Aaron Elkins: Old Scores

Why should that upset Vachey? Because, as several of the other reviewers had surmised, some of the attributions in The Turbulent Century were suspect. In fact, Clotilde had told us, they were more than suspect: all four of the Cubist paintings- a Braque, a Picasso, a Leger, and a Gris-were actually by Vachey; a one-man tour de force that was afterward relegated to the basement, where they'd probably remained concealed until I'd made Christian show them to me the day before.

And several years after that, Clotilde had gone on, Charpentier had verified the authenticity of that unknown Leger in Basel, only-and by now, of course, I was ahead of her-it wasn't a Leger, it was another Vachey counterfeit. It had been given to a friend in fun, but somehow wound up a few years later on the wall of a restaurant, and subsequently on the block at one of the big London auction houses. According to Clotilde, Charpentier had later verified a second Vachey-cum-Leger that had found its way into the art market in Vienna, valued at several million dollars.

Where these paintings were now, God only knew (which is, of course, why we straight arrows get so exercised even about forgeries made in fun).

Thus, Charpentier had consistently valued in the millions of francs the excellent forgeries to which Vachey had affixed the signatures of Braque, or Gris, or-especially-Leger. Equally consistently, he had heaped contempt on the paintings Vachey had produced under his own name. It was more than enough to rouse the ire of any painter-forger who had a high regard for his own merits, which Vachey most assuredly had.

"And so," I said, "he set this whole thing up to bring Charpentier down a peg. He knew Charpentier would accept the Leger as real-"

"How could he possibly know that?"

"He'd fallen for every one of Vachey's 'Legers' up till then. Why should this be any different?"

"That's so. And he was right."

"Yes, it would have worked. When that self-portrait came to light, Charpentier's reputation would have been in worse shape than that gesso."

Wordlessly, she offered me the remains of the baguettes. When I shook my head, she threw them to the appreciative swans. "But what about Vachey's reputation?" she asked. "Everyone would find out he was a forger."

"No, what everyone would know was that he was good enough to make a chump out of France's most eminent Cubist authority. Nobody would think of him as a forger, any more than people thought of him as a thief when he stole those paintings from the Barillot. He was having another one of his jokes, that's all."

"Only Charpentier didn't see the humor in it," Anne mused. "And now they're both dead."

A dreary gray cloud sheet had moved in, and with it had come a cold, fitful wind. Piles of neatly raked brown leaves at the junctions of the paths began to come apart and skitter over the gravel. We both got to work gathering up the food.

"One more thing, Chris. I see why Vachey couldn't let the Leger be tested, but why keep you from testing the Rembrandt? You don't think there could be something…"

"Not a chance. No, he applied the restrictions to both pictures because if he did it to one and not the other, it would have given the show away. Charpentier wouldn't have gone near it."

"Well, I still don't understand what SAM has to do with all this. Why-really-did he donate the Rembrandt?"

I shrugged. "I suppose, for the reason he said. To make good on that old promise to Ferdinand de Quincy."

"But if he wanted to give you a painting, why not simply give it to you? Why involve the Seattle Art Museum in this other mess? And the Louvre, for that matter?"

"We're back to guessing, but I assume he wanted to have the biggest, splashiest show he could. Partly because that's the way he was, and partly because he wanted to expose Charpentier's blooper as publicly as possible-right in the middle of the big exhibition."

"Whew." She shook her head. "It's pretty complex, isn't it? Messy."

"Vachey was a complex man."

I put the last of our leavings in the paper sack they'd come in, and threw an olive that had fallen on the bench to the swans, which weren't interested.

"Didn't you say he was murdered in the Place Darcy?" Anne asked abruptly.

"Yes, why?" I glanced up to find her gazing at a blue-and-white street sign on one of the concrete gate posts along the park fence. PLACE DARCY, it said.

We looked at each other. Vachey had died here, his body found in this pond. Perhaps he'd been sitting on this very bench…

I put down the sack. "Let's open the wine after all." She nodded and got out the plastic glasses again. I poured, and we raised our glasses. "To a complex man," I said.

The temperature in the Galerie Vachey at five o'clock was a properly cool sixty-eight degrees, the humidity a comfortable fifty percent. But the "little gala" planned by Clotilde had failed to materialize. Initially contrived by Vachey, it was to have been his moment of triumph, when his brilliant outmaneuvering of the dean of France's Cubist authorities would be revealed to an astonished world. Even with Vachey dead, the loyal Clotilde had intended to go on with the show. But now, with Charpentier dead, too, any remaining pizazz had gone out of it.

Instead, there was a quiet signing at a folding table set up in front of the Rembrandt, followed by a subdued cocktail party in the reception area for no more than a dozen people. The sole press representative was a reporter from Le Bien Public, the Dijon newspaper, who left after taking a couple of pictures of Christian and me stiffly shaking hands in front of the painting. Questions on Charpentier's death and the faked Violon et Cruche were turned brusquely away by Sully; these matters would be addressed at a press conference to be held at the prefecture at nine the following morning.

My mission to Dijon completed at last, I was headed to the modest buffet table, where Calvin and Anne were drinking champagne and browsing among the hors d'oeuvres, when an unusually pensive-looking Lorenzo placed a hand on my arm.

"Ah, Christopher? Is it true? Violon et Cruche was painted by Vachey himself?"

"It's true, all right."

"And he painted many other such paintings? Derains, Delaunays.. .?

"Apparently." According to Clotilde, there were at least sixty forgeries described in meticulous detail in the scrapbook.

Lorenzo chewed the corner of his lip. His Adam's apple bobbed. "Christopher, you don't think… that is to say, between my father and myself, we've bought a number of pictures from him, many of them Cubist, none of them tested. You don't imagine he would actually have

… that some of them might be…"

I clapped him on the shoulder. "Lorenzo, what are you worrying about? Look at things postexistentially, that's all. Why do you want to get hung up with this immaterial contextualism?"

Sure, it was mean, but I just couldn't help myself. Sometimes these things come over me.

Naturally, I felt awful as soon as I said it. I tightened my grip on his shoulder reassuringly. "Actually, I don't see what there is to worry about. As far as anyone knows, he never tried to sell any of his fakes."

He looked a little less stricken, a little more hopeful. "No? "

"No, he did them for his own satisfaction. When he was finished with them, into the cellar they went."

"You're telling me the truth?"

I was and I wasn't. They might have gone into the cellar, but they hadn't remained in the cellar. When I'd been down there with Christian the day before, there had been about twenty-five of them lined up on the lower rack of the storeroom. That left a round figure of thirty-five unaccounted for-thirty-five fakes by a master-forger capable of fooling some of France's greatest experts. Who knew where they were now? Two of them had found their way to the big auction houses. Were the others hanging in the living rooms of friends? On other restaurant walls around Europe? Had some even found their way to museums, perhaps? Or to Lorenzo's collection?