Cezanne's Quarry (18 page)

“Never!” the artist crossed his arms, striving to seem indifferent, despite the contrary evidence in his eyes and voice.

“Had
you
written her letters?”

“A few.”

“And what were these about?”

“You know.” The shrug was an attempt to be dismissive.

“No, I don’t.” Martin did know that whatever the artist did write had angered the Englishman enough for him to tear up the letters, crack apart one of Cézanne’s paintings, and throw the whole lot into a fire built on one of the hottest nights in the middle of August.

“Tell me what was in those letters,” Martin insisted again.

The brother-in-law was bouncing in his chair, waiting to jump in, although both he and Martin knew there was nothing to object to in any of these questions. The scratching of Old Joseph’s pen had stopped, and he turned his head slightly. Martin did not move, willing to let the silence go on indefinitely. The artist was stubborn, but evidently guileless. Martin could wait him out.

The lawyer, however, could not keep quiet. “May I talk with my client for a bit? I know nothing about this.”

“
May
you let him leave the room?” Cézanne retorted. “Not everyone needs to know my business.”

Excellent.
Martin would love to carry on without the lawyer. “M. Conil, I think M. Cézanne wishes to talk with me alone.”

“Paul, this is not very smart.”

“Go.”

“You don’t want to be alone with an examining magistrate if you can help it.”

“Go!” louder this time.

“It seems,” Martin interjected, “that your brother-in-law does not want you in the room. That is his right.” Martin got more pleasure than he should have out of this small victory. He had, in this very short time, developed a visceral dislike for the lawyer.

Defeated, Conil sighed and put on his hat. “I’ll be outside with the family,” he told Martin, and took his leave.

Martin started again. “I know these are difficult questions.”

The artist said nothing.

“But you must answer them. This is a murder case. You wouldn’t want your son to see you in jail, would you?” Martin said nothing about the rest of the family. They were Cézanne’s particular burden to bear, with their overweening protectiveness of him and his utter dependence on them. At what age? Martin glanced at his notes. At the age of forty-six. Martin was not going to bludgeon him with these facts. At least, not yet. “As I said,” he repeated, “you would not want your son—”

“All right, all right. What do you want?”

“For you to answer my questions.”

“Your
difficult
questions. Isn’t that what you said? Difficult?” The artist rose, and began pacing in the small space in front of Martin’s desk. “What could you know about what it’s like to be entangled by a wife you never intended to marry, and a family that’s in your business every minute of the day? You’re too young. You’ve probably been on the straight-and-narrow all your life. Me? I couldn’t stand law school. I couldn’t be a banker. Everyone laughs at me. No one understands, no one
sees
what I’m trying to do. Then finally you meet the one person, the only one you can talk to, be with, who can look at the world and see what you see, and. . . .” The outburst stopped almost as abruptly as it had begun. Cézanne gave Martin a disconsolate look. “Is she really dead?”

“You must know that,” Martin said quietly, hoping that Cézanne would keep on talking.

“How would I? How could I?” Cézanne sat down and swiped his hat off his head. “How would I know that? It must have been him. Westerbury. With his shoddy ideas and shady background. He must have been jealous. Jealous of us.”

From everything Martin had just seen and heard, this seemed unlikely.

“Did you give Charles Westerbury reason to be jealous?”

“No!”

“No?”

“I only kissed her once. She only allowed me that one time. I thought then that she would—” Cézanne stopped.

“Would what?”

“I don’t know. Leave him. Love me.” His blinking eyes darted around the room. He really did not seem to know.

“Well, what did you tell her in the letters?”

Cézanne stiffened.

“What did you tell her in the letters?” Martin repeated, slowly and loudly.

A moment passed before he began. “Just that I loved her. I could not help myself. I saw her, and I loved her. From that first moment, the very first time out on the Cours. Then, when we talked, I loved her more. Just the way she looked at me. As if she knew my very soul. I thought I couldn’t live without her. But now. . . .” He bent down to put his head in his hands.

