Aaron Elkins - Old Scores

She still had hold of me. I patted her hand clumsily. "Madame-"

"So you see, he's not so wonderful as you think, is he? Oh, yes, and I could tell you a few other things too."

She used my arm to push herself ponderously up. Luckily, I saw it coming, or we both might have wound up on the floor. She leaned heavily against the glass doors to Vachey's study.

"Do you see that book, the blue one on its side, on the end of the shelf there? The fat one? Wouldn't you like to know what's in it?"

"Actually, madame, I think I'd better-"

"I'll tell you, monsieur. The private record of all his 'great discoveries,' nothing less. You follow me?" Her eyes had turned cunning now, and mean. "All of them. Where they really came from, what they really are. Yes, that's right." With a drunk's malevolent snigger she held up a key she'd dug out of her sequined purse. "You see what I have?"

The key scratched clumsily at the door plate and found the slot. The tumblers turned. The door opened slightly. "Come, I'll show you. Don't be afraid."

Rude or not, it was past time to get out of there. I put on an awkward dumb show of seeing someone I knew near the bar, excused myself, and fled.

The truth is that I had come within a hair of taking her up… his "great discoveries"… where they really came from, what they really are. If Gisele knew what she was talking about, which was hardly a sure thing, everything I needed to know might be right there in that book. All I'd had to do was walk through that door with her and find out. But that kind of unethical adventuring is out of my line. I don't believe in prying uninvited into other people's offices, however virtuous the ends, and, to be honest, I don't have the stomach for it.

I mean, what if I got caught?

As you can imagine, the conversation hadn't done much to ease my mind. I slipped back into the gallery to look at the Rembrandt again. The longer I looked, the fishier it got, but I attributed that to the effects of Madame Gremonde and the cognac. Still, it made me nervous, and I decided again to leave it for tomorrow when I would be both fresh and sober. For now, I wanted to see how Charpentier was doing with the Leger.

Violon et Cruch. A relatively straightforward painting, as Legers go, about two feet by three, of a violin and a jug on a small table against a gaudy background of geometric patterns; squares, diamonds, circles, rectangles. I didn't have a clue as to whether it was real or fake, or good or bad. My impression-and that's all it was in this case; not even a guess- was that it wasn't a bad picture, presuming, of course, that you liked Legers. The colors were bright, the lines clean, the perspective attractively screwy, and the objects entertainingly distorted.

It seemed to me, in fact, to be a rather happy, even comic, picture, but you could never tell that from the sober, expectant group standing in front of it and taking up almost the whole of the alcove in which it hung. They were, I gathered, hoping to be in on a further exchange between Vachey and Charpentier.

The two men stood in a cleared space in front of the painting, Charpentier studying it down his nose, his head thrown back, his arms behind him, hands clasping elbows. Vachey stood beside him, radiating confidence. When I came in, I got a little smile from him.

After a minute or two Charpentier let a long, noisy snort out through his nose, brought his arms from behind him, and reclasped them in front the same way, each hand on the opposite elbow.

"So," he said.

"So?" said Vachey.

Charpentier looked at him with surprise. "You want to hear now? Here, in public?"

"Why not? What do I have to be afraid of? I already know what it is."

"All right. Well, you happen to be correct. I congratulate you. Without doubt, it comes from the hand of Fernand Leger."

No one said anything, but you could feel a spark crackle through the room. In a corner I saw Froger looking as if he didn't know whether to yip for joy or to weep.

Vachey smiled at Charpentier, so self-assured-or self-controlled-that not a glimmer showed through of the relief he must have felt. I was impressed. Nobody can be that sure of a painting.

"Not a very good one, however," Charpentier said.

Vachey caught his breath, as if he'd been punched in the chest, then responded hotly. "Not a-not a very good-how can you-"

"Well, what do you expect me to say?" Charpentier out-growled him. "Do you want the truth or don't you? The composition is unsure, the handling of the oils lacks his finest sensitivity, the whole is tentative and unemphatic. It is experimental. Surely, you can see that for yourself. I should say it was done shortly after the war, when Leger was, shall we way, feeling his way toward the more explicitly figurative tradition of his later years. I'd put it at about 1918, or perhaps as late as 1920. It may-"

"Unemphatic!" Vachey burst out. "Tentative? I can hardly believe you seriously… Just look at it… And you call yourself a-" He choked on his words.

"You commissioned my opinion, monsieur, and you have it," Charpentier said sharply. "I don't propose to argue with you about it."

Vachey glared bitterly at him, eyes glistening, mouth clamped shut.

"Now look, Rene," Charpentier said, unbending just a little, "what we have here cannot be considered a major work by any stretch of the imagination, but as an addition to Leger's known oeuvre, it's not without interest and not without value. If that isn't good enough for you, get someone else's opinion."

Vachey looked as if he wanted to fight it out, but apparently thought better of it.

"Thank you, Jean-Luc," he said stiffly. "Is there anything else you can tell me?"

"Certainly, but not now. I would need more time with it."

Vachey nodded, stone-faced, but after another moment the smile crept back into place, a little crooked now. "Well, the reputation of Jean-Luc Charpentier remains intact. No one can accuse him of hesitating to speak his mind."

"You have a reputation too," Charpentier shot back. "Don't forget my fee."

Vachey joined in the mild laughter that followed this. He was about to say something more when he was stopped by a commotion. Gisele Gremonde stood near the entrance to the alcove, listing and slovenly, her wig askew.

"You all think he's so wonderful, don't you?" she said.

"Now, Gisele," Vachey said.

"The generous Rene Vachey," she said, her voice swelling. "The virtuous Rene Vachey."

Before she got herself fully in gear I slipped out. Once had been enough.

I don't think I consciously meant to return to Vachey's study, but that's where I wound up; in the isolated bay that fronted it, before the glass doors. The metal bar that slid into the doorframe when the key was turned was still withdrawn. The doors were still unlocked.

Thirty feet away from me lay the thick blue book, seductive and attainable. I peered at it through the glass, irresolute and waffling. Believe me, I was telling the truth before. Skulking uninvited into someone else's office to pry into his private affairs is not something that comes naturally to me. The right course of action, I knew all too well, was to walk away from there and confront Vachey himself about the painting. But I honestly doubted whether I'd get a straight answer. And whatever he told me, could I believe him?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had an obligation, to myself and to SAM, and maybe even to art itself, to see if that book had anything to say about the Rembrandt. Or so it seemed after the two cognacs and the four (five?) glasses of wine I'd had that evening.

I shot one quick look over my shoulder, turned the handle, and walked in. Skulked in.

This time I didn't worry about the Aubusson. I went directly to the pair of painted eighteenth-century bookcases that stood against the wall behind Vachey's chair. The book lay on its side, next to an intricately tooled set of volumes, on the second shelf of the case on the right, within arm's reach of the chair. It was the blue looseleaf book Vachey had had open when I'd come to see him that afternoon, and as Madame Gremonde had said, it was evidently a scrapbook of some kind, with tag ends of newspaper clippings poking out at the edges of pages made curly and stiff by glue.