Aaron Elkins: Old Scores

Anne caught her breath. "Chris, be careful! It's so fragile!"

"Trust me," I said. "But tell me if you hear Pepin coming. I wouldn't want him to have a fit." I picked away a little more.

"Chris-"

"You're right, that's an ear, all right." A bit more judicious scratching and a few more square centimeters of the underpainting emerged. "And an eye."

Anne watched closely over my shoulder. "It's another Leger, isn't it? Or am I wrong?"

"You're wrong," I said. I shook my head slowly back and forth. "My God, have I been dense."

She looked in confusion from the painting to me. "You wouldn't care to tell me what's going on?"

"In a minute. I still need another couple of pieces." I grabbed her hand. "Come on, let's go find Clotilde Guyot."

Madame Guyot hadn't wasted any time in following my suggestion about taking over Vachey's study. We found her there behind a large but nondescript desk. (Christian, true to form, had removed all the furnishings of value.) She was in conference with Lorenzo Bolzano and Jean-Luc Charpentier. Madame Guyot, it seemed, thought that she might be able to arrange the purchase of a painting by Odilon Redon to add to Lorenzo's expanding Synthetist collection, and Charpentier was along to provide counsel.

Lorenzo, an old friend of Anne's as well as mine, leaped sprawling out of his chair to embrace her, then made her take his seat. "Don't worry, don't worry, we were getting ready to leave anyway."

"Is something the matter?" Clotilde asked, clearly puzzled by our barging in.

"There's seems to be a problem with the Leger," I said. Her friendly eyes became more alert, more expectant. "Oh?"

"The gesso's beginning to slip."

Lorenzo's jaw dropped. "Inherent vice!" he exclaimed.

This was not a mere Lorenzoism. "Inherent vice" is conservator-talk for the deterioration of a work due to the use of inferior materials.

"I don't think so," I said. "Not exactly."

"Well, I wouldn't worry too much," Charpentier said, looking at his watch. "These things can be remedied. Leger was not always the most painstaking of preparers, you know." He stood up, joining Lorenzo. "I think our business here is concluded. Madame, you'll let us know if Monsieur Boisson will consider our offer?"

"Of course," she said. "I have every hope." The two men bowed. "We'll find our own way out," Charpentier said.

Clotilde waited until they were gone. "So it's happened," she said. She was bubbling with excitement, her pink face glossy.

I took Charpentier's seat. "It's no accident, is it? That gesso was meant to crumble."

She beamed happily at me. I took it as a "yes."

"That's why the temperature in the gallery was kept so high, isn't it? To destabilize it. That was what Vachey wanted to happen, right?"

"Well, of course."

"What was he doing, settling some old scores?"

She continued to smile radiantly at me. "Tell me, Monsieur Norgren, do you intend to accept the Rembrandt?"

"What? Yes, why?"

"We'd like to have a small ceremony at the signing," she said. "Would five o'clock be convenient?"

I wondered if everyone had as much trouble as I did keeping to the subject with Madame Guyot. "Fine, but right now it's the Leger-"

"You will come, too, my dear," she said to Anne, who replied with a smiling nod, although I wasn't sure how well her rudimentary French was tracking the conversation.

"Madame-" I began, but Clotilde had picked up the desk telephone.

"Marius, will you-ah, Marie. Please tell Monsieur Pepin that the little gala that we have been planning will be held tonight at five. Will you ask him to prepare accordingly? I'm sure he'll need your help."

She hung up and smiled at me. "Now, monsieur, you were saying.. .?"

"I was saying that I'm beginning to understand what's been going on here. The scrapbook-it had nothing to do with Vachey's purchases during the Occupation or any other time, did it? That wasn't what was in it at all. Christian lied to me about it, you lied to me about it-"

"I beg your pardon," Clotilde said. "I did not lie to you about it. I didn't say anything at all to you about it."

"No, but you knew I was on the wrong track, you knew I'd completely misunderstood-"

There was a tap at the glass door, and Pepin put his head in.

"I wanted you to know, madame, that security has been turned off in the northeast wing for a few minutes."

"Why, please?" Clotilde asked.

"It's that damned Charpentier. Now he decides he's interested in looking at the back. I left him with-"

I was out of my chair so explosively it flew over backward. Pepin, startled into immobility, had to be lifted out of the way by the elbows so I could get past him. I ran through the deserted reception area and into the wing with the French paintings. There was no Charpentier. There was no Leger either. The wall where it had hung was bare, the metal supporting bars naked and forlorn.

I stood there agitatedly, trying to think. Charpentier-of course, Charpentier! How could I have failed to see it? I had walked into Clotilde's office and practically handed him the painting. But where was he? What had he done with it? He couldn't have had more than a minute or two alone with it, and he hadn't taken it down the front stairs or I would have seen him. And the back stairs led only to the living quarters and the basement, so there was no-

Christ, the basement! The basement with its capacious old cooking fireplace blazing merrily away, fueled by all that volatile packing material. I tore open the back door and raced noisily down the two flights, nearly pitching headlong down the lower one in my rush. The heavy oak door to the kitchen was closed. I pulled it open.

"Charpentier!"

He was standing with his back to me before the massive stone fireplace, his arms raised, poised to throw the painting into the fire. When I called his name, he twisted his head to glower ferociously at me over his shoulder. Backlit by dancing orange flames, with the painting in his lifted hands, he was like some titanic figure from the Old Testament, like Charlton Heston himself, about to hurl down the tablets from the Mount.

For what seemed an eerily drawn-out time we stared at each other, mute and unmoving. Then, with a grunt, and with more speed than I would have given him credit for, he skimmed thepicture at me, Frisbee-style, but with both hands.. All I could do was fling myself to the side and down, like a batter dropping out of the way of a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball.

The painting skimmed over me and through the open doorway with an ugly, whizzing sound, slammed heavily into the wall of the corridor, and clattered to the flagstone floor.

By the time I got to my feet, Charpentier was advancing with a rusty old kitchen tool he'd pulled down from the wall, probably something made to help turn a spit-roasting ox in the fireplace, but looking distressingly like a medieval foot soldier's pike; a five-foot-long pole tipped with a metal head consisting of a spike and an evil-looking hook. He was a big man, not athletic, but hulking and thick-boned, with a Mephistophelian cast at the best of times, and at this moment he was scaring the hell out of me.

I backed into the corridor, warding him off with upraised palms. "Jean-Luc, don't be ridiculous. You don't want to kill me."

"Yes," he said, "I do."

He did, too. He jabbed the spike at my eyes twice, first a feint and then a sudden, vicious thrust that was all business. I jumped back, managing to deflect the pike with my forearm, and stumbled into the corner of the corridor, floundering against some lengths of wood standing on end. Most of them went rattling to the floor, but clawing behind me with my other hand I got hold of one and brought it out in front of me.

Compared to that pike it wasn't much: about three feet long and the thickness of a piece of one-by-two lumber, probably part of the bracing for a picture crate. I brandished it in Charpentier's face like a cop's baton to keep him off, but he swept it angrily aside with the pike and closed in. I feinted at his face, then jabbed him in the abdomen with the wood, just below the end of his breastbone, but it was a tentative thrust, and mistimed besides. It occurred almost off-handedly to me that this was the first time I had ever used a weapon on a fellow human being-on any living thing bigger than a housefly-and it wasn't my kind of thing. The savage exultation of combat was not raging in my veins. I didn't want to hurt Charpentier, I didn't want to fight him. All I wanted was out.