King Me (Forever Wilde 7)

“The man had brought five pieces for the professor to evaluate. I was so honored to have been chosen to help. The professor had blown all kinds of smoke at me about how clever I was, how special and high achieving. This was a rare treat that would be a boon to my resume.”

King’s fingers grazed softly through my chest hair as he continued. “I identified four of them as forgeries even though all five were actually fake. The art collector was stunned. He and the professor asked me to explain my findings. I told them the first one was a forgery since it used a fastener that was a hundred years newer than the purported age of the piece. The second was a forgery because I’d just seen the original at the Musée d’Orsay two days before. The third couldn’t be genuine because some of the metal framing had zero scratches which was impossible for the combination of that kind of metal and age.”

He rolled onto his back and ran his hand through his own hair. “The fourth was a joke. Turkeys weren’t found in China in the fourteenth century for god’s sake. And finally…”

King rolled back onto his side, reaching for my hand and threading our fingers together again almost without thinking. “Finally they showed me a lesser-known Miró sketch.” King’s hand tightened in mine. “It was a forgery I’d made.” He said it softer than the rest, like he was terrified of admitting it.

Every molecule of the art crime investigator in me began processing this information at Mach speed until I realized this was his quid pro quo.

He was telling me this—giving me this—to pay me back for reassuring him about his family.

I squeezed his hand back. “Where’d they get it?”

“My apartment. Suddenly, I realized I hadn’t been picked because I was teacher’s pet. I’d been found out… or targeted. For some reason, I’d been specifically chosen because of my secret hobby.”

“You were an art forger? For fun?”

Other than the Van Gogh job, I couldn’t remember any Le Chaton cases where we’d discovered a forgery in place of a stolen original, but that didn’t mean there weren’t a million forgeries that had been put in place in heists we hadn’t discovered yet.

“No. No, Falcon. I promise. I did it for me. I did it because… because I wanted to see if I could. To prove that I could. But I swear I never did anything with them back then. They were just for me.”

I could hear the desperate sincerity in his voice. While I was relieved he hadn’t been in the forgery business, I was more affected by his earnest desire not to disappoint me. He obviously cared about my opinion, and that was a gift of sorts. A concession.

“So how did they get a hold of the Miró forgery? I mean, how did they find out about it?”

“I found out later that someone I’d brought back to my place for sex had snooped around while I was sleeping. He ended up sleeping with Elek at some point and mentioned it. The guy was a fellow art student, so he’d recognized what it was and how good it was, I guess. The art world in Paris is smaller than you think.”

He took a deep breath. “So Elek sent him back to sleep with me again to get more information. This time, the guy took photos of the work. Not only the Miró but also some of the other pieces I’d done.”

“And Elek was intrigued enough to recruit you,” I suggested.

King nodded. “And the way he went about it was public enough to ensure an implied threat to my position at the Sorbonne.”

“Why did you say it was the real thing when it wasn’t?”

“I wanted to see if either of them would correct me. It was strictly ego. Up till then, no one else had ever seen any of my forgery attempts. And here was a chance to have not only a renowned, esteemed professor of Eastern European antiquities at le Sorbonne, but also this wealthy art collector who seemed to know his way around an antiquity… it was hubris.”

It was like watching a movie. The story was fantastical. “What happened after that? How did you come to… work with Elek?”

I hated picturing him with the older man. I’d now seen hours of video surveillance and reams of photos of the Hungarian bastard. The man was a fifty-five-year-old pompous jackass who equated flashy displays of wealth with self-worth. At least that’s the way it had always seemed to me.

“When I said it was the original, the professor gasped and looked over at Elek, clearly impressed the man had brought an original Miró sketch to his office. I was surprised he didn’t genuflect at Elek. Meanwhile, Elek’s eyes twinkled at me with a knowing look. And when we were done, he invited me out for coffee. I should have said no, but I wanted my fucking sketch back. And I wanted to know what the hell was going on.”