Old Scores (Chris Norgren 3) (24 page)

* * *

By the next morning a fresh breeze had blown away the murk that had been hanging over Paris. The city looked glorious, and I was full of Yankee optimism and energy, the result, no doubt, of all that fried chicken in my bloodstream. At the hotel I had the standard Parisian breakfast of coffee, rolls, and croissants, and started off on foot for the Louvre, a distance of a mile and a half.

Walking in Paris these days is easier than it used to be, mostly because you no longer have to keep an apprehensive eye on your feet; the notoriously messy dog-droppings (Parisian dogs must be fed a richer diet than those anywhere else) are largely a thing of the past. Seemingly, this is due to the painted white signs on the sidewalks showing an alert-looking dachshund in profile, its nose pointed intelligently toward the curbside gutters down which a cleansing tide of water is flushed several times a day. Beneath the dachshunds, white arrows point in the same direction for good measure, so that even the dumbest dog should get the message.

Apparently they do, because
les dejections canines,
as the French so delicately put it, are no longer the problem they were. You can safely raise your eyes to look at Paris now.

And on a crisp, sparkling fall morning, Paris really is the most gorgeous city in the world. It has everything: trees, parks, a handsome river, historic bridges, breathtaking architecture. And surely no great city is less overwhelming. Along the Quai du Louvre—along the entire length of the Champs Elysées, for that matter—there isn't a building over nine stories high, and most are the same pleasing, uniform seven floors. Aside from the Eiffel Tower, only a single tall structure is visible, and that is a relatively modest skyscraper off in the distance to the south, beyond the Luxembourg Gardens. In the heart of Paris, unlike the heart of London or Tokyo or New York, you get plenty of sky.

It was a good morning for a brisk pace, and I reached the Louvre in under twenty minutes, but it took me almost another ten to walk the length of the south facade and around the east wing to the new entrance (before it was the world's biggest museum, which it still is, it was the world's biggest palace). Still, I arrived ten minutes early at the place de Quincy and I had arranged to meet: the gleaming, columnar base of the science-fictionish elevator in the new subterranean lobby. There was no sign of anyone who might be de Quincy. The only person who looked as if he were waiting for someone was a gnarly, jug-eared, close-cropped, wide-eyed old codger in a knit sport shirt, double-knit trousers, and Day-Glo orange-and-purple jogging shoes; American, all right, but with Boise, Idaho, or Billings, Montana, written all over him, along with "first goldanged trip to Europe."

I wandered around the big new shop on the mezzanine, peeking over the railing every few minutes for a sign of de Quincy. We had picked the Louvre to meet because de Quincy, who lived on the outskirts of Paris in the picture-postcard village of Sceaux, had said he had errands to run in the city, and why not meet in a museum, and what was my favorite museum in Paris?

He'd been in a hurry to get off the telephone, and I had instinctively said the Louvre, which isn't what you're supposed to say, not if you're a visiting
cognoscente.
You're supposed to name some charming little museum that ordinary people have never heard of: the Musée Cognacq-Jay, for example, or the Nissim de Camondo. Just as in New York it's bad form to tell anyone your favorite museum is the Met on Fifth Avenue. You're supposed to say the Cloisters, or the Cooper-Hewitt.

But the Louvre
is
my favorite museum in Paris, and I said so, and de Quincy had been agreeable, and here I was. And there, unless I was mistaken, was de Quincy, a tall, patrician-looking old man in a well-cut double-breasted suit, who was glancing around him—looking for me, I supposed—with some impatience. I know quite a few Americans who've lived abroad for a long time, and there is a certain look they get, an expatriate manner, proud, defiant, and forlorn all at once. And however Italianized or Frenchified they become, there is always an indefinable kernel of something that gives them away as displaced Yanks.

I went downstairs and walked up to him. "Mr. de Quincy? I'm Chris Norgren.
 
It's a–"

"Pardon, monsieur,
" he said politely,
"je ne parle pas anglais.
" He edged away to do his waiting somewhere else.

A few yards away the other old gentlemen still stood there, tugging reflectively on an oversized earlobe and eyeing me.

Could it be? I approached tentatively. "Er, Mr. de Quincy?"

He grinned and stuck out his hand. "Call me Fuzzy."

