Aaron Elkins - Old Scores

They are talking about the western half of it, from the Place de la Concorde to the Louvre. The other half doesn't get much play in the urban architecture journals. East of the Louvre, the Rue de Rivoli turns abruptly proletarian, becoming, in the space of a single block, a bustling, hustling center of gimcrackery and tourist schlock. Here is where you come when you want to purchase a scarf emblazoned with a map of the Paris Metro system, or when you've broken your gilt model of the Eiffel Tower and need to replace it, or, when you're looking for a good buy in Taiwanese Levi's.

Would you care to hazard a guess in which part of the Rue de Rivoli I found number 89-the address at which Vachey had supposedly purchased the Rembrandt? Correct, but why not, inasmuch as Vachey had never called the Atelier Saint-Jean anything but a junk shop?

The store shared a small, off-the-street arcade with a money exchange, a place that seemed to specialize in used issues of Paris-Match, and a snack bar called Le Snack Bar. L'Atelier Saint-Jean itself had changed its name to Top Souvenirs, which I did not regard as an encouraging sign, and now seemed to specialize in plasticized place mats with pictures of Paris street scenes on them, and miniature, plastic-resin reproductions of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo, and other treasures of the Louvre. There wasn't a piece of original art in the place, old or new.

I asked the clerk if she knew where I could find Monsieur Gibeault.

"Alphonse!" she yelled at the top of her voice, and a moment later a bald, preoccupied man in a dirty yellow shirt came out of a side room, closing the door after himself. He peered at me, rotating a dead cigar stub in his mouth, then took me aside, a few feet from some browsers, and lifted his chin, watching me through narrowed eyes.

"You're Monsieur Gibeault, the proprietor?" I asked in French.

He nodded.

"I'm trying to find out about a painting you sold to a friend of mine a while ago."

"I don't sell paintings." He gestured at the shop. "You see any paintings?"

"I'm sure he bought it here-"

"Not from me. From my cousin."

"Your cousin?"

"He owned the place before me. He sold some paintings, stuff he picked up at auctions. Not me, they're a pain in the ass, not worth the trouble."

My confidence level continued to fall. "Could you tell me where I can get in touch with him?"

He laughed. "Sure, try the Montrouge Cemetery."

"He's dead?"

"As a baked codfish."

Somehow I got the impression they hadn't been close. "You wouldn't know where his sales records are?" Shrug.

"If I could see them, it might, er, be worth something to you."

It isn't the sort of line I'm very good at, and he just laughed some more. He spit some tobacco shreds onto the floor. "What kind of painting was this?"

"It may have been a Rembrandt."

He stared at me. "This guy-your friend-says he bought a Rembrandt here?"

I had to admit, it didn't seem very likely. "Well, it didn't look like a Rembrandt at the time. It was covered with grime-"

But he was laughing too hard to hear, real belly laughs of amusement. He clapped me on the shoulder. "Hey, I'll tell you what. If your friend's interested in some more Rembrandts, send him around. I'll give him a good price, he won't beat it anywhere. Van Goghs too, Michelangelos, you name it."

He laughed all the way back into the side room. "Unbelievable," I heard him splutter as he shut the door. He was wiping tears from his eyes.

If nothing else, I had certainly enlivened his day.

This unproductive encounter had been my first enterprise in Paris. I'd taken a taxi directly from the Gare de Lyon to the Rue de Rivoli. Now I hoisted my shoulder bag, found another taxi, and went to my hotel on the Ile Saint-Louis to check in and drop off my things, telling the cab driver to come back in twenty minutes.

The Hotel Saint-Louis is another one of those quiet, homey, unassuming little places- sans pretensions, as they like to say-at which I've been staying since my college days, but which Tony grumbles are no longer commensurate with my distinguished status as the representative of an important museum. Maybe not, but how many decent hotels are there in Paris, where you are a stone's throw-a literal stone's throw-from Notre-Dame, and yet able to sleep with your windows open for fresh air without getting a whiff of exhaust or hearing a single car all night long? Not many, I can tell you.

I got a top-floor room again (there is something about me that makes hotel clerks send me straight to the attic), unpacked the next day's clothes, and hung them in the closet. Actually, I like garret rooms. There is something about being under the eaves and looking out from dormer windows over the rooftops and chimney pots of an old city like Paris that puts you back a century or so. The shop windows four or five stories below have changed a lot over the years, and the people on the narrow streets are inescapably twentieth century, but the rooftops are right out of Daumier. I could have been looking from a nineteenth-century window onto a nineteenth-century roofscape. Well, I was, but you know what I mean.

But today my mind was firmly in the twentieth century; not the 1990s but the darker time of the 1940s. At four o'clock, in a little over half an hour, I was due at the apartment of Julien Mann, the Saint-Denis man who was claiming that the Rembrandt was no Rembrandt, and that Rene Vachey, Nazi stooge and profiteer, had virtually stolen it from his father fifty years before.

The efficient Calvin had gotten his telephone number for me, and I'd called him the previous evening after talking to Anne.

Getting him to speak with me, even on the telephone, hadn't been easy. I'd had to work hard to convince his wife, first that I wasn't a reporter, and second that, museum curator or not, I had no wish to do him out of a painting if it was rightfully his.

He'd picked up the telephone with undisguised reluctance. I had hoped, of course, that he would come across as an oily shyster who had seen a good thing and jumped at the chance to make a killing. Instead, he had been testy and curt, replying with crabby monosyllables to my long explanation of who I was and what I wanted to talk about. It had been all I could do to get him to agree to see me today, after he got home from his job at the payroll office of the Paris Metro.

Sad to say, he hadn't seemed remotely like a shyster.

The taxi took me north from the island over the Pont de Sully, past the blankly modernistic new opera house at the Place de la Bastille-state-of-the-art, they tell me, but about as cozy-looking as the infamous old prison that once stood there-and then up the Boulevard Beaumarchais, one of those lively streets that is everyone's idea of a Paris boulevard. Green-awninged cafes, brasseries, and restaurants follow one after another, most with calendar-scene tables and chairs out on the pavement. There are hordes of people who seem to have nothing more urgent to do than sit with a newspaper and a cup of coffee or an aperitif and watch the world go by. Even on a murky afternoon like this one, it was captivating.

But a little farther on, the character changes. The awnings thin out. The people do too. The buildings become more stark and functional, and by the time you pass the Gare du Nord and the railroad yards, you are in a crushingly bleak, low-rise zone of light-industry plants-window glass, mattress covers, food processing, electronics-with isolated ten- or twelve-story apartment buildings rising meagerly among them like skeleton fingers. On top of every apartment house is a huge neon advertisement lit in blue or red, even at 4:00 p.m. MINOLTA, the signs say, or MITA, or VOLVO, or SANYO; one towering word per rooftop, creating a weird, sparse forest of twisting neon. They are there to catch the eyes of train passengers coming into Paris. Thus, when you approach from Paris, they're backward: OVLOV, ATIM, ATLONIM. You begin to wonder whether you're in the outskirts of Paris or Smolensk.