Old Scores (Chris Norgren 3) (25 page)

While we walked slowly through it, pausing occasionally to look at a particular painting, I told de Quincy about the puzzling restrictions that Vachey had placed on both the Barillot and SAM, and about the generally queer goings-on that had followed them.

By the time I'd finished, we'd walked the entire floor—the lengths of four football fields, as an American guidebook predictably puts it—and were sitting on a stone bench at the head of the east staircase, surrounded by El Grecos, Murillos, and Riberas.

"Interesting," de Quincy said when I was done. "What do you make of it?"

"That's what I was going to ask you. What do you suppose he could have been up to?"

He shook his head slowly back and forth. "Got me."

"Look, Fuzzy, I have to come to a decision tomorrow. If you were in my place, would you take the painting?"

"If what's holding you back is worrying about what he did or didn't do in the forties, I'd say yes, for damn sure, take it."

"That's the main thing, but those weird conditions of his make me nervous too. You knew him pretty well—"

"Not so well."

"But you liked him, you admired him." He nodded. "Fair statement."

"Well, would you say you could take him at his word?"
 

"Well—"

"If he told you what he told me—that there was nothing tricky behind the restriction on testing, or behind the time limits he set up, or behind anything else, would you trust him?"

De Quincy pulled thoughtfully at his earlobe. "About as far as I could throw him."

Chapter 17

I got back to Dijon at 3:00 p.m., which left me just twenty-seven hours to make up my mind about the Rembrandt. If I didn't sign off on Vachey's conditions by the close of business Friday, the offer would be void, and the painting, presumably, would revert with the rest of Vachey's "residue" to his son, Christian.

Christian, who had tried to keep me away from the Rembrandt, and Froger away from the Léger. Christian, who had tried to wrest the Duchamp from Gisèle Grémonde. Christian, who was so little trusted by his father that the older man had kept his new will secret from him, and in it had aced him out of the ownership of the Galerie Vachey and removed him as executor besides.

However, Christian had also been living in the same house with his father for the last six months. Disappointed in his son or not, it seemed probable that Vachey would have let him in on whatever game he was playing with the paintings, and even more likely that Christian would know something about that scrapbook. Until now, however, I hadn't even tried to talk to him. I didn't think he'd see me, for one thing (he had done his best to keep me out of the house altogether), and for another, how could I trust anything told to me by a man who was in line to get the Rembrandt if I turned it down? So I had started with likelier sources, and struck out. Pepin claimed he knew nothing about anything; Gisèle knew about the book but wasn't telling. And Clotilde knew about the book
and
about Vachey's intentions, but she wasn't telling either. That left Christian.

* * *

"Okay, I'll say it one more time," Christian said with a sort of nonchalant irritation. "One: I don't know anything about any blue scrapbook, I never heard of any blue scrapbook, I never saw any blue scrapbook. Two: I was born in 1956, so do you want to tell me how I'm supposed to know anything about my father's activities in the war? Three: I don't know what my father had in mind when he offered you the Rembrandt, why should I? Okay?"

He went back to what he'd been doing: arranging a carton of dog-eared papers and index cards into neat little stacks on the surface of an aged rolltop desk. His English was idiomatic and barely accented, the pronunciation American rather than British, with a slangy, choppy flavor that gave credence to the stories of mob connections in Miami.

"That's hard to believe," I said. "You're his son. You were living in the same house."

He shrugged and stood up, stretching. There was a faint whiff of expensive cologne, dry and lemony. "Well, I can't help what you want to believe. Look, I'm sorry, but I have a million things to do, you know?"

This was the way it had gone from the beginning. We were on the first floor of Vachey's house, at the end of a blind corridor that served as a small study. Christian, in a pin-striped gray suit, again with no tie, hadn't been out-and-out rude, but he hadn't bothered to stop his paper-arranging when I'd arrived either, and he hadn't offered me a seat. I wasn't sure if I'd ever quite gotten his full attention.

Now he smiled and held out his hand. "Sorry, my friend. I wish I could have helped." I could see that his mind was already back on his cards.

