Old Scores (Chris Norgren 3) (10 page)

Once believed to be Rembrandt's father, this particular old derelict shows up in at least a couple of dozen oils and etchings done around 1630, not only by Rembrandt, but by many of the Leiden painters, trumped up in sham finery of one kind or another—turbans and fancy helmets, caftans and pseudo-Biblical armor. In this one, according to the white title card beside the picture, he was supposed to be
Un Officier
—a military officer.

As always, he was grave, introspective, and vaguely dazed by all the frippery. Rembrandt had put him in so many pictures that I'd never gotten them all straight. And I'd forgotten which of them had fallen into the "doubtful" category over the years, and which were still believed to be by Rembrandt. They vary hugely in quality, from clumsy sketches to highly finished pieces. And this one, which I didn't remember having seen in the standard
catalogue raisonné
of Rembrandt's works, seemed to me to be right up there with the best of them.

Was it possible that I was really looking at a Rembrandt, then? An unknown Rembrandt? Could something like this have survived unrecognized for almost four hundred years? I realized with a shock that I was half-convinced, maybe more. If Vachey hadn't laid down his prohibition on testing, then I think I might have been wholly convinced.

No, not quite. Those earlier, unsettling "philosophical" remarks of his about forgery and art kept flitting through my mind, which didn't do anything to ease it. Nor did his sticking it to poor Froger earlier, not that Froger didn't have it coming. I couldn't see where I or SAM had it coming, but who could tell with a quirky guy like Vachey?

The thing was, just because it was good enough to be a Rembrandt, that didn't make it a Rembrandt. At the very top of their form, some of his finest contemporaries or best students might conceivably have done something as good as this too. Gerrit Dou, say, or Rembrandt's own teacher Pieter Lastman.

Searching for the signature, I found a simple monogram near the top right margin, where the dull, stony green of the background lightened to an oily yellow: RHL, with no date. That would stand for Rembrandt Harmenszoon Leidensis, which was the way he signed his paintings in the early 1630s, while he was working in Leiden. It was not until 1633 that the name "Rembrandt" first appears on his paintings in the artist's elegant, familiar script.

So the use of the youthful monogram was right on target; there was nothing about it to make me doubt. On the other hand, there wasn't anything there to make me believe, either.

The problem was that the first thing a crook does when he wants to push some handsome old painting by a lesser-known artist as a handsome old painting by a famous Old Master is to get rid of the original signature and put on a false one. All such fakes have signatures. Without them, they have an almost unwinnable battle to be accepted as anything better than "School of X," and crooks don't go to all this trouble to settle for that.

No matter if the painter in question didn't usually sign his name, or if the forger had no idea what the artist's signature looked like. There are, for example, pictures in several private collections, and even one that used to be in a museum, that bear the proud signature
El Greco
—despite the established fact that the painter invariably signed his pictures with his real name, Domenikos Theotokópoulos. In Greek.

So I didn't know anything that I didn't know before.

* * *

By now, the noise, heat, and jostling of the mob in the alcove had started to get to me. I made my way out and back into the reception area, my mind bouncing all over the place. That painting was going to need more study, the back as well as the front, and I couldn't very well do it in that crush. Or even if I could, I didn't want to. Tomorrow I'd have it to myself, and have all the time I wanted with it.

I'd gotten a well-deserved comeuppance in there, and I was no longer sure about being able to carry out the task I'd come for. What did I do if, as Calvin had so happily and repeatedly posited, I looked at it all day and the day after that, and then some, and still didn't know if it was genuine or not? Having seen it, however, at least I knew we weren't being flummoxed with some preposterous fraud. If it was a fake, it was a dandy.

What I needed right then was a little peace to sort out my thoughts, but it was almost as crowded in the reception area as in the gallery. The bar along one wall was open, and by now people had had enough to drink so that the sound level was about where it is a couple of hours into a successful cocktail party. I peeked around a partition to look into the somewhat isolated bay just outside Vachey's study, with the paintings by Duchamp, Villon, et al. To my relief, only one person was in it, a woman in her sixties, who was slumped in one of two armchairs in the center, quietly sipping cognac and contemplating the Duchamp. Near her, on a butler's table, a waiter had set down and forgotten a tray with seven or eight glasses of cognac and a few empties.

