No Rest for the Dead

by Andrew F. Gulli; Lamia J. Gulli

  Christopher Thomas looked at her over the café table. He smiled. “But the rich always are,” he said. “I can’t recall a single occasion, not one, where I’ve been entertained—how should I put it?—parsimoniously by people with money. Can you?”

  She did not reply. And the reason, thought Christopher, was that she had never really been there. She met these people through the museum, but meeting was one thing; social acceptance was another. It was different for him. Not only had he married Rosemary, but he had worked his way up through the art world. He had come from nowhere, but that was no disadvantage if you were a chameleon. Take on the local color. Think the local thoughts. It was easy. People in the art world listened to him, deferred to him.

  Justine reached for the bottle of Chablis that the café proprietor had placed on the table. She filled his glass, then poured a small amount into her own.

  “Well, I guess I’m not used to this,” she said, feeling slightly out of step, slightly apart from this literal ivory tower, nothing new. It was the way she’d felt in graduate school and just about every other institution. “But I must say I like it.”

  He took a sip of the wine. “Of course. Who wouldn’t?”

  “It sure beats work.”

  He shook his hand with the bandaged finger at her in mock admonition. “Listen, this is work. Remember, this is a conference and we’re here on behalf of the museum—not because we want to spend five days in France. Not because we want to stay in the Château Bellepierce. Not because we want to sit in cafés like this and drink Chablis. We can go to Napa for all that.”

  She laughed nervously. “Of course. It’s just I forget sometimes.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Tell me again what happened to your hand?”

  “I never told you the first time you asked.”

  They lapsed into silence. She looked over his shoulder, blurring him out for a moment, to the small line of pollarded trees on the other side of the square. Under the trees, on a small rectangle of raked white earth, a group of men in flat caps were playing boules. Somebody was winning, she saw, and was being slapped on the back in congratulation; a small triumph, a little thing. Beyond the boules players and the trees, in the church on the corner, a stout woman dressed in black was standing at the open doorway, looking in her direction.

  Christopher looked at his watch. “We’d better get back to the château. It’s four o’clock. There’s a lecture at five. I think we should be there.”

  Everybody would be there—every one of the eight connoisseurs invited by their host and all twelve experts. They would listen, ask a few questions, then break up until drinks before dinner. It was hardly demanding.

  Justine drained her glass. At home she would never have drunk wine at four in the afternoon, but this was France and it seemed a perfectly natural thing to do. She felt… almost happy. When Christopher had suggested that she come on this trip, she had at first been reluctant. She had not been away with him before, and she was not sure whether she wanted to. He was her boss, and although they had crossed the line on several occasions, he was married—and she knew Rosemary. She would never have initiated something like this herself; he had done it, he had pushed her into it at a vulnerable moment and she had acceded. What else could she do?

  But inviting her to come on this trip seemed to be upping the stakes, flaunting their affair. Well, if he was ready for that, then perhaps she was too. She had nobody else in her life at the moment. Of course he had girlfriends—everybody knew that, including Rosemary, or so people said.

  She thought back to their conversation about this trip….

  “You’ve heard of Carl Porter?” he’d asked. “The Porter Foundation?”

  “Yes,” she’d said. Though she hadn’t, not until she’d googled him.

  “Sometimes people forget that there are real people behind these foundations. Carl lives in France and has for years. The money comes from cosmetics—lipstick or something like that. Cheap stuff. Anyway, Carl and his wife got bored with Palm Beach and decided to move to France. He was a big collector. And he knew what he was doing. It’s a great collection now and he likes to share it.”

  It started to make sense to her. “Share it? You mean he might give us—the museum—something?”

  Christopher shook his head. “No. Carl is tight. He’s looking for ways of taking it with him.”

  “So, this invitation?”

  He explained it to her. “Carl’s idea of sharing is to invite people to come and tell him what great paintings he has. He has what he calls conferences. They last five days or so, sometimes a whole week. He invites other collectors and a bunch of people he calls experts from the museums and galleries. That’s us.”

  “And we sing for our supper?”

  Christopher smiled. “Exactly. You won’t have to do anything. It’s just that the invitation is for two people from the museum. Of course, if you’d rather I took someone else…”

  “I’ll come.”

  Justine came back to the moment, staring at Christopher Thomas, his angular face, the permanent sneer on his lips.

  Christopher seemed pleased. For her part, she was under no illusions as to why he had asked her. He would need entertainment. He had actually used that word before when he referred to what was between them. She was entertainment. She could have been angered, but rather to her surprise she found that she was not. In a way she was even flattered that he—the great Christopher Thomas—should find her entertaining. And what else did she have? She had long ago had the insight—which sometimes people did not get until much later on—that this was no dress rehearsal. You had one chance at life and you had to grab what was offered you. She had worked her way up from circumstances few if any in the rarefied world of art even knew about, and she had no intention of going back. She’d kept her job because of him; certain invitations came her way because he felt fit to pass them on; she was in France because Christopher Thomas liked her enough to ask her. If that meant that they shared a room, then that was not too much of a price to pay. She was a willing participant, something she had been telling herself for several weeks.

