Old Scores

Chapter 17

I got back to Dijon at 3:00 p.m., which left me just twenty-seven hours to make up my mind about the Rembrandt. If I didn't sign off on Vachey's conditions by the close of business Friday, the offer would be void, and the painting, presumably, would revert with the rest of Vachey's "residue" to his son, Christian.

Christian, who had tried to keep me away from the Rembrandt, and Froger away from the Leger. Christian, who had tried to wrest the Duchamp from Gisele Gremonde. Christian, who was so little trusted by his father that the older man had kept his new will secret from him, and in it had aced him out of the ownership of the Galerie Vachey and removed him as executor besides.

However, Christian had also been living in the same house with his father for the last six months. Disappointed in his son or not, it seemed probable that Vachey would have let him in on whatever game he was playing with the paintings, and even more likely that Christian would know something about that scrapbook. Until now, however, I hadn't even tried to talk to him. I didn't think he'd see me, for one thing (he had done his best to keep me out of the house altogether), and for another, how could I trust anything told to me by a man who was in line to get the Rembrandt if I turned it down? So I had started with likelier sources, and struck out. Pepin claimed he knew nothing about anything; Gisele knew about the book but wasn't telling. And Clotilde knew about the book and about Vachey's intentions, but she wasn't telling either. That left Christian.

"Okay, I'll say it one more time," Christian said with a sort of nonchalant irritation. "One: I don't know anything about any blue scrapbook, I never heard of any blue scrapbook, I never saw any blue scrapbook. Two: I was born in 1956, so do you want to tell me how I'm supposed to know anything about my father's activities in the war? Three: I don't know what my father had in mind when he offered you the Rembrandt, why should I? Okay?"

He went back to what he'd been doing: arranging a carton of dog-eared papers and index cards into neat little stacks on the surface of an aged rolltop desk. His English was idiomatic and barely accented, the pronunciation American rather than British, with a slangy, choppy flavor that gave credence to the stories of mob connections in Miami.

"That's hard to believe," I said. "You're his son. You were living in the same house."

He shrugged and stood up, stretching. There was a faint whiff of expensive cologne, dry and lemony. "Well, I can't help what you want to believe. Look, I'm sorry, but I have a million things to do, you know?"

This was the way it had gone from the beginning. We were on the first floor of Vachey's house, at the end of a blind corridor that served as a small study. Christian, in a pin-striped gray suit, again with no tie, hadn't been out-and-out rude, but he hadn't bothered to stop his paper-arranging when I'd arrived either, and he hadn't offered me a seat. I wasn't sure if I'd ever quite gotten his full attention.

Now he smiled and held out his hand. "Sorry, my friend. I wish I could have helped." I could see that his mind was already back on his cards.

There wasn't much I could do but go. "Well, thanks for your time," I said. "If you happen to think-"

And right then, as suddenly as that, one feature of the gluey, murky swamp I'd been sloshing around in for days popped into sharp, clean focus. I recognized his cologne. I remembered the last time I'd smelled it-a second or so before I went flying out the window of Vachey's study. At the time I'd had the impression that a faint, citrusy, distinctive smell had come from the opened pages of the scrapbook, but it hadn't come from the pages at all.

"You pushed me out that window," I said.

I finally had his attention. He jerked his hand out of mine and took a step back, eyes startled. I had laughed when I said it-a sort of delighted cackle-because it felt so good to finally know something, and Christian probably thought I'd gone around the bend.

"Don't be dumb," he said. "What window? What are you talking about? Why the hell would I want to push you out of a window?"

"To keep me from seeing the book."

"What book?" Finding that I didn't intend to strangle him after all, he'd managed to put some self-assurance back into his voice. He raised his eyes to the ceiling and tried an indignant laugh. "I can't believe it. This guy has the nerve to walk in here-"

"The hell with it," I said. "I'm not going to stand here and fight about it. You tried to kill me, and I can damn well prove it, and as far as I'm concerned, I'm just as happy letting Lefevre get it out of you."

I turned smartly and strode down the long corridor, the old wooden floor groaning at each step. I had made it all the way to the door that led to the public part of the house and gotten it open before he called out.

"Wait a minute, will you… Chris?"

I turned, still holding the handle. For a moment there, I thought I'd overplayed my hand.

