“She doesn’t look like my idea of a psychic.”

“Psychics often don’t—the real ones. They are frequently rather earthy people. Has she cast your horoscope yet?”

“Well—yes, as a matter of fact, she has.”

“Have you a good destiny?”

“Odd, apparently. Odder than I would have thought.”

“Not odder than I would have thought. I chose you for my apprentice because you were odd, and you have revealed new depths of oddity ever since. That picture you painted while I was in Rome, for instance. It was a portrait, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I won’t pry. It had the unmistakable quality of a portrait, a feeling between subject and painter, which cannot be faked—not to my eye, that’s to say. Where are your preliminary drawings?”

Francis produced them from a portfolio.

“You are a thorough creature, aren’t you? Even your preliminaries on the right paper, in the right style. Not your Harry Furniss style. Nevertheless, I’ll wager that when you first drew that dwarf, it was in your Harry Furniss manner.”

“It was. He was dead, and I did a few sketches while he was being prepared for burial.”

“You see? Odd, as I said. How you profited from Harry Furniss’s book! Forget nothing; learn the trick of remembering through the hand. I shall be interested to hear what they think of it in London.”

“Meister, who are ‘they’? Haven’t I a right to know what I’m mixed up in, working here with you? There must surely be some risk. Why am I kept in the dark?”

“ ‘They’ are a few very distinguished dealers in art, who make all the business arrangements in this little game which, as you say, involves some risk.”

“They’re swapping these worthless, or at least trivial, pictures for pictures of greatly superior quality?”

“They are exchanging certain pictures for others, for complicated reasons.”

“All right. But is it no more than what Prince Max said? An elaborate hoax on the German Reich?”

“It would be a very bold man who would try to hoax the German Reich.”

“Well, somebody seems to be doing it. Is this a government thing? Some sort of Secret Service lark?”

“The British government knows about it, and very likely the American government knows—but only a very few people, who would deny all knowledge if there should be a discovery and a row.”

“It’s for private gain, then?”

“There is money involved. This work we are doing is not unrequited.”

“ ‘Unrequited’! What a word for such a thing! You mean that you and the Countess and Prince Max are getting damn well paid!”

“For services rendered. The Countess supplies the pictures on which we work. Where else but in such a place as this, where there are two pictures stacked in those innumerable service corridors for every one on the walls, would you find things of the right age, right character, and indeed authentic? I supply a quality of craftsmanship that makes those pictures look rather more desirable to the agents of the great Reichsmarschall than they did in their earlier, neglected state. Prince Max sees that the pictures arrive in England and reach the dealers, which involves substantial risk. Such services do not come cheap, but what we receive is not comparable to what the London dealers receive, because they get fine Italian art for mediocre German art, and they sell it at splendid prices.”

“A huge international fraud, in fact.”

“If there is fraud, it is not the kind you suggest. If the German experts consider our pictures so desirable that they will exchange Italian pictures of great value for them, are we to say that they do not know what they are doing? No money changes hands—not at that point. The Reich is not anxious that large sums of German money should leave the country even for works of German art; that is the reason for the exchange arrangement. The German experts have a task; it is to form the finest and most complete and most impressive collection of German art in the world. They need both quantity and quality. The work we do here does not aim at quality in the highest reaches—no Dürers, no Grünewalds, no Cranachs. To provide those we should have to resort to faking—from which, of course, I shrink in holy horror. We simply make old, undistinguished pictures into old pictures of some distinction.”

“Except for Drollig Hansel. He’s a fake and he’s gone to England.”

“My dear man, don’t allow yourself to become heated, or you may say things you will wish you had not said. Drollig Hansel is a student exercise, undertaken in the style of an earlier day, as a test of skill. The test has been splendidly passed. I am the judge, and I know what I am talking about. If an expert, seeing it among the others, cannot tell that it is modern, what greater proof can you have of my achievement? But you are blameless. You did not paint to deceive, you signed nobody else’s name to it, and you did not yourself send it to England.”

“That’s casuistry.”

“Much talk in the art world is casuistry.”

CASUISTRY: the study of Ethics as it relates to questions of conscience. That was how the Church used the word. But in Francis’s mind it had a Protestant ring, and it meant quibbling—teetering on the tightrope above a dangerous abyss. His conscience twinged sorely after the Countess received a letter from Prince Max, relating how a newly uncovered picture was causing a small sensation among a score or so of art experts in London.

Pictures of dwarfs are not uncommon, and some of the subjects can be identified. Van Dyck painted Queen Henrietta Maria with her dwarf. Sir Jeffrey Hudson; Bronzino painted the dwarf Morgante in the nude—a front view and a back one so that no detail should be missed; the Prado has the female dwarf Eugenia Martinez Vallego, clothed and nude. The dwarfs of Rizi and Velasquez, who seem to observe royal splendour from a remote, half-comprehending world of their own, are not known by name, but by the pain in their intent regard. Less squeamish ages were delighted by dwarfs, and some of them were used in much the manner that had driven F. X. Bouchard of Blairlogie to put his head in a noose.

The Countess read her cousin’s letter to Saraceni and Francis with as much excitement as that reserved lady ever chose to show. The experts had given the painting a little cleaning, and what had they found? That what had looked like the Fuggers’ Firmemeiden, their family mark, was perhaps something more; true, it looked like a pitchfork, or a three-branched candlestick with an O beside it, but it could also be a gallows with a noose hanging from it! The experts were delighted by their find, and the puzzle it suggested. Had the dwarf been a hangman, then? That it was indeed Drollig Hansel, known as an obscure figure in history but never before seen, they did not choose to doubt. This was really a find for the Führermuseum, a real whiff from an earlier, spiritually fearless Germany, which did not shrink from realities, even when they were also grotesqueries.

Prince Max’s letter was carefully phrased. No inquiring secret police, peeping into the letters that a German aristocrat wrote to his high-born cousin, could have understood anything more than the facts that were stated. But there was rejoicing at Düsterstein.

Francis did not rejoice. His intention to make some record, to offer some comment, on the fate of the dwarf he had known had been unveiled, and he had not expected that to happen. His picture had been a very private affair, an ex voto almost, a memorial to a man he had never spoken to, and had come to know only after his death. He could not contain his dismay and torment, and he had to say so to Saraceni.

“Are you really surprised, my dear man? There are very few secrets in this world, as you are quite old enough to have found out. And art is a way of telling the truth.”

“That’s what Browning said. My aunt was always quoting him.”