by Aaron Elkins
He shook his head. "The Baroque," he said turning again to the rehung Léger with its welter of clashing colors, jarring angles, and harsh perspective, "is not my cup of tea."
Back in the Dutch section, Calvin and I stood by while Pepin used his tournevis to unscrew the clamps that held two sturdy eyelets in the back of the picture's frame to a pair of hooks on metal rods coming down from a bar that ran along the ceiling. When he'd gotten them loosened, he got himself set and began to lift the painting from the wall, brushing off my help at first, but I got pushy again. Taking old pictures down is a two-man job. Together we lifted it carefully from the hooks and placed it upright, with its back to us, on a carpeted dolly he'd brought.
The result wasn't worth the effort. As I'd anticipated, the picture had been relined; that is, the age-weakened old canvas had been glued to a fresh piece of linen backing to strengthen it, and the whole thing reattached to a new stretcher. There wasn't a mark on it.
"Recently done," I said. "New lightweight bars, thermoplastic adhesive, all brand-new . . . Vachey probably had it done himself."
In itself, there was nothing wrong with that. It's the proper way to treat old pictures, and the relining had been done competently enough. On the other hand, it's also the first thing a crook does if there's something about the back of a canvas that he wants to hide. Not that I had found anything yet to suggest there was something—
"Pick up Nadia, quarter to one, for lunch at the Toison d'Or," Calvin said matter-of-factly from over my left shoulder.
I turned toward him, frowning. "What?"
"Not you, me," he said. "That was my pen."
It took a moment to register. "Your pen talks? Now why doesn't that surprise me?"
"Neat, huh? Well, if you don't need me anymore, I ought to get going."
"I'll get along," I said, "somehow."
"Anything I can do to, you know, help things along this afternoon?"
"Sure, maybe you could see if you could dig up something useful."
"Such as."
"Anything. The name of the junk shop Vachey's supposed to have bought this from would be nice."
"Where am I supposed to get that?"
I lowered my voice. "You could try Pepin. He seems pretty forthcoming."
"Right. Sure. Will do. Well, gotta go."
I nodded mutely to him as he left, his toothy, cocky grin in place. Pick up Nadia. Lithe, sexy, pretty Nadia. How did the guy do it, I wondered glumly. And where, while I was on the topic of lithe, sexy, pretty people, was Anne right now? Sleeping, no doubt; it was just 4:00 a.m. on the West Coast. In an hour the pale early-morning light would begin to filter through the curtains onto her face. She would stir.
"We are finished?" Pepin asked, having had enough of watching me staring into the middle distance.
"We are finished," I said. Together we got the painting back up. I had to admit that no one could have handled it any more tenderly than Pepin did.
I was hot from the mild effort, which struck me as odd. Picture galleries usually have rigid climate control systems, and the ideal temperature is generally agreed to be sixty-eight degrees. But it felt more like seventy-four or seventy-five to me. It had the previous night as well, but I'd attributed that to the crush. The air seemed dry too, below the conventional fifty to fifty-five percent humidity, but I was less sure about that.
"Monsieur Pepin, does it seem a little warm in here to you?"
Pepin took this, as he took just about everything, as a personal insult.
"Thank you. Are there other complaints you wish me to convey to Monsieur Va—to Madame Guyot?"
"I'm not complaining, I—never mind, forget it."
The hell with it, I thought. A few weeks at seventy-four degrees wasn't going to hurt my Rembrandt. Not when you considered that it had apparently gotten along without my expert advice, or anybody's expert advice, for 360-plus years. Junk shops and attics are not known for their exacting temperature controls.
Oops. Did I just call it a Rembrandt? No quotation marks, no "alleged"? Did I just call it my Rembrandt? Watch it there, Norgren, don't commit yourself before you have to. Even dead, Vachey was likely to have a trick or two up his sleeve.
I thanked Pepin for his help, and went and got Charpentier.
"Frankly, Christopher," he said as we departed le maison Vachey, I'm glad you're coming with me. You can restrain me if Froger again brings out the savage beast in me."