  Christopher drove back to the château in the rented Peugeot. It was not a long drive as the château was barely five miles from the village. It was good land: the wide landscape of Charente stretched under the high Poitou-Charentes sky, here and there a major town, but for the most part a place of small villages surrounded by sunflower and wheat fields, vineyards, stretches of forest. The château had been virtually derelict before Carl acquired it from its last owner, an almost blind French colonel, the last vestige of a distinguished family that had lived there for five centuries. He had left much of the furniture simply because he could not bear to sell it and had wept as he had shown Carl and his wife, Terry, round each room.

  Christopher had been there before on several occasions after Carl had moved the collection from the secure warehouse near Philadelphia where it had spent the previous eighteen months. Carl had wanted his advice, not only on the paintings he had but on works he intended to acquire. Christopher was happy to give his opinions and had even persuaded Carl to sell several paintings of doubtful merit or questionable provenance. This advice had been rewarded with a fee—a remarkably generous one in view of Carl’s reputation for meanness—or occasionally with a gift of a small painting. Christopher had a Vuillard pastel—admittedly an undistinguished one—that Carl had given him in gratitude for brokering the acquisition of something that Carl had long been looking for.

  Christopher had held on to the Vuillard for a year before discreetly selling it to a dealer in Paris who assured him that it would be sold to a private client and not appear in the auction rooms. He knew that Carl looked at all the catalogs—Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips—and if the Vuillard came onto the open market, he would see it and would not be pleased.

  Christopher and Justine had arrived the day before, taking the high-speed train down from Charles de Gaulle and picking up the rental car
at Angoulême. Justine had been fascinated by the château and somewhat relieved she had her own room. But that night, after dinner, Christopher had knocked on her door and she had let him in.

  “It’s a very old house,” he had whispered. “And I get so lonely.”

  The main conference started the next day with a discussion of two of Carl’s latest acquisitions—a Dürer and an early Hopper. The Dürer was introduced by a woman from Berlin, who talked at great length. “Look at the face, the way it leaps out of the background, caught by the light. Everything else is in shadow; only the face is illuminated.”

  Christopher nudged Justine. “He was using a camera obscura. You read Hockney on that?”

  A man sitting nearby looked disapprovingly in his direction; Christopher acknowledged the look with a nod. Justine suppressed a smile. She remembered a friend saying to her, “Look, Justine, that man is using you. It’s so obvious.” And she knew that her friend was right but said, “But he’s so amusing. He makes it fun. Don’t you understand that?”

  The Hopper was more exciting. It was not well-known and had languished in an obscure private collection for thirty years before Carl had the chance to buy it for a mere $4 million. A hotel room at night with a curtain moved by the wind: classic Hopper territory, with its air of something about to happen. Carl gave the talk himself—his main performance of the week—and his audience listened with all the attentiveness of those who were being paid to listen or, if not actually being paid, were the recipients of a week of hospitality from a man who had $4 million to spend on a painting of an empty room in which something indefinable was going to take place.

  Christopher’s attention wandered, and he found himself looking at the back of the neck of the German woman who had talked to them about Dürer. German. Precise. A bit superior. Scholarly. She’d be fussy and out of place in San Francisco; too stiff. Yet women like that were a challenge, attainable but not available, which made her all the more interesting. This German woman, who now, for no reason, turned her head slightly and met his glance, crossed her legs this way then that—shapely legs—and smiled at him.

  He returned the smile.

  “I’m not sitting next to you at dinner,” Justine said to Christopher.

  “But we’ll see one another later?”

  She touched him lightly on the forearm. “Yes. Why not?”

  He could think of several reasons why not. All of them good reasons—none to be revealed, of course. There were his appetites to be satisfied, and for now the lovely Justine would adequately fulfill them.

  He glanced at the German woman as they moved through to the dining room, a long room with a chambered, painted ceiling portraying an apotheosis.

  He was seated next to the German woman—a coup—and Carl was on her other side; they were clearly in favor.

  “Carl,” he said, pointing to the ceiling, “you’ve told me before, but I’ve forgotten. The apotheosis above our heads. Who?”

  “Who’s being carried up to heaven? Or who painted it?”

  “Who’s being carried up?”

  “The great-grandfather of the man I bought it from. The colonel.”

  The German woman craned her neck. “And did he deserve it?”

  “In his view, yes,” said Carl.

  They laughed. Then the German woman turned to Christopher and said, “I was hoping to be able to talk to you.”

  He raised an eyebrow. She was more attractive up close, and the accent intrigued him. She sounded more Swedish than German.

  It was a request—or the intimation of a request. They were planning an exhibition in Berlin of a Flemish artist whose work was represented in Christopher’s museum. Could he oblige? And they would reciprocate, of course, when the occasion permitted.

  The German woman spoke precisely. “I could come and fetch it if you can’t spare anybody.”

  “Sure. And I could show you San Francisco.”

  “That would be very kind.”

