The Mystery of the Lost Cezanne

by M. L. Longworth

  She was arranging a small woolen blanket over a sleeping baby as he approached. “Commandante Barrès?” he asked, leaning down.

  “Yes,” she answered, standing up and shaking his hand. “You don’t have to whisper; Jeanne can sleep through anything.”

  He smiled and said, “Jeanne. Lovely name.” Joan of Arc.

  “Thank you for coming down to Boulogne,” she said as they sat side by side on a wooden bench. “I’m on maternity leave, but I was . . . intrigued . . . when your call came through to the precinct. A colleague called me at home right away.”

  “Really?” Verlaque asked, looking at sleeping Jeanne. “I had no idea that you’re not working at the moment. I’m so sorry.”

  She waved his apology away with a gloved hand. “No, no, don’t be sorry,” she said. “My colleague called me because he knows how obsessive I can get. You see, Cézanne is my favorite painter. And given the sunny day, I thought we could meet here. I live around the corner. Jeanne is now six months old, so I’m just about to start back at work.”

  “It’s lovely here, even on a cold day,” Verlaque said, looking at the pruned climbing roses. “It’s my first visit.”

  “Ah. Albert Kahn was one of those great nineteenth-century philanthropists,” Barrès said. “He was interested in a bit of everything: plants, as you can see; photography; science and medicine. He lost it all in the crash of 1929. We’re lucky that the city of Boulogne-Billancourt bought the estate in 1940. Kahn’s houses on the Riviera, where the gardens were even bigger, are now lost.”

  He looked at the policewoman. She was tall and slender, although it was hard to see her figure as she was wrapped in a bright-pink woolen coat. She wore her brown hair cut short, which showed off her dangling silver earrings that looked handmade, a one-off. “How long have you been in the art theft division, Commandante Barrès?” he asked.

  “Eleven years total,” she answered. “And I’ve been commandante for five. Our office is a mix of gendarmes and police; we work together.”

  “Were you an art student before joining the force?”

  “No,” she said, laughing. “I studied languages, which comes in handy on the job. But I’m studying art history now, part-time. I’m working on my MA at the Sorbonne. It’s a challenge, though, with Jeanne.”

  Verlaque had almost forgotten about sleeping Jeanne and looked at her tiny hands clutching the top of the blanket. “I’ll tell you why I’m here,” he began. “We’re investigating the murder of a man, René Rouquet, who lived in Paul Cézanne’s former apartment in downtown Aix. About a week before Rouquet died he found a canvas that had been rolled up and hidden somewhere in the apartment. A portrait of a young woman—”

  “And you think it’s a Cézanne?”

  “A local doctor who’s an amateur art historian thinks so, yes,” he said. “But a retired art auctioneer from Sotheby’s thinks it’s a fake, although he seemed to me to be very taken with it.”

  “You think he’s lying?”

  “Yes. But I don’t know why.”

  “What’s his name?” Barrès asked.

  “Edmund Lydgate.”

  She wrote the name down in a small notebook and frowned. “His name rings a bell, but I don’t know why. I’ll look it up when I get back home.”

  Verlaque refrained from telling the commandante that he had lost the canvas. “How easy is it to sell a stolen Cézanne?” he asked. “I’m trying to understand why Rouquet was killed, and if the killer was someone experienced in selling stolen art.”

  “It would be impossible to sell a stolen Cézanne in the legitimate art market. That’s why the Ashmolean Museum Cézanne has never been recovered. Paintings like a Cézanne, or van Gogh, or an Old Master, when stolen, go underground. They disappear.”

  Verlaque leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Tell me about the Oxford theft.”

  “We police who specialize in art theft share files, across the globe,” she said. “If I remember correctly, the Ashmolean theft took place on New Year’s Eve, while all of Oxford was celebrating. The thief took advantage of some scaffolding on the building’s façade and used it to get up to the roof. He broke one of the glass panes of a skylight and then lowered himself down using a rope ladder. On the way down he threw a smoke bomb on the floor, which set off the alarms, but the police officers who arrived on the scene weren’t allowed to go in.”

