Painted Ladies

“Is there anyone at this museum with a specialized knowledge of Dutch art, and the art business?”

“Sure.” She looked at Otto’s dad. “That lovely man, with the salt-and-pepper beard. You know, Carl something?”

“Carl Trachtman,” Otto’s dad said. “Probably the leading expert in the world in low-country art.”

Susan nodded at me.

“Do you suppose he’d talk with the big ugly one here?”

“He talks to me,” Otto’s dad said.

I grinned at him.

“Then I’m golden,” I said.

Otto’s dad smiled and took out a cell phone.

“We’re practically in-laws,” he said. “I’ll give him a call.”

“See,” Susan said. “I told you I’d find somebody.”

The two dogs were lying between us, Pearl’s head resting on Otto’s.

“She has a Ph.D. from Harvard,” I said to Otto’s dad.

“Wow!” he said, and punched up a number on his cell phone.

35

The Museum of the Dutch Renaissance was on upper Madison Avenue in Manhattan, several blocks north of the Viand Coffee Shop. The museum was a lovely low building that had once been a church, and Carl Trachtman was the curator.

“Otto is a glorious dog,” Trachtman said when I sat down.

“So is Pearl,” I said.

Trachtman smiled.

“Proud parents,” he said.

“You have a dog?” I said.

“I do,” Trachtman said. “A Piebald dachshund named Vermeer. We call her Vee.”

“She glorious?” I said.

Trachtman smiled.

“Completely,” he said.

“Many dogs are,” I said.

Trachtman went around behind his ornate antique desk, doubtless of low-country origin, and sat down and smiled.

“Now that we’ve exchanged bona fides,” Trachtman said, “let me say that I’m very familiar with this case. I’ve followed it with great interest. My great hope is that it wasn’t Lady with a Finch that exploded.”

“Wasn’t enough left to test,” I said. “But for what it’s worth, I don’t think it was destroyed.”

“Its life has been so hazardous,” Trachtman said, “for the nearly four hundred years since Hermenszoon painted it.”

He looked at my card.

“You’re a private detective,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“What is your interest in the case?”

“I was Dr. Prince’s bodyguard when he got killed,” I said.

Trachtman nodded slowly. He was a smallish overweight man with a Vandyke beard and receding gray hair.

“And you wish to get what? Revenge?”

“You might call it that,” I said. “I cannot let people murder somebody I was hired to protect.”

Trachtman nodded.

“So it would be, perhaps, more about you than poor Dr. Prince,” he said.

“Probably,” I said. “But whatever it is, I’m on it, and I’m not going to let go of it.”

“Determination is not a bad thing,” Trachtman said. “Properly applied. How would you like me to help you.”

“Tell me about the painting, tell me about Prince; you may correctly assume that I know nothing.”

“I suspect you know more than you pretend to,” Trachtman said.

“Hard to know less,” I said.

“Where shall I begin,” Trachtman said. “Background on seventeenth-century low-country realism? What makes this painting so special? What makes Hermenszoon so special?”

“Probably a paragraph of that stuff, so I can sound smart talking about the case,” I said. “But mostly I’m interested in the history of the painting and whatever you may know about Ashton Prince.”

Trachtman leaned back a little in his chair, as if he was about to enjoy a good meal.

“Frans Hermenszoon,” he said, “had he lived, would have been as widely known today as Rembrandt or Vermeer, with whom he was contemporary. He was in many ways an exemplar of the best of everything in seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Use of light, and meticulous realism, and an understated commentary on human, by which he would have meant Dutch, existence. Lady with a Finch, for instance, in its stillness and beauty and meticulous realism, seems permanent. Yet, of course, we know that the bird will fly off any moment. So with human life, Hermenszoon seems to suggest.”

“He died young?” I asked, just to avoid passivity.

“Not yet thirty,” Trachtman said. “Stabbed through the eye, apparently in a drunken brawl.”

“Like Christopher Marlowe,” I said.

“My, my,” Trachtman said. “You do know more than you let on.”

“I live alone,” I said. “I read a lot.”

“No wife?” Trachtman said.

“No,” I said. “Though I have kept intimate company with the girl of my dreams for most of my adult life.”

“But not married?”

“No.”

“Why?” Trachtman said.

“I don’t know.”

“It is good to have someone,” Trachtman said. “I’m glad you do.”

“How many paintings are there by Hermenszoon?” I said.

“In his lifetime there were perhaps eight. To the best of our knowledge, only Lady with a Finch survives.”

“How do you know there used to be eight?”

“Transaction records, diaries, letters,” Trachtman said. “Usual sources.”

“So being the one and only makes it even more valuable than it otherwise might be?”

“The painting is a great work of art,” Trachtman said. “It’s priceless.”

“And its pricelessness is enhanced by its singularity,” I said.

Trachtman smiled.

“Well put,” he said.

“Is there a history?”