Old Scores (Chris Norgren 3) (3 page)

"So what do you think, Chris? Too good to be true?"
 

"By half," I said.

In Seattle, you can't walk very far without passing an espresso bar, and most of us are addicted to the stuff. Tony and I, exercising our iron wills, ignored two of them, but finally succumbed at the third, a plant-filled, conservatory-like Starbucks on Fourth near Union. We got on the end of a line of five or six people at the counter.

"Uh-uh, no, it
is
too good to be true," I muttered while the barista went through her steamy routine at the espresso machine. "There's a catch somewhere."

"Um,
 
there is a sort of catch," Tony said.

I looked at him sharply. I didn't like the sound of that
um.
"What catch?"

"Two catches, you might say."

"What catches?"

"Well, remember what you were saying about getting that X-ray and microscopic analysis done?"

"Yes—oh, Bussière, that's the name of the lab in Lyons. I have the number in—"

"No dice," Tony said.

"What?"

"No labs. No X-ray, no ultraviolet, no cross-sectional analysis, nothing but the naked eye. You can look at it all you want, but no scientific stuff."

"Why not, for God's sake?"

"That's the way he wants it, Chris."

"But
why?
Tony, come on, he knows it's a fake, that's the only possible reason."

"Not necessarily. He says they're fragile. He's worried about damaging them."

"With X rays? That's ridiculous, you know that."
 

"Apparently he doesn't."

I shook my head. "I don't buy it. You know what it is? He's got a good fake, that's all, and he's giving it to us because he thinks Seattle is probably located just west of Dogpatch, and what could we know about art? He thinks he can get it by us, and after he does, he's going to announce that it really
is
a fake, and so once again he'll show us all up for the greedy, ignorant idiots we are—don't ask me what his point is this time."

Tony listened to this harangue, visibly and somewhat smugly amused. "And could he?"

"Could he what?"

"Get it by you?"

"By me?" Oddly enough, the question caught me by surprise. "I don't think so," I said honestly, after a moment.
 

"So there's no problem."

"Well, yes, there is. First of all, there's the question of why he won't allow tests—he knows damn well they won't hurt the picture, and he knows equally well that museums
always
run them before they buy something."

"True, but we're not buying anything, are we? He's giving it to us."

"What's the difference? Why not allow them? And there's a second problem. Sure, if it isn't real, I think I could spot that, but a lot of other so-called experts have thought the same thing and wound up making big mistakes. What if I made a mistake?" I shook my head. "I don't like seeing us put anything in our collection without adequate testing."

"But you're not a 'so-called' expert, Chris," Tony said simply. "If you tell me it's a fake, we won't touch it. If you say it's real, that'll be plenty good enough for me. We'll take it in a flash."

I was flattered, even touched. I cleared my throat. "Thank you, Tony. I appreciate that."

"Besides, we can test the hell out of it after we get it here."

"Right," I said, laughing. Tony wasn't the sentimental type either.

Tony smiled in return; somewhat weakly, I thought. "Well, actually, even that's not true, Chris. You see, this is a restricted gift."

"A restricted gift? You mean we're not allowed to sell it later? Even if we decide we don't like it?"

His expression was one of bottomless forbearance. "Chris."
 

"Tony?"

"Museums are not in the business of'selling' works of art," he said softly. "You know that."

"Oh. Right. Sorry. I don't know what I was thinking of. I meant we're not allowed to de-accession it?"

I suppose I was getting back at him for getting me into this— for despite all my reservations, I knew perfectly well I was in it up to my eyebrows.

"That's better," he said, fractionally mollified. "But not only can we not de-accession it, we have to agree to keep it on permanent exhibit—well, for five years, anyway—properly labeled
as
a Rembrandt, and displayed in a manner befitting a Rembrandt."

He exhaled, long and soberly. "So, my friend, if we decide to take it, we better be damn sure it
is
a Rembrandt ahead of time."

