Old Scores (Chris Norgren 3) (18 page)

I was starting to have a bit more respect for Froger. He might be a horse's ass, but he wasn't a hundred percent horse's ass.

"Well, Jean-Luc," he said, "you've examined the painting again?"

"I have."

"And?"

"And it is still a Léger. Still an extremely poor one."

Froger's chin came off his chest. "Extremely poor? Last night it was merely not so good."

Charpentier pursed his lips. "I was being charitable. I may have been carried away."

Froger glowered momentarily, then rearranged his face and smiled. Clearly, he had resolved not to let Charpentier get his goat this time. "In any case," he said, moistening his lips, "you advise me to accept it?"

"I advise nothing. I'm not being paid to advise."

"But it
is
a Léger? You're sure of that?"

"It is a Léger," Charpentier said with truly amazing patience, given the fact that he had to be pretty tired of having his expertise questioned by now. "If that's all that matters to you, accept it."

Froger got his fingers into his collar, under the rolls of flesh, and tugged at it. "Look, Jean-Luc, no offense, but I'm very nervous about this. No one knows Léger better than you, I freely admit it, but even you can't be
sure
it's authentic."

"I am ready to stake my reputation on it," Charpentier said quietly.

But it was Froger's reputation that was worrying Froger. He hunched his massive shoulders uneasily. "It's just that I don't know what I'm getting into, and I don't want to be made a fool of."

Charpentier had finally had enough. He thumped the desk with a fist. "If you don't trust my judgment, damn it, go ahead and get someone else. They'll tell you exactly what I've told you."

Fat chance, I thought. Getting someone else would mean the Barillot, not Vachey's estate, would be footing the bill. Predictably, Froger started hemming and hawing. "Well, no, that is to say, of course I trust your judgment, Jean-Luc. Implicitly. That goes without saying. Er—Christopher, what about your Rembrandt? Are you going to accept it?"

"Probably, yes, if I can get some questions about its history settled. I think it's authentic."

How about that, I'd actually said it out loud. It was a bit of a shock hearing it.

"Gentlemen." Froger had summoned up his bottom-of-the-well baritone. He leaned forward, thick elbows on the satiny, billowing surface of the desk. "Gentlemen, if you're right, if this is an authentic painting by Léger, an authentic painting by Rembrandt—then what are we to make of Vachey's posturing and fooling about, of his absolute refusal to allow tests? What was he trying to do?"

 
That was a switch. Last night he'd been telling us what Vachey had in mind, not asking us.

"According to you," Charpentier said, not letting him forget it, "it's because they're forgeries. Well, they're not forgeries, and I would have thought that would be enough for you. As to Vachey, whatever he had in mind, no one is ever likely to know what it was now."

That didn't satisfy Froger. "All right, let me put it this way, Jean-Luc. Let's say I had independently commissioned you to help me decide whether to buy this painting, the very same painting. Let's say there were no restrictions about testing. Would you recommend that I send it to a laboratory to be absolutely certain it's authentic before purchasing it?"

Charpentier rubbed his nose. He got out his pack of Gitanes and lit up. Froger hurriedly produced an onyx ashtray and put it in front of him.
 
"Only if you had money you were determined to waste," Charpentier said. "In the first place, every criterion reveals it as a Léger and nothing else; every single one. Second, remember that Léger is a twentieth-century master, not an artist of the Baroque or the Renaissance, so there is very little help that scientific tests can provide."

That seemed like an overstatement to me. True, even the most advanced dating techniques weren't going to be of much use on a painting less than a hundred years old, but what about infrared photography to highlight painting techniques, spectroscopy to analyze paint formulas, and all the rest of it? (Not that I could claim an overwhelmingly thorough grasp of all the rest of it.)

"Do you mean you never advise your clients to test modern paintings?" I asked him.

"Once in a great while I do, if there is some question that expert scrutiny cannot answer. But ordinarily, no. A scientific test is no better than the technician performing it. Technicians are people, and people make mistakes, Christopher."

"Experts are people too," I said.

