This was the man who had let them in. He was a roly-poly sloppy man of about fifty, wearing bedroom slippers, paint-stained dark corduroy trousers, a mostly-green plaid shirt and a dark green ratty cardigan sweater with leather elbow patches. He hadn’t shaved today, and it was possible he hadn’t shaved yesterday.
Victor was making the introductions, announcing each name as though that person were a particular discovery of Victor’s own: “Griswold Porculey, I’d like you to meet my uncle, Andy Kelp, and his friend, Mister John Dortmunder.”
“W’r’ya,” Dortmunder said, shaking Porculey’s extended hand.
“How do you do. How do you do. Victor’s uncle, eh?”
“His mother is my older sister,” Kelp explained.
Porculey gestured at the girl on the sofa, saying, “And this is my friend, Cleo Marlahy, an ever-present comfort.”
Throwing off the throw, Cleo Marlahy uncurled her legs and sprang to her feet, saying, “Coffee? Tea? Wine?” Then doubtfully, to Porculey, “Do we have any liquor?”
“We might have vermouth.”
“I’d love some coffee,” Kelp said. Dortmunder said, “Me, too.”
Victor said, “May I have wine? I’m older than I look.”
Porculey said, “Red or white?” “Red, please.”
“Done,” said Porculey. “We don’t have any white.”
.The girl was wearing black velvet pants and a white blouse. She was barefoot, and her toenails were painted an extremely dark red; the color of drying blood. She bounded away on these feet like the little mermaid, while Porculey directed his guests into chairs and himself dropped with a grunt into the sofa.
Kelp said, “This is quite a place. Very clever idea.”
“Only rent I could afford,” Porculey said, “to get this much space and north light.” He gestured toward the skylight. “They gave me a good rent,” he went on, “because they had so many empty stores, and because I agreed to make one or two turns around the place after the shops all close. Sort of a night watchman. Cheaper for them, cheaper for me. I’m a night bird anyway, and I walk anyway, so it’s no hardship. We took down the partitions in the changing rooms, put our bedroom back there. Only problem’s the lack of a kitchen, but we don’t need much. Couple of hot plates, little refrigerator, use the sink in the lay. Perfect, really. They give more heat than any landlord in my experience, there’s no nosy neighbors to poke and pry, and any shop I want is right outside that door.”
Cleo returned, with a mismatched pair of white mugs for Dortmunder and Kelp, and an empty jelly glass for Victor.
Distributing the mugs, she then picked up a gallon jug of Gab Hearty Burgundy from the floor beside the sofa, half filled the jelly glass, gave it to Victor, and said, “Porky? More wine?”
“Don’t mind if I do. Don’t mind if I do.”
Porculey drank from a tapered pilsner glass meant for beer, in which the dark red wine looked like something in a laboratory experiment. Cleo’s glass, which she rescued from way under the sofa, was a small glass stein which had originally held mustard. She filled it to the top with hearty burgundy, plopped onto the sofa next to Porculey, raised her stein, and said, “Absent friends.”
“May they rot,” said Porculey, lifting his pilsner glass in the toast, and took a healthy swig. Then he said, looking at Dortmunder, “I understand you folks have a problem.”
“We do,” Dortmunder agreed. “We helped a fellow fake an art theft, to get the insurance. He wants the painting back, but we don’t have it any more. It got lost. Kelp seems to think you could run up an imitation and we could give that back to the guy instead of the original.”
Kelp said, “We’d make it worth your while, of course.”
Porculey grunted in amusement. “Yes, I should think you would,” he said. The hand not holding the pilsner glass had strayed over to Cleo’s near thigh and was massaging it gently. The girl sipped wine and smiled comfortably to herself. Porculey said, “What painting is this?”
“It’s called Folly Leads Man to Ruin, by somebody called Veenbes.”
“Veenbes.” Porculey put his head back, gazing up toward the corner of the ceiling. His hand stroked and stroked. “Veenbes. Folly Leads Man to Ruin. Mm, mm, possibly. Book,” he decided, all at once, and released Cleo’s leg in order to heave himself out of the sofa and onto his feet.
