by Aaron Elkins
So what's the problem, you say? Your own love life should be that good, you think?
There was, in fact, only one difficulty, one small impediment: We happened to live 6,200 miles apart, give or take a few hundred one way or the other. I was in Seattle, and Anne was in Kaiserslautern, Germany. True, it is possible to have wonderful experiences under those conditions. But it is not possible to have frequent wonderful experiences. Or frequent anything.
On the other hand, it may not be all bad. My friend Louis (the psychotherapist) wondered recently over a glass of Orvieto if I hadn't gotten myself into so bizarre a fix on purpose, to avoid the repetitive, counterproductive conflict between erotic energy and social utility; that is (I think), between love and work. Repressive desublimation, it's called, and apparently it is the grease that makes the wheels of industry and commerce go 'round.
But with all due respect to Louis, I didn't buy it; I'd never given much thought to the wheels of industry and commerce— and I missed Anne like crazy.
Anne was a captain in the U.S. Air Force. She had been something called a community liaison officer, but recently, with the cutting back of European military forces, was made an education officer, responsible for developing programs to help servicemen find their way back into the work force in the United States.
I had met her a couple of years earlier when I was in Europe helping to organize an exhibition of paintings. At the time, my personal life was in shreds. I was in the throes of a miserable divorce; sulky, hurt, and thoroughly down on the female sex in general. Anne had come along just when I needed her and had helped me to see things straight again. During the six weeks I was in Europe we'd become close, and closer still when I left.
Since then we'd spent a fortune in telephone bills, and seen each other perhaps eight times. All right, exactly eight times. Fortunately, I have the kind of job that gets me to Europe two or three times a year, for a week or two at a time, and Anne had taken two long, marvelous vacations with me in the United States. Eight times in two years is once every three months, on the average. About right for getting together with your brother-in-law; a little sparse for relating to your meaningful other.
The trouble was, Anne was as dedicated to her career as I was to mine. And being a fully credentialed Late-Twentieth-Century Male—sensitive, supporting, and enlightened—was I about to suggest that she give up her job and come live with me in Seattle? Not me. Even though I did earn considerably more money than she did. Even though her Air Force career was hardly a "career" if they could switch her from community liaison to educational services overnight, without bothering to ask her opinion about it. Even though she could easily enough find interesting work in Seattle, but what the hell was I supposed to do in Kaiserslautern? No, sensible as such a decision might seem to you—to any right-thinking person—I wouldn't think of bringing it up.
Not for a minute.
And so we got along on our once-every-three-months schedule—worried, but not overly worried, about how it would all eventually work out. For the present, it was the best we could do, and we were grateful for what time we did have together. Which is not to say that there weren't problems sometimes— such as the one I had just gotten myself into by volunteering (or did I volunteer? With Tony, you're never sure.) to be aboard a plane to France on the following Sunday.
Sunday, you see, was the day on which Anne expected to find me waiting at San Francisco International Airport at 1:00 p.m. She would arrive then on a military charter flight from Frankfurt, having convinced her superiors that her presence was essential at a job-reentry conference to be held at McChord Air Force Base, near Tacoma, on the following Wednesday. That gave us—would have given us—three crisp, glorious November days to drive slowly up the northern California and Oregon coasts to Puget Sound. We would stay—would have stayed—at inns I knew of, with woodburning fireplaces and huge windows looking out on rocky headlands and crashing surf.
Now I'd be lucky to get back from France by Wednesday night, which would leave just three days for us to be together before she had to fly back to Germany.
Not feeling good about it, I called her from my office at 2:00 p.m., 11:00 p.m. German time. The phone rang twice before she picked it up.
"Hello?"
I knew from the velvety timbre of her voice that the telephone had awakened her. I imagined her pushing herself up on her pillow, short brown hair tousled and warm from sleep. I felt my own voice soften.
"Anne, it's Chris. I'm sorry I woke you up."
