The Mystery of the Lost Cezanne

by M. L. Longworth

  “Allez, allez,” he called out, waving his arms in the air. “We’ll positively freeze out here.”

  “We almost bought this house, Monsieur Lydgate,” Dr. Bonnet said while Lydgate hurriedly hung their coats up in the hallway.

  “Really?” Lydgate said. “How extraordinary. I’ve owned it for more than a half century. And lucky thing, too. I couldn’t afford it now. Come into the salon.”

  Verlaque looked at Marine and raised an eyebrow; Lydgate didn’t seem the bit interested in the odd coincidence that Marine’s father knew the house. But if M. Lydgate did not physically resemble what Marine thought an English auctioneer should look like, his furnishings fit the bill. Every spare inch of the living and dining rooms was filled with art and antiques, from Napoleon-era writing desks and commodes to 1950s Italian lighting. The walls were covered in framed paintings, and, like the furniture, they seemed to be from various eras.

  “Please sit,” Lydgate instructed, again flapping his arms. “I’ll serve some sherry, and then I’ll look at your treasure. Unless you’d care for something stronger. Single-malt whiskey, perhaps?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Verlaque said as he looked around the room.

  “Oh good,” Lydgate said. “I’ll join you in one.”

  As Lydgate busied himself with the drinks, Marine said, “Your paintings, M. Lydgate. They’re all portraits.”

  “Yes, indeed,” he answered, handing Marine and her father a glass each of sherry. “I’m a sucker for them. I think it’s because I like being alone. They keep me company.”

  “Then I’m glad you agreed to meet us,” Verlaque said. “Thank you.”

  “Of course your commissioner didn’t give me much of a choice, seeing as someone was killed over this piece of canvas.”

  “When did M. Rouquet call you?” Verlaque asked.

  Lydgate raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Hmm, a few days ago. Wednesday? Thursday? It was hard to understand him, and I’m proud of my French. He was very excited.”

  “Do you know how he got your phone number?” Verlaque asked.

  “That’s a good question,” Lydgate replied. “No, I don’t know. My license has been temporarily suspended, so I couldn’t drive to Aix, and it seems he couldn’t drive up here. He blathered on about an old scooter.”

  Verlaque nodded; Pierre had told him that René got around on an old, disused post office scooter, still yellow but missing one of the panniers. “Did Rouquet sound frigthened?”

  Lydgate thought for a moment with his hand on his chin. “No,” he replied. “Just excited.”

  “And he didn’t mention any names? Anyone who might be following him?”

  “No. The only name he mentioned was Cézanne’s. Well, now that we’ve all been served drinks, how about a peek at this canvas?” Lydgate asked.

  Verlaque stood up, took the canvas out of its bag, and unraveled the bath towel that he had brought from his apartment to protect it.

  “Oh dear,” Lydgate said, pointing to the towel.

  “What?” Verlaque asked.

  “Fibers, dear boy, fibers. Never mind; lay it over there,” Lydgate said, motioning to a polished mahogany table. “I say, how did you manage to sneak the painting away from the Palais de Justice?”

  “Authority,” Verlaque said. “Plus, I didn’t tell anyone. But I did bring gloves,” he went on, taking a pair out of his tweed jacket.

  “You can wear those,” Lydgate said, also pulling a pair out of his jacket pocket. “I’ll wear my own.”

  Verlaque unrolled the canvas and Lydgate immediately put a hand to his mouth, gasping, “Oh my! It’s a beauty.” He quickly put on the gloves and looked at the painting for some minutes, humming quietly to himself. Anatole Bonnet paced the room; Marine stayed quietly sitting, watching Lydgate; and Verlaque stood beside him, his hands folded behind his back. The only sound, when Lydgate wasn’t humming, was the ticking of a clock.

  “Fine blues and greens,” Lydgate finally said.

  “Are they Cézanne blues and greens?” Verlaque asked, smiling.

  “Oh yes. And they’re repeated throughout the painting, just as he would have done.”

  “But other painters did that, too, right?” Marine asked. “Repeated the colors, I mean. Put the green from the grass also in the sky, that kind of thing.”

