It was only two o'clock, but I was fatigued and still a little tottery from the previous night's episode, so I went back to the hotel to put my feet up, once again taking the chattering old elevator to the fourth floor instead of walking. Inside the room, I took off my shoes, plumped up the pillows, and lay back on the bed. It felt good too.
Charpentier's remarks had started me thinking about this business of the tests again. He'd overdone it, but he was essentially right about laboratory analysis not being as useful on forgeries of modern paintings as on forgeries of old ones. The best thing a test can do for you in pinpointing a fake is to show you that a purported 360-year-old Rembrandt is painted on a 50-year-old canvas, or uses pigments that weren't developed until the late nineteenth century, or is painted over a picture of a 1960 Ford Fairlane. The older a picture is supposed to be, the more a lab has to go on. From that standpoint, it would seem that, of the two-the Leger and the Rembrandt-the likelier candidate for fake was the Rembrandt. That was Charpentier's point.
But we weren't dealing with a modern forgery of a Rembrandt; of that I was sure. As a matter of fact, there weren't many modern forgeries of them around-precisely because there were so many Rembrandt-like paintings still available from Rembrandt's own time. At the worst, that's what An Officer was. And all the scientific wizardry in the world can't help you detect a 360-year-old fake of a 360-year-old painting..
So what was the point of the prohibition? I was right back at what Calvin had aptly enough called square one. Back at it? When had I ever been off it?
I settled in more comfortably to give it some deeper contemplation.
At 6:20 the telephone rang. I got it to my ear without opening my eyes.
"Hey, Chris-"
"Calvin, why are you always waking me up?"
"Why are you always asleep?"
I yawned and swung my feet over the side of the bed. "L'Atelier Saint-Jean," Calvin said, "89 Rue de Rivoli, proprietaire M. Gibeault."
I finished my yawn. "Hm. French, nest-ce pas?"
"It's the junk shop, Chris."
That opened my eyes. "The-you mean where he said he bought the Rembrandt? Pepin actually gave it to you?"
"Are you kidding me? Not that I didn't ask him, but he claims he doesn't know anything about the Rembrandt. Apparently, there were a lot of things that Vachey kept close to his vest, and this was one."
"So then, who told you-"
"I got it from Madame Guyot." He coughed modestly. "She sort of took a shine to me."
"Calvin, that's great," I said. "I can catch a train to Paris tomorrow-"
"I found out some other interesting stuff too. If you think this whole thing is already as weird as it's going to get, think again. You had your dinner yet?"
"I've been asleep. I'm not terrifically hungry."
"There's a brasserie at the foot of the Rue de la Liberte, practically across the street from you. We can get an omelet or something. Meet you there in five minutes."
"Guess," Calvin said, smugly watching me over his glass of white wine, "who Pepin is."
"What do you mean, who he is? Vachey's secretary, his security head, whatever."
"Ho-ho, there's more to it than that, my man."
I poured most of my tiny bottle of Badoit mineral water (I wasn't feeling up to wine yet) into my glass. "Calvin, this is very entertaining, but how about just telling me?"
"Well, you know that heist that Vachey pulled off at the Barillot ten years ago?"
"It wasn't a 'heist,' " I said irritably. "He was making a point. They got their paintings back, and more."
Calvin's eyes widened. I was surprised myself. When had I gone so far over into Vachey's camp that I would defend the theft of art, whatever the reason behind it? I quickly corrected myself. "All right, yes, it was a heist. Sorry. But what about it?"
"And how Froger fired his security chief over the lapse in precautions? Well, you want to guess the name of that fired security chief?"
"You're telling me it was Pepin?"
"You got it. Vachey gave him a job the next week, and Pepin's been there ever since." He grinned. "You don't suppose that might explain why he's a teeny bit paranoid about anybody getting within arm's length of anything in the Galerie Vachey?"
I nodded. Once burned, twice shy. "You know, it also might…"
The waiter set down our orders. A ham omelet for Calvin, a cheese omelet for me, each served alongside two minuscule tomato wedges on a miniature lettuce leaf. With them came a basket of rolls, a tray with bottles of vinegar and oil on it, and-as with almost everything else in this town-a pot of Dijon mustard.
