Pentimento

Chapter One: A Man Who Copies

The rain had been falling on Brooklyn for three days, and the radiator in Damon Hendry's studio made a sound like someone counting change in another room.

He worked with the window cracked an inch, because the varnish fumes gave him headaches and because he liked the noise of the street. On the easel in front of him sat a small Dutch winter scene, nineteenth century, not good, worth perhaps four thousand dollars on a generous day. A previous owner had hung it above a fireplace for sixty years and let the smoke eat it. Damon had spent eleven hours lifting the grime off in patient little circles, and beneath the brown, an entire sky had come back — a pale, cold, marvelous blue that nobody had looked at since before the First World War.

That was the part of the job he loved. You cleaned away someone else's neglect and found the original intention underneath, still waiting, still perfectly intact.

On the other easel, turned toward the wall, was the other kind of work.

He finished the sky, set down the swab, and turned the second canvas around. It was a study of a girl in a garden, in the manner of a minor Danish painter who had died in 1911 and whose catalogue was famously incomplete. Damon had built it over five weeks: an old stretcher bought from an estate clearance, a genuine period canvas scraped down, ground layers mixed the way they had mixed them, a craquelure coaxed out of the surface with heat and a chilled palette knife. He had aged the tacking margins with tea and dust from his own floorboards.

It was, he thought without vanity, better than most of what the man had actually painted.

His phone buzzed on the windowsill. He knew who it was before he looked.

VICTOR SABEL: Where is it.

VICTOR SABEL: Damon. Where is it.

VICTOR SABEL: You took money in February. It is April.

Damon typed: Friday. It's drying.

The reply came in four seconds. Friday, or I make a phone call I don't want to make. You understand me. I have a list of nine paintings with your fingerprints in the ground layer.

Damon set the phone face down.

Sabel ran a gallery on the third floor of a building in Chelsea that had no sign on the door, and he had been feeding Damon work for six years — small work, unglamorous work, the kind of canvases that end up over the sofas of people who buy art the way they buy furniture. Nobody had been hurt. Damon told himself that often enough that it had worn smooth, like a coin in a pocket. Nobody had been hurt, and Sabel would never actually make his phone call, because the call would end with Sabel in the same room, wearing the same handcuffs.

Still. There were nine of them. And Damon had thirteen hundred dollars in the world and owed his landlord twenty-two hundred.

He washed his brushes, shaped the tips with his lips out of an old habit his instructors had hated, and stood them upright in a jar. Then he went down four flights to the vestibule to check the mail, because the mail was the only lottery he still played.

Among the takeout menus was a cream-colored envelope, heavy stock, his name typed. The return address said BLAINE & FORD, ATTORNEYS AT LAW, and a street in Hartford.

He opened it standing up, next to the row of dented brass mailboxes.

Dear Mr. Hendry,

I write on behalf of my client, Mr. Wallace Cavill, of Cavill Mills. I understand you attended the Rhode Island School of Design and that during your first year you shared rooms with Mr. Cavill's son, Alden. Mr. Cavill is gravely ill and wishes very much to see his son, who has been living in Florence, Italy, and who has not responded to communication from this office since November. I would like to discuss a private matter with you at your earliest convenience. I am authorized to compensate you generously for your time.

Damon read it twice in the vestibule. Then he went up the four flights, sat on the edge of his bed, and read it a third time with the letter shaking very slightly in his hand.

Alden Cavill.

He had not said the name aloud in ten years, but it had never once been out of reach.

They had shared a room for exactly one semester, the fall Damon was nineteen. Damon had arrived with a scholarship, two hundred dollars, and a duffel bag containing everything he owned. Alden had arrived in a car driven by someone else, with a leather trunk, a stereo, and a case of wine he had no intention of opening carefully. He was cheerful, sloppy, generous in an absent-minded way, and completely without malice, which somehow made it worse. He left wet towels on Damon's bed. He lost a hundred-dollar bill in the sofa and forgot about it, and Damon found it three weeks later and could not bring himself to keep it, and Alden had laughed and said, Honestly, keep it, I don't even remember losing it.

He had painted badly and happily. He had never worried, not once, not about anything. Damon had lain awake in that room listening to Alden breathe and had understood, with a clarity that had never faded, that some people are handed the world at birth and never learn that it can be taken away.

Alden had transferred out in January, to a program in Providence, then to somewhere else, then abroad. He had, Damon was certain, forgotten Damon's name before the ice melted that spring.

Damon looked around his studio: the folding table, the hot plate, the mattress on the floor with a good sheet on it because he was not an animal, the beautiful stolen blue sky drying on the easel, the forgery beside it.

He called the number on the letter at nine the next morning.

The voice that answered was dry and unhurried. “Lawrence Blaine.”

“This is Damon Hendry. You wrote to me about Alden Cavill.”

A pause, the sound of a page. “Mr. Hendry. Thank you for being prompt. Can you come to New York — I mean into Manhattan — on Thursday? I'll be at my client's apartment on Sixty-Third Street. Eleven o'clock.”

“Can you tell me what this is about?”

“I can tell you the shape of it,” Blaine said. “My client's son is thirty-three years old and has been in Florence for three years, painting, and spending. He does not answer his father's calls. His father has perhaps four months. I have tried the ordinary routes — letters, wires, a colleague in Rome. Alden has become extremely good at not being found by people who look like lawyers.”

“And I don't look like a lawyer.”

“You look,” Blaine said, “like an old friend passing through Italy who happens to work in the art world and speaks the language. Do you speak the language?”

“Passably. I spent a summer in Bologna copying frescoes.”

“Passably is more than I have.” Another pause. “Mr. Hendry, I'll be direct, because my time is short and my client's is shorter. Five thousand dollars, a round-trip ticket, and expenses. You go to Florence, you find him, you talk to him as a friend and not as an emissary, and you tell him his father is dying and would like to say something to him before he does. Whether he comes home is not your responsibility. Finding him and speaking to him is.”

Damon watched a pigeon settle on the fire escape.

“Why me?” he said. “Really.”

“Because my client hired an investigator, and the investigator produced a list of eleven people who overlapped with Alden between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. Nine of them are unreachable, unwilling, or unsuitable. One of them is dead. You are the eleventh, and you are the only one on the list who did not already know how to be rich.” Blaine's voice did not change at all as he said it. “Forgive me. I've found that people who have money treat other people's money like weather. You strike me as someone who might actually complete an errand.”

Damon found, to his surprise, that he was smiling. “Thursday at eleven,” he said.

He hung up and stood in the middle of the room for a long moment.

Then he turned the girl in the garden back to face the wall, because he did not want her watching him, and he began, very quietly, to plan what he would pack.