by Aaron Elkins
"There isn't any," Tony said.
My fork stopped halfway to my mouth. "No provenance?"
"Not to speak of, no. He says he got it from, well, from a junk shop in Paris. It was grimy, almost black. Naturally, the seller had no idea what it was."
"Well, how does he know what it is?"
"He says he knew the minute he saw it. He bought it, had it cleaned, took a good look at it, and satisfied himself that he was right."
"What do you mean, satisfied himself? Are you saying he authenticated it himself?"
"That's it."
I laughed. "Come on, Tony, this is a joke. An art dealer authenticating his own picture? What kind of authentication is that? Especially René Vachey, for God's sake."
He shrugged. "What do you want me to say?"
"Well, what do the French experts have to say about it?"
"I told you, nobody's seen it. He's setting up a big show at his gallery, and this is going to be the centerpiece. Critics, press, everybody's invited. I hear it's already making a huge flap over there. He's practically challenging the experts to prove his attribution's wrong, and people are starting to choose up sides before they even see the damn thing. Vachey has a lot of enemies, and, as usual, he's right in the middle of it. He called Edmond Froger a dilettante ignorant, in Le Monde."
"Oh, wonderful."
Tony shrugged. "Well, the guy is a horse's ass."
This was starting to have an ominously familiar ring. Several years before the Barillot affair, Vachey had gotten together about fifty of his own paintings to form a well-publicized exhibition called the Turbulent Century: 1860-1960. It ran for a month at a gallery he owned in London, and was scheduled to go to Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, and back to France. In all these places, eager museums had been squabbling with each other for the privilege of getting it. This was quite a show, including works by Gauguin, Seurat, Braque, and Picasso.
Except it didn't, not according to some reputable critics and reviewers who pronounced most of the collection to be questionable or downright spurious. Others, equally distinguished, supported Vachey's claims of authenticity. Battle lines were drawn. There was another flap, with epithets a lot more colorful than "dilettante ignorant" being hurled back and forth. In this one, Vachey remained back in Dijon, away from center stage, enjoying the fireworks while the experts fought it out. In the end, the museums scuttled for cover and pulled out with much huffing and puffing. Not, however, before they—and by extension, art museums in general, and by further extension, art experts in general—had been made laughingstocks. There were a lot of people who thought that just might have been the iconoclastic Vachey's aim in the first place.
And right now I was starting to wonder if it wasn't time for us to think about scuttling for cover ourselves.
"He can't expect us to accept the offer without seeing it, can he?" I asked. "Because if so—"
"No, you've got yourself an invitation to the opening. You can examine it to your heart's content. Okay?"
I considered. The odds were about a hundred to one against the trip accomplishing anything. An unknown "Rembrandt" discovered in a junk shop by a man with an offbeat sense of humor and a quirky history, to put it mildly. No provenance, no reliable authentication. Not a very good bet. On the other hand, for a hundred-to-one shot at this particular reward, yes, I was willing to take a trip to Dijon. Which is a very lovely little town, I might add.
"Good," Tony said heartily, "so it's settled. I'd better send Calvin along with you. He's at the Return of Cultural Property Conference in The Hague, anyway, so he can pop over to France easy. He can take care of the paperwork details, check the fine print, that kind of thing—his French is even better than yours. That'll leave you to concentrate on the painting."
"Fine." Then, after a second: "What do you mean, you'd better?"
Calvin Boyer was the museum's public affairs officer, formerly known as the marketing director. I enjoyed his company—well, most of the time—and he seemed pretty good at what he did, whatever it was, but I couldn't see his being much help in this.
"Well, you know," Tony said, just a little cagily, "you're absolutely tops at what you do, and you know that I trust you completely to handle anything that comes up—"
"Right. But?"
"But, you know, sometimes you're, well, you're not too swift when it comes to people. And Vachey is a very tricky customer."
"Oh, I'm gullible, is that it?"
