Jenna Takes the Fall

by A. R. Taylor

  “You’re in something like the Witness Protection Program, is that it?”

  “You can’t use any of this, you mustn’t.”

  “I know, I know.” She didn’t necessarily believe him, but she kissed him deeply and firmly on the lips and let him go away with the wave of her hand into the glistening, frozen night.

  At the end of the next day Jenna and Matthieu shared yet another glass of wine, and she broached the subject of the Spranger painting. “Do you know anything about how the count got it? It’s extraordinary in its own awful sort of way.”

  “It’s very strange. It’s got a lot of layers, and maybe there’s even something else beneath, another image altogether. Why should we care? He pays me big.” Nevertheless, he looked away when he said this and fingered the rim of his glass nervously. “I don’t like to think of people as criminals. Do you know something?”

  “No, no, not really, but the world is full of fakes. They say possibly forty percent of all museum collections are fake.”

  “That can’t be. Only Americans say things like that, but then who really cares? Is a beautiful fake worth less than the beautiful real thing? Originality is overrated. And so what if he stole it? The gift must always move, no? So said the famous Lewis Hyde in a book I just read.”

  Jenna didn’t understand quite what he meant but didn’t want to press him, as she was grateful and loyal to him, reminding her of the too forgiving people she knew in Ohio, closing off painful discussions, wanting everything ugly to go away. Or maybe he was just being French, surrendering the world of morality to those who actually cared about it. After he calmed down, she delicately broached the subject of fellow art restorers. “The best are in Italy,” he said, “though they eat that terrible food. How many ways can you cook a tomato? I do know someone in Ventimiglia. He is quite the gentleman, but the town has its drawbacks. Tourists, people from the Riviera go there to shop, and there’s a train back to Nice every day. My competition, but why do you ask?”

  “I might have to leave here.”

  “Don’t leave me. You’re the nicest American I’ve ever met. You must not.” He stood up suddenly, moved and confused.

  “I must, Matthieu. There are things you don’t know about me—”

  “I do know.”

  “What do you know?” She felt sick, worse though, ashamed.

  “I see you’re hiding yourself. It’s obvious. And why do you live at the hotel?”

  “I might buy a house.”

  “How can you? You’re a child. But you don’t have to tell me anything. I’m content with the hidden thing. It’s in every one of the paintings I work with. You can tell it in the layers: who first painted it, who then reworked it, when, with what skill, with what understanding, even perhaps what year. It’s a record of each hand that has touched it, so you see, I’m familiar with what is behind. The history of the world submerged under resin.”

  “Would the man you know take me on, do you think?”

  “No, I won’t have it.” But when she left the studio that night he hugged her hard. “Think more about this, but don’t think too fast.”

  That night, as she sipped her wine at dinner, she sat ramrod straight in her chair. Behold another stupefying evening watching three wealthy Londoners laugh loudly and drink quantities of Scotch, Vincent’s favorite drink. They swirled before her in a gaudy tableau, and she marveled at her newfound ability to deal with loss, as if she had participated in training for some massive loss contest like a runner for a reverse marathon. She had lost her only family in Ohio, and then her work in New York, her friends there, her boss and her lover, also a new lover. And now the only other person with any real interest in her at all, Matthieu—she would have to lose him, too. She had developed a new muscle, that was how she thought of it, the “I’m losing you” muscle, which, despite all her wishes, had grown taut and strong.

  Two weeks later, after another long and painful conversation, Matthieu finally agreed to help her get a place in the studio of the Ventimiglia restorer. Rather than buy a house for herself in the Champagne region, she bought Matthieu a new car and the six hectares adjacent to his studio. All this she managed in Fère-en-Tardenois, to the amazement of the local real estate man. He couldn’t understand a secret transaction of this magnitude; he couldn’t understand such a rich young lady, nor why she would want to help a seventy-five-year-old artist and art restorer of limited future, but she had her way. He recommended an agent in Ventimiglia who could help her find somewhere to live there. “Though it’s a shopping place, for the French to save tax. At least it’s on the water.”

