Aaron Elkins: Old Scores

Lefevre listened skeptically. "And Vachey knew this?"

"Vachey planned it. That's why he ordered the gallery kept so warm. Otherwise it could have taken months for the gesso to start breaking up. But he didn't want it to happen later, he wanted it to happen right when it was getting the most publicity-during the two weeks of the exhibition. And the way to do that was to turn the heat up. The warmer it was, the faster it would deteriorate." I shook my head ruefully. "I noticed right away that the temperature was too high. Damn, I should have figured out what was going on."

Actually, I didn't really believe that anybody could have figured out what was going on, but I thought Lefevre would appreciate thinking that I'd missed something obvious.

"And to what end," he said, "would Vachey go to so much trouble?"

"To make a fool of Charpentier. The gesso would come off in the middle of the show, followed by consternation and disbelief, and accompanied by loads of publicity. And when the experts got a look at the painting underneath, they would see beyond a doubt that it had been made in the last few years-which would mean that the overpainting couldn't possibly be from Leger's time. After the way Charpentier had come on about its being genuine, he'd be finished; his name would be a joke."

Through a shifting veil of cigarette smoke, Lefevre appraised me. "And all this is your own rendering of the way it is? Or is there perhaps some factual corroboration?"

"Factual-?" I laughed. "Well, there's the fact that Charpentier ran down here and tried to burn the thing the minute he heard about the gesso slipping. And there's the fact that he did his damnedest to do me in when I caught him at it."

He picked a shred of tobacco from his lip. "No, no, Mr. Norgren, these things support the hypothesis that Charpentier wished to keep the underpainting from being seen, yes; they are hardly proof that he murdered Rene Vachey."

"Well, no, but there are other things-"

The telephone on Pepin's desk chirped. Lefevre picked it up. "Yes, put him through."

He was on the telephone for two or three minutes, saying little, but issuing brief, inspectorish queries: "How? Where, exactly? When? What procedure have you followed?"

In the meantime I was trying to arrange my thoughts. Lefevre was right; I didn't have any proof that Charpentier had killed Vachey, but I had enough collateral evidence to sink a battleship. What I needed to do was to put it in cogent form. With my head still pounding, that was proving hard.

Lefevre gave a few brief commands over the telephone and hung up. "Charpentier is dead."

"Suicide?" I said automatically, less a question than a statement. It was odd. I hadn't given a moment's speculation to where Charpentier had been going or what he'd intended to do, and yet the news was so unsurprising it was almost as if I'd already heard it. I guess I'd been able to read that private, cloudy expression better than I'd thought.

"Yes," Lefevre said. "He was in his room. They knocked, they demanded entrance. And they heard a shot." He shrugged. "No more Charpentier." He was looking very thoughtful.

"Ah," I said. I wasn't feeling thoughtful. I was waiting to see what was coming next.

"The weapon with which he killed himself is a 6.35mm Mauser, the kind of thing that is called a pocket pistol in America, I believe?"

He was asking the wrong person about handgun terminology, but I thought I knew what he was driving at. "The same one that killed Vachey?" I asked.

"I have no doubt it will prove so. It's not a weapon one sees very often any longer." His Gauloises were lying on the desk, and he started to slip one out, but changed his mind and put them in his pocket instead, then cleared his throat and stood up abruptly.

So, Mr. Norgren, it seems that once again you've been the inadvertent agent of justice." He tucked in his chin and made some more gargly noises. "Thank you for your efforts."

I didn't know about the "inadvertent," but I wasn't going to do any better than that from Lefevre. He'd had enough trouble getting that much out.

"You're welcome, but there's more I'd better tell you."

He nodded. "Better to do it at the prefecture, I think, unless you don't feel well enough…"

"No, I'm perfectly fine," I said, getting up too. I felt more fluttery than sick, and the pounding had almost subsided. "Let's go."

But Lefevre's attention had been caught by the painting again. "A forgery on top of a forgery," he mused, bending over it. "The one underneath-it's a portrait of some sort, abstract but not quite abstract, no? Isn't this an eye? Ah, and here's the corner of the mouth…"

"It's a portrait, all right." I reached over and used my fingers to pull away a little more of the overpainting so that both eyes were visible, an arresting, smoky gray dappled with hazel.

After a second, Lefevre barked a brief note of laughter. "Vachey! It's a portrait of Rene Vachey."

"A self-portrait," I said, and laughed a little myself. "Beautifully done… in the unmistakable style of Fernand Leger."

Vachey was a forger?" Anne said, looking up from unwrapping a hunk of goat cheese.

"An extraordinary forger," I said. "He could do all the Cubists-Leger, Gris, Braque, Picasso. Not for a livelihood, you understand; more as an avocation, something he played away at once in a while as a matter of-well, of pride, I suppose."

"An avenue of self-actualization, you might say," Anne said dryly.

"Lorenzo might say," I said with a laugh, helping myself to cheese and bread.

We were in a little park a block from the hotel, one I'd often looked down on from the room; a square of prettily regimented greenery, with a formally laid out pond, and terraces and balustrades done in the ornate Italianate manner that had been popular in the time of Napoleon III. I'd come back from police headquarters looking, according to Anne, like something the cat dragged in, and although I hadn't felt like going anywhere, she had insisted on some fresh air and a pique-nique. Now I was glad she had; I'd been eating nonstop, not even waiting for her to get everything laid out between us on the bench.

"That's what the scrapbook was all about," I said, chewing. "His own record of all the fakes he painted, described in loving detail: pigments, techniques, materials. Right up to and including 'Leger's' Violon et Cruche."

"I don't understand. I thought it was a record of the paintings he'd bought." She frowned. " 'Les peintures de Rene Vachey'…"

"Right, 'The Paintings of Rene Vachey.' Well, think about it. If you're talking about a collector, it means the paintings he owns. But if you're talking about an artist, it means the paintings he's created. It's the same in English; 'The Paintings of J. Paul Getty II and 'The Paintings of Pablo Picasso' are two different things. I guess Vachey thought of himself more along the lines of Picasso. I misread it completely."

"Well… all right, but how do you know you've got it right, now? Did they find the book?"

"No, it looks like Charpentier got rid of it somewhere. But Lefevre called in Clotilde Guyot while I was there, and she verified it all."

The book, Clotilde had said, contained comprehensive material on counterfeits by Vachey dating back to 1942; his own notes, plus newspaper clippings and magazine articles. Like many self-admiring forgers before him, he'd wanted to be sure that in the end he could prove the paintings had indeed come from his own hand.

I'd asked her rather pointedly why she hadn't told me that when I'd asked the day before. "Because," she said just as pointedly, "you neglected to mention the small fact that the book had been stolen." Indeed I had, and so Clotilde had understandably assumed that it was still in its usual place in Vachey's office, that no outsiders had any idea of what was in it, and how then could it have had any relevance to Vachey's death? I absorbed a sidewise, stinging look from Lefevre and let the matter drop.