Faking It - Crusie Jennifer (электронные книги без регистрации .TXT) 📗

“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, but they’re good paintings. They should be on people’s walls.”

“Sell them as fakes.”

“Right,” Tilda said. “Nobody will notice that.” She bent over to slide another painting away.

“You have a great butt,” Davy said.

She straightened, and he waited for her to snap at him.

“Thank you,” she said, and picked up another painting. “But I also have this problem here.”

“Sell them,” Davy said again, waiting for her to bend over again. “Publicize the sale as all the paintings that Goodnights bought thinking they were real and then couldn’t sell when they found out they were fakes. That’s why there are so many of them, because the Goodnights are such honest dealers.” He looked around at the riot of color.

“Yeah,” Tilda said. “I could bring that off. Because honesty is so easy to fake.”

She looked down at the forgeries, so much pain on her face that Davy forgot he wanted her. “Okay, there’s something else going on here. This is the thing that got you last night, isn’t it? I’m not getting why this is so awful, or how the Scarlets fit into it.”

“What?” Tilda looked up from the Durer. “Oh. They don’t. I wasn’t trained to paint the Scarlets, I was trained for this.”

Davy shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

“My dad trained me as a classical painter,” Tilda said. “The same way his dad trained him and his dad before that. But then one day Dad showed up with a Homer Hodge and said, ‘Paint like this,’ and they were so simple that-” She broke off. “I painted six of them and left.” She shrugged. “No big deal.”

“Why did you leave?” Davy said.

Tilda bit her lip. “It was a bad time,” she said offhand, but her voice shook a little. “I was a kid. It doesn’t matter. Long time ago, all over now.” She started to put the paintings away.

“How old a kid?”

“Seventeen.”

Davy straightened. “What the hell happened?”

“You know, it really isn’t-”

“Tilda, stop lying and tell me.”

Tilda pressed her lips together in a caricature of a smile. “I wasn’t lying. It doesn’t matter. Eve and Andrew found out they were pregnant, that’s all. He was my best friend, we were the way Nadine and Ethan are now, but he was Eve’s friend, too, and she was so beautiful, and he took her to the prom, and…” She waved her hand. “No big deal.”

“That’s why you left?” Davy said back. “No. It’s something else. What happened with your dad?”

Tilda turned her back on him and put another painting in the cabinet.

“We’re not going upstairs until you tell me,” Davy said. “Spill it.”

“It wasn’t anything,” Tilda said. “We found out Nadine was on the way, and I came down here to work on the last Scarlet.” She forged a smile for him. “The one you scammed from Colby. The dancers.”

“The lovers,” Davy said.

Her smile disappeared and she nodded. “I was working on it, down here, crying, and Dad came in and said…” She swallowed. “He said, ‘When will you learn you were born to paint and not to love?’”