Aaron Elkins - Old Scores

A few minutes later, he slid the walls apart and stood doubtfully aside to let us pass. "Touch nothing, please. You'll tell me when you go? I must arm the systems again."

"Of course," I told him.

"Arm the systems, hell," Calvin said as Pepin reluctantly left us on our own. "He probably wants to count the paintings when we leave."

I laughed. "Forget it, it's just his manner. Nothing personal. Come on, let's have a look. Maybe I'll learn something too."

"Looks good to me," Calvin said helpfully.

We'd been at it for half-an-hour. Calvin had listened uncomplainingly, possibly even comprehendingly, to my muttered comments on the paints, the manner of application, the surface crackling, the canvas, the frame construction.

"Looks good to me too, Calvin."

"As good as a Rembrandt?"

It wasn't easy to say. The technical details all seemed to be as they should have been on a genuine Rembrandt. But what did it prove? All of them applied to Flinck too. Same time period, same place, same materials, same equipment. And the same techniques, patiently learned over several years, from the master himself.

I took a few steps back to get away from the minutiae, to try to take in the subtleties, nontechnical and intangible. And the more I studied it, the more I thought I could see signs of that mysterious, brooding power that would bloom later in Rembrandt's career, the singular ability to make the viewer feel that he was looking into the mind, even the character, of the subject. The longer I looked at that worn and dissipated face, the more I seemed to see in it. No doubt about it, that wistful old bum was getting to me.

"I think," I said slowly, "it might be the real thing."

Calvin looked at me with interest. "Yeah? That's terrific."

"On the other hand…" I said.

He shook his head. "I love you guys. There's always another hand."

"It's a judgment call, that's all. I think it's a Rembrandt, but I wouldn't bet my life on it." After a moment, to cheer him up, I added: "Yours, maybe."

"Thanks. Tell me this: So let's say it doesn't belong to Julien Mann- is it good enough to hang in SAM?"

I nodded. "Oh, yeah, it's Dutch Baroque at its finest. Whoever painted it."

"If that's the way you feel about it, then what's the problem? Sign the contract, and we can worry about where it came from later."

"I just told you. I'm not positive it's a Rembrandt."

"Big deal," Calvin said, "you're not positive. You also just told me it's a great piece of art in its own right. Why do we have to say what we think it is or isn't? Can't we just waffle a little, sign the papers, and say thank you? So what if it turns out to be by Flinck or somebody else? We still wind up with a great painting, right? Unless it's really Mann's, in which case we turn it over to him. What's to lose?"

"No good, Calvin. You're forgetting one thing."

"What am I-? Oh, yeah." He settled down. "The restrictions. We have to display it as a Rembrandt."

"So that if it turned out not to be, we'd look like goats no matter how we tried to explain it away-which is just what we've been worried about from the beginning, isn't it?"

"Yeah, but-"

"Look at what Les Echos Quotidiens has already done to us. Not only do they have us accepting the painting, they've got us agreeing that it's a Rembrandt. And we haven't said a word yet."

Over the partitions we heard the voices of Pepin and Jean-Luc Charpentier. Charpentier, it appeared, had come at Froger's request to look at the Leger, and Pepin was delivering the same prissy lecture he'd given us, about not touching anything.

"See?" I said to Calvin. "He picks on everybody."

A moment later, Pepin himself appeared in the alcove, pushing his fingers through his dark, thinning hair. "Is everything all right? You are done?"

"Not quite," I said. "Could we take it down, please?"

He stared at me. "Down?"

"Yes, I'd like to examine the back."

"The back?" He was peering at me as if I'd asked him to be so kind as to slice the picture into eight equal segments. "Why do you want to examine the back?"

"I need to see what's on it. The back of a painting is part of it."

Not really. Any canvas this old had almost certainly been relined, possibly more than once, so that the back that would now be visible wouldn't be the original one. All the same, one finds all kinds of things on it-stickers, numbers, notations, stamps-that can tell something of its history. And this one needed all the provenance it could get.

He scowled at me, then at his watch. "No, I can't, I would have to get a tournevis."

It was a word I didn't know. "Pardon?"

He made a twisting gesture. A screwdriver.

"All right," I said.

"No, monsieur, not all right," he said irritably. "I would have to disconnect an additional alarm system as well. Do you realize how much is expected of me today? I have a great many important things to attend to. I'm extremely busy. Extremely busy," he added, in case I failed to grasp the point.

"Nevertheless," I said firmly.

I'm not really this pushy. Ordinarily, I'm the least assertive, the most accommodating, of men. Ask anyone. Tony likes to poke fun at me for being the only person in the art world without known enemies, something he apparently regards as indicative of a personality defect. My friend, the endlessly helpful Louis, once explained to me over an Italian dinner that my narcissistic, ego-ideal-driven need to be liked had created an unhealthy avoidance of confrontation, particularly of dyadic confrontation. This, he further informed me, had contributed greatly to the failure of my marriage and to several subsequent post-divorce, pre-Anne disasters.

Well, Louis and Tony would both have been proud of me today. I wasn't making any friend of Marius Pepin. But I couldn't help feeling that he was going out of his way to be obstructive, for no reason I could see.

He stared frigidly at me. "Very well, monsieur." He pivoted with military crispness and went off in a huff.

"No, it's you," Calvin observed. "He doesn't like you."

"I'm not too crazy about him either. Something tells me he's not going to put himself out to hurry back here with his tournevis. Why don't we go see how Charpentier's doing in the other room?"

We found him standing before the canvas just the way he had last night: his big head thrown back, his hands behind him, clasping his elbows. He was wearing a scruffy, yellowish-brown tweed jacket with leather elbow patches (to protect against all that elbow-clasping?), a baggy tan sweater, a dull brown shirt with curling collar points, and an ancient, mustard-colored tie. It was the dress of a man who didn't care how he dressed, and he looked a lot more at home than he had in a tuxedo.

He turned his head as we came in, nodding abstractedly when I introduced Calvin. "You heard about Vachey?" he asked, returning to the picture.

"Yes," I said, "it's hard to believe."

His purplish lips curled. "Let's be honest, Christopher. It's a miracle no one killed the old scoundrel years ago." Charpentier was never going to be known as a man who went around with his heart on his sleeve.

I couldn't think of anything to reply. I'd taken a quick liking to Vachey, but all the same I knew what Charpentier meant. Rene Vachey had been a man with a knack-possibly with a relish-for making enemies, and he'd spent a great many years doing it. Inspector Lefevre, I thought, was not going to have any trouble finding likely suspects.

I changed the subject, gesturing at the Leger. "What do you think of it this morning?"

He shrugged. "The same thing as I thought last night, why should it be different?"

"It's authentic? There's no doubt in your mind?"

"Doubt?" Charpentier said. "Are you joking? None whatever, none at all. Everything cries out 'Leger.' Not merely the composition, which can of course be imitated successfully, but the particularities of execution, which cannot. Look, for example, at the shading on the inside of the pitcher, how it is applied more thinly than the white-you see how the ground shows through, and the texture of the open-weave canvas as well? How, in addition, the ground itself makes up the greater part of the white background? What could be more characteristic?"