by Aaron Elkins
He shook his head. "I should have put it in a drawer or something, but there wasn't any time, and I was a little rattled. I mean, you were yelling out there—I didn't know whether you were dying or what."
I fell back against the wall. "Damn." Whether he was telling the truth or not, it was plain that I wasn't going to get to see the book. Another dead end, after all.
"Then I want to see those paintings in the basement," I said.
"Why? The Rembrandt's upstairs in the gallery where it always was."
"I just want to. Let's go, please."
He shrugged. "Whatever you say. I just want to cooperate."
He gestured me ahead of him down the hallway, but first I picked up the telephone in the vestibule and dialed Calvin's hotel. I may, as Tony says, not be the world's swiftest study when it comes to perceiving ulterior motives, but even I knew enough not to head off to the cellar, alone with a guy who'd shoved me out of a second-story window three days before. I wasn't going to give him another shot at me, with or without personal animosity.
"Calvin?" I said, when the hotel clerk had switched me to his room. "It's four-thirty right now, and I'm with Christian Vachey at his house. Just wanted you to know. I'll see you in an hour."
To make sure Christian didn't miss a word, I said it in French. As far as Calvin was concerned, I could have delivered it in New Caledonian, because he wasn't there. But this was for Christian's benefit, and I could see that he got the message.
We took the back stairs to the basement. At the rear of the house downstairs was a cheerless kitchen that hadn't changed much since the seventeenth century: flagstone floors, warped, scarred wooden tables, a huge, stone cooking fireplace, a few rusted, giant-sized cooking implements that looked like torture devices hanging on the soot-blackened walls. It was used for storage now, full of packing materials, paper, and disassembled picture crates. Next to it was Pepin's office, where we'd met for the presentation of the will. Pepin looked up from his desk in surprise, and was motioned by Christian to come along.
The three of us walked through to the front half of the house, past a small alcove set up as a studio with an easel and painting supplies, and then up to a steel door, which Christian unlocked. Behind it was a windowless room with insulated walls, in which thirty or forty glassine-wrapped paintings were neatly lined up in a two-layer wooden framework of carpeted bins.
Christian pointed to a group of ten or twelve wrapped pictures in the upper rack. "You want to unwrap those, Pepin?" To me, he said: "Those are the ones you wanted to see."
"No, I think I'd better see them all, please."
He didn't like it, but he spread his hands submissively and nodded to Pepin. "Do what the man says."
Pepin, predictably, didn't like it either, but he got to work taking off the wrappers and propping the paintings on the floor against the walls of the corridor.
He started with the ones in the lower rack. All were modern— early twentieth century. I thought I recognized some of the artists.
"Isn't that a Gris?" I asked. "And a Delaunay?"
"Sure are," Christian said. "And this one here is a Derain."
Could these be some of the "worthless" paintings de Quincy told me about? But why would René Vachey have kept them here in the cellar all these years?
"They must be worth a fair amount of money," I said.
Christian grinned. "I sure hope so."
By now Pepin, working quickly, had come to the paintings in the upper rack—the pictures that the young René Vachey had bought in the forties, according to Christian—and begun to lay them out. They were what Christian had said they were: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings of little value, some Dutch, some French, all age-darkened. Most of them appeared to be apprentice studies, many unfinished, the best of them no better than competent. They would have been right at home on the walls of the Barillot, if that tells you anything. They weren't worth the time it took to give them a second glance.
Except one.
I lifted it, examined it, checked the frame, and finally propped it back against the wall. Another piece of the puzzle had dropped into place. If this kept up, I might eventually figure out what was going on.
"Look familiar to you?" I asked Christian.
"What? No. Well, in a way. It looks a little like that Rembrandt."
"It looks a lot like that Rembrandt," I said.
Christian gave it a quintessential double take, eyes boggling, jaw dropping. "Rembrandt!" He stared hungrily at it, then at me, a laugh gurgling in his chest. "You're not telling me that this is actually a . . . that all this time, down here in the cellar, there's been a—a—"
"A Flinck," I said.
