(though sometimes, in a burst of activity, he would dash off five paintings in a week). Beltracchi would typically spend a couple of hours on a painting, he told me; sometimes "two days," if it was a large canvas. Then Helene, her sister, Jeanette Spurzem, or Otto Schulte-Kellinghaus, who had rejoined his old friend, would deliver the paintings to Christie's, Sotheby's, Lempertz, and other houses for the spring and fall auctions. Wolfgang, says his wife, had an almost "autistic" sense of how to imitate an artist's technique. But he also, she insists, prepared himself. "He reads about the artist, travels to where he lived, steeps himself in the literature. He's like an actor." Wolfgang explains: "You have to know about the artist's past, present, and future. You have to know how the painter moved and how much time it took him to complete a work." However, it seems that Beltracchi sometimes employed a simpler method. Aya Soika, a Berlin-based specialist in the German Expressionist Max Pechstein, says that Beltracchi used a projector to cast images of Pechstein watercolors and ink drawings onto canvas, then traced larger copies, using oil paint. (Beltracchi disputes her claim.) "He altered the size, but the proportions were exactly the same," says Soika, who examined two fake Pechsteins, Seine Bridge with Freight Barges and Reclining Nude with Cat. By the early 2000s, Beltracchi's fakes were selling at auction to collectors for the high six figures, sometimes more. Steve Martin paid $860,000 in 2004 for a counterfeit