Chasing Cezanne (6 page)

The two men wrapped the painting carefully and placed it in the carton. The carton went back in the van. The doors were closed. The men disappeared inside the house. All of this recorded on film.

Andre lowered the camera. What was that all about? It couldn't possibly be a burglary, not in broad daylight in the presence of Claude, the infinitely trustworthy Claude with his twenty years of faithful service. Was the painting being sent away for cleaning? Reframing? If so, why was it leaving the house in the back of a plumber's van? It was odd. It was very odd.

But as Andre had to admit, it was none of his business. He returned to the car and drove slowly back through clean, respectable, somnolent Cap Ferrat until he reached the coast road that would take him into Nice.

Despite an initial mild and really quite unjustified feeling of anticlimax—Marie-Laure would probably never have remembered him anyway; or else closer acquaintance would have shown her to be a spoiled brat after all—Andre found himself enjoying his day off. Unlike Cannes, which slips into a kind of languid semihibernation once the festivals are over and the tourists have escaped, Nice remains awake all through the year. Restaurants stay open, markets continue, the streets are busy, the Promenade des Anglais is a-bob with joggers who like their exercise with
a sea view, the traffic spits and snarls, the town breathes and sweats and lives.

Andre strolled through the lanes of Vieux Nice, with a stop at the Place Saint-François to admire some recently removed residents of the Mediterranean, now occupying slabs in the fish market. He sat outside and had a beer in the Cours Saleya, using his long lens again to take shots of the stallholders and their clients, the worthy housewives of the neighborhood, connoisseurs of the lettuce and the broad bean and the bargain. After a lunch of
moules
and salad and cheese, he shot three or four rolls of color in Auer and Alziari, bought some lavender essence for Noel, and—smiling at the thought of her wearing it—a genuine, made in the Pyrenees, guaranteed
-imperméable-à-l'eau
beret for Lucy.

It started to rain on his way back to Saint-Paul, a steady light drizzle that persisted through the night and into the morning, a change in the weather that Andre welcomed. He always found it hard to leave the south of France; harder still if the sun was high and hot; less of a wrench under dripping gray skies.

The palm trees along the road to the airport, moist and morose, seeming to huddle under the rain, gave way to the glass and steel and concrete of the terminal. Andre returned his car to Avis and took his place in the check-in line among the businessmen (were they the same weary gypsies who had flown over with him from New York?) and a scattering of holidaymakers bearing sun-pink cheeks and noses.

“Hi! How you doing?”

Andre turned, to find his window-sensitive neighbor of the flight over beaming at him. He smiled back and nodded at her. It wasn't enough.

“So. How was your trip? I'll bet you had some great food. I went to this really neat place in Cannes, maybe you know it, Le something Rouge? Wait, I have the card somewhere.” She produced from her bag a swollen Filofax. The line moved up one. Andre prayed for a full flight and a seat well away from his new friend.

LATE afternoon at JFK, a red sun dropping and the air like a knife, the banks of soiled snow a dismal contrast with the bright flower beds of Nice. Andre detached a hardened gobbet of lurid green chewing gum from the seat of the cab as he got in, and tried to make himself understood to the driver. It had been a smooth and mercifully crowded flight, the only distraction a movie in which one of Hollywood's steroid heroes had systematically wiped out the rest of the cast. There had been ample encouragement to close the eyes and think.

The scene at Denoyer's villa returned to nag at his thoughts, as it had several times during the flight. The incongruity of what he knew to be a very valuable painting being loaded, however carefully, into a local workman's van was impossible to forget. And there had been something else, which he had paid no great attention to at the time: The intercom set into the stone gatepost had been dead when he'd pressed the button. Normal enough, if the house had been closed up and there had been no one to answer. But Claude had been there. It was as though
the property had been deliberately disconnected from the outside world.

He felt a sudden impatience to see the photographs he had taken, a record more reliable than memory, and decided to go straight to the processing lab and get the film developed. Leaning forward to make himself heard over the swirls and torrents of sitar music, he gave the address to the back of the cabdriver's turbaned head.

It was almost seven by the time he pushed open the front door of his apartment. Dropping his bags, he went over and switched on the viewing box set into the top of his worktable. The glow flickered and spread into a sheet of pure white light as he laid the transparencies in vivid rows across the glass. The tiny images shone up at him—Claude, the Cézanne, the Zucarelli van and, presumably, Zucarelli himself. Andre rearranged the transparencies, putting them in chronological sequence, telling the story. The details were clear, the focus perfectly sharp even under the magnification of a loupe. As evidence it could hardly have been more conclusive.

But evidence of what? An innocent errand? Andre sat back on the stool, shaking his head. It wasn't right.

He stared at the bulletin board on the wall above his table, a jumble of Polaroids, bills, newspaper clippings, numbers and addresses on scraps of paper, a menu from L'Ami Louis, expense claim forms, unanswered invitations, unopened envelopes from the IRS, and, like a shaft of sunshine among the gloom of those loose ends, a photograph he'd taken of Lucy in the office. He had caught
her during a call to Camilla, and she was holding the phone away from her ear as she looked into the camera, a wide, triumphant grin lighting up her face. It had been the day she'd negotiated his last fee increase with
DQ
, an increase that Camilla had finally accepted with very poor grace and a great deal of bluster.

Lulu. He'd show her the photographs, see what she thought, get a second opinion. He picked up the phone.

“Lulu? Andre. I just got back. There's something I want to show you.”

“Is there a problem? Are you OK?”

“I'm fine. How about dinner?”

“It's Saturday night, Andre. You know? When working girls have dates and go out.”

“A drink? A quick drink? It might be important.”

A short silence. “Can you meet me where I'm having dinner?”

