Aaron Elkins - Old Scores

There comes a time in most foreign trips, especially when things are not going as well as they might, when one craves the solace of one's native food, and this felt like it. From Madame Gremonde's condominium I walked a block to the Champs Elysees, then turned right for two more blocks until I came to the huge, multifloored Burger King. There, surrounded by black- and-white photographs of American movie actors looking curiously Gallic-a tousled Clark Gable with a woebegone and philosophical half smile, a sleepy-eyed Gary Cooper in three-quarter profile, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth as if he were doing an Yves Montand imitation-I made a solitary, satisfying dinner of le chicken deluxe (a double-order), le milkshake au chocolat, and les frites, earning a pitying look from the server when I asked him to hold the mayo and give me some ketchup to go along with the fries.

Afterward, I walked a few steps to a movie theater and watched Kevin Costner emote in dubbed French as Robin de Bois, Prince des Voleurs.

By the next morning a fresh breeze had blown away the murk that had been hanging over Paris. The city looked glorious, and I was full of Yankee optimism and energy, the result, no doubt, of all that fried chicken in my bloodstream. At the hotel I had the standard Parisian breakfast of coffee, rolls, and croissants, and started off on foot for the Louvre, a distance of a mile and a half.

Walking in Paris these days is easier than it used to be, mostly because you no longer have to keep an apprehensive eye on your feet; the notoriously messy dog-droppings (Parisian dogs must be fed a richer diet than those anywhere else) are largely a thing of the past. Seemingly, this is due to the painted white signs on the sidewalks showing an alert-looking dachshund in profile, its nose pointed intelligently toward the curbside gutters down which a cleansing tide of water is flushed several times a day. Beneath the dachshunds, white arrows point in the same direction for good measure, so that even the dumbest dog should get the message.

Apparently they do, because les dejections canines, as the French so delicately put it, are no longer the problem they were. You can safely raise your eyes to look at Paris now.

And on a crisp, sparkling fall morning, Paris really is the most gorgeous city in the world. It has everything: trees, parks, a handsome river, historic bridges, breathtaking architecture. And surely no great city is less overwhelming. Along the Quai du Louvre-along the entire length of the Champs Elysees, for that matter-there isn't a building over nine stories high, and most are the same pleasing, uniform seven floors. Aside from the Eiffel Tower, only a single tall structure is visible, and that is a relatively modest skyscraper off in the distance to the south, beyond the Luxembourg Gardens. In the heart of Paris, unlike the heart of London or Tokyo or New York, you get plenty of sky.

It was a good morning for a brisk pace, and I reached the Louvre in under twenty minutes, but it took me almost another ten to walk the length of the south facade and around the east wing to the new entrance (before it was the world's biggest museum, which it still is, it was the world's biggest palace). Still, I arrived ten minutes early at the place de Quincy and I had arranged to meet: the gleaming, columnar base of the science-fictionish elevator in the new subterranean lobby. There was no sign of anyone who might be de Quincy. The only person who looked as if he were waiting for someone was a gnarly, jug-eared, close-cropped, wide-eyed old codger in a knit sport shirt, double-knit trousers, and Day-Glo orange-and-purple jogging shoes; American, all right, but with Boise, Idaho, or Billings, Montana, written all over him, along with "first goldanged trip to Europe."

I wandered around the big new shop on the mezzanine, peeking over the railing every few minutes for a sign of de Quincy. We had picked the Louvre to meet because de Quincy, who lived on the outskirts of Paris in the picture-postcard village of Sceaux, had said he had errands to run in the city, and why not meet in a museum, and what was my favorite museum in Paris?

He'd been in a hurry to get off the telephone, and I had instinctively said the Louvre, which isn't what you're supposed to say, not if you're a visiting cognoscente. You're supposed to name some charming little museum that ordinary people have never heard of: the Musee Cognacq-Jay, for example, or the Nissim de Camondo. Just as in New York it's bad form to tell anyone your favorite museum is the Met on Fifth Avenue. You're supposed to say the Cloisters, or the Cooper-Hewitt.

But the Louvre is my favorite museum in Paris, and I said so, and de Quincy had been agreeable, and here I was. And there, unless I was mistaken, was de Quincy, a tall, patrician-looking old man in a well-cut double-breasted suit, who was glancing around him-looking for me, I supposed-with some impatience. I know quite a few Americans who've lived abroad for a long time, and there is a certain look they get, an expatriate manner, proud, defiant, and forlorn all at once. And however Italianized or Frenchified they become, there is always an indefinable kernel of something that gives them away as displaced Yanks.

I went downstairs and walked up to him. "Mr. de Quincy? I'm Chris Norgren. It's a-"

"Pardon, monsieur, " he said politely, "je ne parle pas anglais. " He edged away to do his waiting somewhere else.

A few yards away the other old gentlemen still stood there, tugging reflectively on an oversized earlobe and eyeing me.

Could it be? I approached tentatively. "Er, Mr. de Quincy?"

He grinned and stuck out his hand. "Call me Fuzzy."

Well, it had been a natural mistake. With a name like Ferdinand Oscar de Quincy, the image that comes to mind does not include Day-Glo jogging shoes and double-knits. But, it turned out, they suited him perfectly. At a time when it was almost a given that the directors of art museums would come from the cosmopolitan East Coast, be scions of art-collecting families, and have Ivy League degrees, de Quincy had been born on a wheat farm along the Idaho-Washington border (so I hadn't been so far off), and gotten his education at Gonzaga University in Spokane.

He had come to the Seattle Art Museum as a part-time bookkeeper and business manager, developed an interest in art, and gone to the University of Washington in his spare time for a master's degree in art history. He'd enlisted in the Army in 1941, fought his way through France and Belgium in the infantry, and then been transferred to MFA amp; A, where he'd worked for three years, in the thick of the most exciting and successful art recovery operation in history. Afterward, he'd returned to SAM, and when the directorship became vacant, he'd been a shoo-in.

All this I learned inside of ten minutes, in the mezzanine cafe, where de Quincy ordered a croque-monsieur -a toasted ham-and-cheese sandwich-and I had a plain omelet with fried potatoes. (The French breakfast croissant, tasty as it is, is not long on staying power.)

Ferdinand Oscar "Fuzzy" de Quincy was a friendly, lively chatterbox of a man. All I had to do was raise an interested eyebrow or murmur an encouraging monosyllable, and he would happily take the ball and run with it. After the day I'd spent yesterday trying to pry information out of one suspicious, close-mouthed individual after another, he was a pleasure.

He'd read with sadness about Vachey's death, he'd heard about Julien Mann's claims, he even knew that I was looking into Vachey's background, and he was delighted-"just tickled pink"-that I'd sought him out. I'd come to the right man, he assured me.

He explained that he'd been part of the MFA amp; A team that had been assigned to Neuschwanstein, the fairyland Bavarian castle in which the Germans had stored the bulk of their French loot. While there, he'd identified and supervised the return of twelve eighteenth-century French paintings taken from Vachey's personal collection. He'd met Vachey for the first time shortly afterward, and the overjoyed Vachey had talked about repaying him. De Quincy had suggested that he give something to the Seattle Art Museum some time when he-