Caravaggio's Angel

by Ruth Brandon

  Betray everything he believed in, or lose it all. Faced with a choice like that, suicide might easily seem the logical way out.

  ‘What’s going to happen to the picture? Is your father going to sell it?’ In my mind I was already running through the possible buyers for such a thing and wondering how amenable they might be to an approach. We wouldn’t get it, that was for sure – it would fetch about five times our annual purchasing budget. Possibly more.

  Manu burst out laughing. ‘You’re not going to believe this. It’s the only really good thing to have come out of the whole ghastly business. My grandmother left it to the Louvre!’

  21

  Proof: London, October

  By the time Manu and I stopped talking, I’d long missed the last train. I spent a sleepless night on one of his several sofas and crept out of the apartment before he got up. At 7 a.m. the building was silent. But the concierge was vis-ible, a thin, overalled woman in her late fifties, putting out the rubbish bags. As I’d hoped. We exchanged Bonjours, and I asked her to keep a bit of an eye on Manu. ‘If he doesn’t appear for a couple of days, perhaps you could find some excuse to go up and check he’s all right?’

  She agreed she would, and added, ‘Very like his papa, isn’t he?’

  ‘Does he come here? The Minister?’

  ‘No, no, but you see him on the television. As far as I know he’s only been here the once. Not long before his brother died. Monsieur Antoine. What a nice man. Tragedy, really.’

  ‘You mean the Minister was here before his brother was found?’

  She looked at me uncomprehendingly. For her, of course, Antoine’s death and the finding of the body were one and the same event. ‘Two days before, yes. I’d never seen him but I recognized him from the television. He was just leaving. He was in such a hurry I don’t think he even noticed me, but you’d know him anywhere, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Did you tell anyone about this?’

  ‘No, why would I?’

  Why, indeed.

  Remembering Delphine, I took particular care crossing the road. But no one seemed anxious to run me down, and soon I was in the metro headed for the Gare du Nord. As the Eurostar swayed northwards, I thought about the concierge’s revelation. However superficial, there must surely have been some sort of inquiry into Antoine Rigaut’s death? If someone is found dead of gunshot wounds, then the police are brought in. And in that case, surely they’d ask the concierge about who’d come and gone at the relevant time?

  Not if the verdict was suicide. Why would they?

  So leave it alone, said a voice inside my head – David’s voice, I recognized it at once, ballasted with the successful lawyer’s weary, unshockable calm. Learn a lesson, why don’t you? So Jean-Jacques Rigaut seems always to be on the spot when a close relative dies. Fine. What’s that to you? You weren’t there, you aren’t a member of the family, you aren’t even French, so he won’t be your President. You’re English, and your job is to curate pictures. You’ve just discovered something rather significant in the curating line. And now that the Louvre owns both the pictures, why shouldn’t they lend them?

  ‘Charles? It’s Reggie Lee.’

  ‘I thought we’d had this conversation. I can’t help you.’

  ‘Ah, but things have changed. D’you know what I’ve just heard? Madame Rigaut left her picture to the Louvre.’

  ‘So I understand.’

  ‘Well, then, there’s no more problem, is there? You own them both, you can lend them both. Monsieur Rigaut hasn’t got anything to do with it any more.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Reggie,’ he said flatly. ‘The answer’s still no. Don’t ask why. You’ll just have to accept it. It was bad luck, the wrong moment, these things happen. That’s the way it is, and too bad.’ And he rang off.

  The wrong moment? Still? For what? For Charlie’s career, was what it came down to. Even now it was more than that career was worth to reverse the decision without checking back. I wasn’t unsympathetic. The prospect of asking Rigaut to change his mind on this particular topic at this particular moment would have daunted a better man than Charles Rey. In his place I’d probably have done the same.

  Unlike Charlie, Joe sounded gratifyingly pleased to hear my voice. ‘Recovered from your little misadventure?’

  For a moment I couldn’t remember which misadventure he was referring to. ‘I’ve got my passport back, if that’s what you mean. Look, I’m on to something rather interesting. D’you want to meet up?’

  ‘You’re still pursuing this Caravaggio stuff?’

