“Let’s see it,” said Teller.

I pulled the object out of the box and held it up to the light. It fit in one hand.

I said, “This is the mechanical ballerina that Joseph Stalin took with him everywhere he went. He took it to Berlin to the 1924 Die Kunst der Fälschung Conference and to Prague the year after. In his memoirs he called it his most precious object. He received it as a gift from a teacher when he was attending the Tiflis Theological Seminary in the Caucasus, and later he gave it to Ekaterina, his first wife. She died in 1907 holding it in her hand. It was on his office desk in Moscow for thirty years and can be seen in rare photographs by Slotkin and Dubrovny dated 1930 and 1947. In his later years, when he’d co-opted Zhdanov into murdering all of his opposition and Stalin couldn’t sleep, he kept it by his bedside. They say he made the ballerina dance all night. Look. It still works.”

I flicked a switch and the first bars of The Nutcracker began to play – a tinny jingle barely audible. The metal dancer, as tall as my pinkie finger, cranked into action with a staccato plié and surlevé. The paint had long worn off the figurine but a slight smile remained carved into her metal face.

Teller put down his pistol.

“Prove it,” he said.

“Prove what?”

“The provenance.”

There was a moment of silence, which he broke. “Where d’you get it?”

“I can’t give my sources, but it was moved from the State Historical Museum in Moscow to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, then onto the National Museum of Georgia.”

“Georgia? Where? Atlanta?”

I paused and felt a bead of sweat cut loose on my forehead.

“No,” I said. “Georgia the country. Where Stalin was from.”

“What the hell,” he said. “Stalin was Russian.”

“Born in Georgia.”

Teller stared at me, then at the ballerina, then at me again.

“Jesus,” I said. “Just fucking google it. Georgia’s a country.”

He kept looking at me.

I said, “The ballerina was thought to be lost in a museum fire. It turns up in Finland in the 1970s. The collector dies and his collection gets split between his four children. They hate each other and go their separate ways. Twenty years later the ballerina turns up in Argentina.”

“Argentina?”

“Argentina. In a cardboard box, in a finca outside . . .”

“A what?”

“A finca. A country house. Outside Buenos Aires. Some visiting Communist émigré recognizes it and steals it. Our people authenticate it. It’s the real deal. I gave you the price. The seller said it’s non-negotiable. Take it or leave it.”

“Sounds like a crock of shit to me, all these countries and made-up stories.”

“Objects of this value rarely come on the market. You don’t want it, that’s fine. I walk away. We have other offers.”

He spat onto the concrete floor between us and handed me a bag of money.

“Old style, huh?” I said.

“You gonna count it?”

“What do you think?”

***

I took the elevator to Rhonda Seligman’s office on West Links Avenue. I didn’t bother knocking and she didn’t bother feigning indignation.

“The iron ballerina,” I said. “That’ll be my last job. Teller pulled a gun on me and his goons were blocking the door. I’m out.”

“Wait,” she said. She was sitting at her large fake Louis XIV desk. “Teller isn’t violent.”

“What the fuck did you set me up for? They were Mafiosi. They even wore black leather jackets.”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry won’t cut it,” I said. “If they had a quarter of a brain cell between them, I’d be dead. Stalin and a fucking ballerina. You can’t make this shit up. Except you did.”

“We’ve sold to Teller before. He’s not known for that kind of thing.”

“I don’t give a shit what he’s known for. He pulled a gun on me. I’m out.”

I handed her a sports bag.

“Here’s your money. I took my cut already. And don’t even think of threatening me. If I die in the next twelve months, it triggers a message that goes directly to the FBI and a bunch of other folks and you’re out of business at best, in jail at worst. I’m not a squealer and I kept my nerve with Teller, but I’m out.”

“Sit down,” she said.

“No.”

I headed for the door.

“Wait!” she called after me. “Hey!”

I exited. I took the stairs and pushed open the big double doors. There were a few people milling about and the midday sun was almost blinding. She was right behind me, trying to keep up.

She said, “Teller was faking it. He’s with us.”

I stopped. “What?”

She ushered me into a side street.

“You have no idea,” she said. “You don’t know anything. Half the people you sell to aren’t the real buyers. More than half. They’re the middlemen – brokers and lackeys. You think a worm like Teller has a million dollars to buy a trinket? That isn’t even his real name.”

“Why did he pull a gun on me?”

“The people he works for are goons. They’re Mafia.”

“You just said he’s one of us.”

“He is. He’s playing a part. You’ve never heard of a double agent? An embedded asset? Jesus wept.”

***

“‘Jesus wept’ is the shortest verse in the King James Bible. But you know that already.”

I left a pause for effect, cleared my throat and leaned forward. They were listening, all three of them dressed in black raincoats, a wake of prehistoric birds.

