A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,45

on these gloves.”

Gabriel felt a flutter of nervous excitement. Whatever the man was about to show him would be important. The setting demanded some sort of unveiling. When Klinman left the room and all was silent, Gabriel could hear the hum of dehumidifiers.

Klinman returned with a large portfolio. He set it on a desk and unzipped it. As soon as he stepped forward, holding the paper with his gloved fingertips, Gabriel knew what he was looking at.

It was a small square of paper, probably not more than thirty centimeters, and it held three drawings. The first was a barely rendered face. The lines were exact, if they didn’t quite connect. A young man’s face, an aquiline nose, an erect neck, and a sensitive gaze. Here was youth, but a youth that was concerned: Wounded by the past? Worried about the future? Melancholic? Pensive? Beneath this was a more detailed study. A hand gloved in heavy leather. Gabriel was sure it had some sort of name. A falconry glove? But no, then it would extend up the forearm, and this glove ended at the disembodied wrist. It held its mate, which was limp, sagging, though it maintained the memory of the form of the fingers that had just been inside it. The third sketch was a ruffled, high-collared Renaissance shirt, just a neck. It was a play of shadow, the ruffles suggested by shading rather than line.

It was obviously a study for Titian’s Man with a Glove; the final canvas hung in the Louvre and Gabriel had seen it a dozen times. A sketch for a work this important was like looking into the artist’s atelier, or even into his brain. Here was how he worked out his precise lines, the faces that registered age, pain, pleasure. Here was the nascent expressive hand so naturally curved and lifelike—an entire portrait boiled down to the placement of one finger, one empty leather finger.

Carefully, Klinman turned the drawing over. On the back was the ornate mark of its original dealer, which Gabriel didn’t recognize. Also, through the light, Gabriel could see the embossed watermark—the paper had been handmade and signed by its maker. These two marks served to authenticate the drawing. This was a real Titian. The master had drawn this himself.

“Stunning, isn’t it?” Klinman asked. “People think of dealers as tooth pullers, but we are just as moved by beauty as the next person. We unite beauty with others who appreciate it.”

Cold air blew on Gabriel’s neck. He felt feverish, and his back was clammy.

Klinman showed him a succession of significant studies by little-known Renaissance painters, rococo practitioners, and Mannerists. He had an impressive collection. Some came in their original frames. All the while he talked to Gabriel about his profession.

“This drawing I found in a marché aux puces. It does happen sometimes. I was looking for something else entirely when I came across this Piranesi. The seller had no idea what it was. He had dated it correctly, but he missed the classic Piranesi hand, the subject matter that is unmistakably his piazzas.”

The afternoon wore on. Gabriel put his head close to each of the drawings, so close he could smell the peaty mold and the fragrant pulp. The smell reminded him of the woodshed where he had painted the Connois all those summers ago, the same dense, rotting earth. He looked at the lines, the hesitations, the fluidities, the places the master pressed down harder and where the line was fainter, fatter, thinner, darker, grayer.

Then Klinman pulled out a sheet of blank paper. It was old; not quite as old as the others, but meaty, like paper produced with care.

“Care to venture a guess as to who this is?”

Gabriel felt confused, intoxicated, like he’d been breathing in turpentine for days. He looked up at Klinman.

“Come on. You can guess. You’ve gotten every artist right all afternoon, even Chassériau imitating Ingres. You can identify this artist. Try.”

Gabriel motioned for Klinman to put the page on the light table. It was definitely blank. Klinman was playing some kind of joke on him. The paper had some glue on the edges; it had been pasted into a book, but it had never been drawn on. Faintly, in the top left corner, Gabriel saw the traces of a pencil: £50. He looked up. “Fifty pounds? The paper belonged to someone famous?”

Klinman chuckled, though he did it kindly so that it wasn’t exactly at Gabriel’s expense. “No, no,” he said. “That’s how much the paper