Old Scores

Chapter 3

"You want my best guess?" Calvin asked, looking up from a copy of the Executive Gift Catalog, which I'd gotten for him from the seat pocket on the plane. Calvin Boyer is the only person I know who actually orders things from these catalogs. I can personally affirm that on his office desk is a palm-sized digital clock, an electronic chronometer that can time up to three functions simultaneously, that his Porsche has a customized shift knob of hand-rubbed walnut and richly gleaming brass with CWB engraved on it, and that he ordinarily travels with a handy-dandy pocket calculator capable of saying "Where is the toilet?" in seven languages (something he didn't need on this trip, having lived in France until he was eleven). Even now I could see the dark glint of the multifunctional navigator's wristwatch, with "safety-ratcheted bezel," on his wrist.

Despite these and numerous other oddities of personality, Calvin is a likable guy, lively and upbeat, and even bright in an obtuse sort of way.

I turned from the window. "Sure," I said. "What's your best guess?"

We were seated side by side in the comfortable, plush chairs of a FrenchRail TGV, that sleek, silent, 180-mile-per-hour train that is usually the fastest and always the most comfortable way of getting from Paris to any other important French city. I had landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport a couple of hours earlier after a reasonably pleasant thirteen-hour flight from Seattle-the first-class seat didn't hurt any-and gone directly to the Gare de Lyon to meet Calvin in time to make the 5:19 for Dijon.

"I think these paintings of his are fakes," Calvin said. "Both of them. The Rembrandt and the other guy too."

"Leger," I said. "I agree with you."

"I think he's on another one of his crusades. He wants to show the world that art experts are fundamentally full of crap. I'm telling you."

"Could be," I said, then smiled. "You wouldn't think he'd have to go to so much trouble to make that particular point."

"He thinks the pictures are so good," Calvin continued, "that he can get them by you and most of the other pros-as long as nobody starts analyzing pigments or whatever they do in the labs. And as soon as some of you guys commit yourselves and say they're genuine, then he's going to get them scientifically tested himself, and the results are going to show that they're fakes after all, and that he put one over on you and half of the art world.

"Thereby demonstrating that art experts are fundamentally full of crap," he concluded with more verve than was strictly necessary.

"I heard you the first time, Calvin."

"Hey, nothing personal, pal. My advice to you is not to commit yourself one way or the other."

"I have to. We have to either accept it or turn it down by the end of Tuesday. Day after tomorrow."

"Hey, that's really tough," he said, his interest returning to the page. "Whoa, what about this? 'A double-sided calculator-clock desk folder. Flip it up, and it tells the time, flip it down…' "

Calvin's hypothesis was pretty much the one that I'd come up with last week in talking with Tony. Since then I'd refined it a bit. I imagined the feisty and more than slightly crackpot Vachey had in mind another one of his media extravaganzas. According to Tony, the French art experts and critics were already quarreling over the authenticity of the "newly found" paintings, and no one had even seen them yet. After the public unveiling at tomorrow's exclusive but highly publicized reception they would very likely be at each others' throats, and Vachey himself would have center stage once more. I assumed he had some kind of big finish in mind, and Calvin's guess that he himself would eventually submit the paintings to a scientific examination and then trumpet the results was as good as anything I could think of.

I had even come up with a reason for his donating the paintings to a couple of museums instead of simply announcing and displaying his "finds" and letting the critics respond on their own. He had cleverly reasoned, I thought, that museum officials, rapacious entities that we were-or that he thought we were-would be so blinded by our acquisitiveness that we might very well be a great deal less skeptical and more suggestible than the professional, presumably more objective (ha!) art critics.

I turned thoughtfully back to the darkening window. We were about twenty minutes into the trip, just breaking clear of the seemingly endless outskirts of Paris. Miles of grimy railroad yards had been succeeded by blocks of drab and graceless apartment buildings, which were followed in turn by anonymous factories, warehouses, and auto-wrecking yards, and then by great, sinister tracts of weedy, bulldozer-rutted land pockmarked with oily puddles. In the murk of dusk it had all seemed even more depressing than it actually was, but now we were in open country at last; plowed fields and ancient fortified farmhouses and rolling, wooded hills. In an hour we would be in Dijon.

I sighed, wondering just what we were getting into.

Calvin looked up once more. "On the other hand," he offered helpfully, "maybe they're real and this isn't a setup at all."

"True. Which is why we are speeding over the French countryside at this very moment. But if they're real, why is he so against scientific tests?"

"Yeah," Calvin said.

"You know, there's another possibility, Calvin; a variation on the make-the-experts-look-like-jerks theme. What if this Rembrandt is the real thing, and Vachey is laying on all these conditions to make us think it's not real? Not allowing any tests… giving us only one day to make our decision… Anybody with any sense would conclude Vachey's trying to put one over on us, right? So let's say we play it conservatively and refuse the painting because we doubt its authenticity. Then Vachey goes ahead and proves it is authentic-"

"And we wind up looking like saps." He glanced at me admiringly. "Jeez, Chris, you got a devious mind."

I laughed. "Tell that to Tony, will you?"

When we got to Dijon, Calvin headed instinctively for La Cloche, the town's most elegant hotel, while I went to the inexpensive Hotel du Nord a few blocks away-not because I was repentant about the first-class seat to Paris (I wasn't), and was trying to save Tony money (I wasn't), but because the du Nord was where I had stayed the first time I saw Dijon, when it was the best I could afford. I had liked the simple ambience, liked the people who ran it, and been coming back ever since. Actually, Tony had tried to get me to book a room at La Cloche too, his philosophy being that penny-pinching in the matter of hotels reflected badly on the museum. But I wasn't penny-pinching, I was just reliving my youth.

Once I'd showered, I joined Calvin for a light dinner at a cafe a couple of blocks away, but I wasn't much in the way of company. I was washed out from the long trip, lonely for Anne, and nursing a mild case of first-night-in-a-foreign-city blues. And according to my biological clock (showily confirmed by Calvin's snazzy wristwatch), it was noon Seattle-time and I'd been up all night.

But Calvin hadn't. He'd only come a few hundred miles, from a conference in The Hague, and was full of his usual high spirits. Despite my telling him that unless things had changed, nightlife in Dijon was nonexistent, he went off to see for himself. If there was any to be found, I had no doubt that he would find it. Notwithstanding an unimpressively geeky build, a darty manner, and what seemed to me to be a striking facial resemblance to Bugs Bunny, Calvin did extremely well in singles bars, discos, and the like. It was because he was a good dresser, he claimed.

As for me, I had no interest in singles bars or discos. I went up to my room on the top floor of the du Nord, thinking dejectedly about Anne driving north from San Francisco, solitary and reflective. She'd be in the beautiful Mendocino headlands by now, or maybe as far as the giant redwood country if she'd been in a hurry and taken Highway 101. But why would she be in a hurry?

I sighed, and for a while I stood with my elbows on the high sill of the casement window, looking mindlessly out into the night, over the slate roofs of the medieval university just across the way, and the harsh Gothic towers of the cathedral of Saint-Benigne a few blocks beyond. When I realized I was falling asleep on my feet, I pulled off my clothes, managed a few sketchy strokes with my toothbrush, and fell heavily into bed. Tomorrow was the big day, culminating in the opening of the show at Vachey's gallery.

But first, at 11:00 a.m., I had my own private interview with Rene Vachey, arranged with considerable difficulty before I left Seattle. I intended to meet him head-on about his refusal to allow testing. And if I couldn't get him to change his mind, well, I was damn well going to know the reason why.