  “Because of the smoke.”

  “Right,” she answered. “So he, or she, took one Cézanne, a landscape, and went out via the skylight.”

  “Just one Cézanne?” Verlaque asked. “Was the theft an order from a collector?”

  Commandante Barrès shook her head back and forth. “That’s a common misconception,” she said. “Because of the movies, art thieves are imagined to be glamorous, sophisticated, and cunning. That couldn’t be further from the truth. They are professional criminals, many of them very hardened. They, for the most part, steal whatever is most convenient, or whatever paintings they have seen on television. In 2003 two thieves stole two of van Gogh’s early dark paintings from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.”

  Verlaque looked at her. “I’ve been to that museum,” he said. “They didn’t take the sunflowers?”

  “No,” she answered. “I would have taken a self-portrait myself.”

  Verlaque laughed. “So why two of his early works?”

  Commandante Barrès smiled. “They were the first two paintings listed in the museum’s catalogue.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. So you can see, there’s seldom a rich, cultured patron paying these men to steal. They’re just thugs, often involved in organized crime.”

  “What in the world would these guys do with a Cézanne landscape, or two van Goghs?” Verlaque asked. “They can’t possibly sell them at Sotheby’s.”

  “The Mafia is a perfect place to ‘get rid’ of masterpieces,” she replied.

  “I read your article ‘To Catch a Thief,’” Verlaque said.

  “Thank you!” she answered. “Well then, as I said in the article, stolen masterpieces are used as currency. Criminals use artworks to pay off fellow criminals—for example, to pay off debts. The Mafia has connections all over the world—”

  “Making it so easy to use priceless artworks to pay for arms, or drugs,” Verlaque said. He thought of his quick dismissal from Orsani’s house.

  “Yes, and they have a built-in system of transportation. Crossing borders is usually no problem. Some of the objects are sold, and the quicker the objects are sold, the harder it is for us to trace them. We recently recovered a stolen gold clock from the seventeenth century; it was stolen from a château in Brittany on a Saturday night and on Tuesday morning was on the art market. But if it is sold illegally on the black market, an artwork can disappear forever.”

  She reached down into the bottom of the buggy and pulled out a padded case, unzipping it to reveal an iPad. She turned it on and opened a file, flipping through the photos to show Verlaque.

  “Those are all stolen objects?” he asked.

  “Yes, ninety-two thousand of them, to be exact.”

  He whistled. “What’s your recovery rate?”

  “Ten percent.” She pointed to a lamp made in the 1960s. “This was a rare prototype made by Gae Aulenti,” she said. “It was stolen from the minister of finance’s office by one of his staffers. As elections come and go and ministers are changed, their staffs often leave with ‘souvenirs.’” Commandante Barrès found a photo of a painting being held up by two smiling policemen. “In 2005 a security guard at the Pompidou stole this Picasso worth two and a half million. It proved impossible for him to sell as he didn’t have the right connections, and so it was recovered.”

  Verlaque got a lump in his throat, thinking of the upcoming Soulages exhibition. “Do you have a photo of the painting
you found in Aix?” she asked.

  Verlaque got his cell phone out of his coat pocket and showed her the portrait.

  “I don’t recognize it,” she said.

  Verlaque was about to interrupt and say that it had just been found when the commandante said, “Have you done a background check on stolen Cézannes?” she asked. “A small Monet landscape was stolen from a museum in Le Havre in 1974 only to turn up at Christie’s forty years later.”

  “The thief waited that long?”

  “Yes; talk about patience. But we had photos of the painting on file, so it was easy to catch. A retired curator from the museum remembered it and called us when she saw its photograph in a Christie’s catalogue. She still felt guilty, all those years later.”