In themselves, restrictions like these are not extraordinary. Donors are always sticking little riders on their bequests that tell you what kind of case something is to be displayed in, or when or where it's to be placed, or what should be next to it, or how it ought to be lit. That, as far as it goes, isn't usually objectionable. These things are gifts, after all, and the people donating them usually love them every bit as much as we do. Why shouldn't they care about what happens to them after they go to a museum?

But this was different. The proscription on testing made it different; the absence of provenance made it different; above all, the presence of the unpredictable René Vachey pulling the strings made it different.

"You mentioned two catches," I said. "Was that the second one?"

"Actually, no; that was still part of the first."
 

"What," I said, gritting my teeth, "is the second?" "Um, it'll hold. I'll tell you about it when we get back."

Um
again. "Tell me now."
 

"Patience. Let's have our coffee first." "Tony—"

"Here, Chris," Tony said generously as we got to the cashier, "let me pick up the tab. This is on me."

Chapter 2

I knew that whatever else was coming was going to be bad because Tony invited me into his office when we got back to the museum, then further suggested that we step out on his private terrace. It is well known among the staff that this little terrace, for whatever reason, is Tony's locale of choice for dealing with recalcitrant curators. Maybe he thinks the unspoken threat of winding up, crushed and broken, on the pavement of Second Avenue five stories below helps soften us up.

"Terrific view, isn't it?" he said, elbows on the railing. "You can really feel the pulse of the city from here."

"What's the other catch, Tony?"

He sighed. "The, uh, timing of Vachey's showing is a little unfortunate, I'm afraid. And he insists on your being there."

"As long as it's not next week," I said, smiling, then stopped abruptly. "Tony . . . it's not—"

But his look told me that it was.

I grabbed him by the arm and peered at him. "Not Sunday. Tell me it's not Sunday."

"Would that I could," he said sadly.
 

"Oh, Christ. Tony—"

"Actually, it isn't Sunday, it's five p.m. Monday, but you can't get from here to Dijon by five o'clock the same day, what with the time difference, so you'd have to leave Sunday. Saturday night, to be on the safe side. I know it's a nuisance—"

"Nuisance! Tony, I put in for this time off three months ago. You know how—wait a minute, why couldn't I go check out the painting earlier? I could be in Dijon tomorrow. I could be back by the weekend. I could—"

But Tony was shaking his head. "Nobody gets to see the pictures before the showing. That's the deal."

"All right, what about after? I could go in a couple of weeks, see them then."

More head shaking. "No. For one thing he wants you at the opening Monday. For another, we have to make our decision by the end of the following day. You get twenty-four hours to examine it and come to a decision. Otherwise it's off and he goes someplace else with it."

"You said I could examine it to my heart's content," I said bitterly.

"To your heart's content as long as it's inside of one day."

The image of Tony lying crushed and broken on the pavement of Second Avenue, five stories below, flitted briefly through my mind. "Tony, this is absolutely crazy. There are too many conditions."

He surprised me by agreeing readily. "Way too many. Vachey's playing some kind of game; that's obvious. And, look, if you get out there, and you wind up having doubts about the picture, or his motives, or anything else that tells you we ought to keep clear of this, then that's that. Case closed."

"Doubts? Are you kidding? Of course I have doubts. Even if it turns out to be real, how do we know it's not stolen? Who knows where he got it? Or how? I mean, come on, a junk shop? The guy must think we're complete rubes."

Tony let me rant on for a while, but he knew as well as I did what I was really griping about. When I finally wound down, he put a sympathetic hand on my shoulder.

"This is sure screwing up your love life, isn't it?"

"Boy, you said a mouthful," I said ruefully.

* * *

The truth of the matter was that my love life wasn't in any too good shape to begin with. I was in love, yes. With a bright and beautiful woman named Anne Greene. And she was in love with me; I had no doubts on that score. Anything we did together was sheer pleasure. We could talk earnestly for hours, brimming with interest and animation, and then laugh because we couldn't remember what we'd been talking about. On walks, on drives, on bicycle paths, at concerts, at art shows, in bed—as long as it was with her, everything was full of warmth, and laughter, and peace. I dated no other women, and she dated no other men. Not because we had an explicit understanding, but because that was the way we liked it. We'd each found the right person. Why keep looking?

