They had finally made a pact: KMDR would hold off for at least three days before airing any footage of her. In return, Claire would agree not to talk to any other reporters—and to allow them to film the painting a new anonymity might allow her to retrieve. Liz's azure eyes—a little too riveting to be real—had gotten even wider as she contemplated the idea that this "exclusive" might catapult her into a larger media market. Their two-person "news crew" broadcast local news twice a day on a station that devoted the rest of its airtime to the Home Shopping Network. She was meant for better things than KMDR, Liz had confided to Claire, while Brad watched her with what seemed to be lust-tinged amusement. Things like her own talk show or anchoring a program like Hard Copy or Inside Edition.
Despite their promise, Claire thought the chances were about fifty-fifty that Liz would give in to temptation and decide that half a scoop was bigger than none. But even if she didn't show up on KMDR's newscast tonight, Claire's new look was already overexposed.
Then she had remembered Lori's complaints five years before, when she had given birth to her son Max. "It defies the laws of physics," Lori had said. "I can push the stroller right through a crowd—and no one looks at me. It's as if I've become invisible. Guys in suits, teenagers, working women—it's like I don't exist for them at all." The funny thing was, now that Claire had a stroller—adding an additional pregnancy had been her own inspiration—she noticed how many women like her crowded the mall. There were dozens of other women piloting their own strollers, often with an extra kid reluctantly being pulled along by the hand. She had never taken notice of all these mommies before, but they must have surely been here.
For the fourth time, Claire ran her eyes over the people who encircled the ice skating rink. There! Was that Dante's dark head?
Something loosened inside her as she realized it was him. Among predominantly milk-pale Portlanders, Dante's olive skin and long dark curls looked even more exotic than they had in New York. As she watched, he craned his neck to scan the faces of the people sitting on the benches on the upper level. Without pausing, his gaze swept past her face.
Claire gripped the handle of the stroller harder. She had to decide now—did she trust him or not? Had he been the one who had followed her through the museum and then broken into her hotel room in New York? Could he somehow be involved in the terrible things that had happened here? Had he really come to Portland to help her? Or was he just looking for another chance to get his hands on a priceless and beautiful object?
Without making a conscious decision, Claire found herself on her feet. Before she could even raise her hand, Dante swiveled his head to look at her. His face suddenly creased into a smile. He gave her a little nod before taking the escalator stairs two at time.
"And how's the little mother?" he asked, bending down to kiss her cheek. His cool lips left behind a humming patch of skin.
"It's a long story." She suddenly realized how hungry she was. Her last full meal had been J. B.'s omelet, some twelve hours before. "Can I tell it to you over a plate of pasta?"
"Certainly. Will there be two or three of us at dinner?"
It took Claire a second before she realized he was referring to the stroller's occupant. "Baby Newborn doesn't really require food. But I know a neighborhood place where they'll let us park the stroller next to the table."
"I kind of like you as a brunette," Dante said as they left the shopping center. He had taken over pushing the stroller and his black satchel was now stashed in the stroller basket on top of Claire's things. "And I think the pregnancy gives you a certain glow." His smile, made raffish by his gold earring and mended tooth, was replaced with a swift, serious sideways glance. "But can I ask about the painting? Is it safe? Do you have it with you?" He cast a glance at the jumble of packages that filled the stroller's basket.
"It's not here. And I think it's safe. At least for now." She felt a prick of doubt. She wished Dante had asked about how she was doing—although it was clear that she was okay—or at least about Charlie.
At 4:00 p.m. on a Monday afternoon, the sponge-painted ocher walls of Raphael's held only empty tables, two waiters and a busboy. While they perused the menus, their waiter brought a bowl of olive oil and a hand-formed loaf of bread. Dante watched with an amused smile as Claire dipped slice after slice in the fragrant oil, alternating bites with bits of her story.
When their food came—Claire had ordered smoked salmon chowder and Dante pasta with sausage and red peppers—she eyed his plate hungrily before picking up her soup spoon. As soon as she lifted it to her mouth, she realized she had made an inspired choice. Each mouthful offered a new flavor: smoky caramelized onions, feathers of fresh dill, tiny new red potatoes, smoky slices of salmon, kernels of fresh sweet corn that popped between her teeth. When Claire finished, it was hard not to pick up the bowl to drink the last drops. Using the last piece of bread, she compromised by wiping the bowl clean.
Dante pushed the remains of his pasta toward her. "Still hungry?"
"Well, if you don't mind . . ." Claire realized she had been making little sounds of delight when she ate. She flushed as she remembered Troy's insinuation that a woman's reaction to food foretold what she would be like in bed.
Luckily, Dante couldn't read her thoughts. "So you think this Avery guy's chauffeur broke into your hotel?"
"I'm not absolutely sure, but yes, I think so. What I don't know is whether Troy knew. And if so, did he put the guy up to it? I mean, why would he want to steal it if he thought it was a fake?"
"Two possibilities. One is that he told you it was a fake so he could buy it from you cheap and then auction it off as his own fantastic find. The other is that it really is a fake, but that he was hoping to pawn it off on someone gullible he knew from Avery's. There's a lot of people who would be willing to pay a fortune to own a secret Vermeer, even if they could never show it to another soul."