By this time I'd decided I could use another glass myself, so I helped myself to one from the tray, offering my companion a perfunctory smile when she glanced at me. I got an uncordial nod in return, but sat in the other chair anyway. If she didn't bother me, I wasn't about to bother her.

The brandy tasted stale and heavy. All the same, I drank most of it down. My mind felt stale and heavy too. Maybe I didn't want to think; maybe I just needed a few minutes of passive contemplation on my own. The far wall of the bay was mostly made up of the glass doors that led into Vachey's antique study, now softly illuminated with indirect amber light, like an interior by Rubens. For a while I let my eyes rest on the furnishings in a mild, pointless, but somehow rewarding bout of covetousness. Then I turned toward the silvery blue Duchamp on the wall a few feet away. I could read the title on the placard:
jeune fille qui chante
. Singing girl.

"You think he's so wonderful, don't you?" The woman said in French, quite loudly.

"I beg your pardon?" I thought she might be calling to someone out in the reception area.

"I said," she replied, staring at the painting and not at me, "you all think he's so wonderful, don't you?"
 

"Uh . . . Duchamp?"

"No, not Duchamp." She jerked her head to the left, toward Vachey's study. "The upstanding, the virtuous, René Vachey. You all stand in line to kiss his ass, don't you? The great benefactor of society. Yes? Well, I say shit to that."

I began to see why she had the bay to herself.

I also realized that the tray of cognac had not been accidentally left by an absent-minded waiter. It was hers alone, and until I'd arrived to horn in, she'd been making solitary progress through it.

She turned to look at me, a blowzy woman with an awful coppery-red wig and copper-dyed eyebrows tweezed and teased into painfully thin, scanty arcs in which each separate filament of hair could be seen. Dry-eyed for the moment, her face was blotched and out-of-focus from crying, the mascara smeared, the lurid lipstick blurred and off-center. In her hair, on the left side, was a black velvet bow glittering with rhinestones, girlish and pathetic.

"You like him?" she said.

"Uh . . . Vachey?"

"Not Vachey, Duchamp."

The conversation was not improving.

"So?" she prompted. "Tell me. You like that painting?"

"Yes, it's fine," I said, putting down my glass and thinking about going. But to leave now would look too much as if I were fleeing (which I would be), and I didn't have the heart to be rude to this forlorn old woman. No doubt Louis would explain to me that it was me I was worried about, not her—that I was reacting to feelings of guilt generalized from the childhood suppression of aggressive impulses toward my mother, etc., etc.—and maybe he'd be right. Anyway, I supposed I could stand it a little longer.

She gave a little snort. "He likes it fine."

She stood up, a little rocky, and a little top-heavy too; one of those boxy, thin-legged women who put on weight above the waist, not below. Once reasonably steady, she went to the painting and stood beside it, lifting both arms, looking upward, her stretchy red lips parted in what I believe she thought was a carefree expression. When she realized she was still holding her glass, she stuck it in my hand and resumed her stance, expression and all.

"You see?" she said out of the corner of her mouth. I didn't see.

Slowly she lowered her arms. "This picture was made in 1929," she said with simple, slurred dignity. "I am the little girl, the model." Briefly, she struck the pose again. "You don't see it? The line of the arm? The tilt of the head? The expression of childish abandon?"

Now, I don't know how familiar you are with the works of Marcel Duchamp.
Nude Descending a Staircase?
We are talking about the prime mover of Dadaism here, one of the original Cubo-Futurists, the man we all have to thank for Conceptual Art, and this picture was right up there: a swirl of hard-edged overlapping forms like steel plates arranged in a complex spiral. You might be able to find the line of an arm or the tilt of a head if you were willing to be open-minded about it, but an
expression?
Of childish abandon, no less? Not bloody likely.

When I couldn't think of what to say, she gave a sigh of exasperation. "Naturally, monsieur, one changes with time. I am, ah, sixty-eight years of age, as it happens."

