Chasing Cezanne (30 page)

Cyrus was shaving, negotiating the tricky planes and crevices just beneath the nose, when the phone rang.

“Good morning, my friend. It's Nico Franzen. I hope
you're well?” He sounded cheerful and confident, very different from the worried Franzen who had last spoken to him.

“Delighted to hear from you, Nico. Where are you?”

“Well away from Saint-Germain, thank God. Now listen: I'm on my way to stay with a friend near Aix. Could we meet there? It's easy from Paris. The TGV will get you down to Avignon in four hours, and you can rent a car at the station.”

Cyrus wiped shaving cream from the phone and reached for a notepad and pencil. “We'll be there. Where do you want to meet?”

“I'll give you the number where I'll be. Call me when you get to Aix. We have a lot to talk about.” A brief pause, and then: “Cyrus, you didn't notice anything yesterday? You weren't being followed?”

Cyrus thought for a moment. If he mentioned seeing Holtz, there was a chance that he might spook the Dutchman. That could wait until they met. “No, old boy. Nothing.”

“Good, good. Do you have a pencil?” Franzen read out Anouk's number and listened as Cyrus repeated it. “Tell me something.” There was a note of concern in his voice that made Cyrus frown. “Where did you eat last night?”

“Brasserie Lipp.”

“
Choucroute?
”

“Of course.”

“Excellent. Well then,
à bientôt
.”

Cyrus called Andre and Lucy, finished shaving, packed, and was down having coffee in half an hour. They
joined him a few minutes later, flushed and slightly tousled and eager for news.

“I told you he'd call,” said Cyrus, the pink of his early morning complexion heightened by excitement. “Now we're getting somewhere. I'm only sorry that we're dragging young Lucy away from Paris.” His eyebrows twitched in apology. “But they tell me that Provence isn't a bad spot. Never been to Aix myself. Have you, Andre?”

“Prettiest girls in the world. University students. Maybe even one or two rich widows. And you'll like it, Lulu. It's a beautiful town.”

Lucy employed the pout that she had been practicing after observing Parisian women: lower lip thrust out, mouth turned down, the full oral shrug. “Beautiful girls?” she said. “Sounds like a nightmare. Couldn't we meet him somewhere else? What's the French equivalent of Hoboken? There I'd be comfortable.”

By the time they had finished breakfast and settled the hotel bill, Paradou was on his fifth cigarette and wishing he had brought his magazine. When he saw them and their luggage come through the door, his heart sank. They were going to the airport. They were going home. With his hundred thousand dollars.
Merde
. As a taxi pulled to a stop outside the hotel, he turned on the engine, instinctively checking the fuel gauge.

The taxi crossed the river but, instead of continuing northeast in the direction of Roissy, turned sharp right.
Paradou flicked his indicator, much relieved; they had to be going to one of the stations, Austerlitz or Lyon. After another five minutes, it was clear that they were going to the Gare de Lyon. Which meant he would have to leave the car in a tow-away zone. To hell with it. What was a fine compared to a hundred grand? With his free hand, he took the phone from the dashboard and stuffed it in his pocket, while he followed the taxi down to the entrance reserved for TGV passengers. If they already had tickets, it was going to be a scramble to keep up with them. Leaving the car with two wheels cocked on the curb, he took his bag and ran into the concourse.

And skidded to a stop, almost bumping into the girl as she stood looking at magazines on the newsstand. Then he saw the other two. They had joined one of the lines—the long, slow-moving, and, to Paradou, infinitely welcome lines—waiting to buy tickets. He picked up a newspaper and, averting his head, joined the line next to them.

He reached his window just before they reached theirs. The sales clerk stared at him, surly and impatient. “
Alors, monsieur?
”

Metz? Strasbourg? Marseille? With a muttered excuse, Paradou moved aside and pretended to look for something in his bag, keeping his back to the line next to him, straining his ears.

He very nearly missed it, expecting to hear an American accent instead of Andre's Parisian French asking for three seats to Avignon. But then, in English: “Cyrus? The next one leaves in ten minutes.”

So it was Avignon. Paradou shouldered his way back
into the line, glaring down complaints from a woman and her yapping dog, pushing money through the
guichet
. He had a few minutes before the train left. No point in calling Holtz yet. He would wait until he was sure all three of them were on board.

Camilla was doing her very best to be bright and cheerful, but it was frightfully hard going. Rudi's good mood of the previous day had vanished—ruined, she was sure, by that dreadful, uncouth man who had left the lavatory seat up, one of Camilla's pet peeves. Dinner at Taillevent, in spite of the heavenly food, had been less than sparkling. And all morning, Rudi had done nothing but growl: hardly touched his breakfast, didn't want his massage, and was really very coarse when she had suggested lunch with Jean-Paul and Philippe, who were such a fun couple. All in all, she was beginning to wish she hadn't come. Look at him now, sitting by the phone like a man in a trance. But it was time to make an effort, even if one would rather be spared the sordid details.

