Madonna and Corpse

by Jefferson Bass

  “Now you’ve got me on pins and needles, Inspector.” Dubois smiled slyly, and Descartes felt a moment of panic: My god, is he gay? Does he think I’m hitting on him?

  “No, no, it’s not about your sex life or anything,” the inspector blurted. “It’s about a painting I saw at the museum. It’s six, seven hundred years old, but the faces looked modern. A man and a woman—John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene.”

  “Ah, yes. The Puccinelli. Puccinelli prefigures Botticelli in some important ways, you know,” the painter went on, and Descartes nodded, though of course he didn’t know, or hadn’t known, until this moment. “Human figures in low relief. Not much depth or volume to them. Doesn’t that painting remind you of a cinema poster?”

  “That’s it!” Descartes exclaimed. “I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but that’s it.” His mind makes a connection between the religious painting and the playful painting of Marilyn Monroe on the half shell.

  “Puccinelli died half a century before Botticelli was born,” Dubois went on, “but it’s almost as if Botticelli apprenticed with him. Puccinelli worked in Siena and Florence, so Botticelli would have seen his works, of course.” He smiled. “Sorry. You didn’t ask for an art-history lecture. Did you have a specific question about the painting, Detective?”

  Descartes suddenly looked self-conscious. “I was wondering ... Obviously you have quite the knack for copying. Could you do a copy of that one?”

  Dubois smiled, again almost flirtatiously. “Come.” He led Descartes to a stack of paintings leaning against the studio’s back wall. When he’d flipped halfway through the stack, he motioned for the inspector to look.

  Descartes was stunned. The picture leaning so casually against a wall, in a jumble of other paintings, was a perfect likeness of the one in the museum. “Would you consider selling it to me? Not that I could afford it, I’m sure.”

  Dubois laughed. “Ah, Detective, this is my own personal copy. It has, shall we say, sentimental value to me.” Seeing the detective’s crestfallen expression, he added, “But I expect I could dash off another copy without much trouble. Maybe not quite this good, but close. I suspect you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.”

  “What would it cost?”

  The artist smiled. “For you, Inspector? No charge. Consider it my initiation gift.”

  Descartes raised his eyebrows, puzzled. “Initiation?”

  “Your initiation into a new addiction, Detective. Art. Its joys and its sorrows.”

  Descartes laughed. “I won’t get addicted. I just happen to like this one painting.”

  “It always starts with one painting, Detective. That’s the gateway drug. Soon you’ll be coveting others. Other portraits of Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist. Other works by Puccinelli. Works by later artists he inspired. A Madonna and Child by Botticelli, for instance.”

  The next day at noon, the inspector, Mme. Clergue, and Devereaux took the two Madonna and Child paintings to the Radiology Department at Avignon Hospital for an X-ray examination, which the museum lacked the equipment to perform. One painting—the painting Dubois had hung on the wall thirty-six hours before; the painting the inspector had tagged with his used chewing gum—looked uniformly gray in the films. The second painting—the one the museum had displayed proudly for two years since its “restoration”—lit up, the word DUBOIS in white block letters. “I’ll be damned,” said Descartes. “You had the copy and he had the original. And he brought it back. He actually brought it back.”

  Once more Madame Clergue cried, with a mixture of humiliation and relief—humiliation at having been fooled, relief at having the lost masterpiece restored.

  Chapter 6

  Dubois

  A less skilled, less confident artist would have begun by sketching the Madonna’s outlines in pencil, then painting over them meticulously. The result might have been close to the original in all its dimensions, yet it would have been patently inferior: clearly the work of a cautious, tentative copyist. From years of experience, Dubois knows that it’s not enough to imitate Botticelli; no: he must boldly become Botticelli, just as a skilled actor temporarily loses himself in the character he’s portraying.

