Madonna and Corpse

by Jefferson Bass

  “I was not,” she quavered, slowly drawing herself up. They glared at each other. Finally, steeling her voice, she said, “Since, as you say, there was no theft, there is no need for an investigation. I do not wish to press charges for the break-in, Inspector.”

  Descartes’s surprise gave way to suspicion. Only a fool—or someone with something to hide—would drop the matter here. “That’s not how it works, Madame. If I suspect a crime—and I do, criminal trespass—I am obliged to investigate. And you are obliged to cooperate.”

  “I have no information that could possibly help.”

  “What are you keeping from me, Madame?”

  “Nothing, Inspector.”

  “Then why is your eye twitching like that? And why are your hands shaking?”

  She turned her face to the right, so he could no longer see that eye, and folded her arms resolutely across the raincoat.

  Descartes glowered. Finally he rose, anger emanating from him in waves. “Stay,” he commanded sternly, shaking a finger at her as if she were a wayward spaniel. “If you move from that chair before I get back, I’ll arrest you for obstructing an investigation.” He spun and stalked from the room. Ninety seconds later he returned. “Now come,” he said harshly. He led her back to the gallery.

  Both paintings were gone.

  She seized his arm with both hands, a pair of buzzard’s claws clutching at a tree branch. “What have you done?” she gasped.

  He pointed through the doorway to the adjoining gallery. The two paintings rested in the far corner, leaning against adjacent walls. Madame Clergue shuffled toward them, her feet—in slippers, Descartes noticed for the first time—rasping across the varnished floor.

  “So, Madame Director,” he said coldly. “Which is your original, and which is the copy?” Standing wide-eyed before them, she looked from one painting to the other, back and forth, back and forth, as if the Madonnas were engaged in a tennis match. “Well? Which is which?”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but all that came out was a choked sob. Madame Madeleine Clergue wept, burying her face in her hands. When at last she looked up, her face had aged another ten years. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “God damn that son of a bitch.”

  Chapter 2

  Dubois

  Jacques Dubois dips a clean cloth in turpentine and drapes it across the painting, stretching and smoothing the fabric to remove all wrinkles. The white cloth—cut from an expensive linen bedsheet—is virtually transparent. Through the fine weave of fabric, as if behind a veil, a homely Virgin Mary cradles an even homelier Jesus. The baby’s head is far too small for his body, his face more like a middle-aged man’s than an infant’s, his body bizarrely muscled like a miniature weightlifter’s. Dubois smiles at the pair and murmurs, “Soon you will be so much prettier. You’ll thank me.”

  In his early years, Dubois felt guilty about taking solvents or a heat gun to ancient paintings simply so that he could recycle an old canvas or wooden panel for his own works. By now, though, he knows he’s performing a service: ridding the world of mediocrities and replacing them with masterpieces. It’s as if he’s buying up dreadful shacks on spectacular lots, then knocking them down and erecting architectural gems in their stead.

  After washing his hands in the paint-stained sink, he leaves the studio, crossing his backyard through clouds of blossoming plum and pear trees. In the kitchen of the old farmhouse, he assembles a simple lunch: fresh goat cheese, briny black olives, baby arugula drizzled with olive oil and lemon, a crusty baguette, and a glass—then another—of a delicate, apricot-hued rosé from a nearby vineyard. He eats slowly, savoring both the food and the latest auction catalog from Sotheby’s of London, which includes one of his works, a “Gainsborough” landscape he painted two years ago. “A previously unknown work, this is a particularly fine example of the simple style Thomas Gainsborough favored in his later period,” the catalog informs him. Once Dubois has finished with his modest portions of food, wine, and triumph, he washes, dries, and puts away the dishes before recrossing the backyard.

  When Dubois bought the farm—what was it, twenty years ago? no, my God, nearly thirty!—the studio was a roofless set of walls, crammed with broken-down tractors, rusted plows, and God-knows-what-other ruined implements. The house was no prize, either, but Dubois focused solely on the barn for the first year, transforming the cavernous ruin into a bright, airy workspace.

