Old Masters by James King

Author:James King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cormorant Books
Published: 2014-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

CRIMES

Chapter Sixteen

The flight home is six hours. My patience will not be taxed. I assure myself it is a piece of cake. In-flight movies, a short snooze, reunion with Jacob. This is about as good as it gets.

Two hours in, after the meal service has been completed and I have downed two gin and tonics, I close my eyes and anticipate two or three hours of blissful sleep. Instead, the piercing, anguished eyes of young John Martin appear before me. Other sets of eyes follow, all very similar. Where do I know these people from? Slowly, faces from each of the six portraits in Brown’s exhibition catalogue emerge. The images move as if on an old-fashioned Kodak Carousel, more and more quickly, until they merge into one another.

I struggle to descend deeper into my dream, but then the plane hits an air pocket and I am wide awake, my forehead drenched in sweat. In that horrible moment, an epiphany occurs: the eyes in the six portraits and the eyes in the photograph at the City of Toronto Archive are the same. They are the eyes of John Martin.

The truth has been staring at me all along, and I have been unable to see it. He was the creator of the six canvases.

Now I see what incredible hubris the man possessed. First, he had faked and sold six masterworks. Then, he had the gall to borrow them back from the Japanese collector and the five institutions he had duped. He even assembled colour reproductions of them — and their same pairs of eyes — in a pamphlet.

Yet no one had possessed the astuteness to see it. In part, this must have been because of the magnitude of the duplicity: it was so unimaginable it went undetected. I have the advantage of having uncovered the photograph.

What made him resume his career as a forger in England? How exactly am I going to unmask Gabriel Brown? These are the questions I need to answer. And there are more delicate issues: For instance, what am I going to tell Amelia?

I had begun to form a bond of sympathy, however tenuous, with Brown. I had thought the Krieghoff forgeries youthful misdemeanours, but now I see that they were training for a brilliant criminal career. I detest him. Rather than simply uncovering the truth about his past, I want to expose him. His crimes should be known to the world.

Only a few hours to gather myself before my plane sets down at Heathrow. I will assume a convincing camouflage for Amelia. I will remain the dutiful biographer to her, while privately I assume the role of avenger. This will be my new, unsought part in this astounding scenario.

I have heard tell that many biographers come to despise their subjects because they loathe the close contact with another being more important than they. But I have uncovered a monster, pure and simple. Though I did not create the fiend as Dr. Frankenstein did his, I detest him with the same intensity.

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