Aaron Elkins - Old Scores

Everybody still carries baguettes here, but there aren't so many bicycles anymore, and berets are a thing of the past, worn only by Spaniards and Americans-and a few rare mavericks like Charpentier. Add those Neanderthal eyebrows and the rubbery red nose to the rest of it, and he seemed like a throwback, a workman heading back to the job after his midday tumbler of red wine, crusty bread, and cheese.

I was feeling a bit Neanderthal myself, surrounded as we were by hordes of good-looking, well-dressed university students on their way back to class. Twice a day-for morning coffee and at lunch-the students briefly overwhelmed the otherwise quiet Old City, streaming to and from the cafes and sandwich bars. They are very noticeable too, and not just because of their number. French university students are strikingly different-looking from their American counterparts-languid and trendy in expensive bomber jackets and oversized sweaters with pushed-up sleeves, and meticulously groomed and dressed so as to create the impression of being carelessly groomed and dressed. To my discerning American eye they looked more like walking advertisements for Arpels or Calvin Klein than like serious, legitimate students. Where were their ragged cut-offs, for God's sake, their combat boots, their nose rings? Where were their Frisbees?

"Jean-Luc," I said, "did you know Vachey very well?"

"Not very well, no."

"Really? I got the impression last night you were old friends." Old acquaintances, anyway.

"No, no, I reviewed some of his paintings many, many years ago when I wrote for ActuelArt. My remarks failed to please him, I'm afraid."

"Do you mean his show, The Turbulent Century?"

"No. As a matter of fact, I did review The Turbulent Century as well, but, no, I refer now to his own works."

"His own works?"

He glanced at me, scowling through cigarette smoke. "You didn't know he once painted?"

"I had no idea. What kind of thing did he do?"

When we stepped out of the narrow, shaded Rue des Forges and into the sunny, open space of the Place Francois Rude with its fountain and outdoor cafe tables, Charpentier seemed to realize the day was anything but wintry. The beret was snatched off his head with one hand and stuffed in a pocket of his tweed jacket, the muffler was tugged from his neck with the other hand and stuffed into the opposite pocket. It made him look a little less anachronistic, but it didn't do anything for the shape of his jacket. And even in the sunshine, he walked as if he were breasting an Antarctic gale.

"Rene Vachey was an artiste with a purpose," he said, leaving no doubt about his view of "artistes" with purposes. "He believed that the Abstractionists had all but killed art. He wanted painting to return to the figurative Cubism of Braque and Picasso-of Leger, for that matter. And that's the way he painted."

He took an immense pull on the cigarette without taking it from his mouth. A half-inch of it sizzled into ash, drooped, and landed on his lapel. "Well, he was right about Abstractionism, I'll give him that much." He paused to unleash a long gust of smoke. "Painting has been going steadily to hell ever since the 1920s-Mondrian and his damned neoplasticists. Sterile. Nothing but dead end after dead end. You agree, I imagine?"

I did, except that if you ask me, painting's been going to hell for a lot longer than that, ever since Daubigny and his Barbizon group came along, way back in the 1850s.

Sorry, Tony, it just slipped out.

"But of course," he went on, "these reactionary movements have no chance. They're nothing but self-indulgent fantasies, impossible of success. Look at the Pre-Raphaelites-and Vachey was no Rossetti, I can tell you."

"But he was actually good enough to have his own show?"

Charpentier snorted, or maybe it was a laugh. "How good must you be to have a show in your own gallery? It was an exhibition, with all his usual, tiresome fanfare, of works by the small cadre of neo-Cubists in his circle. I had the questionable privilege of reviewing them for ActuelArt."

"Not favorably, I gather."

"They were rubbish. And the six or seven pieces by Vachey himself were laughable-derivative, shallow, pallid, clumsy, uninformed. That is what I wrote, and I was forced to write it again two years later, when he was misguided enough to participate in a second show. Apparently, that review-admittedly somewhat less generous-convinced him that his career lay in the selling of pictures, in which he was already well-established, and not in the painting of them."

He stopped to deposit his cigarette stub in a waste bin. "I have always looked upon it," he said, "as my single greatest contribution to the welfare of art."

We stopped at a student-ravaged sandwich bar for its last two ham-and-tomato sandwiches on not-so-crusty bread, then walked a block further down the Rue Dauphine toward the Musee Barillot, Charpentier lighting up again as we left the bar, and pulling in smoke as hungrily as if he'd been without a cigarette for weeks. In France, they still take their smoking seriously.

"Jean-Luc…"

He turned toward me, sucking on his teeth. "Um?"

"I was just wondering something. I understand that everything points to that painting being a genuine Leger, and yet-well, with what you've told me about Vachey having painted in the Cubist style, well-is there any possibility-"

I was searching for a delicate way to put it to the prickly Charpentier, but couldn't think of any. "- any possibility that the painting is a fake after all?"

The tangled eyebrows drew ominously together. "Fake?"

"By Vachey."

The eyebrows sprang apart. "Vachey?" His jaw dropped. The cigarette, pasted to his lower lip, stayed put. "Haven't you heard one damned thing I've said?"

"Yes, of course, it's just that I can't help feeling-"

He waved me quiet. "I know, I feel it too. Rene was up to something, but what? He was playing a game of cat-and-mouse, how can we have any doubt about that? But with whom?" He walked along without saying anything for a few steps. "And in the end," he said with a meaningful sidewise glance, "did the mouse turn upon the cat and rend it?"

He took the cigarette out of his mouth long enough to use a finger to work at some food stuck between his molars. "All I can tell you is this: "Whatever he was up to, it did not involve a counterfeit Leger. The Violon et Cruche is authentic, Christopher, infinitely beyond the capacities of Rene Vachey. Besides, you must remember that he hasn't painted in more than fifteen years."

"But who's to say when this was painted?"

He shook his head tolerantly, marveling at my persistence. "Tell me, what would you say is the possibility that Vachey himself painted your Rembrandt?"

"Are you serious? None at all. One in a billion."

"Well, then, why is it so hard to believe me when I tell you the same thing about the other? Of course, I realize that you are not a great admirer of Leger's works-"

"I never said-"

"You hardly need to say it," he said, "but even you must admit that his technical command, even in an artistically unfulfilled work like Violon et Cruche, is staggering. The idea that any forger, let alone a sophomoric dauber like Vachey, would be capable of having fabricated it is simply… No, as amusing as your theory is, it's beyond the realm of possibility. I'm afraid we need another one."

We were at the entrance of the Barillot. Charpentier tossed away the cigarette stub and clapped me bearishly on the shoulder. "Come, into the lion's den."

The Barillot, as I've suggested before, was the kind of museum that gives museums a bad name, the kind whose main excuse for existing is that the original donor bequeathed the building-and the collection-to the city and left a modest fund to keep it afloat. There were perhaps three good pieces in the place (four, including the Goya charcoal Vachey had donated after his all-in-fun-no-hard-feelings theft), but it would have been too depressing to hunt for them in the tiny, badly lit rooms jammed with somber, dark paintings, sometimes literally from floor to ceiling.