Old Scores

Aaron Elkins
Chapter 1

"My treat," Tony said, reaching over my extended hand to pick up the check. "This is on me."

Oh-oh, I thought. Watch out now.

This is not to imply that Tony Whitehead is a devious type, or one in whom every generous action implies some ulterior motive. It's just that Tony usually doesn't do things without a reason. Sometimes it's to your advantage, sometimes it's not. And it's been my experience that when he picks up the tab-it's not.

Tony is my boss, the director of the Seattle Art Museum (or SAM, as we insiders call it). I'm Chris Norgren, the curator of Renaissance and Baroque art. We were lunching a few blocks from the museum in the stylish, dark-wood elegance of a trendy new dining spot called Palomino. Our table was at a railing overlooking the spectacular glass-and-granite atrium of the Pacific First Centre building four stories below. As befitted a restaurant that described itself as "a Euro-Seattle bistro," Palomino was neoeclectic all the way. The furnishings were vaguely Art Deco, the wall hangings and open brick ovens vaguely Country French, the massive round columns and mauve walls vaguely Aegean.

It was all very handsome and inviting, and certainly of the moment, but it wasn't a choice I would have expected from Tony, who prided himself on ferreting out little hole-in-the-wall "finds" under the Alaskan Freeway. He'd surprised me by suggesting it. And made me wonder what was up.

Not that I didn't trust him, you understand. As a matter of fact, I do trust him. And I like him a lot. He works hard and he has high standards for himself and his staff. He's a skilled administrator and a formidable Trecento scholar, and more than once I'd seen him stand up for his people when the chips were down. He'd been particularly kind to me at a critical time in my life.

All the same, there was an occasional whiff of snake oil in his nature, and he had a history of getting me involved in things I should have known better than to get involved in. Always for the greater good of the Seattle Art Museum, of course, or in the interests of art itself. But not always in the interests of my personal comfort and convenience.

"How was the meal?" he said amiably.

"Delicious," I said. Which was true. I'd had a spit-roasted-chicken pizza, thereby taking advantage in one dish of both the Milanese girarrosto that roasted the fowl, and the alder-fired Roman pizza oven. The famous apple-wood-fired oven had made its contribution in the form of bruschetta, delicately charred chunks of Italian bread coated with olive oil, garlic, and bits of sun-dried tomato. I hadn't figured out a way to try the hardwood grill, too, but whatever I'd had was excellent.

"How about some dessert?"

"No, thanks."

"Why don't we have some salad? You know, a palate-cleanser."

I agreed. We ordered green salads. Did we wish fresh Gorgonzola and walnuts on them, the black-shirted, black-trousered waitress wanted to know. We didn't. Would we care for another glass of wine?

"Go ahead, Chris," Tony said expansively. "No hurry getting back. We've got all the time in the world."

"No, thanks, Tony. Gee, I wonder why I have this feeling I'm going to need a clear head."

"Ha, ha," he said reassuringly, "not really. Although, you know, there is something I wanted to tell you about. Don't look so edgy, Chris. I think you're going to find this interesting."

I didn't doubt it.

He reached for the bruschetta and tore off a piece. "As it happens, there's a collector who wants to give us one of his paintings," he said off-handedly. "It'd fall in your bailiwick if we take it."

"What painting?" I asked warily.

"Oh, it's just a portrait. By, what's his name, you know, Rembrandt."

Well, there in a nutshell was why no one had ever accused Tony of not knowing how to get someone's attention.

"What's-his-name-Rembrandt," I said thickly, once I got my voice going again. "Tony, this is…" I frowned. "What do you mean, if we take it? Are you kidding me?"

"Well, we do have a small problem. The man we're talking about is Rene Vachey."

"Rene…?" I stared at him. "And he just… just up and offered us this old Rembrandt he happened to have lying around?"

Tony continued his placid chewing. "That's about it. One of his lawyers called me this morning to tell me about it."

"Just like that? Out of the blue?"

"Just like that."

I sat back against my chair, not sure just what my feelings were. "Mixed" would be as good a way as any to describe them, I guess. A Rembrandt portrait. Any red-blooded curator of Baroque art who says he wouldn't be salivating for it sight unseen would be lying through his teeth. I mean, after all, Rembrandt is-well, Rembrandt. The fact that SAM didn't own a single one of his paintings was something I regarded as almost a personal affront, but I'd long ago given up the idea of getting one any time soon. And now, suddenly, there it was, in my mind's eye, gilded seventeenth-century frame and all, hanging in the Late Renaissance and Baroque Gallery on the fourth floor, in pride of place on the west wall. I was dazzled.