Charpentier smiled thinly at me through a blue-tinged haze. "Let's consider the Rembrandt for a moment, and not the Léger. You would like to have it tested? Very good. But what if the technician innocently takes a paint sample from an area restored in the nineteenth century, what happens then to the dating? This has happened, my dear Christopher."

"I know that. You need informed judgment too. That's why I wouldn't have been any happier about it if Vachey had reversed it and said we could submit the paintings to all the tests we wanted, but we weren't allowed to look at them. You need both, not just—"

"And what about errors that are not so innocent? Fakers can add metallic salts to underpainting, and throw off X-ray analysis. This, too, has happened, and not so long ago. They can confound infrared photography by—"

"I just don't like to be made a fool of," Froger muttered again.
 
"There's
something
wrong. Even dead, I don't trust the son of a bitch."

"No one's going to argue with you there, Edmond," Charpentier said.

"I remember that Turbulent Century fiasco of his," Froger went on. "I reviewed it for the
Revue,
you know. Now don't climb back on your high horse, Jean-Luc. I know you thought highly of it—"

"I did not think highly of it," Charpentier said irritably. "Get your facts straight. I thought highly of the figurative and Analytical Cubist portion of it. René had collected some remarkable works there. As for the rest of the exhibition, I wasn't qualified to make judgments, but I certainly had my doubts about the quality of some of the pieces."

"Yes, well, I can't speak for your Analytical Cubists, but, by God, I know Seurat and the Neoimpressionists; that's
my
specialty. And I tell you, that show was
filled
with trash that Vachey was trying to put over on us. It was shameful. I said it at the time—I don't hold my tongue when I have something to say, you know that—and I still say it. Well, naturally, I'm worried now. How could I help it?"

"Edmond, do you mean actual forgeries?" I asked. I'd never read his review of Vachey's notorious exhibition, or Charpen tier's, or anybody else's, but I'd certainly developed an interest.

The word made him skittish. His hand went to his collar again. "Forgeries? No, when did I use the word
forgeries?
Did you hear me use the word
forgeries?
We could fill this museum— your museum too, and the Louvre, and the Metropolitan—with disputed attributions without ever touching on forgeries, isn't that so?"

I had to admit it was so.

"No," he said, "I didn't say forgeries, I said only ... I meant only . . . inferior works."

"So what are you worried about?" Charpentier asked brusquely. "Haven't I just finished telling you that this Léger of yours is an inferior work? You already know it. What sinister surprise is to be feared?"

Froger shook his head darkly. He still didn't trust the son of a bitch.

Charpentier ground out his cigarette in the ashtray, and stood up. "I don't see what else there is for me to tell you. I'll give you a report in a few days, but there won't be anything startling in it. Are you going to accept the painting?"

"I—yes, I suppose so. Isn't that what you're advising me? Isn't that what it comes to? If it isn't too much to ask for your advice."

"I'm advising you to put it in one of the dark corners with which the Barillot is so richly supplied. If you're lucky, no one will notice it. Good day, Edmond."

Chapter 13

It was only two o'clock, but I was fatigued and still a little tottery from the previous night's episode, so I went back to the hotel to put my feet up, once again taking the chattering old elevator to the fourth floor instead of walking. Inside the room, I took off my shoes, plumped up the pillows, and lay back on the bed. It felt good too.

Charpentier's remarks had started me thinking about this business of the tests again. He'd overdone it, but he was essentially right about laboratory analysis not being as useful on forgeries of modern paintings as on forgeries of old ones. The best thing a test can do for you in pinpointing a fake is to show you that a purported 360-year-old Rembrandt is painted on a 50-year-old canvas, or uses pigments that weren't developed until the late nineteenth century, or is painted over a picture of a 1960 Ford Fairlane. The older a picture is supposed to be, the more a lab has to go on. From that standpoint, it would seem that, of the two—the Léger and the Rembrandt—the likelier candidate for fake was the Rembrandt. That was Charpentier's point.

But we weren't dealing with a
modern
forgery of a Rembrandt; of that I was sure. As a matter of fact, there weren't many modern forgeries of them around—precisely because there were so many Rembrandt-like paintings still available from Rembrandt's own time. At the worst, that's what
An Officer
was. And all the scientific wizardry in the world can't help you detect a 360-year-old fake of a 360-year-old painting..