I laughed. "We can restrain each other."
Chapter 12
Hunching grouchily along with a cigarette loosely wedged in the corner of his mouth, hands in the pockets of his baggy tweed jacket, chin tucked into a wool muffler, and black beret jammed down to his ears—all despite the mild fall weather—Charpentier reminded me of one of those black-and-white photos of postwar France, in which everybody was riding a bicycle, or carrying a baguette, or both, all the while looking Gallic as hell.
Everybody still carries baguettes here, but there aren't so many bicycles anymore, and berets are a thing of the past, worn only by Spaniards and Americans—and a few rare mavericks like Charpentier. Add those Neanderthal eyebrows and the rubbery red nose to the rest of it, and he seemed like a throwback, a workman heading back to the job after his midday tumbler of red wine, crusty bread, and cheese.
I was feeling a bit Neanderthal myself, surrounded as we were by hordes of good-looking, well-dressed university students on their way back to class. Twice a day—for morning coffee and at lunch—the students briefly overwhelmed the otherwise quiet Old City, streaming to and from the cafés and sandwich bars. They are very noticeable too, and not just because of their number. French university students are strikingly different-looking from their American counterparts—languid and trendy in expensive bomber jackets and oversized sweaters with pushed-up sleeves, and meticulously groomed and dressed so as to create the impression of being carelessly groomed and dressed. To my discerning American eye they looked more like walking advertisements for Arpels or Calvin Klein than like serious, legitimate students. Where were their ragged cut-offs, for God's sake, their combat boots, their nose rings? Where were their Frisbees?
"Jean-Luc," I said, "did you know Vachey very well?"
"Not very well, no."
"Really? I got the impression last night you were old friends." Old acquaintances, anyway.
"No, no, I reviewed some of his paintings many, many years ago when I wrote for ActuelArt. My remarks failed to please him, I'm afraid."
"Do you mean his show, The Turbulent Century?"
"No. As a matter of fact, I did review The Turbulent Century as well, but, no, I refer now to his own works."
"His own works?"
He glanced at me, scowling through cigarette smoke. "You didn't know he once painted?"
"I had no idea. What kind of thing did he do?"
When we stepped out of the narrow, shaded Rue des Forges and into the sunny, open space of the Place Francois Rude with its fountain and outdoor café tables, Charpentier seemed to realize the day was anything but wintry. The beret was snatched off his head with one hand and stuffed in a pocket of his tweed jacket, the muffler was tugged from his neck with the other hand and stuffed into the opposite pocket. It made him look a little less anachronistic, but it didn't do anything for the shape of his jacket. And even in the sunshine, he walked as if he were breasting an Antarctic gale.
"René Vachey was an artiste with a purpose," he said, leaving no doubt about his view of "artistes" with purposes. "He believed that the Abstractionists had all but killed art. He wanted painting to return to the figurative Cubism of Braque and Picasso—of Léger, for that matter. And that's the way he painted."
He took an immense pull on the cigarette without taking it from his mouth. A half-inch of it sizzled into ash, drooped, and landed on his lapel. "Well, he was right about Abstractionism, I'll give him that much." He paused to unleash a long gust of smoke. "Painting has been going steadily to hell ever since the 1920s—Mondrian and his
damned neoplasticists. Sterile. Nothing but dead end after dead end. You agree, I imagine?"
I did, except that if you ask me, painting's been going to hell for a lot longer than that, ever since Daubigny and his Barbizon group came along, way back in the 1850s.
Sorry, Tony, it just slipped out.
"But of course," he went on, "these reactionary movements have no chance. They're nothing but self-indulgent fantasies, impossible of success. Look at the Pre-Raphaelites—and Vachey was no Rossetti, I can tell you."
"But he was actually good enough to have his own show?"
Charpentier snorted, or maybe it was a laugh. "How good must you be to have a show in your own gallery? It was an exhibition, with all his usual, tiresome fanfare, of works by the small cadre of neo-Cubists in his circle. I had the questionable privilege of reviewing them for ActuelArt."
"Not favorably, I gather."
