by Aaron Elkins
De Quincy waved a corner of his sandwich until he got his mouthful down. "Story's piffle too," he said.
My shoulders stopped tingling. "But—"
"You happen to know a Swiss dealer named Gessner?"
"I don't think so."
"Zurich. You ought to talk to him sometime. If he's still alive. Bought a bunch of those worthless paintings from Vachey in forty-four. Nice little odalisque by Matisse, couple of Vlaminck still lifes . . . let's see, Dufy, Rouault, Pierre Bonnard—"
"I don't understand."
De Quincy smiled. "Well, what do you mean by 'worthless'? Depends on who's doing the valuing, wouldn't you say?"
I almost asked him if he'd been talking to Lorenzo, but he quickly explained what he meant. Hitler had detested modern French art so much that he had forbidden the shipment of it into Germany. Thus, when the Nazi "collection agencies" in France found pieces of twentieth-century French art in their hauls, they were unable to do anything with them but try to sell them in a virtually nonexistent French market—or, as in Vachey's case, trade them for art that met the Führer's aesthetic standards. So Vachey was able to buy up, say, a Flinck at negligible cost, trade it for, say, a Matisse from the Germans, and then make a huge profit in the Swiss market, which had remained active through the war. This he did more than once, and according to de Quincy, the proceeds had provided the nest egg from which he'd built his fortune.
"In Switzerland, you see," De Quincy said, "he could get some real money, not the play money they had here during the Occupation."
"Yes, I see," I said woodenly. I saw that Vachey, after all was said and done, had been what Mann had said he was: a parasite who'd fed on his countrymen's helplessness in the most terrible of times.
"Now don't go off all half-cocked," de Quincy said. "My opinion, Vachey was an honest-to-Jesus hero, Chris. Took some real risks—I mean stand-him-in-front-of-the-firing-squad risks—to help people get away before the Nazis got them. Helped them get rid of their collections, helped them get out of the country—"
"And made a killing doing it."
"Sure he did, why shouldn't he? Guy wasn't a professional hero, he was a businessman, what do you expect? I'm telling you, he did a lot of good. More than you know. Lot of sides to the man. Come on, you want to walk through the museum or not?"
I had a final, half-hearted bite of the cooling omelet. "Sure, let's."
But the Louvre is not a museum you walk "through," not unless you have three days to do it. You have to pick your area, and I chose the first floor of the Denon wing, where the main European painting collection was. As we slowly climbed the broad staircase past Winged Victory—the full-size marble version—de Quincy told me about an aspect of Vachey's endlessly varied life of which I'd known nothing.
In the early eighties, it seemed, he had acted as a middleman for the French government, successfully negotiating with shadowy figures in East Germany for the return of a famous ceramics collection that had been looted from a museum in Nancy during the war. This patriotic mission he took on without any payment and without any public recognition. His part in it came out only when the French government minister involved retired and published his memoirs. More recently there had been governmental leaks suggesting that it had been only one of several such delicate assignments Vachey had performed for his country.
"So you see," de Quincy said, pausing to catch his breath at the top of the stairs, "more to the man than meets the eye."
"Amen to that," I said. "Did you stay in contact with him all these years?"
"Not really. Followed his career, of course. Ran into him now and again. Always liked the fella. Something to him."
"Fuzzy, why didn't he invite you to the reception the other night? That gift was really in your honor."
He smiled, pleased. "Did invite me. Fact is, I don't go much of anyplace if it involves sleeping out." He patted his hip. "Ligament troubles. Need to sleep in my own bed. Tell me, what's the Rembrandt look like?"
"It looks good. I think it's authentic; a lot like the one in the Getty, but with a huge plume and a greenish cast in the background. I'm sure it's not listed in Bredius. Does it sound like anything you've ever run into with Vachey?"
He shook his head. "Nope. Wasn't in his collection when I saw it way back when."
"I don't suppose you'd have any idea where he might have gotten it?"
