Artifice, p.9
Artifice, page 9
She hoped the place would be riddled with fakes.
“Are you reading, girl, or typing?”
Van Meegeren was still on the sofa, eyes closed. But he was noticing everything she did.
“I am creating my terms,” Isa said. And she typed. Slowly.
Van Meegeren got up and poured himself another drink. He’d had another and a third cigarette before she was done, splayed out in his chair in an attitude of amused disdain. Isa pulled the paper off the roll with a zip and handed it to him.
He read aloud, haphazardly. Contemptuously.
“ ‘Model will be paid fifty guilders per two-hour session, payment due each session, yes, yes. Sessions will take place at Keizersgracht 321. Sessions with the model will be chaperoned …’ ”
He looked up at that one, and Isa crossed her arms. She hadn’t grown up in the garret for nothing. He read on, faster. The paper was shaking in his hand, just a little.
“ ‘Model will be fully clothed. Model will approve all clothing. Model will approve all poses. Model will be painted as posed, in the approved pose, and as clothed, in approved clothing, or ownership of the painting will transfer to the model.’ ”
Van Meegeren sighed dramatically. “You really know how to suck the fun out of things. Well. In that case …” He picked up a pen, struck through the fifty guilders, and wrote in twenty-five.
“Fine,” said Isa. She was pleased. Fifty had been ridiculous, and twenty-five still might buy her a sack of coal. “When would you like me to begin?”
“Tomorrow,” he said, waving a hand. “I’ve had enough of you for a day, and I don’t get up early. Come at one.”
Isa nodded. “And where is your housekeeper now?”
“What do you want with her?”
“As a witness. For the signatures. I assumed your wife was not home.”
He laughed again and rang for the housekeeper, whose name was Mrs. Martinelli—from his villa in Italy, Van Meegeren said—a woman who had seen a thing or two and did not blink an eye.
They signed, and Isa watched the shake in the lines as Van Meegeren wrote his name, the telltale tremors in the ink, the manic movements, and the flush on his face. Van Meegeren must be an alcoholic. And a yellow stain began spreading inside her, mottling her cool blues and greens.
She had to learn how to forge a Vermeer.
And the man who could teach her could not even hold a pen straight.
When Van Meegeren’s door shut behind her, Isa buttoned her coat, passed up the tram, and walked home in air that smelled of cold instead of chill, a slow wander over worn brick and cracked stones. She missed her bicycle—confiscated for the rubber—the wind of speed freezing her cheeks and blowing down her hair.
She always had loved a north wind.
And there was no woman with a kerchief on her way home, and nothing underneath her flowerpot. Nothing on her father’s sofa bed but the pillows. She kicked off her shoes, climbed through the wardrobe, and found him on the garret sofa. Asleep. Again. A heap of long limbs and garish clothes.
The flower was still blooming inside her chest.
She went quiet in her stocking feet and stood before the makeshift gallery hanging from the drying slats. Her father’s pretend Vermeer was small, like so many Vermeers, a street scene of a bygone Amsterdam, where the rooflines were the focal points, the sparse, tiny people relegated to the details. It was a lovely piece. Pure and serene. Just like a Vermeer. Isa looked back at her sleeping father.
An artistic mimic, Francina had said. That’s what Theodoor de Smit was. As talented as all the rest of them put together. When Isa was young, watching her father paint, she’d thought of him as the sun, a blaze of color and passion around which the rest of them had circled. It was only now that she was beginning to realize what a distant star she had been in her parents’ universe. Isa leaned in, studying the painting.
If this picture had been genuine, it would have been worth thousands before the war. Tens of thousands. A large Vermeer, an early, religious work, had gone for three hundred thousand to a museum in Rotterdam. So what would it be worth to the Nazis now, with their desire to appear as cultured as the Dutch?
A vast sum, if Van Meegeren’s lifestyle was any indicator. It would have to be, to be worth the risk.
Hers would have to be good enough to be worth the risk.
She wished she had asked Michel Lange what he had seen on the Rembrandt.
