when he regained consciousness.
At last, the couple reached the elevator, and, striding across the lobby, I made my hasty exit. Out on the street, the sunlight seemed blinding, colors supersaturated. My heart was beating hard and fast in my chest, and, to my horror, my hands were trembling. I hurried to West End Avenue and hailed a cab.
All the way downtown, I watched in a daze the city blur by me as the taxi sped through midtown, Chelsea, the Village, and then into Soho. I was dying to know what was inside the briefcase, but after everything that had happened since I had first seen it, I felt an odd kind of superstition that compelled me to keep it closed until I was safely inside my apartment. I say “odd” because I am not by nature a superstitious person. I don’t give a fig about Friday the thirteenth or care if I step under a ladder or on a crack in the sidewalk. But in this case, two people were dead and another had been injured. Already, a certain aura had commenced to encircle this battered briefcase. I found that I was clutching it to my breast, much as Lenz had done as he had hurried down the Empire’s grand stone staircase.
With a sign of relief, I turned the keys in the upper and lower Medeco locks and entered my loft apartment. The high-pitched beeping of the security system ceased when I punched the code into the wall-mounted keypad.
Then, as I always did, I lit the dozen candles I had scattered about the main living space and gazed at my old friends hanging on the walls – paintings by Picasso, Monet, Dufy, Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Delacroix, and Renoir. Many of them I had inherited from my father, but others I had acquired on my own. They were like my children, these pieces of history, these blissful doorways into the true glory of the world, the pinnacle of man’s achievements. With only the soft, diffused illumination drifting through the room, these paintings had the appearance of an intimate gathering of dinner guests who, having long ago shed their mortal coils, had nevertheless left behind a distinct aura of intent.
After a time, I hit the light switch and turned on the stereo. Miles Davis’s exotic Sketches of Spain flooded the room. I poured myself a very large Oban Scotch and took a deep sip as I watched the last of the afternoon’s sunlight burnish the scuffed and scarred leather briefcase. The thing seemed to breathe like a winded animal.
I sat down and without a moment’s further hesitation, opened it up. I pulled out a soft, square package, swaddled in a protected skin of bubble wrap. As I peeled off the layers of plastic, I could see an image emerging.
It was a small painting, unframed and unlovely. No Old Master or Postimpressionist had created this. It was a rather stiff and awkward portrait of a woman of indefinite age. There was no life whatsoever in her face. I picked it up and held it in front of me. I wondered what poor sucker Lenz had targeted to buy this worthless painting – one could hardly call it art. Well, I had done my good deed for the day; that was certain. On the other hand, what was Lenz doing with this at the museum? And, even more puzzling, why was this homely painting the object of so much violence?
I continued to study the portrait. As far as I could see, there was nothing out of the ordinary about it. It was the kind of thing one might see anywhere around the city for a couple of hundred dollars. Sipping on my Scotch, I brought it into my studio where I routinely checked paintings for authenticity. I scraped off a piece of pigment from the lower left-hand corner and checked its date. An hour later- after completing my series of chemical tests – I had determined by the level of lead that, indeed, the painting had been done in the 1940’s. Nothing extraordinary about that. Then why had the man with the El Greco face gone to the trouble of snatching it from Lenz? And why had he, in turn, been murdered by the bull? It made no sense.
I put the painting aside and picked up the phone. I stared at it as I ordered hot and sour soup, an egg roll, and Kung Pao Chicken, extra hot, from my local Chinese take-out. It was getting late, and I hadn’t eaten much of Max’s trout. As I cradled the receiver, I noticed something. The angle of light changed, and I chanced to see a darker area in the corner where I had scraped off the pigment. I peered at it through my overhead lighted magnifier, and sure enough, there was paint underneath. That was typical. Almost all painters coated bare canvas with pigment so their colors would take better. This, however, appeared different. The hue was a deep umber, making it extremely unlikely that any artist would have used it to “cure” his canvas.
Using a combination of chemicals, I carefully stripped off a larger section of the portrait. Now, through the lens of my magnifier, I could see that the texture of the pigment was altogether different from that of the painting on top. I recognized that texture and tone, and my heart skipped a beat.
Miles Davis’s music faded, the walls fell away from the studio, and I was alone, floating in the infinite of history with this square of canvas, wood, and pigment. I felt a mounting frenzy grip me, and I tried to calm myself. But as I worked, I could hear the beating of the painting’s long-buried heart.
When I was halfway done, I knew that I was looking at a genuine Raphael. The color palette of rich muted umbers that abruptly faded to pale gold and pinks as light from an unseen source struck the subject and the beautifully controlled brushwork made the work unmistakable. What I couldn’t figure out was the subject itself. It looked like none of the great master’s paintings, and, believe me, I am familiar with the entire œuvre.
It wasn’t until I had washed away the last of the execrable portrait that I knew what I held in my hands. This was a portrait, delicate, breathtaking, and erotically intimate, of Venus rising from the sea. Ever since my first trip to Venice, I had heard stories, unsubstantiated rumors, that Raphael had painted his own rendition of the birth of the Greek goddess that Botticelli had made famous. That was unsurprising, since Raphael’s powerful fresco of the nymph Galatea was inspired by the same poem by the Florentine Angelo Poliziano that had fired Botticelli’s brush. Though the Raphael Venus was described in a number of texts, no one in the current art world had claimed to have seen it – in fact, some scholars argued it never existed. And so it had slipped into the realm of legend.
But I had seen this painting once before – or, rather, a painting Lenz had claimed to be Raphael’s Venus. By exposing it as a fake, albeit an exceedingly clever one, I had cost Lenz an enormous commission. At first, he’d seemed bitter about that and had at every opportunity tried to smear my reputation. When that had failed, he had lapsed into a kind of stylized chumminess that would have been inappropriate if it hadn’t had about it the heavy stench of irony.
Speaking of ironic, now, somehow Lenz had come into possession of the real Raphael Venus. The legend had come to life. The portrait was just as it had been described in the now not-so-apocryphal texts. This painting was virtually priceless.
No wonder two men were dead. I had been suspicious of Lenz’s death from the first. Now it was easy for me to understand the lengths someone would go to procure such a rare and magnificent painting. This was art on the most exalted level.
Venus, immersed in the early morning sunlight, gazed out at me from her dark eyes, at once enigmatic and laughing. What had she been thinking at the moment of her birth? Using the alchemy of genius, Raphael had infused the goddess with a serenity as vibrant as it was numinous. In this altogether astonishing portrait, he had made certain that one could recognize in the goddess’s face all the stages of life – childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age.
I was rapt by the magic Raphael had wrought. I could not take my eyes off his vision of Venus, even when the downstairs buzzer rang. Reluctant to leave my new friend, I put her away. Then I went back through the apartment to the intercom. My take-out order had arrived, and I buzzed in the delivery boy. I was fumbling through my purse when the doorbell rang.
“Just a minute,” I called as I fished my wallet out and unlocked the door. Two men shouldered their way in. Neither of them was Chinese.
“Hello, Ms.