"A flink!" he shouted back at me. "What the fuck is a flink?"
Pepin, who was standing quietly behind us, said thoughtfully to me: "You may be right, monsieur."
"You've never seen this before?" I asked him.
"I have never seen any of these before."
"Who the fuck ..." Christian began again, and Pepin explained who Govert Flinck was.
"It took a few seconds to penetrate. "You mean this is the painting this guy Mann wants back?" he said to me. "Not the Rembrandt upstairs?"
"That's exactly what I mean. Look at it. Picture of an old soldier—obviously the same model, same costume, same pose. He probably copied it directly from the Rembrandt picture—or more likely from some other student's copy."
Christian leaned over from the waist to examine it, hands on his knees. "Show me where it says 'Flinck.' "
"It doesn't. Nobody would sign a picture like this; it was just an exercise. Look, it isn't even properly finished. But I don't see how there can be much question that it's Mann's painting. How many pictures of this particular model, posed this particular way, could your father own? And you've already said he got these in the forties."
But there was more than that to back up Mann's claim. A small part of the lower right corner of the frame had been broken off and been glued back on. Some of the gilt around the break had flaked off, and the repair was plainly visible. It even looked like a job done by a couple of frightened kids, with a dried spurt of glue protruding from the back. We were looking at Capitaine Le Nez, all right.
I held back from mentioning the crack to Christian, however. It would have been too easy for him to get rid of the frame and put a new one on.
"What's it worth?" he asked.
"Just what you said—not much. It's nowhere near as good as the one upstairs and wasn't meant to be. It's a student exercise, a long way from Flinck at his best. And I doubt if there's any way to prove it is by Flinck." I turned from the picture to look directly at him. "Why don't you give it to him, Christian? Nobody's going to give you much money for it."
"Give it to him? What for? His father sold it, didn't he?"
"Come on, you know what the situation was. It would be a generous gesture on your part."
But his loose-lipped mouth had firmed. "If he thinks he has a case," he said sullenly, "let him go ahead and prove it in court."
And there I had to let it rest, not very hopefully. Even with that repair on the frame, I didn't give Julien Mann and his lawyer brother-in-law much chance of convincing a court of law that he had a legal right to it. A moral right, maybe, but courts didn't deal in moral rights.
We left Pepin rewrapping the paintings and came upstairs, back to the front door.
Christian had his easy, male-bonding smile in place again, and even went so far as to drape an arm over my shoulder. This was not a good move on his part; I could smell that now-familiar, citrusy cologne again. Back came distinct and unwelcome memories of pitching nose-first into the night.
"Well, what do you say, friend?" he said. "I've been as honest as I know how. Everything I know, you know. What now?"
"What do you mean, what now?" I got out from under his arm.
"You know what I mean. What are you going to do now?"
"What am I going to do now? I'm going to talk
to Lefevre. Everything I know, he knows."
I opened the door and stepped out into the public vestibule. Several people were coming down from viewing the show. Christian, still smiling, waited for them to pass.
"Look, I see what you're trying to do. You're trying to get me to tell you what my father had cooked up, but I honest-to-God don't—"
"No, I'm telling you what I'm going to do."
"What the hell good will it do you? And what do you do if I deny everything? I don't believe you have any proof. What proof do you have?"
"So long, Christian." I went out and down the outside steps.
He followed me to the head of the staircase. The smile had disappeared. "Now wait," he shouted after me. "I thought . . . you led me to believe . . . Now look, Norgren, you can't . . . you can't . . ."
Chapter 18
I could, but I didn't. He was right about the proof. What was I supposed to tell Lefevre, that I recognized Christian's cologne? So what? How many other men in France wore the same scent? Besides, I believed his story, at least in its general outlines. He hadn't set out to murder me; it had been the book, the record, he was after, and I didn't think there was any connection between his hapless attempt to get it and his father's death. Even the business about somebody else making off with it rang true to me. As for Mann's portrait, that hadn't been a police matter to begin with, and it wasn't now.