This was an old complaint from Tony, who was given to wondering aloud how a naive soul like me had survived as well as I had among the sharks of the art world.
"I'm just saying you maybe trust people a little too much," he said. "You're not suspicious enough, you don't have a devious mind. You take people at face value, you don't always look under the surface of things. This is not a criticism, Chris."
It sure sounded like one to me, and I started to climb up on my high horse, but caught myself in time. As a divorced man whose very first clue that his marriage wasn't everything it might have been came when his wife moved in with another man—this was after she'd been seeing him for a year without my noticing a thing—I figured I was in no position to tell Tony about how sharp I was at seeing under the surface of things.
Besides, I have a friend named Louis who from time to time has told me pretty much the same thing Tony just had. Louis says that I tend to resort to the secondary repression of ego-threatening perceptions for fear of bringing to the surface the primal hostilities and id functions that I long ago denied by means of primal or infantile repression.
At least I think that's pretty much the same thing Tony said. Louis is by trade a Freudian-Marcusian psychotherapist, and not always as lucid as Tony.
"Calvin's an M.B.A., Chris," Tony explained further. "You're an art historian."
"Okay," I said, not quite grasping his logic, but letting it pass. "Actually, I'll be glad to have him along. And he can help work out the logistics for getting the painting analyzed. We'll want to have Taupin, from Paris, run it through infrared and X ray, don't you think? And there's that outfit in Lyons—what's its name?—that can do laser microanalysis. I've got it somewhere."
"Mm," Tony said, and pushed his salad plate away. He'd finished his salad. I'd hardly looked at mine. "Come on, let's head back."
We took the escalator down to the lobby, passing under a "Baroque" stone arch that had come from a 1920s theater that had once stood on the site. Once out on Fifth Avenue on a mild October afternoon, we threaded our way through shoppers, bemused tourists, and fellow late-lunchers getting back to work. While we walked, Tony told me more.
The Rembrandt, it seemed, wasn't the only centerpiece of Vachey's show. Vachey, no piker when it came to gall, was actually claiming to have come up with a second "newly discovered" painting; this one by the Frenchman Fernand Léger, who was, with Picasso and Braque, one of the foremost proponents of Cubism in the early years of the twentieth century. The Léger, it was understood, would be going to a French museum, as yet unnamed.
"Is that right?" I said. "Where'd he find this one, at a garage sale in Toulouse?"
"Strasbourg, actually," Tony said. "A flea market," and then he couldn't help laughing. "Now don't jump to conclusions here, Chris. Whatever else you can say about Vachey, he has a hell of a record for stumbling on masterpieces nobody even knew were out there." He started counting them off on his fingers. "There's that Constable that's in San Francisco now, remember? And that Francesco Guardi that wound up in, where was it, Budapest, and don't forget the Lebrun—"
"Well, yes, I know, but—"
"All those authentications were verified later—beyond any doubt, Chris. Sure, he's made a few that didn't hold up, but that much you have to admit."
"I suppose so," I said. "Well, there's one thing to be thankful for, anyway."
"What's that?"
"I was just thinking: He might have given the Rembrandt to a French museum and stuck us with the Léger." I put my hand over my heart. "Whe
w, it's too awful to contemplate."
I say such things primarily for the fun of annoying Tony, who has a thing about me being too enamored of my specialty. He thinks I need to be more eclectic. He says I put the Old Masters up on a pedestal (he's right), and that I look down my nose at anything after the eighteenth century (he's wrong, but not wildly wrong).
But this time he wouldn't bite. He merely gave me one of his superior, pitying looks and went on with his story. According to the terms, both pictures were to be displayed for two weeks at Le Galerie Vachey, after which they would go to their respective new owners. Vachey would pick up all transportation and insurance costs. He would even provide a continuing fund to cover future conservation and insurance.
"So what do you think, Chris? Too good to be true?"
"By half," I said.