"You're forgetting a third possibility. What if the chauffeur got the idea himself? After all, he heard us talking about the painting and he knew exactly where I was staying."
"But where does this Karl guy come into the whole thing? Do you think he kidnapped Charlie?"
"I know he was in our house. No one else has feet that big." Their waiter was busy telling a joke to the busboy, so she risked taking a sip of wine from Dante's glass. She wasn't up to listening to any lectures about endangering the health of her imaginary unborn baby.
"Which probably makes him the one who searched your house."
"But what about Charlie?" Claire pressed her fingertips against her closed eyes. "She's eighty-three years old! She only weighs about ninety pounds. I don't even hug her hard. This guy's so much bigger—he could hurt her without even meaning to." Her fingers pressed harder. Bursts of red and orange light exploded behind her eyelids. She dropped her hands to the table, and Dante reached out and covered one briefly with his own.
"But you didn't see any sign that she'd been hurt, did you? Maybe she's hiding just like you are. She came home, saw what had happened and took off. With her history she probably doesn't trust police too much. And even if this guy Karl did kidnap her, I think he'd keep her safe. He knows she's the one sure way to get to you."
Claire felt a little better. "I'm just afraid he killed her. I couldn't stand it if she were dead."
"I don't mean to be blunt, but if she were dead, wouldn't he have left her body there? After all, he didn't mind attracting a lot of attention when he killed your neighbor."
"So you think Karl's the one who did that?"
"He seems a pretty likely suspect. Or maybe that guy Paul who told you he was a cop." Dante had asked if they should call in the local police, but Claire was too frightened, and he didn't push it. She remembered Paul Roberts's engraved badge and the police light on the dash of his car. What if he really were a cop, bought off by someone who knew about the painting? Claire took a deep breath and explained where she had hidden the painting. Dante's next suggestion was that they retrieve the painting
and fly back to New York, where there were international art experts as well as a police force more experienced in dealing with art crimes.
"There's one thing I don't understand about what happened to my neighbor," Claire said. "To Sonia. If they thought she was me, why weren't they worried about blowing up the painting, too?"
"I'll have to admit I don't understand that either." Dante tilted his head back to drain the last of the wine. His white shirt was open at the neck, and Claire watched the muscles move in the column of his throat. A tuft of wiry hair was just visible at the base. She tried to ignore the wave of heat that ran from her breasts to her belly.
"What do you think we should do next?
Claire liked the way he said "we." It made her feel less alone. "I wish I knew if the painting were real or not. If it were a fake, I might just be tempted to burn it."
Dante set his glass down hard. "Burn it! Why?"
In quick succession, Claire saw Charlie's face, the hotel maid's frightened eyes, Soma's hand raised in greeting. "So much evil is being done to try to get it."
"But if it is real, you can't destroy it. And I think it is very real. Remember those photos I took? I've carried them with me ever since." He reached for his satchel and took out a manila envelope.
Inside were the color photographs he had shown her earlier. He ran the tip of his index finger over the curve of the woman's cheek. "There were dozens of Dutch genre painters, but a woman in a Vermeer painting is something extraordinary. Cool, remote and absolutely beautiful."
"Like a still life. That's what you said when we first met."
"You remember that?" He gave her a surprised look that lengthened into a smile. "And it's more than just a feeling. I told you that a Vermeer matching this description was sold at the famous Dissius auction three hundred years ago. There are stories that it turned up later with a French king's mistress, that a Hapsburg duke lost it at a gaming table. But there's a few more things I'd like to check on." His next question surprised her. "Does your office building have any other tenants besides the state of Oregon?"
"The state doesn't own it. We just rent space there."
"What do the other tenants do?"
"There's a law firm and a temp agency and a building contractor—"
Dante interrupted her list. "Any kind of doctor?"
"There's a clinic on sixteen. They have about five or six doctors, but I'm not sure what they specialize in. I was only up there once when I closed my finger in a filing cabinet and I thought it might be broken. They X-rayed it and said—"
He interrupted her again. "Would that magic card of yours get us in there?"
"The one that really belongs to the security guard? I don't know. It might. Why?"
"I've been thinking about another way we could tell if what you have is a Vermeer. But to do it, I need an X-ray machine."
KPASAMD
Chapter 33For dessert, the waiter brought her a slice of chocolate-peanut butter pie with a single candle flickering in it. She realized she had told Dante it was her birthday when she talked about what had happened that morning. His dark eyes reflecting the flame of the candle, Dante told her to make a wish. There were so many things to wish for. Claire tried to cover all the bases by closing her eyes and wishing simply that everything would turn out all right.
They dawdled over dessert and then several cups of coffee until the waiter simply left them alone, having given up all hope of turning their table. While Dante paid the bill, Claire called her mom from the pay phone to let her know that she was all right, Jean reported that she had hung up on an Oregonian reporter and turned another away at the door. When Jean began to worry about whether Claire would be safe, she finally reassured her that she was going to her own building, which Jean knew was accessible only by card key.
