Old Scores (Chris Norgren 3) (29 page)

I'd asked her rather pointedly why she hadn't told me that when I'd asked the day before. "Because," she said just as pointedly, "you neglected to mention the small fact that the book had been stolen." Indeed I had, and so Clotilde had understandably assumed that it was still in its usual place in Vachey's office, that no outsiders had any idea of what was in it, and how then could it have had any relevance to Vachey's death? I absorbed a sidewise, stinging look from Lefevre and let the matter drop.

"But how did
you
know what was in it?" Anne asked. "Before she verified it, I mean?"

"Oh, hell," I grumbled. "I should have figured that much out a long time ago."

Yesterday afternoon, anyway, when I was looking right at those Cubist paintings in Vachey's basement, the ones Christian had so obligingly unwrapped for me. Why, I should have asked myself a little harder, would anyone have kept authentic paintings by Gris, Derain, and the rest of them, a collection worth a fortune, stowed away in dusty wrappings in the cellar? And only a minute earlier I'd walked blithely by that alcove set up with paints and easel, and never had it occurred to me to wonder what it was doing there and who'd been using it.

But by that time, as I explained to Anne, I was no longer
thinking
forgery, not even about the Léger—not so much because of Charpentier's seeming confidence in it, but because of Vachey's. He had been so transparently shocked, so startled, at Charpentier's suggesting that it was anything but an absolutely first-rate Léger, that it had seemed impossible that he was perpetrating a fake. Now, of course, I understood: he hadn't been shocked, he'd been offended. Who the devil was Jean-Luc Charpentier to assert that a Léger by Vachey wasn't every bit as good as a Léger by Léger?

Anne had continued to lay out food while I spoke: two cheeses, a couple of baguettes, a slice of smooth liver pate with truffles, a plastic tub of green olives and another of string beans and peppers in vinaigrette, a split of red wine with two stemmed plastic wine glasses. And I had continued to gobble it down. She began to pour the wine.

"Not for me," I said. "I was drinking brandy at eleven o'clock this morning."

She stuffed the cork back in. "Me neither. I just thought maybe you could use it. Chris, how could Vachey have done the Léger so beautifully? Didn't you tell me he hadn't painted in twenty years?"

"Sure, and who told me? Charpentier. That's what he'd thought himself for twenty years, and he wanted me to keep thinking it. He'd just misattributed an outright forgery by Vachey, he'd killed Vachey over it, and he didn't want even the thought of a Vachey forgery to cross my mind." I found a bottle of mineral water in the paper sack and poured us some. "And it didn't."

"Mm." She chewed thoughtfully on an olive. "But how did
you
know it was Charpentier who killed him? I mean, I know how you know now, but how did you know before? When Pepin stuck his head in the door to say Charpentier had the painting off the wall, you were out of there so fast—"

"That's what gave it away. Until that minute I didn't have a clue. But why would Charpentier dash off and take the painting down the minute he heard about the gesso? The only reason I could think of was to somehow keep the evidence that it was a fake from coming out." I gestured with a bread slice. "And there you are."

"I am? Where?" Anne said with a tinge of annoyance. "I hate to sound dim-witted, but do remember, yesterday morning I was still in Tacoma with my mind full of job-reentry problems."

I accepted the rebuke. My mind had been on René Vachey for a week, I'd been right here in France, I'd been aware of a hundred details she knew nothing about, and still I hadn't been able to put them together until they'd been handed to me on a platter. No wonder she was a little confused.

I put down the string beans I'd been working on and gathered my thoughts.
 
"All right. Charpentier made a beeline for the painting the second he heard there was a problem with it. Why? Because he knew it was a fake. But he
hadn't
known it was a fake on Monday night or he'd never have gone into his speech about its being a Léger, but not a very good Léger, etcetera, etcetera. Question: When and how had he found out it was a fake? Answer: When—"

"When he stole the scrapbook."

"Right. Apparently, when Gisèle started ranting about it at the reception, and throwing around those innuendos about Vachey's 'great discoveries,' Charpentier started wondering if he'd been had, after all, the same way I had. So while she was still raving, he got away from the crowd and snuck off to Vachey's study—"

"To which you had snuck off only minutes before—"

"Me and Christian, only I suppose he wasn't sneaking, strictly speaking, since he lives there. Well, Christian found me with the book, heaved me through the window, stuck the book in another case, and got out. Whereupon—"

"Charpentier came in, snatched the book, and also got out?"

