Aaron Elkins - Old Scores

"Could we just hold up a minute, Mr. de Quincy?"

"Fuzzy."

"Fuzzy. You're saying the Nazis took these paintings from him, right?"

"Sure did. Confiscated most of his collection. Trumped up some charge or other. Consorting with Jews, something like that." Voluble though he was, de Quincy didn't believe in wasting words just to make complete sentences.

"If that's so, it suggests that he wasn't working for them at all, that Mann's story isn't accurate."

He snorted. "Story's piffle. Vachey was trying to help those Hebrew folk, not hurt 'em. Couldn't stand the Nazis. Fella's all mixed up, take it from me."

I put down my fork. This was what I'd hoped to hear. And it came from a man who had no ax to grind. I felt a tingling in the muscles of my shoulders, as if a weight that had sat on them for a long time had begun to lift.

"So what Clotilde told me is true," I said, more to myself than to him.

De Quincy, chewing, watched me with interest. "Gallery manager? Depends on what she told you."

I told him what she'd said: that Vachey had bought pictures during the Occupation and re-sold them to the Nazis-out of compassion, not avarice-that he'd made no profit and had meant to make no profit, that often the Germans had "paid" him not in money but in worthless paintings they'd forced him to take, or in almost equally worthless Occupation francs.

De Quincy waved a corner of his sandwich until he got his mouthful down. "Story's piffle too," he said.

My shoulders stopped tingling. "But-"

"You happen to know a Swiss dealer named Gessner?"

"I don't think so."

"Zurich. You ought to talk to him sometime. If he's still alive. Bought a bunch of those worthless paintings from Vachey in forty-four. Nice little odalisque by Matisse, couple of Vlaminck still lifes… let's see, Dufy, Rouault, Pierre Bonnard-"

"I don't understand."

De Quincy smiled. "Well, what do you mean by 'worthless'? Depends on who's doing the valuing, wouldn't you say?"

I almost asked him if he'd been talking to Lorenzo, but he quickly explained what he meant. Hitler had detested modern French art so much that he had forbidden the shipment of it into Germany. Thus, when the Nazi "collection agencies" in France found pieces of twentieth-century French art in their hauls, they were unable to do anything with them but try to sell them in a virtually nonexistent French market-or, as in Vachey's case, trade them for art that met the Fuhrer's aesthetic standards. So Vachey was able to buy up, say, a Flinck at negligible cost, trade it for, say, a Matisse from the Germans, and then make a huge profit in the Swiss market, which had remained active through the war. This he did more than once, and according to de Quincy, the proceeds had provided the nest egg from which he'd built his fortune.

"In Switzerland, you see," De Quincy said, "he could get some real money, not the play money they had here during the Occupation."

"Yes, I see," I said woodenly. I saw that Vachey, after all was said and done, had been what Mann had said he was: a parasite who'd fed on his countrymen's helplessness in the most terrible of times.

"Now don't go off all half-cocked," de Quincy said. "My opinion, Vachey was an honest-to-Jesus hero, Chris. Took some real risks-I mean stand-him-in-front-of-the-firing-squad risks-to help people get away before the Nazis got them. Helped them get rid of their collections, helped them get out of the country-"

"And made a killing doing it."

"Sure he did, why shouldn't he? Guy wasn't a professional hero, he was a businessman, what do you expect? I'm telling you, he did a lot of good. More than you know. Lot of sides to the man. Come on, you want to walk through the museum or not?"

I had a final, half-hearted bite of the cooling omelet. "Sure, let's."

But the Louvre is not a museum you walk "through," not unless you have three days to do it. You have to pick your area, and I chose the first floor of the Denon wing, where the main European painting collection was. As we slowly climbed the broad staircase past Winged Victory -the full-size marble version-de Quincy told me about an aspect of Vachey's endlessly varied life of which I'd known nothing.

In the early eighties, it seemed, he had acted as a middleman for the French government, successfully negotiating with shadowy figures in East Germany for the return of a famous ceramics collection that had been looted from a museum in Nancy during the war. This patriotic mission he took on without any payment and without any public recognition. His part in it came out only when the French government minister involved retired and published his memoirs. More recently there had been governmental leaks suggesting that it had been only one of several such delicate assignments Vachey had performed for his country.

"So you see," de Quincy said, pausing to catch his breath at the top of the stairs, "more to the man than meets the eye."

"Amen to that," I said. "Did you stay in contact with him all these years?"

"Not really. Followed his career, of course. Ran into him now and again. Always liked the fella. Something to him."

"Fuzzy, why didn't he invite you to the reception the other night? That gift was really in your honor."

He smiled, pleased. "Did invite me. Fact is, I don't go much of anyplace if it involves sleeping out." He patted his hip. "Ligament troubles. Need to sleep in my own bed. Tell me, what's the Rembrandt look like?"

"It looks good. I think it's authentic; a lot like the one in the Getty, but with a huge plume and a greenish cast in the background. I'm sure it's not listed in Bredius. Does it sound like anything you've ever run into with Vachey?"

He shook his head. "Nope. Wasn't in his collection when I saw it way back when."

"I don't suppose you'd have any idea where he might have gotten it?"

"Nope. All I know is what he said. Junk shop. Knowing him, it could be true."

We walked through the Apollo Gallery, where groups of avid schoolchildren were clustered three deep around cases holding the crown jewels, turned right, and found ourselves at one end of what used to be called the Grande Galerie, and with good reason. Now blandly referred to as Denon Rooms 4 to 8 for touristic ease, these adjacent spaces form a single glorious gallery 1,000 feet long (I know because I paced it once and counted 332 steps), the longest, greatest gallery of art that ever existed, densely lined on both sides with masterpieces of French painting-Watteau, Poussin, La Tour, Fragonard-and a few dozen assorted Italians-Botticelli, Giotto, Giovanni Bellini, for starters-thrown in to avoid too parochial a flavor. The elegant, arched ceiling is punctuated every 250 feet or so by an ornate, marble-columned cupola. At the far end, you go around a crick in the floor plan, and there you are, looking down an additional 300 feet of Flemish, Dutch, and Spanish masterworks.

All this is one half of one floor of one wing. And there are three wings. Some museum.

While we walked slowly through it, pausing occasionally to look at a particular painting, I told de Quincy about the puzzling restrictions that Vachey had placed on both the Barillot and SAM, and about the generally queer goings-on that had followed them.

By the time I'd finished, we'd walked the entire floor-the lengths of four football fields, as an American guidebook predictably puts it-and were sitting on a stone bench at the head of the east staircase, surrounded by El Grecos, Murillos, and Riberas.

"Interesting," de Quincy said when I was done. "What do you make of it?"

"That's what I was going to ask you. What do you suppose he could have been up to?"

He shook his head slowly back and forth. "Got me."

"Look, Fuzzy, I have to come to a decision tomorrow. If you were in my place, would you take the painting?"