  So he begins by sketching a collage of disjointed, deconstructed images atop the brilliant white lead: A pair of downcast girlish eyes here, another pair there. A rosebud of a mouth, floating freely in one corner of the panel. A baby’s pudgy arm and outstretched fingers, reaching for nothing but the edge of the panel. Dubois dashes off these images swiftly, with the bold strokes of a limbering-up exercise not meant for any eyes but the artist’s alone. As he sketches, he moves in an almost balletic dance with the panel, accompanied once more by the intricately entwined voices of “10,000 Virgins.” In his mind the trappings of the modern world blur and dissolve, like the paint he’s scraped off the panel, and he travels back and back and back: back to a time when Lorenzo de Medici—Il Magnifico—ruled Florence with an iron hand and a golden purse; back to a time when Michelangelo and Leonardo and Botticelli blazed across the starry firmament like dazzling comets. The sketches are the perfect way to warm up. But more than that, they’re also a brilliant part of his plan.

  They take less than an hour. He steps back to survey his work. Although he’s drawn them with a crayon of dull gray lead—he casts the crayons himself by melting down fishing weights—the images are bold and energetic. They’re just the sort of studies, he feels sure, that a cocky twenty-two-year-old Botticelli might dash off, brimming with confidence after eight years of grueling apprenticeship.

  Satisfied with the images, and with his own chameleon-like transformation from an aging Frenchman to a youthful Botticelli, Dubois exchanges the lead crayon for a broad brush. He dips it in white lead, and in minutes the sketches have vanished, covered by another silky coat of primer: the foundation for the painting itself. Thanks to a series of extensive, expensive experiments he performed years before in Rome, Dubois knows that if the finished painting is X-rayed—as he’ll earnestly suggest that it be, for everyone’s peace of mind—the London dealer and her American client will be astonished. Beneath the lovely Madonna and Child, their eyes will behold a hidden treasure: the ghostly image of Botticelli’s own preliminary study for the finished work. The panel, they’ll realize, is a miraculous two-for-one deal, easily worth ten times the paltry five million pounds Dubois has settled for! It’s a steal, they’ll congratulate each other. All parties to the transaction will be delighted, including Dubois, who earmarked part of the five million for a secure, climate-controlled vault in Switzerland, where the genuine Botticelli—the genuine genuine Botticelli—awaits him, safe, sound, and spectacular.

  Only the final piece of his plan remains to be set in motion.

  Chapter 7

  Descartes

  Six weeks after Madame Clergue’s “original” Botticelli was restored to its prominent spot in Gallery 11—six weeks after the lead-signed fake was consigned to an ignominious storage bin—Descartes received a call from Detective Sergeant Reginald Smythe of New Scotland Yard. According to the excruciatingly courteous Smythe, London’s National Gallery was having serious doubts about the authenticity of one of its prize paintings. The painting was Caravaggio’s Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist, which had passed through the hands of an art restorer in Avignon, a Jacques Dubois, several years before. Before Smythe traveled all the way from London, he wondered, might Inspector Descartes be so very kind as to determine, by discreet observation, whether Dubois was, in fact, still in residence and available for interrogation? Of course, Descartes assured the British detective, he’d handle it immediately.

  Descartes tried Dubois throughout that morning and afternoon—a dozen calls—with no answer. Finally, as darkness fell, he decided to take a drive out to Barthelasse Island. It was possible the artist was away, but it was equally possible that he was simply absorbed in painting.

  The day had been gray and cool, and as he crossed the bridge to the island in the deepeni
ng dusk, Descartes noticed fog spooling down the river, blanketing the emerald-green waters, spilling onto the low-lying farmland, triggering—for some inexplicable reason—his lifelong fear of drowning. By the time he descended the exit ramp, the road was dark and blanketed in mist. If Descartes hadn’t saved the GPS track from his prior visit, he’d never have found his way back to the narrow lane that led to Dubois’s place.

  Halfway up the narrow, walled lane—all the more claustrophobic in the darkness and fog—Descartes felt the hairs on his neck prickle. At first he could not attach the sensation to anything but the looming walls and blinding fog. As he approached the house, though, he realized that the mist ahead was glowing red-orange, the light flickering and throbbing, rapidly growing higher and brighter. He punched the throttle, heedless of danger, careening between the high, narrow walls. Suddenly, with a crack like a gunshot, his left mirror snapped against one wall. Reflexively he swerved slightly, and with another sharp crack, his right mirror shattered.

