by Aaron Elkins
"I know, madame," I said softly. "My friend told me about it." I was embarrassed: uncomfortably aware of the privileged, painless life I'd led; and aware, also, of how quickly I'd leaped to accuse Vachey, if only in my mind. It was good to hear another side of the story. I was starting to wonder how many more there were.
Madame Guyot, her face a shiny pink, seemed embarrassed too. Effusive and talkative she might be, but I didn't think that these deep, raw emotions had very often been put on public display. But she appeared to be relieved as well, purged by the deluge of memory and tears. A terminal sigh that lifted and dropped her shoulders was followed by a sweet, proud, almost playful smile, and a change of subject. "So, Monsieur Norgren, how do you like the office of the new proprietor of the Galerie Vachey?"
I looked around me, ready to change the subject myself. Clotilde Guyot's workspace made my office in SAM look like the grand ballroom at Fontainebleau. Located at the back of the house, behind the gallery, it was more like a utility room (which was probably what it had once been) than an office; a windowless, closetlike cubicle about twelve feet by twelve, with fuse boxes, fire extinguishers, and alarm system displays on the walls instead of artwork. There were metal file cabinets in two of the corners, and fiberboard storage boxes stacked up on the floor. A small table against one wall held a copier and a fax machine.
It was, in other words, still a utility room, except for the student-sized desk and two chairs that had been sandwiched between the copier and one of the cabinets.
I smiled back at her. "You must be looking forward to moving into Monsieur Vachey's office."
She goggled as if I'd made an indecent proposal. "Oh, I could never do that. I—no, that wouldn't be right at all."
But I could see that the idea simply hadn't occurred to her before, and that even while she was instinctively rejecting it, she was beginning to turn it over in her mind.
"Well, perhaps after a respectful interval," she allowed, trying the thought out on me. "Naturally, I wouldn't ask for the furnishings; they would be Christian's...." For a few seconds she floated off among bright images of Vachey's large and airy study. Then she blushed, distressed at the impropriety of such notions, and blurted: "Oh, monsieur, who would kill a man like that?"
"I don't know," I told her gently. "I know the police are doing their best to find out."
"Of course," she said without conviction.
"Madame, perhaps you can help. There are some things . . ."
Her eyes lit up again. "Yes?"
I leaned toward her over the cluttered desk. "There was a blue book in Monsieur Vachey's study, a scrapbook with clippings pasted into it. You know it?"
She nodded.
"You know what's in it?"
"Oh, yes."
I tried not to sound excited. "Yes? What?"
She smiled charmingly at me, her plump cheeks dimpling. "Oh, I couldn't possibly tell you that."
I stared at her. "But—is there anything about the Rembrandt?"
She shook her head.
"The Flinck, then?" I said after a moment. She shook her head.
"But it is a record of how he came by his collection, isn't that right?"
But she just went on wagging her head from side to side, sweetly smiling all the while. She wasn't saying no, she was telling me I wasn't going to get an answer out of her.
My lips were dry. I licked them. "Madame, I know that's what it is. Perhaps I haven't been clear; I think it may have had something to do with his death."
"Oh, I think not. You must trust me, I'm afraid."
"But—" I paused to settle myself down. "I think it's pretty obvious to everyone," I said with a knowing, encouraging smile, "that Monsieur Vachey had some kind of plan in mind in connection with the gallery's current exhibition. Some kind of—of game. Everything about these two paintings—the Léger, the Rembrandt–has been peculiar, right from the beginning. You must see that."
"Certainly, I see it," she agreed.
"Well, that book might give us some clue as to what that game was."
"Ah, but I already know what it was." "
You do? What?"
"Oh, I couldn't possibly tell you that either." She was being positively coy now. I tried to think just where it was that I'd lost control of the conversation. Or had I ever had it?
"But he may have been killed over it," I said.
"Oh, I doubt that very much."
"If you won't tell me, you have to tell the police."
"I have to do no such thing, Monsieur Norgren."
"Madame Guyot," I said, doing what I thought was an excellent job of keeping my voice down, "surely you see that his murder could have been related to—to whatever he was planning."