"They were rubbish. And the six or seven pieces by Vachey himself were laughable—derivative, shallow, pallid, clumsy, uninformed. That is what I wrote, and I was forced to write it again two years later, when he was misguided enough to participate in a second show. Apparently, that review—admittedly somewhat less generous—convinced him that his career lay in the selling of pictures, in which he was already well-established, and not in the painting of them."
He stopped to deposit his cigarette stub in a waste bin. "I have always looked upon it," he said, "as my single greatest contribution to the welfare of art."
* * *
We stopped at a student-ravaged sandwich bar for its last two ham-and-tomato sandwiches on not-so-crusty bread, then walked a block further down the Rue Dauphine toward the Musée Barillot, Charpentier lighting up again as we left the bar, and pulling in smoke as hungrily as if he'd been without a cigarette for weeks. In France, they still take their smoking seriously.
"Jean-Luc ..."
He turned toward me, sucking on his teeth. "Um?"
"I was just wondering something. I understand that everything points to that painting being a genuine Léger, and yet—well, with what you've told me about Vachey having painted in the Cubist style, well—is there any possibility—"
I was searching for a delicate way to put it to the prickly Charpentier, but couldn't think of any. "—any possibility that the painting is a fake after all?"
The tangled eyebrows drew ominously together. "Fake?"
"By Vachey."
The eyebrows sprang apart. "Vachey?" His jaw dropped. The cigarette, pasted to his lower lip, stayed put. "Haven't you heard one damned thing I've said?"
"Yes, of course, it's just that I can't help feeling—"
He waved me quiet. "I know, I feel it too. René was up to something, but what? He was playing a game of cat-and-mouse, how can we have any doubt about that? But with whom?" He walked along without saying anything for a few steps. "And in the end," he said with a meaningful sidewise glance, "did the mouse turn upon the cat and rend it?"
He took the cigarette out of his mouth long enough to use a finger to work at some food stuck between his molars. "All I can tell you is this: "Whatever he was up to, it did not involve a counterfeit Léger. The Violon et Cruche is authentic, Christopher, infinitely beyond the capacities of René Vachey. Besides, you must remember that he hasn't painted in more than fifteen years."
"But who's to say when this was painted?"
He shook his head tolerantly, marveling at my persistence. "Tell me, what would you say is the possibility that Vachey himself painted your Rembrandt?"
"Are you serious? None at all. One in a billion."
"Well, then, why is it so hard to believe me when I tell you the same thing about the other? Of course, I realize that you are not a great admirer of Léger's works—"
"I never said—"
"You hardly need to say it," he said, "but even you must admit that his technical command, even in an artistically unfulfilled work like Violon et Cruche, is staggering. The idea that any forger, let alone a sophomoric dauber like Vachey, would be capable of having fabricated it is simply . . . No, as amusing as your theory is, it's beyond the realm of possibility. I'm afraid we need another one."
We were at the entrance of the Barillot. Charpentier tossed away the cigarette stub and clapped me bearishly on the shoulder. "Come, into the lion's den."
* * *
The Barillot, as I've suggested before, was the kind of museum that gives museums a bad name, the kind whose main excuse for existing is that the original donor bequeathed the building—and the collection—to the city and left a modest fund to keep it afloat. There were perhaps three good pieces in the place (four, including the Goya charcoal Vachey had donated after his all-in-fun-no-hard-feelings theft), but it would have been too depressing to hunt for them in the tiny, badly lit rooms jammed with somber, dark paintings, sometimes literally from floor to ceiling.
Many of the pictures had placards like ATTRIBUÉ A ABRAHAM VAN DEN TEMPEL or D'APRÊS JEROME BOSCH beside them; less than emphatic, as labels go. We have some at SAM too—every museum does—but most of the ones here were very obviously no more than amateur efforts, or student exercises at best, some of them flat-out dreadful. The more boldly identified paintings, and there were some by bona fide Old Masters, were almost as bad. Every artist has off-days, of course, and the Barillot offered living proof. In a way, it was unmatched in that respect. It had a bad Murillo, a bad Steen, a bad Tintoretto, and a bad Fragonard, and how many museums can you say that about? There was even a bad Velázquez, and that might just be unique.