  By the time he reached the house, the foggy glow had resolved into flames—soaring, roaring flames—and he saw that behind the house, the studio was ablaze, the inferno fueled by turpentine, oil, and God only knew what other flammables. Skidding to a stop behind Dubois’s old Citroën—he’s home? he wondered with a mixture of surprise and concern—he leaped from the car and raced through the gate, not even slowing to glance at the incongruous object propped against the fence.

  The high clerestory windows in the shop burst just as he reached the building, raining bits of glass upon Descartes. Shielding his face in the crook of one arm, he ran to the door and tried it, but it was locked. Pushing through the lavender that hugged the wall, he reached a large window and peered inside. Even through the glass, the heat broiled his face and he wrapped both arms across it, leaving only a narrow slit through which he surveyed the interior. Through the dancing flames, his eyes locked on a shape. “Shit,” he muttered. Slumped over the work table was Dubois. His right arm was splayed out on the table, and resting atop the hand, slightly askew, was what appeared to be a pistol. The left side of the artist’s head was missing.

  “Shit,” Descartes repeated—“shit, shit, shit”—and stepped away from the window to call the dispatcher. He had not even begun to dial when the window exploded. Shards seethed past his head and tore across the yard, shredding the leaves of ornamental plants. Moments later, the window on the other side of the door blew, too. Arms of flame reached out from each window, enfolding the building in a deadly embrace, clawing at the roof. Small blooms of flame sprouted through the arches of the clay roof tiles. Then, in swift succession, the rafters burned through, and a hole in the roof opened like a maw, gaping wider and wider until it had swallowed the top of the studio entirely.

  By the time the fire trucks arrived, the building had been reduced to smoldering embers.

  The autopsy and forensics report confirmed what Descartes already knew. The corpse was burned beyond recognition, but the coroner confirmed that it was a white male, somewhere in his fifties or sixties. Although the fingers had burned down to bare bone, and the artist had no dental records that Descartes could locate, DNA from the charred corpse was matched to DNA from a hairbrush in the house, so the dead man was positively identified as Dubois. His manner of death was a single gunshot wound to the head, and his death was ruled a suicide.

  As he tucked the autopsy report into the case file, Descartes took one last look at the note Dubois had tacked to the gatepost at the entrance to his yard. “The police in London plan to arrest me, but they’re too late. I cannot bear the thought of prison, and so I take the coward’s exit. My life has been one long series of deceptions and evasions, so this sort of death is only fitting.” Descartes replaced the note, closed the dossier, and filed it in the archive of closed cases. Then he signed out and headed home for lunch.

  When he unlocked the deadbolt, Descartes stood in the apartment’s open doorway, his face breaking into a smile as he surveyed the opposite wall. There, Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist—regal, serene, and sexy—basked in the glow of the halogen track lights Descartes had stayed up late last night installing. The painting looked infinitely better than the horrible Jackson Pollock print that had hung there for years. Thank God that bitch Yvonne had taken it with her when she left.

  Perhaps he should have left Magdalene and the Baptist where he’d found them, propped against the fence at the Dubois place, beside the post where the artist had tacked his farewell note. But what business was the painting of the National Police? The painting was a parting gift—a personal gift—from the old faker. A second note, taped to the frame, made that clear: “Goodbye, Inspector. I enjoyed meeting you, and I hope this trifle brings you much pleasure. —R.D.”

  He’d driven home in the pale, watery light of midmorning, the second note tucked into his pocket, the painting tucked into the trunk of his car, the shattered mirrors dangling and flapping on either side of the car. He’d slammed the trunk only moments before the firemen and the forensic technicians had arrived to hose down the ruins, recover the charred body, and gather their evidence.

  Chapter 8

  Dubois

  Jack Woods raises the back of his chaise longue and takes a slow, appreciative swig of sangria. Woods is a grizzled sixty-year-old Englishman; until six days before, he was a grizzled sixty-year-old Frenchman, Jacques Dubois. He’s working hard to inhabit the new name, but so far he still thinks of himself as Dubois.

  His eyes shielded behind reflective sunglasses, he surveys the youthful bodies gleaming on the sand here at Cala del Home Mort—“Dead Man’s Beach”—a speck of Spanish coastline whose very name seems tailor-made for Dubois. With a few pale, doughy exceptions, the nude young men on display here are as tautly sculpted and bronze as any casting by Donatello or Rodin, and despite the name of the beach, they seem very much alive.