"Well, I don't see how. It hasn't happened yet."
"All the same . . ."I stared at her. Yet? "Do you mean that it's still going to happen?"
Her smile was at its most grandmotherly and serene. "I certainly hope so, young man."
* * *
Good work, Norgren. Your skillful interrogation, disguised by a clever facade of bumbling incoherence, had pried from the elusive Madame Guyot a significant fact: "It" hadn't happened yet.
Whether "it" really had any connection with Vachey's death, I didn't know. Despite her supreme confidence that it didn't, I was reserving judgment. As to whether it had any bearing on the Rembrandt, I didn't see that there was much room for doubt. What else was there but the Rembrandt and the Léger?
There was, of course, one little thing I hadn't quite managed to find out: What was "it"? All I knew now that I hadn't known before was that the fireworks weren't over yet. Whatever kind of stink bomb Vachey had lit, there was a delayed-action fuse on it. But for the moment, there wasn't much to be done about it. All I could do, in effect, was wait for another shoe—dropped by a dead man—to hit the floor. And something told me it was going to make a hell of a noise.
On leaving the Galerie Vachey I went back to the Hôtel du Nord and called the prefecture of police to let them know that I would be in Paris overnight, staying at the Hôtel Saint-Louis. I left the message with a clerk, getting off the line before Lefevre could come on to hector me about keeping my nose out of official police matters. Not that my Paris plans had any direct relation to Vachey's death. I was going there to see what I could learn that might be relevant to the Rembrandt, and that was all. If I did happen to find out something that seemed pertinent to the murder, I would pass it right along to the inspector, braving the abuse I would no doubt receive for my trouble.
I threw a change of clothes and some toiletries into an overnight bag, stopped at the hotel desk to tell them I'd be back late the next day, and walked three blocks along the Avenue Maréchal-Foch to the railway station, where I was twenty-five minutes early for the 12:16 train for Paris. There wasn't time for lunch in the crowded buffet, but I went downstairs to where the coffee bar was, to get a quick double-espresso (I'd been away from Seattle too long; my blood was starting to thin) and a ham-and-cheese-stuffed croissant. Taking them to a circular stand-up counter with room for four, I glanced up at the tall, stooped, balding man across from me. We both spoke at the same time.
"Lorenzo! I thought you'd gone back to Florence."
"Christopher! I didn't know you were still here."
"Yes," I said, "I'm still trying to decide what to do about the Rembrandt. But what about you?"
"As long as I'm here in France—ah, mi scusi, signora—I thought I would visit some dealers. You know, I'm—scusi, signore—"
When Lorenzo Bolzano spoke, arms and elbows were likely to fly anywhere. The people on either side of him scowled at him, gathered up as much of their drinks as hadn't been spilled, and went elsewhere, muttering.
Lorenzo, grandly unaware of their withering glances, continued: "You know, I'm making some big changes in the collection, Christopher."
"Oh?" The "collection" was the great assemblage of paintings, rich in Old Masters, that had been begun by his father, Claudio,a man who m
ade René Vachey seem almost like a penny-ante dabbler.
"Yes, I want to develop some real depth in the Synthetists. What do you think?"
What did I think? I thought it sounded like Lorenzo. The Synthetists—or Symbolists or Cloisonnistes—were a school of French artists who rejected naturalistic interpretation for a more "expressive" style in which objects were represented by areas of flat, brilliant color bounded by heavy swaths of black. Open-minded though I am, I've never been able to make much sense of them. They were Lorenzo's cup of tea, all right.
"Jean-Luc Charpentier is helping me. We're off to Lyon today to look at an Anquetin and a couple of Bernards." He poured the last of his Orangina into a paper cup, sipped from it, and smacked his lips. "It comes at a good time, you know. I finally managed to sell off those two Bronzinos, remember them?—brr, so cold, so formal—so I can afford to expand in other directions. When are you coming to Florence, Christopher? I want you to see."
