Cold War - Jerome Preisler [19]
The human brain’s ability to draw fine distinctions cannot be overstated, especially in the gray realm of morality and ethics. Elata’s mind was particularly supple; it had no great difficulty justifying his actions. First and foremost, there was the need to survive; he had to eat. If he had come quite a distance from the days when he was truly starving—as the Rolex and privately tailored sports coat he wore over his jeans attested—that distance was not so great as to dim the memory.
His second justification was that he was actually an artist. As such, he not only understood what the masters he imitated were doing, he extended it. Copying them had become part of his art, part of the great tradition of master and student that many of them had followed during their own apprenticeship. He learned their style and technique, then addressed himself to subjects as they would have. He did not copy paintings directly. If, when he was finished, others believed that the work on his easel had been done by the master himself, that was irrelevant to him. Elata himself never passed the paintings off as anything other than his own. And as far as he knew, those who sold them did not either.
That this knowledge was a product of willful ignorance made no difference to him morally, even if it might make such baubles as the Rolex possible.
And then there was the final justification, the grand and undebatable one—art itself. For art transcended all. It transcended da Vinci as surely as it transcended Marc Elata. It transcended Picasso, it transcended Elata’s present employer and greatest patron, Gabriel Morgan. It endured and would endure, even if every work in this museum were burned tomorrow.
Elata shuddered and turned abruptly, afraid that he had somehow inadvertently shared his thoughts with the rest of the room. But he had not. The tourists continued to wander through like cows grazing in a field.
He glanced at his watch. Still another three hours to kill.
Elata had not come to Paris to prepare himself for another round of paintings. His job was quite different—Morgan had hired him to detect a forgery rather than produce one.
Elata had done this sort of thing before. He had examined a Giotto supposedly passed down from the Nazis, steering Morgan away because of a tint under one of the eyes—a careless trick in an otherwise competent job. He had stuck to his opinion despite the arguments of two academic authenticators; in the end, Morgan had listened to him and passed on the painting, though not without regret. The painting had subsequently surfaced in an Australian collection, where a fresh and rather destructive laboratory analysis of it had denounced it as a fake—a careless piece of priming gave it away.
From that point on, Morgan insisted on Elata viewing every important piece he bought. Or so Morgan claimed, though Elata suspected that he did not. But the fact that he said so increased the pressure; the forger turned authenticator feared greatly making a mistake. Morgan no doubt considered this as big an incentive as his sizable fees.
Morgan did not rely on psychology or money alone. He made sure his expert was supplied with the proper tools to aid his judgment. In this case, he had arranged for Elata to receive a small piece of paper containing a sketch and swatch of paint. The fact that this piece of paper—a letter by Picasso, exceedingly rare because it contained a description and rough sketch as well as a dab of paint—belonged not to Morgan but to the Musée Picasso was of no consequence to Elata’s conscience, though it necessitated certain physical arrangements, this trip to Paris the primary one.
Elata folded and unfolded his arms, moving through the Louvre gallery. He had hoped looking at the paintings would consume some of his nervous energy, but it was no use. He was due at the Musée Picasso at precisely 2:10; he did not wish to arrive early and inadvertently draw attention to himself, but he had difficulty throttling his energy. He was not