Old Scores (Chris Norgren 3)

by Aaron Elkins

  "I'm afraid I don't remember noticing it either," I said.

  "Well, we did a good job gluing it!" He was squirming with excitement. "Look for it, you'll see; the lower right corner! A piece—so big." He used his fingers to make a triangular shape about an inch on a side.

  "What kind of frame was it?"

  He gestured impatiently. "I don't remember the frame—no wait, I think it had fancy carving—but the break—look for it!"

  "I'll look," I said. "You'd better mention this to your attorney too."

  He jerked his head no. "I don't trust him. I trust you, monsieur. You look, please." He was out of his chair and practically pulling me out of mine, as if the sooner he got me up and walking, the sooner I'd be back in Dijon.

  "I'll look," I promised again as I stood up, "but—I'm sorry, Monsieur Mann—I think I would already have seen it if it was there."

  Chapter 16

  I not only didn't think it was there, I knew it wasn't there. I'd examined every millimeter of that painting, and there weren't any repaired cracks in the lower right corner or anywhere else. Somewhere along the line, the frame (which did have carving on it, but how hard would it have been to guess that?) had been stripped down to bare wood and lightly stained, so even an expertly done job would have been visible, let alone the work of a couple of scared kids.

  But that proved nothing, one way or the other. The picture had recently been relined; who was to say it hadn't been reframed as well?

  How about the rest of Mann's story? Well, in general, I believed it; that is, I believed that his father had sold some painting to Vachey in some circumstance, that it was probably a picture of an old man who had a hat with a plume, and that somebody had identified its creator as Govert Flinck. I also believed that Mann was telling the truth as he remembered it; why would he invent the tale about breaking the frame if it hadn't really happened?

  He had nothing to gain from urging me to look for a crack that wasn't there.

  Beyond that, I didn't know how much to take at face value. Mann's perceptions were too old, too thoroughly pickled in bitterness. A well-justified bitterness, to be sure, but did Vachey— Vachey, personally—deserve it? How could I reconcile Mann's cruel, smiling profiteer with Clotilde Guyot's compassionate patriot? I knew which one I wanted to believe in, but I didn't know which one was true.

  And what about the painting itself, the one Mann and his dead brother had played in front of—could it really have been painted by Govert Flinck? Sure, but if so, it wasn't the same painting Vachey had donated to SAM. The more I thought about that picture—and I'd been thinking about it a lot—the more convinced I'd become that that subtle, marvelous old soldier had been beyond anything Flinck could have done. It was a Rembrandt, all right; Mann was wrong about that. If I had to, I was ready to stand up to the Rembrandt Police and defend it.

  But that didn't mean I was out of the woods. It was still possible that Un Officier was indeed the picture Vachey had bought from Mann's father, but that it had been incorrectly ascribed to Flinck instead of to Rembrandt at the time, and Mann had been talking about a Rembrandt all along; he just didn't know it.

  Under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn't have given that a lot of credence—there are quite a few similar pictures out there, of quite a few similar old men, by quite a few competent but lesser Dutch artists (such as Govert Flinck), and Mann's picture was most likely to be one of them. If so, it was probably somewhere in Russia or eastern Germany, and he didn't stand a chance of ever seeing it again. But Vachey's prankish conditions and whimsical behavior—and above all, his murder—had made the circumstances anything but ordinary. All bets were off.

  I was so muddled and dithery by this time that I was half-rooting for Julien Mann—maybe more than half—to prove his case, which was a pretty strange state of affairs, considering where I stood if he did.

  Such were my disordered reflections when the taxi I'd taken from Mann's apartment building in Saint-Denis let me off at 27 Rue Jean-Mermoz, the snazzy Right Bank condominium that Calvin the Resourceful had learned was the address of Gisèle Grémonde, ex-diva, ex-lover of René Vachey . . . and the woman who had been so eager to tell me just what was in that mysterious, missing blue book that had gotten me pitched out of a window—and perhaps gotten René Vachey pitched out of this life.

  * * *

  She wasn't so eager anymore. "I am entertaining," she told me imperiously, standing in her doorway and squarely blocking my way. "And I am about to go out. One would do better to telephone before calling, monsieur."