At the same time, the mention of the donor's name had made me thoroughly leery. I'd never met the elderly Rene Vachey, but I knew who he was. A successful French art dealer as well as a collector, he was one of the art world's more eccentric characters (and take my word for it, that is saying something), unpredictable, controversial, notorious. To some, an unscrupulous and self-serving scoundrel; but to many others a welcome gadfly in a field cram-full of self-puffery and faddishness. I could see both points of view.

The most spectacular of his escapades had occurred about ten years earlier, when the morning shift at the Musee Barillot in Dijon had walked in to discover to their horror that six of the museum's most-prized possessions had vanished during the night, frames and all. Among them were paintings by Tintoretto, Murillo, and Goya.

The usual tumult followed. The police were called in and got to work grilling museum employees and other suspicious characters. Photographs and descriptions of the stolen works were given to Interpol. Accusations of lax security were flung at the museum director, who responded by wringing his hands and bemoaning the sad state to which French morality had degenerated. He also fired his security chief.

Then, exactly four weeks later, Rene Vachey opened a public exhibition of works from his own excellent collection, mounted in his own gallery, three blocks from the museum. This was something he did occasionally, but this time there was a difference. Featured proudly and prominently in their original frames were the six pictures missing from the Barillot.

More tumult. Vachey, one of Dijon's most prominent citizens, permitted himself to be arrested and charged in what was almost a public ceremony. Afterward, he held a news conference well-attended by the Parisian press corps (whom he had taken care to invite). Yes, he said, he had taken the pictures from the museum, or rather caused them to be taken; the responsibility was entirely his. But stolen them? No, he had not stolen them. To steal, he pointed out, was to take the property of another, was it not? But whose property were these paintings? Did the Musee Barillot own them? He thought not, and he thought he could prove he was right.

Now I ought to point out that we are not talking about timeless works of art here, despite the famous names. Artists are like anyone else; they have off-days. Usually they themselves destroy or paint over their less successful efforts, but often enough these works survive. And there are certain small European museums, and some American ones, too, that have capitalized on this, picking them up relatively cheaply and amassing collections rich in great names but lacking in great works. This is not my favorite approach to developing a museum, based as it is on the belief that the average museumgoer is too dumb to know or care what he or she is looking at as long as the label says Picasso or Matisse. Worse, that's precisely the kind of museumgoer it helps to create. ("Ooh, look, a genuine Picasso! Isn't that beautiful?")

Anyway, the Musee Barillot, I have to say, was just such a museum. In fairness, it could hardly have afforded a first-rate collection of paintings. Containing a modest collection willed to the city by a wealthy physician named (surprise) Barillot at the turn of the century, it had since received little support beyond that required for maintenance. It had, in fact, made almost no acquisitions since the late 1940s. Just how it had managed to acquire the pictures in question was something that was buried in the remote past. They had hung there as long as anybody could remember, that was all.

And it was just this point that had started the clever Vachey thinking. He did some research, tracing them back to their appearance in the country in about 1800 as Napoleonic loot from Italy, Germany, and Spain. With thousands of other plundered artworks they had been destined for the Louvre, but they were among those the experts pronounced unworthy of basking in la gloire de France and had found their way into the French art market. Eventually, one or two at a time, the museum in Dijon had picked them up in the early years of the twentieth century. They had done so legally, paying the going price, and they had the papers to prove it (although it had taken them a while to locate them in the dusty vaults of a bank in Beaune).

Vachey shrugged this off. How could paintings or anything else be purchased legally from sellers who had no right to them in the first place? But French law didn't see it that way, and a much-publicized court case ensued, with Vachey cheerfully questioning the French legal system's authority to rule in cases involving non-French property.

Yes, cheerfully. For the whole thing was a sensational stunt. There had never been a question of its being anything else. Certainly these second-rate products of first-rate artists had no financial or aesthetic appeal to Vachey. His own collection was infinitely more valuable than the Musee's. He had simply decided to call attention, somewhat ahead of its time, to the enormous and tangled question of Who Owns Art?-and perhaps to make some waves and ruffle a few feathers in the sober, snooty French art establishment along the way.