“Would it help to talk about it, sweetie?”

Holtz didn't take his eyes from the phone. “I doubt it.”

Camilla lit a cigarette, puffing smoke in his direction with a toss of her head. “Rudi, there are times when I find your boyish charm quite resistible. I'm only trying to help. What is it? That Dutch person?”

Of course it was that Dutch person, wandering around Paris with a thirty-million-dollar Cézanne. The
same Dutch person who was supposed to have called to say where he was. Until he called, until Paradou called, Holtz could do nothing except sit by the phone, a prisoner in the Ritz. He looked up at Camilla. “You don't really want to know, do you?”

Camilla ducked her head, unable to resist admiring the effect of her two-tone Chanel shoes against the muted pinks and greens of the Aubusson. “Frankly, sweetie,” she said, “no. No, I don't. I think I might pop out for a stroll.”

Holtz grunted.

The train crept out of the station as the last passengers to board moved through the compartments in search of their seats. Diligent executives took off their jackets and snapped open their laptops, mothers with young children searched in their baggage for toys and distractions, holidaymakers opened their magazines and guidebooks, hardly noticing the train pick up speed—a smooth, gradual acceleration that would take them south at more than a hundred miles an hour.

Paradou had bought a second-class ticket and was making his way up from the rear of the train to the first-class compartments, his eyes behind dark glasses flicking from side to side as he looked for Lucy's distinctive mop of curly hair. The anxiety he had felt at the station had gone. He had watched them get on, and he knew where they were getting off. All he had to do before reporting back to
Holtz was to check that they hadn't met anyone on the train. Then he could take it easy for a few hours.

He saw them halfway up the front compartment, sitting in one of the four-seat sections with a table. The fourth seat was empty. Reaching in his pocket for his cell phone, he ducked through the door marked W.C. at the end of the compartment, made himself as comfortable as the seat would allow, and tapped in the number for the Ritz.

It was an extended call, partly because Holtz took advantage of it to bring up something that had been nagging away at his mind all morning. Suppose Franzen was playing games? He should have called the Ritz by now; he hadn't. Why not? Either because he wanted to hold out for more money or because he had decided to ignore warnings, common sense, and his enormous moral obligation to Holtz in order to work with Cyrus Pine. Holtz began to describe the Dutchman.

Paradou stopped him. “It may well be that he is a greedy, ungrateful Dutch
putz
—whatever that is—Monsieur Holtz, but it doesn't help me to identify him. What does he look like, and what do you want me to do if I find him?”

Holtz collected himself and confined his remarks to Franzen's physical appearance, making Paradou repeat the description. He was less precise about further instructions, if only because he didn't know what to suggest. Eliminating Franzen—Paradou's first choice; he could see the fee escalating—was out of the question … at least until the paintings had been recovered. “Just let me know
as soon as you see him,” said Holtz, “and then I'll decide. And let me have the number of your cell phone.”

Lucy came back from the bar car with three cups of coffee and a puzzled expression. “Now I've heard everything. Do guys go to the bathroom in twos over here? Is it a French thing?”

Andre looked up, smiling. “Never used to be, Lulu. Why?”

“When I came past just now, I could hear someone talking in there.” She nodded in the direction of the toilet as she sat down. “You know, a real conversation.” She shook her head. France really was different.

The train continued south, the rhythm of its wheels regular, gentle, and soporific. Lyon came and went, and the countryside changed from the spring-green curves of Burgundy to the more jagged scenery of the Midi, with vineyards clinging to steep hillsides and a perceptibly deeper blueness in the sky. While Cyrus snored softly, Andre told Lucy what he knew about Provence: a different country, with its own language and its own impenetrable way of speaking French; the personality of the people, hot and quick-tempered and Mediterranean; the perception of time, marked by seasons instead of clocks, with punctuality dismissed as a curious northern obsession; the empty beauty of the backcountry, the crowded good humor of markets; the flamingos and cowboys of the Camargue; and the food—the
tapenade
and
estouffade
, truffles and figs, goat's cheeses, olive oil, herb-flavored lamb from Sisteron, the diamond-shaped almond
calissons
of Aix.

Lucy put a finger over Andre's mouth. “You sound like a one-man tourist office. And you're making me very hungry.”

The announcement came over the loudspeaker in French and English, advising passengers that Avignon was the next stop and that they would have two minutes precisely to disembark. Cyrus opened his eyes and shook his head. “Very nearly dropped off,” he said. “Are we there?”

Avignon station is not the place one would choose as an introduction to Provence. It is in a permanent state of waiting to be cleaned up and waiting to be organized, with temperamental escalators and long flights of steps to make the carrying of heavy bags as awkward as possible, and an area in front of the station that seems to have been designed by a particularly malevolent urban planner with a hatred for cars. Chaos reigns. Voices are frequently raised, and from time to time the hands and arms of blocked, frustrated drivers are brandished in emphatic and vulgar salutes.