"Nope. All I know is what he said. Junk shop. Knowing him, it could be true."
We walked through the Apollo Gallery, where groups of avid schoolchildren were clustered three deep around cases holding the crown jewels, turned right, and found ourselves at one end of what used to be called the Grande Galerie, and with good reason. Now blandly referred to as Denon Rooms 4 to 8 for touristic ease, these adjacent spaces form a single glorious gallery 1,000 feet long (I know because I paced it once and counted 332 steps), the longest, greatest gallery of art that ever existed, densely lined on both sides with masterpieces of French painting—Watteau, Poussin, La Tour, Fragonard—and a few dozen assorted Italians—Botticelli, Giotto, Giovanni Bellini, for starters—thrown in to avoid too parochial a flavor. The elegant, arched ceiling is punctuated every 250 feet or so by an ornate, marble-columned cupola. At the far end, you go around a crick in the floor plan, and there you are, looking down an additional 300 feet of Flemish, Dutch, and Spanish masterworks.
All this is one half of one floor of one wing. And there are three wings. Some museum.
While we walked slowly through it, pausing occasionally to look at a particular painting, I told de Quincy about the puzzling restrictions that Vachey had placed on both the Barillot and SAM, and about the generally queer goings-on that had followed them.
By the time I'd finished, we'd walked the entire floor—the lengths of four football fields, as an American guidebook predictably puts it—and were sitting on a stone bench at the head of the east staircase, surrounded by El Grecos, Murillos, and Riberas.
"Interesting," de Quincy said when I was done. "What do you make of it?"
"That's what I was going to ask you. What do you suppose he could have been up to?"
He shook his head slowly back and forth. "Got me."
"Look, Fuzzy, I have to come to a decision tomorrow. If you were in my place, would you take the painting?"
"If what's holding you back is worrying about what he did or didn't do in the forties, I'd say yes, for damn sure, take it."
"That's the main thing, but those weird conditions of his make me nervous too. You knew him pretty well—"
"Not so well."
"But you liked him, you admired him." He nodded. "Fair statement."
"Well, would you say you could take him at his word?"
"Well—"
"If he told you what he told me—that there was nothing tricky behind the restriction on testing, or behind the time limits he set up, or behind anything else, would you trust him?"
De Quincy pulled thoughtfully at his earlobe. "About as far as I could throw him."
Chapter 17
I got back to Dijon at 3:00 p.m., which left me just twenty-seven hours to make up my mind about the Rembrandt. If I didn't sign off on Vachey's conditions by the close of business Friday, the offer would be void, and the painting, presumably, would revert with the rest of Vachey's "residue" to his son, Christian.
Christian, who had tried to keep me away from the Rembrandt, and Froger away from the Léger. Christian, who had tried to wrest the Duchamp from Gisèle Grémonde. Christian, who was so little trusted by his father that the older man had kept his new will secret from him, and in it had aced him out of the ownership of the Galerie Vachey and removed him as executor besides.
However, Christian had also been living in the same house with his father for the last six months. Disappointed in his son or not, it seemed probable that Vachey would have let him in on whatever game he was playing with the paintings, and even more likely that Christian would know something about that scrapbook. Until now, however, I had
n't even tried to talk to him. I didn't think he'd see me, for one thing (he had done his best to keep me out of the house altogether), and for another, how could I trust anything told to me by a man who was in line to get the Rembrandt if I turned it down? So I had started with likelier sources, and struck out. Pepin claimed he knew nothing about anything; Gisèle knew about the book but wasn't telling. And Clotilde knew about the book and about Vachey's intentions, but she wasn't telling either. That left Christian.
* * *
"Okay, I'll say it one more time," Christian said with a sort of nonchalant irritation. "One: I don't know anything about any blue scrapbook, I never heard of any blue scrapbook, I never saw any blue scrapbook. Two: I was born in 1956, so do you want to tell me how I'm supposed to know anything about my father's activities in the war? Three: I don't know what my father had in mind when he offered you the Rembrandt, why should I? Okay?"
