While Katie was at Art Today, David was sleeping off his jet lag, rousing himself around noon, having something to eat, then heading to the local library to use the files of The New York Times on microfiche, first using the printed index, then winding the wide negative film strips to articles on art forgery published over the past few decades. There wasn’t much, but he took notes, along with checking out the only book on the subject in the stacks. He needed to bone up fast on the general nature of forging art works and seeing what kind of people were involved, since he was pretty sure they all had to have had much better brains than the thugs and mobsters he’d gone after during his police career.
         Indeed, he loved regaling Katie with just how stupid the wiseguys he put away actually were. If a thug managed to live past forty, David called it “survival of the fastest,” those who could get away, far away, when he wanted out of the mob life. For some, that was the Witness Protection Program, for others, just getting on a plane to Patagonia. But David always insisted that the smartest gangsters—the capos—had the I.Q. of an ox, while their inferiors’ brain power rarely rose above that of a gnat.
         But forgers had to be very smart, very canny, very, very good at what they did, not least the guys who could reproduce to near perfection twenty- and fifty-dollar bills, with which David had a bit more familiarity than he did about art forgery.
         Right at the start, David learned that forging art was as old as art itself. After the Greek master Praxiteles (above) became a renowned sculptor in 4th century B.C., the Romans copied his statues and tried to sell them as originals, with sellers, buyers and scholars all haggling over attributions.  David was surprised to find that even a very young Michelangelo, in 1496, carved a figure of a sleeping Cupid, washed it with dirt to make it look very old, and sold it to a dealer in Milan, who in turn sold it to a Renaissance cardinal. Even though caught in the fraud, Michelangelo had shown his artistic prowess, and the statue was held in high esteem until it disappeared in the Great Fire of London in 1666.
         Reading on, David developed a real admiration for the ways so many forgers were able to fool the experts, and, as a former cop, he loved reading about how they were eventually caught. Katie had already suggested that he should research the most famous forger of the 20th century—Hans van Meergeren, who happened to be Dutch.
         Starting before World War II, van Meergeren had been painting copies of 17th century Dutch masters for sale as copies, but in the 1930s he turned to forgery, creating new works in the style of  Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch and Gerard ter Borch. All of them fooled the experts.  But his most notorious forgery was of seven Vermeers.
       Van Meergeren spent four years perfecting his technique of forgery. As Vermeer would have done, van Meergeren mixed his own paint colors from raw materials, like lapus lazuli, which produced a vibrant blue, white lead, indigo from India and a mercury sulfide called cinnabar to make an intense red. He wove his own paint brushes, and it was easy enough for him to find old canvases and frames dating back to the 17th century in flea markets. 
         He would first scrape off the paint from an old canvas, create his fake, then, to make it look as if painted in the 17th century, he’d wash it with a phenyl formaldehyde resin that hardened the paints as if they’d dried out over hundreds of years. Then he’d further dry them out in a hot oven.  After that, by rolling the canvases up on a metal tube, he could produce cracks of varying degrees that all Vermeer paintings had acquired as they aged. Then van Meergeren rubbed black ink into the cracks.
         The first fake he did he called Supper at Emmaus (right), based on a similar painting by the Italian artist Caravaggio of Christ stopping to have dinner after rising from the dead. Van Meergeren cannily chose the subject because Vermeer scholars believed the artist might have once traveled to Italy to learn from the masters there, so choosing the Caravaggio painting to forge in the style of a young Vermeer gave van Meergeren the leeway to claim the painting was not in the “mature style” Vermeer became famous for.
         When Supper at Emmaus was finished, van Meergeren’s attorney obtained authentification by Vermeer scholar Abraham Bredius, who pronounced it not just a true Vermeer but “the masterpiece” by the artist.  The painting was then sold to The Rembrandt Society for 520,000 guilders and donated to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (below).
         Van Meergeren followed up with several more fake Vermeers, whose sales made him a millionaire. Even as World War II raged, van Meergeren prospered, especially by selling his forgeries, through an art dealer named Alois Miedl, to Nazi bankers, dealers and to Hermann Goering himself, whose appetite for European art, bought or stolen, was insatiable.  Goering bought van Meergeren’s Christ with the Adulteress (below) in 1943, but with the decline of the Third Reich pending, stored it in an Austrian salt mine, where it was discovered, along with 6,750 other works of art, in 1945 by a British Special Operations mission.
         Afterwards, Allied experts on stolen art began questioning van Meergeren’s dealer, Miedl, who confessed that he’d obtained the Vermeer from van Meergeren, which resulted in the forger’s arrest for fraud and for collaborating with the Nazis. Threatened with the death penalty, van Meergeren told the authorities he had faked the paintings; yet, even then some Vermeer scholars insisted the paintings were authentic.
         Then, in a bizarre turn, during his trial van Meergeren offered to prove his fraud by painting a “new” Vermeer—he called it Jesus Among the Doctors (below)—in the middle of the courtroom, with judges, lawyers and art experts watching.