  ‘It’s connected.’

  ‘How about the Rigaut story?

  ‘It’s connected with that, too.’

  Joe said he’d buy me lunch and I could tell him all about it. I explained that I’d been away from the office a lot recently – a long lunch at this juncture might not be tactful.

  ‘So make it dinner. Eight? I’ll see you at Sapori’s,’ he said.

  Sapori’s, an echoing ex-warehouse in Drury Lane that combines considerable discomfort with the best casalinga cooking in London, had been one of our favourite haunts in the dear dead days. It isn’t exactly the venue for romance, but if you want a private conversation it’s got a lot going for it – there’s so much noise that you can hardly hear what the person opposite is saying, let alone anyone at the next table.

  Joe was there when I arrived, making inroads into a bottle of Montepulciano and dipping raw vegetables into a little dish of olive oil, which he was spreading liberally over the table. It was odd, seeing him and knowing he was waiting for me. I’d run across him once or twice since we’d split up – at a couple of parties, across the room in a pub – and each time my stomach had done a sort of somersault. Now, however, it stayed put. Olivier’s doing? Or perhaps its previous antics had been the result of unpreparedness.

  Joe waved, wiped his fingers, stood up and kissed me formally on both cheeks, mwa mwa. He’d put on a bit of weight, though not enough to make him discard the ancient brown corduroy suit I’d tried so often to chuck out. I sniffed its well-remembered bouquet with a mixture of annoyance and nostalgia.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Exciting life you’re leading these days.’

  ‘Much too exciting,’ I agreed. ‘If I fall asleep don’t take it personally.’

  ‘You won’t,’ he assured me. ‘Not in these chairs.’

  He poured me a glass of wine and we considered the menu. As usual, I chose the seafood spaghetti. ‘Nice to see some things don’t change,’ Joe said. He ordered the same thing himself and asked for a half-bottle of white Orvieto to go with it. When the stuff about twenty-one units of alcohol a week being the healthy maximum first came out, and we tried comparing it with his normal intake, we just laughed. Hollowly, and slightly tipsily. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Shoot. Tell me all.’

  So I did.

  By the time I finished, our table was littered with dead bottles, most of the other customers had left, and I felt so tired that I had no idea whether or not I’d spent the entire evening talking gibberish.

  Joe signalled for the bill. ‘I don’t know if I’ve got the detail right,’ he said, ‘but if half of this is true that’s your man’s career up the spout.’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice. That’s the terrifying thing.’

  He sat with his elbows on the table tapping his teeth with a teaspoon, a signal that he was deep in thought. ‘There must have been an inquiry into Antoine’s death. An old lady of eighty-eight’s one thing, but he was a public figure.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘Thing is, how do we get hold of it?’

  ‘No idea.’ Now that I’d stopped talking I was fading fast.

  ‘Poor old Reg, you don’t look as though you’ve got much idea about anything just now. Let’s get you home.’

  Drury Lane is undoubtedly one of the nastiest streets in London, but fortunately it’s always full of taxis that will take you somewhere nicer. When we got to my house Joe didn’t suggest coming
in, but kissed me chastely and said, as I’d hoped he might, ‘Why don’t you leave it with me and I’ll look into a few details?’ Then he rolled away into the city, a happy journalist in pursuit of a hot new story, while I fell into my bed and a dreamless sleep.

  For the next week I got on with my work and tried to put Caravaggio, the Rigaut family, and everything associated with them, out of my mind. Then Joe phoned, and all that good work was instantly undone.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Things may be moving.’

  ‘Things?’

  ‘I’ve been beavering on your behalf,’ he said. ‘To prove your gratitude you can make me dinner this time. What sort of wine shall I bring?’

  It seemed we were back on terms, though exactly which had yet to be negotiated. I wasn’t sure that any of them included the assumption that I was automatically available just because he happened to have a spare evening. ‘How do you know I’m free for dinner?’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  I sighed. ‘As it happens I am.’

  ‘Fine, then I’ll bring a St Emilion.’

