The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery) Read Online Free PDF Page A

professor this way, she bristled anew. Creep , she thought.
    But Prentice responded only with a polite, strained smile, and left.
    “You know, Jerry,” Clark said, watching him go, “I don’t think that man likes me.” The smile broadened, the crinkles deepened. Alix expected a wink and she got one.
    “Don’t look at me,” Jerry said. “I can neither confirm nor deny.”
    “Really, it surpasseth understanding,” said Clark. “But Alix, what ‘concerns’ you about our prize possession here?”
    “The museum’s number-one attraction, so I hear,” Jerry offered. “As determined by the latest thing in eyeball mono-macro-moto-ridiculization .” Never let a good line go to waste, that was Jerry’s motto.
    Clark smiled. Alix didn’t. She hesitated before taking it any further without something more than a feeling to go on, but inasmuch as the cat was halfway out of the bag . . . “I assume you’re satisfied it’s a genuine Pollock?” she said.
    “And you’re not?” Theatrically, he clapped his hand to his forehead. “God help us, the Art Whisperer strikes again!”
    This time she did smile, but weakly. Lately she was hearing more references to herself as the Art Whisperer, and while at first it had amused and even flattered her, it was getting a little old now.
    “I wondered how long it was going to take,” Clark went on playfully. “I mean, I knew it was going to happen, of course—your reputation precedes you—but do you really have to do your thing with our Pollock ? Couldn’t you pick another one? Any other one? Please ? There’s a Childe Hassam in Gallery Two that’s always gotten on my nerves. Let me show it to you and maybe you could—”
    “Clark, I’m serious. There’s something . . . something not right with this picture. I know it’s there, I can almost see it, it’s trying to jump out at me, but—”
    “But at this point you can’t say what it is. Am I right?”
    She nodded dejectedly. “Yet.”
    “Ah, the old connoisseur’s eye.” He threw an amused wink at Jerry.
    Connoisseur’s eye, another term that was starting to bug her. Or not the term so much—it had once been used with respect—but the implied derision that often went along with it nowadays. To a lot of people in the art world—and Clark’s manner indicated he was one of them—the idea that anyone could claim such a faculty was either snake oil or, more tolerantly, self-delusion. The only ways to determine the authenticity of a painting, so the prevailing wisdom went, were through painstaking scholarship and rigorous scientific analysis— evidence —and not some nebulous, mysterious “expert” first impression that was too woolly to put into words.
    Those who took this position, and they were the majority, had a lot of history on their side. The pronouncements of so-called connoisseurs, including many of the most respected ones, had in the end been proven wrong again, and again, and again. Alix was well aware of this, but held fast to her confidence in her own instinctive judgments. Like plenty of others, she had the training, scholarship, and experience it took to offer a credible opinion on whether a painting was fake or not, but like hardly anybody else, she was also blessed (or cursed, it sometimes seemed) with the innate ability to unconsciously reduce it all into an instant, totally intuitive judgment call that she couldn’t back up with words—not at first. She couldn’t do it with every painting or every painter, but when the feeling was there, and when the artist concerned was an artist she “connected” with, there was no mistaking it. This was the fifth time her connoisseur’s eye had spotted a fake where none had been suspected, and so far she was batting four for four. Every single one had turned out not to be what it was supposed to be.
    There was one thing that was making her nervous this time around, though. Jackson Pollock was an artist with whom she didn’t connect. She