Claire and Dante got to the building's parking lot at 7:30 P.M., just as the last car was leaving, and walked down the parking garage stairs to the basement entrance. After hours, the basement door opened only to card key holders, so it was a good way to test—without witnesses—whether the twice-stolen card still worked. It did. They took the elevator straight from the basement to the thirteenth floor, bypassing the front desk entirely. The pillow was still strapped across Claire's belly and Dante pushed the stroller. She figured that if they were challenged, the props might provide a precious moment or two of confusion.
Their luck held on Claire's floor. Her cubicle was still half- decorated for the birthday party that had never happened. A single jelly-filled donut had even survived Frank's assault on the Winchells box, and Claire ate it while Dante retrieved the painting.
When he climbed down to stand beside her, the bubble-wrapped painting in his hands, she noticed how his breathing had quickened more than could be expected from a climb on and off a desktop.
Dante's fingers hovered over the tape. "Mind if I take another look?" he asked. Claire nodded. Standing so close, she noticed he smelled like cinnamon. He slid the painting out. For a long moment, they both stared at the woman, caught in a moment in time, with her wide eyes and slightly parted lips. In turn, she regarded them without surprise.
"Whoever painted this knew the secret of light, didn't he?" said Dante, breaking the silence. "Look at how the light flows into this room and creates a dozen different shades of every color it touches. Even the shadows are rich with colors."
"Did you notice she doesn't have a shadow? Charlie pointed that out to me."
"She's got a good eye. The best painters make you think you're looking at reality by showing you something completely different."
"Are you one of the best painters? Someday I'd like to see your work."
An expression she couldn't translate crossed Dante's face. "I'm afraid you'd probably be disappointed." He turned away from her and delicately slid the painting back into the bubble wrap.
Claire's stolen key card again worked its magic on the clinic's door. They took a quick walk around the office, which was laid out for maximum efficiency. A central nursing station was surrounded by four exam rooms, each barely big enough for an examining table, a stool, and a countertop with sink. Behind the receptionist's desk were a couple of physician's offices, each with two desks. A third room held the X-ray machine, which was mounted on a movable arm attached to the ceiling. Dante raised and lowered it, a thoughtful expression on his face. Then he went back into the reception area and retrieved his satchel from underneath the stroller.
He began to lay out a series of tools in a neat row on the receptionist's desk. There was a black headpiece with magnifying lenses, a roll of white cotton wrapped in paper, some orange sticks, a sheaf of white heavy paper, a stoppered bottle of red-tinged fluid, and what Claire guessed was a scalpel. "I brought some things with me that might help me figure out what we're looking at."
"You mean whether it's real or not?"
"It may not be that simple. In real life, there are a lot more shades of gray than there are blacks and whites. Say this really is a Vermeer, or at least it began life that way. Any three-hundred-and- fifty-year-old painting will have changed since it left the artist's easel. The question is—how much repainting has to take place before it is no longer a Vermeer?" From the satchel, he took a black case not much bigger than his palm. "So this could be a Vermeer. Or it could be a Vermeer that has been so heavily repainted that it really isn't much of a Vermeer at all anymore. Or it could be a painting by someone else who was painting at the same time as Vermeer. Or it could be an out-and-out forgery painted last week."
Dante opened the carrying case, revealing a small portable light. "In some ways, we have it easy. If this were a possible Rembrandt, it would be even more complicated. Rembrandt ran a painting school, and as part of their training, his students used to copy his paintings, or paint their own works in his style. That means there are literally hundreds of paintings floating around that are the right age, done on the right kind of canvas with the right paints in the right style. They're just not Rembrandts. And to make it
even more complicated, Rembrandt used to make corrections directly on his students' work, showing them how he would do it. So some paintings might be ninety percent student and ten percent Rembrandt. And if a student's painting was really good, Rembrandt might just sign it himself."
"So how can anyone even tell if a painting is a Rembrandt or not?"
"Sometimes even the experts don't know. Still, everyone agrees there are hundreds of real Rembrandts. But there are only thirty- two undisputed Vermeers, with maybe another dozen arguables. Some of those may have something in common with Rembrandt's work. After he died, people forged his signature on paintings that weren't his but might have been. Not only is it a lot easier to fake a signature than a whole painting, it's also a hell of a lot harder to detect."
Claire remembered how closely both Troy and Dante had examined the painting. "But there isn't a signature."
"That's one thing that makes me think this may really be a Vermeer. If you had created a forged Vermeer, you'd want the whole world to realize it."
Dante plugged in his portable lamp and turned off the overhead light. They were left with a single narrow focused beam of light. He propped the painting on a thick copy of Physicians' Desk Reference, and then dropped to his knees and began to inspect it from below, holding the light nearly parallel to the surface.
"What is that?" Claire knew there was no need to whisper, but it seemed natural in the darkness.
"It's called a raking light."
Some parts of the painting stood out in high relief, while others fell in dark shadows. The fine cracks that glazed the painting now appeared as deep canyons. It reminded Claire of photographs of the moon, with their revelations of mountains, ridges and craters. "What are you looking for?"