”

“This is a priority. We’re on this case. We’re detectives again. We gave our word to the chief inspector.”

“You gave your word.”

“They’re paying us time and a half until Lawson comes back. Double time if it’s after hours like last night. That would buy you your new tractor tires or pitchforks or whatever it is one needs on a farm.”

“It certainly would come in useful. All right, I’ll tell the wife, and if she gives the go-ahead I’ll see you in half an hour.”

“First order of business is probably to investigate this phone box in Dundalk.”

“How are we going to do that?”

“You fancy a trip over the border?”

“No.”

“Well, we’ll discuss it when you come in. See you in a bit, mate.”

I hung up the phone, put on a clean white shirt, pulled on my shoulder holster avec Glock 17, and a black leather jacket over the top of that.

Out to the Beemer. I looked underneath it for bombs, found zilch, drove up to Victoria, and instead of turning right turned left toward the new housing developments they were building up there.

It was a bold new world up here, left of Coronation Road and past the graveyard. When I’d first moved here, this was all Irish countryside, but now there was a Presbyterian church, scores of brand-new houses, a new road, and even an integrated primary school (Carrick’s first), which had had the radical idea that Protestant and Catholic kids should be educated together.

Also, up here lived a guy we’d lifted for selling stolen paintings. His name was Archie Simmons, and he’d been arrested many times for dealing stolen goods out of his antique shop in Carrick. If he couldn’t get stolen art, he’d forge it himself and pass it off as an original. If you ever wonder why there are just so many George William Russells or Jack B. Yeatses on the market, it’s down to people like Archie. The RUC had been trying to nail him since the 1960s without much success. The most recent case against him had collapsed because the witness who had accepted a “genuine” Marc Chagall burgled from a manor house in County Down had recanted his story at the preliminary hearing, and Archie had had to be freed. This kind of thing happened all the time. In cases of art theft where there was a paramilitary dimension and provenance issues, the case often got dropped to avoid great embarrassment. Few people wanted to admit that they’d had a forgery hanging in their living room for years.

Muddy lane, new housing development, big mock Tudor with a Merc parked outside.

I knocked on the door.

A long pause. I knocked again.

“Who is it?”

“Sean Duffy,” I said.

“The policeman?”

“Aye.”

“What’s this about?”

“Open the door and I’ll tell you.”

He opened the door a crack. He was a tall, skinny old geezer with gray skin, white scruffy beard, and lank white hair. He looked near death, but he had looked like that since the first mug shot I’d seen of him, taken in 1967, so he was probably going to be one of those old dudes who would live forever.

“I haven’t done nothing,” Archie said in a vague English accent that sounded put on.

“I never said you did.”

“Duffy, eh? I heard you jacked it in.”

“I have.”

“So what are you doing here at this hour of the morning?”

“I’m only working part-time,” I said, and explained the circumstances that had led me to his doorstep this muggy July day. “I’ve got a couple of Polaroids here. What I’d like you to do is identify a couple of Picasso prints for me. Tell me if they’re originals and, if so, how much they’re worth.”

“What do I get out of it?”

“The cops not hassling you for a few months? For instance, over the expired road tax on your Merc?”

“Show me the Polaroids,” he said.

I showed him the pictures of the two Picasso prints in Mr. Townes’s house.

“Oh, these are nice!” Archie said. “Come in. I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

I went inside Archie’s house, which was stuffed with vases, paintings, and bric-a-brac. If I were a cop on the robbery squad, I could have made two great arrests in the previous twelve hours: last night in the Nazi guy’s house, and this morning with all this gear.

But I had bigger fish to fry.

Archie went into the kitchen to make the tea while I flicked on the telly and caught the news. Trouble in Belfast, trouble in Derry—same old, same old.

Archie came in with a tray.

Tea, biscuits, Archie admiring the Polaroids.

“Well?” I asked.

“Like I say, these are lovely.”

“Can you tell me about the provenance?”

“Not from a photo. If you could show me the real thing...”

“Have you got five minutes? I could run you over to the crime scene.”

“Okay.”

Beemer down Victoria Road to the Belfast Road. Good morning to the constable guarding the house. Through the RUC DO NOT CROSS tape and into the living room.