This he did brilliantly, for three well-publicized weeks, until the court began to make threatening noises. In the end, the paintings went back to the museum, as Vachey had always claimed-and I believed him-was his intention. He also paid the museum's legal expenses and voluntarily donated from his own collection, as a goodwill gesture, a fine Goya charcoal study that was worth more than all six "stolen" pictures put together.

From beginning to end, he had clearly considered the whole affair an enormous lark. Whether you conclude his basic motives were altruistic or self-serving depends on who you talk to. There was little doubt that he accomplished something useful by focusing attention on an important issue. On the other hand, he also became for a while the world's most celebrated art dealer, which couldn't have been bad for business. But whichever way you felt about that, the fact remained that he did it by burglarizing a museum, and anytime you load pictures in and out of trucks you subject them to frightening risks, especially when you do it through windows-in a hurry and on the sly. I've already said that these weren't among the Western world's great masterpieces, but Tintorettos are Tintorettos, and as far as art people are concerned, you don't mess with them to prove a point.

He'd also caused an art museum, and by extension, art museums in general, to look foolish, and that was what was worrying Tony and me right now.

So that was the man who wanted to give us a Rembrandt. Who knew what he was up to this time? The only thing I was sure of was that any gift horse from Rene Vachey required a long, hard look in the mouth.

"This picture," I said to Tony, "what does it look like?"

The salads had come. Tony began on his. "I told you," he said. "It's a portrait. Oil on canvas."

That struck me as a rather laconic description from a man who can get every bit as overheated about old paintings as I can.

"But what kind of a portrait? Of whom? Group or single subject? What kind of condition is it in? How much restoration has there been?"

Tony hunched his shoulders and chewed, the implication being that his mouth was too full of arugula and fennel to reply at the moment.

I leaned forward, eyes narrowed. "You haven't actually seen it, have you?"

"Well, not exactly-"

"Have you?"

"Well, no, nobody has."

"Not even photographs?"

"Well, n-"

"So we don't really know for sure it's what he says it is."

Tony swallowed and put down his fork. "Hell, we don't know for sure it exists. This could be some hoax, some game he's playing. It probably is."

I sat back and looked at him, thoroughly deflated. "So why are we even talking about it? Why are we bothering?"

"Because," Tony said, "he just might be on the level. What do you want me to do, tell him we're not interested? Tell him to go find some other museum for his lousy Rembrandt? Tell him to go ahead and give it to the Met?"

"No, I guess not."

"Of course not. How'd you feel if the next time you walked into the Met, your Rembrandt was hanging on their wall?"

I laughed. "Not good."

"Well, neither would I. So let's not jump to conclusions."

"Agreed. But something's clearly fishy here, Tony. Look, why would Vachey donate anything to us? Why not some other museum? Why not the Met? That'd give him a bigger public arena, if that's what he's after. Or why not a French museum, where at least he'd come away with some tax benefits?"

"Makes you wonder, doesn't it," Tony agreed.

"We've never had any kind of association with him, have we?"

"Well, in a way, yes. You know who Ferdinand Oscar de Quincy was?"

It wasn't a name you'd be likely to forget once you'd heard it. "Sure, he had your job back in the fifties."

"That's right. Well, before that, in the forties he was with MFA amp; A. You remember what that is, don't you?"

I nodded. MFA amp; A-Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives- was the U.S. Army unit that, with major British assistance, had tracked down so much of the stupendous German art plunder of World War II and gotten it back to the museums and individuals it had been taken from. It had been the biggest and most successful recovery of stolen art in history, a well-deserved feather in the cap of the U.S. military. Afterward, most of MFA amp; A's experts, like Rorimer of the Met, and like de Quincy of SAM, had returned to the museum world from which they'd been recruited.

"Anyhow," Tony said, "according to Vachey, de Quincy was personally responsible for getting a dozen of his paintings back to him, and he swore then that he'd repay him someday by giving something worthwhile to de Quincy's museum." He shrugged. "That's us."

"What took him so long? It's been almost fifty years. De Quincy's been gone for forty."

"You've got me. According to his attorney, Vachey's getting on in years, he's getting sentimental. Wants to set his accounts in order before he passes on. He's taking care of old obligations, settling debts, redoing his will, all that kind of thing."

I picked abstractedly at the salad. What I'd heard so far was not abundantly convincing. From what I knew of Vachey, I didn't think he was the sentimental type, or at least not sentimental enough to give away something worth millions just to discharge a half-century-old obligation. There was surely something peculiar going on here, something we hadn't been told.

