Madonna and Corpse

Chapter 5 Descartes

Descartes’s stomach rumblings had been reverberating for hours in the museum’s workshop. Still, before leaving for lunch, he dashed upstairs to Gallery 6 for a look at the portrait whose entry-hall enlargement had caught his fancy. The original was even more vivid and striking than the reproduction. Mary Magdalene’s hair was long, wavy, and golden; her blue dress and red shawl were bright and cheery; her features, shown in three-quarter profile, were strong, anchored by a roman nose and eyes that were large, frank, and sensual. No downcast, demure virgin, this one, Descartes thought. John the Baptist was equally powerful. Over a furry animal pelt, he wore a full-length purple shawl trimmed in gold. His long hair and beard were dark brown and curly, and his sun-baked skin was a deep bronze verging on black, although the narrow, chiseled nose and cheekbones made it clear that he wasn’t African. Staring at the painting, Descartes finds himself entertaining inappropriately larcenous fantasies. Hell, as long as the guy was inside, he thought, why didn’t he steal this one?

Spiraling back down, he emerged, bleary-eyed, blinking, and famished, into the dazzling Provençal day, the sun nearly overhead. A leftover sandwich awaited him in the refrigerator at police headquarters, but he was far too hungry for that now. Swimming against a tide of tourists, he angled across Avignon’s main square in search of a more satisfying lunch.

The museum was on the narrow, northern end of the long, thin plaza. Flanking the long eastern side was Avignon’s main tourist attraction, the Palace of the Popes, an immense Gothic fortress where a series of pontiffs had reigned during the fourteenth century.

Descartes had lived in Avignon for nearly two decades — ever since graduating from the academy — but he’d never set foot in the palace. He regarded Old Avignon as a museum or a stage set—mausoleum, in fact, might be the word that best expressed his sentiments. The papal palace and the art museums were fine for the flocking tourists, but Descartes couldn’t be bothered to care about power-hungry priests and self-indulgent artists who’d lived half a millennium ago. But now, the fact that a crime had occurred at the museum — not just spray-paint graffiti or rock-throwing vandalism, but something offbeat and baffling — suddenly made the museum itself intriguing. It was as if he’d discovered a youthful, racy photo of an elderly spinster aunt. Perhaps, he thought, there were similar mysteries, unknown depths to be plumbed, within the soaring walls and mighty towers of the papal palace.

Descartes’s hunger pangs brought his mind back to the primal exigencies of the body. He needed to eat, he needed to take a dump, and he needed to take a nap. For need one and maybe need two, he angled toward a Moroccan couscous place a block beyond the Palace of the Popes. The food was simple but tasty, and the prices weren’t bad, especially if you flashed your badge to remind the manager that you were a cop. Descartes’s mouth began to water as he imagined the restaurant’s chicken tagine, the succulent, tangy meat — seasoned with green olives and lemons and sweet, plump raisins — falling off the bone, the savory juices saturating the small pearls of couscous.

A few doors before he reached the restaurant, he passed Cinema Vox and paused to see what was playing. Leaning against the theater’s large front window, he cupped his hands around his eyes to block the glare and peered in at the posters. The Avengers, Battleship, and Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Foreign crap, he thought, conveniently overlooking the fact that he actually preferred foreign crap — especially American action thrillers — to the depressing, pretentious fare French filmmakers produced.

Just as he was pulling away from the window, something he’d glimpsed shifted from his subconscious, and he leaned back in for another look. For some reason, the cinema had a large print of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus hung over the refreshment stand, but the picture wasn’t quite right. Descartes stared, then laughed out loud. Instead of Venus, Marilyn Monroe perched on the clamshell, her feet in stiletto sandals, her pleated white dress swirling around the tops of her thighs, her mouth open in her signature vampish smile. It was an unprecedented experience for the detective: seeing a modern painting that was a playful riff on a classical masterpiece — one of the few classical masterpieces Descartes actually knew. With the force of an epiphany, he realized that art itself — like the museum he’d just left — was both more intriguing and more sexy than he’d ever dreamed.

After chasing his lunch with two strong hits of espresso, the inspector decided to forgo his nap and gut it out until bedtime, so as not to wreck his sleep cycle even more thoroughly. Instead, he spent several hours in Avignon’s library — a spectacular old building, he noted with newly appreciative eyes, housed in what had been a cardinal’s palace back in the fourteenth century, when the popes called Avignon home. Situated in the vast reading room, surrounded by ancient frescos, hand-glazed floor tiles, leaded windows, and an ornate coffered ceiling, Descartes scanned a stack of books about art restorers and art forgers. He learned, to his surprise, that the line between restoration and forgery was not as bright a line as he’d assumed, and that in practice, the two endeavors were often separated by only the narrowest and most slippery of slopes. A restorer hired to repair a flaked-off Virgin Mary here, a water-stained Jesus there, might eventually be asked to re-create entire scenes, repaint entire canvases… and might well be tempted to sell similar re-creations for more than the paltry wages museums paid for restorations. The more Descartes read, the more flooded with fakes the art world seemed — and the more gullible and foolish art “experts” appeared. One British forger, a cheeky Cockney named Tom Keating, had such scorn for the experts that he planted blatant clues in his fakes. He used modern materials, included modern images in his backgrounds, and even went so far as to scrawl the word FAKE in lead-based paint beneath the primer of his “masterpieces,” so that any dealer, auction house, or museum that bothered to X-ray the work would see, instantly and beyond a doubt, that it was a modern counterfeit. Astonishingly, Keating managed to pass off some two thousand fakes before he was caught.

