She made her way to the door at the far end of the room, sweeping up a bottle of gin as she passed the bar. She had to tack twice to gain the center of the door, which then gave her some difficulty in opening. In the end she gave it a hinge-loosening kick that knocked it ajar. She turned and waved her cigarette holder at Jonathan before disappearing.

Jonathan looked questioningly at MacTaint, who bared his lower teeth in a grimace of pleasure as he dug his fingernails into the ingrown stubble under his chin. "She drinks, you know," he said.

"Does she?"

"Oh, yes. I found her out there in the yard fifteen years ago," he explained, shifting the scratching to under an arm. "Somebody'd beat her up pretty badly."

"So you took her in?"

"To my eternal regret. Still! An occasional spat is good for the glands. She's a good old hole, really."

"What was this number she was doing for me?"

MacTaint shrugged. "Bits of old roles she's done, I suppose. She's more than a little mental, you know."

"She's not the only one. Cheers." Jonathan drank off half his whiskey and looked around the room with genuine appreciation. "You live well."

MacTaint nodded agreement. "I don't move many paintings anymore. Only one or two a year. But what with no income tax, I do well enough."

"Who are those painters outside?"

"Damned if I know. They come and they go. I keep the place warm and light, and there's always tea and bread and cheese about for them. Sometimes there's only one or two of them, sometimes half a dozen. That tall one who gave you the evil eye, he's been around for years and years. Still working on the same canvas. Feels he owns the place-by squatter's right, I shouldn't wonder. Complains sometimes if the cheese isn't to his liking. The others come and go. I suppose they hear about the place from one another."

"You're a good man, MacTaint."

"Ain't that the bleeding truth. Did I ever tell you that I was once a painter myself?"

"No, never."

"Oh, yes! More than forty years ago I came down to The Smoke to study art. Full of theories I was, about art and socialism. You didn't look at my paintings, you read them. Essays, they were. Hungry children, strikers being bashed up by police, that sort of business. Trash. Then finally I discovered that my calling lay in stealing and flogging paintings. It's fun to do what you're good at."

They fell silent for a time, watching the fire loop yellow and blue in the hearth. It settled with a hiss of sparks, and the sound pulled MacTaint from his musings. "Jon? I asked you to drop over this evening for a reason."

"Not just to drink up your whiskey?"

"No. I've got something I want you to see." He grunted out of his chair and crossed to a painting that had been standing in an ornate old frame, its face to the wall. He carried it back tenderly and set it up on a chair. "What do you think of that?"

Jonathan scanned it and nodded. Then he leaned forward to examine it in detail. After five minutes, he sat back and finished off his Laphroaig. "You're not thinking of selling it, are you?"

MacTaint's eyes twinkled beneath his shaggy eyebrows. "And why not?"

"I was thinking of your reputation. You've never peddled a fake before."

"Goddamn your eye!" MacTaint cackled and scratched his scruffy head. "That would pass muster anywhere in the world."

"I'm not saying it's not a good copy-in fact it's extraordinary. But it is a forgery, and you don't flog fakes."

"Don't bother your head about that. I've never sold a piece of shoddy goods before, and I never shall. But slake my curiosity, lad. How can you tell it's phony?"

Jonathan shrugged. It was difficult to explain the almost automatic processes of mind and eye that constituted his gift. "Oh, a thousand things," he said.

"For instance?"

He sat back and closed his eyes, dredging up the original of J.-B.-S. Chardin's House of Cardsfrom the lagan of his memory and holding it in focus as he studied the mental image. Then he opened his eyes slowly and examined the painting before him. "All right. This was done in Holland. At least, the Van M. technique was used. A relatively valueless painting of the proper age and size was sanded down, and the surface crackle was brought up by successive bakings of layers of paint."

MacTaint nodded.

"But the crackle was not perfect here." He touched the white areas around the face of the young man in a three-cornered hat. "And when the crackle didn't bake through perfectly, your forger rolled the canvas to force it. Basically a good job, too. But in these areas it ought to be deeper and more widely spaced. Your man seems to have forgotten that white dries more slowly than other pigments."

"And that's the only flaw? Crackle?"

"No, no. Dozens of other errors. Most of them are excessive precision. Forgers tend to be more exact in their draftsmanship than the artist was. Look here, for instance, at the perspective on the boy's left eye."

"Looks all right to me."

"Precisely. On the original, Chardin made a slight error-probably caused by two sittings during the drawing. And look here at the coin. It's as carefully drawn as the marker there. In the genuine painting, the coin has blurred outlines, as though it were in a different field of focus from the marker."

MacTaint shook his head in admiration, and a fall of dandruff floated to his lap. "Goddamn those eyes of yours."

"Even forgetting my eyes, this thing would bounce the minute it hit the market. The original hangs in the National Gallery."

"Oh, get along with you!"

They laughed, knowing that many forgeries hang bravely and unchallenged in the major galleries of the world, while the originals hang in clandestine splendor in private collections. This was, in fact, the case with all but one of Jonathan's own Impressionists.

"Would this pass inspection, Jon?"

They both knew that the real skills of major curators were limited to the documentation of ownership patterns, despite their tendencies to report in terms of genuine knowledge. "With what provenance?" Jonathan asked.

"Oh... let's say it was hanging in the National Gallery in place of the real one."

Jonathan raised his eyebrows, his turn to feel admiration. "No question at all," he pronounced with confidence. "But how would you get at the real Chardin, Mac? Since the '57 thing, they've stiffened their security and there hasn't been a successful theft."

"What makes you think that?" MacTaint's eyes were round with feigned surprise, and he looked more than ever like a mischievous leprechaun.

"But there's a weight alarm system. You couldn't possibly get one off the wall without being detected."

"Of course it would be detected. It's always detected."

"Always? Tell me, Mac. How many paintings have you nicked from the National Gallery?"

"All told?" MacTaint squinted sideways in concentration. "Over the years? Ah-h, let's see... seven."

"Seven!" Jonathan stared at the old man. "I'll take that drink now," he said quietly.

"Here you go."

"Ta."

"Cheers."

They drank in silence. Jonathan shook his head. "I'm trying to see this in my mind, Mac. First, you walk to the gallery."

"I do that. Yes. In I walk."

"Then you take the painting from the wall. The alarms go off."

"Dreadful noise."

"You hang up a reasonably good forgery in its place, and you stroll out. Is that it?"

"Well, I don't stroll, exactly. More like running arse over teakettle. But in broad terms, yes, that's it."

"Now the alarm system tells them which picture has been tampered with, right?"

"Correct."

"And yet it never occurs to them to give the painting a professional scrutiny."

"They give it a great deal of attention. But not scrutiny." MacTaint was enjoying Jonathan's confusion immensely. "You're dying to know how I do it, aren't you?"