  No matter to Jenna. She wanted out of the hotel, and the date was fast approaching when she could leave. By the looks on their faces, the staff couldn’t believe it when days later they finally got to say good-bye to someone they called “their perpetual guest.” They seemed tremendously eager to help her with her belongings, perhaps because the spectacle of someone like her moldering in what they, more than any others, experienced as an unbelievable old heap of a building, made no sense to them. Her bill had reached magnificent sums, the highest anyone had run up, though she had paid it off by the month. Nevertheless, the tip she left them, collectively at the front desk, was unprecedented, the largest in their history. At her departure in her car piled high with her bags, maids, bellmen, the gardener even, all lined up and waved her off. She was to them “la petite Americaine sans patrie.”

  SEVEN

  Jenna and her Renault drove down toward Troyes, thence through the Loire Valley until it intersected with the Rhone River, past Lyon, and then east over toward Antibes on the French Riviera. It was a very long drive, and very beautiful, the great yellow fields of rapeseed flowers, starting out small and growing bigger and bigger as she moved south, and at this time of year there weren’t even many tour buses. But there were post offices. She had written a list of suspects regarding the Champagne bottle, and right at the top stood Jorge, who studied and collected wine and always boasted he could find anyone, anywhere, so why not herself? Had he wanted to tell her something specific?

  At the beginning of her journey, not far from Tours, she mailed a label she had collected from G. H. Mumm, a golden label with a red sash across the front, to the Hull offices, addressed to Jorge. Nothing else, but what she meant was Sabine, a “mum” all right, also silent. If it was he who had indicated the widow to her, she would indicate the same back, as if she understood him. Any more direct communication would reveal too much, since the lawyer knew her movements and probably, at the very least, would have told Jorge her first location.

  Not many miles from Monaco, she crossed the Italian border into Ventimiglia, winding down the tiny roads along the cliffs. Like many villages in the region, the town rose up from the port stepwise, and Matthieu’s friend had arranged for her to rent a penthouse apartment looking out over the newer part of town. Though thirty minutes from France, and the train came bearing shoppers every single day, especially for the market on Friday, Jenna felt herself very much in Italy. Each evening she could smell tomatoes and garlic roasting in a pan from the apartments nearby, and she would sit out on the balcony, glass of red wine in hand, breathing in all things Italian, especially now in late April, when the nights grew softer and warmer.

  For days after she first arrived in her new country, the freedom from constraint, the frequent laughter of her neighbors, the wonderful obsession with eating, eating, eating enchanted her, until she was living solely on gelato and pasta and could no longer close the buttons on her skirt. This had to stop, and she had to work, which she soon began to do in the atelier of Maestro Pietro Sarani. Her way had been made easy with Matthieu’s letter of introduction, and she found herself, without much fanfare, learning to restore Italian Renaissance paintings that had, over time, turned brown.

  Signor Sarani was a handsome, gray-haired man in his fifties, with a high forehead and a distinctive, aquiline nose who, even in the jumble of the studio, wore silk shirts and soft woolen
slacks, smoking incessantly and tipping the ashes anywhere he liked with his long, thin fingers. Abrupt, businesslike, he had first been titillated by Jenna’s beauty, but very shortly thereafter considered her an asset and set her to work with two of his other assistants, brothers Gianni and Paolo, who laughed constantly and poked each other like schoolboys but were careful over the canvases. The atmosphere was entirely unlike that of Monsieur Legard’s studio, churchlike in its cool silence and intensity. Here life figured as a joke, a joke and a mess, and the boys—i ragazzi—teased Sarani forever about his clothes, his whole elegant manner, aping it both in front of him and behind his back. They existed for fun and often tried to rope Jenna into their doings. She resisted their antics, feeling some days as if she were back in high school, and besides, she wanted to impress Sarani.

