Chasing Cezanne (5 page)

The old woman had prepared a kitchen lunch for them, and here Camilla's relentless good humor and flattery were put to a severe test. It was the kind of simple meal Andre would have been happy to eat every day: fat, shiny black olives, radishes with white butter, country bread that stood up to chewing, a jug of red wine, and, sliced with great care and ceremony, a wonderfully dense, rosy
saucisson
.

Andre held out his plate for the old woman to serve him. “What a treat,” he said. “This is impossible to find in America. Actually, I think it's illegal over there.”

The old woman smiled. “They tell me some French cheeses are, too. What a very strange country it must be.”
She turned to Camilla. “Do you have enough, madame? It comes from Aries, this
saucisson
. A little beef, a little pork, a little donkey. They say the donkey gives it that particular taste.”

Camilla's smile froze. Lunch was already an ordeal, with no Badoit—no water at all, except for the highly suspect liquid that came from the kitchen tap—no salad, and one of the cats sitting on the table next to the wine jug. And now donkey. Despite the risk of traumatizing her intestinal tract, she had been willing herself to choke down a slice of sausage for the sake of politeness and the greater good of the magazine. But
donkey
. Donkey was beyond her.

Andre glanced up, took in her rigid face and the glazed desperation of her stare, and saw that she was lost for words. He'd never known this to happen before, and it had the effect of making her seem very close to human. He leaned across to the old woman.

“I'm so sorry,” he said. “I completely forgot to tell you—madame my colleague is vegetarian.” He couldn't resist adding, “She has an extremely sensitive colon.”

“
Ah bon?
”

“I'm afraid so. Her doctor has forbidden her red meat of any description. Particularly the donkey, which is most aggravating to delicate tissues.”

The old woman nodded gravely. They both looked at Camilla, who assumed an expression of deep regret. “Silly old colon,” she said. “Such a bore.”

An offer of cold noodles and salt cod was quickly made and just as quickly waved away—Camilla declaring
herself more than satisfied with olives and radishes—and lunch was soon over. Only the cat lingered at the table, hoping to make off with the remains of the sausage as the others pushed back their chairs to resume work. In fact, there was little more to be done. Andre repositioned the icons, photographing them against a variety of backgrounds—stone, faded plasterwork, a wooden shutter—and coaxed an unexpectedly youthful smile out of the old woman when he took a portrait of her sitting on a low stone wall next to one of the cats. Camilla made notes and murmured into a small tape recorder. By three, they were finished.

As the car pulled away up the hill, Camilla lit a cigarette, blowing smoke out of the window with a long, thankful sigh. “God,” she said, “donkey. How could you possibly eat it?”

“It was very tasty.” Andre slowed down as a mud-colored dog sidled across the road and paused to sneer at the car before hopping into an overgrown ditch. “You should try eating tripe. Now, there's a challenge.”

Camilla shuddered. She sometimes found the French—or at least the rural French, not her dear, civilized chums in Paris—offensively earthy in their eating habits. And what was worse, they took as much delight in talking about those frightful ingredients as they did in eating them: the gizzards and underbellies, the rabbits' heads and sheep's feet, the nameless jellied morsels, the various and unlovely permutations of offal. She shuddered again.

“Now, sweetie,” she said, “when are you going back to New York?”

It was Andre's turn to shudder. He had no desire to leave early spring for the bitter tail end of a Manhattan winter. “Over the weekend, I guess. I thought I'd go into Nice tomorrow and do a few shots of Alziari and Auer.”

“Doesn't ring a bell. Are they people I should know?”

“They're shops.” Andre turned in to Saint-Paul and pulled up outside the hotel. “Marvelous-looking shops. One sells olives and olive oil, the other one has terrific jams.”

This was of no interest to Camilla, who could see nothing of any social consequence in olives or jam. Getting out of the car, she looked around, then beckoned imperiously at a Mercedes parked on the far side of the
place
. “There's dear Jean-Louis. Tell him to come in and get my bags, would you? I'm just going to check my messages.”

The hectic ritual of Camilla's departure for the airport occupied the next fifteen minutes: Under the attentive eye of the gendarme, bags were ferried to the Mercedes and stowed; the services of a chambermaid were enlisted to search beneath Camilla's bed for a missing earring; a last-minute fax was sent to New York; the airport was called to confirm that the flight was on time; tips and compliments were distributed. Finally, with a collective sigh of farewell, the hotel staff watched Camilla cross the courtyard and settle in the back of the car. Through the open window, she looked up at Andre.

“You
will
have the transparencies in my office on Tuesday, sweetie, won't you? I'm putting the issue to bed next week.” And then, without waiting for an answer, “
Ciao
.”

With that, the window slid up, and Camilla set off to take Paris by storm. Hoping that the concierge at the Ritz was braced for the coming assault, Andre watched the Mercedes move cautiously up the narrow street and out of the village.

Now there was the luxury of a free evening and an entire day to himself. After a shower, he went down to the bar with his map, the creased, worn, yellow Michelin 245 that he'd had since university, and spread it on the table next to his
kir
. The 245 was his favorite map, a souvenir of sentimental journeys, a map of memories. Most of his long summer vacations had been spent in the area it covered, from Nîmes and the Camargue in the west to the Italian border in the east. Fine times they had been, too, despite a chronic shortage of money and frequent romantic complications. He thought back to those days, days when it seemed the sun had always shone, the five-franc wine had tasted like Latour, the cheap backstreet hotels had been clean and welcoming, and there had always been a tanned body next to his, dark against the white sheets. Did it never rain? Had it really been like that? Probably not. If he were honest, he could barely remember the names of some of the girls.

