Gods and Pawns (Company) Read online

  And the fellow passenger, instead of shrinking away and ringing for a Public Health Monitor, would actually nod in agreement and might even venture to reply something like: “Really amazing!”

  Even the transport’s assigned Public Health Monitor, watching them narrowly, would silently agree: this was really amazing.

  The world’s moneyed elite had much more to say about it, of course, because they knew more big words.

  “How much?” Catchpenny barked into his communicator.

  “They’ll be auctioned,” replied Eeling. “But it’ll run into the billions, I can tell you that right now. You’ve got until autumn to raise the money.”

  “This autumn? I thought there’d be lawsuits! Don’t tell me the Bohemians have settled ownership that fast.”

  “Actually, they have. There was documentation with them. The whole collection was taken from some old family by Goering’s art people. Just stolen; no money changed hands. There’s a living descendant with proof. All the Bohemians are doing is fining her for back inheritance taxes.”

  “But what about verification? They might be more, what was the man’s name? Van Meegerens? Forgeries.”

  “They’re in the labs. Five have already been pronounced authentic. X-rays, all the chemical tests. The rest are expected to pass, too. Seventy canvases, Catchpenny!”

  Catchpenny caught his breath. “There isn’t that much money in the world.” But he felt gleeful, lightheaded.

  “I’ve already made your bid for the print rights. Sell your house.”

  “Yes!” Catchpenny ordered up a list of Realtors’ commcodes and eye-circled three of them. “Find out who else is bidding, and make the usual arrangements.”

  “That will run into money, too,” said Eeling cautiously, after a momentary pause during which she had ordered up a private list of commcodes for certain persons who did necessary, if unsavory, things at a price.

  “Doesn’t matter!”

  “Agreed.” Eeling signed out. The less discussion now, the better.

  One week later, Hearst News Services featured a ten-second newsdab mentioning that exclusive print rights for the new Vermeers had gone to a prestigious gallery in London, but did not mention the name.

  The Kitchen, 1665

  “It’s wonderful,” said Mevrouw Van Drouten. “But I can only give you a hundred guilders for it.”

  “But it’s worth more than that!” Catharina cried. “Look at all the detail!” She tilted The Lens Grinder forward. “You know how long it took to set up that scene? We had to borrow all the lens-grinding tools. My poor brother had to be dressed and made to sit still, which is miserably hard, let me tell you. And it’s a big canvas!”

  “My dear, I know. I think it’s worth a couple of hundred at least, but what can I do?” Mevrouw Van Drouten opened her wide blue eyes in a frank stare. “It’s not my money. The Doctor gives me a hundred and tells me to bring home a painting. It’s not my fault he’s a wretched old miser. At least he buys from you, eh? Cash instead of trade to the grocer.”

  Catharina, knowing she was defeated, pursed her lips and set The Lens Grinder on a piece of sacking, preparing to wrap it for transport. A dismal screaming erupted from the next room, and a tempest burst in at knee level: fat Beatrix running from little Jan, clutching a mug of soapy water that slopped as she fled.

  “I want bubbles,” little Jan was roaring. Now in close pursuit came Maria, burdened by the infant she lugged in its long gown, too late to prevent Jan from slipping in the spill and falling flat. His roaring went up in volume.

  “Oh, look what you did—” she wailed, and her eyes widened in horror as she saw the adults. “Mama’s working,” she told the little ones, grabbing Jan by the back of his skirts with one fist and bending double as she strained to haul him backward out of the room. Catharina turned a basilisk stare on Beatrix, who gulped and exited swiftly. Maria paused in her dragging to smile frantically at Van Drouten.

  “How nice to see you again, Mevrouw,” she panted. “Wasn’t that a nice picture Daddy did this time? I knew you’d like it, and we really need the money—”

  “Jannekin, get up this instant,” said Catharina, and the little boy left off yelling and scrambled out of the room on hands and knees.

  “I must be going, please excuse me,” said Maria in an attempt at adult gentility, and curtsied, nearly dropping the baby. “I’m sorry, Mama, but he wanted to drink the bubble stuff and—”

  “Not now,” said Catharina.