So what was the point of the prohibition? I was right back at what Calvin had aptly enough called square one. Back at it? When had I ever been off it?

I settled in more comfortably to give it some deeper contemplation.

At 6:20 the telephone rang. I got it to my ear without opening my eyes.

"Hey, Chris—"

"Calvin, why are you always waking me up?"
 

"Why are you always asleep?"

I yawned and swung my feet over the side of the bed. "L'Atelier Saint-Jean," Calvin said, "89 Rue de Rivoli,
propriétaire
M. Gibeault."

I finished my yawn. "Hm. French,
nest-ce pas?"

 
"It's the junk shop, Chris."

That opened my eyes. "The—you mean where he said he bought the Rembrandt? Pepin actually gave it to you?"

"Are you kidding me? Not that I didn't ask him, but he claims he doesn't know anything about the Rembrandt. Apparently, there were a lot of things that Vachey kept close to his vest, and this was one."

"So then, who told you—"

"I got it from Madame Guyot." He coughed modestly. "She sort of took a shine to me."

"Calvin, that's great," I said. "I can catch a train to Paris tomorrow—"

"I found out some other interesting stuff too. If you think this whole thing is already as weird as it's going to get, think again. You had your dinner yet?"

"I've been asleep. I'm not terrifically hungry."

"There's a
brasserie
at the foot of the Rue de la Liberté, practically across the street from you. We can get an omelet or something. Meet you there in five minutes."

* * *

"Guess," Calvin said, smugly watching me over his glass of white wine, "who Pepin is."

"What do you mean, who he is? Vachey's secretary, his security head, whatever."

"Ho-ho, there's more to it than that, my man."

I poured most of my tiny bottle of Badoit mineral water (I wasn't feeling up to wine yet) into my glass. "Calvin, this is very entertaining, but how about just telling me?"

"Well, you know that heist that Vachey pulled off at the Barillot ten years ago?"

"It wasn't a 'heist,' " I said irritably. "He was making a point. They got their paintings back, and more."

Calvin's eyes widened. I was surprised myself. When had I gone so far over into Vachey's camp that I would defend the theft of art, whatever the reason behind it? I quickly corrected myself. "All right, yes, it was a heist. Sorry. But what about it?"

"And how Froger fired his security chief over the lapse in precautions? Well, you want to guess the name of that fired security chief?"

"You're telling me it was
Pepin?"

"You got it. Vachey gave him a job the next week, and Pepin's been there ever since." He grinned. "You don't suppose that might explain why he's a teeny bit paranoid about anybody getting within arm's length of anything in the Galerie Vachey?"

I nodded. Once burned, twice shy. "You know, it also might ..."

The waiter set down our orders. A ham omelet for Calvin, a cheese omelet for me, each served alongside two minuscule tomato wedges on a miniature lettuce leaf. With them came a basket of rolls, a tray with bottles of vinegar and oil on it, and—as with almost everything else in this town—a pot of Dijon mustard.

"It also might what?" Calvin asked when my sentence died away.

Frowning, I broke open a roll. "I was just thinking . . . Let's say that happened to you. That Vachey hired you to work for him after Froger fired you. How would you feel?"

Calvin hunched his shoulders. "Relieved, I guess. There couldn't have been too many places that would have been willing to take a chance on him after that."

"How would you feel toward Vachey?"

"I don't know—grateful?"

"Even though he's the one that got you fired in the first place? Even though you'd never be able to get a job in the field with anybody else?"

"Oh, I see what you mean. You'd have sort of mixed feelings, wouldn't you? You'd be grateful—but you'd also hate his guts every time you looked at him."

"Exactly," I said. "I was just wondering if he might have hated him enough to kill him."

"But why right at this particular time? All that happened years ago."

"For one thing, to make it look as if it had something to do with the exhibition, or those charges in
Les Echos Quotidiens,
or any of the other things that are going on right now."

Calvin was shaking his head. "Maybe, but it sounds kind of far-out to me, Chris. A lot of people probably hated Vachey enough to kill him. Jeez, we know about twenty of them ourselves."