  She was light years removed from the stricken hag who had sat numbly through the presentation of Vachey's will—and from that blowzy and malicious drunk who'd cornered me at the reception as well. Her coppery wig was back in place—not in the least askew this time—her vivid makeup had been recently and emphatically plastered on, and she was manifestly in control of her faculties.

  Behind her was a small foyer, a very different thing from Julien Mann's, with a parquet floor, and a compact Mazarin writing desk and Louis XIV chair against one wall, beneath a collection of signed photographs. I recognized Toscanini, Pinza, and Callas. From the room beyond came the raspy sound of an old recording; a soprano singing a lilting, Verdi-like aria. I thought I could make out, in the middle tones, a hauntingly sweet, youthful version of Madame Grémonde's time-coarsened voice.

  I apologized for the second time (I'd had to do some fast talking at the downstairs speaker-phone to get her to let me into the building). "Perhaps you don't remember speaking with me at the reception the other night," I said now, "but—"

  "You are correct, Monsieur Norgren, I don't."

  "You were telling me about a book of Monsieur Vachey's; a blue scrapbook . . . ."

  She watched me impatiently, one plucked eyebrow slightly raised. "I do not recall it," she said coldly. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

  "Madame, are you telling me the police haven't been in touch with you about this?"

  Her mouth tightened. "So I have you to thank for that. Well, I'll tell you what I told them. If I indeed said what you said I did, I'm afraid I have no idea at all what was in my mind. I may have had something more to drink than was good for me. When that happens I have been known to become a little, shall we say, fanciful."

  No, I thought, that wasn't it. The difference between now and Monday night wasn't in her blood-alcohol level, it was in her feelings toward Vachey. Last Monday she had thought he was giving her treasured Duchamp to someone else, and she had burned to destroy him for it. Now she knew that in almost his last act he had lived up to his old promise, and like Clotilde Guyot she was determined to protect his memory.

  "I'll tell you what I think, madame," I said bluntly. "I think there are records in it of his purchases during the Occupation. I think you're trying to keep them from coming out to preserve his reputation, and I think you're making a mistake. It was fifty years ago, a lifetime away."

  "You may think as you please, monsieur," she said. "And now, if that is all . . . ?"

  I made a last try at keeping her from shutting the door in my face. "The music—it's beautiful."

  She warmed slightly. "Thank you. You like grand opera?"

  "Very much," I said, wondering why I hadn't started this way. I tilted my head, the better to hear the music. "I've always loved Verdi, and that soprano is wonderful—" I let a slow smile come to my face. "Why, that's you, isn't it?"

  Contemptible, I admit it, but it was a desperate stab. Who else was there who could fill me in on that damn scrapbook?

  Madame Grémonde's face iced up again. "The composer is not Verdi but Bellini. And the singer is not me, it is Lily Pons." She pursed her crimson lips, lifted her several powdered chins, and swung the door closed. A second later she opened it a crack. "I had no trouble with my lower registers. Good evening, monsieur."

  * * *

  So, after almost a full day in Paris, after hustling in and out of taxis to hunt down Julien Mann, Gisèle Grémon
de, and M. Gibeault of Top Souvenirs, I had come away with next to nothing. Well, with nothing.

  There was still one person left on my Paris agenda: Ferdinand Oscar de Quincy, former director of the Seattle Art Museum, former captain with MFA & A, the U.S. Army's art recovery squad, and the man who had once found and returned a dozen of Vachey's own paintings, thereby sowing the seed—so Vachey had claimed—for his eventual donation of the Rembrandt to SAM. I was hoping de Quincy could help me get straight in my mind just who René Vachey was. But that wouldn't be until tomorrow morning, when we were to meet at the Louvre. For the moment, I was at liberty, alone and with nothing to do in the City of Lights. Nothing I felt like doing, anyway.

