The Color of Night

CHAPTER 32

Charles Rousset cautiously made his way along the stone path that for a few meters clung to the curve of the precipice above the Cap d’Antibes like a swallow’s nest glued to a cliff before it gained solid ground again and ascended toward the old house. He paused a moment and turned to enjoy the view of the Mediterranean. There was a haze over the water today, an impressionist’s interpretation. How could one help but be romantic about such a stunning perspective?

Reluctantly he turned back again to the path, which, like the house to which it led, was in a state of neglect, not from indifference, but from a lack of the proper funds to maintain it. At one time it had been a pristine piece of real estate. In the 1950s it had been purchased by a London banker who lavished a great deal of his fortune on it. In those days the footpath had been lined with brilliant bowers of saffron sepiara and the blindingly bright cerise bracts of the bougainvillea. Exotic flowering cycas marked each turning of the way, and pastel perennials of every color snuggled in among the crevices and corners.

Those were former days. The banker and his wife were long since gone, as were the flowers and the blooming trees. Common cactus and weeds had now overgrown the edges of the footpath, and unforgiving rocks gouged up through the flat stones to make walking a precarious effort.

The house was large but could not be called a proper villa. It was sited handsomely above the blue-and-green bay, and though its stucco was cracked and stained, though the stones of its courtyard and terrace were loosened and hosted sprays of dried native grass, and though some of its terra-cotta roof tiles were slipping and askew, the style and beauty of the house still gave Rousset a thrill as he rounded the last turn in the footpath and came upon it, silhouetted against the ageless Mediterranean.

Edith Vernon was the only child of the banker who had built the house, and when her father died, in much reduced circumstances, the house was the only thing he left her. Though it was debt free, Edie, who was now in her early sixties, was hard-pressed to keep it up and pay the proper taxes. When her father was in his financial heyday, Edie was in hers as well. An art student in her university years, she fully partook of Rome’s la dolce vita, and her beauty opened what few doors her father’s money would not. Though the memories of those days remained, they were all that remained, and Edie had scratched out a poor living during the last two decades, trying to live off her art. Like many artists, she was a better copier of others’ work than she was a creator of her own. At this she was brilliant.

“Good God!” she exclaimed. She was standing solidly in the kitchen doorway, her hands on her hips, looking out at him. “Claude?”

“Indeed.”

She gaped at him.

“And”-he tipped his head forward in a polite bow, smiling-“Charles Rousset.”

“My Gahhhhd! I don’t believe it!”

“Oh, do, Edie. You really must.” Corsier laughed as Edie stepped outside and embraced him. She was wearing a long peasant skirt and a cotton blouse hanging loose to distract from the fact that she no longer had much of a definable waist. Her long honey-colored hair was shot through with gray, and she had it pulled back and piled in a rough chignon. She was thicker now, but even so there was something undeniably sensual about her that made hugging her a pleasure. She smelled of lavender and the musk of oil paints.

She stepped back and put the palm of one hand against his goatee. “This becomes you, dear. Very fetching.” He smiled. “The Schieles,” she said. “I did these… these darlings for you?”

“Indeed.”

“Oh, Claude!” She clapped her hands together. “Quelle intrigue!”

They had tea on the frumpy terrace and brought each other up-to-date on the gossipy parts of their lives in the intervening five years since they had seen each other. Corsier, of course, left out almost everything, and he supposed that Edie did also.

“Well,” she said finally, setting aside the tiny wicker tea table and putting her hands on her knees, which were spread apart underneath the long skirt, “let’s get down to business.”

She got up and returned in a moment with two drawing boards with butcher’s paper covering the image on each. She propped them against the legs of the tea table and went out again, returning instantly with two thin easels, which she set up with their backs to the house so that the pictures would catch the light from the sea. She put a board on each easel and removed the papers. Then she stepped back beside Corsier so that they could look at the pictures together.

Corsier smiled. He was thrilled.

“You like them, then,” she said.

“They’re perfect.” He got up from his chair and went over to look at each of them more closely. “Edie,” he said, his face glued to the pictures, “these are exquisite.”

“Schiele,” she said, “the man’s a freak. Insane.” She came up beside Corsier. “You were very precise, as usual, Claude. I confess, I wasn’t always sure I was doing the right thing. You said to have her arms thus, as in this picture. Her legs thus. Her hair thus, but opposite, as in that picture. Her eyes looking directly at you, but vacant.”

“I left the color to you.”

“I knew them. I remember the originals that I’ve seen as though I had owned them myself.”

She pondered her drawings. “Despite your assurances to the contrary, I had a friend in Berlin send me some old drawing paper he had salvaged from a prewar paper mill near Munich. It’ll pass close examination, but not a chemical analysis. The pencil wasn’t a problem. Getting the right shade on the watercolor was a little tough.”

Corsier stepped back again from the two pictures, each of them roughly twenty-one inches high by fourteen inches wide. Both of them were unabashed exhibitionist portrayals of the female body, the distinctive mark of Egon Schiele. The first was a pencil drawing of a nude woman standing, looking at herself in the mirror. The back of the woman was nearest the viewer, and then another, smaller image of the woman was seen from the front, behind the first image, this one being the actual reflection. She was vamping for the artist, wearing only black stockings pulled up to midthigh. She had short bobbed hair and thin, horizontal eyes encircled by smoky shading.

The second picture was of two nude young women, done in pencil and watercolor. The two women lounged on a dark amethyst drapery. One of them had bobbed hair, the other long raven tresses. Their pubic hair was as jet as their ringlets, and there were pale splotches of lilac on their cheeks and nipples. Both of them were looking at the artist, one of them from the corners of her eyes as though she were just in the beginning movements of looking away.

“Nineteen eleven,” Corsier said. “I wanted them to precede his harsh, ectomorphic later works. You’ve done a wonderful job, Edie, of making them sensual while hinting at the meanness that was soon to dominate his style.”

“Those rather prissy mouths,” Edie said. “I liked doing them. I liked doing the eyes.” She paused. “But the pelvis on this one”-she pointed to one of the figures-“was difficult… maddening. Those explicit crotches on them were problems.” She laughed at herself.

“Good use of the amethyst”-Corsier came in closer to the dual portrait-“on the drapery, darker at the edges. Mmmmmm. I like this horizontal line above her stomach.” He perused the drawings for a long time.

Finally he straightened up. “Les splendide!”

Edie laughed. “God,” she said, “I can’t believe I’ve done this.” She stepped back and leaned on a stone pillar. “I don’t know what’s going on here, Claude,” she said, her voice a little more sober, “but frankly, at my age prison doesn’t suit me at all.”

Corsier turned around, his bearish body seeming even more formidable in his dapper linen suit. He came over to her and leaned on the other side of the pillar.

“Edie, just take the money, my dear, and forget about the drawings. They are destined to be short-lived.”

“Really.”

“Indeed.”

“What does that mean?”

“Destroyed.”

“Bloody hell,” she said.

They were both looking at the pictures.

“I suppose one is better off ignorant,” she mused.

“As far as you are concerned, I love Schiele, couldn’t afford them, and you made copies for me.”

“Except there are no originals.”

“Even better. You imagined Schiele for me.”

They said nothing for a moment.

“I need the money,” she said by way of explanation.

“You didn’t have to say that.”

“Odd,” she said. “I’m proud of them. Just as Schiele must have been proud when he did something like them.”

“You should be proud,” Corsier said. “No one would ever know the difference. Ever. Schiele would receive kudos for them. Why should it be any different for you?”

“Because they came from my cold intellect, Claude, not from a searing fire in my gut.” She sighed. “Credit where credit’s due. Come on. Let’s box them up for you.”