Old Scores (Chris Norgren 3) (23 page)

He was leaning on the windowsill, staring into the haze but not seeing it. "They gave it to me on my parents' dinnerware," he said tightly. "The willow-pattern plates my mother had bought when my brother, Alfred, was born, the silver that had been a wedding gift from her sister in Toulouse. In the corner was the buffet that we had kept them in. They didn't even realize it." He turned toward me, as if curious as to what my response would be.

I didn't know what to say. "They'd stolen them?"

I think he smiled, but it was hard to tell. "Not stolen, no. These were good, kind-hearted people, not thieves or monsters. Still, after the Nazis took us away, they just walked upstairs and took what they wanted. So did our other neighbors. We were Jews, after all, and what ever they might say now, they didn't expect ever to see us again. And then, somehow, these good, kind-hearted people managed to forget where they'd gotten these fine, new possessions, managed to forget the times my mother had served
them
coffee and cake on those same cups and plates. And they really
did
forget, you see."

He came back and sat wearily down. "And so, Monsieur Norgren," he said, picking up his
Kir
again, "do you really expect that I could find friends and neighbors who would remember the beautiful portrait that hung in our home, and vouch for my claim?"

Again, there wasn't much I could say. I sipped some more from my drink.

Mann had finished his, and the alcohol appeared to have mellowed him. I suspected he didn't often drink; both bottles had been full to start with. "You seem like a nice young man," he said—making that twice in one day that someone had called me "young man." "But I must warn you that I will not rest until this painting is returned. What's right is right."

Underneath the resolution there was a kind of subdued despair. He was fighting the good fight, I thought, but in his heart he didn't believe he could win it. Not against the famous René Vachey. Not against a big American museum.

"I understand," I said. "We're not against you, Monsieur Mann. We want the painting to go where it rightfully belongs. If it's your father's painting, I will do what I can to help you get it back. I mean that sincerely."

Behind the bottle-bottom glasses Mann's small, fierce eyes reappraised me. He'd begun with the idea that he was receiving an enemy. Now he wondered if I was—maybe not an enemy.

"Thank you," he said gruffly. "I would like you to know that my motive is not profit. I would never sell it. It's all that's left of my father's. Everything else—everything from my childhood—is gone."

"I understand," I said again. I was almost starting to wish it
would
turn out to be his.

He leaned dreamily against the back of his chair. "It's a wonderful painting, isn't it? As a boy, I—another drink, monsieur?"

I shook my head. The talk was winding down, and I sensed that I'd be going soon. Chalk up one more conversation that had answered no questions, resolved no ambiguities.

"As a boy, my older brother and I—Alfred was his name— would play at soldiers. The old man in the picture was our captain;
Capitaine Le Nez,
we called him.
 
Because of the nose, you see. We would line up before him and salute ..." An unreadable expression rolled over his face. His hand moved up to rest, trembling, on his domed forehead. "My God . . ."

My interest quickened. "What is it?"

"It's broken," he said wonderingly. "I forgot completely. We broke it."

"You broke the painting?"

"The frame—we broke the frame. I can describe it perfectly." Agitated, he reached out to touch my wrist with dry, spidery fingers. "That would be proof, wouldn't it?"

He and his brother, he said, had been reporting to
Capitaine Le Nez
one morning, when the play had gotten a little rough. They had accidentally knocked the picture from the wall and chipped a piece from the lower right corner. Terrified, they had glued it back on and apparently gotten away with it; their father had never noticed the repair.

"I'm afraid I don't remember noticing it either," I said.

"Well, we did a good job gluing it!" He was squirming with excitement. "Look for it, you'll see; the lower right corner! A piece—so big." He used his fingers to make a triangular shape about an inch on a side.

"What kind of frame was it?"

He gestured impatiently. "I don't remember the frame—no wait, I think it had fancy carving—but the break—look for it!"

"I'll look," I said. "You'd better mention this to your attorney too."

He jerked his head no. "I don't trust him. I trust you, monsieur.
You
look, please." He was out of his chair and practically pulling me out of mine, as if the sooner he got me up and walking, the sooner I'd be back in Dijon.

"I'll look," I promised again as I stood up, "but—I'm sorry, Monsieur Mann—I think I would already have seen it if it was there."

