The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [122]
Van Meegeren and Rienstra were friends of a sort—Van Meegeren had bought his grand Amsterdam house through Rienstra—but they were not close. Among Rienstra’s many acquaintances was the shady but well-connected art dealer Alois Miedl. A character out of Casablanca, Miedl was the friend of Goering’s who had a Jewish wife. Miedl claimed later that he had secretly supported the resistance throughout the war. In occupied Holland little was black or white, but in the gray area between trading with the Nazis out of necessity on the one hand and collaborating with them out of sheer greed on the other, Miedl occupied a place in the dark gray range of the spectrum. In 1940, as discussed earlier, one of Amsterdam’s most prominent art dealers, Jacques Goudstikker, had fled Holland ahead of the Nazis only to die in an accident at sea. At the end of a tangled and dubious negotiation, Miedl ended up as the owner of the Goudstikker dealership and its hugely valuable collection.
In 1943, Van Meegeren told Rienstra about an extraordinary painting he’d come across, a Vermeer called Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery, and he spun his usual story about how his involvement had to be kept secret. Rienstra brought the painting to Miedl, and Miedl whisked it off to show Goering. The Reich Marshal couldn’t make up his mind. He coveted the painting (and kept it on display at Carin Hall for months) but balked at the $10-million asking price. While Goering procrastinated, Rienstra asked around in the art world about his new partner, Van Meegeren. What had people heard?
Nothing good, as it turned out. Rienstra was “stunned” to hear that Van Meegeren tumbled from one drinking bout to the next, with fits of delirium in between. A painter named Max Rauta passed along rumors that in the twenties Van Meegeren had been mixed up in a scandal to do with Frans Hals forgeries. Rienstra told Van Meegeren he was done with him.
That left Van Meegeren in a fix. If Rienstra had still been in possession of Adultery, Van Meegeren could simply have taken the picture back and looked for another middleman. But with the painting in Goering’s hands, and with millions at stake, Van Meegeren had no choice but to deal with Miedl directly. To get his money he would have to step out of the shadows.
When Goering and Miedl finally hatched a deal for Adultery—Goering traded 137 paintings from his collection for this lone masterpiece—Van Meegeren’s name was on the paperwork. Most forgers are finally caught, one scholar has written, because they fool one person too few. Van Meegeren’s misfortune was that he fooled one person too many.
55
“I PAINTED IT MYSELF!”
Joop Piller had settled on the most fitting quarters imaginable for an investigation squad specializing in looted property. Piller had moved into the sumptuous art dealership at 458 Herengracht, the building that had belonged to Goudstikker and then, after the Jewish dealer fled Holland, to Miedl. Goudstikker’s building had managed to retain its grandeur through the occupation years. The marble staircase was undamaged, as were the carpets and the antique furniture and the satin wall linings. Many of the prize paintings had vanished, but the walls in every room still boasted gilt frames and venerable works of art. The best room, with a bay window overlooking a garden, had served in its day as an office for Jacques Goudstikker and then Alois Miedl. Now Piller took it over.
Piller was on Van Meegeren’s trail in no time. It was almost inevitable: Piller had set to work in premises once run by Miedl; Van Meegeren and Miedl had been in cahoots; Miedl had kept impeccable records. (Piller could