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crooks recognized him (and they would be trying more than the general public), it would be more profitable to kidnap him than to turn the attention of the police to him. “Why,” Tom asked, “did you take your brother’s passport? Haven’t you got a passport?”
    “Yes. A new one.” Frank had sat down, in the same corner of the sofa as before. “I don’t know. Maybe because he’s older and I felt safer. We look a little bit alike. Only he’s blonder.” Frank winced as if with shame.
    “You get along with Johnny? You like him?”
    “Oh, pretty well. Sure.” Frank looked at Tom.
    That was a genuine answer, Tom felt. “Got along all right with your father?”
    Frank looked toward the fireplace. “It’s hard to talk about since—”
    Tom let him struggle.
    “First he wanted Johnny to take an interest in Pierson—the company, I mean, then he wanted me to. Johnny can’t make it into Harvard Business School, or he doesn’t want to. Johnny’s interested in photography .” Frank said it as if it were something bizarre, and gave Tom a glance. “So Dad then started on me. This was—oh, more than a year ago. I kept saying I wasn’t sure, because it’s a very big—business, you know, and why should I want to—dedicate my life to it.” There was a flash of wrath in Frank’s brown eyes.
    Tom waited.
    “So—maybe no, we didn’t get along so well—if I’m honest.” Frank picked up his coffee cup. He had not tasted the brandy, and maybe didn’t need it, because he was talking quite well.
    The seconds passed, nothing more came from Frank, and out of mercy, because Tom could see there was more pain to come, Tom said, “I noticed you looking at the Derwatt.” He nodded toward “Man in Chair” over the fireplace. “Do you like it?— It’s my favorite.”
    “It’s one I don’t know. I know that one—from a catalogue.” Frank said with a glance over his left shoulder.
    He meant “The Red Chairs,” a genuine Derwatt, and Tom knew at once which catalogue the boy had probably looked at, a recent one from the Buckmaster Gallery. The gallery now made an effort to keep the forgeries out of its catalogues.
    “Were some really forged?” Frank asked.
    “I don’t know,” Tom said, with his best effort at sincerity. “Never was proven. No. I seem to remember Derwatt came to London to verify—certain ones.”
    “Yes, I thought maybe you were there, because you know the people at that gallery, don’t you?” Now Frank perked up a bit. “My father has a Derwatt, you know.”
    Tom was glad to veer slightly. “What one?”
    “It’s called ‘The Rainbow.’ Do you know it? Beige colors below, and a rainbow mostly red above. All fuzzy and jagged. You can’t tell what city it is, Mexico or New York.”
    Tom knew. A Bernard Tufts forgery. “I know,” Tom said, as if with fond memory of a genuine. “Your father liked Derwatt?”
    “Who doesn’t? There’s something warm about his stuff—human, I mean, which you don’t find in modern painting all the time. I mean—if someone wants warmth. Francis Bacon is tough and real, but so is this , even if it’s just a couple of little girls.” The boy looked over his left shoulder at the two little girls in the red chairs, flaming red fire behind them, a picture that could certainly be called warm because of its subject matter, but Tom knew Frank meant a warmth of attitude on Derwatt’s part, which showed in his repeated outlines of bodies and faces.
    Tom felt a curiously personal affront, because apparently the boy did not prefer “Man in Chair,” which showed an equal warmth on the part of the painter, though neither the man nor the chair was on fire. It was a phony, though. That was why Tom preferred it. At least Frank had not yet asked if it might be a phony, a question which if he put it would be based on something he had heard or read, Tom thought. “You evidently enjoy paintings.”
    Frank squirmed a very little. “I like Rembrandt a lot.