Another Brit, Eric Hebborn, became a one-man assembly line for “old master” drawings. Unlike Keating, Hebborn — a classically trained artist of considerable talent — was careful to use antique paper, centuries-old recipes for inks and paints and varnishes, and historically authentic techniques to create his pieces. By Hebborn’s reckoning — he published a boastful memoir shortly before he died — he’d passed off hundreds of his drawings as the works of old masters before he was exposed… and hundreds more afterward, once unscrupulous dealers knew he was the go-to guy for high-quality forgeries.

Thus forearmed with knowledge of the wiles of fakers, Descartes felt prepared to take on Dubois. He would trick the artist, ensnare him in a trap from which there could be no escape. Leaving the library, which occupied a clogged artery in the ancient heart of Avignon, the detective threaded the Peugeot police sedan through the maze of streets, then out through a portal in the medieval city wall. He took the Daladier Bridge over the Rhône, then midway across, veered onto the exit ramp for Barthelasse Island—“the largest river island in France!” the Tourism Office liked to boast, though the competition was not particularly fierce, as best Descartes could tell. Still, the island — mostly public parks and private farms — was a pretty piece of pastoral land, with great views of Avignon’s medieval skyline, and Descartes had had good luck bringing dates here on pleasant weekends. Take the water taxi over—women love that shit, he reflected with a smile — and pack a picnic lunch. Plenty of wine and a big blanket, those were the essentials.

The GPS was worthless out here — there wasn’t a numerical street address for Dubois — and it took Descartes twenty minutes and a half-dozen map checks to find the artist’s place. It was a renovated farmhouse in the northern, less developed part of the island, set a half mile down a narrow lane that led to a handful of other farmhouses. The lane was tightly hemmed in on both sides by stone walls, and while Descartes wasn’t much prone to claustrophobia, he heaved a sigh of relief when the walls widened and Dubois’s property hove into view on his right. A semicircular drive arced past a wooden fence with trellised gate, and Descartes parked behind a rusting Citroën that was pulled off the driveway just ahead of the gate. Descartes felt the car’s hood and found it cool, but he noticed that the tires had left fresh tracks in the mud, which meant the car had been driven home and parked sometime after yesterday’s rain shower.

Inside the fence, the property seemed more botanical garden than yard, with riotous red beds of poppies, dangling clusters of violet wisteria, and enough lavender to turn the whole yard purple-blue and supply the Chanel perfume factory, come midsummer. Somewhere behind all that foliage, he felt sure, was a house.

When he found it, he rapped the weathered brass knocker three times without getting an answer. He peered through a side window, saw no signs of movement, and cocked his head to listen. Rock-and-roll music — an English band, Dire Straits, if he wasn’t mistaken — floated up from somewhere behind the house. Descartes followed the sound around to the back, through an orchard of blooming fruit trees, and up to the door of a building that was simultaneously rustic and sophisticated: rough stucco walls into which large, many paned windows had been set, the roof composed of clay tiles, supported by exposed rafters whose carved ends curved upward slightly: a French peasant of a barn that had acquired an aristocratic Japanese accent somewhere along the way.

Descartes held his police credentials in his left hand and rapped the door with his right — moderately at first, to no effect, then harder, so as to be heard over the throbbing bass and drums of the music. Putting on a stern face, he rehearsed the steps that would lead Dubois slowly but inexorably into his snare. Dubois beat him to the punch, though, flinging himself into the trap the moment he opened the door and saw Descartes’s credentials. “Welcome, Inspector,” he said with a smile that actually seemed genuine. “I’ve been expecting you for hours. Have you come to ask why I was crazy enough to sneak a fake Botticelli into the museum… or why I was stupid enough to return an original masterpiece I’d managed to make off with?”

Descartes was taken aback, but only for a moment. He gave a half smile, a compliment to an adversary whom he realized he’d been underestimating. “Which question should I be asking?”

Dubois shrugged. “If I knew that, it would mean I knew which painting was which. And the sad truth is, I don’t.”

“Excuse me? Don’t what?”

“Don’t know. Come in, Inspector. Take a look around my studio. Have a cup of tea, or a glass of wine. And hear my mortifying confession.”

Two hours and two bottles of wine later, the inspector’s head was spinning with pigments, fixatives, sizings, solvents, brushstrokes, and discourses on the unique, unmistakable, inimitable, yet easily aped techniques of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and — last but not least — Botticelli. “Botticelli was the Andy Warhol of his day,” pronounced Dubois. “You’ve seen Warhol’s posters of Marilyn Monroe’s face, yes? He transforms her into a cartoon character with rainbow-colored skin. Look at Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. The goddess is almost a cartoon. A beautiful, sexy cartoon, but a cartoon nonetheless. I tell you, Inspector, if Botticelli were alive today, he’d be making his art with cans of spray paint on city walls.”

