Aaron Elkins - Old Scores

On leaving the Galerie Vachey I went back to the Hotel du Nord and called the prefecture of police to let them know that I would be in Paris overnight, staying at the Hotel Saint-Louis. I left the message with a clerk, getting off the line before Lefevre could come on to hector me about keeping my nose out of official police matters. Not that my Paris plans had any direct relation to Vachey's death. I was going there to see what I could learn that might be relevant to the Rembrandt, and that was all. If I did happen to find out something that seemed pertinent to the murder, I would pass it right along to the inspector, braving the abuse I would no doubt receive for my trouble.

I threw a change of clothes and some toiletries into an overnight bag, stopped at the hotel desk to tell them I'd be back late the next day, and walked three blocks along the Avenue Marechal-Foch to the railway station, where I was twenty-five minutes early for the 12:16 train for Paris. There wasn't time for lunch in the crowded buffet, but I went downstairs to where the coffee bar was, to get a quick double-espresso (I'd been away from Seattle too long; my blood was starting to thin) and a ham-and-cheese-stuffed croissant. Taking them to a circular stand-up counter with room for four, I glanced up at the tall, stooped, balding man across from me. We both spoke at the same time.

"Lorenzo! I thought you'd gone back to Florence."

"Christopher! I didn't know you were still here."

"Yes," I said, "I'm still trying to decide what to do about the Rembrandt. But what about you?"

"As long as I'm here in France- ah, mi scusi, signora -I thought I would visit some dealers. You know, I'm- scusi, signore-"

When Lorenzo Bolzano spoke, arms and elbows were likely to fly anywhere. The people on either side of him scowled at him, gathered up as much of their drinks as hadn't been spilled, and went elsewhere, muttering.

Lorenzo, grandly unaware of their withering glances, continued: "You know, I'm making some big changes in the collection, Christopher."

"Oh?" The "collection" was the great assemblage of paintings, rich in Old Masters, that had been begun by his father, Claudio, a man who made Rene Vachey seem almost like a penny-ante dabbler.

"Yes, I want to develop some real depth in the Synthetists. What do you think?"

What did I think? I thought it sounded like Lorenzo. The Synthetists-or Symbolists or Cloisonnistes-were a school of French artists who rejected naturalistic interpretation for a more "expressive" style in which objects were represented by areas of flat, brilliant color bounded by heavy swaths of black. Open-minded though I am, I've never been able to make much sense of them. They were Lorenzo's cup of tea, all right.

"Jean-Luc Charpentier is helping me. We're off to Lyon today to look at an Anquetin and a couple of Bernards." He poured the last of his Orangina into a paper cup, sipped from it, and smacked his lips. "It comes at a good time, you know. I finally managed to sell off those two Bronzinos, remember them?-brr, so cold, so formal-so I can afford to expand in other directions. When are you coming to Florence, Christopher? I want you to see."

The idea of finding Bronzino's elegant, exquisitely finished figures and limpid, enameled colors replaced by the turbid mush of Redon and company was enough to make me shudder. Lorenzo's discriminating father, I imagined, would be turning over in his grave about now. Of course, this is not to say that Claudio Bolzano had not been been lacking in certain respects. He had been a crook and a murderer, for example. Lorenzo, for all his nuttiness, was as honest and open as anyone could be.

"I'd like to do that, Lorenzo. Can I ask you about something else?"

"Sure, ask."

"It's about Vachey-"

His mobile face darkened. "Ah, Vachey. How terrible."

"You've bought a fair number of paintings from him, haven't you?"

He nodded, sipping the Orangina.

"Look, you're aware that I've got good reason to think there might be something fishy about this Rembrandt-it might not even be a Rembrandt. What I want to know is: Have you ever had any reason to doubt the authenticity of anything he sold you? Could you always rely on his attribution?"

Lorenzo's coffee-bean eyes gleamed; I had given him the kind of opening he loved. "But wherein does an attribution lie?" he asked in his rhetorical singsong. "Entirely in the perception of the attributer, no? Ah-ha-ha. Your question presupposes a simple dichotomy of possibilities that are inherent in the object-authentic or inauthentic, and nothing else, yes? And yet, surely you would not deny that the levels of attributional certainty are unlimited, and that they pertain more to the artificial and predetermined constructs of the attributer's perspective-"

I let him warm up long enough to allow me to swallow some of the croissant, then held up my hand. "Lorenzo, believe me, I'd like nothing better than to argue this out with you, but I have to catch a train in a minute. You know what I mean: Did he ever knowingly try to sell you a fake?" I drank some coffee. "Or unknowingly, for that matter."

The struggle was apparent in his face. Answering a yes-or-no question with a yes or a no didn't come naturally to Lorenzo. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down. "No," he said, practically sweating with the effort.

"Do you usually run your own tests on the objects you buy?"

"Certainly not. You don't need tests if you know what you're doing."

Maybe not, but did Lorenzo know what he was doing? In all the years I'd known him, I'd never resolved that question to my satisfaction. As a professor of art criticism and as a collector, he demonstrated formidable breadth. On the other hand, if you really believed that there wasn't any difference between fake and genuine, then how were you supposed to tell one from the other? Someday I'd have to pursue that with him.

"Once, years ago, my father began to have questions about a Ferdinand Hodler we'd gotten from Vachey," he admitted.

"They were unsubstantiated, as it turned out, but Vachey offered at once to take it back, without hesitation. This was five years after it had been purchased. So I think we can say he was a man of honor, in that regard at least."

Maybe yes, maybe no. A willingness to take back a dubious painting didn't say much one way or the other. Art dealers necessarily work hard to protect their reputations. They flinch from even the insinuation that a fake has ever passed through their hands. Rather than let the issue publicly arise, they will leap to refund money or make a quiet exchange at the first sign that a buyer is beginning to have doubts.

Naturally, that doesn't mean the next pigeon won't get stuck with it.

But at least I knew that Lorenzo and his father, who between them had been buying from Vachey for three decades, had never found anything, explicit or otherwise, to link Vachey with a fake, and that was something.

"However-" Lorenzo said, and I knew by the quickening of his voice that our descent into the concrete was over; we were off and running again, Lorenzo-style. "However, doesn't the very framing of your question assume, a priori, the existence of a unidimensional pole of reality entirely at odds with the precepts of Einstein's theory of the unified field-"

I was saved from the unimaginable consummation of this thought by the appearance of Jean-Luc Charpentier, who dragged Lorenzo off for the Lyon train. I waved them on their way, gulped the last of my croissant, and ran for the train to Paris.

The Rue de Rivoli is one of Paris's great avenues, a broad and gracious thoroughfare bordering the Louvre and the Tuileries, designed under Napoleon and completed in the reign of Louis-Philippe. Elegant, block-long porticoes front massive, classical buildings crowned with striking mansard roofs. The arcades are crammed with smart shops, bookstores, and art galleries, and three of the world's most stately hotels-the Crillon, the Inter-Continental, and the Meurice-front it within three blocks of each other. Architectural historians generally describe this pleasing, harmonious boulevard as one of the triumphs of nineteenth-century urban design.