  “It hadn’t occurred to me that the canvas we found in Aix could have been a Cézanne stolen years ago,” Verlaque said. Marine’s father hadn’t recognized it, but did he know every Cézanne painting? Lydgate he didn’t trust; he hadn’t even looked at it that long. And he now realized that they knew little about René Rouquet.

  “What do you know about fakes?” he asked. Since he had canceled his meeting with Hippolyte and Hervé, perhaps the commandante could shed some light on the art of creating, and selling, reproductions.

  “Ah, fakes are abundant and sold everywhere, from eBay to international galleries. Forgeries are getting better and better, which is why the provenance of your supposed Cézanne canvas is being disputed. These days it really is hard to determine the fakes from the genuine. The general public certainly has no idea, and even museum curators can be fooled. A Manet in a museum in Caracas was stolen and replaced with a copy. The copy was so good that the theft went unnoticed for years.”

  “And by then the real Manet was long gone,” Verlaque suggested.

  “Yes,” she answered. “Last night I read an essay written in the 1930s by the art critic Walter Benjamin. Homework.” She smiled and went on. “He predicted that in the new age of mechanical reproduction, the quasi-sacred quality of art would fade. He called it their ‘aura.’ Artworks would no longer be precious cultural treasures but just images circulating freely all over the world. Their value would drop.”

  “But the opposite’s happened,” Verlaque said. Jeanne made a gurgling sound, signaling the near end of their meeting. “Prices of original art are insane.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But he was right about their images being everywhere . . . reproductions in books, on TV, posters . . .”

  “T-shirts, calendars,” Verlaque added. “It’s as if all that reproduction drove the prices, and value, and desire, even higher. As Andy Warhol was all too aware of.”

  Commandante Barrès smiled, impressed by the judge with the streaked black-and-gray hair and the broken nose. “And because of the ready availability of images of the originals,” she said, “fakes get better all the time.”

  “Yes, we all know what the originals look like, as we stare at them every morning on our coffee cups. We’re intimate with them.”

  “And forgers are now using modern technology to make more-accurate copies. Digital scanning, for example. They can use those microscopic details to make exact reproductions. But there’s something they can’t reproduce—”

  “The brushstrokes?”

  “Exactly. Who can reproduce van Gogh’s energetic brushstrokes? Or Rembrandt’s?”

  “The soul of the painting,” Verlaque offered. “Benjamin’s word ‘aura’ is apt.”

  “Yes. But enter the twenty-first century, and 3-D printing.”

  “Merde. I didn’t think this would have a happy ending.”

  “Ah oui,” she said. “Even van Gogh’s own museum in Holland offers—free of charge—massive amounts of close-up scientific information of Vincent’s oil paintings. We may yet come full circle and prove Walter Benjamin correct.”

  “When reproductions become so good,” Verlaque said, “that the originals no longer have any value.”

  “And at that moment the art market will collapse,” the commandante said. “And I’ll be out of a job.”

  She picked up a now-awake and yawning Jeanne and rocked her in her arms.

  “Thank you for this meeting,” Verlaque said, uncrossing his legs to get up.

  “No problem,” Commandante Barrès said. She looked down at his ankles and smiled. “Nice socks, by the way. I couldn’t help but admire them.”

  “Thank you,” Verlaque said, laughing. They were a gift from my father, via Chiara, his Florentine girlfriend. “My father gave them to me.”

  “Missoni, right?” she asked. She pointed in the direction of Albert Kahn’s beloved Japanese garden. “Like that woman’s coat over there.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Teppanyaki

  Rebecca Schultz was standing on a Japanese bridge, looking down into the water, when Verlaque caught up with her.

  He coughed and she swung around. “Oh my God!” she gasped in English. She then did a half laugh and continued in French, “You’re the last person I expected to see here. You startled me, Judge.”

  He said nothing but held out his hand for her to shake.

  “Have you been here before?” she asked, pulling off a green leather glove to shake his hand. “It’s one of my favorite places in Paris.”

  He stared at her, bewildered by her genuine surprise. Either that, or she was a great actress. “You didn’t follow me here?” he asked.