I supposed I'd ultimately have to tell Lefevre all about it, but I knew he'd classify it under the heading of Unsolicited Assistance, and I wasn't up to his reaction yet. It could wait one more day. Right now, I was ready for a drink and something to eat.
When I got to the Hôtel du Nord, Gerard, the clerk behind the counter, called out to someone as I entered the small lobby. "Here he is now."
There was a movement on my left, in the corner where a group of easy chairs were arranged around a table. I turned toward it.
"Hi, Chris," Anne said.
* * *
The waiter laid out our breakfast, café complet for two: a big pitcher of hot coffee, a jug of hot milk, two six-inch chunks of baguette, croissants, hard rolls, butter, and foil-packed jams.
Anne did the pouring into the big cups. We tore off pieces of our croissants, littering the white tablecloth with flakes. We buttered our croissants. We took our first bites, our first sips. We looked at each other.
"Well," Anne said.
"Well," I said.
There is a way of saying "well" that means the small talk is over, and very pleasant it may have been, but now let's get down to serious business, if you please.
In our case it had been more than small talk, and it had been extremely pleasant. Once I'd come down off the ceiling the previous evening, Anne explained that she'd decided that my idea of a weekend in France was too good to pass up, and that maybe she could pull just a few more strings. She'd lined up a military flight to Rhein-Main Air Base in Germany. From the nearby Frankfurt Airport she'd caught a commercial plane to Paris, and then another flight on to Dijon. She'd arrived only an hour earlier, and she was starving.
We'd gone out for a simple, wonderful dinner of moules marinière, bread, and the house Chablis at a plain little restaurant on the Rue Dr. Maret, two blocks from the hotel. I hardly remember what we talked about, but it wasn't anything important. Mostly, I just basked in the knowledge that I was going to have three days to be with her after all. I think I didn't so much listen to her talk as watch her talk, happily taking in everything about her: those lovely, near-violet eyes, the wide, friendly mouth, the ghost of a tic that came and went in the soft skin below her eyes when she was nervous or excited, and which never failed to move me.
Somewhere toward the end of the meal I began edging toward the question of her commission, but the time hadn't been right for it, and we veered back to less threatening topics. She told me about her conference, I told her about what had been happening in Dijon and Paris. We laughed about the dachshunds painted on the Parisian sidewalks.
Afterward, when we went back to the hotel, we didn't talk about much of anything; there was a lot of lost time to make up for. Then this morning I'd awakened with my face against her smooth, honey-colored hair, and there hadn't been a lot of talk then either. We'd taken particular pains to stay well clear of the topic of her commission. Right up until that pair of wells.
I forced down a hunk of croissant.
"So," I said.
"So," she said.
This was serious stuff, all right. Bull-by-the-horns time. "What's it going to be, Anne?" I said. "Are you resigning or not?"
She tore off a tiny piece of croissant and rolled it in her fingers. "Which do you want first, the good news or the bad?" I'd been hoping it was all going to be good. "Bad," I said.
"All right. I'm staying in, Chris."
"I see."
"Don't look like that, Chris. Can't you be happy for me? I'll be heading up my own training unit." She smiled, proud and shy at the same time. "I got my line number for major. I'm right up at the top."
"Of course I'm happy for you." I leaned forward, put my hand on top of hers. "You deserve it. Congratulations, Anne, it's wonderful news."
It was the lousiest news I'd heard all year.
I couldn't have been too convincing, because she went into a long explanation of how the new assignment would tap her potential in ways that the old one hadn't, and what a wonderful career opportunity it was for her, and how the old notions of a sexual dichotomy of labor no longer applied in today's world.
I sat there doing my best to look liberated, but all I could think of was the dreary routine of seeing her only three or four times a year, and all the logistical coordination it took to make even that much work out. My face must have fallen enough for her to take pity on me, because she broke off her spiel and laughed.