There wasn't much I could do but go. "Well, thanks for your time," I said. "If you happen to think—"

And right then, as suddenly as that, one feature of the gluey, murky swamp I'd been sloshing around in for days popped into sharp, clean focus. I recognized his cologne. I remembered the last time I'd smelled it—a second or so before I went flying out the window of Vachey's study. At the time I'd had the impression that a faint, citrusy, distinctive smell had come from the opened pages of the scrapbook, but it hadn't come from the pages at all.

"You pushed me out that window," I said.

I finally had his attention. He jerked his hand out of mine and took a step back, eyes startled. I had laughed when I said it—a sort of delighted cackle—because it felt so good to finally
know
something, and Christian probably thought I'd gone around the bend.

"Don't be dumb," he said. "What window? What are you talking about? Why the hell would I want to push you out of a window?"

"To keep me from seeing the book."

"What
book?" Finding that I didn't intend to strangle him after all, he'd managed to put some self-assurance back into his voice. He raised his eyes to the ceiling and tried an indignant laugh. "I can't believe it. This guy has the nerve to walk in here—"

"The hell with it," I said. "I'm not going to stand here and fight about it. You tried to kill me, and I can damn well prove
 
it, and as far as I'm concerned, I'm just as happy letting Lefevre get it out of you."

I turned smartly and strode down the long corridor, the old wooden floor groaning at each step. I had made it all the way to the door that led to the public part of the house and gotten it open before he called out.

"Wait a minute, will you . . . Chris?"

I turned, still holding the handle. For a moment there, I thought I'd overplayed my hand.

"All right, okay, you're right," he said. He came down the long hallway with his rolling, cocky stride, letting a sheepish, oily half-smile form on his face, confident that no one could fail to be charmed by his unassuming candor.

"You're right," he said again when he reached me, "what can I say? But believe me, doing you any harm was the last thing I was thinking of. I mean, I don't bear you any personal animosity, Chris. Far from it."

"Well, that's a load off my mind."

He laughed. "Let me explain, okay? When I heard that damn woman start—"

"Gisèle Grémonde?"

He nodded. "—start in with that stuff about the upstanding René Vachey, the great René Vachey, and she actually started talking about that scrapbook of his, I took off for the study to make sure the door was locked and the damn thing was out of sight." He shrugged. "Well, you beat me to it, and I saw you disappearing behind a corner with the damn thing, so I followed you in and ... I guess I just acted without thinking. I'd had a few too many, you know?"

He flashed his friendly, between-us-guys smile to show that he knew I understood that it had all been in good fun. "Look, I wasn't thinking about pushing you out the window. All I was after was the book. I'm not a violent guy, Chris. Hell, I'm a pacifist, believe me."

"I believe you." I wasn't sure if I did or not, but I wasn't interested in arguing with him. It was information I was after.

"Thanks, Chris. So—you going to go to the cops?"

"That depends. I need to know what's in the book."

This was a bald-faced attempt to mislead him. Of course I would go to the police. But before I did, I wanted to see that scrapbook for myself. With the matter left in Lefevre's hands, who knew when, or if, I would ever see it? Not by six o'clock tomorrow, anyway.

"Sorry." He shook his head sadly. The dangling earring swayed, the Superman forelock stirred.

"Look, Christian," I said, "let's get something straight. All I'm trying to do is find out if there's anything in there that might make me think twice about accepting the painting. Otherwise, I'll just have to take a chance and go ahead and sign off on it."

He could hardly mistake the implication of this wily ploy: If I rejected the painting, he'd get it. So, if anything, it was to his advantage to let me see the scrapbook. It made sense to me; I hoped it made sense to him.

Apparently, it did. He stepped back into the hallway. "Okay, come on in."

Once inside, he closed the door. "I guess you know what's in it, then."

I nodded. "I think so. Notes and clippings your father kept of his art purchases—starting during the Occupation."

"That's it. Why he kept them all these years—why he kept them in the first place—I don't know. I suppose he figured that some day Julien Mann or someone like him would crawl out from under a rock and start whining about being robbed, and my father wanted to be able to prove he didn't do anything illegal."