  For years now, every morning he’s brought his coffee out here, gazing across the Rhône as the rooftops of Avignon catch fire in the rising sun. The light paints the grim gray towers of the Palace of the Popes a delicate shade of pink and sets the cathedral’s towering gold statue of the Virgin blindingly ablaze. Dubois has tried to capture this magical morning alchemy of light and stone in paint on canvas, but even his prodigious skills are not up to the challenge.

  Inside the studio, Dubois inspects the Madonna and the Christ-child. Their features have softened, as if the two glasses of wine are blurring Dubois’s vision. Folding back one corner of the turpentine-soaked cloth, he presses a thumbnail to the paint and feels it yield. “Perfect,” he purrs. He puts a CD into the Bose player and presses Play, and Mick Jagger laments, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Nodding his head in time to the beat, Dubois begins to deconstruct the ancient painting.

  Peeling off the veil of fabric, its fibers smeary with reds, blues, and golds from the painting, he lays it on the table and picks up a putty knife. Starting at the bottom-left corner of the panel, he scrapes upward and across in a series of short, swift strokes, taking care not to dig into the soft poplar wood beneath the paint. A moment’s carelessness, a single gouge, and the panel, for which he paid half a year’s income to a rapacious dealer in Rome, would be ruined, useless except as firewood or a tavern sign. The cost of Dubois’s raw materials—mediocre medieval paintings exhumed from attics and junk shops; blank paper and vellum, sliced from the flyleaves of ancient volumes beneath the noses of dozing librarians; boards pilfered from unguarded old chapels and fortresses—has risen a hundredfold during his career. Luckily, his own prices have increased a thousandfold, at least for showpieces like the one he’s about to create.

  With each push of the putty knife, the paint glides another fraction of an inch up the blade, accumulating in thin, rippled ridges like multicolored cake frosting. Back and forth, left and right he works, pausing each time he reaches one side or the other to wipe the knife with a rag. After several hours of rhythmic strokes, he is approaching the base coat of white lead. He soaks another clean piece of linen in turpentine and lays it on the panel, then steps back to stretch. When he straightens up and arches backward, the ache in his back makes him groan. Oh, shit, I’m too old for this, he thinks, then, Good thing I’m getting out. Twisting his torso from side to side, he wrings a satisfying series of cracks from his spine and smiles slightly. Not with a whimper, but some bangs, he thinks. After a few more stretches, he removes the cloth and gently wipes off most of the white-lead primer, taking care not to rub all the way into the gesso, the underlying mixture of animal-hide glue and chalk dust used to fill the grain, smooth imperfections in the wood, and create a rigid, perfect surface on which to paint.

  If he works quickly for the next few days, he’ll be finished by the time François arrives from Marseilles, bringing Dubois the final piece of the puzzle. Dubois owes François for this—owes him both money and sex—but the investment will be well worth it.

  Chapter 3

  Descartes

  “Thank God I stuck my chewing gum on the back of the copy.” Descartes’s proud announcement was not greeted with the outpouring of gratitude he’d expected.

  The inspector, Mme. Clergue, and her chief conservator, Henri Devereaux—the museum functionary who’d been fluttering on the edge of Descartes’s vision since one A.M.—were huddled blearily in the museum’s workshop. They’d spent hours poring over the two paintings. They’d used their naked eyes, they’d used magnifying glasses, they’d even used
ultraviolet light to search for the telltale fluorescence of modern pigments. They’d found innumerable minor differences—after all, each work was painted by hand—but absolutely nothing to indicate which painting was created in 1467 and which in 2012.

  For a painting that was more than five hundred years old, the Botticelli—whichever the hell the Botticelli was—looked damned good, Descartes thought. The inspector had been raised Catholic, so he’d seen enough Madonna-and-child paintings to last him an eternity. This one, though, was different. For one thing, it wasn’t dark or gloomy; beneath a bright blue shawl, Mary wore a reddish-orange dress; the arched window opening that framed the mother and child was also a cheery blue. The Virgin—the mother—looked to be all of fifteen years old, Descartes thought; seventeen, tops. Her face was pale, with delicate, pretty features, large eyes, and a high, intelligent forehead. On her head she wore a sheer lace cap that allowed glimpses of golden hair; above the cap was a disk of gold filigree, so gossamer-fine as to be nearly invisible. Her neck was long, slender, and gracefully arched as she gazed down at the robust boy sprawled across her lap. Her right hand cradled his head; her left hand covered her right breast, and barely visible between the index and middle fingers was a nipple, all but concealed by the design of the dress and the modesty of the mother. Descartes had no children—he no longer even had a wife, not since that bitch Yvonne had dumped him for some German tourist she met in a bar—but somehow this painting evoked in him feelings of paternal protectiveness and tenderness he wished he could attach to a family.