He went back to what he'd been doing: arranging a carton of dog-eared papers and index cards into neat little stacks on the surface of an aged rolltop desk. His English was idiomatic and barely accented, the pronunciation American rather than British, with a slangy, choppy flavor that gave credence to the stories of mob connections in Miami.
"That's hard to believe," I said. "You're his son. You were living in the same house."
He shrugged and stood up, stretching. There was a faint whiff of expensive cologne, dry and lemony. "Well, I can't help what you want to believe. Look, I'm sorry, but I have a million things to do, you know?"
This was the way it had gone from the beginning. We were on the first floor of Vachey's house, at the end of a blind corridor that served as a small study. Christian, in a pin-striped gray suit, again with no tie, hadn't been out-and-out rude, but he hadn't bothered to stop his paper-arranging when I'd arrived either, and he hadn't offered me a seat. I wasn't sure if I'd ever quite gotten his full attention.
Now he smiled and held out his hand. "Sorry, my friend. I wish I could have helped." I could see that his mind was already back on his cards.
There wasn't much I could do but go. "Well, thanks for your time," I said. "If you happen to think—"
And right then, as suddenly as that, one feature of the gluey, murky swamp I'd been sloshing around in for days popped into sharp, clean focus. I recognized his cologne. I remembered the last time I'd smelled it—a second or so before I went flying out the window of Vachey's study. At the time I'd had the impression that a faint, citrusy, distinctive smell had come from the opened pages of the scrapbook, but it hadn't come from the pages at all.
"You pushed me out that window," I said.
I finally had his attention. He jerked his hand out of mine and took a step back, eyes startled. I had laughed when I said it—a sort of delighted cackle—because it felt so good to finally know something, and Christian probably thought I'd gone around the bend.
"Don't be dumb," he said. "What window? What are you talking about? Why the hell would I want to push you out of a window?"
"To keep me from seeing the book."
"What book?" Finding that I didn't intend to strangle him after all, he'd managed to put some self-assurance back into his voice. He raised his eyes to the ceiling and tried an indignant laugh. "I can't believe it. This guy has the nerve to walk in here—"
"The hell with it," I said. "I'm not going to stand here and fight about it. You tried to kill me, and I can damn well prove it, and as far as I'm concerned, I'm just as happy letting Lefevre get it out of you."
I turned smartly and strode down the long corridor, the old wooden floor groaning at each step. I had made it all the way to the door that led to the public part of the house and gotten it open before he called out.
"Wait a minute, will you . . . Chris?"
I turned, still holding the handle. For a moment there, I thought I'd overplayed my hand.
"All right, okay, you're right," he said. He came down the long hallway with his rolling, cocky stride, letting a sheepish, oily half-smile form on his face, confident that no one could fail to be charmed by his unassuming candor.
"You're right," he said again when he reached me, "what can I say? But believe me, doing you any harm was the last thing I was thinking of. I mean, I don't bear you any personal animosity, Chris. Far from it."
"Well, that's a load off my mind."
He laughed. "Let me explain, okay? When I heard that damn woman start—"
"Gisèle Grémonde?"
He nodded. "—start in with that stuff about the upstanding René Vachey, the great René Vachey, and she actually started talking about that scrapbook of his, I took off for the study to make sure the door was locked and the damn thing was out of sight." He shrugged. "Well, you beat me to it, and I saw you disappearing behind a corner with the damn thing, so I followed you in and ... I guess I just acted without thinking. I'd had a few too many, you know?"
He flashed his friendly, between-us-guys smile to show that he knew I understood that it had all been in good fun. "Look, I wasn't thinking about pushing you out the window. All I was after was the book. I'm not a violent guy, Chris. Hell, I'm a pacifist, believe me."
"I believe you." I wasn't sure if I did or not, but I wasn't interested in arguing with him. It was information I was after.
