Faking It Read online

  “And how do you feel about that, Ethan?” Gwen said, exasperated with them both.

  Ethan shrugged. “It’s summer.”

  No, it isn’t, Gwen thought, It’s Nadine.

  “You look tired, Grandma,” Nadine said. “Go to bed. Ethan and I will take care of everything down here.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Gwen said and then someone banged on the street door to the gallery. “Who could that be? It’s after midnight.”

  “Want me to get it?” Ethan said.

  “No.” Gwen went toward the door. “You stay here and clean.”

  When she lifted the shade on the street door, Mason was standing there. “Hey, we’re closed,” she said, opening the door for him.

  “Thought you might be able to spare another drink,” Mason said, a little sheepishly, as he came in.

  “Hello, Mr. Phipps,” Nadine said politely, when they came into the office. “Come on, Ethan, let’s do the gallery.” She picked up the sweeper and went into the gallery, Ethan following her with a trash bag and a pained expression.

  “Cute kids,” Mason said, while Gwen got out the orange juice and vodka.

  “Good kids,” Gwen said, failing to see how anybody could call either Nadine or Ethan cute. She glanced through the glass into the gallery. Nadine was attacking the floors with the sweeper while Ethan gathered up miscellaneous cups and plates, keeping one eye on Nadine’s rear end. Maybe it was time to send Ethan home.

  “I thought maybe,” Mason began and hesitated. “I don’t want to go home to Clea tonight, Gwen,” he blurted finally. “Let me stay with you.”

  “Oh,” Gwen said.

  “I don’t want to rush you,” Mason said, moving closer. “I know you’re tired.”

  Oh, good, I look tired. Gwen stood up. “You’re a very generous man, Mason.”

  “I’m not generous,” Mason said. “I get a lot, too. It’s lonely back at the house.”

  Gwen thought, I know. It’s lonely where I am, too. And sooner or later... “Would you like to see my apartment?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said solemnly. “I would like to very much.”

  “Great,” she said and stood up. “It’s this way.”

  ❖ ❖ ❖

  THE BASEMENT ROOM was big when Tilda turned on the light. Davy saw three walls lined with expensive-looking metal cabinets and the fourth with shelves full of tools and equipment, some of it standard artist’s supplies but a lot of it unfamiliar. The whole place was white, just like everything else in the basement.

  Tilda pulled out a bentwood side chair that had seen better days, and said, “Sit,” and Davy sat, facing the longest wall of cabinets. She opened the first cabinet and pulled out a painting, cornfields under a heavily painted, swirling blue sky.

  “Do you know what this is?” she said.

  “A van Gogh?” Davy said, not caring. “You have great legs.”

  “A Goodnight,” Tilda said. “My great-grandpa painted it. Of course, he signed it van Gogh.”

  Davy squinted at it. “Why didn’t Great-grandpa sell it?”

  “Because it was lousy,” Tilda said and began to open more cabinets, her body moving under the slippery fabric of her dress. Davy watched as she pulled out painting after painting, her body tensing with each canvas until she had dozens of them propped against the walls and lying at her feet, and he wanted her so much he was dizzy with it.

  “All Goodnights,” she said, looking at them. “They’ve been down here for decades, in the family for centuries. Our great secret. We should burn them, but we can’t. They’re history. They’re part of us.”

  “Burn them?” Davy said, not caring. “Why didn’t you sell them?”

  Tilda put her hands on her hips and looked at him sternly, which made him stop thinking about the paintings entirely. “They’re forgeries. That’s illegal.”

  “Really, Scarlet?” Davy said. “Come here and tell me about it.”

  “Okay, because most of them are really bad,” Tilda said, dropping her hands. “And because some of them were intended for future generations. We pass them down.”

  “Why?” Davy said, trying to gauge how much longer he had to talk to her before he could get that dress off.

  “I told you,” Tilda said, “the hardest forgeries to break are the contemporaries, the ones painted during the time the real artist worked. Science can’t touch them. So every generation of Goodnights paints for the next generation.”

  “Because once the artist is dead, nobody can tell,” Davy said, gaining new respect for the Goodnights. “How many of these do you have?” A small part of him was interested from a purely financial point, but most of him was praying she wasn’t going to make him look at all of them. It would take hours and there was very little blood left in his brain.

  “Over two hundred if you include the drawings and prints,” Tilda said. “We have some that go all the way back to Antonio Giordano, who is supposed to be the first of us. We switched to Goodnight when we came to America.”

  “To fit in?”

  “To cover up the fact that we were related to my great-uncle Paolo Giordano,” Tilda said. “He sold a Leonardo off the wall and got caught.”

  “Off the wall,” Davy said, interested in spite of his lack of blood. “He just pointed to it and said—”

  “No,” Tilda said. “He lined up a client and said, ‘I’ll steal the Leonardo for you.’ And he did. And he told the client he was painting a copy for the police to find so that they’d stop looking for it and they’d all be safe.”

  “Who got the copy?” Davy said.

  “The client,” Tilda said. “Well, clients. He told the same story to four different collectors. My great-uncle would never keep a national treasure. Borrow, yes, steal, no. And the clients deserved it because they were stealing a national treasure. Greed.”

  “Classic con,” Davy said. “As long as the mark is crooked, he can’t go to the cops. Come over here and discuss this with me.”

  “And if he’s crooked, he deserved to be taken,” Tilda said. “I know this part. My dad used to drill it into me.” She went over to the last of the cabinets and pulled out another painting.

  “What if they buy it because they like it?” Davy said, wishing she’d come back to him.

  “Then they’re getting what they paid for, aren’t they?” Tilda said, turning the painting so he could see it. It was of a woman with protruding eyes hovering over a well-fed mother and her disturbing-looking baby. “This is our prize, a Durer Saint Anne,” she said. “A Goodnight Durer, of course, but still.”

  “Okay,” Davy said.

  “Antonio painted it in 1553,” Tilda said. “But it wasn’t his usual good work, so the family kept it. For four hundred years. If it was good and we sold this as a Durer, analysis of the paint and canvas would show that it was real. It would go for millions at auction, and nobody would ever catch on.”

  “But it’s bad?” Davy said, tilting his head to look at it. “It looks okay to me. Old.”

  “It’s not bad,” Tilda said, “but it’s not good enough. There are half a dozen paintings down here, any one of which would solve all our problems if we could sell it. But we can’t.”

  “Your morals do you justice,” Davy said. “Give them a vacation and come upstairs with me.”

  “It’s not my morals,” Tilda said. “We can’t afford to get caught. Nobody has ever tied the Goodnights to fraud, if you don’t count Great-uncle Paolo. If a fake turns up, everybody starts looking at everything they’ve ever bought from us. And we can’t afford to give decades of dissatisfied customers their money back.” She put the Durer back. “And I’m not good enough to stonewall them on it. I’m just not the wheeler-dealer my dad was. The guilt...” She shook her head. “I get upset. So this stuff stays down here, and it drives me crazy. I’d burn it all if I could, I really would, but I can’t. My family made these.” She picked up another canvas to put it back. “And a lot of them are good. They’re not good forgeries, b