So what's the problem, you say? Your own love life should be that good, you think?

There was, in fact, only one difficulty, one small impediment: We happened to live 6,200 miles apart, give or take a few hundred one way or the other. I was in Seattle, and Anne was in Kaiserslautern, Germany. True, it is possible to have wonderful experiences under those conditions. But it is not possible to have frequent wonderful experiences. Or frequent anything.

On the other hand, it may not be all bad. My friend Louis (the psychotherapist) wondered recently over a glass of Orvieto if I hadn't gotten myself into so bizarre a fix on purpose, to avoid the repetitive, counterproductive conflict between erotic energy and social utility; that is (I think), between love and work. Repressive desublimation, it's called, and apparently it is the grease that makes the wheels of industry and commerce go 'round.

But with all due respect to Louis, I didn't buy it; I'd never given much thought to the wheels of industry and commerce— and I missed Anne like crazy.

Anne was a captain in the U.S. Air Force. She had been something called a community liaison officer, but recently, with the cutting back of European military forces, was made an education officer, responsible for developing programs to help servicemen find their way back into the work force in the United States.

I had met her a couple of years earlier when I was in Europe helping to organize an exhibition of paintings. At the time, my personal life was in shreds. I was in the throes of a miserable divorce; sulky, hurt, and thoroughly down on the female sex in general. Anne had come along just when I needed her and had helped me to see things straight again. During the six weeks I was in Europe we'd become close, and closer still when I left.

Since then we'd spent a fortune in telephone bills, and seen each other perhaps eight times. All right, exactly eight times. Fortunately, I have the kind of job that gets me to Europe two or three times a year, for a week or two at a time, and Anne had taken two long, marvelous vacations with me in the United States. Eight times in two years is once every three months, on the average. About right for getting together with your brother-in-law; a little sparse for relating to your meaningful other.

The trouble was, Anne was as dedicated to her career as I was to mine. And being a fully credentialed Late-Twentieth-Century Male—sensitive, supporting, and enlightened—was I about to suggest that she give up her job and come live with me in Seattle? Not me. Even though I did earn considerably more money than she did. Even though her Air Force career was hardly a "career" if they could switch her from community liaison to educational services overnight, without bothering to ask her opinion about it. Even though she could easily enough find interesting work in Seattle, but what the hell was I supposed to do in Kaiserslautern? No, sensible as such a decision might seem to you—to any right-thinking person—I wouldn't think of bringing it up.
 

Not for a minute.

And so we got along on our once-every-three-months schedule—worried, but not overly worried, about how it would all eventually work out. For the present, it was the best we could do, and we were grateful for what time we did have together. Which is not to say that there weren't problems sometimes— such as the one I had just gotten myself into by volunteering (or did I volunteer? With Tony, you're never sure.) to be aboard a plane to France on the following Sunday.

Sunday, you see, was the day on which Anne expected to find me waiting at San Francisco International Airport at 1:00 p.m. She would arrive then on a military charter flight from Frankfurt, having convinced her superiors that her presence was essential at a job-reentry conference to be held at McChord Air Force Base, near Tacoma, on the following Wednesday. That gave us—would have given us—three crisp, glorious November days to drive slowly up the northern California and Oregon coasts to Puget Sound. We would stay—would have stayed—at inns I knew of, with woodburning fireplaces and huge windows looking out on rocky headlands and crashing surf.

Now I'd be lucky to get back from France by Wednesday night, which would leave just three days for us to be together before she had to fly back to Germany.

Not feeling good about it, I called her from my office at 2:00 p.m., 11:00 p.m. German time. The phone rang twice before she picked it up.

"Hello?"

I knew from the velvety timbre of her voice that the telephone had awakened her. I imagined her pushing herself up on her pillow, short brown hair tousled and warm from sleep. I felt my own voice soften.