He picked up his
kir
, and condensation from the base of the glass dripped onto the Mediterranean just south of Nice. It stained the dotted lines that marked the routes of the ferries to Corsica, and as the stain spread across to the tip of Cap Ferrat it triggered another memory, this one more recent. At the end of the previous summer, he had
spent two days shooting on the Cap, in the elaborate villa—Camilla's whispered description was “
bourgeois-sur-mer
, sweetie”—belonging to the Denoyers, the old-money Denoyers, a family that had been quietly wealthy since the days of Bonaparte. A contract to make uniforms for the many Napoleonic armies had, over the generations, developed into a giant enterprise, successfully providing a variety of textiles to a variety of governments. The current head of the family, Bernard Denoyer, had inherited a well-run company that demanded little of his time, a privilege he enjoyed to the full. Andre remembered liking him. He also remembered liking his daughter.

Photographs of Marie-Laure Denoyer appeared regularly in the smarter French magazines. Depending on the season, she could be seen at Longchamps chatting with one of daddy's jockeys, on the slopes at Courcheval, at the Red Cross Ball in Monte Carlo, beautifully turned out, smiling prettily, invariably surrounded by a knot of hopeful young men. A graceful wisp of a blonde in her very early twenties, with the permanent light-golden tan of someone who is never too long away from the sun, she was surprisingly normal for a rich man's daughter: vivacious, friendly, and, so it appeared, unattached. Camilla had disliked her on sight.

Andre decided to change his plans. Instead of going to Nice in the morning, he'd drive over to Cap Ferrat and pay his respects to the Denoyers. With luck, Marie-Laure might be free for lunch. He finished his
kir
and went through to the restaurant, his appetite sharpened by anticipation of what tomorrow might bring.

Cap Ferrat, elegantly wooded with palm and pine trees, impeccably maintained, furiously expensive, has long been one of the most fashionable addresses on the Côte d'Azur. It juts into the Mediterranean to the east of Nice, villas of the famous and notorious screened by high walls and thick hedges, guarded by iron gates, insulated from the common herd by a buffer of money. Past residents include King Leopold II of Belgium, Somerset Maugham, and the coiffure-conscious Baroness Beatrice de Rothschild, who never, ever, ventured abroad without a trunk containing fifty wigs.

Most of the current residents in these more democratic and dangerous times prefer to be unlisted, unknown, and undisturbed, and Cap Ferrat is one of the few places along the coast where they are able to avoid the jostle and clamor of tourism. Indeed, one of the first things the visitor coming from Nice notices is the absence of hubbub. Even the lawn mowers—heard but not seen behind the walls and hedges—sound muted and deferential, as though fitted with silencers. There are few cars, and they move slowly, almost sedately, with no signs of the normal competitive urgency of the French driver. A sense of calm prevails. People who live here, one feels, never have to rush.

Andre followed the Boulevard General de Gaulle past the lighthouse, turning off down a narrow private road, a cul-de-sac that led to the very tip of the cape. The end of the road was the beginning of the Denoyer estate, marked by ten-feet-high stone walls and massive double gates of
heavy iron, decorated with the Denoyer coat of arms. Beyond the gates, the land dropped away steeply, terraced lawns divided by a drive more than a hundred yards long, lined with palm trees, ending with a turning circle, an ornate fountain, and a rather pompous front door. The slope of the land made it possible to see, above the roof of the house, a silvery strip of the Mediterranean. Andre remembered being taken through the tunnel that led from the garden to the boathouse and private beach, Denoyer remarking on the problems of erosion and the high cost of shipping in extra sand every spring for the enjoyment of his guests.

Andre got out of the car, tried the gate, found it locked. He peered through the iron bars at the house below. Those windows he could see were shuttered, and he had to accept the obvious: The Denoyers were not at home. It was too early in the year; they were doubtless still perched on an alp or prone on a beach, with Marie-Laure refreshing her tan.

With a pang of disappointment, he was turning to get back in the car, when he saw the front door opening. The figure of a man appeared, holding something in front of him. It looked like a square, a vividly colored square, and the man was holding it slightly away from his body with extreme care as he turned his head to look toward the side of the house.

Curious, Andre narrowed his eyes against the glare of the sun, unable to make out any details. And then he remembered his camera. He had put it on the passenger seat,
fitted with the long lens on the off chance of his coming across an interesting shot on the road, a habit he had developed years before. Taking the camera from the car, he adjusted the focus until the figure at the front door was sharp and clear. And, now, familiar.

Andre recognized him as Old Claude (so called to distinguish him from Young Claude, who was the head gardener). For twenty years, Old Claude had been Denoyer's
homme à tout faire
, his handyman, caretaker, runner of errands, driver of guests to and from the airport, supervisor of the indoor staff, guardian of the speedboat, an essential member of the domestic establishment. On the shoot, he had been good-natured and useful, helping to move furniture and adjust lights. Andre had joked about hiring him as an assistant. But what the hell was he doing with the painting?

That, too, was familiar: a Cézanne—the family Cézanne, a very fine study that had once belonged to Renoir. Andre remembered exactly where it had hung, above the ornamental fireplace in the main salon. Camilla had insisted on a series of close-ups, to catch the ravishing brushwork, so she said, although she had never used a single close-up in the article.

Acting on photographer's instinct as much as considered thought, Andre took several shots of Claude on the doorstep before his body was hidden from view by a small van that pulled around from the side of the house and stopped in front of him. It was a conventional, dirty blue Renault of the kind found by the hundred in every town in
France. A small panel on the side identified it as belonging to
Zucarelli Plomberie Chauffage
, and as Andre watched through the lens, the driver got out, opened the back doors of the van, and removed a large cardboard carton and a roll of bubble wrap. He was joined by Claude.