  “Yes, Mama. God go with you, Mevrouw Van Drouten.”

  Mevrouw Van Drouten bit her lip.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said to Catharina. “I’ll give you a hundred and fifty for it, if you’ll throw in this little one for fifty.” She held up a head-and-shoulders portrait of Maria. Catharina glanced at it.

  “Done,” she said at once. It had been nothing more than a test shot on a cloudy day, to see if there was enough light for a serious portrait. Maria had obligingly donned the yellow bodice and posed with a loaf of bread, offering it out to the viewer with an eager expression on her little pale face. There hadn’t been enough light, so the shot hadn’t really worked, but Jan had gone ahead and wasted paint and time on it anyway: ghost child smiling hopefully in a dark room. Catharina took the little canvas and tossed it down on the larger one, nesting it behind the wooden stretchers, and tied the sacking over them with string knotted tight.

  “And here,” Van Drouten said, remembering the paper parcel and drawing it forth from her basket. “Here’s a dozen almond biscuits, enough for two each, eh? So they don’t fight over them.”

  “You must have had children of your own,” said Catharina.

  “Hundreds,” said Van Drouten absently. “I’d like to buy more of the pictures, you know. I love them. If the Doctor gave me a bigger budget, I’d take everything Jan cranked out.”

  “He’s an old fool, your Doctor,” Catharina said. Mevrouw Van Drouten shrugged.

  “Maybe, but he knows what he likes, and he has money,” she replied.

  “And that’s what counts,” said Catharina, smiling as Van Drouten opened her purse.

  In the studio upstairs, Jan paced and wondered if Catharina was presenting his complaints as he’d asked her to do.

  For the first year or so, he’d enjoyed the work: the endless experiments with lighting, the race to capture the evanescent gray images in color by painting directly over them, the thrill of seeing perspective effortlessly perfect on canvas after canvas. Canvas after canvas after canvas…

  But the novelty wore off, especially with the limit in his choice of subjects. All Mevrouw Van Drouten’s client wanted to see was the same subject, repeated in endless variation: a calm woman standing under a window, doing something industrious. Sometimes even that subject failed to please. The painting of Catharina’s sister pouring milk in the kitchen, what had been wrong with that? But Van Drouten had shaken her head regretfully, said it was fine but declined to buy. Likewise the painting of Maria with the lute. And why did everything have to be in tones of ultra-marine blue and yellow?

  Though Van Drouten had explained about that: it seemed her client, the mysterious Doctor, had a lot of his furniture upholstered in blue and yellow, and so he wanted paintings hanging in his rooms to match. Jan hadn’t mixed a good warm red in years now. It was all he could do to sneak a few terracotta jugs into a background.

  He got occasional relief when the Doctor decided to order what Mevrouw Van Drouten referred to as a scientific picture, which involved a man under a window with the trappings of a particular field of study. Even though it meant coaxing Willem into costume and persuading him to sit still, and then rushing to catch the shot before he broke the tools in his hands, at least it was different. Even so, Jan could not for the life of him understand why Mevrouw Van Drouten had passed on the Surveyor, or the Astronomer. But she had; again, that regretful head shake, and the inexplicable remark that some paintings had to make it into the history books.

&
nbsp; He bit his nails, now, looking at his half-finished work ranged around the room. There were the two studies of Girl Wearing a Turban, the lighting dummy he’d set up with Maria in costume and the real painting, for which he’d used pretty Isabella from next door. Catharina wearing the blue bodice and slicing bread: Catharina wearing the yellow bodice and picking out tunes on the virginal. Catharina waving angrily at a moth, in the tatty jacket with its once-elegant fur…

  He heard the relentlessly pleasant voice flowing out into the street, bidding Catharina good day at last, and he stepped swiftly to the door of his studio. He listened for the slam of the front door before emerging onto the landing, and as Catharina mounted toward him he demanded: “Well? What did she say?”

  Catharina looked him in the eye, and he looked away.

  “You didn’t tell her,” he muttered.

