Aaron Elkins - Old Scores

He could hardly mistake the implication of this wily ploy: If I rejected the painting, he'd get it. So, if anything, it was to his advantage to let me see the scrapbook. It made sense to me; I hoped it made sense to him.

Apparently, it did. He stepped back into the hallway. "Okay, come on in."

Once inside, he closed the door. "I guess you know what's in it, then."

I nodded. "I think so. Notes and clippings your father kept of his art purchases-starting during the Occupation."

"That's it. Why he kept them all these years-why he kept them in the first place-I don't know. I suppose he figured that some day Julien Mann or someone like him would crawl out from under a rock and start whining about being robbed, and my father wanted to be able to prove he didn't do anything illegal."

No, there had to be more to it than that in Christian's mind. "Then why push me out the window to keep me from seeing it?"

He gazed sincerely at me, man to man. "Look, Chris, I'm not ashamed of anything my father did. But times change, you know? And what people had to do to survive in 1942-it's the easiest thing in the world to… to make it look lousy today. People don't know the way it was. Well, my father had a hell of a lot of enemies, I think you know that, and they'd just love to haul his name through the mud if the stuff in that book ever got to be public knowledge. And that's something I can't let happen. My father's name is the most important thing he left me."

It sounded good, and Christian delivered it in manly fashion, with just the right amount of eyeball-glistening. But it all seemed a little too high-minded to me for the would-be kingpin of Tanzanian cement and New Caledonian seaweed. What Christian had really been trying to do, I thought, was simply to keep Vachey's records to himself, so as not to provoke other claims like Mann's against the estate. And I was betting there was more to it than that; that some of the paintings that Vachey had bought in the forties were still on the walls of this house, or in a vault somewhere, and Christian had plans to sell them. If so, he'd certainly want to hang tightly on to the records of those old transactions.

I told him as much.

He listened, head down, and looked up at the end with his crooked grin back in place. "Well, yes, okay, I admit it, a few of those old pictures are still in the basement, and, sure, I just might decide to put them up for sale. But between you and me, they're junk-seventeenth-, eighteenth-century apprentice stuff. My father gave up trying to peddle them twenty years ago and forgot all about them. I haven't looked at them myself in years. But things are different now, the art market's gone nuts-maybe I'll haul them out and see what I can get."

"I'm sure you will," I said.

"Look, Chris-no offense-but I don't really see where this is any of your business."

"Maybe not. But the Rembrandt is my business-"

"Sure, but there's nothing about it in that book, take my word for it."

"I'd have to see that for myself." When he hesitated, I added: "Otherwise, I go to the police right now."

"Well…" He adjusted his slightly disarranged forelock with a cupped hand. "The fact is, I don't have it, you know?"

"You don't have it?"

"No. Don't get excited, give me a chance to explain."

When I'd tumbled out the window, he told me, he had snatched the volume up from the floor, meaning to take it someplace safer. But I'd started such a racket from outside that he knew others would momentarily be bursting into the study, so he had hurriedly stuck it in the first place that came to hand, a crowded, waist-high bookcase across the room, thirty feet from where Gisele had been telling everyone it was. Then he'd ducked out of the room just in time to keep my would-be rescuers from finding him there.

Five minutes later, when he'd come back, the book had been gone. Someone had identified it despite its location, and had taken advantage of the uproar to remove it. He had no idea who.

He shook his head. "I should have put it in a drawer or something, but there wasn't any time, and I was a little rattled. I mean, you were yelling out there-I didn't know whether you were dying or what."

I fell back against the wall. "Damn." Whether he was telling the truth or not, it was plain that I wasn't going to get to see the book. Another dead end, after all.

"Then I want to see those paintings in the basement," I said.

"Why? The Rembrandt's upstairs in the gallery where it always was."

"I just want to. Let's go, please."

He shrugged. "Whatever you say. I just want to cooperate."

He gestured me ahead of him down the hallway, but first I picked up the telephone in the vestibule and dialed Calvin's hotel. I may, as Tony says, not be the world's swiftest study when it comes to perceiving ulterior motives, but even I knew enough not to head off to the cellar, alone with a guy who'd shoved me out of a second-story window three days before. I wasn't going to give him another shot at me, with or without personal animosity.

"Calvin?" I said, when the hotel clerk had switched me to his room. "It's four-thirty right now, and I'm with Christian Vachey at his house. Just wanted you to know. I'll see you in an hour."

To make sure Christian didn't miss a word, I said it in French. As far as Calvin was concerned, I could have delivered it in New Caledonian, because he wasn't there. But this was for Christian's benefit, and I could see that he got the message.

We took the back stairs to the basement. At the rear of the house downstairs was a cheerless kitchen that hadn't changed much since the seventeenth century: flagstone floors, warped, scarred wooden tables, a huge, stone cooking fireplace, a few rusted, giant-sized cooking implements that looked like torture devices hanging on the soot-blackened walls. It was used for storage now, full of packing materials, paper, and disassembled picture crates. Next to it was Pepin's office, where we'd met for the presentation of the will. Pepin looked up from his desk in surprise, and was motioned by Christian to come along.

The three of us walked through to the front half of the house, past a small alcove set up as a studio with an easel and painting supplies, and then up to a steel door, which Christian unlocked. Behind it was a windowless room with insulated walls, in which thirty or forty glassine-wrapped paintings were neatly lined up in a two-layer wooden framework of carpeted bins.

Christian pointed to a group of ten or twelve wrapped pictures in the upper rack. "You want to unwrap those, Pepin?" To me, he said: "Those are the ones you wanted to see."

"No, I think I'd better see them all, please."

He didn't like it, but he spread his hands submissively and nodded to Pepin. "Do what the man says."

Pepin, predictably, didn't like it either, but he got to work taking off the wrappers and propping the paintings on the floor against the walls of the corridor.

He started with the ones in the lower rack. All were modern- early twentieth century. I thought I recognized some of the artists.

"Isn't that a Gris?" I asked. "And a Delaunay?"

"Sure are," Christian said. "And this one here is a Derain."

Could these be some of the "worthless" paintings de Quincy told me about? But why would Rene Vachey have kept them here in the cellar all these years?

"They must be worth a fair amount of money," I said.

Christian grinned. "I sure hope so."

By now Pepin, working quickly, had come to the paintings in the upper rack-the pictures that the young Rene Vachey had bought in the forties, according to Christian-and begun to lay them out. They were what Christian had said they were: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings of little value, some Dutch, some French, all age-darkened. Most of them appeared to be apprentice studies, many unfinished, the best of them no better than competent. They would have been right at home on the walls of the Barillot, if that tells you anything. They weren't worth the time it took to give them a second glance.