  He noticed her skin, which had the sort of tan that some northern-European types get so easily, that soft golden color that he found irresistible. She was a few years younger than him, he thought; and he looked at the left hand, pure reflex—a ring, a garnet, but on the wrong finger, just ornament.

  They slipped into an easy, friendly conversation. Carl was engaged to his left, and so they spoke through the first course and into the second. She was flirting with him; the signals were unmistakable. He felt intrigued, slightly flattered too.

  “Where are you staying?” he asked. “I mean, here. I’m at the back. I’ve got this great view—the river and a sort of folly at the end of the lawn.”

  “I’m on that side too,” she said. “I believe that I’m a few doors down the corridor. Yes, two doors, to be exact.”

  He thought that he understood perfectly. He was surprised, but happy, and he found her room easily.

  He did not see Justine at breakfast the next morning. There was a lecture at ten, when a man from the National Gallery in London was going to discuss Carl’s collection of old-master drawings. She would be there and he could talk to her—and sort it out. She has no claim on me, he told himself. No claim at all.

  But where was Justine? He felt slightly irritated; this was work—they had discussed that—and he did not want her to give offense to Carl by not turning up at his carefully orchestrated events. Then he half turned and saw her, sitting at the far end of the back row, her eyes fixed on the lecturer. She did not catch his eye, although he thought that she must have seen him looking at her.

  After the talk was finished, after some questions and some fidgeting among the guests, Carl looked pointedly at his watch. Then it was time for morning coffee, which was served on the terrace.

  The light outside was bright, and Christopher slipped on a pair of sunglasses while he sipped his coffee. Justine came out and looked around quickly—again she must have seen him, he thought, but she made a point of going to speak to somebody else. He put his coffee cup down on the stone parapet that ran along the side of the terrace and walked over to intercept her.

  “Good morning.”

  She looked at him coolly. “Good morning.”

  He looked about him; the other guests were busy chatting to one another; he would not be overheard. “You’re ignoring me.”

  She feigned surprise. “What made you think that?”

  “Don’t be disingenuous. You looked right through me back there.”

  She hesitated, as if assessing how quickly, and how far, to ratchet up the tension. “You’re the one who’s doing the ignoring.”

  She held his gaze, although she was looking into sunglasses and he into her eyes. He had the advantage.

  “How is your German friend?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Your German friend. Your new friend. I spoke to her this morning. Just before the talk.”

  “You—what?”

  “She was surprised,” Justine said. “She was surprised to hear that you were here with me. She thought—”

  Christopher turned and walked away.

  Justine followed him and grabbed hold of his arm. Her grip was surprisingly firm; he felt her nails, digging into him. He tried to shrug her off, but her grip was tight.

  “What do you think you’re doing? Not in front of everybody,” he hissed.

  “Nobody’s looking,” she whispered. “Listen, Christopher, have you ever thought of this: One day one of the people you use will do something to hurt you? I mean, really hurt you?”

  He kept his voice down. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  Justine left him, and he rubbed his arm where she had seized him. He would make her answer for this.

  That evening, Carl said to him after dinner: “Chris, come look at something really interesting, upstairs. Just you.”

  “Of course, Carl. Now?”

  Carl nodded and led the way up to the second floor, to
a room that Christopher had never before been in. The small, private salon was hexagonal for the shape of the tower space it occupied. The overall feeling was one of intimacy: a large bookcase, small paintings on the wall, a tapestry above the fireplace.

  “Poussin,” said Carl, pointing at a picture of a man sitting in an arcadian landscape. “A lovely little picture. Blunt wrote about it, you know. He drew my attention to it.”

  Carl closed the door behind them so that they were away from the eyes of anybody who might be in the corridor outside. “Can’t be too careful. Look at this.” He opened a drawer in a small chest near the window and took out a painting about the size of a large book in a narrow gilt frame.

  “Lovely,” said Christopher. He bent over to peer at the painting. There was a woman and two youths, angels; the angels’ faces were unmistakable. It could only be one particular artist. He stood up again. “Very lovely.”

  Carl was looking at him. “You know what it…”

  Christopher spoke quietly. “I can see what it is.” He paused. “And what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say, ‘Yes, this is it’?”

  Carl shrugged. “I don’t want you to say anything about what this is. What I do want you to say is that you’ll take it to San Francisco for me and hand it over to that restorer friend you have out there—you know the one. He’ll do what’s necessary.”

  Christopher frowned. “Why get me to take it? Can’t you take it yourself?”

  Carl laid the painting down on a table and looked at it fondly. “I can’t do that. I can’t risk its being… intercepted. You know I can’t.” He looked up at Christopher and held his gaze.

  Christopher did know. He knew that this painting, from the studio of Sandro Botticelli, and probably from the artist’s hand, could not fall into the hands of customs.

  “So,” Carl went on. “You’re perfect. Did anyone ever tell you that your face, Christopher, is the quintessential honest face? Successful museum director on his way back from a meeting in France. Nobody’s going to stop you and say, ‘Do you mind telling us something about that little painting you have concealed in your suitcase, Mr. Thomas?’”