What must it be like to see someone once and love her so passionately, so irrationally? To believe, even for a moment, that a woman as beautiful, as extraordinary as Solange Vernet loved you? Martin did not know. It was true that he had never strayed from the “straight-and-narrow.” Perhaps he did not understand love. Martin realized that he had been holding his pen so tightly that his fingers were cramping. He loosened his grip. He had been pouncing, without attempting to understand.

“M. Cézanne, I need to know what it is that you and Mme Vernet had in common. Why did you think—”

“Why did I think she loved me? Is that what you are about to say? Why
shouldn’t
she love me?” Cézanne gave Martin a fierce look, but the question hung in the air as if the answer were all too obvious. A failed artist. A man more afraid of his old, sick father than of a murder charge. A father who could not fully claim his own son. Cézanne wiped his eyes and nose with the back of his hand, gave out a little sigh, and sat back.

“I wasn’t implying anything about your relationship. I am just trying to understand.”

“It was my art that attracted her. She saw what I was trying to do.”

“And that was?”

“To create something new, but as old as the world itself, if you only took the time to think it through and see it.”

That was it? A way of seeing the world that was old and new at the same time? Martin thought back to the pictures he had seen at the Jas and in Gardanne. Some, those that apparently had been painted years ago, like
The Four Seasons
on the salon wall and the murder scenes, just seemed crude. Yet others, the most recent works,
were
different. The quarry fragment, the mountain, the apples and flowers, the portraits of Hortense Fiquet. Different enough to embarrass Hortense, who had tried to make the best of it by bragging about her lover’s Parisian friends.

Cézanne had once again composed himself into a picture of defiant nonchalance, eyes wandering, arms crossed. But Martin knew exactly how to break through this show of indifference.

“M. Cézanne, this seeing the world in a new way, wasn’t that what Westerbury was trying to do?” When the suspect did not react, Martin continued, “Mr. Westerbury told me—”

“Hah! Him? Him?!” The artist’s voice rose with each utterance.

“Yes, him. He was studying the environs and trying to find out—”

“Studying? Oh yes, studying. Being able to say a few phrases that anyone could have gotten out of reading a couple of books. ‘The mountain was thrust up untold millions of years ago.’ Or ‘What we are walking on is the sediment of an ancient lake.’ Or ‘The forces of nature have sent the folds of the mountain this way and that, hiding the inner core of its most ancient elements.’” Cézanne’s Provençal drawl made bad work of Westerbury’s English accent.

“Yes, but certainly books are a part of it.” Martin had got him going again. But he was not understanding what Solange Vernet had seen in the artist.

“Books?
Use your eyes
! I’ve been gathering fossils around here with friends ever since I was a boy. I know the ages of the mountain, the quarry, the river. And I know them where it counts. Here,” he pointed to his forehead, “and here,” he thumped at his heart. “We don’t need some foreign charlatan to come here and tell us what to see.” Cézanne was almost panting. The mere thought of Westerbury roused his fury.

“It’s not something you can get out of a book,” the artist continued. “It’s reflection. You don’t need to make stupid, arrogant claims about religion and science. All you need to do is to see, to think, to understand, and then to try to show it to others.”

“And you explained all this to Mme Vernet?”

Cézanne nodded.

Which is to say that the artist had explained very little. Except that he was against everything that Westerbury stood for. Surely Cézanne had not talked to Solange Vernet in the same way. Or why would she have bothered to spend any time with him? Remembering his encounter with Hortense Fiquet, Martin decided upon another tack.

“Did Mme Vernet know about the work of other artists? Did you discuss them with her?”

“You mean my old friends, the painters that everyone is talking about?”

“Yes.”

“Of course we did.”

“And you told her your work is different because—?”

“Because,” Cézanne said impatiently, “they’re still trying to capture ‘the moment.’
I
am not interested in reproducing an
impression.
I don’t want to paint the surface or the weather or a mood. Or the time of day. I want to do something with permanence.” The artist leaned forward, one finger pointing at the floorboards. “I want to show the world as it really is. I want to get at the structures beneath everything.”

Martin nodded encouragingly.

“What excited her was that I could see the harmony in all this, in the true motifs, the shapes and colors, that hold everything together. The motifs that have built up over millions of years. Like the mountain. I told her that I know more about the mountain than Westerbury will ever know. That some day I will show its whole history, the way the past vibrates in every stone, in one painting.”