In Seattle, you can't walk very far without passing an espresso bar, and most of us are addicted to the stuff. Tony and I, exercising our iron wills, ignored two of them, but finally succumbed at the third, a plant-filled, conservatory-like Starbucks on Fourth near Union. We got on the end of a line of five or six people at the counter.
"Uh-uh, no, it is too good to be true," I muttered while the barista went through her steamy routine at the espresso machine. "There's a catch somewhere."
"Um, there is a sort of catch," Tony said.
I looked at him sharply. I didn't like the sound of that um. "What catch?"
"Two catches, you might say."
"What catches?"
"Well, remember what you were saying about getting that X-ray and microscopic analysis done?"
"Yes—oh, Bussière, that's the name of the lab in Lyons. I have the number in—"
"No dice," Tony said.
"What?"
"No labs. No X-ray, no ultraviolet, no cross-sectional analysis, nothing but the naked eye. You can look at it all you want, but no scientific stuff."
"Why not, for God's sake?"
"That's the way he wants it, Chris."
"But why? Tony, come on, he knows it's a fake, that's the only possible reason."
"Not necessarily. He says they're fragile. He's worried about damaging them."
"With X rays? That's ridiculous, you know that."
"Apparently he doesn't."
I shook my head. "I don't buy it. You know what it is? He's got a good fake, that's all, and he's giving it to us because he thinks Seattle is probably located just west of Dogpatch, and what could we know about art? He thinks he can get it by us, and after he does, he's going to announce that it really is a fake, and so once again he'll show us all up for the greedy, ignorant idiots we are—don't ask me what his point is this time."
Tony listened to this harangue, visibly and somewhat smugly amused. "And could he?"
"Could he what?"
"Get it by you?"
"By me?" Oddly enough, the question caught me by surprise. "I don't think so," I said honestly, after a moment.
"So there's no problem."
"Well, yes, there is. First of all, there's the question of why he won't allow tests—he knows damn well they won't hurt the picture, and he knows equally well that museums always run them before they buy something."
"True, but we're not buying anything, are we? He's giving it to us."
"What's the difference? Why not allow them? And there's a second problem. Sure, if it isn't real, I think I could spot that, but a lot of other so-called experts have thought the same thing and wound up making big mistakes. What if I made a mistake?" I shook my head. "I don't like seeing us put anything in our collection without adequate testing."
"But you're not a 'so-called' expert, Chris," Tony said simply. "If you tell me it's a fake, we won't touch it. If you say it's real, that'll be plenty good enough for me. We'll take it in a flash."
I was flattered, even touched. I cleared my throat. "Thank you, Tony. I appreciate that."
"Besides, we can test the hell out of it after we get it here."
"Right," I said, laughing. Tony wasn't the sentimental type either.
Tony smiled in return; somewhat weakly, I thought. "Well, actually, even that's not true, Chris. You see, this is a restricted gift."
"A restricted gift? You mean we're not allowed to sell it later? Even if we decide we don't like it?"
His expression was one of bottomless forbearance. "Chris."
"Tony?"
"Museums are not in the business of'selling' works of art," he said softly. "You know that."
"Oh. Right. Sorry. I don't know what I was thinking of. I meant we're not allowed to de-accession it?"
I suppose I was getting back at him for getting me into this— for despite all my reservations, I knew perfectly well I was in it up to my eyebrows.
"That's better," he said, fractionally mollified. "But not only can we not de-accession it, we have to agree to keep it on permanent exhibit—well, for five years, anyway—properly labeled as a Rembrandt, and displayed in a manner befitting a Rembrandt."
He exhaled, long and soberly. "So, my friend, if we decide to take it, we better be damn sure it is a Rembrandt ahead of time."
