“Barton,” Stone said, “I’m in some doubt as to whether you’ve completely recovered your memory.”
“I’m not entirely certain, myself,” Barton said. “I seem to remember the things I try to, but I don’t know if I’m just avoiding thinking about the things I think I might not remember.”
Stone shook his head. “Let’s start with the basics: If I leave you in Danbury, buying a van, will you be able to find your way home?”
“Yes. I found my way home an hour ago, didn’t I? From what the doctor in New York told me, once memory starts to return, it continues. Maybe it stops, and some things can’t be recovered, but there’s no regression.”
“That makes sense, I guess. I’m just concerned about leaving you alone in Connecticut with no sense of whether you’ll be safe.”
“Safety is a different question,” Barton said. “My safety is in the possibility that whoever put me in the hospital thought he had put me in the grave.”
“You’re speaking in the singular. Was it one man?”
“I don’t know; he was the most convenient pronoun.”
“Do you have any memory at all of how you got into difficulties?”
“No.”
“But you think it was connected with the secretary?”
Barton looked at Stone as if he were a simple child. “There are two secretaries; one of them is gone, and so is my van. What do you deduce from that?”
“All right, all right. Is there a way to figure out whether the one in the barn is the original or the reproduction?”
“I can get my people in there and, among the three of us, we can probably figure that out. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them made some sort of mark on the reproduction.”
“Then I think you should get them in there, so we’ll know which one we’re dealing with.”
“Why? Whoever has the other one won’t be able to tell the difference. No auction house will be able to tell the difference, not that they could auction it without getting caught.”
“So you think it will be disposed of privately?”
“I think whoever did this already had a buyer. If you were a thief of art you wouldn’t bother to steal, say, a Van Gogh, unless you already had a buyer, would you?”
“I guess not, but what about provenance? Won’t the buyer demand it?”
“Either the buyer is an expert or fancies himself one, or he’ll hire an unscrupulous expert to authenticate it. Provenance can be arranged.”
“Is the piece insured?”
“Yes, but only for what I paid for it. That would be unsatisfactory recompense for the effort I’ve put into this project.”
“But you can sell the one you have, can’t you?”
“I always meant to keep the reproduction for myself,” Barton said. “Of course, merely owning the reproduction, keeping it in my house, would keep the insurance company from paying for the theft, because their experts would think it the original.”
“Which it may well be.”
“Yes. I could never let anyone in the house again, unless I represented it as the reproduction, and I couldn’t afford to insure the piece for what it would bring at auction.”
“This is awfully confusing,” Stone said.
“I’m the one who’s supposed to be confused,” Barton said.
“It seems to be contagious,” Stone replied.
Following Barton’s directions, they pulled into a car dealership, and Barton pointed across the lot. “There,” he said, pointing to a line of new vans, “that’s the one I want, the second in line.”