"Are you about ready for the good news?"
"Good news?" I'd thought her promotion to major was the good news.
She nodded. "I haven't told you where I'm being assigned." I frowned. "Not Kaiserslautern?
She shook her head, her eyes sparkling. She looked like a kid with a secret she couldn't hang on to for another second. "I'll be at the Air Force Academy. I just got it all worked out yesterday, at the conference. I still can't believe it."
"You mean in Colorado?"
"Colorado Springs, yes. Chris, we'll practically be next-door neighbors."
"Next door? Anne, Colorado's a thousand miles from Seattle."
"That's a whole lot better than six thousand. Denver's only three hours from Seattle by air, and less than another hour to Colorado Springs. It's practically commuting distance. We could have lots of whole weekends together—with no jet lag. We'd only be one time zone apart, Chris!"
Oddly enough, it was the time zone that got through to me. There is something about living nine time zones away from your significant other that brings home the fact that you are rather a long way apart. A single time zone sounded like just around the corner.
"I could get on a plane on Friday after work," I said slowly, "and be there the same evening."
"Now you're getting the idea." She smiled tentatively. The faint tic appeared below her eyes. "It is good news, isn't it? It's going to work for us, isn't it? At least for now?"
"It's terrific," I said softly. I put my hand on her cheek, just under her eye, and felt the tender, trembling flesh quiet down. "It'll be great. Just think of those frequent-flyer bonuses we're going to earn."
She laughed and went happily back to eating. "Well, then, let's finish up. I want to see the famous Rembrandt I've been hearing so much about."
* * *
Pepin welcomed us at the door of the Galerie Vachey with his customary bonhomie. "I cannot understand why you are unable to make your visits in the afternoons, when the exhibition is open. And you cannot see Monsieur Vachey—Monsieur Christian Vachey. Inspector Lefevre is with him."
"Take heart, Monsieur Pepin," I said. "It's Madame Guyot I want, and it's the last time I'll bother
you." I lifted my head and sniffed the air. "Do I smell something burning?"
"Madame Guyot has asked me to get rid of some old packing material. I'm burning it in the kitchen fireplace downstairs. You needn't concern yourself; every precaution is being taken."
"I never doubted it," I said with a comradely smile. Now that I had Anne beside me, was I going to let Marius Pepin get under my skin?
Ten minutes later, with the necessary locks unlocked and alarms disarmed, Anne and I stood alone in front of the Rembrandt. I resisted the temptation to deliver an explanatory lecture and let her look at the painting in peace, which she did for a couple of minutes.
"It's wonderful, Chris," she said simply. "It's as if you're looking into that old man's soul. And he's looking into yours." She turned to me. "Are you going to accept it?"
"Yes, I think so. It's not the painting Mann was talking about. Now that I've seen the Flinck for myself, I can stop worrying about that."
"And you think this is really painted by Rembrandt?"
"I do, yes. Where Vachey did get it, I don't have a clue. I'm starting to wonder if he didn't actually pick it up in that junk shop."
"Is that possible? Do things like that really happen?"
"If they happened to anybody, they'd happen to Vachey."
She wanted to see the other pictures, too, so we walked around the gallery for a while. Her tastes being a bit more modern than mine, we spent most of the time in the French section, where the twentieth-century works were.
"And this is the Léger?"
I nodded. "Violon et Cruche"
"It's quite handsome, isn't it?"
"Yes," I said. She'd been gratifyingly appreciative of the Rembrandt. I figured I could afford to be generous about the Léger.
She stepped closer to it. "It's not in very good condition, though, is it? Look here, where the paint's come away, and you can see signs of another picture underneath. I think I can see part of an ear or something ..."
I smiled indulgently. "No, you just think you see what's underneath," I explained. "The juxtapositions and perspectives can be a little startling if you're not familiar with his techniques, and sometimes you get the illusion that you're looking at more than one layer."