Chasing Cezanne (12 page)

Another elevator door slid open. Andre saw Camilla's oversized dark glasses and the shining bounce of her hair as she stepped out, surrounded by a flying wedge of editorial staff, the junior secretary in her official position at Camilla's shoulder. Andre moved toward the group, recognizing this as being one of Camilla's mobile meetings. They were frequent occurrences at the magazine, due partly to the sense of urgency and excitement that Camilla insisted came from thinking on one's feet, but mainly to her congenital unpunctuality. The meetings had been known to continue in the car taking Camilla to lunch or to Bergdorf's. They were part of the show: the successful, overworked editor not letting a second go to waste in the service of the magazine.

They were also most effective when used as a shield against the unwelcome approach of anyone Camilla didn't wish to speak to, and this was such an occasion. She saw Andre—she must have seen him; they were only five feet
apart when he called out to her—and she looked straight at him for a moment before her head jerked away. And then, safely behind a wall of bodies, she was past him. By the time he had turned to follow her, she was through the door and into the back of a waiting car.

Caught between disbelief and mounting irritation, he stood watching the car cut uptown through the traffic on Madison Avenue. He and Camilla had worked together for more than two years. They weren't close friends, nor would they ever be, but he had developed a liking for her and had always thought that it was reciprocated. Apparently not. His calls were no longer returned, and now this deliberate and obvious snub. But why? What had he done wrong?

He hesitated outside the entrance to the building, wondering whether to go up and see Noel, who was usually able to make some kind of sense out of Camilla's signals. But then a mixture of pride and anger took over: If she was going to avoid him, he was damned if he would chase after her. To hell with her, and to hell with
DQ
. There were plenty of other magazines. On his way toward Park Avenue, he ducked into the bar of the Drake to celebrate a minor victory of independence over immediate need. And immediate need there was, as he had to admit when he looked at the cocktail napkin on which he'd added up the cost of his new equipment. If the insurance people didn't come through—and they were showing every sign of trying to delay settlement until well into the twenty-first century—he would start to feel the pinch very shortly. Work, that was the answer. He raised his glass in a
silent toast to the next job. Lucy was bound to come up with something soon.

“OK, so it's not enough to retire on, but it's better than anything else in town.” Lucy's face wore a puzzled, slightly defensive expression. “It's dead out there.” She glanced down at her notepad. “I've tried just about everything except the
Plumbers' Gazette
, and the only other job anyone could come up with was a catalogue.” She wrinkled her nose. She didn't like her photographers doing catalogues unless the alimony payments really had got them by the throat and they were desperate. She shrugged. “You never know. It might be fun.”

The assignment was for an English magazine at an English fee, significantly lower than Andre's American rate. But Lucy was right. Shooting tapestries in a stately home was certainly better than the grind of working on dozens of room settings under the eye of an art director who wanted everything lit by searchlight. Andre had been through that when he was starting out, and he didn't feel like going back to it.

“Lulu, it's fine. Honestly. I don't have much choice at the moment. When do they want it done?”

Lucy consulted her notes. “Yesterday? It's a crisis. They had it all set up. Their regular photographer was down there, and then he fell off a horse and broke his arm.”

Andre winced. “They don't expect me to get on a horse, do they? What was he doing on a horse, for God's sake?”

“How do I know? Grip with your knees, you'll be fine.”

“You're a hard woman, Lulu. I wish I'd had you with me this morning.” Andre described his unsuccessful brush with Camilla and saw a frown settling on Lucy's face. “So there I was,” he said, “standing in the lobby like a
connard—
”

“A what?”

“A jerk—and she looked straight through me. And she saw me, I know she did.”

Lucy got up from her desk. “Andre, she's a flake. You're always saying she's not so bad, she has her funny little ways but she knows her job, she puts out a good magazine. That may be true”—Lucy wagged a cautionary finger—“but it doesn't alter the fact that she's a flake. When she likes you she's all over you like a rash; when she doesn't, you don't exist. And for some reason, now she doesn't like you.” Lucy folded her arms and cocked her head to one side. “Are you sure nothing happened when you were in France together?”

Andre thought back to the evening in the Colombe d'Or and shook his head. “No. Nothing.”

The frown on Lucy's face was replaced by the hint of a smile, a rather knowing smile. “Maybe that's the problem.”

Cyrus Pine, beneath the carefully maintained veneer of affable, casual charm that he displayed to his clients,
was highly competitive. It had been in his nature to want to win ever since Eton, when he had discovered that “coming top”—either in sports or in the classroom—afforded him a certain cushion against the minor brutalities of public school existence. And it was at Eton that he had learned to disguise his gifts, since it was very poor form to be seen to try too hard. Success that seemed to come as a result of accident or luck was acceptable; success as a result of obvious determination and hard work was not. By the time he finished at Harvard, the pattern was established: He appeared to be one of life's fortunate amateurs. This camouflage also worked well for him in business, but the reality was that he worked as hard and liked a deal as much as the next man.