"Thanks, Chris. So—you going to go to the cops?"
"That depends. I need to know what's in the book."
This was a bald-faced attempt to mislead him. Of course I would go to the police. But before I did, I wanted to see that scrapbook for myself. With the matter left in Lefevre's hands, who knew when, or if, I would ever see it? Not by six o'clock tomorrow, anyway.
"Sorry." He shook his head sadly. The dangling earring swayed, the Superman forelock stirred.
"Look, Christian," I said, "let's get something straight. All I'm trying to do is find out if there's anything in there that might make me think twice about accepting the painting. Otherwise, I'll just have to take a chance and go ahead and sign off on it."
He could hardly mistake the implication of this wily ploy: If I rejected the painting, he'd get it. So, if anything, it was to his advantage to let me see the scrapbook. It made sense to me; I hoped it made sense to him.
Apparently, it did. He stepped back into the hallway. "Okay, come on in."
Once inside, he closed the door. "I guess you know what's in it, then."
I nodded. "I think so. Notes and clippings your father kept of his art purchases—starting during the Occupation."
"That's it. Why he kept them all these years—why he kept them in the first place—I don't know. I suppose he figured that some day Julien Mann or someone like him would crawl out from under a rock and start whining about being robbed, and my father wanted to be able to prove he didn't do anything illegal."
No, there had to be more to it than that in Christian's mind. "Then why push me out the window to keep me from seeing it?"
He gazed sincerely at me, man to man. "Look, Chris, I'm not ashamed of anything my father did. But times change, you know? And what people had to do to survive in 1942—it's the easiest thing in the world to ... to make it look lousy today. People don't know the way it was. Well, my father had a hell of a lot of enemies, I think you know that, and they'd just love to haul his name through the mud if the stuff in that book ever got to be public knowledge. And that's something I can't let happen. My father's name is the most important thing he left me."
It sounded good, and Christian delivered it in manly fashion, with just the right amount of eyeball-glistening. But it all seemed a little too high-minded to me for the would-be kingpin of Tanzanian cement and New Caledonian seaweed. What Christian had really been trying to do, I thought, was simply to keep Vachey's records to himself, so as not to provoke other claims like Mann's against the estate. And I was betting there was more to it than that; that some of the paintings that Vachey had bought in the forties were still on the walls of this house, or in a vault somewhere, and Christian had plans to sell them. If so, he'd certai
nly want to hang tightly on to the records of those old transactions.
I told him as much.
He listened, head down, and looked up at the end with his crooked grin back in place. "Well, yes, okay, I admit it, a few of those old pictures are still in the basement, and, sure, I just might decide to put them up for sale. But between you and me, they're junk—seventeenth-, eighteenth-century apprentice stuff. My father gave up trying to peddle them twenty years ago and forgot all about them. I haven't looked at them myself in years. But things are different now, the art market's gone nuts—maybe I'll haul them out and see what I can get."
"I'm sure you will," I said.
"Look, Chris—no offense—but I don't really see where this is any of your business."
"Maybe not. But the Rembrandt is my business—"
"Sure, but there's nothing about it in that book, take my word for it."
"I'd have to see that for myself." When he hesitated, I added: "Otherwise, I go to the police right now."
"Well..." He adjusted his slightly disarranged forelock with a cupped hand. "The fact is, I don't have it, you know?"
"You don't have it?"
"No. Don't get excited, give me a chance to explain."
When I'd tumbled out the window, he told me, he had snatched the volume up from the floor, meaning to take it someplace safer. But I'd started such a racket from outside that he knew others would momentarily be bursting into the study, so he had hurriedly stuck it in the first place that came to hand, a crowded, waist-high bookcase across the room, thirty feet from where Gisèle had been telling everyone it was. Then he'd ducked out of the room just in time to keep my would-be rescuers from finding him there.
Five minutes later, when he'd come back, the book had been gone. Someone had identified it despite its location, and had taken advantage of the uproar to remove it. He had no idea who.