  He arrived just after nine, with the wine in one hand and a rather unattractive bunch of flowers in the other – those spray chrysanthemums in dreary white and pink that look half-dead before they’ve begun. I have rules about things like that. There are the fruit salad rules – no oranges, no apples or pears, and absolutely, under any circumstances, no bananas – and the bunch of flowers rules, in which pink spray chrysanths figure in the banana position. Still, the wine looked excellent.

  He put his burdens down and looked around, checking to see what had changed since he lived here. Then, for the first time in over a year, we kissed. Properly.

  I’d dreamed of this moment, its absence had for months reduced me to despair. And now my wish had been granted – but as in all the fairy stories, there was a catch. The kiss was too late: delightful and familiar, but not, as once, liquidizing. Amour, perhaps irrevocably, seemed to have transmuted to amitié amoureuse. I wondered if Joe felt it, too. Perhaps that was what he’d been waiting for before making contact again.

  We let each other go; he looked at me quizzically, but didn’t say anything. Instead he made for the drawer where the corkscrew lived (that at least was still the same) and opened the wine. ‘What are we eating?’

  ‘Lamb chops.’ In the supermarket on the way back from the tube blankness had struck, and lamb chops were the result. I knew he’d be disappointed. A lamb chop is – well, a lamb chop. Eat one, you’ve eaten them all. But just for the moment, culinary imagination was beyond me.

  ‘Anything else? It’s a really good wine, this.’

  ‘Potatoes.’

  He sighed. ‘OK, are you going to ask me what I’ve found out?’

  ‘What have you found out?’ I wished I didn’t feel so tired.

  ‘Well, I got in touch with my friend Pascal. I can’t remember if you met him? Does the kind of thing I do, for Le Monde. Anyhow, he knows people who know the examining magistrate – he was at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, and bingo, that’s it, even though he cut loose and became a journo. The top of that pyramid’s ridiculously small, if you make it that far the whole of French politics just seems like an old boys’ reunion.’

  ‘Nice for some. And?’

  By now Joe had poured himself a glass of wine and settled into what had once been his usual armchair. He pulled a notebook out of his briefcase. ‘Hang on a mo . . . Yeah. The inquiry into your boy’s death.’

  ‘Antoine Rigaut.’

  ‘That’s the one. Apparently it was squashed. Orders from on high. The examining magistrate somehow gathered that if he was too persistent it wouldn’t do his career a bit of good. So he brought in a verdict of suicide and everyone was happy.’

  I chopped some mint and mashed it with lemon juice into a lump of butter. I always enjoy economy, whether of thought or action, and mint butter served two purposes: it raised the gastronomic stakes, and making it was conducive to contemplation – rhythmic, without urgency. I thought of Charlie Rey, how he wouldn’t lend the picture, and wouldn’t say why – how he hated talking about it. He, too, had his career to consider. I wondered what he’d found, that day in Antoine Rigaut’s apartment. There must have been something, or Jean-Jacques would have left the examining magistrate alone. When, as with his mother, there’d been nothing to find, he’d been only too delighted for the law to take its course. Tampering is a risk even for the powerful – they have so much more to lose if it comes out.

  ‘How well does your friend Pascal know whoever told him this?’

  ‘No idea. Why?’

  ‘I just wondered if there might have been some photos. There must have been, mustn’t there? When the police first got there they must have taken some. They ought to be in the file. If the file still exists.’

  ‘You’re asking him to ask his mate to steal the file?’

  ‘Not the file. Just a photo . . . He needn’t even steal it. He could just copy it. Then we might be getting somewhere. Why don’t you see if he can work something out? Tell him there might be a big story in there. Come on, dinner’s ready.’

  The photo arrived five days later. It was in a manila envelope with an English stamp and a central London postmark, the address computer-printed, no sender’s identification. There was no covering note, just the picture. The subject was viewed from above, the body of a man slumped forward over a desk. The right-hand half of his head was covered with blood, as was the desk. Near his right hand, on the desk, lay a pistol.

  That evening I rang Manu. I didn’t bother with niceties but dived straight into the meat of it. ‘Manu, it’s Reggie. Do you have a computer?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, sounding puzzled.