"Tony, let's assume the painting does exist. Let's assume it's really a Rembrandt. How positive are we that he's got legal ownership? How did he come by it? What does the provenance look like?"

Now provenances are tricky things. A provenance is the pedigree of a painting, the record of its ownership from the time it left the artist's hands. Since paintings change hands often, works as old as the ones we were talking about tend to have long provenances. Often they have gaps; for one reason or another, pictures disappear for a while and then turn up again, often fifty or a hundred years later. When this happens, there are always questions. How, after all, can people be absolutely certain that a long-lost Titian that is discovered in the living room of an Atlanta townhouse is the very same picture last seen or heard of in 1908 when it disappeared from the wall of a church in Pisa? (Answer: they can't, not absolutely.)

Even when there aren't gaps, there are often questions about authenticity or ownership. But a reasonably solid-looking provenance, capable of being at least partially verified, is a necessary place to start. Without it, no museum curator in his right mind would touch a so-called Old Master.

"There isn't any," Tony said.

My fork stopped halfway to my mouth. "No provenance?"

"Not to speak of, no. He says he got it from, well, from a junk shop in Paris. It was grimy, almost black. Naturally, the seller had no idea what it was."

"Well, how does he know what it is?"

"He says he knew the minute he saw it. He bought it, had it cleaned, took a good look at it, and satisfied himself that he was right."

"What do you mean, satisfied himself? Are you saying he authenticated it himself?"

"That's it."

I laughed. "Come on, Tony, this is a joke. An art dealer authenticating his own picture? What kind of authentication is that? Especially Rene Vachey, for God's sake."

He shrugged. "What do you want me to say?"

"Well, what do the French experts have to say about it?"

"I told you, nobody's seen it. He's setting up a big show at his gallery, and this is going to be the centerpiece. Critics, press, everybody's invited. I hear it's already making a huge flap over there. He's practically challenging the experts to prove his attribution's wrong, and people are starting to choose up sides before they even see the damn thing. Vachey has a lot of enemies, and, as usual, he's right in the middle of it. He called Edmond Froger a dilettante ignorant, in Le Monde."

"Oh, wonderful."

Tony shrugged. "Well, the guy is a horse's ass."

This was starting to have an ominously familiar ring. Several years before the Barillot affair, Vachey had gotten together about fifty of his own paintings to form a well-publicized exhibition called the Turbulent Century: 1860-1960. It ran for a month at a gallery he owned in London, and was scheduled to go to Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, and back to France. In all these places, eager museums had been squabbling with each other for the privilege of getting it. This was quite a show, including works by Gauguin, Seurat, Braque, and Picasso.

Except it didn't, not according to some reputable critics and reviewers who pronounced most of the collection to be questionable or downright spurious. Others, equally distinguished, supported Vachey's claims of authenticity. Battle lines were drawn. There was another flap, with epithets a lot more colorful than "dilettante ignorant" being hurled back and forth. In this one, Vachey remained back in Dijon, away from center stage, enjoying the fireworks while the experts fought it out. In the end, the museums scuttled for cover and pulled out with much huffing and puffing. Not, however, before they-and by extension, art museums in general, and by further extension, art experts in general-had been made laughingstocks. There were a lot of people who thought that just might have been the iconoclastic Vachey's aim in the first place.

And right now I was starting to wonder if it wasn't time for us to think about scuttling for cover ourselves.

"He can't expect us to accept the offer without seeing it, can he?" I asked. "Because if so-"

"No, you've got yourself an invitation to the opening. You can examine it to your heart's content. Okay?"

I considered. The odds were about a hundred to one against the trip accomplishing anything. An unknown "Rembrandt" discovered in a junk shop by a man with an offbeat sense of humor and a quirky history, to put it mildly. No provenance, no reliable authentication. Not a very good bet. On the other hand, for a hundred-to-one shot at this particular reward, yes, I was willing to take a trip to Dijon. Which is a very lovely little town, I might add.

"Good," Tony said heartily, "so it's settled. I'd better send Calvin along with you. He's at the Return of Cultural Property Conference in The Hague, anyway, so he can pop over to France easy. He can take care of the paperwork details, check the fine print, that kind of thing-his French is even better than yours. That'll leave you to concentrate on the painting."

"Fine." Then, after a second: "What do you mean, you'd better?"

Calvin Boyer was the museum's public affairs officer, formerly known as the marketing director. I enjoyed his company-well, most of the time-and he seemed pretty good at what he did, whatever it was, but I couldn't see his being much help in this.