"It also might what?" Calvin asked when my sentence died away.
Frowning, I broke open a roll. "I was just thinking… Let's say that happened to you. That Vachey hired you to work for him after Froger fired you. How would you feel?"
Calvin hunched his shoulders. "Relieved, I guess. There couldn't have been too many places that would have been willing to take a chance on him after that."
"How would you feel toward Vachey?"
"I don't know-grateful?"
"Even though he's the one that got you fired in the first place? Even though you'd never be able to get a job in the field with anybody else?"
"Oh, I see what you mean. You'd have sort of mixed feelings, wouldn't you? You'd be grateful-but you'd also hate his guts every time you looked at him."
"Exactly," I said. "I was just wondering if he might have hated him enough to kill him."
"But why right at this particular time? All that happened years ago."
"For one thing, to make it look as if it had something to do with the exhibition, or those charges in Les Echos Quotidiens, or any of the other things that are going on right now."
Calvin was shaking his head. "Maybe, but it sounds kind of far-out to me, Chris. A lot of people probably hated Vachey enough to kill him. Jeez, we know about twenty of them ourselves."
"Like who?"
"Like Gisele Gremonde."
"You mean because of the Duchamp? But he gave it to her before he died."
"Yeah, but she didn't find that out until this morning, after he was already dead."
"Well, yes, but-"
"And what about that sleazeball son, Christian? You see how shocked he was to hear about the new will? Maybe he thought Vachey was only planning to change his will, and he murdered him to head him off. And then he finds out this morning he was too late by a year or so. Didn't you catch that oh-shit look on his face?"
"That's true, I guess-"
"Don't forget Mann either. Talk about an ax to grind. For all we know he's been hunting Vachey all these years and just found out where he lived."
I sighed. They didn't add up to twenty, but they were enough. "You're right. I guess I was just thinking out loud."
"And don't forget all the people we don't know who probably hated his guts."
I started on the omelet, and for a minute or two we ate in silence.
"Guess who Clotilde Guyot is," Calvin said. I looked up, fork in hand.
"You're full of surprises, aren't you? Who?"
"This is something you probably know more about than I do. You know what Aryanization was?"
Yes, I knew. During World War II, early in the Occupation, Jewish businesses had been declared ownerless. The Nazi logic was unassailable: Jews had been made technically stateless by German decree, and how could stateless people have property rights? Jewish firms were therefore commandeered by the authorities. The owners were trucked off to the death camps in the East, or interned in France, or if they were lucky, they bought their way out of Europe or otherwise managed to disappear from sight.
There was some local outrage over this, of course, but the French were in no position to pursue complaints with vigor; besides, a number of influential citizens were beneficiaries of the policy. Confiscated Jewish firms were turned over, lock, stock, and barrel, to local businessmen of indisputably Aryan descent. Once cleansed of non-Aryan pollution, the firms were soon back in business. The conversion process was referred to by the Germans as "Aryanization."
"Well, that's how Vachey got his first gallery," Calvin told me. "The Nazis handed it to him. It was the Galerie Royale in Paris-you know, the one Vachey owned in 1942. Well, before that, it'd belonged to Clotilde's uncle."
I put down my fork. My appetite, not very hearty to start with, was gone. "Oh, hell, Calvin," I said quietly.
He looked surprised. "Why oh hell? I mean, look, it was a lousy deal, but it's not as if Vachey personally stole it from the guy. He probably didn't have any choice in the matter either."
"No, Calvin, it wasn't like that. Who do you think the Nazis gave these businesses to? The people they already loved doing business with, that's who. The toadies, the stooges, the collaborators, the parasites." And whether I wanted to believe it or not, it was starting to look as if Rene Vachey had been one, or even all, of the above.
Calvin was shaking his head. "Well, that's not the way she remembers it. The way she sees it, Vachey walked on water." He put down his fork and leaned forward. "Let me tell you."