He paused. Martin had stopped nodding.

Cézanne leaned forward and peered into Martin’s face. “I can see you don’t get it.”

Obviously, Solange Vernet had reacted in a more pleasing manner. Had this been because of a certain natural politesse on her part, or had she only been play-acting, toying with the artist as she probably had been toying with Martin in the bookstore?

“You don’t understand,” Cézanne confirmed, and once again crossed his arms and turned his head toward the side of the room. Here was a man accustomed to the world’s skepticism.

“And she, Mme Vernet, comprehended all this?”

“She said she did.”

“And she disappointed you?”

Cézanne did not answer. Disappointment did not come close to describing what he was feeling. Rejection, humiliation, and grief were written all over his face. It was clear to Martin that despite all the proud theorizing, Westerbury and Cézanne were not fighting over the mountain. Or the quarry. They were fighting over Solange Vernet. But what would have made Solange Vernet shift her attention and affections from one man to another?

“M. Cézanne, how much do you think Mme Vernet knew about your family?”

Cézanne’s shrug was barely visible.

“Did she know how wealthy your father is?”

Another shrug.

Martin raised his voice to show his impatience. “Did you ever talk about your family and its standing in town?”

“No.” A quiet shake of the head.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.” Less audible still.

“And Mme Fiquet. Did Solange Vernet know about your relationship with her? And your son?”

“Yes.”

“Then how could you possibly expect—?”

“I don’t know what I expected!” Cézanne glared at him. “I told you. I couldn’t help myself.”

The man had been thoroughly humiliated, but Martin was becoming irritated with his blockheadedness and naïveté. Why enter into an adventure of this kind with no thought of the consequences?

“It was never about the money. Mine or hers,” Cézanne volunteered. “It was,” he said, looking straight at Martin with his dark, wary eyes, “it was about love, and art.”

Love and art, love and science, how pure all their motives were! If only the murder victims were around to give their side of the story.

“Very well, then.” This was going nowhere. Martin pushed his chair toward the open window, hoping to catch a breeze. Poor Old Joseph, stuck in the airless alcove, sat in discreet stillness, waiting for Martin to get at something useful.

“M. Cézanne, when was the last time you wrote to Solange Vernet?”

“In July.”

“Not more recently?”

“No.”

“Not even a note?”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“She didn’t answer my letters, any of them.”

“How could she? Wouldn’t your family find out?”

“I had arranged for her to send them to Médan.”

To Zola’s grand estate. Martin was astounded. This had been quite an intrigue, at least on Cézanne’s part. “You did not send her a note right after the Virgin’s feast?” he asked.

“No, no, no. What could I say? I had decided to give up.”

“You did not, then, give a note to a little boy to deliver, a boy who has been found murdered?”

The artist’s eyes widened, his mouth fell open.

“Good God, no. A boy? A boy, killed? Good God.” He shook his head back and forth. “Who would do that?”

“Not Westerbury, then?” Martin decided to take the true measure of Cézanne’s hatred of the Englishman.

“A boy?” Martin had managed to stun Cézanne out of his own little world of jealousy and unrequited love. “A boy? No. But then, who?”

“Why not you?”

“Me? I have a son.”

That was what Martin had been thinking. But he was not about to let the suspect off the hook.” What about your violent art?” He had been waiting for the right moment to spring this on Cézanne.

“Violent?” The artist gave Martin an astonished look and put his hand to his heart like some peasant declaring his own honesty. “Violent?”

Could he really have forgotten his own depictions of murder? “M. Cézanne, we found a piece of your canvas in the quarry where Solange Vernet was killed. I have also gone to the Jas and found two pictures of a woman being killed. A woman with golden-red hair. I have one of them right here.” Martin pointed to the cabinet beside his desk. “I also brought back a leering, lascivious painting of men worshiping at the altar of someone who resembles Solange Vernet, a
nude
Solange Vernet.” “Resembles” was a generous interpretation; the woman in the painting did have Solange Vernet’s golden-red hair, undone, hanging loosely on her shoulders.