“But it was your engraving skills that got you hired to sniff out counterfeit?”
He nodded. “Engraving is the foundation for creating the most lucrative counterfeits. Currency is the most popular, but stock certificates, land deeds, and even postage stamps can all be faked. It’s actually not that hard for me to spot anomalies in engravings.”
The Kestrel Gang he had sought for so long had mastered dozens of types of engraved forgeries, and his hand instinctively trailed to the kestrel clip holding his tie in place. Caroline noticed.
“Any luck tracking them down?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I’ll find them someday. It’s only a matter of time. What’s frustrating is that forgers disappear quickly, but their work slips into circulation and can go years without anyone noticing. In fact, there’s one in this very building. Do you want me to show you?”
Her eyes widened. “Absolutely!”
He’d spotted the Vermeer painting two years ago and was almost certain it was a fake. His footsteps echoed on the marble staircase as he headed down to the room of seventeenth-century European masters. He strode past the old-world paintings of grim-faced Dutch merchants and epic battle scenes to stand before the barefoot peasant girl with a rabbit on her lap. She sat on an overturned barrel in a rustic barnyard so perfectly rendered that he could almost smell the hay and dust.
The painting was enchanting, with the girl’s fingers splayed to clutch the rabbit poised to jump from her lap. An open window in the farmhouse behind the girl showed cooling loaves of bread on the windowsill.
“It’s charming,” Caroline said.
“Yes.”
“I love how it looks like the girl is holding her breath, as though she knows that rabbit is about to make a leap for freedom.”
He smiled, for that was exactly the expression on the girl’s face. “Yes. Sadly, I think it’s a forgery.”
“How can you tell?”
There were only around forty known paintings by Vermeer, so it was hard to establish a pattern. Most of Vermeer’s paintings were of domestic scenes inside well-appointed homes, but not all. Most of his subjects were people of means, but not all. That made this painting atypical on two fronts, but the other details, like the mastery of light and shadow, were classic Vermeer.
“I can’t be certain,” he said. “I notified the museum director of my suspicion and asked to study the back of the canvas, to look for clues of its age and construction, but he denied the request. So there it hangs.”
“What does it matter?” Caroline asked. “It’s a charming addition and just as good as any of the other paintings here.”
He strolled to a real Vermeer several paces away.The Woman in Greenwasn’t particularly interesting, showing a plain-faced woman reading a letter in a lackluster room. But it was real, and that vaulted it far above the girl with the rabbit.
“A painting is more than the arrangement of pigment on canvas,” he said. “A real Vermeer is centuries of history and a chance to step into an earlier time and place. It’s a chance to be in the Dutch master’s studio, look over his shoulder, and glimpse what had him so entranced. Heknewthat woman reading the letter. Who was she? Why did he choose to memorialize her for all time? Does the letter contain good news or bad? A fake will never capture that aura of mystery and authenticity. It’s flawed from the start.”
Caroline glanced back at the girl with the rabbit, skepticismon her face. “I hear what you’re saying, but I disagree. If I could have one of these paintings on the wall of my home, the rabbit wins every time. The woman with the letter is hopelessly dull and frumpy.”
He was torn between laughing and tearing his hair out in frustration. The rabbit painting was a fraud, and he knew it in his bones but couldn’t prove it without the museum’s cooperation. And why would they? The privately owned museum had probably paid a fortune for that fake Vermeer, and the government had no jurisdiction over them.
“Somewhere out there, a con artist is wallowing in ill-gotten riches from that painting.”
“And that bothers you?”
It drove him insane. “I don’t like cheaters. The artist is to be commended for his talent, but why did he have to cheat?”
This was probably the point at which she was going to call him a Puritan and a killjoy. But she surprised him.
“He cheated because he understood the value of Vermeer’s style and knew he could never create one to surpass it. You should pity him.”
And just like that, she forced him to consider the rabbit painting and its artist in a new light. “The rabbit painting has more charm,” he conceded. “But the woman reading the letter has more heft.”
“And you like heft?” she teased.
“I like heft.”
“And I like laughing girls and impish rabbits. Does that make me hopelessly frivolous in your eyes?”
As she spoke, she slid next to the counterfeit painting to look back at him, her countenance alive with laughter and charm. She was breathtaking, and he’d be a fraud if he pretended otherwise. He’d been attracted to women before, but this felt different. Beyond her obvious beauty was a luminous spirit that drew him like a lodestone. She had intelligence andhumor, and he longed for more time to bask in this magnetic attraction.
