“Okay—I just thought I’d ask. ‘Hereafter, in a better world than this—’ “

“ ‘I shall desire more love and knowledge of you.’ I’ll hold you to that.”

“And I’ll hold you to that.”

“Corniche! I want you to go to the Netherlands and kill a man.”

“At your service, Meister. Shall I take my dagger or rely on the poisoned chalice?”

“You will rely on the poisoned word. Only that will do the job.”

“Then I suppose I’d better know his name.”

“His name, unfortunately for him, is Jean-Paul Letztpfennig. I am a great believer in the influence of names on destiny, and Letztpfennig is not a lucky name. Nor is he a lucky man. He wanted a career as a painter, but his stuff was dull and derivative. A failure, indeed, but just at the moment he is attracting a lot of attention.”

“Not from me. Never heard of him.”

“His notoriety is not mentioned in the German papers, but he is of great interest to Germany. The glassy eye of Reichsmarschall Göring is on him. He wants to sell the Reichsmarschall a ridiculous fake painting.”

“If it’s ridiculous how did the Reichsmarschall ever cast his glassy eye on it?”

“Because Letztpfennig, who is probably the most left-handed schlemiel in the art world at present, is hawking his fake around, and if it were real it would be the great find of the century. Nothing less than a major work by Hubertus van Eyck.”

“Not Jan van Eyck?”

“No; Hubertus, Jan’s brother who died in 1426, quite young. But Hubertus was a very great painter. It was he who designed and painted quite a bit of the magnificent Adoration of the Lamb, which is at Ghent. Jan finished it. There aren’t many pictures by Hubertus, and the appearance of one now is bound to create a sensation. But it is a fake.”

“How do you know?”

“I know because I feel it in my bones. It is my ability to feel things in my bones that lifts me above the general run of art experts. We all have sensitive bones, of course. But I am a painter myself, and I know more about how the great painters of the past worked than even Berenson, because Berenson is not a painter, and his bones keep changing their mind; he has attributed some very remarkable pictures to as many as three painters over a period of twenty years, to the dismay of their owners. When I know a thing I know it forever. And Letztpfennig’s van Eyck is a fake.”

“You’ve seen it?”

“I don’t have to see it. If Letztpfennig vouches for it, it’s a fake. He has made a tiny reputation among gullible people, but I know him through and through. He is the worst kind of scoundrel—an unlucky, muddling scoundrel. And he must be destroyed.”

“Meister—”

“Yes?”

“I have never mentioned this, because it seems tactless, but I have been told that you possess the Evil Eye. Why don’t you simply destroy Letztpfennig yourself?”

“Oh, what a dreadful world we live in! How spitefully people talk! The Evil Eye! Of course, I know that stupid people say that, merely because one or two people to whom I have taken a dislike have had unfortunate accidents. Only a broken bone, or losing their sight, or something of that sort. Never anything fatal. I am still a Catholic, you know; I would recoil from killing a rival.”

“But don’t you want me to kill Letztpfennig?”

“I spoke in terms of melodramatic exaggeration, to get your full attention. I only want you to kill him professionally.”

“Oh, I see. Nothing serious.”

“If he dies of chagrin, that is because he is over-sensitive. Nobody’s fault but his own. Psychological suicide. Not uncommon.”

“This is just a matter of professional rivalry, is it?”

“Do you suppose I would elevate such an idiot as Letztpfennig to the status of a rival? A rival to me! You must think I hold my abilities in low esteem. No, he must go because he is dangerous.”

“Dangerous to the trade of selling dubious pictures to the Reich?”

“How coarsely you judge these things! It is the Lutheran streak in you—a perverse, self-destroying concept of morality. You refuse to see things as they are. I, and several people of whom you know one or two, am carefully securing some Italian art from the German Reich in exchange for pictures they like better. And not one of those pictures has been a fake—only a picture that has been assisted to put its best face foremost. The chain of action is carefully calculated. Everything goes through people with unexceptionable credentials, and we never pitch the note too high—no Dürers, no Cranachs. And now this Flemish buffoon appears with a fake Hubertus van Eyck, and wants gigantic sums either in cash or in paintings the Reich thinks it can spare, and he has the effrontery to haggle, and bring in an American bidder for his picture, with the result that the Dutch government is intervening in the matter, and God alone knows what beans may be spilled.”

“Could you give me some facts? I now know the range of your passion; I’d just like to know what Letztpfennig has done, and what you want me to do.”

“There is a very nice strain of common sense in you, Corniche. Your family background is in banking, is it not? Not that my experience of bankers puts them above art dealers in matters of probity. But they manage to look and sound so trustworthy, even when they are not. Well—this all began about two years ago when Jean-Paul Letztpfenmg let it be known that during a jaunt to Belgium he had come upon a picture in an old country house that he bought because he wanted an old canvas. Idiot! Who wants an old canvas unless he means to fake something with it? Anyhow—he says he cleaned the picture and found it to be a painting of The Harrowing of Hell. You know the subject?”

“I know what it is. I’ve never seen a painting of it.”

“They are extremely rare. It was a favourite theme in manuscript illuminations and sometimes in stained glass, but it did not appeal to painters. It is Christ redeeming the souls of the better class of pagans from Hell, where they had presumably languished until His death on the Cross. Well—if it were real and not something Letztpfennig had fudged up himself, it would be interesting, and if it were in the Gothic style it might reasonably go to the Führermuseum, if the German experts passed it. Though those highly intelligent men have so far shown themselves willing to deal only with reputable people like the group with whom I—and you, now that Drollig Hansel has given such satisfaction—are associated. But Letztpfennig, like the blockhead he is, asserts that a signature—by which he means a monogram—is on the picture that establishes it as the work of Hubertus van Eyck.

“When that leaked out, there was a sensation, and an immediate request for information and a chance to bid from an American collector. One of the biggest, and when I tell you that his agent and expert is Addison Thresher you will know whom I am talking about. And there were complications, because, as you know, the Reichsmarschall is a keen collector himself, and if there were a Hubertus van Eyck to be had, he wanted it. To be paid for, I need hardly tell you, by paintings from German museums. Great men are above trivialities in such negotiations. He offered, or his agents offered on his behalf, some splendid Italian things, and Letztpfennig was out of his meagre wits trying to decide whether he should grab the American dollars at once, or grab the Italian pictures, for resale in the States.

“That was when the Dutch government stepped in. You know how dearly they love the Reich. Their Ministry of Fine Art said that a great masterpiece by Hubertus van Eyck was a national treasure and could not leave the country. You would have thought that Belgium would have intervened and said that the picture had, after all, been found in Belgium, but nothing was heard from Belgium and that made Addison Thresher suspicious that the picture had never been in Belgium and was probably a fake.