Rembrandt's Ghost by Paul Christopher Page A

paintings this old get relined every fifty years or so—the original canvas is bonded to a newer blank canvas to give it strength. It’s usually done with wax or resin. This is different. The canvas with the ship painting is a mask, a ghost image put over the original wood panel.”
    “You think there’s something underneath?” Sir James said.
    “The Nazi label probably dates from 1940. The Goudstikker label is much older. I think somebody took an old Rembrandt copy and stuck it on the wood panel to hide the identity of the original painting from Goering’s people.”
    “How can you be sure?” Billy asked.
    “I know a man at the Courtauld who can help us.”
    “Today?” queried Tulkinghorn.
    “Why the sudden urgency?”
    “The Amsterdam house,” explained Tulkinghorn.
    “What about it?” asked Billy.
    “Mr. Boegart’s instructions are quite clear, I’m afraid,” the old man replied. “The house, like the other bequests, must be taken into possession personally and by both of you within fifteen days or the items will revert to the estate.”
    “The boat as well?” said Finn. “That means we have to go to Amsterdam and then Malaysia? All within two weeks?”
    “Precisely, Miss Ryan.” Sir James cleared his throat. “And the
Batavia Queen
is a ship, not a boat.”
    “What’s the difference?” Finn asked, suddenly irritated with Tulkinghorn’s old-fashioned nit-picking.
    “The usual definition is that a ship is big enough to carry its own boat,” said Billy. “But this is all madness. Why on earth is Boegart doing it?”
    “At a guess, I should venture to say that he is trying to tell you something,” offered Tulkinghorn.
    “He’s trying to get us to follow in his footsteps,” Finn said.
    “But why?” Billy asked.
    Finn looked at the ornately framed object on the table in front of them, still bearing the ugly emblem of its violent past and the name of a man long dead. “I think it starts with the painting,” she answered. “And that means a trip to the Courtauld.”
     
     
     

Chapter

7

     
    Somerset House is a gigantic neoclassical building a quarter mile long. Its original function in 1775 was to be larger, more imposing, and more important than any other so-called national building in the world. Its secondary function was to provide office space for every government bureaucracy in England anyone could think of, from the tax department and the Naval Office down to the office of the King’s Bargekeeper, the Public Lottery, and the office of Peddlers and Hawkers. Over the years the bureaucracies have come and gone, but the huge building always remains. It occupies a single enormous block of London real estate bounded by the Strand, Lancaster Place, Surrey Street, and the Victoria Embankment.
    When it moved from its old quarters in Portman Square to the Somerset House North Wing on the Strand in 1989, the Courtauld Institute of Art, with all its galleries, laboratories, lecture theaters, and libraries, barely made a ripple at its new home. Few people outside the rarified world of art history would have known the Courtauld even existed if it hadn’t been for the less than illustrious tenure of its onetime director and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, the infamous and disgraced KGB spy, Sir Anthony Blunt. The Courtauld, however, managed to survive the revelations about its former director’s seedy past, and over the years it became one of the world’s great postgraduate institutions concerned with art in all its aspects.
    Dr. Alpheus Duff Shneegarten, professor emeritus in the Department of Conservation at the Courtauld, was a very short, very round man in his eighties who might well have been the model for Tolkien’s Hobbit. He had a large head that was ten percent snow-white hair, forty percent hooked patrician nose, and the rest of it jutting chin with an ancient curved briar stuck between large, nicotine-stained teeth and a pair of smiling lips. His intelligent eyes were