Chasing Cezanne

by Peter Mayle

  Deals in the art world—or in Pine’s rarefied part of the art world—frequently depend on information acquired before anyone else. Occasionally, this will fall into your lap, the long-service award presented by an old contact after years of patient cultivation. More often, it comes from following up and sifting through the whispers and rumors that inevitably swirl around a business in which many millions of dollars are chasing a few hundred paintings. And for Cyrus Pine, who liked to joke that the ideal art dealer was an acrobat who kept his nose to the grindstone, his ear to the ground, and his eye on the main chance, no whisper was too faint to pursue.

  When he returned to his office after a decorous and wine-free lunch with an elderly client who regularly pronounced herself bored with her collection of Pissarros and Sisleys (and just as regularly changed her mind), Cyrus settled himself by the phone. The young man’s story might be nothing more than a curious, unimportant incident, but one never knew. With a glass of cognac to take away the taste of mineral water, he began to work his way through the Rolodex.

  9

  THE apartment had reverted to chaos, as though the burglars had come back for more. Outer cartons, inner cartons, skeins of torn plastic skin with cellulite puckers, Styrofoam in all its rich diversity—molds, blocks, wedges, countless drifting shards taking flight with every passing breath of air: the floor was a testament to America’s passion for overpackaging.

  In contrast, the long worktable at the end of the room was a picture of order. Camera bodies, lenses, Polaroid backs, film, and filters were laid out in line, waiting their turn to be stowed in the padded compartments of dark-blue nylon bags. It was a comforting sight. Andre had felt vulnerable without the tools of his trade, as if his eye and his professional skills had been stolen along with his equipment. But now, as he ran his fingers over the buttons and knurls and listened to the snick of a lens fitting into its housing, he felt his mood lift and his confidence return. Maybe after England he’d slip over to Paris for a couple of days, to see if he could get an assignment from one of the French magazines. A week or so in the south, shooting for Cote Sud, would be the perfect antidote to the frustrations of the past few days. He picked up the Nikon. It wasn’t his old, battered familiar friend, but he enjoyed its heft and the way the shape of the camera body fitted into his hand. Taking it to the window, he squinted through the viewfinder at the early evening mosaic of shade and deep shadow, lights beginning to blink on. Screw DQ, and screw Camilla. He would manage without them.

  He answered the phone on the second ring, expecting to hear Lucy and her usual pretrip nanny routine, making sure he had his tickets and his passport and plenty of clean socks, so he was taken aback for a moment when he heard the distinctive clipped drawl.

  “Dear boy, it’s Cyrus. I hope I’m not disturbing you. I expect you’re tied up, but I’m calling on the off chance that you might be free to join me for a drink. I’ve been doing a little research. Thought you might be interested.”

  “That’s very kind, Cyrus.” Andre glanced at the littered floor. “As a matter of fact, I had a date with a roomful of garbage, but I’ve just canceled it. Where do you want to meet?”

  “Do you know the Harvard Club? Forty-fourth, between Fifth and Sixth, number 27. It’s quiet there, and you can actually see who you’re talking to. I’m getting too old for dim bars. Shall we say six-thirty? Oh, I’m afraid you’ll need a tie. They like ties.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  It took Andre some time to find his token tie, rolled up in the side pocket of one of his jackets. The tyranny of the tie had often inconvenienced and irritated him, never more than when he had stayed at an outrageously expensive, outrageously pretentious hotel in Dallas. After a day of shooting in a Texan palazzo, he had wandered into the hotel bar, sober and respectable in his Sunday-best blazer, and had been refused admission because the snowy bosom of his freshly laundered white shirt was tieless. The authorities had lent him a whisky-stained length of violently patterned silk—the bar tie—and he was then permitted a drink, as though he was a pariah suddenly become socially acceptable. He had shared the bar with two boisterous men wearing bootlaces around their necks, and a woman who, apart from a cascade of jewelry, was practically naked from the waist up. One of the men had been wearing a large hat too, he remembered, a sartorial touch that would have been frowned upon in many parts of the civilized world. Ever since that experience, he had traveled with an all-purpose, black knitted silk tie in his pocket—crease-resistant, stain-friendly, and suitable for funerals. He adjusted the knot and set out, with a sense of expectation, for the haven where the great and the good of Harvard go to refresh themselves after a bruising day among the bulls and bears and lawsuits of corporate America.