  “No, I didn’t tell her! For the love of God, Jan, what am I supposed to do?” she cried. “Do you want to eat? Do you want your children to eat? It’s the only money we’ve got coming in, and you want to lose even that much because you’re bored? Lord Jesus!”

  “It isn’t that it’s boring,” he shouted back. “My art’s been killed, do you understand at all? She gave me an eye that could see like God and then shut me up in a room where there was nothing, almost nothing to look at, so the gift is useless! It’s wrecked my soul!”

  “Then go dig ditches for a living,” Catharina told him. “Better still, send me out to dig ditches, eh? With the girls? And you can paint whatever your heart desires, then. Get your womenfolk earning your bread and waiting on you hand and foot, just so long as your painting goes well. Who needs a rich patron? Not us.”

  She said it wearily, almost without bitterness nowadays, and turned away and went back down the stairs.

  “It isn’t art,” he shouted after her.

  “I know that,” she replied. “But it’s money.”

  He drew breath to shout a retort, and went into a coughing fit instead. That was another problem with the damned picture business; the fumes from the magic developing fluid were eating into his lungs. He retreated into his studio and collapsed into one of the lion-headed chairs, staring at the camera obscura with loathing.

  But he could never really manage to loathe the canvases, dull as they were. Within the hour he was on his feet again, back at the easel, clouding the lead-tin yellow with white and making the fall of sunlight ever more softly luminous, ever more subtly the light of Eden before sin arose in the garden to ruin everything…and pale Maria, backlit by yesterday’s sun, stood in yesterday’s room and offered for inspection the white apple, her young face solemn. The long pared curl of peel at her foot suggested the Old Serpent, trampled and crushed at last perhaps, the secret allegory doubled upon itself, sin and redemption in one…

  The sigh of the brush became the only sound, drowned out bells that marked the passing hours. He didn’t need food. He didn’t need drink. All he really needed was this room, wasn’t that so?

  And the light.

  “Calvin Sharpey for Hearst News Services!” cried that celebrity, striking a pose for the kameramen. He flashed the brightest of smiles, waved his microphone (it was a dummy, ceremonial and functionless as a scepter, studded with rhinestones; kameramen had been picking up both image and audio for generations now) at the woman beside him, and went on: “Look! Hearst ’sclusive interview! This is the lady who owns the old paintings! Auction today! Liz Van Drouten, what do you think?”

  “Well, I hope that some of them will go to museums here in Euro—”

  “Hearst News Services making a bid for holomuseum rights!” Calvin announced. “Hoping to bring the art of Jim Vermeer to you, the public!”

  “Jan Vermeer,” said the woman, quietly, but the kameramen Heard her.

  “So! Wasn’t it really amazing about your ancestors having all these in some castle or something? And nobody knew? It sure was different back then!”

  “Yes, it was,” Van Drouten agreed.

  “Think maybe Jim was a friend of your family? Maybe hiding from Hitler?”

  “No,” Van Drouten explained, “You’re getting your history mixed up, my dear. Jan Vermeer and Hitler lived two centuries apart.”

  “Wow! That is so much old stuff!” Calvin winked knowingly at the kameramen. He sang a snatch of that week’s popular tune: “Can’t get it into my pooor little heaaad! Pretty but dumb, folks, what can I tell you? Here’s another look at the paintings on auction today!”

  The kameramen relaxed, turning away as the prerecorded montage of paintings ran. Calvin Sharpey dropped his flashy smile and shouted for a glass of water, ignoring Van Drouten, who remained on her mark. She merely adjusted the drape of the gray gown that had been cut to make her look as dull as possible, a nonentity the audience would forget thirty seconds after her interview had ended, especially when contrasted with Calvin Sharpey’s rhinestones.

  Now the montage was ending, to judge from the way the kameramen stiffened and swung their blank avid faces back to center stage. Immediately on again, Calvin Sharpey grabbed the pasteboard sheet his PA handed him. He held it up—it was a color print of the Girl with Pearl Earring, with the face cut away to an oval hole—and thrust his face through, mugging as the kameramen focused on him again.

  “Welcome baa—aack!” he said. “It’s Calvin Sharpey! Weren’t those paintings really something?”