"You didn't, not really. I was hoping it was you when I heard it ring." She sounded excited and happy. My heart sank a little more. "Chris, guess what, there was room for me on an earlier flight. I'll be in San Francisco at seven o'clock in the morning. That'll give us the full day together, do you realize that?. We could—"
I sighed and got it out. "Anne, I can't make it Sunday."
"You can't—is something wrong? You're all right, aren't you?"
"Yes, I'm all right. It's just that something's come up at work. I'll be gone till late Wednesday. . . ." I explained; not very coherently, I'm afraid. "Anne, it's not as if—" I faltered. Not as if what? Not as if I were more interested in chasing down the Rembrandt than I was in seeing her? Well, I wasn't; it was just that ... I didn't know what to say, so I let the sentence hang there.
"We'll still have three days together," I told her. I hoped I sounded more exuberant than I felt. "All we'll miss are the first four."
Right. Just the long, looping, lonely curves of U.S. 101, with the rockbound sea on our left and those sweeping, forested bluffs on our right. Just the brooding offshore monoliths of Bandon and Cannon Beach, shrouded in blue-gray fall mists. Just the lighthouses at Yaquina and Heceta Head on their bleak, wave-pounded promontories. Just the shout-out-loud pleasure of having an entire, endless week ahead in each other's company.
Having only the three days killed all that. You can't have an endless three days. From the beginning, you can hear the clock ticking.
"I know," she said.
"We'll drive the coast next time," I said. "It'll still be there. So will those inns along the way."
"Did you make the reservations?"
"Yes. I'll cancel them," I said glumly.
"No, don't cancel them. I think I'd like to make the drive by myself. I'll rent a car."
"It's over a thousand miles."
"That's all right. It'll be nice to look at the sea. And I can use some time by myself. I want to do some thinking."
That didn't sound exactly ominous, but it didn't suffuse me with joy either.
"We'll talk when you get back to Seattle," she said.
That sounded ominous.
"Anne, this is just one of those logistical problems, it's nothing serious. They happen, that's all. Remember when you couldn't make it to Antwerp last year?"
"Of course I remember. I know this isn't your fault."
"So what is there to talk about?"
"I don't know. I'm not making sense. I'm still half-asleep. I'm sorry I won't see you till Wednesday."
"Me too. You still have the key to my place?"
"Uh-huh."
"I'll leave some things in the refrigerator for you."
"Thank you."
"Anne?" I hesitated. "Everything's all right between us, isn't it?"
"Of course it is," she said, sounding surprised. "Don't worry, we'll work things out. Chris?"
I waited. I realized the back of my neck was tense.
"I love you. Very much." The softness was back in her voice. I felt most of the tightness melt out of my neck.
"I love you," I said sincerely. "I'll see you Wednesday."
I hung up, reassured but not totally.
What was there to work out?
* * *
A few minutes later I called Tony's administrative assistant. "Lloyd, I need some airplane tickets." I gave him the details.
"Will do," he said. "Pronto mucho."
"Oh, and I'd like to go first-cl
ass, please. Or business-class, if you can't get that."
This was taboo, as I knew very well. First-class seats were standard if you were transporting, say, a Van Gogh or a Caravaggio—one seat for you, one for the picture—but mere human beings traveling on museum business flew K-class. Generally speaking, I had no objection to the policy; this was the first time I'd asked for an exception.
There was a pause before Lloyd answered. "I'll have to clear that with Tony."
"Fine," I said. "He owes me."
Chapter 3
"You want my best guess?" Calvin asked, looking up from a copy of the Executive Gift Catalog, which I'd gotten for him from the seat pocket on the plane. Calvin Boyer is the only person I know who actually orders things from these catalogs. I can personally affirm that on his office desk is a palm-sized digital clock, an electronic chronometer that can time up to three functions simultaneously, that his Porsche has a customized shift knob of hand-rubbed walnut and richly gleaming brass with CWB engraved on it, and that he ordinarily travels with a handy-dandy pocket calculator capable of saying "Where is the toilet?" in seven languages (something he didn't need on this trip, having lived in France until he was eleven). Even now I could see the dark glint of the multifunctional navigator's wristwatch, with "safety-ratcheted bezel," on his wrist.