In themselves, restrictions like these are not extraordinary. Donors are always sticking little riders on their bequests that tell you what kind of case something is to be displayed in, or when or where it's to be placed, or what should be next to it, or how it ought to be lit. That, as far as it goes, isn't usually objectionable. These things are gifts, after all, and the people donating them usually love them every bit as much as we do. Why shouldn't they care about what happens to them after they go to a museum?
But this was different. The proscription on testing made it different; the absence of provenance made it different; above all, the presence of the unpredictable René Vachey pulling the strings made it different.
"You mentioned two catches," I said. "Was that the second one?"
"Actually, no; that was still part of the first."
"What," I said, gritting my teeth, "is the second?" "Um, it'll hold. I'll tell you about it when we get back."
Um again. "Tell me now."
"Patience. Let's have our coffee first." "Tony—"
"Here, Chris," Tony said generously as we got to the cashier, "let me pick up the tab. This is on me."
Chapter 2
I knew that whatever else was coming was going to be bad because Tony invited me into his office when we got back to the museum, then further suggested that we step out on his private terrace. It is well known among the staff that this little terrace, for whatever reason, is Tony's locale of choice for dealing with recalcitrant curators. Maybe he thinks the unspoken threat of winding up, crushed and broken, on the pavement of Second Avenue five stories below helps soften us up.
"Terrific view, isn't it?" he said, elbows on the railing. "You can really feel the pulse of the city from here."
"What's the other catch, Tony?"
He sighed. "The, uh, timing of Vachey's showing is a little unfortunate, I'm afraid. And he insists on your being there."
"As long as it's not next week," I said, smiling, then stopped abruptly. "Tony . . . it's not—"
But his look told me that it was.
I grabbed him by the arm and peered at him. "Not Sunday. Tell me it's not Sunday."
"Would that I could," he said sadly.
"Oh, Christ. Tony—"
"Actually, it isn't Sunday, it's five p.m. Monday, but you can't get from here to Dijon by five o'clock the same day, what with the time difference, so you'd have to leave Sunday. Saturday night, to be on the safe side. I know it's a nuisance—"
"Nuisance! Tony, I put in for this time off three months ago. You know how—wait a minute, why couldn't I go check out the painting earlier? I could be in Dijon tomorrow. I could be back by the weekend. I could—"
But Tony was shaking his head. "Nobody gets to see the pictures before the showing. That's the deal."
"All right, what about after? I could go in a couple of weeks, see them then."
"You said I could examine it to my heart's content," I said bitterly.
"To your heart's content as long as it's inside of one day."
The image of Tony lying crushed and broken on the pavement of Second Avenue, five stories below, flitted briefly through my mind. "Tony, this is absolutely crazy. There are too many conditions."
He surprised me by agreeing readily. "Way too many. Vachey's playing some kind of game; that's obvious. And, look, if you get out there, and you wind up having doubts about the picture, or his motives, or anything else that tells you we ought to keep clear of this, then that's that. Case closed."
"Doubts? Are you kidding? Of course I have doubts. Even if it turns out to be real, how do we know it's not stolen? Who knows where he got it? Or how? I mean, come on, a junk shop? The guy must think we're complete rubes."
Tony let me rant on for a while, but he knew as well as I did what I was really griping about. When I finally wound down, he put a sympathetic hand on my shoulder.
"This is sure screwing up your love life, isn't it?"
"Boy, you said a mouthful," I said ruefully.
* * *
The truth of the matter was that my love life wasn't in any too good shape to begin with. I was in love, yes. With a bright and beautiful woman named Anne Greene. And she was in love with me; I had no doubts on that score. Anything we did together was sheer pleasure. We could talk earnestly for hours, brimming with interest and animation, and then laugh because we couldn't remember what we'd been talking about. On walks, on drives, on bicycle paths, at concerts, at art shows, in bed—as long as it was with her, everything was full of warmth, and laughter, and peace. I dated no other women, and she dated no other men. Not because we had an explicit understanding, but because that was the way we liked it. We'd each found the right person. Why keep looking?