"All right, okay, you're right," he said. He came down the long hallway with his rolling, cocky stride, letting a sheepish, oily half-smile form on his face, confident that no one could fail to be charmed by his unassuming candor.

"You're right," he said again when he reached me, "what can I say? But believe me, doing you any harm was the last thing I was thinking of. I mean, I don't bear you any personal animosity, Chris. Far from it."

"Well, that's a load off my mind."

He laughed. "Let me explain, okay? When I heard that damn woman start-"

"Gisele Gremonde?"

He nodded. "-start in with that stuff about the upstanding Rene Vachey, the great Rene Vachey, and she actually started talking about that scrapbook of his, I took off for the study to make sure the door was locked and the damn thing was out of sight." He shrugged. "Well, you beat me to it, and I saw you disappearing behind a corner with the damn thing, so I followed you in and… I guess I just acted without thinking. I'd had a few too many, you know?"

He flashed his friendly, between-us-guys smile to show that he knew I understood that it had all been in good fun. "Look, I wasn't thinking about pushing you out the window. All I was after was the book. I'm not a violent guy, Chris. Hell, I'm a pacifist, believe me."

"I believe you." I wasn't sure if I did or not, but I wasn't interested in arguing with him. It was information I was after.

"Thanks, Chris. So-you going to go to the cops?"

"That depends. I need to know what's in the book."

This was a bald-faced attempt to mislead him. Of course I would go to the police. But before I did, I wanted to see that scrapbook for myself. With the matter left in Lefevre's hands, who knew when, or if, I would ever see it? Not by six o'clock tomorrow, anyway.

"Sorry." He shook his head sadly. The dangling earring swayed, the Superman forelock stirred.

"Look, Christian," I said, "let's get something straight. All I'm trying to do is find out if there's anything in there that might make me think twice about accepting the painting. Otherwise, I'll just have to take a chance and go ahead and sign off on it."

He could hardly mistake the implication of this wily ploy: If I rejected the painting, he'd get it. So, if anything, it was to his advantage to let me see the scrapbook. It made sense to me; I hoped it made sense to him.

Apparently, it did. He stepped back into the hallway. "Okay, come on in."

Once inside, he closed the door. "I guess you know what's in it, then."

I nodded. "I think so. Notes and clippings your father kept of his art purchases-starting during the Occupation."

"That's it. Why he kept them all these years-why he kept them in the first place-I don't know. I suppose he figured that some day Julien Mann or someone like him would crawl out from under a rock and start whining about being robbed, and my father wanted to be able to prove he didn't do anything illegal."

No, there had to be more to it than that in Christian's mind. "Then why push me out the window to keep me from seeing it?"

He gazed sincerely at me, man to man. "Look, Chris, I'm not ashamed of anything my father did. But times change, you know? And what people had to do to survive in 1942-it's the easiest thing in the world to… to make it look lousy today. People don't know the way it was. Well, my father had a hell of a lot of enemies, I think you know that, and they'd just love to haul his name through the mud if the stuff in that book ever got to be public knowledge. And that's something I can't let happen. My father's name is the most important thing he left me."

It sounded good, and Christian delivered it in manly fashion, with just the right amount of eyeball-glistening. But it all seemed a little too high-minded to me for the would-be kingpin of Tanzanian cement and New Caledonian seaweed. What Christian had really been trying to do, I thought, was simply to keep Vachey's records to himself, so as not to provoke other claims like Mann's against the estate. And I was betting there was more to it than that; that some of the paintings that Vachey had bought in the forties were still on the walls of this house, or in a vault somewhere, and Christian had plans to sell them. If so, he'd certainly want to hang tightly on to the records of those old transactions.

I told him as much.

He listened, head down, and looked up at the end with his crooked grin back in place. "Well, yes, okay, I admit it, a few of those old pictures are still in the basement, and, sure, I just might decide to put them up for sale. But between you and me, they're junk-seventeenth-, eighteenth-century apprentice stuff. My father gave up trying to peddle them twenty years ago and forgot all about them. I haven't looked at them myself in years. But things are different now, the art market's gone nuts-maybe I'll haul them out and see what I can get."

"I'm sure you will," I said.

"Look, Chris-no offense-but I don't really see where this is any of your business."