  Checking his coat, he found Cyrus Pine in a corridor off the lobby, studying the announcements pinned to the notice board, his smoothly tailored back to the cloakroom. Andre went over and stood beside him. “I hope they haven’t issued a ban on photographers.”

  Pine turned and smiled. “I was looking to see if any of the members had been caught trying to entice young women into the steam baths. Those were the days.” He nodded at a flyer pinned to the red felt. “Times have changed. Now I see we’re having Japanese-speaking lunches. How are you, dear boy?” He took Andre by the elbow. “The bar’s through here.”

  It is a bar without frills at the Harvard Club, the way bars used to be before hanging ferns replaced tobacco smoke and the jabber of jukeboxes and sports commentaries destroyed quiet conversation. There are, it’s true, two television sets—recently installed, to Pine’s considerable annoyance—but on this particular evening they were blank and mute. It was a slow night; of the four small tables, only one was occupied, by a single figure bent over his newspaper. Another member sat at the bar, lost in thought. There were no frivolous distractions from the peaceful enjoyment of alcohol.

  The two men settled at one end of the bar, far from the uproar made by the reading member turning the pages of his Wall Street Journal. Pine deliberated over his Scotch for a first long swallow, indicated his appreciation with a sigh, and settled himself on a barstool. Andre listened to the room. The loudest sound was the clink of bourbon against vodka as the bartender rearranged his bottles. “I get the feeling,” he said, his voice low, “that we should be passing notes to each other, or whispering.”

  “Good Lord, no,” said Pine. “This is lively compared with a place I sometimes use in London. You know? One of those really ancient clubs. Disraeli was a member—I dare say he still is. Let me tell you a quick story, supposed to be true.” He leaned forward, his eyes bright with amusement. “The reading room there has a very strict rule of silence, and the armchairs on either side of the fireplace are traditionally taken by two of the oldest members for their afternoon meditations. Well, one day old Carruthers totters in, to find the equally old Smythe already in his chair, fast asleep, a copy of the Financial Times over his face as usual. Carruthers reads his paper, has his nap, leaves the reading room at gin time. Smythe still there, hasn’t moved a muscle. A couple of hours later, Carruthers comes back. History doesn’t relate why—probably left his false teeth under one of the cushions. Anyway, he finds Smythe in exactly the same position. Hasn’t budged. Odd, thinks Carruthers, so he taps Smythe on the shoulder. Nothing. He shakes him. Nothing. He lifts up the newspaper, sees staring eyes, wide-open mouth, and puts two and two together. ‘My God!’ says he. ‘One of the members has died! Fetch a doctor!’ Comes a stern voice from another member, snoozing in the shadows at the far end of the room: ‘Silence, chatterbox!’ ”

  Pine’s shoulders shook with mirth, his head nodding as he watched Andre laugh. “You see? Compared with that, what we have here is Rowdy Hall.” He took another sip and dabbed his lips. “Now then, to business. Tell me something,” he said. “Last time you saw this Denoyer fellow, did you get the impression that he was thinking of selling the Cézanne? A tear in the eye when he looked at the photographs? An unguarded remark? A quick call
to Christie’s? Anything like that?”

  Andre thought back to the evening of anticlimax at Cooper Cay. “No. As I told you, the only thing that seemed not quite right was the fact that he wasn’t surprised. Or if he was, he did a good job of hiding it.”

  “Does he strike you as an undemonstrative man?” The bushy eyebrows jigged up and down. “No disrespect to the French, but they aren’t exactly famous for hiding their feelings. Impulsive, yes. Dramatic, often. Inscrutable, hardly ever. It’s part of their charm.”

  “Controlled,” said Andre. “I think that might be a better way of putting it. Perhaps it was just that I was a stranger, but I felt he always took an extra moment—just a second or two—before he answered a question or reacted to anything. He thought before he spoke.”