Andre was there in twenty minutes. He settled himself at the half-empty bar and looked around. The last time he had walked past, a few months before, the place had been a run-down hardware store, specializing in window displays of dusty small appliances and dead flies. Now it had been transformed into another SoHo restaurant hoping to be hip—stripped-down decor, hard surfaces, and a lighting level sufficiently high for anyone remotely celebrated to be easily recognized from across the room. The hostess—an aspiring actress, judging by the greasepaint—had the offhand manner and ceremonial swaying walk common to her breed, the menu sprouted with fashionable vegetables, and
the wine list was heavily diluted with a dozen brands of mineral water. The owners seemed to have thought of everything; there was no reason why the restaurant shouldn't be a great success for at least three months.

It was still a little too early in the evening for the hoped-for invasion by models and their escorts, and the diners now reaching the end of their meals had the subdued look of customers who had been thoroughly intimidated by both the prices and the restaurant staff. Tunnel people, Camilla would have called them, who had come into the city from New Jersey and the suburbs for a glamorous evening. They were known to drink little and to tip sparingly, and so were treated with a coolness just this side of obvious disdain by the waiters. On the way home, they would tell each other, with a kind of perverse satisfaction, what a tough town New York was.

Andre could see the entrance to the restaurant reflected in the mirror behind the bar, and each time the door opened he glanced up, looking for Lucy's headful of black curls. When she finally did arrive he was caught by surprise and had to look twice, so little did she resemble the familiar office Lucy he'd been expecting. Her hair was pulled back, severe and shining, showing off the smooth long rise of her neck; her eyes and cheekbones were subtly accentuated by makeup; she was wearing earrings, two tiny gold studs in each lobe and a short dress of dark silk, cut in the skimpy fashion of the day to look as much as possible like an item of expensive underwear.

Andre stood up and kissed her on both cheeks, breathing in her scent, conscious of the bare skin of her shoulders
under his hands, his pleasure at seeing her tinged with jealousy.

“I'd have worn a tie if I'd known you were going to dress up.” He let his hands fall to his sides. “What are you going to have?”

Lucy raised the barman's eyebrows by ordering a rum and water, no ice, sipping it slowly as Andre described what he'd seen on Cap Ferrat. He showed her the transparencies, watching the play of light on the angles of her face as she held them up and wondering whom she was having dinner with. The restaurant was becoming busy, and the bar was now under attack from modish young men, their sidelong glances surreptitiously comparing each other's stubble and haircuts while they waited for their drinks. Andre felt underdressed and overshaved.

“Well?” he said. “What do you think? That painting must be worth a fortune.”

Lucy stacked the transparencies in a small pile on the bar with long, scarlet-tipped fingers. It was the first time Andre had seen her wearing nail varnish. “I don't know,” she said. “If they were stealing it, why wouldn't they do it at night? Why hang around on the doorstep with it?” She took another sip of rum and smiled at the frown on his face. “Listen, if it bothers you, call Denoyer. Do you know where he is?”

“I can find out. It's odd, though, isn't it? You're right—I'll call him.” He slipped the transparencies into an envelope and gazed at Lucy with what he hoped was a soulful expression. “All alone on Saturday night,” he said, “the girl of my dreams promised to another.” He sighed,
a heavy, long-drawn-out sigh. “Pizza and TV, dirty dishes. Maybe I'll go mad and wash my hair. Maybe I should get a cat.”

Lucy grinned. “You're breaking my heart.”

“Who's the lucky man?”

She looked into her drink. “Just a guy.”

“Meet him at the gym? That's what it was, love among the Nautilus machines. Your eyes met over the bench press. One look at his pectorals and you were lost.” He sighed again. “Why don't these things ever happen to me?”

“You're never here.” She looked at him in silence for a moment. “Right?”

Andre nodded. “Right. Anyway, he's late. He's blown it. Why don't we go around the corner and get some real food, some …” A gust of aftershave made him look up, and the space between them was suddenly filled by a young man in a dark suit and an aggressively loud striped shirt. Andre was sure that red felt suspenders lurked under his jacket. What a ponce.

Lucy made the introductions; the two men shook hands with a marked lack of enthusiasm, and Andre surrendered his barstool. “Lulu, I'll call you tomorrow, after I've talked to Denoyer.” He did his best with a smile. “Enjoy your dinner.”

Walking home, the sidewalk treacherous with a skim of ice, Andre reflected on the often-quoted statistic that there were three unattached females in Manhattan for every one unattached male. It wasn't doing him much good at the moment; nor would it, he had to admit, as long as he spent most of his life somewhere else. Lucy
was right. He stopped off at a deli for a sandwich, trying to avoid mental images of her and the striped shirt having dinner.

Later, to the celestial sound of Isaac Stern swooping through Mendelssohn, he searched the drawer where he tossed all the business cards given to him. Denoyer's, in the large and opulent French style, would be bigger than the rest. There. He picked it out and studied the classical black copperplate.

Two addresses, identified by seasons:
Eté
, Villa La Pinède, 06230 Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.
Hiver
, Cooper Cay, New Providence, Bahamas. No mention of Paris or Courcheval, so unless he was skiing, Denoyer should still be in the Bahamas.

Andre yawned, still on French time, four in the morning. He would call tomorrow.

Denoyer's voice, on a fuzzy line from Cooper Cay, was relaxed and amiable. Of course he remembered Andre, and those magnificent photographs. Many of his friends had complimented him on the article. He hoped that Andre was thinking of taking some pictures in the Bahamas. The islands were delightful at this time of year, particularly when the weather in Manhattan was so disagreeable. Denoyer paused, leaving direct questions unasked, and waited.