  In a high, dark, and distant room, someone stopped pacing and regarded the floating image of Calvin Sharpey’s magnified smirk.

  “Fire that dumb son of a bitch,” said a cold soft voice.

  “Right away, Mr. Hearst,” said somebody else, running to a communications console, and, five minutes later on the other side of the globe, Van Drouten watched with interest as Calvin Sharpey was hustled off between two men in gray suits, protesting loudly, but the kameramen had done with him, and with her, too; they were turning away, closing like glassy-eyed wolves to See the media event of the year: the auction of the lost Vermeers.

  Unnecessary now, Van Drouten faded into the sidelines, unnoticed behind the kameramen and the security forces. To be perfectly honest, she had no mystic powers of invisibility whatsoever: just fifteen centuries’ worth of experience at letting mortals see only what she intended them to see. Liz Van Drouten had been an interesting role, but there wasn’t much left of her. Two or three publicity shots, perhaps, before she could drop from sight, and a brief post-auction interview, when she would mention that she had decided to donate to charity whatever fabulous sum the auction had raised.

  This was a lie, of course. All the proceeds were going straight into the coffers of her masters in the Company, and seven centuries of careful planning would pay off at last. But the words charity and donation tended to deflect an audience’s interest.

  Van Drouten sighed, looking out over the faces of the crowd that waited to bid. Some watched the podium with fixed stares, willing the clock to speed up; some whispered together behind their bidding fans, or peered around at the competition to assess them. To a man and woman, they might have stepped out of one of Daumier’s engravings, might have been models for Rapacity personified, Desire, Obsession, whole-hearted Need. Van Drouten thought they were sad, and rather endearing. But then, she had always liked mortals and their passions.

  There were so few passions left in this day and age.

  So she savored the murmur that ran through the crowd, the audible pounding of seventy mortal hearts, the hissed or caught breath as the auctioneer stepped up to the podium at last. Intent as lovers, the kameramen dove close, Saw his rising hammer and Heard him as he drew breath and said: “Ladies and gentlemen! May I draw your attention to Item Number One?”

  And it lit on the black screen behind him, the projected image of Vermeer’s Girl with Peeled Apple. Van Drouten smiled involuntarily: there was young Maria again, greeting her across the dead centuries.

  “Jan Vermeer’s original oil on canvas, signed, circa 1668. Includes all rights of reproduction wor
ldwide. Bidding starts at one million pounds, ladies and gentlemen, one million—”

  Before he could even repeat the phrase, bidding fans had sprung up like flat flowers in a garden of greed.

  The Path to the Tomb, 1673

  “See?” Mevrouw Van Drouten was telling him gleefully, pointing to the easel. “You don’t even have to think anymore. All you have to do is paint them in!”

  He tried to reply but the words stuck in his dry mouth. He could only moan in horror at the line of little gray canvases stretching to the horizon, as many as the days of his life; and they were numbered. He couldn’t breathe.

  “See?” Mevrouw Van Drouten put a brush in his hand, a housepainter’s brush of all things. “All the spaces marked with a One you paint in blue. All the spaces marked with a Two, you paint in yellow. What could be easier? And look, here, the paint is already mixed for you. But you have to crank them out quickly, or you’ll lose the light!”

  And with revulsion he felt himself drawn to the canvases, because she was right: he only had so much time before he lost the light. He slapped on the thin color over the meaningless black-and-white images, and Mevrouw Van Drouten watched, grinning, but looked constantly over at the clock, the enormous clock, saying: “Not much time. Not much time,” but somehow he could never paint fast enough, and meanwhile the house was getting shabbier and more bare, the children thinner, his cough was getting worse, and Catharina was staring at him, crying, “Soup!”

  “…nice soup the lady next door sent, won’t you even try?”

  “I don’t have time, I’ll lose the light!” he told her, but she slipped the spoon into his mouth and he realized with a start that he was in bed. Catharina was leaning over him, looking sadly into his eyes. She gave him another spoonful of soup and felt his forehead, felt his stubbled cheeks. Her palm was cool.