Isa touched the paint of the Vermeer De Smit. Dry, without the first hint of the telltale craquelure. And when she pushed in a fingernail at the corner, it made a tiny dent.
Isa went to the storage closet, still a mess from her father’s rummaging, and found a small canvas. And then she hesitated. She didn’t want to use her father’s paints, not while his supplies were so low, and he would have given up art altogether before he touched Francina’s. Francina’s paints were holy.
But this, Isa thought, was a holy cause.
She picked up her mother’s battered, dusty paint box and took it downstairs with the canvas, changed into her spattered overalls, and spent the rest of the day baking.
The first trial blistered the paint. Isa lowered the temperature. The next attempt turned the white pigment the color of rye, toasting the exposed canvas like a piece of bread. It was fiddly, turning the canvas to a clean side, painstaking because she was impatient, interesting because the browned paint cooled and turned white again.
Her next try was more successful. The paint hardened, but it didn’t crack. She did it again, and this time tried creating the cracks, pushing the canvas with her finger while the paint was still warm. Flakes fell to the table like confetti.
Isa baked longer. Shorter. Hotter. Cooler. Wasting her mother’s paint and running up the bill for the gas. Making a mess of the kitchen table. She sat in one chair, propped her feet in another, and examined the cooked rainbow she had made, shrinking on the canvas, chunks entirely missing.
What if the problem was the paint?
Francina’s paints were premixed tubes of pigment and linseed oil. Would they react differently, maybe, with more or less oil? Or if they were hand-mixed, mortar and stone, like a Dutch master would have done? Or perhaps the problem was because the paint was fully wet. Would the paint crack if she had started with a drier surface?
Should she put the Vermeer De Smit in the oven?
Maybe baking wasn’t even the answer.
Or what if nothing was the answer, and she couldn’t alter the Vermeer De Smit at all? What if she couldn’t get the money? What if she’d agreed to let a Nazi stay in her house for nothing?
Truus was going to dump her in a canal. Or Willem would. Or she could be arrested, and no child would be saved, and the gallery would be lost.
Isa looked up at a familiar thumping from far above her head. Her father—awake, apparently—repeatedly throwing a shoe against the floor of the garret, a favorite method for requiring one’s presence. She went down the hall, through the wardrobe, his voice coming to meet her as she climbed the stairs.
“Have you brought food?”
Isa paused, her head just above the level of the paint-dotted floorboards. Theodoor de Smit was bright, upright, and behind his canvas. She could see one stocking foot and one street shoe through the railing.
“What are you waiting for, child?” he yelled. “Didn’t you hear me? Breakfast! How can I be expected to work if I am famished?” His brush moved in tiny, rapid strokes, brows pointed down in concentration.
“Papa,” Isa ventured. “You’ll remember to leave the blackout curtains up, won’t you? In case the bombers come?”
He didn’t answer. He leaned forward, living his paint.
“Papa, you have to remember that if you take down the curtains at night, then someone will call the police.”
That got his attention. The dark eyes flicked upward. “Yes, yes,” he said. “But I need food. And I will need the ultramarine, if you please. Before this afternoon.”
It was already afternoon. It was nearly evening. “Couldn’t you use cobalt, Papa?”
“No! Ultramarine. Pigment, mind you. Not the synthetic.”
Isa blinked. Pure ultramarine had been too expensive for anyone even before the war. Would they test her father’s Vermeer for ultramarine? Cobalt hadn’t existed in Vermeer’s time. Isa felt her brows scrunch. “What are you working on?”
“Nothing,” he snapped.
Nothing. He just needed a paint worth its weight in gold, and she was supposed to wave a wand and get it for him, right along with his breakfast. At dinnertime. When he didn’t even know if there was food downstairs. They could be on the point of starvation, for all her father knew.
He didn’t even know if the tax had been paid.
And she was hot. Ruby-red. Crimson and scarlet.
Isa went back down the stairs, boiled a potato, ate it, and tidied the kitchen. She looped the wire over the latch on the leaded glass, checked the rest of the blackouts, and made sure the table was tight against the back door. Then she positioned the chair beneath her bedroom latch, slid on her robe, and unpinned her hair while her father threw his second shoe—and other things besides.