* * *

Well, it had been a natural mistake. With a name like Ferdinand Oscar de Quincy, the image that comes to mind does not include Day-Glo jogging shoes and double-knits. But, it turned out, they suited him perfectly. At a time when it was almost a given that the directors of art museums would come from the cosmopolitan East Coast, be scions of art-collecting families, and have Ivy League degrees, de Quincy had been born on a wheat farm along the Idaho-Washington border (so I hadn't been so far off), and gotten his education at Gonzaga University in Spokane.

He had come to the Seattle Art Museum as a part-time bookkeeper and business manager, developed an interest in art, and gone to the University of Washington in his spare time for a master's degree in art history. He'd enlisted in the Army in 1941, fought his way through France and Belgium in the infantry, and then been transferred to MFA & A, where he'd worked for three years, in the thick of the most exciting and successful art recovery operation in history. Afterward, he'd returned to SAM, and when the directorship became vacant, he'd been a shoo-in.

All this I learned inside of ten minutes, in the mezzanine cafe, where de Quincy ordered a
croque-monsieur
—a toasted ham-and-cheese sandwich—and I had a plain omelet with fried potatoes. (The French breakfast croissant, tasty as it is, is not long on staying power.)

Ferdinand Oscar "Fuzzy" de Quincy was a friendly, lively chatterbox of a man. All I had to do was raise an interested eyebrow or murmur an encouraging monosyllable, and he would happily take the ball and run with it. After the day I'd spent yesterday trying to pry information out of one suspicious, close-mouthed individual after another, he was a pleasure.

He'd read with sadness about Vachey's death, he'd heard about Julien Mann's claims, he even knew that I was looking into Vachey's background, and he was delighted—"just tickled pink"—that I'd sought him out. I'd come to the right man, he assured me.

He explained that he'd been part of the MFA & A team that had been assigned to Neuschwanstein, the fairyland Bavarian castle in which the Germans had stored the bulk of their French loot. While there, he'd identified and supervised the return of twelve eighteenth-century French paintings taken from Vachey's personal collection. He'd met Vachey for the first time shortly afterward, and the overjoyed Vachey had talked about repaying him. De Quincy had suggested that he give something to the Seattle Art Museum some time when he—

"Could we just hold up a minute, Mr. de Quincy?"

"Fuzzy."

"Fuzzy. You're saying the Nazis
took
these paintings from him, right?"

"Sure did. Confiscated most of his collection. Trumped up some charge or other. Consorting with Jews, something like that." Voluble though he was, de Quincy didn't believe in wasting words just to make complete sentences.

"If that's so, it suggests that he wasn't working
for
them at all, that Mann's story isn't accurate."

He snorted. "Story's piffle. Vachey was trying to help those Hebrew folk, not hurt 'em. Couldn't stand the Nazis. Fella's all mixed up, take it from me."

I put down my fork. This was what I'd hoped to hear. And it came from a man who had no ax to grind. I felt a tingling in the muscles of my shoulders, as if a weight that had sat on them for a long time had begun to lift.

"So what Clotilde told me is true," I said, more to myself than to him.

De Quincy, chewing, watched me with interest. "Gallery manager? Depends on what she told you."

I told him what she'd said: that Vachey had bought pictures during the Occupation and re-sold them to the Nazis—out of compassion, not avarice—that he'd made no profit and had meant to make no profit, that often the Germans had "paid" him not in money but in worthless paintings they'd forced him to take, or in almost equally worthless Occupation francs.

De Quincy waved a corner of his sandwich until he got his mouthful down. "Story's piffle too," he said.

My shoulders stopped tingling. "But—"

"You happen to know a Swiss dealer named Gessner?"

"I don't think so."

"Zurich. You ought to talk to him sometime. If he's still alive. Bought a bunch of those worthless paintings from Vachey in forty-four. Nice little odalisque by Matisse, couple of Vlaminck still lifes . . . let's see, Dufy, Rouault, Pierre Bonnard—"
 

"I don't understand."

De Quincy smiled. "Well, what do you mean by 'worthless'? Depends on who's doing the valuing, wouldn't you say?"