Despite these and numerous other oddities of personality, Calvin is a likable guy, lively and upbeat, and even bright in an obtuse sort of way.
I turned from the window. "Sure," I said. "What's your best guess?"
We were seated side by side in the comfortable, plush chairs of a FrenchRail TGV, that sleek, silent, 180-mile-per-hour train that is usually the fastest and always the most comfortable way of getting from Paris to any other important French city. I had landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport a couple of hours earlier after a reasonably pleasant thirteen-hour flight from Seattle—the first-class seat didn't hurt any—and gone directly to the Gare de Lyon to meet Calvin in time to make the 5:19 for Dijon.
"I think these paintings of his are fakes," Calvin said. "Both of them. The Rembrandt and the other guy too."
"Léger," I said. "I agree with you."
"I think he's on another one of his crusades. He wants to show the world that art experts are fundamentally full of crap. I'm telling you."
"Could be," I said, then smiled. "You wouldn't think he'd have to go to so much trouble to make that particular point."
"He thinks the pictures are so good," Calvin continued, "that he can get them by you and most of the other pros—as long as nobody starts analyzing pigments or whatever they do in the labs. And as soon as some of you guys commit yourselves and say they're genuine, then he's going to get them scientifically tested himself, and the results are going to show that they're fakes after all, and that he put one over on you and half of the art world.
"Thereby demonstrating that art experts are fundamentally full of crap," he concluded with more verve than was strictly necessary.
"I heard you the first time, Calvin."
"Hey, nothing personal, pal. My advice to you is not to commit yourself one way or the other."
"I have to. We have to either accept it or turn it down by the end of Tuesday. Day after tomorrow."
"Hey, that's really tough," he said, his interest returning to the page. "Whoa, what about this? 'A double-sided calculator-clock desk folder. Flip it up, and it tells the time, flip it down . . .' "
Calvin's hypothesis was pretty much the one that I'd come up with last week in talking with Tony. Since then I'd refined it a bit. I imagined the feisty and more than slightly crackpot Vachey had in mind another one of his media extravaganzas. According to Tony, the French art experts and critics were already quarreling over the authenticity of the "newly found" paintings, and no one had even seen them yet. After the public unveiling at tomorrow's exclusive but highly publicized reception they would very likely be at each others' throats, and Vachey himself would have center stage once more. I assumed he had some kind of big finish in mind, and Calvin's guess that he himself would eventually submit the paintings to a scientific examination and then trumpet the results was as good as anything I could think of.
I had even come up with a reason for his donating the paintings to a couple of museums instead of simply announcing and displaying his "finds" and letting the critics respond on their own. He had cleverly reasoned, I thought, that museum officials, rapacious entities that we were—or that he thought we were—would be so blinded by our acquisitiveness that we might very well be a great deal less skeptical and more suggestible than the professional, presumably more objective (ha!) art critics.
I turned thoughtfully back to the darkening window. We were about twenty minutes into the trip, just breaking clear of the seemingly endless outskirts of Paris. Miles of grimy railroad yards had been succeeded by blocks of drab and graceless apartment buildings, which were followed in turn by anonymous factories, warehouses, and auto-wrecking yards, and then by great, sinister tracts of weedy, bulldozer-rutted land pockmarked with oily puddles. In the murk of dusk it had all seemed even more depressing than it actually was, but now we were in open country at last; plowed fields and ancient fortified farmhouses and rolling, wooded hills. In an hour we would be in Dijon.
I sighed, wondering just what we were getting into.
Calvin looked up once more. "On the other hand," he offered helpfully, "maybe they're real and this isn't a setup at all."
"True. Which is why we are speeding over the French countryside at this very moment. But if they're real, why is he so against scientific tests?"
"Yeah," Calvin said.
