Starry Nights (10 page)

“You'd think that's the sort of thing that might come up though.”

“It's coming up now. And I came to you first since you've always liked my art. My great art.” It's as if Max is prodding me, poking me in a hunt for soft spots. Pointing out that I've been nice to him, then twisting his own words about great art back on himself. “And I thought you might want to introduce me to your mother so I can resolve the matter with her.”

My mother is focused on the sun-damaged Renoirs right now, so if I bring Max to her with some spurious claim, she'll have a fit. She'll berate me for not having done the legwork myself. I walk to the stairwell and motion for Max to follow me. “Show me the papers first,” I say, hoping I come across as tough and steady. But inside a queasiness sets in. I don't want him to take her away. I don't want Clio to leave, and even though I hardly believe the painting is his, I can't take any chances.

“It was ours. It was stolen during the Nazi occupation in 1942, and we've been searching for it since then.”

Provenance.

I curse silently. To be sold, shown, or exhibited a painting must have a traceable history and the owners must also prove its whereabouts during the Nazi era, when hundreds of thousands of paintings were looted. My mother conducted a thorough vetting on
The Girl in the Garden
already, but all provenance claims are taken seriously. Max reaches inside the folder. Using only the tips of his fingers to handle them, he shows me a series of papers claiming his family bought the painting from Bonheur's family before the Second World War. He leans closer to me and his breath smells like heavy rose perfume. He smells like what I imagine the girls at their vanities in those Renoirs smell like. “She, the girl, was my great-great-grandmother. We bought the painting to protect her virtue.”

“That's just a story,” I say, shaking my head and repeating the words my mother said to me. But the story of two artists in love with the girl—with Clio—feels more true every night.

“I would like to show Ms. Garnier the documents.”

I don't want to believe him, but the documents look as real as any others I've seen. Since I'm not one to authenticate records, I take Max to my mother's office, where he introduces himself as Maximillian Broussard and makes an impassioned case for his family's ownership of
The Girl in the Garden
. “As you can see, we still feel a great responsibility to guard her reputation, even now.”

“Mr. Broussard, we have researched this painting's ownership thoroughly, but we treat provenance claims quite seriously and I will certainly look into this,” my mother says, a cool veneer
masking what must be a roiling sea inside. He leaves copies of the documents with my mother, and she tells him she will reach back out to him tomorrow after she confers with her board. “Julien, can you show Mr. Broussard out?”

I guide him upstairs, out to the floors and to the exits. “I am sorry to be the bearer of such bad news, but I am sure you understand family obligations of this sort,” he says.

I say nothing as the crowds move by.

He leans closer and speaks in a low voice, the cloying rose perfume hanging heavily near me. “But some girls can just be trouble, and they shouldn't be let out.”

It's as if all the sound were vacuumed up, as if all the visitors became clay figures, stuck in an animated pose, and it's just Max and me. This guy who seems to know more about a painting than he should. A guy who's been watching me and watching her.

I'm stuck for a moment, the soles of my boots trapped by my own shock, as I watch him walk away from the museum. But when he heads across the street, I follow him. He settles back onto the green-slatted chair in front of his easel, pushes up the cuffs on his sleeves.

When I see his hands I nearly gasp. His fingers are curled inward, the nails scratching his palms, bent up and seized.

Like Renoir's.

Then he cracks his knuckles, and turns his TEN EUROS sign around. His hands are back to normal. Young, flexible Max's hands.

Clio's words about the ghosts of great artists ring through me.
Though you'd think they might visit museums too.
What if she
wasn't joking? Maybe the ghost of Renoir is inhabiting Max the street artist?

I walk over to Max as he reaches for his pencils. I turn the other green chair around, the one his caricature subjects sit in when drawn. I plunk myself down.

“Dude, you're going to have your picture drawn?” he asks, and he sounds like Max again, like the guy who draws exaggerated sketches of tourists.

“What was the deal with that back there?”

“What back where?”

“Hello? In the museum?”

“I've been here the whole time. What are you talking about?”