I almost asked him if he'd been talking to Lorenzo, but he quickly explained what he meant. Hitler had detested modern French art so much that he had forbidden the shipment of it into Germany. Thus, when the Nazi "collection agencies" in France found pieces of twentieth-century French art in their hauls, they were unable to do anything with them but try to sell them in a virtually nonexistent French market—or, as in Vachey's case, trade them for art that met the Führer's aesthetic standards. So Vachey was able to buy up, say, a Flinck at negligible cost, trade it for, say, a Matisse from the Germans, and then make a huge profit in the Swiss market, which had remained active through the war. This he did more than once, and according to de Quincy, the proceeds had provided the nest egg from which he'd built his fortune.

"In Switzerland, you see," De Quincy said, "he could get some real money, not the play money they had here during the Occupation."

"Yes, I see," I said woodenly. I saw that Vachey, after all was said and done, had been what Mann had said he was: a parasite who'd fed on his countrymen's helplessness in the most terrible of times.

"Now don't go off all half-cocked," de Quincy said. "My opinion, Vachey was an honest-to-Jesus hero, Chris. Took some real risks—I mean stand-him-in-front-of-the-firing-squad risks—to help people get away before the Nazis got them. Helped them get rid of their collections, helped them get out of the country—"

"And made a killing doing it."

"Sure he did, why shouldn't he? Guy wasn't a professional hero, he was a businessman, what do you expect? I'm telling you, he did a lot of good. More than you know. Lot of sides to the man. Come on, you want to walk through the museum or not?"

I had a final, half-hearted bite of the cooling omelet. "Sure, let's."

But the Louvre is not a museum you walk "through," not unless you have three days to do it. You have to pick your area, and I chose the first floor of the Denon wing, where the main European painting collection was. As we slowly climbed the broad staircase past
Winged Victory
—the full-size marble version—de Quincy told me about an aspect of Vachey's endlessly varied life of which I'd known nothing.

In the early eighties, it seemed, he had acted as a middleman for the French government, successfully negotiating with shadowy figures in East Germany for the return of a famous ceramics collection that had been looted from a museum in Nancy during the war. This patriotic mission he took on without any payment and without any public recognition. His part in it came out only when the French government minister involved retired and published his memoirs. More recently there had been governmental leaks suggesting that it had been only one of several such delicate assignments Vachey had performed for his country.

"So you see," de Quincy said, pausing to catch his breath at the top of the stairs, "more to the man than meets the eye."

"Amen to that," I said. "Did you stay in contact with him all these years?"

"Not really. Followed his career, of course. Ran into him now and again. Always liked the fella. Something to him."

"Fuzzy, why didn't he invite you to the reception the other night? That gift was really in your honor."

He smiled, pleased. "Did invite me. Fact is, I don't go much of anyplace if it involves sleeping out." He patted his hip. "Ligament troubles. Need to sleep in my own bed. Tell me, what's the Rembrandt look like?"

"It looks good. I think it's authentic; a lot like the one in the Getty, but with a huge plume and a greenish cast in the background. I'm sure it's not listed in Bredius. Does it sound like anything you've ever run into with Vachey?"

He shook his head. "Nope. Wasn't in his collection when I saw it way back when."

"I don't suppose you'd have any idea where he might have gotten it?"

"Nope. All I know is what he said. Junk shop. Knowing him, it could be true."

We walked through the Apollo Gallery, where groups of avid schoolchildren were clustered three deep around cases holding the crown jewels, turned right, and found ourselves at one end of what used to be called the Grande Galerie, and with good reason. Now blandly referred to as Denon Rooms 4 to 8 for touristic ease, these adjacent spaces form a single glorious gallery 1,000 feet long (I know because I paced it once and counted 332 steps), the longest, greatest gallery of art that ever existed, densely lined on both sides with masterpieces of French painting—Watteau, Poussin, La Tour, Fragonard—and a few dozen assorted Italians—Botticelli, Giotto, Giovanni Bellini, for starters—thrown in to avoid too parochial a flavor. The elegant, arched ceiling is punctuated every 250 feet or so by an ornate, marble-columned cupola. At the far end, you go around a crick in the floor plan, and there you are, looking down an additional 300 feet of Flemish, Dutch, and Spanish masterworks.

All this is one half of one floor of one wing. And there are three wings. Some museum.