Chapter 15 #2
"The craquelure forms because the oil medium contracts as it polymerises.
If I paint with high oil content and subject the finished painting to rapid thermal cycling---heat and cold, repeated---the paint film will crack naturally.
Real cracks. The stress fractures propagate through the paint film the way they would over decades, except accelerated. "
"The crack depth?"
"Controlled by the number of cycles. More cycles, deeper cracks. The depth will be irregular---natural variation, forty to sixty microns. Organic."
I am drawing on the notepad as I talk---a diagram of a paint film, pigment particles suspended in oil, stress lines propagating.
My hand moves fast. It looks like a geological fault line.
I am engineering an earthquake in miniature, a controlled catastrophe that will age a painting by a century in a week.
Kazimir studies the diagram. His hand has found the back of my neck---unconscious, automatic, the gesture that has become his resting position when we are in proximity, the point that his body defaults to the way mine defaults to a loaded brush.
His thumb traces the edge of my hairline. I lean into it. I do not stop drawing.
"The thermal cycling," he says. "The equipment?"
"A modified kiln. Small, programmable, with precise temperature control.
I'll need to build a cradle to hold the canvas flat during the cycling, and the temperature differential needs to be significant---room temperature to seventy degrees Celsius and back, in twelve-hour intervals.
The paint film will start cracking within the first cycle.
By the fifth, the craquelure will be indistinguishable from natural aging. "
"How long?"
"Five days for the Modigliani. A week for the Soutine, because the impasto is thicker and the stress needs more time to propagate."
He is quiet. His thumb has stopped moving on my neck. His hand is still, the fingers resting against my skin with a pressure that has shifted from idle comfort to focused attention.
"We do not have a week," he says.
His phone is in his hand. I didn't see him take it out.
The screen shows a message---short, in Russian, the Cyrillic characters sharp and small.
His face as he reads it is the face from the restaurant, the face from the Sorokin phone call: the subtle contraction of a man receiving information he does not want.
"What is it?"
He sets the phone on the worktable. Screen up. I cannot read Russian, but I can read his face, and his face is telling me that the load has just shifted---the weight pressed down harder than the walls were designed to bear.
"The Consortium is sending an auditor," he says. His voice is level. "Sergei Morozov. Their chief authenticator. He verifies all replacements before they enter the pipeline. He was not scheduled for three weeks."
"And now?"
"Forty-eight hours."
Forty-eight hours. Two days. The Modigliani is finished but unaged. The Soutine is wet on the easel. The Rothko---the one that started all of this---has not been touched.
I do the maths. Thermal cycling: five days minimum. Finishing the Soutine: two days. The Rothko: a week of work. Total time needed: two weeks. Time available: forty-eight hours.
The maths does not work.
"Why the acceleration?" I ask.
"Sorokin has heard rumours. Someone in the pipeline has been asking questions about the flagged works.
" Kazimir reads the message again. "Morozov is not a bureaucrat.
He is a forensic specialist. If the works show any evidence of accelerated aging or modern materials, he will report it. And the Consortium will act."
Act. A word that contains thirty-one names and a steel table.
I look at the Soutine on the easel. The wet reds. The church-lead whites. The paint that is hours old and needs to look a century dead in two days.
I look at Kazimir. His hand is still on my neck.
His thumb has resumed its slow, unconscious circuit of my hairline.
He is looking at the phone and his face is the mask, but the hand on my neck is not the mask, and the hand is saying what the face will not: I brought you into this, and the walls are closing, and I do not have a plan for what happens when they meet.
"We can't do three," I say. My voice is steady. The steadiness surprises me. "Forty-eight hours. One painting, finished and aged. Maybe two, if I don't sleep. Three is impossible."
"Morozov will expect three."
"Then we give him one and a reason to believe the other two are coming.
" I pick up the notepad. The craquelure diagram stares back at me---the fault lines, the stress fractures, the controlled catastrophe.
"The Modigliani is finished. I age it overnight with an accelerated cycle---higher temperature differential, shorter intervals, riskier but faster.
The Soutine, I push through wet. It won't be aged but it can be presented as in-progress. The Rothko---"
I stop. The Rothko. The painting that started everything. The forgery I made in a Shoreditch squat for a buyer in Monaco who was Kazimir's agent. The painting that brought me here.
"The Rothko I already painted," I say. "The Monaco commission. You still have it."
His eyes meet mine. The grey is sharp. Calculating. "The Monaco commission was painted with modern materials. It will not pass the scanner."
"It doesn't need to pass the scanner. It needs to pass Morozov's eyes for forty-eight hours.
He's an authenticator, not a spectrometer.
If I rework the surface with the church-lead white and the period pigments---a glaze, not a repaint---it changes the chemistry of the top layer without touching the substrate.
The scan happens in March. Morozov happens in two days.
We only need to fool the man, not the machine. "
The studio is quiet. The Soutine watches from the easel. The worktable is covered in notes and diagrams and the mineral dust of a hundred hours of work.
Kazimir's hand tightens on my neck. The pressure is brief---a pulse, a held note.
"Do it," he says.
I pick up a brush. The bristles are stiff with dried paint. I dip them in turpentine and work the fibres soft, and the familiar ritual steadies my hands, borrowed from a confidence I have decided to perform until the performance becomes real.
Forty-eight hours. One night to age a Modigliani. One day to finish a Soutine. One evening to resurface a Rothko with church lead and period pigments and the stolen chemistry of the dead.
The brush is ready. The north light falls. Kazimir stands behind me, his hand on my neck.
Forty-eight hours. I've worked with worse odds.