  “Quite so, like Vermeer,” Lydgate replied. “But Cézanne did more than repeat color. He didn’t just delineate shapes—cubes, cylinders—by outlines; he did it by meticulous use of color changes.” Lydgate pointed to the girl’s large buttons on her blue blouse. “Look,” he said. “Here, a series of color gradations determined the roundness of this button. Normally it’s easiest to see with fruit in his still lifes. But he did it with flat shapes, too—like the back of her chair. They are not uniformly colored, as we imagine that this classic cane-seated chair was—a dreary kind of brown oak.” Lydgate shook his shoulders. “Oh, how I detest oak!”

  “I agree,” Verlaque said. Anatole Bonnet looked at his daughter with a puzzled look. Some people had preferences for different kinds of wood? He and Florence had bought most of their furniture from the Camif catalogue.

  Dr. Bonnet said, “To Cézanne the chair is a series of planes, not just an object to sit on. The chair is subject to the same kinds of color variations as clouds and water.”

  “As is the wall behind the girl,” Verlaque said.

  “Ah yes,” Lydgate quickly answered. “Again, so many color variations. All painstakingly done by small parallel brushstrokes. No wonder Cézanne was always in a bad mood!”

  “There’s something that amazes me when I look at a Cézanne,” Dr. Bonnet said. “Not one element stands out. A mountain, a cabanon, a pine tree: all equally important.”

  “Normally yes,” Lydgate said. “Harmony.”

  “The poet Rilke wrote, ‘It’s as if every place were aware of all the other places,’” Dr. Bonnet said. “Cézanne called it ‘joining hands.’”

  “That’s lovely,” Marine said. She leaned over the painting and looked at it. “But this painting—” she said. “The girl is more important than the other elements, isn’t she? I see her first, more than the wall, or the chair. She shimmers.”

  “Ah yes,” Lydgate said. “Quel dommage.”

  “What do you mean? Are you saying because of the girl it’s not a real Cézanne?” Verlaque asked.

  “I don’t think it is, no,” Lydgate said. “But it’s a master copy.”

  “Are you sure?” Marine asked. Lydgate had seemed taken with it.

  “It’s awfully well done. I’ll need more time with it. But first, we must eat. I had the butcher in Apt deliver this poulet de Bresse.” Lydgate ushered them into the adjoining dining room.

  Verlaque smiled at the thought of buying meat a few towns away, liking Lydgate more and more. The table had been set with much polished silver and pressed white linens, and Marine followed their host into the kitchen to help serve. “You can take the gratin dauphinois, dear,” Lydgate said, handing Marine a pair of oven mitts and gesturing to the oven. “I swear there’s no cream in it!” he said. “Just oodles of butter!”

  Much admiration of the golden poulet was expressed as Lydgate proudly opened a 1989 Domaine Leroy. “You’re being very generous, Mr. Lydgate,” Verlaque said in English. “I’ve never had Lalou Bize-Leroy’s wines; only read about them.”

  Lydgate looked at the bottle as if confused. He then said, “Working in an auction house for so many years did have its advantages,” as he poured a little wine into Verlaque’s glass to taste.

  “It’s delicious,” Verlaque said.

  Lydgate smiled and filled the rest of the glasses. “Velour,” Marine said after tasting it. “Silky, but thicker, like velour.”

  “So, Mr. Lydgate,” Verlaque said after they had begun eating, “have you ever come across the fact that Cézann
e had a mistress—an Aixoise—in 1885?”

  “No,” Lydgate said—almost too quickly, Marine thought. “But I’m not an expert in the biographies of artists.”

  “Who is?”

  “Well,” Lydgate said, setting down his fork, “Rebecca Schultz from Yale, for one.”

  “Unfortunately she has disappeared from her hotel,” Anatole Bonnet said, helping himself to more gratin.

  “What say you?” Lydgate asked. “What hotel? Is the eminent professor here? In Provence?”

  Verlaque glared at Anatole, who shrunk down in his chair.

  “Yes, she is,” Verlaque answered. “She was the one who found M. Rouquet’s body, in Cézanne’s old flat.”

  “Oooh, suspect number one, and now she’s flown the coop,” Lydgate said, pressing his two hands together, the tips of his fingers meeting. “Of course she has her own motives.”