If the story she had told Calvin was even half-true, and I hoped it was, I could see why she felt that way. Far from being a despicable predator who had thrived on others' misery, he had been a genuine hero, according to Clotilde. Yes, he had taken over her Uncle Joachim Lippe's Galerie Royale under the Nazis' policy, but he had used his earnings and his influence to assist others less fortunate. He had spent 80,000 francs-real francs, not Occupation notes; a colossal sum to him in those days- and had undergone enormous personal risk besides, in trying to arrange the Lippe family's escape from Occupied Europe.
In Joachim's case, he had failed-the Gestapo arrested the elderly man three hours before he was to leave Paris, and he had frozen to death in a cattle car while en route to Auschwitz- but Vachey did succeed in getting Joachim's wife and two little girls to Vichy France, then to Portugal, and finally to Canada. Afterward, he had continued to send them money until the mid-1950s, when Mrs. Lippe married again.
Clotilde, then sixteen, wasn't Jewish herself, but as far as the Gestapo were concerned, having a Jewish uncle had been close enough. With her arrest and deportation to slave labor in Eastern Europe imminent, Vachey had hidden her, her mother, and Clotilde's six-year-old brother in his own basement for seven weeks-an act that would have resulted in his own death if it had been known-while he cajoled and bribed French and German officials into issuing the precious papers that certified the Guyots' non-Jewishness.
Once they were safe, he had given Clotilde a job in the gallery, and she had worked for him ever since.
"Fifty goddamn years, can you imagine?" Calvin said. "How'd you like to work for Tony for fifty years? I'm telling you, she thinks he was the greatest thing that ever walked around on two legs." He shook his head slowly. "And no wonder."
Still, I did wonder. Clotilde's relationship to Vachey was even more equivocal than Pepin's. Vachey had risked his own life to save her and her family-but he'd also been the man who'd profited from the death of her uncle and the confiscation of his gallery, the man who'd taken it over with the approval of, and perhaps on the instructions of, the Nazi authorities. Now, in the end, he'd given it back to her, but he had already made good use of it as a springboard to wealth, while she had remained a paid employee for half a century.
Did she hate him? Love him? Both? What would I have felt in her position, or in Pepin's? It was impossible to imagine. Here I'd known the man only a single day, and I couldn't seem to figure out whether I admired him or despised him.
"What else did she say?" I asked.
"Nothing much. Why, what else did you want her to say?"
"Possibly something about this Flinck thing. If she's been working for Vachey since 1942, she'd know whether there was anything to Mann's charges."
Calvin finished his omelet and slid the plate aside. "Yeah, but would she tell? She's really loyal to the guy, Chris. If you want, I could talk to her tomorrow and see."
"Let me do it, Calvin. I'll catch her in the morning, before I go to Paris and hunt down that junk shop. You know what you can do, though; you can get hold of Les Echos Quotidiens and set them straight on our actual position on the Rembrandt." I smiled. "Which is no position at all, of course."
He nodded. "Will do. Tony already asked me to talk to them. The rest of the press too. My instructions are to stonewall. I'm real good at that."
"Tony? When did you talk to him?"
"This afternoon. The Echos Quotidiens people tried to get a statement out of him, and he didn't know what they were talking about." He raised his eyebrows. "He knows now."
"You filled him in on everything?"
He nodded. "Oh, except about your getting sloshed, and sneaking into Vachey's study, and falling out the window. I forgot that part."
"Thank you, I owe you. What did he say?"
"Well, you know Tony; it's hard to fluster him. But he needs to talk to you."
"I need to talk to him. It's eight o'clock," I said, looking at a wall clock. "Eleven in Seattle. If I call him right now, I can probably get him before he goes to lunch." I signaled the waiter for our check.
"Go ahead," Calvin said, "I'll get the check. And if I were you, I'd hit the sack early. You look bushed."
I stood up. "I think I'll do that. Thanks, Calvin." I started for the door, then turned with a laugh. "And thanks again for forgetting the part about Vachey's study."
He grinned back at me. "Hell, he wouldn't have believed it anyway."