She sketched while he thumped and complained through the ceiling, calling in the hallway, tromping up and down the stairs. Isa ignored him, drawing purpling twists around an enormous red bloom, a hothouse flower, exotic, poisonous, filling the page. She didn’t notice the cold that reached through the window cracks and along the rug. She started again, this time in shades of sky and sea foam.
If the secret of craquelure could be found, she would find it.
She would be careful. And reckless. And the Nazis would pay. For everything.
And her father would never even notice she’d been gone.
THEODOOR DE SMIT had gone quiet by the early morning, as usual, but Isa slept late, just in case. Enjoying the warmth of her bed so she wouldn’t encounter him. She put on a plain, blue-print dress, loosely pinned her hair. She didn’t know what Van Meegeren would want, and when she looked in the mirror she was grim again, a few pale freckles standing out on her nose.
Did she always look like she was spoiling for a fight?
Or was this the way everyone looked in an ugly world?
Isa slid on her coat, checked the flowerpot, and walked beneath a sky made of granite. Past powder-frozen windowpanes and frosted leaves, taking the long way around, back and forth, over and down, skirting the icy iron rails. Walking in circles to the mansion of Han van Meegeren.
She didn’t see the woman in the kerchief.
She could only hope the woman in the kerchief hadn’t seen her.
Isa was early to her appointment, and Mrs. Martinelli let her know it. She was not allowed to wait in the studio, or even in the office, and now that she was a model, she was no longer living room material. The housekeeper sat her at a table in the kitchen, a shining kitchen, with blue-and-white tiles—in the old style, but brand-new—with a geometric pattern and a glossy glaze. The icebox did not run on ice; it was plugged in, but Isa was sizing up the oven. Big enough for some paintings, she decided, but not for Woman with a Wine Glass.
She probably needed to stop this foolish idea about baking paintings.
“Would you like the coffee?” asked Mrs. Martinelli.
Isa nodded, surprised. The tone had been friendly, even kindly. Maybe Mrs. Martinelli wasn’t used to Van Meegeren’s models being so quiet and good. A rattling cup and saucer was set in front of her. Isa sipped, and then she closed her eyes. It was real coffee, the coffee of three years ago—staying up late to watch the painters in the garret kind of coffee—and miracle upon miracles, there was sugar in it. Isa couldn’t help her sigh. Which seemed to further please Mrs. Martinelli.
Mrs. Martinelli, Isa guessed, wasn’t often complimented.
“This is a beautiful kitchen,” Isa tried. “It must be a pleasure to cook in.”
“Cooking the food is my joy,” she said. “The cooking is … my purpose.”
Her purpose. What an interesting thing to say. Other than being her father’s caretaker and her mother’s amusement, Isa wasn’t sure she’d ever had a purpose.
“Today we have guests,” Mrs. Martinelli went on. “So there is a lot of the cooking.”
Isa was glad to hear it. At least there would be people in the house. She looked up at the ceiling, with its circle of grape-leaf plasterwork. This room had not been made to be a kitchen.
“I suppose Mr. Van Meegeren had this kitchen put in for you? When he moved to Amsterdam?”
“Sì, yes,” she said, stirring something floury in a bowl. “He likes for his things to be … not cheap. The old one, down the stairs, it is …” She shook her head, showing her disapprobation rather than voicing it.
Isa nodded understandingly.
There was another kitchen. Probably in the cellar, like Moshe’s room. A kitchen that could have an oven.
And then something buzzed and lit a little bulb, a bulb in a row of bulbs, the sign above it marked STUDIO. Mrs. Martinelli told her to finish her coffee.
They went up the elegant staircase, and up again to a third-floor room that ran along the back of the house, where windows had been cut along the entire wall, made for capturing the light. It was as if blackouts didn’t exist on the Keizersgracht. The granite light was pale, a bleak wash from a cold sky, gray with blue undertones. Much like Van Meegeren’s face. His beret sat lopsided. He looked a little ill. He glanced up at Isa from behind the canvas he was working on and then at the clock.
