Faking It d-2 Read online

  Tilda snorted. “You can’t even trust the artist. They used to take paintings to Picasso for verification, and if he’d painted them and he didn’t like them, he’d deny them. But if somebody else had painted them and he liked them-”

  “He’d claim them,” Davy said. “That makes sense.”

  “Only if you’re dishonest,” Tilda said virtuously.

  “But there are other ways of telling? Science? Chemical analysis?”

  “For some things,” Tilda said, growing more cautious. “Good forgers scrape down old canvases and grind and mix their own paints. You can still get them on trace elements, so if people take their time and get the results back before they buy, they can walk away. But if they’ve already bought it, even if the evidence comes back-”

  “They don’t want to hear it,” Davy said.

  “Right.” Tilda frowned at him. “You know about this?”

  “People don’t like to be made fools of,” Davy said.

  “So they’d rather keep believing the con than go after the guy who swindled them.”

  Tilda shrugged. “I can’t feel sorry for them. If they really fell in love with the painting, what difference does it make if it’s real or a fake or a forgery? And if they didn’t like it, they shouldn’t have bought it.”

  “So they deserve to be swindled,” Davy said. “I’ve heard this before.”

  “No.” Tilda jerked her head up. “Nobody deserves to be swindled.”

  “You said a fake or a forgery,” Davy said. “I thought they were the same thing.”

  Tilda looked at him, trying to think how she could get rid of him. “A forgery is corrupt from the beginning,” she told him. “A fake is something that began honest and then somebody corrupted it to make it look like something else. And now, I really have to go.”

  “You know a lot about this.” Davy’s smile was open and honest. Clearly a forgery.

  “Family business. Nobody knows how the crooks work better than the legit people in the same business. Look, I have work to do.”

  “So what’s the best art con?” Davy said, keeping his seat against the door. “What’s the surefire fake?”

  Tilda frowned at him. “You planning on going into art fraud?”

  “The fake that can’t be caught,” Davy said. “Tell me and I’ll let you out.”

  “It’s not a fake,” Tilda said. “It’s a forgery. A contemporary forgery.” When Davy shook his head, she added, “A forgery painted at the same time the real painter was painting.”

  “What if you didn’t have an ancestor who forged and left you his work? What’s the next best thing?”

  Tilda sighed. “There was one guy, Brigido Lara. He forged an entire civilization.”

  Davy grinned. “My kind of guy.”

  “Yes,” Tilda said. “He was exactly like you. He had no morals and no fear.”

  “What’d he do?”

  Tilda hesitated, and he folded his arms.

  She sighed again, trying to shame him into letting her go. “Okay, when pre-Columbian pottery got hot in the eighties, he made beautiful ceramics and then spread the word that they were from a newly discovered tribe, and he was the greatest living expert.”

  “I’m impressed,” Davy said. “How’d they ever catch him?”

  “They didn’t,” Tilda said. “He finally came clean.”

  “And even then, a lot of people didn’t believe him,” Davy said.

  “It was really beautiful pottery,” Tilda said. “Lara became an expert on pre-Columbian fakes, if you can believe it. The old ‘set a thief to catch a thief bit.”

  “Hard to believe,” Davy said, not meeting her eyes.

  “My dad had a Lara piece for a while until somebody talked him into selling it.”

  “But he told them it was a forgery,” Davy said.

  “Of course,” Tilda said, tensing again.

  “So, Matilda,” Davy said, watching her closely. “Are we stealing back a fake or a forgery?” Tilda froze, and Davy shook his head. “Look, babe, it has to be one or the other. There’s no other reason for you to be so desperate to get it back.”

  “The Scarlets are real,” Tilda said. “What are you stealing?”

  “We’re not talking about me,” Davy said.

  “We are now,” Tilda said. “Unless you’d like to agree that neither one of us really needs to know what the other one is up to.”

  “Maybe we’ll talk later.” He leaned forward to get up as Steve scrambled out of his lap to follow Tilda.

  “Maybe we won’t,” Tilda said. “For us there is no later. You’re out of here once we get back. Have a nice time in Australia.”

  Then she opened the door, hitting him in the back with no guilt whatsoever.

  DAVY WATCHED Tilda unlock the basement door, Steve on her heels, and then pull it shut behind them, neatly cutting him off from following her. A locked basement. Clearly the Goodnights had secrets. He tried to think if there was any way that could help him and decided that whatever was down there was Tilda’s problem, not his, and that was the way it should stay. A better plan was to go eat. The way his luck was going he’d be in jail by midnight, so he might as well take advantage of German Village ’s good restaurants.

  At seven-thirty, he went back to the apartment, keeping the door ajar so he could hear Tilda when she came to get him. He turned on his cell phone and called Simon again, but there was still no answer, so Davy left a message that he needed fifteen hundred dollars FedExed to Gwen, sparing a moment to wonder where Simon was. Somewhere brunette, undoubtedly. Then since it was Friday, he dutifully punched in his sister’s number, and his niece answered on the second ring. “Hey, Dill, it’s me,” Davy said.

  “Excellent,” Dillie said. “I need some advice from a guy.”

  “Right,” Davy said. “I reserve the right to bail from this conversation at any time.”

  “Don’t be wimpy,” Dillie said. “Jamie Barclay quit the softball team. She says boys don’t like girls who compete with them. Mom says that’s garbage. But she would say that. I mean, you know Mom. But Jamie’s mom says it’s true. And she’s been married to a lot of guys. So I need to know. Is it true? And don’t give me any of that after-school-special stuff.”

  “Well, yes and no,” Davy said, following with some difficulty. “Some guys don’t. That’s not the point. You like softball, right?”

  “Yes,” Dillie said. “But-”

  “Well, what kind of loser guy would make you give up something you liked so he could feel better?”

  “Yeah, I know,” Dillie said. “That sounds good, but-”

  “Got your eye on a seventh-grader, too?”

  “No,” Dillie said. “He’s in my grade. His name’s Jordan.”

  “And he doesn’t want you to play?”

  “I didn’t ask. He doesn’t know I like him. He doesn’t know I exist.”

  “Okay, I’ve got it.” Davy thought for a moment. “I think you have to look at the big picture here, Dill. This guy, whoever he is, is a practice swing.”

  “Huh?”

  “Very few people mate for life with the people they fall for at twelve. Doesn’t mean it isn’t real, doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, but basically, we’re talking a practice swing in the big game of love.”

  Dillie groaned.

  “So he’s temporary. But softball is permanent. You can play softball forever if you want to. Softball is not a practice swing. The things you love are never practice swings.”

  “Okay, yeah, that’s good,” Dillie said, sounding overly patient, “but I like Jordan. You know?”

  “Right.” Davy looked at the ceiling and sighed. “I’m going to explain something to you, so listen carefully. And don’t ever tell your mom I told you. Or God knows, your dad. They’d never let me near you again.”

  “Okay,” Dillie said. “Cool.”

  “You can get anything you want from people if you approach them the right way. But you have