No, there had to be more to it than that in Christian's mind. "Then why push me out the window to keep me from seeing it?"

He gazed sincerely at me, man to man. "Look, Chris, I'm not ashamed of anything my father did. But times change, you know? And what people had to do to survive in 1942—it's the easiest thing in the world to ... to make it look lousy today. People don't know the way it was. Well, my father had a hell of a lot of enemies, I think you know that, and they'd just love to haul his name through the mud if the stuff in that book ever got to be public knowledge. And that's something I can't let happen. My father's name is the most important thing he left me."

It sounded good, and Christian delivered it in manly fashion, with just the right amount of eyeball-glistening. But it all seemed a little too high-minded to me for the would-be kingpin of Tanzanian cement and New Caledonian seaweed. What Christian had really been trying to do, I thought, was simply to keep Vachey's records to himself, so as not to provoke other claims like Mann's against the estate. And I was betting there was more to it than that; that some of the paintings that Vachey had bought in the forties were still on the walls of this house, or in a vault somewhere, and Christian had plans to sell them. If so, he'd certainly want to hang tightly on to the records of those old transactions.

I told him as much.

He listened, head down, and looked up at the end with his crooked grin back in place. "Well, yes, okay, I admit it, a few of those old pictures are still in the basement, and, sure, I just might decide to put them up for sale. But between you and me, they're junk—seventeenth-, eighteenth-century apprentice stuff. My father gave up trying to peddle them twenty years ago and forgot all about them. I haven't looked at them myself in years. But things are different now, the art market's gone nuts—maybe I'll haul them out and see what I can get."

"I'm sure you will," I said.

"Look, Chris—no offense—but I don't really see where this is any of your business."

"Maybe not. But the Rembrandt is my business—"

"Sure, but there's nothing about it in that book, take my word for it."

"I'd have to see that for myself." When he hesitated, I added: "Otherwise, I go to the police right now."

"Well..." He adjusted his slightly disarranged forelock with a cupped hand. "The fact is, I don't have it, you know?"

"You don't
have
it?"

"No. Don't get excited, give me a chance to explain."

When I'd tumbled out the window, he told me, he had snatched the volume up from the floor, meaning to take it someplace safer. But I'd started such a racket from outside that he knew others would momentarily be bursting into the study, so he had hurriedly stuck it in the first place that came to hand, a crowded, waist-high bookcase across the room, thirty feet from where Gisèle had been telling everyone it was. Then he'd ducked out of the room just in time to keep my would-be rescuers from finding him there.

Five minutes later, when he'd come back, the book had been gone. Someone had identified it despite its location, and had taken advantage of the uproar to remove it. He had no idea who.

He shook his head. "I should have put it in a drawer or something, but there wasn't any time, and I was a little rattled. I mean, you were yelling out there—I didn't know whether you were dying or what."

I fell back against the wall. "Damn." Whether he was telling the truth or not, it was plain that I wasn't going to get to see the book. Another dead end, after all.

"Then I want to see those paintings in the basement," I said.

"Why? The Rembrandt's upstairs in the gallery where it always was."

"I just want to. Let's go, please."

He shrugged. "Whatever you say.
 
I just want to cooperate."

He gestured me ahead of him down the hallway, but first I picked up the telephone in the vestibule and dialed Calvin's hotel. I may, as Tony says, not be the world's swiftest study when it comes to perceiving ulterior motives, but even I knew enough not to head off to the cellar, alone with a guy who'd shoved me out of a second-story window three days before. I wasn't going to give him another shot at me, with or without personal animosity.

"Calvin?" I said, when the hotel clerk had switched me to his room. "It's four-thirty right now, and I'm with Christian Vachey at his house. Just wanted you to know. I'll see you in an hour."

To make sure Christian didn't miss a word, I said it in French. As far as Calvin was concerned, I could have delivered it in New Caledonian, because he wasn't there. But this was for Christian's benefit, and I could see that he got the message.