"Well, you know," Tony said, just a little cagily, "you're absolutely tops at what you do, and you know that I trust you completely to handle anything that comes up-"

"Right. But?"

"But, you know, sometimes you're, well, you're not too swift when it comes to people. And Vachey is a very tricky customer."

"Oh, I'm gullible, is that it?"

This was an old complaint from Tony, who was given to wondering aloud how a naive soul like me had survived as well as I had among the sharks of the art world.

"I'm just saying you maybe trust people a little too much," he said. "You're not suspicious enough, you don't have a devious mind. You take people at face value, you don't always look under the surface of things. This is not a criticism, Chris."

It sure sounded like one to me, and I started to climb up on my high horse, but caught myself in time. As a divorced man whose very first clue that his marriage wasn't everything it might have been came when his wife moved in with another man-this was after she'd been seeing him for a year without my noticing a thing-I figured I was in no position to tell Tony about how sharp I was at seeing under the surface of things.

Besides, I have a friend named Louis who from time to time has told me pretty much the same thing Tony just had. Louis says that I tend to resort to the secondary repression of ego-threatening perceptions for fear of bringing to the surface the primal hostilities and id functions that I long ago denied by means of primal or infantile repression.

At least I think that's pretty much the same thing Tony said. Louis is by trade a Freudian-Marcusian psychotherapist, and not always as lucid as Tony.

"Calvin's an M.B.A., Chris," Tony explained further. "You're an art historian."

"Okay," I said, not quite grasping his logic, but letting it pass. "Actually, I'll be glad to have him along. And he can help work out the logistics for getting the painting analyzed. We'll want to have Taupin, from Paris, run it through infrared and X ray, don't you think? And there's that outfit in Lyons-what's its name?-that can do laser microanalysis. I've got it somewhere."

"Mm," Tony said, and pushed his salad plate away. He'd finished his salad. I'd hardly looked at mine. "Come on, let's head back."

We took the escalator down to the lobby, passing under a "Baroque" stone arch that had come from a 1920s theater that had once stood on the site. Once out on Fifth Avenue on a mild October afternoon, we threaded our way through shoppers, bemused tourists, and fellow late-lunchers getting back to work. While we walked, Tony told me more.

The Rembrandt, it seemed, wasn't the only centerpiece of Vachey's show. Vachey, no piker when it came to gall, was actually claiming to have come up with a second "newly discovered" painting; this one by the Frenchman Fernand Leger, who was, with Picasso and Braque, one of the foremost proponents of Cubism in the early years of the twentieth century. The Leger, it was understood, would be going to a French museum, as yet unnamed.

"Is that right?" I said. "Where'd he find this one, at a garage sale in Toulouse?"

"Strasbourg, actually," Tony said. "A flea market," and then he couldn't help laughing. "Now don't jump to conclusions here, Chris. Whatever else you can say about Vachey, he has a hell of a record for stumbling on masterpieces nobody even knew were out there." He started counting them off on his fingers. "There's that Constable that's in San Francisco now, remember? And that Francesco Guardi that wound up in, where was it, Budapest, and don't forget the Lebrun-"

"Well, yes, I know, but-"

"All those authentications were verified later-beyond any doubt, Chris. Sure, he's made a few that didn't hold up, but that much you have to admit."

"I suppose so," I said. "Well, there's one thing to be thankful for, anyway."

"What's that?"

"I was just thinking: He might have given the Rembrandt to a French museum and stuck us with the Leger." I put my hand over my heart. "Whew, it's too awful to contemplate."

I say such things primarily for the fun of annoying Tony, who has a thing about me being too enamored of my specialty. He thinks I need to be more eclectic. He says I put the Old Masters up on a pedestal (he's right), and that I look down my nose at anything after the eighteenth century (he's wrong, but not wildly wrong).

But this time he wouldn't bite. He merely gave me one of his superior, pitying looks and went on with his story. According to the terms, both pictures were to be displayed for two weeks at Le Galerie Vachey, after which they would go to their respective new owners. Vachey would pick up all transportation and insurance costs. He would even provide a continuing fund to cover future conservation and insurance.

"So what do you think, Chris? Too good to be true?"

"By half," I said.

In Seattle, you can't walk very far without passing an espresso bar, and most of us are addicted to the stuff. Tony and I, exercising our iron wills, ignored two of them, but finally succumbed at the third, a plant-filled, conservatory-like Starbucks on Fourth near Union. We got on the end of a line of five or six people at the counter.

