The Lost Testament: A Bronson Novel by James Becker

Author:James Becker [Becker, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780451466457
Amazon: 0451466454
Publisher: Signet
Published: 2013-12-03T06:00:00+00:00

57

Bronson and Angela sat side by side and stared at the screen, their coffees forgotten beside them. What they were looking at wasn’t, to be honest, much of a Web site. The home page had a simple title—“Ancient parchment for sale”—and contained a single color photograph of the relic itself. The second page contained slightly more in the way of illustrations, pictures that had clearly been cropped from those taken by Ali Mohammed. Each picture showed just a small section of the text that had been revealed by his sophisticated techniques.

The third page contained no pictures, and simply gave an e-mail address—the same address that Angela had already used in communicating with the hitherto unidentified owner of the parchment—and a name. The mysterious owner was at last revealed to be a man called Anum Husani.

“I don’t understand,” Angela said. “The only thing this tells us that we didn’t know before is his name. I’ve already got copies of all these pictures, so why is he bothering to load them onto a Web site and then suggesting I view them?”

“Let’s take another look at the e-mail.”

Angela called it up again.

“That’s what I thought he might have done,” Bronson said, pointing at the top of the screen. “He didn’t just send this e-mail to you. It looks as if he’s sent it to every museum in America and Western Europe. He created the Web site just to show people what he’s got for sale. He’s obviously trying to generate a kind of auction for the relic. Is that likely to happen?”

Angela shook her head.

“That’s difficult to say, because there are two things he hasn’t mentioned. The first is what the text on the parchment actually says, so perhaps he doesn’t know. I certainly don’t, not fully. I doubt if any museum or collector would stump up much money without a full translation.”

“And the other thing?” Bronson asked.

“In a word, provenance. A lot of museums won’t touch any object if they can’t establish full details of its history, because in the world of antiques and antiquities there are an awful lot of very accomplished counterfeiters. Some of them have managed to fool acknowledged experts in their fields, time and time again, like Tom Keating. He fooled almost everybody. He painted Old Masters, including Gainsborough, Renoir and Degas, as well as Samuel Palmer watercolors, and almost all of them were certified as genuine by art experts of the day.”

“And nobody twigged?”

“No. Or, at least, not for a long time, and they really should have been picked up right from the start, because Keating always left a clue in his forgeries, something so blatant that any competent art examiner should have detected it immediately.”

“What sort of clues?” Bronson asked.

“Oh, he was quite fond of writing a vulgar remark in white lead on the canvas before he started painting. Obviously it would be invisible once the work was finished, but it would show up immediately with an X-ray. Or he would use a type of material in the painting that would simply have been unavailable to the genuine artist.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.