  So far she had heard nothing more from Jorge, because she now figured him as absolutely the first Champagne sender, but maybe he would choose some auspicious time to send more info or clues? About Inti she had done nothing and heard nothing. She returned to her old trick of avoiding newspapers, but at last she got up the courage to thumb through the Herald Tribune while sipping espresso at an outdoor café in the old part of town. Nothing at all about the Hulls, thank goodness, nothing to suggest there was any mystery about the will. This was the year 2000, and people concerned themselves with the millennium, the thought that every digital link might unexpectedly come crashing down. Cell phones certainly existed, and those who owned one felt heavily dependent on it, but the lines of international gossip had not yet reached celestial proportions.

  Unfortunately, the one person who could do her real harm did at last get in touch with her again. The hotel forwarded to her a typewritten note from Inti. Back now in New York, he informed her that he was working on an exposé of kickbacks in the giving out of airport concessions. She disliked the investigative sound but even more so his cold tone. With no real explanation for his hasty exit from the French countryside, he also did not say when his piece on the art-loving or art-stealing count would appear, if ever. At the very bottom he had scrawled, “You had me, and you still have me.” All in all, the note made her even more anxious than before, but she could do nothing really, unless she wanted to communicate with him, and she could think of no good way to do that.

  For the next year Jenna worked in the Sarani atelier without incident, learning everything she could about the restoration of Italian Renaissance oil painting. Matthieu wrote to her that the so-called Spranger had been restored and duly returned to the count, and that as a result he labored away on a host of the man’s new paintings, delighted with the flow of work and money. By late August of 2001, everyone had gone off on holiday except crazed tourists. Jenna spent these hot days in the temperature-controlled studio where she meticulously restored a still life of dubious value, but it was very bright and appealing, a modern piece that one of Sarani’s best clients insisted needed to be “refreshed,” the apples perhaps “molto più rossas.”

  One evening, exhausted from her work, as she sat sipping a glass of red wine on her balcony, her phone rang. On the line was Matthieu, sputtering, shouting, “You cannot believe it, oh, I cannot. How could this have happened?”

  “What, Matthieu? What has happened?”

  “There is a newspaper, a friend told me, an article by a young man, Inti something, what kind of name is that? I never heard of such a thing. He writes that there was an art theft in New York, and it all happened with the possible ‘collusion’ of a certain French art restorer in Fère-en-Tardenois. Who is that—me and nobody else, but he doesn’t say my name, according to my friend. Or you maybe, no, how could that be?” Jenna’s heart stopped, and her mind went blank. “Cate?”

  “I don’t know anything about this. When did the article appear?”

  “My friend said a few days ago. I’ve been trying to find a copy, but it seems impossible. What can we do?”

  “I do actually know that person, Inti Weill.”

  Matthieu interrupted, shouting, “What, you?”

  “I don’t know him well, but we met at the little restaurant—” Her voice floated into empty air. He had hung up on her. That night she slept not at all, frantic to get hold of the article, but where, an international newsstand maybe? In a frenzy, her mind went back to the literal, but the digital was the answer. She got on her computer and found the article itself from the Times, and it read pretty much as Matthieu had said. Still, it was buried in the metro section, a very short piece on the continuing investigation of an art theft in Tarrytown, a work by Fragonard and one by Bartholomeus Spranger, both owned by Mrs. Regina Pittman, though the investigation had been subsumed into the recent divorce filing of Mr. Pittman. Neither Jenna nor Legard were mentioned by name. Did that make the count a thief or just the buyer of a stolen work of art?

  She called Matthieu back. “What? I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Please, Matthieu. Listen to me. If we did work on this particular Bartholomeus Spranger, the count has something to do with the theft. How much do you really know about him?”

  “He has a big house and many paintings, coming from where I don’t know. He seems a rich man without much taste. Will we go to prison? Dieu me protège.”