"Uh-uh, no, it is too good to be true," I muttered while the barista went through her steamy routine at the espresso machine. "There's a catch somewhere."

"Um, there is a sort of catch," Tony said.

I looked at him sharply. I didn't like the sound of that um. "What catch?"

"Two catches, you might say."

"What catches?"

"Well, remember what you were saying about getting that X-ray and microscopic analysis done?"

"Yes-oh, Bussiere, that's the name of the lab in Lyons. I have the number in-"

"No dice," Tony said.

"What?"

"No labs. No X-ray, no ultraviolet, no cross-sectional analysis, nothing but the naked eye. You can look at it all you want, but no scientific stuff."

"Why not, for God's sake?"

"That's the way he wants it, Chris."

"But why? Tony, come on, he knows it's a fake, that's the only possible reason."

"Not necessarily. He says they're fragile. He's worried about damaging them."

"With X rays? That's ridiculous, you know that."

"Apparently he doesn't."

I shook my head. "I don't buy it. You know what it is? He's got a good fake, that's all, and he's giving it to us because he thinks Seattle is probably located just west of Dogpatch, and what could we know about art? He thinks he can get it by us, and after he does, he's going to announce that it really is a fake, and so once again he'll show us all up for the greedy, ignorant idiots we are-don't ask me what his point is this time."

Tony listened to this harangue, visibly and somewhat smugly amused. "And could he?"

"Could he what?"

"Get it by you?"

"By me?" Oddly enough, the question caught me by surprise. "I don't think so," I said honestly, after a moment.

"So there's no problem."

"Well, yes, there is. First of all, there's the question of why he won't allow tests-he knows damn well they won't hurt the picture, and he knows equally well that museums always run them before they buy something."

"True, but we're not buying anything, are we? He's giving it to us."

"What's the difference? Why not allow them? And there's a second problem. Sure, if it isn't real, I think I could spot that, but a lot of other so-called experts have thought the same thing and wound up making big mistakes. What if I made a mistake?" I shook my head. "I don't like seeing us put anything in our collection without adequate testing."

"But you're not a 'so-called' expert, Chris," Tony said simply. "If you tell me it's a fake, we won't touch it. If you say it's real, that'll be plenty good enough for me. We'll take it in a flash."

I was flattered, even touched. I cleared my throat. "Thank you, Tony. I appreciate that."

"Besides, we can test the hell out of it after we get it here."

"Right," I said, laughing. Tony wasn't the sentimental type either.

Tony smiled in return; somewhat weakly, I thought. "Well, actually, even that's not true, Chris. You see, this is a restricted gift."

"A restricted gift? You mean we're not allowed to sell it later? Even if we decide we don't like it?"

His expression was one of bottomless forbearance. "Chris."

"Tony?"

"Museums are not in the business of'selling' works of art," he said softly. "You know that."

"Oh. Right. Sorry. I don't know what I was thinking of. I meant we're not allowed to de-accession it?"

I suppose I was getting back at him for getting me into this- for despite all my reservations, I knew perfectly well I was in it up to my eyebrows.

"That's better," he said, fractionally mollified. "But not only can we not de-accession it, we have to agree to keep it on permanent exhibit-well, for five years, anyway-properly labeled as a Rembrandt, and displayed in a manner befitting a Rembrandt."

He exhaled, long and soberly. "So, my friend, if we decide to take it, we better be damn sure it is a Rembrandt ahead of time."

In themselves, restrictions like these are not extraordinary. Donors are always sticking little riders on their bequests that tell you what kind of case something is to be displayed in, or when or where it's to be placed, or what should be next to it, or how it ought to be lit. That, as far as it goes, isn't usually objectionable. These things are gifts, after all, and the people donating them usually love them every bit as much as we do. Why shouldn't they care about what happens to them after they go to a museum?

But this was different. The proscription on testing made it different; the absence of provenance made it different; above all, the presence of the unpredictable Rene Vachey pulling the strings made it different.

"You mentioned two catches," I said. "Was that the second one?"

"Actually, no; that was still part of the first."

"What," I said, gritting my teeth, "is the second?" "Um, it'll hold. I'll tell you about it when we get back."

Um again. "Tell me now."

"Patience. Let's have our coffee first." "Tony-"

"Here, Chris," Tony said generously as we got to the cashier, "let me pick up the tab. This is on me."