  “Good God,” said Pine, “that is unusual. Where would the world be if everyone was like that? Luckily, it’s not a habit shared by many people in the art business.” He glanced up at the bartender, using a circling finger to semaphore his need for another Scotch. “I made a few calls this afternoon, not entirely truthful calls, I have to admit. Said I was acting on behalf of a serious collector—name withheld to protect my commission, naturally—who was in the market for a Cézanne. Client of outstanding probity, significant funds available, payment anywhere in the world, all the usual guff. Ah, thank you, Tom.” Pine paused and sipped. “Now, here’s the interesting part. Normally, when you dangle a worm in the water like this, it takes quite a while before there’s a bite. But not this time.”

  Pine paused, cocked his head, and looked at Andre’s attentive face for a few seconds in silence. The inspection seemed to satisfy him. “I’m going to be quite candid with you. If there is a deal to be done here, I’d like to be in on it. I’m not getting any younger, and these things don’t come along every day of the week. And as you brought it to me, it’s only right and proper that you take a share.” Another pause, while the two men looked at each other.

  Andre wasn’t sure what to say and took refuge in his wine as he tried to gather his thoughts. Money had never crossed his mind; all he wanted to do was to satisfy his curiosity. “Do you really think that’s likely? A deal?”

  “Who knows? I could find three buyers tomorrow for that painting, if it was available—and if Denoyer would let me handle it.”

  “And you think it is available?”

  Pine laughed, causing the member opposite to frown and look up from paying homage to his martini. “You’re dodging the issue, dear boy. We won’t know that for sure until we do some homework.”

  “We?”

  “Why not? I know the art business, you know Denoyer. I have the impression that you’re an honorable young man, and I am an absolute pillar of rectitude, although I say it myself. Two minds on the problem are better than one. All in all, it seems like a reasonable basis for collaboration. Let me get you some more wine.” Pine kept his eyes on Andre’s face while the finger circled once more at the bartender. “Well? Are you in? It might be fun.”

  Andre found Pine a difficult man to resist and couldn’t immediately think of any reason why he should try. “I wouldn’t be doing it for the money,” he said. “The money’s not important.”

  Pine’s reaction was a clench of the face—so severe that his eyebrows almost collided. “Don’t be ridiculous. Money’s always important. Money is freedom.” The eyebrows resumed their normal position, and Pine’s face relaxed into a smile. “But if it makes you feel any better, you can do it for a good cause.”

  “What’s that?”

  “My old age.”

  Andre looked at the silver hair, the twinkling eyes, the jaunty, slightly lopsided bow tie. It might be fun, Pine had said, and Andre had a feeling that it probably would. “All right,” he said. “I’ll do what I can. But I have to work as well, you realize that.”

  “Good man. I couldn’t be more pleased. We’ll fit the work in, don’t you worry. Now let me tell you what I heard this afternoon.” Pine waited for the bartender to replace Andre’s glass and glide back to his bottles.

  “We mustn’t get too excited,” Pine said, “because this isn’t even a grown-up rumor; more of a gleam in the eye than anything else. But as I said, the reaction was very fast, within a couple of hours of my dropping the word. There’s a dear old soul who works at the Met—I give her lunch two or three times a year—and she has the longest ears in town. According to her, I imagine after listening to some conversation she wasn’t supposed to hear or reading a memo upside down on somebody’s desk, there is the merest breath of a hint that an important Cézanne will be coming onto the market within the next two or three months. Nothing firm, of course, and no details.” Pine leaned forward for emphasis. “Except this: The painting is privately owned, no museums involved, and it hasn’t made the rounds for a long time. Which fits our bill, doesn’t it?”

  Andre had instinctively leaned forward as well and caught himself looking over his shoulder. “There might be others, mightn’t there? I mean, he was quite prolific.”

  “He certainly was. Must have done sixty paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, for a start, and practically died with a brush in his hand. But this is too much of a coincidence.” Pine looked at their empty glasses and then at his watch. “Can you stay for dinner? Drinkable wine, good nursery food. Unless you’re out on the town tonight?”