  ‘OK, I’m going to email you a picture, and I want you to tell me what you think.’

  I sent it off, and when, half an hour later, no answer-ing email had appeared, rang him again. He sounded tetchy. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did you get it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s your uncle, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s him. I was going to get back to you but it kind of got to me.’

  ‘Sorry. Yes, of course.’

  ‘Also there’s something wrong, and I’ve been trying to work out what it is.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘At first I thought the print might be the wrong way round, but then I went into the room and it isn’t, the window and everything’s in the right place.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The thing is, the pistol’s by his right hand. And my uncle Antoine was left-handed.’

  22

  Jean-Jacques: Paris, October

  ‘You realize what that means,’ Manu said.

  ‘Of course.’

  I’d been thinking about it ever since I first saw the photo. The sight of the gun had brought to mind that other gun, the one Manu had tried to pull – with his left hand; hadn’t he told me left-handedness ran in his family? There were doubtless other forensic matters – the angle of the shot, whether it could have been self-inflicted – that only an expert could identify. But no one could argue with this. When you pick up a gun to kill yourself, the hand you use, unless it’s been cut off or otherwise disabled, is the one that comes naturally.

  Of course this didn’t prove who had done the deed – only that it hadn’t been the dead man. If anything, the photo argued against rather than for Jean-Jacques’ guilt – he and Antoine had grown up together, he surely could not have forgotten such an obvious detail? But he wasn’t, at least to my knowledge, accustomed to actual face-to-face murder. Perhaps it had been messier than he’d bargained for, and he’d had to make the best of a bad job. And in the end it wasn’t so risky. You’d have to know a person very well to register that particular anomaly – it certainly wasn’t the kind of thing to strike an examining magistrate. I wondered if he knew the concierge had seen him, and hoped, for her sake, that she was right and he didn’t. Better not mention that conversation even to Manu. />
  ‘What are you going to do?’ he said. ‘Tell the police?’

  ‘I don’t think so. They weren’t much use last time, were they? Listen, I want to ask a favour.’

  ‘What?’ He sounded suspicious.

  ‘I’d like to get in touch with your father, but it won’t be easy – he’ll have walls of guards fending people off. So I need the number of his private line. He must have one.’

  ‘Régine, we’ve been through this. What’s done’s done. Just keep away from my father. Let it go. He’s a dangerous man.’

  ‘And I’m a grown-up woman. I can look after myself. Why don’t you just give me the number.’

  After a little bullying he gave it to me, as I’d known he would. He was weak, poor Manu. Flattened.

  It sat on the table in front of me now, daring me to dial it. Every sane instinct advised against. What I had in mind wasn’t just scary, it was wrong. Mad, dangerous, immoral, on every count a no-no. So why was I doing it? Perhaps wickedness is like death – contagious. You want to keep away from it for fear of infection. Unfortunately it had come to find me. Though there as in all other respects, I wasn’t in Jean-Jacques’ league. Ambition, ruthlessness, greed – you name it, he had me outclassed. Disreputable, that was the word for what I proposed. That was more my level.

  I knew what I ought to do. Failing the police – and that the police would fail I had little doubt – I ought to tell Joe what I’d found and leave the rest to him. What could be more important than to bring a criminal to justice?

  Nothing. And I would. Oh, yes. I owed Juliette and Delphine nothing less, not to speak of the ones I’d never met – Antoine Rigaut, and who knew how many others? But in St Augustine’s immortal words, not yet. Between Jean-Jacques and me, things had got too personal. I needed to finish them off in my own way and my own time.

  The number began with 06 – a cellphone. I wondered whether it would work. He probably had it arranged so that different ringtones indicated different callers. In which case I’d never get through directly.

  I dialled; the phone rang – and switched to voicemail. I said, ‘Monsieur Rigaut, this is Régine Lee. I’m in pos-session of some interesting facts regarding the provenance of your Caravaggio, and various events surrounding it, and also some information regarding your brother’s death. I’m thinking of publishing it. If you’re happy with that, fine. If not, we can discuss it.’ I left my own number, and rang off.