“Here, eh? Late, I see. We’ll have to work a little longer.”
“I was here early,” Isa replied. “You called for me late, and our session will end on time, as per the contract. Though I will be happy to be paid for a second session.”
Van Meegeren pouted for exactly five seconds. And then he laughed, shook his head, and seemed to regret it. He left his palette on a stool and went to wash his hands.
“You also remember the other stipulation, about a chaperone being in the house?”
“What was that?” Van Meegeren said, but Isa met Mrs. Martinelli’s gaze and knew they had an understanding. Mrs. Martinelli nodded, tapped a finger beside her eyebrow—a move that meant she had an eye on things—and made her way back to her cooking.
And then Van Meegeren was bustling. Arranging a chair, finding a sketchbook, judging the light. Isa stared at a plaster head sitting on the table. It was a severed head, with upturned eyes and stringy hair and red ribbons trailing from its ravaged neck.
Not Salome, Isa thought. Anything but Salome.
“You can dress in there,” he said, tossing her a bundle of chiffon. “Or here,” he added, “if you’ve decided to stop being so fussy.”
Isa found the little closet he’d pointed to and turned the skeleton key in the lock. She was out in five minutes. It wasn’t the worst of costumes. Better, probably, than she had expected. A long, flowing, classical sort of dress with a high waist and gold braiding that made thin straps to show her shoulders. A little loose, but Isa had brought a packet of pins.
She had, after all, grown up in the garret.
Van Meegeren was with her in a second, walking his circle, stroking his mustache, taking down her hair and adjusting the straps. But this time, it was impersonal.
It was business.
This was art.
“I want your face done,” he said, pointing back to the dressing closet. “Kohl around the eyes, lipstick, probably nothing else. You’ll find what you need.”
“What is the subject matter?” Isa asked, looking at her dress. “The time period?”
“Judith,” he replied, “with the head of Holofernes.”
Isa sighed. Why did artists have to be so fascinated with a woman holding a severed head? Probably because they were mostly men.
Fifteen minutes later, Isa was standing on a chair, her eyes painted, a sword propped against her shoulder, the plaster head held out like she was using it for a lantern. The window was open, to stir both her hair and the head’s. It was freezing. Van Meegeren sat on the floor with his legs crossed, sketching from an upward perspective. Isa used her time to study the studio of a forger.
And she saw nothing unexpected. Vases and urns for props, canvases and easels. A sink full of jars of soaking brushes, and a wooden cabinet with filing drawers for paint. She would look at that as soon as she could, though there was nothing unconventional about the palette he’d left behind on his stool. Cadmium reds and yellows. White and a Van Dyck brown. A blue that was probably cobalt. But the palette, Isa noticed, was new, the freshly varnished wood still visible under the pools of spurted, blending colors. Her father’s palette was a mess, a mix of everything. An old friend.
And then Isa began to fully understand why models got paid. The arm holding the severed head ached. Her back ached, and her legs, from holding her balance on the chair. The sword was digging a hole in her shoulder, her nose starting to run from the chill. She sniffed and tried to distract herself, to study Van Meegeren’s sketch from her vantage point, upside down. The perspective was powerful, though he was leaving out the freckles on her nose—Judith did not have freckles—and her chest, Isa thought, was not quite as represented.
Van Meegeren’s right hand began to shake. He paused, stretched the fingers, and tried again. The ache in Isa’s arm progressed to a pain that turned her chill into a sweat.
“A break,” Van Meegeren announced. Isa lowered the head, gasping.
She got down from the chair while Van Meegeren got up, the manic energy of before completely vanished. He poured himself a drink, downed it in one, and had another. His form of alcoholism, Isa thought, was different from what she’d seen before. Severe, but more functional.
She set the head on the table, watching him try to control his tremor from the corner of her eye. She thought of Van Meegeren’s war. A war of painting and profit, of women and chocolates and silk kimonos. A war with enough alcohol to be an alcoholic, while other people got nothing but the truck. While Holland lost its treasures. While the Netherlands lost its children.
“Your toilet?” Isa asked. The question came out as an accusation.