The idea of finding Bronzino's elegant, exquisitely finished figures and limpid, enameled colors replaced by the turbid mush of Redon and company was enough to make me shudder. Lorenzo's discriminating father, I imagined, would be turning over in his grave about now. Of course, this is not to say that Claudio Bolzano had not been been lacking in certain respects. He had been a crook and a murderer, for example. Lorenzo, for all his nuttiness, was as honest and open as anyone could be.
"I'd like to do that, Lorenzo. Can I ask you about something else?"
"Sure, ask."
"It's about Vachey—"
His mobile face darkened. "Ah, Vachey. How terrible."
"You've bought a fair number of paintings from him, haven't you?"
He nodded, sipping the Orangina.
"Look, you're aware that I've got good reason to think there might be something fishy about this Rembrandt—it might not even be a Rembrandt. What I want to know is: Have you ever had any reason to doubt the authenticity of anything he sold you? Could you always rely on his attribution?"
Lorenzo's coffee-bean eyes gleamed; I had given him the kind of opening he loved. "But wherein does an attribution lie?" he asked in his rhetorical singsong. "Entirely in the perception of the attributer, no? Ah-ha-ha. Your question presupposes a simple dichotomy of possibilities that are inherent in the object—authentic or inauthentic, and nothing else, yes? And yet, surely you would not deny that the levels of attributional certainty are unlimited, and that they pertain more to the artificial and predetermined constructs of the attributer's perspective—"
I let him warm up long enough to allow me to swallow some of the croissant, then held up my hand. "Lorenzo, believe me, I'd like nothing better than to argue this out with you, but I have to catch a train in a minute. You know what I mean: Did he ever knowingly try to sell you a fake?" I drank some coffee. "Or unknowingly, for that matter."
The struggle was apparent in his face. Answering a yes-or-no question with a yes or a no didn't come naturally to Lorenzo. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down. "No," he said, practically sweating with the effort.
"Do you usually run your own tests on the objects you buy?"
"Certainly not. You don't need tests if you know what you're doing."
Maybe not, but did Lorenzo know what he was doing? In all the years I'd known him, I'd never resolved that question to my satisfaction. As a professor of art criticism and as a collector, he demonstrated formidable breadth. On the other hand, if you really believed that there wasn't any difference between fake and genuine, then how were you supposed to tell one from the other? Someday I'd have to pursue that with him.
"Once, years ago, my father began to have questions about a Ferdinand Hodler we'd gotten from Vachey," he admitted.
"They were unsubstantiated, as it turned out, but Vachey offered at once to take it back, without hesitation. This was five years after it had been purchased. So I think we can say he was a man of honor, in that regard at least."
Maybe yes, maybe no. A willingness to take back a dubious painting didn't say much one way or the other. Art dealers necessarily work hard to protect their reputations. They flinch from even the insinuation that a fake has ever passed through their hands. Rather than let the issue publicly arise, they will leap to refund money or make a quiet exchange at the first sign that a buyer is beginning to have doubts.
Naturally, that doesn't mean the next pigeon won't get stuck with it.
But at least I knew that Lorenzo and his father, who between them had been buying from Vachey for three decades, had never found anything, explicit or otherwise, to link Vachey with a fake, and that was something.
"However—" Lorenzo said, and I knew by the quickening of his voice that our descent into the concrete was over; we were off and running again, Lorenzo-style. "However, doesn't the very framing of your question assume, a priori, the existence of a unidimensional pole of reality entirely at odds with the precepts of Einstein's theory of the unified field—"
I was saved from the unimaginable consummation of this thought by the appearance of Jean-Luc Charpentier, who dragged Lorenzo off for the Lyon train. I waved them on their way, gulped the last of my croissant, and ran for the train to Paris.
Chapter 15
The Rue de Rivoli is one of Paris's great avenues, a broad and gracious thoroughfare bordering the Louvre and the Tuileries, designed under Napoleon and completed in the reign of Louis-Philippe. Elegant, block-long porticoes front massive, classical buildings crowned with striking mansard roofs. The arcades are crammed with smart shops, bookstores, and art galleries, and three of the world's most stately hotels—the Crillon, the Inter-Continental, and the Meurice—front it within three blocks of each other. Architectural historians generally describe this pleasing, harmonious boulevard as one of the triumphs of nineteenth-century urban design.
