Old Scores (Chris Norgren 3)

by Aaron Elkins

  Fat chance, I thought. Getting someone else would mean the Barillot, not Vachey's estate, would be footing the bill. Predictably, Froger started hemming and hawing. "Well, no, that is to say, of course I trust your judgment, Jean-Luc. Implicitly. That goes without saying. Er—Christopher, what about your Rembrandt? Are you going to accept it?"

  "Probably, yes, if I can get some questions about its history settled. I think it's authentic."

  How about that, I'd actually said it out loud. It was a bit of a shock hearing it.

  "Gentlemen." Froger had summoned up his bottom-of-the-well baritone. He leaned forward, thick elbows on the satiny, billowing surface of the desk. "Gentlemen, if you're right, if this is an authentic painting by Léger, an authentic painting by Rembrandt—then what are we to make of Vachey's posturing and fooling about, of his absolute refusal to allow tests? What was he trying to do?"

  That was a switch. Last night he'd been telling us what Vachey had in mind, not asking us.

  "According to you," Charpentier said, not letting him forget it, "it's because they're forgeries. Well, they're not forgeries, and I would have thought that would be enough for you. As to Vachey, whatever he had in mind, no one is ever likely to know what it was now."

  That didn't satisfy Froger. "All right, let me put it this way, Jean-Luc. Let's say I had independently commissioned you to help me decide whether to buy this painting, the very same painting. Let's say there were no restrictions about testing. Would you recommend that I send it to a laboratory to be absolutely certain it's authentic before purchasing it?"

  Charpentier rubbed his nose. He got out his pack of Gitanes and lit up. Froger hurriedly produced an onyx ashtray and put it in front of him. "Only if you had money you were determined to waste," Charpentier said. "In the first place, every criterion reveals it as a Léger and nothing else; every single one. Second, remember that Léger is a twentieth-century master, not an artist of the Baroque or the Renaissance, so there is very little help that scientific tests can provide."

  That seemed like an overstatement to me. True, even the most advanced dating techniques weren't going to be of much use on a painting less than a hundred years old, but what about infrared photography to highlight painting techniques, spectroscopy to analyze paint formulas, and all the rest of it? (Not that I could claim an overwhelmingly thorough grasp of all the rest of it.)

  "Do you mean you never advise your clients to test modern paintings?" I asked him.

  "Once in a great while I do, if there is some question that expert scrutiny cannot answer. But ordinarily, no. A scientific test is no better than the technician performing it. Technicians are people, and people make mistakes, Christopher."

  "Experts are people too," I said.

  Charpentier smiled thinly at me through a blue-tinged haze. "Let's consider the Rembrandt for a moment, and not the Léger. You would like to have it tested? Very good. But what if the technician innocently takes a paint sample from an area restored in the nineteenth century, what happens then to the dating? This has happened, my dear Christopher."

  "I know that. You need informed judgment too. That's why I wouldn't have been any happier about it if Vachey had reversed it and said we could submit the paintings to all the tests we wanted, but we weren't allowed to look at them. You need both, not just—"

  "And what about errors that are not so innocent? Fakers can add metallic salts to underpainting, and throw off X-ray analysis. This, too, has happened, and not so long ago. They can confound infrared photography by—"

  "I just don't like to be made a fool of," Froger muttered again. "There's something wrong. Even dead, I don't trust the son of a bitch."

  "No one's going to argue with you there, Edmond," Charpentier said.

  "I remember that Turbulent Century fiasco of his," Froger went on. "I reviewed it for the Revue, you know. Now don't climb back on your high horse, Jean-Luc. I know you thought highly of it—"

  "I did not think highly of it," Charpentier said irritably. "Get your facts straight. I thought highly of the figurative and Analytical Cubist portion of it. René had collected some remarkable works there. As for the rest of the exhibition, I wasn't qualified to make judgments, but I certainly had my doubts about the quality of some of the pieces."

  "Yes, well, I can't speak for your Analytical Cubists, but, by God, I know Seurat and the Neoimpressionists; that's my specialty. And I tell you, that show was filled with trash that Vachey was trying to put over on us. It was shameful. I said it at the time—I don't hold my tongue when I have something to say, you know that—and I still say it. Well, naturally, I'm worried now. How could I help it?"

