“Damn!” Thalia slapped her forehead with the palm of one hand. “Of course! I knew that! Why didn’t I think of it?”

“According to the documentation, a lot of pretty famous people didn’t make the connection either.”

“But why?”

“Blinded by the beauty, perhaps. Or maybe it’s because they wanted to believe it was old. Art is in the mind and so is what we believe. You want to believe because you can get a higher price for a genuine piece.”

Thalia murmured her agreement, then pointed to the two Renoirs. “It’s pretty obvious to me that the one on the right is the fake. It has no finesse.”

Zoe chuckled. “Actually, they’re both by Renoir. When he needed some money, he’d dash off his own copy of one of his best-selling works and sell it.”

“Of course,” Thalia said. “I should have remembered that. It’s just been so long since I handled anything so recent. Most everything I’ve dealt with in the past few years has been six or eight thousand years old or more.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Zoe nodded.

“It does raise the question of legitimacy,” Thalia said as she looked from one Renoir to another. “I mean, it is a genuine Renoir, but…” She thought for a moment. “I suppose there’s nothing wrong with an artist copying himself.”

“Nothing at all,” Zoe agreed. “Some, like Renoir, did it for money. Some artists were in love with a concept, returning to the same subject time after time. But even more significantly, I think that other artists returned to the exact same pieces because they believed they had become better painters and sculptors and wanted to do justice to subjects they had fallen in love with.”

Thalia nodded slowly as she thought about this. The faint rumble of a train filled the silence with bass notes. The floor vibrated beneath their feet.

“Okay then, how about the Vermeer?” Thalia said finally, pointing to a painting of Joseph in Egypt Revealing His Identity to His Brothers.

“The Vermeers. Plural,” Zoe said as she leaned forward and pulled a second painting from behind the first. “Actually there are two.”

“Zoe!” Thalia said suddenly, her face wide with surprise. “This Vermeer… Miracle at Galilee—” She pointed to the one Zoe had just revealed. “What’s it doing here?”

“I added it to the collection this afternoon right before we knocked off. It was in a corner. Somehow I had overlooked it earlier.”

“It’s…”

“Uh-huh.” Zoe nodded. “Without a doubt another Van Meergeren. Every Vermeer in the collection was a fake except the one which struck me so deeply that first day I visited Max.”

Hans van Meergeren was perhaps the most famous known art forger of modern times. A Dutch painter of great skill and little inspiration or originality, he was famous for his forgeries of Delft genius Jan Vermeer. The paintings, supposedly from Vermeer’s “lost years” in Italy, received widespread acceptance by many collectors and curators. His elaborate counterfeits were exposed after World War II when he was accused of being a Nazi collaborator and selling them national art treasures. To save his skin, Van Meergeren confessed that the paintings he had sold to the Nazis—including one called Christ and the Adulteress that Reichsmarschall Herman Goering purchased—were forgeries that he had painted himself.