Aaron Elkins - Old Scores

"Let me do it, Calvin. I'll catch her in the morning, before I go to Paris and hunt down that junk shop. You know what you can do, though; you can get hold of Les Echos Quotidiens and set them straight on our actual position on the Rembrandt." I smiled. "Which is no position at all, of course."

He nodded. "Will do. Tony already asked me to talk to them. The rest of the press too. My instructions are to stonewall. I'm real good at that."

"Tony? When did you talk to him?"

"This afternoon. The Echos Quotidiens people tried to get a statement out of him, and he didn't know what they were talking about." He raised his eyebrows. "He knows now."

"You filled him in on everything?"

He nodded. "Oh, except about your getting sloshed, and sneaking into Vachey's study, and falling out the window. I forgot that part."

"Thank you, I owe you. What did he say?"

"Well, you know Tony; it's hard to fluster him. But he needs to talk to you."

"I need to talk to him. It's eight o'clock," I said, looking at a wall clock. "Eleven in Seattle. If I call him right now, I can probably get him before he goes to lunch." I signaled the waiter for our check.

"Go ahead," Calvin said, "I'll get the check. And if I were you, I'd hit the sack early. You look bushed."

I stood up. "I think I'll do that. Thanks, Calvin." I started for the door, then turned with a laugh. "And thanks again for forgetting the part about Vachey's study."

He grinned back at me. "Hell, he wouldn't have believed it anyway."

I reached Tony at 11:20 a.m. Seattle time. The call was forwarded to him by his secretary.

"Well, well, Chris, how's everything in France?" he asked jovially. "Things going well?"

Tony Whitehead was a man of more than one telephone voice. I recognized this particular persona as the avuncular one that he used when speaking with staff members while important people-board members, donors, journalists-were within earshot. It was meant, I believe, to convey the impression (more or less accurate, give or take the occasional crisis) that we were one big, happy, problem-free family.

"Call me when you're free," I said. "I'll be in the rest of the night."

"I'll certainly do that," Tony boomed. "Wonderful hearing from you, Chris. Keep up the good work."

Sixty seconds later my phone chirped. "Calvin tells me you've run into some problems." He sounded like Tony again, not like Santa Claus. "Sorry to hear it."

"Well, you did tell me it'd be interesting."

"Do they know who killed Vachey?" "I don't think so."

I heard a familiar crik-crak over the line; the sound that my office chair made when it was tipped back. Tony had gone down the hall to make the call from my office. I imagined him leaning back, looking out over Elliott Bay, watching the green-and-white ferries pull into Colman dock.

"Calvin says you like the picture."

"It's beautiful," I told him enthusiastically. "It's a portrait of the old man they used to call Rembrandt's father. It's just about as fine as the one in Malibu, Tony."

"That's saying a lot," he said, and I could hear the suppressed excitement. "So-is it by Rembrandt?"

"Maybe. Probably."

"Not by Govert Flinck?"

"I don't think so, but that's not the main issue anymore, Tony. Now there are Vachey's wartime activities to think about. Even if this isn't the painting Julien Mann's talking about, it's still possible Vachey got it the same way. If he did, I don't think we'd want to touch it… would we?"

"Absolutely not," Tony said without hesitation. "I'd want to see it back where it belongs. "However-" He let out a long sigh. "I want to ask a big favor of you, Chris."

He paused for an affirmative response, but I held my tongue. When Tony skips the flimflamming and tells you right up front that he's about to ask you for a big favor-you can count on it being a big one, all right.

"We don't have to sign for it until Friday, is that right?" he asked when I didn't reply. "Three more days?"

"That's right. Vachey extended the time limit."

"Now, I know you want to fly home tomorrow-no, don't stop me-and I know how long it's been since you've seen Anne, and that she's only going to be here until Saturday, but… well, I'd like you to stay on in France a few more days."

"Tony-"

"I know, and, believe me, I hate to ask it. But this could be the most significant acquisition-"

"If it's authentic. And if it hasn't been extorted from Mann's father or anyone else."

"Right. Exactly. And that's my point. We still have three days. I'd like you to see if you can dig up anything at all on its provenance, look into Mann's claim, find out if there's anything else in the woodwork we need to worry about. Maybe you can find the junk shop where Vachey says he bought it. Go to Paris if you have to… uh, Chris, are you there?"

I was there. I was just wondering whether I ought to mention to Tony that Inspector Lefevre had made it plain that I wasn't leaving France for the next several days in any case, and that I had in fact already learned the name of the junk shop, and had made plans to go to Paris. Hearing this would certainly ease Tony's conscience. On the other hand, it would have been nice to have him thinking he owed me a favor.

It was an ethical dilemma, over which I agonized for almost two nanoseconds.

"Yes, I'm here, Tony," I said stoically. "All right, if you think it's for the best… I'll stick around."

"Thanks, Chris," he said warmly. "I knew you'd come through."

"Forget it." Now he was starting to make me feel guilty. "Anything else?"

"Just one suggestion. You might want to look up Ferdinand Oscar de Quincy and see what light he can throw on things."

I blinked stupidly at the receiver. "Ferdinand de Quincy is still alive?"

De Quincy was the man who had been the director of SAM in the early 1950s, the man who, a decade before that, had supposedly located and returned some of Vachey's paintings to him after they had disappeared eastward with the Nazis, the man because of whom Vachey was giving us the Rembrandt in the first place. It had never occurred to me that he might still be around.

"Yeah, I was surprised too. But it suddenly dawned on me that he was only about thirty in 1945, which would put him in his seventies now, so I asked Lloyd to see what he could find out. And it turns out he lives just outside of Paris."

"But-then why wasn't he at the reception? Surely Vachey would have invited him, surely he'd have wanted to come-"

"I have no idea. Why don't you go find out? He's bound to have information on Vachey. His number's-"

"Wait. Pen. Okay, go ahead."

"His number's 43-54-23-31."

I wrote it on the flyleaf of a Wallace Stegner paperback I'd brought with me to pass the time when things got dull. Needless to say, this was the first time I'd opened it.

After I hung up, I sat on the edge of the bed and stared moodily at the telephone. My mind was still in Seattle, but not on Tony or SAM. I was thinking about the house I rented in Magnolia, about two miles from the museum. Anne would be arriving tonight, and I wanted to talk to her. It looked as if I was going to be stuck here until Friday, which meant I couldn't be back in Seattle until Saturday, which would leave us just a single day together. One day-and no nights; a dismal yield after all those months of anticipation and planning.

But I had an idea for salvaging something. Anne's conference was a one-day affair. It would be over at the end of tomorrow, Wednesday. What if she arranged for a military flight back to Europe tomorrow night? There were plenty of them to England, Germany, and Holland. She could be here in Dijon late Thursday. That would give us Friday together, and Saturday, and even a bonus of Sunday, because Kaiserslautern was only three hours from Dijon, and she wouldn't have to leave until late afternoon. What's more, my time limit for coming to a decision on the painting was the close of business Friday, so one way or another my work would be done the day after she got here. We could go back up to Paris for a couple of days, or rent a car and drive through Provence, or do whatever she wanted.