I took Archie to the pictures.

“What do you think?” I asked him.

“These are gorgeous.”

“Genuine?”

He looked at them for a minute and nodded happily. “Without doubt. A hundred percent genuine article.”

“How do you know they’re genuine?”

“If the owner of these got himself murdered, who gets to inherit these little beauties?”

“We’re actually having some trouble tracking the next of kin.”

Archie smiled wickedly. “If you can’t trace any relatives, what happens?”

“I don’t know. Put them up for auction, I suppose?”

“I’d be interested in bidding in that auction.”

“Hold your horses, Archie. Getting ahead of yourself. Are you going to tell me what I want to know, or are you just a big faker like everyone else? Do you actually know what these are?”

Archie bristled, and his voice assumed an odd hectoring Anglo-Irish schoolmaster-y cadence: “During his seven decades of printmaking, Picasso created five major sets of etchings. Fifteen works in The Saltimbanques Suite of 1904–1905, one hundred works in the Vollard Suite of 1930–1937, sixty works in Series 60 of 1966–1968, three hundred forty-seven works in the 347 Series of 1968, and, finally, his hundred and fifty-six works in the 156 Series of 1969–1971. These suites alone total nearly seven hundred individual images.”

“Christ, you have all that in your noggin?” I asked, impressed.

“I checked while I was making your tea earlier.”

“So what are these particular etchings from?”

“ Le Repos du Sculpteur . Vollard Suite B 162. Signed. They’re actually aquatints rather than true etchings, I believe.”

“What is that?”

“A metal plate is covered with an acid-resistant ground, usually varnish, through which the image is drawn with a pointed tool, exposing the metal below. The plate is then immersed in a bath of acid that bites away the metal where it was exposed by the drawn areas that were no longer protected by the ground. After the plate has been “etched” and cleaned, it is ready to be inked and printed—or reworked by the artist.”

“So how much?—”

“I’m not done,” Archie said, warming to his theme. “In the aquatint method, Picasso would draw directly on the metal plate with a black watery ink thickened by the addition of dissolved sugar and gum arabic. The drawing was then covered with an acid-resistant varnish or etching ground and immersed in warm water. This dissolves the drawing material. The plate is lightly rubbed, leaving the bare plate. The protecting varnish will still stick to the plate where the plate has not previously been treated with the ink-and-sugar mixture. A lovely process, which is why he made hundreds of the bastards.”

“Hundreds? So not worth very much?”

“Oh, no, quite the reverse. These have become very collectible in the last two decades since Picasso’s death.”

“How much?”

“Ten grand the pair.”

“Ten grand! You’re joking.”

“Not at all.”

“But from what you’re saying, it’s just a print basically.”

“A signed print from a very collectible series. Signed by Picasso.”

“Wow. Ten grand?”

“At the right auction, yes.”

“What do you think of the rest of the art in here?”

“Completely worthless. Some big reproductions and the, ahem, artist’s own stuff.”

“How could a hobbyist portrait painter acquire something like this?”

“He must have an independent source of wealth. Don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but this guy was a complete hack.”

“Are there good auction records for the Vollard Suite etchings?”

“Yes, there are. There have to be. With so many Picasso etchings floating around, the possibility of fakes has always been there. Dealers and buyers insist on a watertight provenance.”

“So could you find out for me who bought these two particular—what was that word?”

“Aquatints.”

“You could find out who bought these aquatints and when?”

“I could. But the question is, why would I?”

“Again, Archie, it would be helping me out. It would be helping out Carrickfergus RUC.”

“Who would then stay off my bloody back until the end of the year?”

“Put it like this, Archie, if you have any trouble with the local cops until, say, Christmas, you can give me a call and I’ll see what I can do. I won’t help you with anything violent or a domestic, but apart from that, I’ll be your man.”

Archie liked the sound of that. “I’ll get you that info by the end of the week.”

“Sooner would be better. This is a murder investigation.”

“All right, I’ll see what I can do.”

My nose told me this was a step in the right direction. We might not be able to find out who killed Mr. Townes, but if we could find out who bought those Picassos at auction, we might be well on the way to finding out who our victim really was.