"Yes. You're doubtful?"

"Well, yes. It's just that it has the feel of—I mean, it sounds like The Three Stooges, Chris—everybody following everybody else."

"I don't think anybody was following anybody. We were all after the book. We were probably the only ones who had what you'd call a pressing interest in it."

She tore a slice of bread into pieces and offered them to a pair of small, softly honking white swans, handsome birds with black throats and red bills, that had paddled hopefully up to us on the pond we sat beside. When they wouldn't come near her outstretched hand, she tossed them some, and turned back to me.

"How did Charpentier know where to look for it? He could only have had a second before the crowd got there."

"Probably the same way Christian knew I had it. By looking through the glass door of the study while Christian was hiding it."

"You're guessing, though, aren't you?"

"Sure, I'm guessing. Charpentier's dead. Vachey's dead. What else is there to do but guess? I'm also guessing—but Lefevre agrees—that when Charpentier found out from the book that the Léger was a fake, he caught Vachey on his predawn walk the next morning. Maybe he tried to find out what Vachey had planned—remember, it was pretty obvious the guy had something tricky up his sleeve—maybe he tried to reason with him, maybe—who knows? Anyway, he wound up shooting him. With his little pocket pistol."

She was shaking her head. "No, I'm sorry, it still doesn't make sense. What good did it do to kill Vachey? That wouldn't stop the gesso from slipping."

"Ah, but Charpentier didn't know the gesso was going to slip."

"But he had the book—"

"All he knew was that it was a fake. There wasn't anything in it about the gesso. I have that straight from Clotilde. The entry wasn't complete. Vachey was waiting for the newspaper clippings that were sure to follow. So, as far as Charpentier knew, if he could just keep the picture from being scientifically tested— which was what Vachey wanted anyway—he'd be safe."

That was another little clue that I'd missed—how vehemently Charpentier had been against testing when we were talking to Froger at the Barillot. And how he'd been so much more negative about the painting than he'd been the evening before, advising Froger to stick it out of sight—and, he hoped, out of mind—in one of the Barillot's darkest corners.

"Attaboy," Anne said. One of the swans had waddled a few steps out of the water, made a tentative peck at the bread on her palm, and run back with it. The other had remained where it was, gobbling nervously.

She tossed it a chunk. "Go back a little. I can see what Charpentier's motivations were, but I don't understand Vachey's. Why was he after Charpentier's neck? Froger's, yes—they'd been enemies for years—but what did Charpentier ever do to him?"

I plastered a last slice of bread with pate and bit into it. "To René Vachey, the feud with a windbag like Froger was nothing. I'm sure he looked forward to making him look a little silly over the Léger, but Froger was small fry, and anyway he never claimed to be a Cubist expert."

I swallowed, full at last, and wiped my fingers on a paper napkin. "But Charpentier ..."

Charpentier, on the other hand, did claim to be a Cubist expert, and Charpentier, unlike Froger, had deeply wounded Vachey. It had started when he'd twice ridiculed Vachey's early "neo-Cubist" efforts. "Derivative, shallow, pallid, uninformed," he'd called them, but that much Vachey might have lived with; honest criticism from a straightforward if curmudgeonly critic. But a few years after that, he'd
praised
Vachey's controversial Turbulent Century show, his collection of works purportedly by Braque, Picasso, and others.

Why should that upset Vachey? Because, as several of the other reviewers had surmised, some of the attributions in The Turbulent Century were suspect. In fact, Clotilde had told us, they were more than suspect: all four of the Cubist paintings— a Braque, a Picasso, a Léger, and a Gris—were actually by Vachey; a one-man tour de force that was afterward relegated to the basement, where they'd probably remained concealed until I'd made Christian show them to me the day before.

And several years after that, Clotilde had gone on, Charpentier had verified the authenticity of that unknown Léger in Basel, only—and by now, of course, I was ahead of her—it wasn't a Léger, it was another Vachey counterfeit. It had been given to a friend in fun, but somehow wound up a few years later on the wall of a restaurant, and subsequently on the block at one of the big London auction houses. According to Clotilde, Charpentier had later verified a second Vachey-cum-Léger that had found its way into the art market in Vienna, valued at several million dollars.