  “Pardon me?” Marine asked.

  “The Schultz collection,” Lydgate said, carving more chicken. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it.”

  “That’s why her name rang a bell!” Dr. Bonnet said, slapping his forehead. “I knew she was a historian, but there was something about her past that I kept trying to remember.”

  “Would you two care to fill us in?” Marine asked.

  Lydgate opened another bottle of Leroy and poured it out. “Imagine this: 1961. A young Jewish couple—she’s a high school teacher and he runs his family’s fruit and vegetable delivery company in lower Manhattan. They live in a rent-controlled apartment and cannot have children. One evening he—Isaac Schultz—sees a small Cézanne in a gallery window on his way home from work. It costs five thousand dollars. More than two years’ rent. He goes home and talks to his wife—Judy—and they decide to buy it. In installments. It takes them two years. Five years on, they own four Cézannes, two Picassos, and a Duchamp sculpture that they put in the middle of the living room. The fruit company flourishes when people in Montana and Kansas insist on having clementines and avocados all year round, and Isaac’s brother Irv turns out to be a whiz at trucking and logistics. They become comfortably well-off, but never billionaires, like today’s collectors. Everything the Schultzes earn from then on is spent on buying art. They seldom go to Europe, never dine out. She doesn’t wear furs or jewels; he patches his broken eyeglasses with masking tape. They never buy a car. Yet by the early ’70s they own almost thirty Cézannes of Mont Sainte Victoire alone. Only one thing is missing.”

  “A child,” Verlaque said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Edmund Lydgate’s Prognosis

  What an inspirational story,” Marine said. “I remember Gertrude Stein telling a young Hemingway to buy art and nothing else. The Schultzes took her rule to heart. Are they still alive?”

  “Isaac Schultz died three years ago,” Lydgate said. “And Judy in September.”

  “And the art collection?” Verlaque asked. “Rebecca will inherit, no?”

  “Yes, poor girl.”

  “I’m not following, Mr. Lydgate,” Verlaque said.

  “Nasty American inheritance taxes. There’s no way Rebecca can keep the art, as she’ll have to pay tax on the current market value of the paintings.”

  “That’s insane!” Marine said. “Her parents obviously had no idea when they bought the art how overblown art prices would become.”

  Lydgate said, “And knowing the trade like I do, she’s been hounded by Christie’s, Sotheby’s, the Japanese, and the Russians.”

  “Perhaps this young woman may not want the stigma attached with owning such a spectacular art collection. That requires a certain kind of person, one who likes being in the limelight, for instance,” Dr. Bonnet said.

  Oh, I think she’d enjoy that, thought Verlaque. Rebecca Schultz was now hardly a chief suspect; why kill for a Cézanne if you grew up with them hanging in your kitchen?

  “Do you have any idea what the Schultz collection will sell for?” Marine asked.

  Lydgate got up and began clearing the dishes. “To give you a rough idea, a small watercolor study of Cézanne’s card players recently sold at Christie’s for almost twenty million dollars. And the Schultzes owned major paintings, not watercolors.”

  “So even if she can’t afford to keep the collection,” Marine said, “Dr. Schultz will be a wealthy woman after the sale.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Lydgate said.

  “Let me help you clear the dishes,” Anatole Bonnet said, jumping up.

  “Thank you,” Lydgate said. “I’ll give you some dessert plates to set out for the cake you so kindly brought. I see it’s from Michaud’s; I’d recognize that red box anywhere.”

  With Lydgate and her father in the kitchen, Marine turned to Verlaque and whispered, “So that clears Rebecca Schultz, doesn’t it? Why would she kill for a Cézanne?”

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” he answered. “And according to our host, it’s a fake.”

  “But Schultz doesn’t know that,” Marine said. “She hasn’t seen it. Perhaps she desperately wants it as a personal vendetta—against whom, I don’t know.”

  “And she’d know about Cézanne’s Aix lover,” Verlaque said, “as his eminent biographer. That fact was easy enough for even me to find out.” He reached into his jacket pocket and checked his cell phone. “No messages,” he said.