“What I’m telling you now is that as Jesus wept, Bartholomew, one of his disciples, wiped Jesus’s eyes with the back of his hand and mixed the tears in a vial full of the waters of Galilee. Then he wrapped the vial in cloth and put it in a bronze tabernacle which he placed deep in the cave of Simon the Pious. There, it survived for twenty centuries, through wars and cataclysms of many kinds. Gentlemen, these are the tears of Jesus our Lord and savior. You have one chance to buy this vial. The Catholic Church would give me half of Christendom for it, more gold than in all the cathedrals of Latin America. I already told you the price. Let me know within the hour.”

We were in Gdansk and the rain wouldn’t stop. It rattled a tattoo on the window. The guy opposite me was an American representing a Polish shipping magnate and the office stank of whale oil. He nodded and said something in Polish to the two advisers. One of them initiated a bank transfer on a laptop while I waited in silence.

Eventually, the American said, “Where are you from in the States?”

“New York,” I said.

“Which part?”

I looked at my watch, heard the rain hammering. “I moved around.”

I checked my phone, saw the transfer had gone through, and got out of there.

***

The Fabrication Room back in the States is like something out of the bar scene in Star Wars: a freak show, fifteen kooks, crackpots, and deviants from different galaxies. There were Algerian forgers, Colombian counterfeiters, Danish furniture makers. There was Scaramucci the Fence from God knows what hellhole, but he had only one arm and he walked with a limp; Helmut the German who’d gone from stealing hubcaps to lifting Picassos in nine months; Mickey Six, who got his nickname from being sentenced to six years in prison three times, and served as the heavy; a researcher with a doctorate in History from Harvard; a geologist from the Sorbonne; an anthropologist from Cambridge; and a bunch of tech guys who faked all the documents.

Then there was the backroom where Stamowicz worked. He was a painter who specialized in Old Masters – particularly Titian and Giotto. His room was the largest in the building – a cross between a science lab, a library, and an art studio. He had pipettes, Bunsen burners, and test tubes full of chemical agents that he used to age the canvases, maybe five hundred art books, and pots of paint and brushes of every kind everywhere. The floor was laid out with old, pigment-spattered newspapers.

Stamowicz was the only one I spoke to regularly. We would hang out in his studio and shoot the shit, me in my everyman demotic, he in his screwball Eastern European argot. He didn’t take himself too seriously, but he was a genius. He’d fooled art historians from Paris to Pyongyang and he didn’t give a damn.

I once asked him why he didn’t just paint his own stuff. He said, “Because I have no talent.” I tried to reason with him but he said, “You think parrot is equal of Shakespeare?”

***

Rhonda Seligman gave me ‘Portrait with Parrot,’ an oil painting from the School of Rembrandt, to sell to one of the world’s biggest private collectors. To be precise, she gave me ‘Portrait with Parrot,’ a Stamowicz fake, to sell to one of the world’s biggest private collectors. But to everyone else it was a School of Rembrandt, a late work by the Dutchman Abraham van Gelder.

I’d told her, “I’ll do one more, then I’m out. And don’t give me anything involving the Mafia or skipping three time zones.” So she gave me the parrot.

I said I needed two months to do my research and get testimonials and she said, “You have four weeks.” As usual, she made up some impossibly prolix story about the provenance of the painting, but this was a School of Rembrandt, not some knockoff conceptual bullshit with two squiggles and a piece of chewing gum. I needed bona fides, which meant contacting a bunch of aesthetes in Boston and Amsterdam, Leiden and Jerusalem. I worked overtime. I hawked the picture around, and got my quotes: yes, School of Rembrandt, x-rayed, spectrometised, verified. The fake document manufacturers in the Fabrication Room did the rest.

My mark was a 65-year-old British woman, heiress to a fortune and matriarch to a family of art collectors. I figured she’d be stupid, like most rich people, but I figured wrong. As soon as I set foot in her office-cum-salon outside London I had a bad feeling. She appraised me immediately, the way you appraise a painting by an Old Master. The room was large and tastefully decorated with big color-field abstracts on the walls and expensive-looking vases on every surface, Qianlong and Ming style, dragons and arabesques. The light fixtures were hidden.

She was tall and slim and polite, the last of which I found intimidating. Most buyers you could imagine pissing in a field or eating hotdogs. Not her. She had money written all over her, and worse, intelligence. She offered me a seat and I took it.

“The piece was painted in 1648,” I began. “It’s from an estate sale: Count Louis Montferrand Orleans, in Geneva via Jerusalem and Leiden.”

I handed her a file full of testimonials. She took a derisive glance.

“Yes, you already sent me these,” she said. “Montferrand Orleans.” She pronounced it like a Frenchwoman. “I know the family. You say it came via Jerusalem?”

I was fucked already. She knew the family. Rhonda was supposed to have invented the family.

“Yes, Jerusalem.”

“Interesting,” she said and rubbed her chin. “But I’m more interested in the parrot. I’m wondering how this minor member of the Dutch bourgeoisie got hold of a parrot for this portrait because parrots were from the New World. And I’m not sure Rembrandt would have approved of the handling of the cloak in the image I saw. Too much sfumato. Don’t look so alarmed. I’m just thinking aloud. But I will need to inspect the canvas for myself.” She smiled.

Of course you will.