  “Cyrus, if I told you about my social life at the moment it would put you to sleep. The only girls I spend any time with these days are the ones who tell me to fasten my seat belt.”

  “Really? You should give Courtney a whirl. Tasty little thing, but she doesn’t have much luck with young men. I’ve met one or two of them—middle-aged at twenty-five, and thrilled with themselves. Dull beyond belief.” Pine signed the bar chit and stood up.

  “Suspenders and striped shirts?”

  “Matching underwear, too, I’m sure. Let’s go in, shall we?”

  They left the bar and entered a double-level room that could easily have accommodated three hundred of Harvard’s finest, with parking space to spare for a small army of flunkies. The decorative style fell somewhere between a baronial hall and a hunting lodge, with a profusion of stuffed and mounted trophies, many of them, so Pine explained, the victims of Teddy Roosevelt’s hunting expeditions—heads of elephant and bison, horns and tusks, a gigantic rack of elk antlers. Human trophies took the form of portraits, men of substance with dignified expressions: “Either presidents of the club or presidents of the U.S.,” said Pine, as they made their way through the main room. Above them, a wide balcony accommodated more tables, and Andre noticed several women among the diners, somehow surprising in such masculine surroundings. “We were the last of the university clubs to admit them, I think it was back in ’73. Good thing, too. Makes a pleasant change from looking at all the wildlife on the walls.”

  Pine saluted an acquaintance at a nearby table—a tall, dapper man wearing an emphatic mustache with a fine Ruritanian twirl at each end. “That’s Chapman, brilliant legal mind, plays the clarinet. The bushy-haired fellow with him runs one of the Hollywood studios. Hardly recognized him without his sunglasses. I expect they’re up to no good. Now, what are you going to have?”

  Andre chose clams and salmon hash from a list of simple, unfussy dishes and watched as Pine wrote his selection down on an order form. It was Andre’s first experience of dining in an American university club, and he found it old-fashioned and immensely soothing. There was none of the hovering and the breathless recitation of the specials of the day from an out-of-work actor that seems to be obligatory in many New York restaurants. The red-jacketed waiters murmured, if they spoke at all. They were deft and unobtrusive. They knew their business. Andre rather wished he had gone to Harvard, so that he could escape here whenever the racket of Manhattan became unendurable.

  With the edge taken off their appetites by the first course, Pine resumed the conversation where he had left it in the bar. “Step one,” he said, “or so it seems to me, is to find out where th
e painting is. What’s your guess?”

  “Well, we know it’s not where Denoyer said it was, in a gallery in Cannes. I suppose it might have been sent somewhere for cleaning.”

  “Most unlikely,” said Pine. “It’s not that old, and the lady and her melons looked very healthy in the photograph you took for DQ. Next guess?”

  “Reframing? It wasn’t framed when they put it in the van. Sent up to his house in Paris? Stuck in a bank vault? God knows. It might easily be back in Cap Ferrat by now.”

  “Indeed.” Pine nodded. “It might be. Or it might not. That’s all we have to go on at the moment, and I think that’s where we have to go. Very agreeable at this time of year, as I remember.”

  “Cap Ferrat? Are you serious?”

  “Where else, dear boy? If the painting’s not where it should be, we might be onto something. If it is where it should be, we go down the road to Beaulieu and drown our sorrows at La Reserve. Haven’t been there for twenty years.” Pine looked like a schoolboy at the end of term. “I told you it would be fun.”

  Andre couldn’t argue with the logic and didn’t want to. It would be fun to take off with this amiable old rascal; in any case, he was leaving for Europe tomorrow. And so it was decided that they would meet in Nice, after Andre had finished his stately home assignment. The rest of the evening, which included some memorable cognac of great antiquity, was spent working out how they might get into the house on Cap Ferrat without encouraging the French police to join them.

  10

  HEATHROW on an early-spring morning. Fine, persistent drizzle leaking from a low gray sky; a frieze of sleep-deprived faces lining the carousel to watch the crawl of other people’s luggage; announcements turned into gibberish by the scrambling devices that airports build into their loudspeaker systems; late arrivals; missed connections; anxiety attacks—the start of yet another day dedicated to the joys of travel.