Deals in the art world—or in Pine's rarefied part of the art world—frequently depend on information acquired before anyone else. Occasionally, this will fall into your lap, the long-service award presented by an old contact after years of patient cultivation. More often, it comes from following up and sifting through the whispers and rumors that inevitably swirl around a business in which many millions of dollars are chasing a few hundred paintings. And for Cyrus Pine, who liked to joke that the ideal art dealer was an acrobat who kept his nose to the grindstone, his ear to the ground, and his eye on the main chance, no whisper was too faint to pursue.

When he returned to his office after a decorous and wine-free lunch with an elderly client who regularly pronounced herself bored with her collection of Pissarros
and Sisleys (and just as regularly changed her mind), Cyrus settled himself by the phone. The young man's story might be nothing more than a curious, unimportant incident, but one never knew. With a glass of cognac to take away the taste of mineral water, he began to work his way through the Rolodex.

THE apartment had reverted to chaos, as though the burglars had come back for more. Outer cartons, inner cartons, skeins of torn plastic skin with cellulite puckers, Styrofoam in all its rich diversity—molds, blocks, wedges, countless drifting shards taking flight with every passing breath of air: the floor was a testament to America's passion for overpackaging.

In contrast, the long worktable at the end of the room was a picture of order. Camera bodies, lenses, Polaroid backs, film, and filters were laid out in line, waiting their turn to be stowed in the padded compartments of dark-blue nylon bags. It was a comforting sight. Andre had felt vulnerable without the tools of his trade, as if his eye and his professional skills had been stolen along with his equipment. But now, as he ran his fingers over the buttons and knurls and listened to the snick of a lens fitting into its housing, he felt his mood lift and his confidence return. Maybe after England he'd slip over to Paris for a couple of days, to see if he could get an assignment from one of the French magazines. A week or so in the south, shooting for
Cote Sud
, would be the perfect antidote to the frustrations of the past few days. He picked up the Nikon. It wasn't his old, battered familiar friend, but he enjoyed its heft and the way the shape of the camera body fitted into his hand. Taking it to the window, he squinted through the viewfinder at the early evening mosaic of shade and deep shadow, lights beginning to blink on. Screw
DQ
, and screw Camilla. He would manage without them.

He answered the phone on the second ring, expecting to hear Lucy and her usual pretrip nanny routine, making sure he had his tickets and his passport and plenty of clean socks, so he was taken aback for a moment when he heard the distinctive clipped drawl.

“Dear boy, it's Cyrus. I hope I'm not disturbing you. I expect you're tied up, but I'm calling on the off chance that you might be free to join me for a drink. I've been doing a little research. Thought you might be interested.”

“That's very kind, Cyrus.” Andre glanced at the littered floor. “As a matter of fact, I had a date with a roomful of garbage, but I've just canceled it. Where do you want to meet?”

“Do you know the Harvard Club? Forty-fourth, between Fifth and Sixth, number 27. It's quiet there, and you can actually see who you're talking to. I'm getting too old for dim bars. Shall we say six-thirty? Oh, I'm afraid you'll need a tie. They like ties.”

“I'll be there.”

It took Andre some time to find his token tie, rolled up in the side pocket of one of his jackets. The tyranny of the tie had often inconvenienced and irritated him, never more
than when he had stayed at an outrageously expensive, outrageously pretentious hotel in Dallas. After a day of shooting in a Texan palazzo, he had wandered into the hotel bar, sober and respectable in his Sunday-best blazer, and had been refused admission because the snowy bosom of his freshly laundered white shirt was tieless. The authorities had lent him a whisky-stained length of violently patterned silk—the bar tie—and he was then permitted a drink, as though he was a pariah suddenly become socially acceptable. He had shared the bar with two boisterous men wearing bootlaces around their necks, and a woman who, apart from a cascade of jewelry, was practically naked from the waist up. One of the men had been wearing a large hat too, he remembered, a sartorial touch that would have been frowned upon in many parts of the civilized world. Ever since that experience, he had traveled with an all-purpose, black knitted silk tie in his pocket—crease-resistant, stain-friendly, and suitable for funerals. He adjusted the knot and set out, with a sense of expectation, for the haven where the great and the good of Harvard go to refresh themselves after a bruising day among the bulls and bears and lawsuits of corporate America.

Checking his coat, he found Cyrus Pine in a corridor off the lobby, studying the announcements pinned to the notice board, his smoothly tailored back to the cloakroom. Andre went over and stood beside him. “I hope they haven't issued a ban on photographers.”

Pine turned and smiled. “I was looking to see if any of the members had been caught trying to entice young women into the steam baths. Those were the days.” He
nodded at a flyer pinned to the red felt. “Times have changed. Now I see we're having Japanese-speaking lunches. How are you, dear boy?” He took Andre by the elbow. “The bar's through here.”

It is a bar without frills at the Harvard Club, the way bars used to be before hanging ferns replaced tobacco smoke and the jabber of jukeboxes and sports commentaries destroyed quiet conversation. There are, it's true, two television sets—recently installed, to Pine's considerable annoyance—but on this particular evening they were blank and mute. It was a slow night; of the four small tables, only one was occupied, by a single figure bent over his newspaper. Another member sat at the bar, lost in thought. There were no frivolous distractions from the peaceful enjoyment of alcohol.