  After removing the paintings from the gallery wall, Descartes had kept the director twisting in the wind for hours, refusing to tell her about the telltale wad of chewing gum he stuck behind one corner of the copy’s frame—not until he’d pried the truth, or at least some of it, grudgingly out of her. Three years before, the museum had hired a restoration expert, Jacques Dubois, to clean and restore the Botticelli, she’d finally told the inspector. “People think that paintings get dark over time,” she said. “You’ve probably seen pictures like that—dingy old Rembrandts and Van Dycks that are almost black with age?” He’d nodded, though he couldn’t quite recall if that was actually true. “But it’s not the paint that’s darkened, it’s just the varnish. Strip that off, and a five-hundred-year-old painting is as bright as the day it dried on the easel.” The Botticelli’s varnish had dimmed the painting’s vibrancy, so they’d hired Dubois—one of the best restorers in France, living right here in Avignon—to strip off the old varnish and put on a fresh coat.

  “Why didn’t you want to tell me this? And why did the appearance of the copy upset you so much?”

  She’d looked down at her desk, unable to meet his gaze. “Against my better judgment, I allowed Dubois to do the restoration at his studio. With lesser works, we don’t worry so much, but the Botticelli was a treasure. I was afraid it might be stolen. But Dubois was adamant. He insisted that the restoration wouldn’t be as good if he had to work in our ‘soul-sucking, fluorescent-lit circle of hell’—that’s how he described the museum’s conservation shop. I also knew there was bad blood between him and Monsieur Devereaux. So I agreed to let him take the painting. When I saw the copy, I felt ... it seemed a betrayal of our trust. And the mocking way he hung the copy. It was a slap in the museum’s face.”

  Descartes had felt sure there was more to the story than she was telling, but it was clear she was prepared to stonewall. He decided not to press the point—for now. But he would get to the bottom of it sooner or later. Was it possible that she and Dubois were in cahoots—colluding in some sort of scam—and that he was setting her up to take the fall? Descartes had good instincts—a good nose, he called it—and beneath the scent of the old lady’s baby powder or face cream or whatever the hell it was, the detective caught a strong whiff of fear.

  Chapter 4

  Dubois

  As he changes the CD in the Bose and begins squeezing white lead from a tube, Dubois laments the changing of the times. In the years since health agencies have banned lead-based paint in homes and offices, white lead—artists’ favorite primer for millennia, a white so dazzling it makes paintings glow from within—has become virtually impossible to obtain. It remains perfectly legal, of course, for expendable artists like Dubois to risk lead poisoning, but alas—in dutiful obedience to the law of supply and demand—paint manufacturers no longer find it profitable to make the meager amounts of white lead required by artists, and so stockpiles go steadily down and prices go swiftly up. The single tube he’ll use to reprime this one panel cost him a week’s grocery money, and he had to grovel to get it at all. Soon he may be forced to make his own white lead, the same way the ancient Greeks did, by suspending thin sheets of lead above a vat of vinegar (encased in fresh horse dung, for warmth!) until the lead is covered with white corrosion, then scraping off the corrosion, grinding it, and mixing it with linseed oil. A damned nuisance, he fumes, and all because a few stupid babies ate too many paint chips.