  This time she burst out laughing.

  “Why do I believe you, and yet I have this crazy hunch that if I were to call my commissioner he would tell me that you took the same TGV as I did?”

  The professor stopped smiling. “I took the 7:05 last night.”

  “Moi aussi,” Verlaque replied. My turn to smile.

  She let out a bit of nervous laughter. “Well, at least we weren’t on the same car. I would have seen you. I was in car eleven.”

  “I was in thirteen.” Verlaque looked at Beauty. She was right; if she was in car 11 then he wouldn’t have seen her, even on his way to buy the Cognac, as the bar was in car 14, right next to his. “You left your hotel without telling anyone.”

  “Isn’t that all right?” she asked. “You told me not to leave France, that’s all.”

  “You’re to notify us of your movements.”

  “Oops.”

  It suddenly occurred to Verlaque that Rebecca Schultz may have gotten where she was partly due to her beauty. But it didn’t work on him; he had seen plenty of beautiful women. His heart belonged to Marine. “Have you been in Paris the whole time?” he asked.

  Schultz pulled her mohair scarf tighter around her neck. “No,” she answered. “Listen, can we go somewhere warm to talk?”

  Verlaque looked at his watch. It was 12:25. In an apartment around the corner, Commandante Barrès would be feeding Jeanne. Hortense was more than likely eating alone, or perhaps with another maid, as his father usually ate lunch at his men’s club.

  “Should we get something to eat? It’s lunchtime,” he said.

  • • •

  It had been years since he had been in a teppanyaki restaurant. The pure spectacle of it now embarrassed him, but as children, he and Sébastien loved it. He remembered their laughter as the tofu sizzled on the hot grill, then jumped up and flapped around, much like a fish does when it has been caught and thrown onto the deck of a fishing boat. He must have been smiling as Rebecca Schultz said, “I hope you don’t mind that I brought you here. I used to love this place as a kid.”

  “You’ve been here before?” Verlaque asked as he looked around the simply furnished Japanese restaurant. Today is a Japanese-themed day, he thought.

  “Many times,” she answered. “We used to borrow the pied-à-terre of friends of friends that was on this street. My parents may have had a great art collection, but they were careful not to spend their money on frivolou
s things like hotels. I usually stay down here. Besides, there didn’t seem to be any hotel rooms available in central Paris.”

  “That happens often,” he said. “So that’s why you know about the Albert Kahn museum.”

  “It was a favorite place of my mother’s,” she said.

  Verlaque saw that although the professor was smiling, her eyes were moist. “Why did you come to France?” he asked. “And don’t say for research.”

  She was about to answer when the cook appeared, both regal and frightening in his dark-blue kimono and leather knife holster. He bowed, drizzled oil onto the hot grill, and set six pieces of tofu down, which, as Verlaque remembered, began to jump and flip in midair. Schultz clapped her hands and then immediately brought them up to her face. “I’m sorry,” she cried out. “But the jumping tofu always got me!”

  Verlaque laughed, too. “It’s just as funny now as it was when I was ten,” he said.

  “You’re even more handsome when you laugh,” she said in English.

  The cook set aside the tofu and carefully placed thin slices of rolled omelette on the grill, and Verlaque realized that their conversation would be constantly interrupted by the spectacle of the teppanyaki chef. Had that been Rebecca Schultz’s reason in choosing this restaurant? And here they sat, side by side. Verlaque had to turn most of his upper body to look at her; had they been sitting at an intimate table for two he still wouldn’t have answered her flirtatious comment, but here he didn’t have to, as they had the spectacle to watch. Slices of eggplant were now sizzling as the chef quickly flipped them back and forth, his spatula making rhythmic scraping sounds against the stainless steel grill.

  “Sorry for being so brash,” she said, twisting a large silver cuff, studded with turquoise, along her wrist. “Where were we before my ill-timed flirt?”

  “You were going to tell me why you’re here.”