“You were just on my tour. You had all those documents from the painting.”

“I don't know what you've been smoking, but can I have some of it?” Max laughs. The dour boy he was a few minutes ago has vanished.

I stand up and run a hand through my hair. I mutter something about needing to leave, then walk across the bridge, trying to make sense of this newest wrinkle. Just when I settle into the idea that living art is my life, I learn that ghosts might be real too. The rose perfume smell, the hands—are those signs of ghostly possession? My phone rings, and Bonheur's name flashes on the screen.

I answer, and am about to launch into the story of Max because I have a hunch Bonheur believes in ghosts.

But he goes first. “I literally just finished my final test for the
bac
, when I picked up Sophie's message.”

“Congrats on finishing your exam,” I say, needing to skip past details like
le bac
and his quirky sister. “Listen, this guy I know showed up today on my tour trying to claim—”

“Weird curl on his forehead?”

I stop walking. “You know him?” I duck into the doorway of pharmacy that promises to cure all manner of headaches.

“I saw him walking up and down our block the other afternoon. Seemed fishy. Since Sophie finished classes before I did, she's been keeping tabs on him during the days. He's mostly outside the museum, but she found where he forged the papers earlier today.”

I pump a fist in the air. “Yes! I knew they had to be fake. I can't believe you guys saw him do it.”

Color me impressed. I didn't know Bonheur or his sister had a penchant for spying. The thought crosses my mind briefly that Bonheur could be tricking me. But I trust him. I tell him what Max said at the museum.

“I didn't think he'd get to the museum so quickly, but he moves fast,” Bonheur says. “Let me see if Sophie's still there, where he doctored those papers. Hold on just a sec.”

My head is swimming as this painting becomes a ripple in a pond that won't stop. Each movement it makes spreads. When Bonheur comes back on the line, he gives me an address.

“Sophie will meet you there in twenty minutes. I can be there in forty-five. And listen, bring that calf you won at the party.”

“Why?”

“You never know when Muse dust might come in handy.”

I text my mother that I'll miss my final tour of the day and that she'll need to have someone fill in for me, and I exit the Metro in the Marais to find Sophie. The address Bonheur gave me is on rue des Rosiers. I pass familiar shoe shops selling short boots with high heels, stores hawking expensive tailored shirts for men, and the Jewish deli housed in an old dress store that still has the sign
LES JOLIES JUPES
in blue mosaic tiles above windows now full of rugelach and challah bread. At a corner where three roads converge, people crisscross and lean away from the tires of tiny cars shoehorning their way through the narrow lane.

I walk past a falafel shop. It's where Simon spends many evenings, holding court at one of the red-vinyl booths as friends come and go. I scan the open front, looking for his familiar shock of dark blond hair and slouched-back leisurely command of a patch of this eatery, but he's not here. As I walk and look at addresses, I send him a quick text to see if he'll be around later.

I reach my destination, checking the number above the door against the one on the paper I'm still holding. They match. I've arrived at a vintage shop, the kind with a pastiche of vendors peddling black lace skirts alongside silver tea sets next to sky-blue vanities and lemon-yellow dressers. I pull on the handle, but the door is locked, and the sign says BE BACK IN FIFTEEN MINUTES. I'm about to call Bonheur when the door is pushed open.

“Shh.” It's Sophie.

I step inside.

“Want a bite?” Sophie holds out a falafel sandwich wrapped in wax paper. The pita pouch is stuffed with tomatoes, purple cabbage, cucumbers, and fried chickpea patties. Tahini threatens to slide down the bread. “Messy, I know,” she says. “But so freaking delish.”

“Not hungry, but thanks.”

“Seriously.” She thrusts the sandwich at me, but I decline. “Have you had them? You will never have anything better in your life.” She takes another bite, tearing off a hunk of the falafel sandwich, then wipes off her hand on a napkin and offers to shake.

She seems calm and steady, and I feel unmoored. “Did you break into this shop?”

