Aaron Elkins: Old Scores

"But how did you know what was in it?" Anne asked. "Before she verified it, I mean?"

"Oh, hell," I grumbled. "I should have figured that much out a long time ago."

Yesterday afternoon, anyway, when I was looking right at those Cubist paintings in Vachey's basement, the ones Christian had so obligingly unwrapped for me. Why, I should have asked myself a little harder, would anyone have kept authentic paintings by Gris, Derain, and the rest of them, a collection worth a fortune, stowed away in dusty wrappings in the cellar? And only a minute earlier I'd walked blithely by that alcove set up with paints and easel, and never had it occurred to me to wonder what it was doing there and who'd been using it.

But by that time, as I explained to Anne, I was no longer thinking forgery, not even about the Leger-not so much because of Charpentier's seeming confidence in it, but because of Vachey's. He had been so transparently shocked, so startled, at Charpentier's suggesting that it was anything but an absolutely first-rate Leger, that it had seemed impossible that he was perpetrating a fake. Now, of course, I understood: he hadn't been shocked, he'd been offended. Who the devil was Jean-Luc Charpentier to assert that a Leger by Vachey wasn't every bit as good as a Leger by Leger?

Anne had continued to lay out food while I spoke: two cheeses, a couple of baguettes, a slice of smooth liver pate with truffles, a plastic tub of green olives and another of string beans and peppers in vinaigrette, a split of red wine with two stemmed plastic wine glasses. And I had continued to gobble it down. She began to pour the wine.

"Not for me," I said. "I was drinking brandy at eleven o'clock this morning."

She stuffed the cork back in. "Me neither. I just thought maybe you could use it. Chris, how could Vachey have done the Leger so beautifully? Didn't you tell me he hadn't painted in twenty years?"

"Sure, and who told me? Charpentier. That's what he'd thought himself for twenty years, and he wanted me to keep thinking it. He'd just misattributed an outright forgery by Vachey, he'd killed Vachey over it, and he didn't want even the thought of a Vachey forgery to cross my mind." I found a bottle of mineral water in the paper sack and poured us some. "And it didn't."

"Mm." She chewed thoughtfully on an olive. "But how did you know it was Charpentier who killed him? I mean, I know how you know now, but how did you know before? When Pepin stuck his head in the door to say Charpentier had the painting off the wall, you were out of there so fast-"

"That's what gave it away. Until that minute I didn't have a clue. But why would Charpentier dash off and take the painting down the minute he heard about the gesso? The only reason I could think of was to somehow keep the evidence that it was a fake from coming out." I gestured with a bread slice. "And there you are."

"I am? Where?" Anne said with a tinge of annoyance. "I hate to sound dim-witted, but do remember, yesterday morning I was still in Tacoma with my mind full of job-reentry problems."

I accepted the rebuke. My mind had been on Rene Vachey for a week, I'd been right here in France, I'd been aware of a hundred details she knew nothing about, and still I hadn't been able to put them together until they'd been handed to me on a platter. No wonder she was a little confused.

I put down the string beans I'd been working on and gathered my thoughts. "All right. Charpentier made a beeline for the painting the second he heard there was a problem with it. Why? Because he knew it was a fake. But he hadn't known it was a fake on Monday night or he'd never have gone into his speech about its being a Leger, but not a very good Leger, etcetera, etcetera. Question: When and how had he found out it was a fake? Answer: When-"

"When he stole the scrapbook."

"Right. Apparently, when Gisele started ranting about it at the reception, and throwing around those innuendos about Vachey's 'great discoveries,' Charpentier started wondering if he'd been had, after all, the same way I had. So while she was still raving, he got away from the crowd and snuck off to Vachey's study-"

"To which you had snuck off only minutes before-"

"Me and Christian, only I suppose he wasn't sneaking, strictly speaking, since he lives there. Well, Christian found me with the book, heaved me through the window, stuck the book in another case, and got out. Whereupon-"

"Charpentier came in, snatched the book, and also got out?"

"Yes. You're doubtful?"

"Well, yes. It's just that it has the feel of-I mean, it sounds like The Three Stooges, Chris-everybody following everybody else."

"I don't think anybody was following anybody. We were all after the book. We were probably the only ones who had what you'd call a pressing interest in it."

She tore a slice of bread into pieces and offered them to a pair of small, softly honking white swans, handsome birds with black throats and red bills, that had paddled hopefully up to us on the pond we sat beside. When they wouldn't come near her outstretched hand, she tossed them some, and turned back to me.

"How did Charpentier know where to look for it? He could only have had a second before the crowd got there."

"Probably the same way Christian knew I had it. By looking through the glass door of the study while Christian was hiding it."

"You're guessing, though, aren't you?"

"Sure, I'm guessing. Charpentier's dead. Vachey's dead. What else is there to do but guess? I'm also guessing-but Lefevre agrees-that when Charpentier found out from the book that the Leger was a fake, he caught Vachey on his predawn walk the next morning. Maybe he tried to find out what Vachey had planned-remember, it was pretty obvious the guy had something tricky up his sleeve-maybe he tried to reason with him, maybe-who knows? Anyway, he wound up shooting him. With his little pocket pistol."

She was shaking her head. "No, I'm sorry, it still doesn't make sense. What good did it do to kill Vachey? That wouldn't stop the gesso from slipping."

"Ah, but Charpentier didn't know the gesso was going to slip."

"But he had the book-"

"All he knew was that it was a fake. There wasn't anything in it about the gesso. I have that straight from Clotilde. The entry wasn't complete. Vachey was waiting for the newspaper clippings that were sure to follow. So, as far as Charpentier knew, if he could just keep the picture from being scientifically tested- which was what Vachey wanted anyway-he'd be safe."

That was another little clue that I'd missed-how vehemently Charpentier had been against testing when we were talking to Froger at the Barillot. And how he'd been so much more negative about the painting than he'd been the evening before, advising Froger to stick it out of sight-and, he hoped, out of mind-in one of the Barillot's darkest corners.

"Attaboy," Anne said. One of the swans had waddled a few steps out of the water, made a tentative peck at the bread on her palm, and run back with it. The other had remained where it was, gobbling nervously.

She tossed it a chunk. "Go back a little. I can see what Charpentier's motivations were, but I don't understand Vachey's. Why was he after Charpentier's neck? Froger's, yes-they'd been enemies for years-but what did Charpentier ever do to him?"

I plastered a last slice of bread with pate and bit into it. "To Rene Vachey, the feud with a windbag like Froger was nothing. I'm sure he looked forward to making him look a little silly over the Leger, but Froger was small fry, and anyway he never claimed to be a Cubist expert."

I swallowed, full at last, and wiped my fingers on a paper napkin. "But Charpentier…"

Charpentier, on the other hand, did claim to be a Cubist expert, and Charpentier, unlike Froger, had deeply wounded Vachey. It had started when he'd twice ridiculed Vachey's early "neo-Cubist" efforts. "Derivative, shallow, pallid, uninformed," he'd called them, but that much Vachey might have lived with; honest criticism from a straightforward if curmudgeonly critic. But a few years after that, he'd praised Vachey's controversial Turbulent Century show, his collection of works purportedly by Braque, Picasso, and others.