  There comes a time in most foreign trips, especially when things are not going as well as they might, when one craves the solace of one's native food, and this felt like it. From Madame Grémonde's condominium I walked a block to the Champs Elysées, then turned right for two more blocks until I came to the huge, multifloored Burger King. There, surrounded by black- and-white photographs of American movie actors looking curiously Gallic—a tousled Clark Gable with a woebegone and philosophical half smile, a sleepy-eyed Gary Cooper in three-quarter profile, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth as if he were doing an Yves Montand imitation—I made a solitary, satisfying dinner of le chicken deluxe (a double-order), le milkshake au chocolat, and les frites, earning a pitying look from the server when I asked him to hold the mayo and give me some ketchup to go along with the fries.

  Afterward, I walked a few steps to a movie theater and watched Kevin Costner emote in dubbed French as Robin de Bois, Prince des Voleurs.

  * * *

  By the next morning a fresh breeze had blown away the murk that had been hanging over Paris. The city looked glorious, and I was full of Yankee optimism and energy, the result, no doubt, of all that fried chicken in my bloodstream. At the hotel I had the standard Parisian breakfast of coffee, rolls, and croissants, and started off on foot for the Louvre, a distance of a mile and a half.

  Walking in Paris these days is easier than it used to be, mostly because you no longer have to keep an apprehensive eye on your feet; the notoriously messy dog-droppings (Parisian dogs must be fed a richer diet than those anywhere else) are largely a thing of the past. Seemingly, this is due to the painted white signs on the sidewalks showing an alert-looking dachshund in profile, its nose pointed intelligently toward the curbside gutters down which a cleansing tide of water is flushed several times a day. Beneath the dachshunds, white arrows point in the same direction for good measure, so that even the dumbest dog should get the message.

  Apparently they do, because les dejections canines, as the French so delicately put it, are no longer the problem they were. You can safely raise your eyes to look at Paris now.

  And on a crisp, sparkling fall morning, Paris really is the most gorgeous city in the world. It has everything: trees, parks, a handsome river, historic bridges, breathtaking architecture. And surely no great city is less overwhelming. Along the Quai du Louvre—along the entire length of the Champs Elysées, for that matter—there isn't a building over nine stories high, and most are the same pleasing, uniform seven floors. Aside from the Eiffel Tower, only a single tall structure is visible, and that is a relatively modest skyscraper off in the distance to the south, beyond the Luxembourg Gardens. In the heart of Paris, unlike the heart of London or Tokyo or New York, you get plenty of sky.

  It was a good morning for a brisk pace, and I reached the Louvre in under twenty minutes, but it took me almost another ten to walk the length of the south facade and around the east wing to the new entrance (before it was the world's biggest museum, which it still is, it was the world's biggest palace). Still, I arrived ten minutes early at the place de Quincy and I had arranged to meet: the gleaming, columnar base of the science-fictionish elevator in the new subterranean lobby. There was no sign of anyone who might be de Quincy. The only person who looked as if he were waiting for someone was a gnarly, jug-eared, close-cropped, wide-eyed old codger in a knit sport shirt, double-knit trousers, and Day-Glo orange-and-purple jogging shoes; American, all right, but with Boise, Idaho, or Billings, Montana, written all over him, along with "first goldanged trip to Europe."

  I wandered around the big new shop on the mezzanine, peeking over the railing every few minutes for a sign of de Quincy. We had picked the Louvre to meet because de Quincy, who lived on the outskirts of Paris in the picture-postcard village of Sceaux, had said he had errands to run in the city, and why not meet in a museum, and what was my favorite museum in Paris?

  He'd been in a hurry to get off the telephone, and I had instinctively said the Louvre, which isn't what you're supposed to say, not if you're a visiting cognoscente. You're supposed to name some charming little museum that ordinary people have never heard of: the Musée Cognacq-Jay, for example, or the Nissim de Camondo. Just as in New York it's bad form to tell anyone your favorite museum is the Met on Fifth Avenue. You're supposed to say the Cloisters, or the Cooper-Hewitt.

  But the Louvre is my favorite museum in Paris, and I said so, and de Quincy had been agreeable, and here I was. And there, unless I was mistaken, was de Quincy, a tall, patrician-looking old man in a well-cut double-breasted suit, who was glancing around him—looking for me, I supposed—with some impatience. I know quite a few Americans who've lived abroad for a long time, and there is a certain look they get, an expatriate manner, proud, defiant, and forlorn all at once. And however Italianized or Frenchified they become, there is always an indefinable kernel of something that gives them away as displaced Yanks.