She shifts her free hand back and forth in a so-so gesture. “I hid behind a dresser when they put the rugelach out.” Sophie points to the Jewish deli. “Cass can't resist rugelach, so she took off. She won't be back for another ten minutes, prob.”

“Cass who?”

“Cass Middleton.”

“Did you just say Middleton?”

“Duh.”

“As in
the
Middletons?”

“Double duh.”

Oliver and Cass Middleton are notorious, the father and teenage daughter pair of British forgers who conned the art world a few years ago, pulling off magnificent fakes. They fooled art historians, curators, and gallery owners across continents and far into the vaunted halls of auction houses in London and New York, of collectors in Stuttgart and Kyoto, and of museums in St. Petersburg, Boston, Madrid, and here in Paris too. They were very nearly caught in a scandal involving a fake Gauguin a year ago, but there wasn't enough evidence so the case was dropped. It had been widely rumored that they'd resurfaced in France, but this is the first I've heard of where they landed, here in a vintage shop in the Marais.

“Great. So we've just broken into the Middletons' shop and you're eating falafel.”

“Well technically, Julien,
I'm
the one who broke in. But c'mon. Let's go to the back.” She wraps the remaining bits of her sandwich into the wax paper, balling it up in her hand and tossing it into a trash can by the counter.

The store is large and haphazardly laid out with meandering paths through the goods, like a maze for rats. We walk and the store stretches back, offering up jewelry boxes stacked on bureaus with gilded mirrors, next to hats in pastel hatboxes and retro purses arranged on velvet couches.

Sophie points to a coffee-colored door, marked with peeling
paint and a long scratch near the keyhole. “See that door? It's locked. But that's where the guy was dummying up the papers. Trying to claim that painting was his when it's been in our family the whole time.”

Sophie snorts, and she sounds so indignant.

“Why is this so important to you?” I ask her. “I mean, I know it's your family's painting. But is that all there is to it? Why do you care so much, Sophie?” I'm not averse to snooping in a back room for evidence of forgery; I can't stand forgers, but I know why the painting matters to me personally. I want to know the raison d'être for Sophie and her family, and since the painting was a gift to the museum, it's not about money. “You're asking me to break into a room. Tell me why this is so important to you.”

She rolls her eyes. “Sheesh. Now, Julien? You want to go through all my reasons now?”

“Yes. Now.”

She counts off on her index finger. “One. Because of Suzanne Valadon. My great-great-great-however-many-greats. She always believed anyone could make art. And I believe that too. So that's why Bonheur and I call ourselves the Avant-Garde, like an art society, to keep that idea alive.”

“Fine,” I say, because I'm cool with art societies. The history of art is sprinkled with groups of artists banding together around an ideology or a goal, from architects evangelizing new ways of building to painters trying to resurrect the past. “Her
artistic politics
as Bonheur said. Gotcha. What else?”

She adds in the middle finger to the count. “Two. Because she
asked our family to keep that painting safe because of the curse on it.”

“Wait. There's a curse on the painting?” I ask, but perhaps that's why Clio is trapped—because the painting is cursed.

“Obviously. Suzanne said there was a girl in it. That's why we had to keep it away from Renoir's family all these years. To keep the girl safe.”

Valadon and Renoir. Once contemporaries, then enemies. That's the connection I was seeking when I researched Bonheur's home. “Why would they be enemies?”

“Because Renoir believed art and inspiration was only for great artists. Valadon didn't, and the Muses don't either. They believed that one day there would be an age of great artistic creation and expression. For everyone.” Sophie holds her arms out wide, as if she were parting the artistic seas.

“So there's a curse on that painting because Valadon had some inclusive view of art and Renoir was an elitist? Well, that's all I need to know. Let me just get out the crowbar I keep in my backpack to break into this room.”

“There's one other little teensy, tiny detail.” She points exaggeratedly to me. “That would be the inspiration part of the whole shebang. The whole human muse thingamajig. Muses have always been eternal, but when the first human muse arrived on the scene—humans, who live, love and die and so on—that would mark the start of this great age of artistic expression.” She taps me now with that index finger. “You, doofus. You.”