Oddly enough, I believed her—not about the sixty-eight, but about having posed for Duchamp. "You knew him then, madame? You were a model?"

"No, no," she said, gratified by the question. "I had an uncle who was Duchamp's chess partner for a time, and he recommended me to the artist as a sitter. Only that once. No, my life was given to music, not art. I was an opera singer. Somewhat before your time, I'm afraid. My name is—" She drew herself up. One of those hairline eyebrows rose as she peeked at me from under lowered lids. "—Gisèle Grémonde."

"Gisèle Grémonde," I repeated wonderingly. "Why, of course. You were famous for . . . wasn't it—"

"My Gilda—yes, that's right," she purred. "And my Violetta."

"Of course!" I exclaimed.
 
No, of course I'd never heard of her, but it seemed like the right thing to do.

Madame Grémonde turned into a prima donna before my eyes, taking back her cognac and re-seating herself as if she were on stage, regal and straight-backed. She finished her glass, picked up another, and gestured graciously toward the tray. "Please help yourself, monsieur."

But it didn't last. As she drank from the new glass, looking over its rim at the Duchamp, her eyes overflowed. Tears slid down her cheeks, leaving two oily tracks. Her mascara, her chins, and her body in the chair all slumped at once. She put down the glass and rubbed at her nose with a damp, wadded handkerchief that had been in her hand all along.

"Do you want to know the truth?" she asked, snuffling back the tears. "Would you like to hear the entire, sad, miserable story?"

I may be a pushover, but I knew I definitely didn't want to hear the entire miserable story. I put my glass on the table. "Madame, I've taken up too much of your time already. I've enjoyed—"

"René has had that painting for over forty years, did you know that? He bought it in 1951, to please me. It hung in his Paris apartment for many years. We used to look at it from our chairs at breakfast."

"At breakfast?" I was caught in spite of myself. "Are you— were you and Vachey—?"

"We were not married, no. Of course, René would have left his wife at a word from me, that was common knowledge, but my operatic schedule would not permit it, you see, and always my art came first. But we were very great friends." Her loose, crimson mouth wobbled, then firmed. "Well. That was some years ago. I bear no malice. Passion runs its course. One moves on to the new."

She laid a heavy hand on my forearm. "But always it was to be mine, this painting, you understand? He promised it to me some day, to
me.
And now I learn he has conveniently forgotten. I learn ..." Her face was mottled with an angry flush. "Why should the Louvre have it? Does a freely given promise count for nothing once love is spent? Is the Louvre in such need of another picture?"

She still had hold of me. I patted her hand clumsily. "Madame—"

"So you see, he's not so wonderful as you think, is he? Oh, yes, and I could tell you a few other things too."

She used my arm to push herself ponderously up. Luckily, I saw it coming, or we both might have wound up on the floor. She leaned heavily against the glass doors to Vachey's study.

"Do you see that book, the blue one on its side, on the end of the shelf there? The fat one? Wouldn't you like to know what's in it?"

"Actually, madame, I think I'd better—"

"I'll tell you, monsieur. The private record of all his 'great discoveries,' nothing less. You follow me?" Her eyes had turned cunning now, and mean. "All of them. Where they
really
came from, what they
really
are. Yes, that's right." With a drunk's malevolent snigger she held up a key she'd dug out of her sequined purse. "You see what I have?"

The key scratched clumsily at the door plate and found the slot. The tumblers turned. The door opened slightly. "Come, I'll show you. Don't be afraid."

Rude or not, it was past time to get out of there. I put on an awkward dumb show of seeing someone I knew near the bar, excused myself, and fled.

* * *

The truth is that I had come within a hair of taking her up.
. . . his "great discoveries" . . . where they
really
came from, what they
really
are
. If Gisèle knew what she was talking about, which was hardly a sure thing, everything I needed to know might be right there in that book. All I'd had to do was walk through that door with her and find out. But that kind of unethical adventuring is out of my line. I don't believe in prying uninvited into other people's offices, however virtuous the ends, and, to be honest, I don't have the stomach for it.
 

I mean, what if I got caught?