"Maybe not. But the Rembrandt is my business-"

"Sure, but there's nothing about it in that book, take my word for it."

"I'd have to see that for myself." When he hesitated, I added: "Otherwise, I go to the police right now."

"Well…" He adjusted his slightly disarranged forelock with a cupped hand. "The fact is, I don't have it, you know?"

"You don't have it?"

"No. Don't get excited, give me a chance to explain."

When I'd tumbled out the window, he told me, he had snatched the volume up from the floor, meaning to take it someplace safer. But I'd started such a racket from outside that he knew others would momentarily be bursting into the study, so he had hurriedly stuck it in the first place that came to hand, a crowded, waist-high bookcase across the room, thirty feet from where Gisele had been telling everyone it was. Then he'd ducked out of the room just in time to keep my would-be rescuers from finding him there.

Five minutes later, when he'd come back, the book had been gone. Someone had identified it despite its location, and had taken advantage of the uproar to remove it. He had no idea who.

He shook his head. "I should have put it in a drawer or something, but there wasn't any time, and I was a little rattled. I mean, you were yelling out there-I didn't know whether you were dying or what."

I fell back against the wall. "Damn." Whether he was telling the truth or not, it was plain that I wasn't going to get to see the book. Another dead end, after all.

"Then I want to see those paintings in the basement," I said.

"Why? The Rembrandt's upstairs in the gallery where it always was."

"I just want to. Let's go, please."

He shrugged. "Whatever you say. I just want to cooperate."

He gestured me ahead of him down the hallway, but first I picked up the telephone in the vestibule and dialed Calvin's hotel. I may, as Tony says, not be the world's swiftest study when it comes to perceiving ulterior motives, but even I knew enough not to head off to the cellar, alone with a guy who'd shoved me out of a second-story window three days before. I wasn't going to give him another shot at me, with or without personal animosity.

"Calvin?" I said, when the hotel clerk had switched me to his room. "It's four-thirty right now, and I'm with Christian Vachey at his house. Just wanted you to know. I'll see you in an hour."

To make sure Christian didn't miss a word, I said it in French. As far as Calvin was concerned, I could have delivered it in New Caledonian, because he wasn't there. But this was for Christian's benefit, and I could see that he got the message.

We took the back stairs to the basement. At the rear of the house downstairs was a cheerless kitchen that hadn't changed much since the seventeenth century: flagstone floors, warped, scarred wooden tables, a huge, stone cooking fireplace, a few rusted, giant-sized cooking implements that looked like torture devices hanging on the soot-blackened walls. It was used for storage now, full of packing materials, paper, and disassembled picture crates. Next to it was Pepin's office, where we'd met for the presentation of the will. Pepin looked up from his desk in surprise, and was motioned by Christian to come along.

The three of us walked through to the front half of the house, past a small alcove set up as a studio with an easel and painting supplies, and then up to a steel door, which Christian unlocked. Behind it was a windowless room with insulated walls, in which thirty or forty glassine-wrapped paintings were neatly lined up in a two-layer wooden framework of carpeted bins.

Christian pointed to a group of ten or twelve wrapped pictures in the upper rack. "You want to unwrap those, Pepin?" To me, he said: "Those are the ones you wanted to see."

"No, I think I'd better see them all, please."

He didn't like it, but he spread his hands submissively and nodded to Pepin. "Do what the man says."

Pepin, predictably, didn't like it either, but he got to work taking off the wrappers and propping the paintings on the floor against the walls of the corridor.

He started with the ones in the lower rack. All were modern- early twentieth century. I thought I recognized some of the artists.

"Isn't that a Gris?" I asked. "And a Delaunay?"

"Sure are," Christian said. "And this one here is a Derain."

Could these be some of the "worthless" paintings de Quincy told me about? But why would Rene Vachey have kept them here in the cellar all these years?

"They must be worth a fair amount of money," I said.

Christian grinned. "I sure hope so."

By now Pepin, working quickly, had come to the paintings in the upper rack-the pictures that the young Rene Vachey had bought in the forties, according to Christian-and begun to lay them out. They were what Christian had said they were: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings of little value, some Dutch, some French, all age-darkened. Most of them appeared to be apprentice studies, many unfinished, the best of them no better than competent. They would have been right at home on the walls of the Barillot, if that tells you anything. They weren't worth the time it took to give them a second glance.