And now, it seemed, they would be getting a bad Léger for company.
The building itself, an eighteenth-century townhouse, was still impressive, but it hurt me to see the once-delicate decorative moldings on lintels, jambs, doors, and ceilings buried under so many layers of thick white paint that they were no more than lumpy globs. Fortunately, there wasn't too much anyone could do to the central staircase, an austerely handsome stone spiral that Charpentier and I took upstairs, to where Froger's office was.
At the top, Charpentier put a hand on my arm. "Would you care to make a wager?" he asked. "Froger's first words will be to the effect that the demise of his dear friend René Vachey has shocked him to his soul, and that he himself will go to any lengths to see that justice is done. He may even have tears in his eyes. In fact, I'll include that in the wager."
I smiled. "No bet."
Froger had plenty of warning that we were coming, because we had to walk through three tiny "galleries" with wooden floors so squeaky that we sounded like an army. And we were the only visitors, this being the off-season as far as tourists were concerned, and the people of Dijon having better sense.
Froger's office was larger than most of the gallery rooms. It had no paintings in it, but there was a pedestal bearing an early version of Houdon's marble bust of Mirabeau in one corner, three good Sèvres vases in a wall cupboard, and on one wall a large, faded Gobelin tapestry of hunting goddesses and deer, which hadn't been cleaned in two hundred years. Otherwise, there was just an elegant desk in the center of the room, actually a converted, drop-leaf gaming table from the early eighteenth century, and a couple of superb Empire chairs. Funny kind of a museum, I thought, where the classiest objets d'art in the place were in the director's office.
Seated behind the desk, facing us as we entered, was Froger himself, his hands folded on his belly, and his beefy face grave and composed.
"So somebody's finally killed the arrogant son of a bitch," he said.
I promised myself that the next time Charpentier offered me a bet, I'd take him up on it.
"Do they know who did it?" he asked me.
"How would I know that?"
"You went outside this morning. You had a talk with the inspector."
I'd forgotten he'd been there for the session on Vachey's will. "Well, if he knows, he didn't tell me," I said.
He waved us into the Empire chairs. "There shouldn't be any shortage of suspects, God knows."
&nb
sp; There, at least, he, Charpentier, and I were all in agreement. I wondered if it had occurred to him that he was likely to be on the list himself. His feud with Vachey had been long and bitter, and last night's spiky, highly public encounter hadn't improved things.
"Beginning with me," he said with a rumbling laugh.
I was starting to have a bit more respect for Froger. He might be a horse's ass, but he wasn't a hundred percent horse's ass.
"Well, Jean-Luc," he said, "you've examined the painting again?"
"I have."
"And?"
"And it is still a Léger. Still an extremely poor one."
Froger's chin came off his chest. "Extremely poor? Last night it was merely not so good."
Charpentier pursed his lips. "I was being charitable. I may have been carried away."
Froger glowered momentarily, then rearranged his face and smiled. Clearly, he had resolved not to let Charpentier get his goat this time. "In any case," he said, moistening his lips, "you advise me to accept it?"
"I advise nothing. I'm not being paid to advise."
"But it is a Léger? You're sure of that?"
"It is a Léger," Charpentier said with truly amazing patience, given the fact that he had to be pretty tired of having his expertise questioned by now. "If that's all that matters to you, accept it."
Froger got his fingers into his collar, under the rolls of flesh, and tugged at it. "Look, Jean-Luc, no offense, but I'm very nervous about this. No one knows Léger better than you, I freely admit it, but even you can't be sure it's authentic."
"I am ready to stake my reputation on it," Charpentier said quietly.
But it was Froger's reputation that was worrying Froger. He hunched his massive shoulders uneasily. "It's just that I don't know what I'm getting into, and I don't want to be made a fool of."
Charpentier had finally had enough. He thumped the desk with a fist. "If you don't trust my judgment, damn it, go ahead and get someone else. They'll tell you exactly what I've told you."