  "Edmond, do you mean actual forgeries?" I asked. I'd never read his review of Vachey's notorious exhibition, or Charpen tier's, or anybody else's, but I'd certainly developed an interest.

  The word made him skittish. His hand went to his collar again. "Forgeries? No, when did I use the word forgeries? Did you hear me use the word forgeries? We could fill this museum— your museum too, and the Louvre, and the Metropolitan—with disputed attributions without ever touching on forgeries, isn't that so?"

  I had to admit it was so.

  "No," he said, "I didn't say forgeries, I said only ... I meant only . . . inferior works."

  "So what are you worried about?" Charpentier asked brusquely. "Haven't I just finished telling you that this Léger of yours is an inferior work? You already know it. What sinister surprise is to be feared?"

  Froger shook his head darkly. He still didn't trust the son of a bitch.

  Charpentier ground out his cigarette in the ashtray, and stood up. "I don't see what else there is for me to tell you. I'll give you a report in a few days, but there won't be anything startling in it. Are you going to accept the painting?"

  "I—yes, I suppose so. Isn't that what you're advising me? Isn't that what it comes to? If it isn't too much to ask for your advice."

  "I'm advising you to put it in one of the dark corners with which the Barillot is so richly supplied. If you're lucky, no one will notice it. Good day, Edmond."

  Chapter 13

  It was only two o'clock, but I was fatigued and still a little tottery from the previous night's episode, so I went back to the hotel to put my feet up, once again taking the chattering old elevator to the fourth floor instead of walking. Inside the room, I took off my shoes, plumped up the pillows, and lay back on the bed. It felt good too.

  Charpentier's remarks had started me thinking about this business of the tests again. He'd overdone it, but he was essentially right about laboratory analysis not being as useful on forgeries of modern paintings as on forgeries of old ones. The best thing a test can do for you in pinpointing a fake is to show you that a purported 360-year-old Rembrandt is painted on a 50-year-old canvas, or uses pigments that weren't developed until the late nineteenth century, or is painted over a picture of a 1960 Ford Fairlane. The older a picture is supposed to be, the more a lab has to go on. From that standpoint, it would seem that, of the two—the Léger and the Rembrandt—the likelier candidate for fake was the Rembrandt. That was Charpentier's point.

  But we weren't dealing with a modern forgery of a Rembrandt; of that I was sure. As a matter of fact, there weren't many modern forgeries of them around—precisely because there were so many Rembrandt-like paintings still available from Rembrandt's own time. At the worst, that's what An Officer was. And all the scientific wizardry in the world can't help you detect a 360-year-old fake of a 360-year-old painting..

  So what was the point of the prohibition? I was right back at what Calvin had aptly enough called square one. Back at it? When had I ever been off it?

  I settled in more comfortably to give it some deeper contemplation.

  At 6:20 the telephone rang. I got it to my ear without opening my eyes.

  "Hey, Chris—"

  "Calvin, why are you always waking me up?"

  "Why are you always asleep?"

  I yawned and swung my feet over the side of the
bed. "L'Atelier Saint-Jean," Calvin said, "89 Rue de Rivoli, propriétaire M. Gibeault."

  I finished my yawn. "Hm. French, nest-ce pas?"

  "It's the junk shop, Chris."

  That opened my eyes. "The—you mean where he said he bought the Rembrandt? Pepin actually gave it to you?"

  "Are you kidding me? Not that I didn't ask him, but he claims he doesn't know anything about the Rembrandt. Apparently, there were a lot of things that Vachey kept close to his vest, and this was one."

  "So then, who told you—"

  "I got it from Madame Guyot." He coughed modestly. "She sort of took a shine to me."

  "Calvin, that's great," I said. "I can catch a train to Paris tomorrow—"

  "I found out some other interesting stuff too. If you think this whole thing is already as weird as it's going to get, think again. You had your dinner yet?"

  "I've been asleep. I'm not terrifically hungry."

