Rembrandt's Ghost by Paul Christopher Page B

sparkling blue, and he looked as though he was always on the verge of delivering the punch line of a particularly dirty joke. Shneegarten was invariably dressed in a decades-out-of-date gray Harris tweed three-piece suit no matter what the weather. On his overlarge feet, he wore ancient Birkenstock sandals. He had been born in Germany or Argentina, no one knew for sure which. According to Shneegarten he still lived in England using a student’s visa.
    He was, as he’d once told Finn: “Entirely unique. Search for Shneegarten on your Giggle or whatever you call it and you will find nothing. Nothing, I tell you! I am unique among men! There is only one Shneegarten and he is me!” The old man had been at the institute since before the war and had been friend and adviser to all three founders, industrialist Samuel Courtauld, diplomat and collector Lord Lee of Fareham, and the art historian Sir Robert Witt.
    Shneegarten had been a pioneer in the field of X-ray fluorescence and infrared analysis of paintings. Using these methods he had conceived of and created a database of artists’ fingerprints that had saved more than one museum’s curator from being fooled by clever forgeries.
    Retired from active teaching long ago, Shneegarten now occupied a rabbit warren of lofty attic rooms on the top floor of the institute, which was only accessible by climbing several sets of dusty staircases and one extremely rickety spiral one made out of cast iron that shivered and clanged as Finn Ryan and Billy Pilgrim climbed it. In one of these attic rooms they found the professor bent over an immense canvas that looked like some kind of Turkish or Moroccan street scene. Shneegarten was examining a tiny square of the paintingwith a jeweler’s loupe screwed into the socket of his right eye and he was rubbing a cotton swab delicately over the area. There was a faint odor of ordinary soap.
    It was late afternoon now and it had started raining again; drops pattering lightly on the large, soot-grimy skylight overhead. The illumination on the room was an almost magical silver that seemed to fill the atmosphere with a foreshadowing intensity. He stood up as Finn and Billy stepped into the workroom and popped the jeweler’s loupe out of his eye.
    “Ah,” he said with a smile. “My American girl-friend!” He winked at Billy. “Believe me, sir, if I was only seventy years younger, I would sweep her off her feet and have my way with her! Depend on it!”
    “And I’d probably let you,” said Finn, smiling as she poked the man lightly in his round, protruding belly. He laughed uproariously and poked her back. She introduced Billy.
    “Ah yes, the impoverished lord you mentioned. I’m honored, Your Grace.”
    “William, or Billy if you’d like. Your Grace makes me sound like the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
    Shneegarten smiled.
    “What are you working on?” Finn asked.
    “A dirty Delacroix,” the old man grunted wearily. “Another one of those dreadful things he painted in Tangier, people rioting, women with improbable breasts being raped in improbable positions, horses underfoot dying awful deaths. A terrible lot of meaningless activity and violence. The Quentin Tarantino of his day!” He nodded toward the package under Billy’s arm. They’d wrapped it in Tulkinghorn’s salmon-pink copy of the
Financial Times
and tied it up with twine. “That is for me?” said Shneegarten.
    “Yes,” said Finn. Billy handed the package to the professor. He sliced the string with a scalpel, neatly took off the newspaper, laying it aside on the worktable, and looked at the painting.
    He nodded. “The frame is almost certainly Foggini as you said on the telephone.” He screwed the loupe into his eye socket again and bent down. “Brushstrokes are appropriate for Rembrandt’s studio, although I would say the subject matter looks more like Jan van Leiden or Willem van der Velde. Just look at that sky! Those Dutch, they always painted the sky as though