Free Brush With Death by Hailey Lind

interdisciplinary degree, I suppose,” I muttered.
    â€œIt’s almost like she doesn’t need us,” Mary said to Pete, who nodded solemnly and sank onto the chair facing the red velvet sofa, coffee in hand.
    Apart from the seating area, my disheveled desk, and the kitchenette, the studio was given over to art. Three huge windows along the back wall and two skylights high above suffused the studio with light, even on the grayest of days. Four easels held canvases in varying degrees of completion; mismatched bookshelves were filled with supplies ranging from mineral spirits to broken tiles; and the huge worktables were piled with half-finished projects, including one hundred linear feet of fluted curtain rods and five hundred rod rings that Mary and I were painting, gilding, and distressing for a showroom at the San Francisco Design Center.
    I reminded myself that the curtain rods were due the day after tomorrow as I started calling departments at the University of California at Berkeley, known locally as “Cal.” On the third try I reached a secretary in the Anthropology Department who recognized Cindy’s name. She explained that there were 142 graduate students in the department and she couldn’t be expected to know where they all were, now, could she, but agreed to leave a message in Cindy’s mail cubby. She also volunteered that Cindy’s dissertation adviser, Dr. Gossen, would be available during office hours tomorrow from eleven to one.
    I hung up, turned back to the computer, and brought up an image of La Fornarina. She gazed at me serenely but refused to share her secrets. I searched for fake Raphaels but found only a reference to the legend of the great master himself perpetrating a fraud on an innkeeper by dashing off a tabletop trompe l’oeil (literally, a trick of the eye) of a napkin holding several coins to pay his tab. The story might well be apocryphal, but many revered Old Masters had indulged in a spot of forgery when it suited their purposes. Michelangelo in particularwas fond of fakery, and had recently—five hundred years after his death—been accused of forging an ancient Roman statue. Given our modern standards, the attribution sent the statue’s value sky-high since a work by the incomparable Renaissance artist was far more desirable than yet another anonymous Roman relic.
    Next I checked the art crime registries and museum security networks for chatter about La Fornarina. Italian authorities had stored the painting during World War I, but ever since it had been on display in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica at the Barberini Palace, seldom allowed out on tour. Crispin Engels’ 1879 copy had been catalogued in the same storage facility, along with numerous reproductions by lesser artists. Except for a brief mention of my grandfather’s 1966 scam, there was nothing about known forgeries of La Fornarina. But as an eminent New York museum curator once told me, we only notice the bad forgeries; the good ones go undetected.
    I was about to log off when my eye caught a reference to an Italian fake buster named Donato Sandino. “Donato, you sly devil,” I muttered. “Are you by any chance ‘Doughnut Spumoni’?”
    I kept reading. After outing Grandfather’s forgery of La Fornarina in 1966, Donato Sandino had accepted a position in the Italian Ministry of Culture. According to an article in Curator’s Monthly, in the early 1980s Sandino and “an unnamed American woman” had raised questions about the authenticity of the Barberini’s most famous Raphael. Shortly afterward the inquiry had been dropped, and Sandino left the employ of the Italian government to become the director of the prestigious Dietrich Laboratories in Germany. Dietrich Labs had a well-deserved reputation for uncovering art fakes of all kinds. And now Donato Sandino was after my grandfather.
    It had never occurred to me to ask Georges