  “We’re not going to prison, Matthieu,” but Jenna felt terrified of what this might mean in terms of public exposure. She had to get in touch with Inti somehow and warn him off or beg him or bribe him, and contacting him would be easy enough to do on the New York Times Web site, but dangerously public as well. She should wait a bit to see if he wrote another story, since there was nothing they could do now about whatever he was up to. Perhaps he had no more information or was waiting to expose the count? All speculation amid emptiness, and Jenna needed to stand back a bit from the dimensions of this potential disaster. God forbid she herself should be named in succeeding stories. That would send the lawyers down upon her head, even given her pseudonym. Could they take away the money? The contract said so, but that would pose difficulties for them as well, unfortunate ones that might lead to their public exposure.

  While she watched and waited, the rattling general mess of the Sarani atelier comforted her, and Jenna now worked alone on a piece of sculpture that had sat outside in its owner’s garden for way too long. The twisted limbs and the dancing feet of the Three Graces, Beauty, Mirth, and Abundance, were covered in solidified green mold, and she had to sand every piece of tiny drapery and each minuscule corner to get it clean. This was a bad job, a big job, and amid her panic over Matthieu and the Spranger, she had the gloomy thought that possibly Sarani had demoted her.

  On the upside, when she worked so painstakingly like this, with three sets of toothbrushes in descending order of size, she lost herself in the focus on the small, on the minuscule, its out-of-the-way-ness seemingly a parallel to her own removal from all familiar life. She knew what others did not, but this knowledge did not help her because there appeared to be no outward-facing life attached to it. All flew inward and roosted beneath her weary mind. “Something’s wrong that’s not right,” Margaret Grace McCann would say, and she began to think more and more that her substitution under the body of Vincent Hull was no accident, but how or why it all went down remained a mystery.

  During the three weeks from the time Matthieu discovered the newspaper article, energy fields in the world began to shift and rearrange themselves. Security agents at a small Maine airport pulled aside one suspicious passenger, but he managed to get through. Two other passengers boarded in Washington, and within hours a hail of flame, ash, rubble, paper, and human body parts rained down upon the city of New York and a field in rural Pennsylvania, while Jenna sat before her television in a state of breathlessness and tears. She watched over and over again as the planes crashed into the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center, and stared unbelieving at the tsunami-like plumes of the buildings as they rolled through the streets and over people fleeing. Nothing terrified her so much as seeing human beings jump from that immense h
eight to certain death. Her own exile had lopped her off from much sense of place, but she realized now she had wandered around rootlessly, as if in a postcard. In spite of everything, she did have a home, a place she had left behind and could lament for, that awesome, chaotic home, New York City.

  Were her friends still alive? Gramercy Park was not all that far from the southern tip of the island. What of Jorge, he who had wanted her to take that wine tasting class with him at Windows on the World restaurant? She longed to get in touch with them all somehow, but she could hardly envision what she would say or how explain her new home and way of life. Inti loomed at the center of this tragedy, for he must be reporting on it, God willing if he lived. At this point, her own little sphere might be spared an investigation because nothing else mattered now, since the world, and her world too had come to a stop.

  But of course it did not truly stop. It stopped for several days, during which time Italy fell into mournful hiatus. At last Sarani called them back to the atelier, and in a more somber mode, work continued. Whenever she had the chance, Jenna combed the newspaper for any and all New York news, not sure whether self-interest was a suitable motive. She saw nothing else about any supposed art theft, but instead read many pieces by Inti about the terror and chaos in New York after the planes hit. At least he hadn’t been hurt. Could she go back, would she ever? She thought of the words of her granny’s favorite psalm, “Better dwell in the midst of alarms than reign in this horrible place.” A tale of two alternatives, this she could understand even if both seemed bad and impossible.

  After a mournfully quiet month, with nothing but work and worry, Jenna resolved to visit Matthieu. She went by train, with a box of his favorite candies, Calissons d’Aix, little sticky sweet cookie-like triangles covered in icing, and a bottle of single malt Scotch, The Balvenie, one of Vincent Hull’s favorites, absurdly expensive in France due to tariffs. The old man didn’t want to let her in, just peered out at her from his door. “Please, Matthieu. I come bearing gifts,” she said in her still excellent French. During this past year her Italian had become passable, but the French language remained embedded in her heart.