They are talking about the western half of it, from the Place de la Concorde to the Louvre. The other half doesn't get much play in the urban architecture journals. East of the Louvre, the Rue de Rivoli turns abruptly proletarian, becoming, in the space of a single block, a bustling, hustling center of gimcrackery and tourist schlock. Here is where you come when you want to purchase a scarf emblazoned with a map of the Paris Metro system, or when you've broken your gilt model of the Eiffel Tower and need to replace it, or, when you're looking for a good buy in Taiwanese Levi's.
Would you care to hazard a guess in which part of the Rue de Rivoli I found number 89–the address at which Vachey had supposedly purchased the Rembrandt? Correct, but why not, inasmuch as Vachey had never called the Atelier Saint-Jean anything but a junk shop?
The store shared a small, off-the-street arcade with a money exchange, a place that seemed to specialize in used issues of Paris-Match, and a snack bar called Le Snack Bar. L'Atelier Saint-Jean itself had changed its name to Top Souvenirs, which I did not regard as an encouraging sign, and now seemed to specialize in plasticized place mats with pictures of Paris street scenes on them, and miniature, plastic-resin reproductions of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo, and other treasures of the Louvre. There wasn't a piece of original art in the place, old or new.
I asked the clerk if she knew where I could find Monsieur Gibeault.
"Alphonse!" she yelled at the top of her voice, and a moment later a bald, preoccupied man in a dirty yellow shirt came out of a side room, closing the door after himself. He peered at me, rotating a dead cigar stub in his mouth, then took me aside, a few feet from some browsers, and lifted his chin, watching me through narrowed eyes.
"You're Monsieur Gibeault, the proprietor?" I asked in French.
He nodded.
"I'm trying to find out about a painting you sold to a friend of mine a while ago."
"I don't sell paintings." He gestured at the shop. "You see any paintings?"
"I'm sure he bought it here—"
"Not from me. From my cousin."
"Your cousin?"
"He owned the place before me. He sold some paintings, stuff he picked up at au
ctions. Not me, they're a pain in the ass, not worth the trouble."
My confidence level continued to fall. "Could you tell me where I can get in touch with him?"
He laughed. "Sure, try the Montrouge Cemetery."
"He's dead?"
"As a baked codfish."
Somehow I got the impression they hadn't been close. "You wouldn't know where his sales records are?" Shrug.
"If I could see them, it might, er, be worth something to you."
It isn't the sort of line I'm very good at, and he just laughed some more. He spit some tobacco shreds onto the floor. "What kind of painting was this?"
"It may have been a Rembrandt."
He stared at me. "This guy—your friend—says he bought a Rembrandt here?"
I had to admit, it didn't seem very likely. "Well, it didn't look like a Rembrandt at the time. It was covered with grime—"
But he was laughing too hard to hear, real belly laughs of amusement. He clapped me on the shoulder. "Hey, I'll tell you what. If your friend's interested in some more Rembrandts, send him around. I'll give him a good price, he won't beat it anywhere. Van Goghs too, Michelangelos, you name it."
He laughed all the way back into the side room. "Unbelievable," I heard him splutter as he shut the door. He was wiping tears from his eyes.
If nothing else, I had certainly enlivened his day.
* * *
This unproductive encounter had been my first enterprise in Paris. I'd taken a taxi directly from the Gare de Lyon to the Rue de Rivoli. Now I hoisted my shoulder bag, found another taxi, and went to my hotel on the Île Saint-Louis to check in and drop off my things, telling the cab driver to come back in twenty minutes.
The Hôtel Saint-Louis is another one of those quiet, homey, unassuming little places—sans prétensions, as they like to say—at which I've been staying since my college days, but which Tony grumbles are no longer commensurate with my distinguished status as the representative of an important museum. Maybe not, but how many decent hotels are there in Paris, where you are a stone's throw—a literal stone's throw–from Notre-Dame, and yet able to sleep with your windows open for fresh air without getting a whiff of exhaust or hearing a single car all night long? Not many, I can tell you.