Aaron Elkins - Old Scores

I sighed, wondering just what we were getting into.

Calvin looked up once more. "On the other hand," he offered helpfully, "maybe they're real and this isn't a setup at all."

"True. Which is why we are speeding over the French countryside at this very moment. But if they're real, why is he so against scientific tests?"

"Yeah," Calvin said.

"You know, there's another possibility, Calvin; a variation on the make-the-experts-look-like-jerks theme. What if this Rembrandt is the real thing, and Vachey is laying on all these conditions to make us think it's not real? Not allowing any tests… giving us only one day to make our decision… Anybody with any sense would conclude Vachey's trying to put one over on us, right? So let's say we play it conservatively and refuse the painting because we doubt its authenticity. Then Vachey goes ahead and proves it is authentic-"

"And we wind up looking like saps." He glanced at me admiringly. "Jeez, Chris, you got a devious mind."

I laughed. "Tell that to Tony, will you?"

When we got to Dijon, Calvin headed instinctively for La Cloche, the town's most elegant hotel, while I went to the inexpensive Hotel du Nord a few blocks away-not because I was repentant about the first-class seat to Paris (I wasn't), and was trying to save Tony money (I wasn't), but because the du Nord was where I had stayed the first time I saw Dijon, when it was the best I could afford. I had liked the simple ambience, liked the people who ran it, and been coming back ever since. Actually, Tony had tried to get me to book a room at La Cloche too, his philosophy being that penny-pinching in the matter of hotels reflected badly on the museum. But I wasn't penny-pinching, I was just reliving my youth.

Once I'd showered, I joined Calvin for a light dinner at a cafe a couple of blocks away, but I wasn't much in the way of company. I was washed out from the long trip, lonely for Anne, and nursing a mild case of first-night-in-a-foreign-city blues. And according to my biological clock (showily confirmed by Calvin's snazzy wristwatch), it was noon Seattle-time and I'd been up all night.

But Calvin hadn't. He'd only come a few hundred miles, from a conference in The Hague, and was full of his usual high spirits. Despite my telling him that unless things had changed, nightlife in Dijon was nonexistent, he went off to see for himself. If there was any to be found, I had no doubt that he would find it. Notwithstanding an unimpressively geeky build, a darty manner, and what seemed to me to be a striking facial resemblance to Bugs Bunny, Calvin did extremely well in singles bars, discos, and the like. It was because he was a good dresser, he claimed.

As for me, I had no interest in singles bars or discos. I went up to my room on the top floor of the du Nord, thinking dejectedly about Anne driving north from San Francisco, solitary and reflective. She'd be in the beautiful Mendocino headlands by now, or maybe as far as the giant redwood country if she'd been in a hurry and taken Highway 101. But why would she be in a hurry?

I sighed, and for a while I stood with my elbows on the high sill of the casement window, looking mindlessly out into the night, over the slate roofs of the medieval university just across the way, and the harsh Gothic towers of the cathedral of Saint-Benigne a few blocks beyond. When I realized I was falling asleep on my feet, I pulled off my clothes, managed a few sketchy strokes with my toothbrush, and fell heavily into bed. Tomorrow was the big day, culminating in the opening of the show at Vachey's gallery.

But first, at 11:00 a.m., I had my own private interview with Rene Vachey, arranged with considerable difficulty before I left Seattle. I intended to meet him head-on about his refusal to allow testing. And if I couldn't get him to change his mind, well, I was damn well going to know the reason why.

Once upon a time the power of the dukes of Burgundy matched that of any ruler in Christendom, including the king of France. Those days are long past, but the splendid ducal palace still stands (it is now Dijon's city hall), and the streets around it-Dijon's ancienne ville -are filled with elegant two- and three-story townhouses, built anywhere from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and scrupulously maintained. Walk six or seven blocks in any direction, and you might be in any prosperous French city; modern, bustling, anonymous. But to be in the ancienne ville is to be immersed-architecturally, at least-in a vanished age of refinement, wealth, and quiet charm.

Vachey's townhouse was located here, in the heart of the Old City, three blocks from the Palais des Dues, at 39 Rue de la Prefecture. Like most of the houses on these streets, it had a brief historical-society tablet on its facade, MAISON DE GERLAND, it in French, BUILT 1682-1686 FOR ANTOINE DE GERLAND, COUNSELOR TO THE AUDIT OFFICE AND DEPUTY TO PARLIAMENT. This was the only sign on the building except for a tiny brass plaque, no larger than an apartment house nameplate, beside the entrance archway. LE GALERIE VACHEY, it said simply, almost pretentious in its lack of ostentation.

When I walked through the open archway, actually the old coach entrance, I found myself in an enclosed, cobbled courtyard, open to the sky, in which a coach-and-four would have looked right at home, but that instead held two glossy, dove-gray Renaults parked at an angle in one corner. At the back of the yard was the facade of the house proper, two stories high, classic and well-balanced, with tiers of tall French windows peeking out from a well-trimmed network of ivy creepers just beginning to drop their leaves.

The entrance to the building was by way of a gracefully scalloped flight of stone steps at the top of which a dour, waspish man of fifty appeared, peering mistrustfully at me through the open doorway.

"Dr. Norgren?" he inquired brusquely. I assured him I was.

"Enchante" he muttered, which doesn't carry quite the weight in French that it might in English. He was Marius Pepin, secretary to Rene Vachey, he told me in nasal, distracted French. He extended his hand, but let it fall away just short of touching, as if his thoughts had gone on to other things halfway there. I didn't take offense, because he seemed like a man with a lot on his mind, but still it wasn't what I'd call an exuberant welcome.

I had been keeping Mr. Vachey waiting for some time, I was sternly told-presumably this was the cause of M. Pepin's anxiety-and would I kindly hurry along in, please, as Mr. Vachey was in the midst of an extremely busy day and did not like being kept waiting.

I apologized (I was all of three minutes late, having turned the wrong way at the corner) and followed him into the house and up the wide stairway. Vachey's living quarters, Pepin told me while scurrying ahead, were on the lower floor, with the gallery situated above. Mr. Vachey awaited me in his study, adjoining the gallery. I was to excuse the confusion and disorder resulting from ongoing preparations for the show and reception that evening.

Whatever spasm of hope that gave me of catching a glimpse of the Rembrandt on my way in was quickly dashed. Most of the gallery portion of the floor was blocked by a set of folding, linen-covered partitions at the rear of the stairwell, so that I could see nothing beyond the landing on which I stood. Here, in a sort of bay, were a few well-displayed paintings by French artists of the Cubist movement: Derain, Duchamp, Villon, Delaunay, others I wasn't sure of. There was also a set of glass doors. Pepin went directly to them, pushed one open, murmured a few obsequiously respectful words to someone within, then stood aside and motioned me in.

Stepping by him, I found myself in one of the most fantastic rooms I'd ever been in; big, gorgeous, and dauntingly ornate, the kind of place most people get to see only in a museum, and only in a first-rate museum at that. I almost expected to run into a polite little velvet cord stretched across the entry foyer. But of course there was no cord, and in I strode, past Pepin, stepping directly onto a nineteenth-century Aubusson carpet (wincing curatorially as I did) that was laid on the worn parquet floor. The walls were sheathed in Venetian Renaissance paneling, rich with fifteenth-century urban scenes done in wonderfully detailed marquetry. I'd never before seen so much in one place. One of the panels had 1489 on it, inlaid in yellowed ivory.