  "There's a brasserie at the foot of the Rue de la Liberté, practically across the street from you. We can get an omelet or something. Meet you there in five minutes."

  * * *

  "Guess," Calvin said, smugly watching me over his glass of white wine, "who Pepin is."

  "What do you mean, who he is? Vachey's secretary, his security head, whatever."

  "Ho-ho, there's more to it than that, my man."

  I poured most of my tiny bottle of Badoit mineral water (I wasn't feeling up to wine yet) into my glass. "Calvin, this is very entertaining, but how about just telling me?"

  "Well, you know that heist that Vachey pulled off at the Barillot ten years ago?"

  "It wasn't a 'heist,' " I said irritably. "He was making a point. They got their paintings back, and more."

  Calvin's eyes widened. I was surprised myself. When had I gone so far over into Vachey's camp that I would defend the theft of art, whatever the reason behind it? I quickly corrected myself. "All right, yes, it was a heist. Sorry. But what about it?"

  "And how Froger fired his security chief over the lapse in precautions? Well, you want to guess the name of that fired security chief?"

  "You're telling me it was Pepin?"

  "You got it. Vachey gave him a job the next week, and Pepin's been there ever since." He grinned. "You don't suppose that might explain why he's a teeny bit paranoid about anybody getting within arm's length of anything in the Galerie Vachey?"

  I nodded. Once burned, twice shy. "You know, it also might ..."

  The waiter set down our orders. A ham omelet for Calvin, a cheese omelet for me, each served alongside two minuscule tomato wedges on a miniature lettuce leaf. With them came a basket of rolls, a tray with bottles of vinegar and oil on it, and—as with almost everything else in this town—a pot of Dijon mustard.

  "It also might what?" Calvin asked when my sentence died away.

  Frowning, I broke open a roll. "I was just thinking . . . Let's say that happened to you. That Vachey hired you to work for him after Froger fired you. How would you feel?"

  Calvin hunched his shoulders. "Relieved, I guess. There couldn't have been too many places that would have been willing to take a chance on him after that."

  "How would you feel toward Vachey?"

  "I don't know—grateful?"

  "Even though he's the one that got you fired in the first place? Even though you'd never be able to get a job in the field with anybody else?"

  "Oh, I see what you mean. You'd have sort of mixed feelings, wouldn't you? You'd be grateful—but you'd also hate his guts every time you looked at him."

  "Exactly," I said. "I was just wondering if he might have hated him enough to kill him."

  "But why right at this particular time? All that happened years ago."

  "For one thing, to make it look as if it had something to do with the exhibition, or those charges in Les Echos Quotidiens, or any of the other things that are going on right now."

  Calvin was shaking his head. "Maybe, but it sounds kind of far-out to me, Chris. A lot of people probably hated Vachey enough to kill him. Jeez, we know about twenty of them ourselves."

  "Like who?"

  "Like Gisèle Grémonde."

  "You mean because of the Duchamp? But he gave it to her before he died."

  "Yeah, but she didn't find that out until this morning, after he was already dead."

  "Well, yes, but—"

  "And what about that sleazeball son, Christian? You see how shocked he was to hear about the new will? Maybe he thought Vachey was only planning to change his will, and he murdered him to head him off. And then he finds out this morning he was too late by a year or so. Didn't you catch that oh-shit look on his face?"

  "That's true, I guess—"

  "Don't forget Mann either. Talk about an ax to grind. For all we know he's been hunting Vachey all these years and just found out where he lived."

  I sighed. They didn't add up to twenty, but they were enough. "You're right. I guess I was just thinking out loud."

  "And don't forget all the people we don't know who probably hated his guts."

  I started on the omelet, and for a minute or two we ate in silence.

  "Guess who Clotilde Guyot is," Calvin said. I looked up, fork in hand.

  "You're full of surprises, aren't you? Who?"

  "This is something you probably know more about than I do. You know what Aryanization was?"

  Yes, I knew. During World War II, early in the Occupation, Jewish businesses had been declared ownerless. The Nazi logic was unassailable: Jews had been made technically stateless by German decree, and how could stateless people have property rights? Jewish firms were therefore commandeered by the authorities. The owners were trucked off to the death camps in the East, or interned in France, or if they were lucky, they bought their way out of Europe or otherwise managed to disappear from sight.