  Once he begins applying the white lead to the panel, though, he forgets his irritation and, as always, falls under the spell of the work: the velvety feel and silky sound of the white lead gliding onto the panel. He turns and touches the Bose, and angelic voices fill the studio—a women’s quartet singing an eleventh-century polyphonic chant, “10,000 Virgins.” The soaring melodies infuse his studio and his paint and his soul with sublimity. At this moment, anything is possible; on this luminous, immaculate surface, he can be a Michelangelo, a Da Vinci, a Rembrandt, or any other genius of the ages. As it happens, he will be Botticelli, specifically, the Botticelli who painted the sweet Madonna and Child. This one, his third, will be his best yet—far better than the two that he’s foisted off on the old bat at the Petit Palais—for this time, he has a buyer willing to pay a price worthy of the work.

  It’s taken three years to reel in the buyer, a British art dealer named Felicia Kensington. It began when she wrote to express her admiration of a Caravaggio painting—Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist—that he’d cleaned and retouched for the National Gallery in London. “The painting now glows with Caravaggio’s genius and your own,” she said. Dubois responded with an equally effusive thank-you note, and they passed a few more flattering messages back and forth. Eventually he mentioned, oh so casually, that occasionally he got lucky enough to unearth a work by an old master—a painting or drawing languishing, unsigned and unrecognized, in some junk shop or attic.

  “If,” she’d swiftly responded, “you should happen upon any unsigned works in the style of Caravaggio—for instance, drawings or preliminary studies of the Salome painting, or other scenes in a similar vein—I should be most grateful for the opportunity to have them appraised, and to offer them to certain clients of mine.” Dubois, no fool, had instantly decoded the phrase “unsigned works in the style of,” and six months later, he wrote with the happy news that he’d “discovered” three unsigned studies “in the style of Caravaggio”: one of Salome’s face, one of the Baptist’s head on a trencher, and the third of the old woman (Salome’s mother, perhaps?) lurking in the background. Kensington had paid a thousand pounds apiece for them; a year later, he read that a rare group of three Caravaggio studies had been found and sold to a private collector, for the rumored sum of a million pounds!

  Not long after producing the “Caravaggios,” he’d dined with Kensington in Paris at the King George V Hotel—a lovely, delicate piece of fish in white truffle oil, he recalled fondly—and she’d asked him to keep an eye out for other, similar finds. “My top clients are especially keen on Rembrandt, Titian, Michelangelo, and Botticelli,” she’d gushed. In that moment—the taste of the truffle oil vivid in his memory—Dubois had glimpsed a remarkable opening.

  He’d just been hired by Avignon’s Petit Palais Museum to clean and restore their prized Botticelli, and it had occurred to him that the opportunity of a lifetime glittered before him, if he had the courage to seize it. “What do you think you could pay for a preliminary s
tudy of Botticelli’s Madonna and Child?” he inquired in an offhand tone. “First quality, of course; verifiable fifteenth-century materials.”

  Her eyes took on a hungry gleam. “That would be quite a find,” she said, struggling to keep the excitement out of her voice. “I imagine I’d be able to pay somewhere in the range of, say, fifty thousand pounds?”

  Dubois had nodded noncommittally. Then—after a moment’s pause—he delivered the coup de grâce: “And what if I told you that the museum that thinks it owns the finished painting has been deceived? That the painting hanging in Avignon is a modern fake ... and that the actual, authentic painting might—possibly—be available, for the right price, to a very discreet buyer?”

  She’d stared at him, openmouthed, all pretense of nonchalance gone. “You can’t be serious.” Then, leaning forward, laying a hand on his hand: “Can you? Are you? Is it really possible?”

  He’d played it cool. “Notice, I said ‘what if?’ But I gather you find the idea intriguing. Do you have any clients with ambitions—and budgets—as lofty as that?”

  She regained her poise swiftly. “I believe I do,” she purred. “How soon do you need to know?”

  “One month,” he’d answered.

  Two weeks later his phone rang. “I have a client who is extremely interested in ... the painting you mentioned to me in Paris,” she said. “Needless to say, he’d want assurances that the work is authentic.”

  “Of course,” Dubois had responded, his voice smooth as fresh varnish. “And, I assume, he’d want proof that the other—the one on display—is not authentic.”

  “Yes. That, too.”

  “Neither of those conditions poses a problem,” he went on. “If.”

  “If what?”

  “If the price is right. Bear in mind, only four paintings by Botticelli are in private hands. Four. For a true connoisseur, this would be the acquisition of a lifetime.”