         Embarrassed by the revelation, the experts and the court realized that van Meergeren could no longer be charged with selling state treasures to the Nazis (right), but he was still convicted of fraud and forgery and sentenced to the minimal one year in prison. Van Meergeren died in 1947 while awaiting an appeal. The final irony was that by then van Meergeren had become a quasi-hero by the Dutch, because he had so roundly duped the Nazis.
         By the time David had finished going through all this material, he had acquired a grudging respect for the Dutch forger’s talent and extraordinary chutzpah—something David had never felt about the mobsters he pursued and arrested. Sure, there were some pretty ingenious bank robberies, but mobsters like Joe Bonanno, Vito Genovese and John Gotti had never shown any ingenuity at all. They were simple thugs who got rich by extortion, bribery and murder. Creativity had nothing to do with any of it. In fact, David’s cop friends in Boston told him they believed the break-in at the Gardner Museum had been by a local mob that quickly discovered it would be impossible to fence such high-profile artworks.
         Feeling moderately boned up on 20th century art forgery, David decided to call Gerald Kiley at Interpol to ask who might be the most likely bidders at the auction of the Vermeer.
         Kiley said, “Y’know, David, you’re already assuming a crime has been perpetrated, or is in the process. Do you have reason to think the painting’s a forgery?”
         “I would tell you if I did,” said David. “I spent some time reading about forged art in the 20th century, like that guy van Meergeren, and I have to say I’m amazed that he got away with it as easily as he did. How could all these so-called experts put their reputations on the line and declare the paintings authentic? Even I—and I know nothing about Old Masters—even I could see the van Meergeren copies didn’t look much like Vermeers at all.”
         “Well, one thing you’ve got to understand,” said Kiley, “is that this was during the war, when a whole lot of stuff got stolen and sold and vouched for because there was money in it. The known Vermeers were scattered all over the world and not easy for an expert to have first-hand, detailed experience with. Most of the time they’d probably never seen the original, so they worked from photos, and in the case of private collectors, even photos were not available, or way out of date.”
         “Understood. But do you think a forger could get away with it today?”
         “Not as easily as van Meergeren. The experts today are far more expert at what they do, and now they have scientific methods at their disposal to check the age of things.”
         “You mean carbon dating?”
         “No, carbon dating works only if a piece is at least 40,0000 years old. The Vermeer’s, what? Less than four hundred?”
         “O.K.” said David, “I’m not going to take up your time asking you what other techniques they use today, but to get back to my first question, my colleague Katie Cavuto put in a lot of research time on, like, the hundred biggest art collectors, and I’d like to help her narrow it down to as few as possible who would have the kind of bankroll for a painting they say could go for $100 million.”
         “Give me a day or so, and I’ll see what I can come up with.”
         “I appreciate it. So will Katie.”
         “But I want to remind you again, David: As far as Interpol is concerned, there’s nothing about this sale—thus far—that’s setting off bells and whistles.”
         “But you’ll be keeping an eye on it?”
         “Routine business. And now, I am going to have lunch and afterwards try to track the bust of a fifth century B.C. Babylonian horse god that was stolen last year in Iraq.”       
          David went back to his house and called Katie.
         “What’re you up to?” he asked.
         “I loafed this weekend. Went to the movies last night, finished off  with a pizza.”
         As much as David wanted to know with whom and where Katie went for a movie and a pizza, he stifled the urge to ask.
       “What movie did you see?”
         “Good Will Hunting, about a neurotic genius—a new actor named Matt Damon—with Robin Williams playing his psychiatrist. Pretty impressive work.”
         David thought it sounded like the kind of movie Katie would go to with her lawyer friend. The last movie David had seen was Copland, with Sylvester Stallone playing an honest policeman battling a corrupt precinct in New Jersey.
         “Well,” said David. “I’m expecting some info from the Interpol guy about possible bidders that might help narrow down your list.”
         “Jeez, I hope so,” said Katie. “I’m just not knowledgeable enough about this stuff to reduce the list by much. Best thing I could do was to see which ones were actual billionaires, because no mere multi-millionaire could afford to buy this painting. That got it down to about twenty individuals. Six Americans, three Brits, maybe three Russians, a couple of Chinese, and the rest in Europe or South America. You can’t believe how rich some Mexicans and Brazilians are.”
         “Well, maybe the Interpol list will help.”
         “Oh, by the way, on Thursday I’m going to see my old German history professor at Fordham. Y’know, the guy who was so helpful with us on the Capone case. You want to come with me?”
         David, feeling like a dog being let back in the house, said, “Sure, I liked your professor a lot. What’s his name, Mundt?”
         “Yeah, Karl Mundt. Can you get down to Fordham by four? That’s when he has office hours.”
         “Same place?”
         “Same place.”
         “See you then.” They hung up and David was happy he was going to see Katie in one of those same places they’d gone on the Capone case.  Why, he almost felt nostalgic about it.