"You know, there's another possibility, Calvin; a variation on the make-the-experts-look-like-jerks theme. What if this Rembrandt is the real thing, and Vachey is laying on all these conditions to make us think it's not real? Not allowing any tests . . . giving us only one day to make our decision . . . Anybody with any sense would conclude Vachey's trying to put one over on us, right? So let's say we play it conservatively and refuse the painting because we doubt its authenticity. Then Vachey goes ahead and proves it is authentic—"
"And we wind up looking like saps." He glanced at me admiringly. "Jeez, Chris, you got a devious mind."
I laughed. "Tell that to Tony, will you?"
* * *
When we got to Dijon, Calvin headed instinctively for La Cloche, the town's most elegant hotel, while I went to the inexpensive Hôtel du Nord a few blocks away—not because I was repentant about the first-class seat to Paris (I wasn't), and was trying to save Tony money (I wasn't), but because the du Nord was where I had stayed the first time I saw Dijon, when it was the best I could afford. I had liked the simple ambience, liked the people who ran it, and been coming back ever since. Actually, Tony had tried to get me to book a room at La Cloche too, his philosophy being that penny-pinching in the matter of hotels reflected badly on the museum. But I wasn't penny-pinching, I was just reliving my youth.
Once I'd showered, I joined Calvin for a light dinner at a café a couple of blocks away, but I wasn't much in the way of company. I was washed out from the long trip, lonely for Anne, and nursing a mild case of first-night-in-a-foreign-city blues. And according to my biological clock (showily confirmed by Calvin's snazzy wristwatch), it was noon Seattle-time and I'd been up all night.
But Calvin hadn't. He'd only come a few hundred miles, from a conference in The Hague, and was full of his usual high spirits. Despite my telling him that unless things had changed, nightlife in Dijon was nonexistent, he went off to see for himself. If there was any to be found, I had no doubt that he would find it. Notwithstanding an unimpressively geeky build, a darty manner, and what seemed to me to be a striking facial resemblance to Bugs Bunny, Calvin did extremely well in singles bars, discos, and the like. It was because he was a good dresser, he claimed.
As for me, I had no interest in singles bars or discos. I went up to my room on the top floor of the du Nord, thinking dejectedly about Anne driving north f
rom San Francisco, solitary and reflective. She'd be in the beautiful Mendocino headlands by now, or maybe as far as the giant redwood country if she'd been in a hurry and taken Highway 101. But why would she be in a hurry?
I sighed, and for a while I stood with my elbows on the high sill of the casement window, looking mindlessly out into the night, over the slate roofs of the medieval university just across the way, and the harsh Gothic towers of the cathedral of Saint-Benigne a few blocks beyond. When I realized I was falling asleep on my feet, I pulled off my clothes, managed a few sketchy strokes with my toothbrush, and fell heavily into bed. Tomorrow was the big day, culminating in the opening of the show at Vachey's gallery.
But first, at 11:00 a.m., I had my own private interview with René Vachey, arranged with considerable difficulty before I left Seattle. I intended to meet him head-on about his refusal to allow testing. And if I couldn't get him to change his mind, well, I was damn well going to know the reason why.
Chapter 4
Once upon a time the power of the dukes of Burgundy matched that of any ruler in Christendom, including the king of France. Those days are long past, but the splendid ducal palace still stands (it is now Dijon's city hall), and the streets around it—Dijon's ancienne ville—are filled with elegant two- and three-story townhouses, built anywhere from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and scrupulously maintained. Walk six or seven blocks in any direction, and you might be in any prosperous French city; modern, bustling, anonymous. But to be in the ancienne ville is to be immersed—architecturally, at least—in a vanished age of refinement, wealth, and quiet charm.
Vachey's townhouse was located here, in the heart of the Old City, three blocks from the Palais des Dues, at 39 Rue de la Préfecture. Like most of the houses on these streets, it had a brief historical-society tablet on its facade, MAISON DE GERLAND, it in French, BUILT 1682-1686 FOR ANTOINE DE GERLAND, COUNSELOR TO THE AUDIT OFFICE AND DEPUTY TO PARLIAMENT. This was the only sign on the building except for a tiny brass plaque, no larger than an apartment house nameplate, beside the entrance archway. LE GALERIE VACHEY, it said simply, almost pretentious in its lack of ostentation.