Back in my room, a little depressed now, I had a drink or two from the minibar and watched Bayern play Arsenal on the television, and at a little past noon there came a knock on the door that connected my room to Krebs’s suite and an anouncement that lunch was served. I dined with Krebs, a fish soup and a platter of cold meats, a white wine and beer available.

That day the German papers were full of the uncovering of yet another terrorist plot; we talked about that and I told him about Bosco’s 9/11 installation and the ensuing riot, and he said he would have liked to have seen it. He was firmly on Bosco’s side and said he thought the typical American attitude to the terror attack inane and infantile. Less than three thousand dead and two office buildings destroyed in a nation of three hundred million? It was a joke, and a joke was the appropriate artistic response. Our grotesque reaction was the laughingstock of the world, although people were too polite or too frightened to voice it. Try seven hundred thousand civilian dead in a nation of sixty million, which was what the Germans lost from the Allied bombing, and nearly every building destroyed in some places!

And no artistic response at all-no poetry, no art, no dramas. About the Nazis and the Jews there is plenty, we must never forget and all that, but about the destruction of German urban life not a whisper. We started it, and deserved it, and that was that. But the Americans were innocent, Americans never did anything bad, even to suggest there was a connection between an aggressive foreign policy, a continuous violent interference in the affairs of other nations, and this event, oh, no, that was off the table entirely.

The funny thing about this attitude was that Lotte shared it, despite having been in lower Manhattan when the planes hit the towers and despite having a kid who went blue when there was any dust in the air. Lotte thought that the right response to terror was bravery. You cleaned up the mess, mourned the dead for a particular limited period, and then moved on. I shared this with Krebs and then we talked about art, and how art dealt with the various horrors the world was heir to, and I said that I never felt a need to deal with that aspect of life in what I did, and did that make me some kind of pussy. Easel painting in oils while the world burned? And he asked what was the worst century in European history before the twentieth. It was the fourteenth century. The Black Death, half the population dead, devastating famines, and still they hardly paused the continual wars. Yet they didn’t stop making art-Giotto, van Eyck, van der Goes.

“So we’re saved by beauty?” I said. “I thought beauty was passé. I thought the concept was king now.”

“No, saving or not saving is hardly the point, as I believe I’ve already said. Although I often think that God, if there really is such a being, only holds his hand from destroying us all because we create beauty for his amusement. And also I think submitting ourselves to the terror of beauty, the ravishment of it, prevents us from giving vent to the kind of despair that would lead to the absolute destruction of our kind. Do you know Rilke?”

He recited some German in that portentous way that people always recite poetry, and then translated, “‘For beauty’s only the beginning of terror we’re still just able to bear. And the reason we adore it so is that it serenely disdains to destroy us.’ So, Wilmot, you are a terrorist also, just like your friend Bosco, but more subtle. They don’t riot against you, but maybe they should.”

“Yeah, but the Nazis were supposed to be big art lovers and it didn’t do much for their destructiveness.”

“Not so. The Nazis-we Nazis?-were simple looters by and large. They wanted the things that indicated imperial power, and their taste was uniformly bad. Kitschmenschen almost to a man.”

“Although Hitler was a painter,” I said. “That always makes me feel terrific about my profession.”

“A very bad painter,” he said, “and an ignoramus. He went to his grave, I believe, under the impression that Michelangelo Merisi-Caravaggio-and Michelangelo Buonarroti were the same person.”

Okay, fun talking about art, and in fact it did make me feel better a little, mainly because it reminded me of the safe haven I had with Lotte when things went sour with us-we could always talk about art. Maybe that’s its true purpose. But I figured I’d take advantage of the casual discussion to mine some information. I said, “So-these people we’re going to see. Since you’re being so mysterious, I’m going to presume they’re your gangster partners. Or sponsors. Cronies?”

“Yes. They are what you might call representatives of the consortium that set up this project.”

“And they’re like the Nazis? Murderers and art lovers in the same package?”

He gave me a stern look for a moment and then grinned. “Wilmot, you persist in being curious. I beg you, please, please do not be curious this afternoon! All right, I understand that you wish to know something about our friends. Very well. In general, only.”

He poured a glass of wine and drank some of it. “We look at the world today and we see interesting things. We say we are living in a global village, which is true enough, but what is not so often observed is that it is a village of feudal times. Legitimacy-the empire, let us say-has collapsed. Religious fanaticism is widespread, of course. Art is simply loot, with no transcendent purposes or value. On the one hand, in the so-called democracies, we see a political class composed of vapid hypocrites, beauty queens, and thugs, placed in office by propaganda and money. In the other former empire, we observe the expropriation of state property by simple gangsters. The rest of the world is ruled as it always has been, by tribal chieftains. So we observe vast masses of new wealth being seized by people who are largely amoral brutes-on a larger scale, just what happened in the original dark ages or in Germany in the thirties. Essentially, therefore, much of the world is controlled by a kind of condottiere. But unlike the originals, these men like to dwell in the shadows. I am speaking, you understand, not about the figureheads, the leaders we see on the television, but the henchmen-the corrupt company officers, the fixers, Central American and African looters. And this class blends into actual gangsters, the more respectable drug lords and arms dealers, the Asian triads, the yakuzas, and so forth. And because they dwell in the shadows they desire symbols of their status, so they can look every day and know they are somebody, and this is why art is stolen from museums and collections.”

“Yeah, but that has nothing to do with forgery. Why are these guys getting involved in this particular operation?”

“Ordinarily they would not; art forgery, as I’m sure you know, has historically been a petty affair. But in recent years all this has changed. The market value of paintings by the noble dead has increased by orders of magnitude. Hundred-million-dollar auctions are not unknown. And this kind of money can attract the sort of people we are talking about. Now, since I have been selling such people paintings for a while, when they think art they naturally come to Krebs. They say, Krebs, can this be done? And I say no, at first, the technical foolery we can do, of course, but really, forging a major work by an old master, who could possibly do this?”

Then he smiled broadly and reached over and patted my hand. He said, “And then I found you.”

“You assumed I could do this from looking at magazine covers and ads?”

“Of course not. That is, I was interested in you, but it was not until Mark sent me those paintings, the one of the movie star as Maria of Austria and the incomplete Los Borrachos, that I understood what you were capable of. When Mark told me you were hallucinating that you were Velázquez under the influence of some drug, it sounded insane, a fantasy, and yet there were the paintings. So I made my contacts and, as you Americans put it, I pitched the deal, and got the clearance and backing I needed.”