Old Scores

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 cafes 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 cafe 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.

"Rene 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 Leger, 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 Musee 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 Leger, 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. Rene 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 Leger. The Violon et Cruche is authentic, Christopher, infinitely beyond the capacities of Rene 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 Leger'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 ATTRIBUE A ABRAHAM VAN DEN TEMPEL or D'APRES 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 Velazquez, and that might just be unique.

And now, it seemed, they would be getting a bad Leger 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 Rene 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 Sevres 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."

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 Leger. 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 Leger? You're sure of that?"

"It is a Leger," 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 Leger 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."

Fat chance, I thought. Getting someone else would mean the Barillot, not Vachey's estate, would be footing the bill. Predictably, Froger started hemming and hawing. "Well, no, that is to say, of course I trust your judgment, Jean-Luc. Implicitly. That goes without saying. Er-Christopher, what about your Rembrandt? Are you going to accept it?"

"Probably, yes, if I can get some questions about its history settled. I think it's authentic."

How about that, I'd actually said it out loud. It was a bit of a shock hearing it.

"Gentlemen." Froger had summoned up his bottom-of-the-well baritone. He leaned forward, thick elbows on the satiny, billowing surface of the desk. "Gentlemen, if you're right, if this is an authentic painting by Leger, an authentic painting by Rembrandt-then what are we to make of Vachey's posturing and fooling about, of his absolute refusal to allow tests? What was he trying to do?"

That was a switch. Last night he'd been telling us what Vachey had in mind, not asking us.

"According to you," Charpentier said, not letting him forget it, "it's because they're forgeries. Well, they're not forgeries, and I would have thought that would be enough for you. As to Vachey, whatever he had in mind, no one is ever likely to know what it was now."

That didn't satisfy Froger. "All right, let me put it this way, Jean-Luc. Let's say I had independently commissioned you to help me decide whether to buy this painting, the very same painting. Let's say there were no restrictions about testing. Would you recommend that I send it to a laboratory to be absolutely certain it's authentic before purchasing it?"

Charpentier rubbed his nose. He got out his pack of Gitanes and lit up. Froger hurriedly produced an onyx ashtray and put it in front of him. "Only if you had money you were determined to waste," Charpentier said. "In the first place, every criterion reveals it as a Leger and nothing else; every single one. Second, remember that Leger is a twentieth-century master, not an artist of the Baroque or the Renaissance, so there is very little help that scientific tests can provide."

That seemed like an overstatement to me. True, even the most advanced dating techniques weren't going to be of much use on a painting less than a hundred years old, but what about infrared photography to highlight painting techniques, spectroscopy to analyze paint formulas, and all the rest of it? (Not that I could claim an overwhelmingly thorough grasp of all the rest of it.)

"Do you mean you never advise your clients to test modern paintings?" I asked him.

"Once in a great while I do, if there is some question that expert scrutiny cannot answer. But ordinarily, no. A scientific test is no better than the technician performing it. Technicians are people, and people make mistakes, Christopher."

"Experts are people too," I said.

Charpentier smiled thinly at me through a blue-tinged haze. "Let's consider the Rembrandt for a moment, and not the Leger. You would like to have it tested? Very good. But what if the technician innocently takes a paint sample from an area restored in the nineteenth century, what happens then to the dating? This has happened, my dear Christopher."

"I know that. You need informed judgment too. That's why I wouldn't have been any happier about it if Vachey had reversed it and said we could submit the paintings to all the tests we wanted, but we weren't allowed to look at them. You need both, not just-"

"And what about errors that are not so innocent? Fakers can add metallic salts to underpainting, and throw off X-ray analysis. This, too, has happened, and not so long ago. They can confound infrared photography by-"

"I just don't like to be made a fool of," Froger muttered again. "There's something wrong. Even dead, I don't trust the son of a bitch."

"No one's going to argue with you there, Edmond," Charpentier said.

"I remember that Turbulent Century fiasco of his," Froger went on. "I reviewed it for the Revue, you know. Now don't climb back on your high horse, Jean-Luc. I know you thought highly of it-"

"I did not think highly of it," Charpentier said irritably. "Get your facts straight. I thought highly of the figurative and Analytical Cubist portion of it. Rene had collected some remarkable works there. As for the rest of the exhibition, I wasn't qualified to make judgments, but I certainly had my doubts about the quality of some of the pieces."

"Yes, well, I can't speak for your Analytical Cubists, but, by God, I know Seurat and the Neoimpressionists; that's my specialty. And I tell you, that show was filled with trash that Vachey was trying to put over on us. It was shameful. I said it at the time-I don't hold my tongue when I have something to say, you know that-and I still say it. Well, naturally, I'm worried now. How could I help it?"

"Edmond, do you mean actual forgeries?" I asked. I'd never read his review of Vachey's notorious exhibition, or Charpen tier's, or anybody else's, but I'd certainly developed an interest.

The word made him skittish. His hand went to his collar again. "Forgeries? No, when did I use the word forgeries? Did you hear me use the word forgeries? We could fill this museum- your museum too, and the Louvre, and the Metropolitan-with disputed attributions without ever touching on forgeries, isn't that so?"

I had to admit it was so.

"No," he said, "I didn't say forgeries, I said only… I meant only… inferior works."

"So what are you worried about?" Charpentier asked brusquely. "Haven't I just finished telling you that this Leger of yours is an inferior work? You already know it. What sinister surprise is to be feared?"

Froger shook his head darkly. He still didn't trust the son of a bitch.

Charpentier ground out his cigarette in the ashtray, and stood up. "I don't see what else there is for me to tell you. I'll give you a report in a few days, but there won't be anything startling in it. Are you going to accept the painting?"

"I-yes, I suppose so. Isn't that what you're advising me? Isn't that what it comes to? If it isn't too much to ask for your advice."

"I'm advising you to put it in one of the dark corners with which the Barillot is so richly supplied. If you're lucky, no one will notice it. Good day, Edmond."