  I went downstairs and walked up to him. "Mr. de Quincy? I'm Chris Norgren. It's a–"

  "Pardon, monsieur," he said politely, "je ne parle pas anglais." He edged away to do his waiting somewhere else.

  A few yards away the other old gentlemen still stood there, tugging reflectively on an oversized earlobe and eyeing me.

  Could it be? I approached tentatively. "Er, Mr. de Quincy?"

  He grinned and stuck out his hand. "Call me Fuzzy."

  * * *

  Well, it had been a natural mistake. With a name like Ferdinand Oscar de Quincy, the image that comes to mind does not include Day-Glo jogging shoes and double-knits. But, it turned out, they suited him perfectly. At a time when it was almost a given that the directors of art museums would come from the cosmopolitan East Coast, be scions of art-collecting families, and have Ivy League degrees, de Quincy had been born on a wheat farm along the Idaho-Washington border (so I hadn't been so far off), and gotten his education at Gonzaga University in Spokane.

  He had come to the Seattle Art Museum as a part-time bookkeeper and business manager, developed an interest in art, and gone to the University of Washington in his spare time for a master's degree in art history. He'd enlisted in the Army in 1941, fought his way through France and Belgium in the infantry, and then been transferred to MFA & A, where he'd worked for three years, in the thick of the most exciting and successful art recovery operation in history. Afterward, he'd returned to SAM, and when the directorship became vacant, he'd been a shoo-in.

  All this I learned inside of ten minutes, in the mezzanine cafe, where de Quincy ordered a croque-monsieur—a toasted ham-and-cheese sandwich—and I had a plain omelet with fried potatoes. (The French breakfast croissant, tasty as it is, is not long on staying power.)

  Ferdinand Oscar "Fuzzy" de Quincy was a friendly, lively chatterbox of a man. All I had to do was raise an interested eyebrow or murmur an encouraging monosyllable, and he would happily take the ball and run with it. After the day I'd spent yesterday trying to pry information out of one suspicious, close-mouthed individual after another, he was a pleasure.

  He'd read with sadness about Vachey's death, he'd heard about Julien Mann's claims, he even knew that I was looking into Vachey's background, and he was delighted—"just tickled pink"—that I'd sought him out. I'd come to the right man, he assured me.

  He explained that he'd been
part of the MFA & A team that had been assigned to Neuschwanstein, the fairyland Bavarian castle in which the Germans had stored the bulk of their French loot. While there, he'd identified and supervised the return of twelve eighteenth-century French paintings taken from Vachey's personal collection. He'd met Vachey for the first time shortly afterward, and the overjoyed Vachey had talked about repaying him. De Quincy had suggested that he give something to the Seattle Art Museum some time when he—

  "Could we just hold up a minute, Mr. de Quincy?"

  "Fuzzy."

  "Fuzzy. You're saying the Nazis took these paintings from him, right?"

  "Sure did. Confiscated most of his collection. Trumped up some charge or other. Consorting with Jews, something like that." Voluble though he was, de Quincy didn't believe in wasting words just to make complete sentences.

  "If that's so, it suggests that he wasn't working for them at all, that Mann's story isn't accurate."

  He snorted. "Story's piffle. Vachey was trying to help those Hebrew folk, not hurt 'em. Couldn't stand the Nazis. Fella's all mixed up, take it from me."

  I put down my fork. This was what I'd hoped to hear. And it came from a man who had no ax to grind. I felt a tingling in the muscles of my shoulders, as if a weight that had sat on them for a long time had begun to lift.

  "So what Clotilde told me is true," I said, more to myself than to him.

  De Quincy, chewing, watched me with interest. "Gallery manager? Depends on what she told you."

  I told him what she'd said: that Vachey had bought pictures during the Occupation and re-sold them to the Nazis—out of compassion, not avarice—that he'd made no profit and had meant to make no profit, that often the Germans had "paid" him not in money but in worthless paintings they'd forced him to take, or in almost equally worthless Occupation francs.