Book? There were any number of books in sight, though no bookcases. Paperbacks were heaped up in corners and under tables, while large hardcover volumes were stuck between uprights of the railings along platform edges. It was to these that Porculey went, carrying his wine, muttering under his breath as he ran his free hand along their spines. Then he stopped, pulled out one book, set the pilsner glass on the floor, thumbed through the volume, shook his head in annoyance and shoved the book back again.
This might take some time. While waiting, Dortmunder looked around, absorbing this weird dwelling place and noticing here and there on the dark walls unframed paintings, presumably Porculey’s. They were all different, and yet they were all the same. In the middle foreground of each was a girl, either naked or wearing something minimal like a white scarf, and in the background was a landscape. The girls were mostly seen full length, and they were always very absorbed in what they were doing. One of them, for instance, sitting on the grass with some ruined castles behind her, plus in the distance a couple of trees and a small pond at which two deer drank, was studying a chess set laid out on the grass in front of her. Another showed a girl on a beach, leaning over the gunwale to look inside a large stranded rowboat, with a huge storm way out at sea in the background. (This was the girl with the scarf.)
The girls were not quite identical. Glancing around, Dortmunder saw maybe four different girls among the paintings, and it was with a sudden shock that he realized one of them was Cleo Marlahy. So that’s what she looks like with her clothes off, he thought, blinking at a picture in which, against a background of an apple orchard white with spring flowers, an unsmiling girl was rather leggily climbing over a rail fence.
“Ah hah!”
Porculey had found something. Back he came, lugging a large book, and showed the page to Dortmunder. “That it?”
“Yes,” said Dortmunder, looking at the small color illustration taking up half the page. The jester pranced, the people followed, the darkness yawned. Below the illustration were the title, the painter’s name and dates, and the words Private Collection.
“Here,” Porculey said, dumped the book in Dortmunder’s lap, and padded off again.
Kelp, leaning over from his chair, said, “That’s it, all right.”
Dortmunder looked at him. “You never even saw the thing.”
“Well, you described it.”
Porculey came back with two more books, both also containing reproductions of the painting. He added these to Dortmunder’s lap and returned to the sofa. Cleo, meanwhile, had gone off to rescue the pilsner glass, and now brought it back and handed it to Porculey. “Thank you, my dear,” he said, and she patted his cheek and sat down again beside him.
Dortmunder’s lap was full of books, all open to illustrations of folly leading man to ruin. He said, “So anyway you know what it looks like.”
“There are also larger reproductions available,” Porculey said. “Prints. Photographs of the original.”
Kelp said, eagerly, “So you can do it?”
“Not a chance,” Porculey said.
Even Dortmunder was surprised at that. Not that he’d ever believed, really believed, there was anything in Kelp’s idea, but the suddenness with which it had been shot down left Dortmunder for just a second without a reaction.
But not Kelp. Sounding almost outraged, he said, “Not a chance? Why not? You’ve got the copies, the reproductions, you’re the guy can do endless perfect twenty dollar bills!”
“Not from photographs,” Porculey said. “Look at those three illustrations. There isn’t one color reproduced the same in all three. Which is the original color, or is the original something entirely different? And even if we could be absolutely sure we had every one of Veenbes’ dozens of colors right, what about the brush-strokes? How is the paint laid on the surface, how does it reflect light, where is it thick, where thin? The man who owns that painting must have looked at it from time to time, he must know what his painting looks like. I might be able to do something that would fool a buyer, maybe even a gallery operator or a museum curator, but the owner of the painting? I’m afraid not.”
Cleo, her smile sympathetic, said, ‘Porky really does know about art. If he says it can’t be done, it can’t be done.”
“So that’s that,” Dortmunder said.
Kelp was frowning so hard he looked like a crumpled piece of paper. “But that can’t be that,” he insisted. “There has to be a way.”