I’ve sold a sword owned by Miguel Hernández de Vaca, one of Columbus’s conquistadors. I’ve sold a farewell letter from Boethius to his wife written on parchment on October 23rd, 524 AD, hours before Boethius’s execution. I’ve sold Queen Isabella of Castile’s five-hundred-year-old velvet gloves, Karl Marx’s desk, the leather boots Fidel Castro wore in 1959 when he came down from the Sierra Maestra to take Havana, and Idi Amin’s salmon-pink necktie to a Hitler enthusiast in backwater Namibia. All fakes. But I’ve never tried to sell a School of Rembrandt oil painting to someone who knows Rembrandt’s shoe size and what he ate for breakfast.

He’s with us. That’s what Rhonda Seligman said about Teller, the buyer who pulled a pistol on me. Could this frosty, polite Englishwoman with an encyclopedia for a brain also be one of us? I doubted it.

“Please put it here,” she said and pointed to a table by the west wall. I took the painting from its reinforced portfolio bag and placed it on the flat surface. She opened a desk drawer and pulled out a flashlight, switched it on, and bent over the painting. “Oh,” she said. “Please make yourself at home. I’ll be a while. Would you like something to drink?”

“No, I’m fine. Thank you.” I sat. She examined.

At some point she began talking to herself. I tried to make out what she was saying, but I only caught snatches, individual words: pigmentation . . . canvas . . . discoloration. Then I realized she was talking into a recording device on the flashlight. This went on for what seemed like several days.

Suddenly, she looked up and asked, “Who painted it?”

“Abraham van Gelder,” I said. “He was a former pupil of . . .”

“No,” she said. A moment of silence passed between us. She caught my eye. “Who painted it?”

“I’m telling you. Abraham van Gelder of the School of . . . “

“No.” She stood up straight and stared at me square in the face. “You and I, perhaps for different reasons, both know that Abraham van Gelder didn’t paint this. I know because the background uses titanium white, which wasn’t invented until the twentieth century, and although the brushstrokes are a marvel, they aren’t Abraham van Gelder’s brushstrokes. They look more like Giotto. Or someone imitating Giotto. And so I ask you once again: who painted it?”

“Madam,” I said, “you’ve read the testimonials, the documents proving the provenance of the work. It’s been authenticated by some of the best minds in . . .”

“I don’t care who authenticated it. This painting isn’t by Abraham van Gelder.”

“I’m a salesman. I understand the work doesn’t appeal to you and so I rescind the offer.”

I got up from the chair, walked over as casually as I could, picked up the painting from the table, and returned it to its portfolio bag.

Without taking her eyes off me, she said, “The artist is highly skilled.”

Indeed. Stamowicz is a genius. But I wasn’t about to give him away.

Then she spoke again. “Was it Kurnov or Stamowicz?”

I looked at her sharply. She smiled. “Ah. Stamowicz,” she said.

***

The rain was still pounding. It seemed that everywhere I went I conjured a tropical storm. Berlin, Chicago, Gdansk, Amsterdam, London, the Gobi Desert. I shook out my umbrella, took the steps two at a time and barged through Rhonda Seligman’s door.

“Don’t bother to knock,” she said.

I opened the portfolio bag strapped to my back and pulled out ‘Portrait with Parrot.’

“She said it uses titanium white and the brushstrokes are wrong. She basically said Stamowicz fucked up and she mentioned him by name. And she knew the Montferrand Orleans family, which was supposed to be fictional. In other words, she had me by the balls. In other words, I’m done. I don’t need the money and I sure as hell don’t need Interpol knocking on my door. No hard feelings. Here’s the painting. Send my love to Stamowicz, the dumb fuck.”

Rhonda pulled some kind of face that I figured was meant to be enigmatic, but by that stage I was halfway out the door.

“Oh,” I said, “and by the way, you still need me alive. I drop dead, the FBI is on your ass.”

“You told me last time.”

“Adios.”

God knows what happened with the parrot painting. There’s no way Stamowicz makes that mistake or a fictional family turns out to be real. But I figured in the house of mirrors in which I lived, anything could happen. That room in the mansion outside London passed through my memory: color-field paintings that looked like Rothkos and vases that looked like Qianlong dynasty and Ming dynasty and a woman who looked and sounded like a British aristocrat, but if I know one damn thing in this life, it’s that nothing is what it seems.

I hailed a taxi and watched the grey city pulsing through the blur of the rain. When I got home, I took off my coat and felt something small and hard in the outside pocket. It was an iron ballerina.

“The fuck?”

I inspected it. It wasn’t the one I’d sold Teller. Maybe it was a souvenir from the Fabrication Room. Had they known I was leaving? Maybe it was a threat of some kind. Stalin was, after all, the biggest mass murderer in history. I sat on my sofa and examined the figure. A patina of rust on the plinth. A barely perceptible smile on the dancer’s face. I flicked a switch and felt a momentary sting as a globule of dark blood oozed out of my finger.

The opening bars of The Nutcracker rang out and the ballerina dipped and rose.