The Prisoner's Wife by Gerard Macdonald

beautiful—but in truth I thought it was fake. Sometimes one gets that feeling. Though Vincent mentions such a canvas in his letters.”
    â€œYou told the buyer?”
    â€œOf course. He was called Lamar Grant. A man from Atlanta.”
    â€œYoung?”
    â€œHe was older than me. Forty. Something like that. Good-looking, you would say, conservative, right wing, far too much money. Family money. Not enough to do in life. He thought he was smart. Smartest guy in the room, he called himself.” She laughed. “A babe magnet, too. To me, not at all magnetic.”
    Unlike her.
    â€œHe didn’t believe he’d bought a fake?”
    â€œNo. Not for a heartbeat. He told me, come on, you think that, so prove it.” She shrugged. “With van Gogh, you know, proof is hard. If you are faking, if you are professional, you can search around—you still buy nineteenth-century painters’ canvas, if you wish. In Arles, even. And stretchers, the same age. We prove nothing from that. The age is right, it will check right; too recent to be wrong. The first time I went to Arles I even talked with Jeanne Calment. When she was a girl, in a shop there, she remembered serving him. Remembered serving Vincent.”
    In his mind, Shawn did the math. Martha had talked of van Gogh.
    â€œCome on,” he said. “Don’t give me that. Even a peasant like me knows dates. This woman, she’d be, what, hundred fifteen? Give or take.”
    â€œGive. When I met her, she was a hundred and twenty-one.”
    He glanced at her face, in profile. “Jesus. That’s a healthy life.”
    â€œSmoked until she was ninety. All her life, drank wine.” She watched him watching her. “Then,” she said, “you know, with a canvas that might be a fake—you’re not sure, of course, you’re guessing—it’s just a sense—you check the pigments. We know exactly what paints van Gogh used for each canvas. Most of the time he couldn’t afford to buy colors, where he was, in the south; he had to write and ask his brother to buy. His brother Theo, in Paris. We have the letters—like I say, in one of them, he mentions La Grenade. He spells out the paints he would need. So, if the pigments are right, if the canvas is right, how do we prove a fake?”
    â€œYou lost me.”
    â€œWe check the provenance. We talk to the former owners—the ones who are meant to have had the canvas. The first I went to see was an old woman in Aix. They said she bought La Grenade —or her father, I think, had it—from a Nazi collection. Always doubtful, those so-called ex-Nazi works. The woman lived on the Cours Mirabeau. Such a beautiful avenue. I booked a room on the Cours; next day I was going to visit. I was getting ready for bed when Lamar—this guy who is paying me—he comes right in my room.”
    â€œYou had no clothes on?”
    She made a gesture that could have been contemptuous or could have been rude.
    â€œI had clothes on. He started pulling them off me. He drank too much, that man, did a lot of coke, but God, he was strong. I knew he was going to rape me. I had a vision of my father doing this thing. With my father, I don’t know if it’s true or if I imagined that. When I asked my mother she said of course it was all imagination, I was stupid, and anyway, she told me, it’s nothing. Most girls, she said, most girls get raped.”
    He was driving faster now; way too fast for these roads. “There’s a thought. What did you do? I mean, in the hotel?”
    â€œI screamed. The door was half open—he’d left it that way. He was a careless man. Darius came in.”
    â€œThen what?”
    â€œIt was the first time I met him. The next thing, Lamar is on the floor. On his back.” She flipped a hand. “Just like that. Of course I had no idea, but Darius was a judo brown belt. I think brown, is that right? Lamar