  “She can’t have disappeared into thin air,” Marine said. She then raised an eyebrow and added, “Being such a beauty.”

  Lydgate and Dr. Bonnet returned with a tropézienne proudly displayed on a crystal cake plate. “Who needs chocolate when there’s Chantilly?” Lydgate asked.

  “Mr. Lydgate,” Verlaque said as the cake was cut and served, “there’s something I’ve never understood about art.”

  “Go on,” Lydgate said, putting a piece of cake in his mouth and sitting back in his chair with a look of bliss.

  “How do you, or any expert for that matter, know that Cézanne didn’t just feel like changing his style for this particular painting?” He had been thinking more and more about his conversation with Bruno Paulik, and was now less confident of his argument.

  Edmund Lydgate looked perplexed.

  Verlaque went on: “How he felt on that particular Tuesday morning, for example.”

  Lydgate smiled and Verlaque could see that Marine’s father had a look of concern on his face.

  “Stop looking at me like I’m a half-wit,” Verlaque said, trying to joke.

  “My dear fellow,” Lydgate said in English, “an artist as serious as Paul Cézanne didn’t just change his style one morning for the fun of it.”

  “Why not?” Verlaque asked, crossing his arms and waiting for more detail.

  “It took him so long to get to that point,” Anatole Bonnet said, switching the conversation back into French. “He had been an outcast, but by 1885 he had finally found his gift. Think of all the teasing he got in Paris. Even the Aixois didn’t understand him.”

  Lydgate said, “He wouldn’t have had the time, nor the interest, to start fooling around with another technique. It’s how people like me—”

  “Experts.”

  “Yes,” Lydgate said, smiling. “It’s how experts can be so sure of what we’re looking at. Although—”

  “Yes?” Marine asked, leaning in.

  Lydgate glanced in the direction of the canvas and got up from the table. He walked over to it, hands held behind his back, and bent down. He picked up a loupe and began looking at details in the painting, humming once more. He looked over at Verlaque and said, “There’s a bottle of eau-de-vie in the kitchen, dear fellow. Would you mind serving us some? You’ll see the small glasses set out beside it.”

  Verlaque did as he was told. Anatole Bonnet set his hand over his glass; even if he hadn’t been the driver, he never drank anything stronger than wine. Marine got up and walked over to Lydgate
’s side. “What do you see, or not see?” she asked.

  “Very astute,” he answered. Dr. Bonnet and Verlaque joined them. “I see the preliminary sketch on the canvas, and Cézanne always did that in brush with a watery blue paint, never with charcoal.” He pointed those parts out. “And I don’t see black coffee.”

  His guests looked at him, perplexed, until Marine said, “As an ager?”

  “Yes. Black coffee poured over a canvas will get into the teeth of the material. Rubbed in by hand, the coffee dries, and in four and a half minutes you’ve aged the painting a hundred years.”

  “There must be other ways to fake the age,” Verlaque said.

  “Vacuum cleaner dust does a great job, too,” Lydgate answered.

  “You’ve got to be joking.”

  “Not at all,” Lydgate said. “A master forger in northern England even painted with cheap house paints for years until being caught.” Lydgate took a large gulp of the eau-de-vie and continued looking at the canvas with the loupe. “This painting hasn’t been fiddled with,” he said. “I don’t see any signs of artificial aging. But I would need more time, and better equipment to look at it with. You don’t suppose—”

  “You can look at it all you want at the Palais de Justice in Aix,” Verlaque said. “But I can’t let it out of my sight.”

  “May I take a few photographs?” Lydgate asked.

  “Five,” Verlaque replied, smiling.

  Lydgate handed Marine a small camera. “Would you mind, dear? We need more eau-de-vie.” Lydgate picked up his glass and held it out. Verlaque poured and Lydgate drank his fiery drink as he paced the room. Marine watched the expert, wondering if he had been steering them into believing that painting was a fake. Lydgate was, after all, passionate about portraits. But now he seemed to be undecided.

  “You gasped when you saw the painting,” Marine said. “Your first instinct was that it was the real thing.”

  Lydgate looked at her. “You’re right.” He walked back over to the canvas, set his empty glass down on a table, and looked at the painting, his hands held behind his back.