  There was some local outrage over this, of course, but the French were in no position to pursue complaints with vigor; besides, a number of influential citizens were beneficiaries of the policy. Confiscated Jewish firms were turned over, lock, stock, and barrel, to local businessmen of indisputably Aryan descent. Once cleansed of non-Aryan pollution, the firms were soon back in business. The conversion process was referred to by the Germans as "Aryanization."

  "Well, that's how Vachey got his first gallery," Calvin told me. "The Nazis handed it to him. It was the Galerie Royale in Paris—you know, the one Vachey owned in 1942. Well, before that, it'd belonged to Clotilde's uncle."

  I put down my fork. My appetite, not very hearty to start with, was gone. "Oh, hell, Calvin," I said quietly.

  He looked surprised. "Why oh hell? I mean, look, it was a lousy deal, but it's not as if Vachey personally stole it from the guy. He probably didn't have any choice in the matter either."

  "No, Calvin, it wasn't like that. Who do you think the Nazis gave these businesses to? The people they already loved doing business with, that's who. The toadies, the stooges, the collaborators, the parasites." And whether I wanted to believe it or not, it was starting to look as if René Vachey had been one, or even all, of the above.

  Calvin was shaking his head. "Well, that's not the way she remembers it. The way she sees it, Vachey walked on water." He put down his fork and leaned forward. "Let me tell you."

  If the story she had told Calvin was even half-true, and I hoped it was, I could see why she felt that way. Far from being a despicable predator who had thrived on others' misery, he had been a genuine hero, according to Clotilde. Yes, he had taken over her Uncle Joachim Lippe's Galerie Royale under the Nazis' policy, but he had used his earnings and his influence to assist others less fortunate. He had spent 80,000 francs—real francs, not Occupation notes; a colossal sum to him in those days— and had undergone enormous personal risk besides, in trying to arrange the Lippe family's escape from Occupied Europe.

  In Joachim's case, he had failed—the Gestapo arrested the elderly man three hours before he was to leave Paris, and he had frozen to death in a cattle car while en ro
ute to Auschwitz— but Vachey did succeed in getting Joachim's wife and two little girls to Vichy France, then to Portugal, and finally to Canada. Afterward, he had continued to send them money until the mid-1950s, when Mrs. Lippe married again.

  Clotilde, then sixteen, wasn't Jewish herself, but as far as the Gestapo were concerned, having a Jewish uncle had been close enough. With her arrest and deportation to slave labor in Eastern Europe imminent, Vachey had hidden her, her mother, and Clotilde's six-year-old brother in his own basement for seven weeks—an act that would have resulted in his own death if it had been known—while he cajoled and bribed French and German officials into issuing the precious papers that certified the Guyots' non-Jewishness.

  Once they were safe, he had given Clotilde a job in the gallery, and she had worked for him ever since.

  "Fifty goddamn years, can you imagine?" Calvin said. "How'd you like to work for Tony for fifty years? I'm telling you, she thinks he was the greatest thing that ever walked around on two legs." He shook his head slowly. "And no wonder."

  Still, I did wonder. Clotilde's relationship to Vachey was even more equivocal than Pepin's. Vachey had risked his own life to save her and her family—but he'd also been the man who'd profited from the death of her uncle and the confiscation of his gallery, the man who'd taken it over with the approval of, and perhaps on the instructions of, the Nazi authorities. Now, in the end, he'd given it back to her, but he had already made good use of it as a springboard to wealth, while she had remained a paid employee for half a century.

  Did she hate him? Love him? Both? What would I have felt in her position, or in Pepin's? It was impossible to imagine. Here I'd known the man only a single day, and I couldn't seem to figure out whether I admired him or despised him.

  "What else did she say?" I asked.

  "Nothing much. Why, what else did you want her to say?"

  "Possibly something about this Flinck thing. If she's been working for Vachey since 1942, she'd know whether there was anything to Mann's charges."