Peeling off the veil of fabric, its fibers smeary with reds, blues, and golds from the painting, he lays it on the table and picks up a putty knife. Starting at the bottom-left corner of the panel, he scrapes upward and across in a series of short, swift strokes, taking care not to dig into the soft poplar wood beneath the paint. A moment’s carelessness, a single gouge, and the panel, for which he paid half a year’s income to a rapacious dealer in Rome, would be ruined, useless except as firewood or a tavern sign. The cost of Dubois’s raw materials—mediocre medieval paintings exhumed from attics and junk shops; blank paper and vellum, sliced from the flyleaves of ancient volumes beneath the noses of dozing librarians; boards pilfered from unguarded old chapels and fortresses—has risen a hundredfold during his career. Luckily, his own prices have increased a thousandfold, at least for showpieces like the one he’s about to create.
With each push of the putty knife, the paint glides another fraction of an inch up the blade, accumulating in thin, rippled ridges like multicolored cake frosting. Back and forth, left and right he works, pausing each time he reaches one side or the other to wipe the knife with a rag. After several hours of rhythmic strokes, he is approaching the base coat of white lead. He soaks another clean piece of linen in turpentine and lays it on the panel, then steps back to stretch. When he straightens up and arches backward, the ache in his back makes him groan. Oh, shit, I’m too old for this, he thinks, then, Good thing I’m getting out. Twisting his torso from side to side, he wrings a satisfying series of cracks from his spine and smiles slightly. Not with a whimper, but some bangs, he thinks. After a few more stretches, he removes the cloth and gently wipes off most of the white-lead primer, taking care not to rub all the way into the gesso, the underlying mixture of animal-hide glue and chalk dust used to fill the grain, smooth imperfections in the wood, and create a rigid, perfect surface on which to paint.
If he works quickly for the next few days, he’ll be finished by the time Fran?ois arrives from Marseilles, bringing Dubois the final piece of the puzzle. Dubois owes Fran?ois for this—owes him both money and sex—but the investment will be well worth it.
Chapter 3
Descartes
“Thank God I stuck my chewing gum on the back of the copy.” Descartes’s proud announcement was not greeted with the outpouring of gratitude he’d expected.
The inspector, Mme. Clergue, and her chief conservator, Henri Devereaux—the museum functionary who’d been fluttering on the edge of Descartes’s vision since one A.M.—were huddled blearily in the museum’s workshop. They’d spent hours poring over the two paintings. They’d used their naked eyes, they’d used magnifying glasses, they’d even used ultraviolet light to search for the telltale fluorescence of modern pigments. They’d found innumerable minor differences—after all, each work was painted by hand—but absolutely nothing to indicate which painting was created in 1467 and which in 2012.
For a painting that was more than five hundred years old, the Botticelli—whichever the hell the Botticelli was—looked damned good, Descartes thought. The inspector had been raised Catholic, so he’d seen enough Madonna-and-child paintings to last him an eternity. This one, though, was different. For one thing, it wasn’t dark or gloomy; beneath a bright blue shawl, Mary wore a reddish-orange dress; the arched window opening that framed the mother and child was also a cheery blue. The Virgin—the mother—looked to be all of fifteen years old, Descartes thought; seventeen, tops. Her face was pale, with delicate, pretty features, large eyes, and a high, intelligent forehead. On her head she wore a sheer lace cap that allowed glimpses of golden hair; above the cap was a disk of gold filigree, so gossamer-fine as to be nearly invisible. Her neck was long, slender, and gracefully arched as she gazed down at the robust boy sprawled across her lap. Her right hand cradled his head; her left hand covered her right breast, and barely visible between the index and middle fingers was a nipple, all but concealed by the design of the dress and the modesty of the mother. Descartes had no children—he no longer even had a wife, not since that bitch Yvonne had dumped him for some German tourist she met in a bar—but somehow this painting evoked in him feelings of paternal protectiveness and tenderness he wished he could attach to a family.
After removing the paintings from the gallery wall, Descartes had kept the director twisting in the wind for hours, refusing to tell her about the telltale wad of chewing gum he stuck behind one corner of the copy’s frame—not until he’d pried the truth, or at least some of it, grudgingly out of her. Three years before, the museum had hired a restoration expert, Jacques Dubois, to clean and restore the Botticelli, she’d finally told the inspector. “People think that paintings get dark over time,” she said. “You’ve probably seen pictures like that—dingy old Rembrandts and Van Dycks that are almost black with age?” He’d nodded, though he couldn’t quite recall if that was actually true. “But it’s not the paint that’s darkened, it’s just the varnish. Strip that off, and a five-hundred-year-old painting is as bright as the day it dried on the easel.” The Botticelli’s varnish had dimmed the painting’s vibrancy, so they’d hired Dubois—one of the best restorers in France, living right here in Avignon—to strip off the old varnish and put on a fresh coat.