Descartes tried to recall the trap he’d designed for Dubois, but the vision was gone, dispersed by the painter’s preemptive strike of erudition and wit — or erased by the second bottle of wine — a delicate rosé that packed a deceptive punch. “But wait,” the detective said, raising an index finger to halt Dubois. “What about Madonna and Child? You said you had a confession.”

“Ah, yes.” Dubois looked chagrined. “The terrible truth, Inspector, is that I abused Madame Clergue’s trust.”

Descartes leaned forward eagerly, taking the notepad and pen from the inner pocket of his jacket. “In what way? Tell me everything.”

“I talked her into letting me bring the painting here to do the restoration. I convinced her that I couldn’t do as good a job there, in that horrid shop of theirs.”

Descartes pounced triumphantly. “And that was a lie!”

“No, no, that was completely true. Have you seen the shop? Dreadful! Those fluorescent lights would have given me the shakes in a matter of minutes, Inspector. No, I did a beautiful job of restoration here, just as I said I would. I’ve brought at least a dozen of their paintings here to work on. But—but—once I finished restoring the Botticelli, I took the liberty of making a copy. As exact a copy as was humanly possible.”

Descartes’s eyes shone in bloodshot triumph. “And you gave the museum the copy and kept the original!”

“Here’s the thing, Inspector. I just don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? One was five centuries old; the other had a ‘wet paint’ sign on it. How could you not tell them apart?”

Dubois shrugged. “I’d just removed the old varnish from the original and put on a new coat, so it looked and smelled new. And I treated the copy to make it look older than it was. Then, disaster struck. The day before I was to return the Botticelli to the museum, the wind tore the roof off my studio. Remember how fierce the mistral was last March? It blew down buildings all along the Rhône Valley.”

“I remember. It blew a tree onto my neighbor’s car.”

“You see? So when it started to rip the roof off, I scooped up all the paintings and put them in the cellar of the house. I was lucky nothing blew out of my hands when I was crossing the yard. But in the confusion, I didn’t keep track of which was the Botticelli and which was the copy. So the next day, when Madame Clergue called and demanded the Botticelli back, I panicked. I couldn’t tell the paintings apart. So you know what I did, Inspector?”

“No, but I suspect you’re about to tell me.”

“I flipped a coin. I literally flipped a coin. ‘Heads, it’s this one; tails, that one.’ It landed on heads, so I took that one. When I delivered it, I was sure Madame Clergue and Devereaux, that smug, snobbish curator of hers, would denounce it as a fake. Instead, they went on and on about the brilliant restoration.” Dubois shook his head sadly. “I shouldn’t have given it another thought, but instead, Inspector, I became obsessed. What if I’d given them the wrong painting? Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. So, yesterday, when I was returning another painting I’d worked on — a piece-of-crap Annunciation that was starting to crack and flake — I hid the Madonna and Child in the same crate. I arrived when I knew Devereaux and Madame Clergue were out to lunch and I’d have the shop to myself. I uncrated both paintings, left the Annunciation for Devereaux to find, and hid in the furnace room until midnight. Then — as you know — I took the painting I’d smuggled in up to the gallery and hung it alongside the other, so the museum could sort it out.”

“But they can’t,” said Descartes. “Madame Clergue and Devereaux are both tearing their hair out. They can’t tell Botticelli’s work from yours.”

Dubois smiled. “Well, I’ll take that as a compliment. A high compliment indeed. But yes, it’s simple to tell the two apart.”

“How?” Descartes held the pen poised above his notepad.

“Mine has the word Dubois in lead foil embedded under the gesso and the primer,” Dubois said. “X-ray the two, and mine will be as plain as the nose on your face. I’m surprised they haven’t already tried that. Still too cheap to buy an X-ray machine.” Descartes made a note—“lead: cf. the Brit, Keating”—then looked up and lifted a bushy, inquiring eyebrow. “It was my way of keeping myself honest, Inspector,” the painter explained. “Of making sure I couldn’t fool the museum even if I were tempted to.” He shrugged sheepishly. “It never occurred to me that I might accidentally fool myself.”

Descartes smiled. “Well, if the camera never lies — the X-ray camera, in this case — I’m sure Madame Clergue and Monsieur Devereaux will be very relieved.”

Dubois hesitated, then added, “Do you think they might be persuaded to return my copy to me?”

“I’ll ask,” said Descartes, “but that might be pushing your luck.” The inspector glanced at the wall of windows in the nearer end of the building. Night had fallen, and instead of seeing outside, the inspector saw only reflections — his and the artist’s, multiplied almost to infinity by the wall of windows at the opposite end of the studio. They were in a rustic version of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. “Shit, I’m late,” said the detective, rising from the chair, a task that took more effort than it should have. “But can I ask you a question?”

“Isn’t that why you came, Inspector? To ask me questions?”

“But this one’s unofficial. It’s personal.”

“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.