Where these paintings were now, God only knew (which is, of course, why we straight arrows get so exercised even about forgeries made in fun).

Thus, Charpentier had consistently valued in the millions of francs the excellent forgeries to which Vachey had affixed the signatures of Braque, or Gris, or—especially—Léger. Equally consistently, he had heaped contempt on the paintings Vachey had produced under his own name. It was more than enough to rouse the ire of any painter-forger who had a high regard for his own merits, which Vachey most assuredly had.

"And so," I said, "he set this whole thing up to bring Charpentier down a peg. He knew Charpentier would accept the Léger as real—"

"How could he possibly know that?"

"He'd fallen for every one of Vachey's 'Légers' up till then. Why should this be any different?"
 

"That's so. And he was right."

"Yes, it would have worked. When that self-portrait came to light, Charpentier's reputation would have been in worse shape than that gesso."

Wordlessly, she offered me the remains of the baguettes. When I shook my head, she threw them to the appreciative swans. "But what about
Vachey's
reputation?" she asked. "Everyone would find out he was a forger."

"No, what everyone would know was that he was good enough to make a chump out of France's most eminent Cubist authority. Nobody would think of him as a forger, any more than people thought of him as a thief when he stole those paintings from the Barillot. He was having another one of his jokes, that's all."

"Only Charpentier didn't see the humor in it," Anne mused. "And now they're both dead."

A dreary gray cloud sheet had moved in, and with it had come a cold, fitful wind. Piles of neatly raked brown leaves at the junctions of the paths began to come apart and skitter over the gravel. We both got to work gathering up the food.

"One more thing, Chris. I see why Vachey couldn't let the Léger be tested, but why keep you from testing the Rembrandt? You don't think there could be something ..."

"Not a chance. No, he applied the restrictions to both pictures because if he did it to one and not the other, it would have given the show away. Charpentier wouldn't have gone near it."

"Well, I still don't understand what SAM has to do with all this. Why—really—did he donate the Rembrandt?"

I shrugged. "I suppose, for the reason he said. To make good on that old promise to Ferdinand de Quincy."

"But if he wanted to give you a painting, why not simply
give
it to you? Why involve the Seattle Art Museum in this other mess? And the Louvre, for that matter?"

"We're back to guessing, but I assume he wanted to have the biggest, splashiest show he could. Partly because that's the way he was, and partly because he wanted to expose Charpentier's blooper as publicly as possible—right in the middle of the big exhibition."

"Whew." She shook her head. "It's pretty complex, isn't it? Messy."

"Vachey was a complex man."

I put the last of our leavings in the paper sack they'd come in, and threw an olive that had fallen on the bench to the swans, which weren't interested.

"Didn't you say he was murdered in the Place Darcy?" Anne asked abruptly.

"Yes, why?" I glanced up to find her gazing at a blue-and-white street sign on one of the concrete gate posts along the park fence.
 
PLACE DARCY, it said.

We looked at each other. Vachey had died here, his body found in this pond. Perhaps he'd been sitting on this very bench . . .

I put down the sack. "Let's open the wine after all." She nodded and got out the plastic glasses again. I poured, and we raised our glasses. "To a complex man," I said.

Chapter 21

The temperature in the Galerie Vachey at five o'clock was a properly cool sixty-eight degrees, the humidity a comfortable fifty percent. But the "little gala" planned by Clotilde had failed to materialize. Initially contrived by Vachey, it was to have been his moment of triumph, when his brilliant outmaneuvering of the dean of France's Cubist authorities would be revealed to an astonished world. Even with Vachey dead, the loyal Clotilde had intended to go on with the show. But now, with Charpentier dead, too, any remaining pizazz had gone out of it.

Instead, there was a quiet signing at a folding table set up in front of the Rembrandt, followed by a subdued cocktail party in the reception area for no more than a dozen people. The sole press representative was a reporter from
Le Bien Public,
the Dijon newspaper, who left after taking a couple of pictures of Christian and me stiffly shaking hands in front of the painting. Questions on Charpentier's death and the faked
Violon et Cruche
were turned brusquely away by Sully; these matters would be addressed at a press conference to be held at the prefecture at nine the following morning.