Except one.

I lifted it, examined it, checked the frame, and finally propped it back against the wall. Another piece of the puzzle had dropped into place. If this kept up, I might eventually figure out what was going on.

"Look familiar to you?" I asked Christian.

"What? No. Well, in a way. It looks a little like that Rembrandt."

"It looks a lot like that Rembrandt," I said.

Christian gave it a quintessential double take, eyes boggling, jaw dropping. "Rembrandt!" He stared hungrily at it, then at me, a laugh gurgling in his chest. "You're not telling me that this is actually a

… that all this time, down here in the cellar, there's been a-a-"

"A Flinck," I said.

" A flink!" he shouted back at me. "What the fuck is a flink?"

Pepin, who was standing quietly behind us, said thoughtfully to me: "You may be right, monsieur."

"You've never seen this before?" I asked him.

"I have never seen any of these before."

"Who the fuck…" Christian began again, and Pepin explained who Govert Flinck was.

"It took a few seconds to penetrate. "You mean this is the painting this guy Mann wants back?" he said to me. "Not the Rembrandt upstairs?"

"That's exactly what I mean. Look at it. Picture of an old soldier-obviously the same model, same costume, same pose. He probably copied it directly from the Rembrandt picture-or more likely from some other student's copy."

Christian leaned over from the waist to examine it, hands on his knees. "Show me where it says 'Flinck.' "

"It doesn't. Nobody would sign a picture like this; it was just an exercise. Look, it isn't even properly finished. But I don't see how there can be much question that it's Mann's painting. How many pictures of this particular model, posed this particular way, could your father own? And you've already said he got these in the forties."

But there was more than that to back up Mann's claim. A small part of the lower right corner of the frame had been broken off and been glued back on. Some of the gilt around the break had flaked off, and the repair was plainly visible. It even looked like a job done by a couple of frightened kids, with a dried spurt of glue protruding from the back. We were looking at Capitaine Le Nez, all right.

I held back from mentioning the crack to Christian, however. It would have been too easy for him to get rid of the frame and put a new one on.

"What's it worth?" he asked.

"Just what you said-not much. It's nowhere near as good as the one upstairs and wasn't meant to be. It's a student exercise, a long way from Flinck at his best. And I doubt if there's any way to prove it is by Flinck." I turned from the picture to look directly at him. "Why don't you give it to him, Christian? Nobody's going to give you much money for it."

"Give it to him? What for? His father sold it, didn't he?"

"Come on, you know what the situation was. It would be a generous gesture on your part."

But his loose-lipped mouth had firmed. "If he thinks he has a case," he said sullenly, "let him go ahead and prove it in court."

And there I had to let it rest, not very hopefully. Even with that repair on the frame, I didn't give Julien Mann and his lawyer brother-in-law much chance of convincing a court of law that he had a legal right to it. A moral right, maybe, but courts didn't deal in moral rights.

We left Pepin rewrapping the paintings and came upstairs, back to the front door.

Christian had his easy, male-bonding smile in place again, and even went so far as to drape an arm over my shoulder. This was not a good move on his part; I could smell that now-familiar, citrusy cologne again. Back came distinct and unwelcome memories of pitching nose-first into the night.

"Well, what do you say, friend?" he said. "I've been as honest as I know how. Everything I know, you know. What now?"

"What do you mean, what now?" I got out from under his arm.

"You know what I mean. What are you going to do now?"

"What am I going to do now? I'm going to talk to Lefevre. Everything I know, he knows."

I opened the door and stepped out into the public vestibule. Several people were coming down from viewing the show. Christian, still smiling, waited for them to pass.

"Look, I see what you're trying to do. You're trying to get me to tell you what my father had cooked up, but I honest-to-God don't-"

"No, I'm telling you what I'm going to do."

"What the hell good will it do you? And what do you do if I deny everything? I don't believe you have any proof. What proof do you have?"

"So long, Christian." I went out and down the outside steps.

He followed me to the head of the staircase. The smile had disappeared. "Now wait," he shouted after me. "I thought… you led me to believe… Now look, Norgren, you can't… you can't.. ."