  Dubois’s lover, François—one of the pale, doughy exceptions—dozes on a neighboring chaise. He’s neither attractive nor interesting, but he deserves Dubois’s undying gratitude. If not for the cadaver François spirited away from his Marseilles mortuary—a fifty-six-year-old heart-attack victim, whose body François replaced in the coffin with sandbags—Dubois could never have composed such an artful forgery of suicide: the charred body; the gunshot-shattered head; the pistol in the outstretched hand; even the new hairbrush, raked through the corpse’s hair and then planted on the bathroom counter. Yes, Dubois chose François wisely, and he does feel deeply grateful.

  Nevertheless, he’s pondering how to rid himself of the pasty mortician, who, having served his purpose, begins to grow tiresome. Dubois needs to shed François without angering him—that is, without sending him running to the police—but it’s a tricky business. He has to think the breakup is his idea, Dubois realizes.

  A nearby sunbather coughs, and the germ of an idea begins to incubate in Dubois’s mind. Perhaps if I came down with an illness, some malady, he muses. Something debasing and repellent, yet not so grave as to inspire nobility and self-sacrifice. Lip cancer? Irritable bowel syndrome? Cadaverous breath? Finally, in a flash of inspiration, it comes to Dubois: Warts—genital warts! Molded of silicone, they can be glued on, their ranks and size growing day by disgusting day. Best of all, Dubois can lay the blame at François’s own ... door, since François—in a moment of drunken remorse—has confessed to three recent infidelities. (Dubois could have consoled François by making a similar confession, but instead he wept, a study in wronged innocence.) Yes, warts will do nicely; in a week—two, at most—François will scurry back to Marseilles, brimming with guilt and compassion. After a day or so of public melancholy, Dubois will set up an easel on the beach, sketch beautiful young men, and swap art for idyllic interludes with one Adonis after another.

  Dubois will soon need a more meaningful outlet for his prodigious energies. But he has a plan for that, too. Only yesterday, on a stroll through town, he spotted an ad in a realtor’s window: “Private villa for lease.” The propert
y—perched on a rocky bluff, with stunning Mediterranean views—includes a gardener’s cottage that would make a charming studio. Already, in a Barcelona warehouse an hour away, Dubois’s materials—sheaves of ancient paper and parchment, handmade pigments and brushes, musty frames and panels, even a few dreadful, sacrificial old paintings—await their metamorphoses into masterpieces.

  He wishes he’d had the nerve to bring the Puccinelli, too, but the risk seemed too great. Astonishing, to think that a policeman—a provincial dolt!—possesses an authentic medieval masterpiece. For the moment, Dubois can appreciate the mirror-image ironies: the blissful ignorance of the museum in Avignon, proudly displaying its “original” Botticelli, and the ignorant bliss of the policeman, adoring his free “copy” of Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist. Someday soon—perhaps with the help of some lithe, lock-picking Spaniard—Dubois will retrieve the original from the policeman, replacing it with an undetectable copy. The swap will be his third time to deceive the inspector, he realizes: first, with the pair of faked Botticellis; second, with the faked suicide (he smiles, recalling the daring ambiguity of the phrase “this sort of death”); soon, with the theft of a priceless painting from the policeman’s own home. All in all, a delightful hat trick.

  Chapter 9

  Descartes

  Descartes was still savoring his lunch and his painting when his mobile jangled. He glanced at the display and frowned; the call was from his boss, the chief inspector. “What’s up?” he asked, trying not to let his annoyance show.

  “A new case for you. A homicide.”

  Shit, not a homicide, Descartes groaned inwardly. Homicides are such a pain in the ass. “Me?” he said, feigning surprise. “Isn’t Pierre next in the rotation?”

  “Pierre is sick. Jean-Paul leaves tomorrow for antiterrorist training. And Etienne is still on paternity leave. Besides, you have the best English, and the case involves two Americans. One ...”—a pause, and Descartes heard papers rattling—“named William Brockton. The other, probably his girlfriend, Miranda Lovelady.”