Chapter 16

I not only didn't think it was there, I
knew
it wasn't there. I'd examined every millimeter of that painting, and there weren't any repaired cracks in the lower right corner or anywhere else. Somewhere along the line, the frame (which did have carving on it, but how hard would it have been to guess that?) had been stripped down to bare wood and lightly stained, so even an expertly done job would have been visible, let alone the work of a couple of scared kids.

But that proved nothing, one way or the other. The picture had recently been relined; who was to say it hadn't been reframed as well?

How about the rest of Mann's story? Well, in general, I believed it; that is, I believed that his father had sold
some
painting to Vachey in
some
circumstance, that it was probably a picture of an old man who had a hat with a plume, and that
somebody
had identified its creator as Govert Flinck. I also believed that Mann was telling the truth as he remembered it; why would he invent the tale about breaking the frame if it hadn't really happened?

He had nothing to gain from urging me to look for a crack that wasn't there.

Beyond that, I didn't know how much to take at face value. Mann's perceptions were too old, too thoroughly pickled in bitterness. A well-justified bitterness, to be sure, but did Vachey— Vachey, personally—deserve it? How could I reconcile Mann's cruel, smiling profiteer with Clotilde Guyot's compassionate patriot? I knew which one I wanted to believe in, but I didn't know which one was true.

And what about the painting itself, the one Mann and his dead brother had played in front of—could it really have been painted by Govert Flinck? Sure, but if so, it wasn't the same painting Vachey had donated to SAM. The more I thought about that picture—and I'd been thinking about it a lot—the more convinced I'd become that that subtle, marvelous old soldier had been beyond anything Flinck could have done. It was a Rembrandt, all right; Mann was wrong about that. If I had to, I was ready to stand up to the Rembrandt Police and defend it.

But that didn't mean I was out of the woods. It was still possible that
Un Officier
was indeed the picture Vachey had bought from Mann's father, but that it had been incorrectly ascribed to Flinck instead of to Rembrandt at the time, and Mann had been talking about a Rembrandt all along; he just didn't know it.

Under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn't have given that a lot of credence—there are quite a few similar pictures out there, of quite a few similar old men, by quite a few competent but lesser Dutch artists (such as Govert Flinck), and Mann's picture was most likely to be one of them. If so, it was probably somewhere in Russia or eastern Germany, and he didn't stand a chance of ever seeing it again. But Vachey's prankish conditions and whimsical behavior—and above all, his murder—had made the circumstances anything but ordinary. All bets were off.

I was so muddled and dithery by this time that I was half-rooting for Julien Mann—maybe more than half—to prove his case, which was a pretty strange state of affairs, considering where I stood if he did.

Such were my disordered reflections when the taxi I'd taken from Mann's apartment building in Saint-Denis let me off at 27 Rue Jean-Mermoz, the snazzy Right Bank condominium that Calvin the Resourceful had learned was the address of Gisèle Grémonde, ex-diva, ex-lover of René Vachey . . . and the woman who had been so eager to tell me just what was in that mysterious, missing blue book that had gotten me pitched out of a window—and perhaps gotten René Vachey pitched out of this life.

* * *

She wasn't so eager anymore. "I am entertaining," she told me imperiously, standing in her doorway and squarely blocking my way. "And I am about to go out. One would do better to telephone before calling, monsieur."

She was light years removed from the stricken hag who had sat numbly through the presentation of Vachey's will—and from that blowzy and malicious drunk who'd cornered me at the reception as well. Her coppery wig was back in place—not in the least askew this time—her vivid makeup had been recently and emphatically plastered on, and she was manifestly in control of her faculties.

Behind her was a small foyer, a very different thing from Julien Mann's, with a parquet floor, and a compact Mazarin writing desk and Louis XIV chair against one wall, beneath a collection of signed photographs. I recognized Toscanini, Pinza, and Callas. From the room beyond came the raspy sound of an old recording; a soprano singing a lilting, Verdi-like aria. I thought I could make out, in the middle tones, a hauntingly sweet, youthful version of Madame Grémonde's time-coarsened voice.

I apologized for the second time (I'd had to do some fast talking at the downstairs speaker-phone to get her to let me into the building). "Perhaps you don't remember speaking with me at the reception the other night," I said now, "but—"

"You are correct, Monsieur Norgren, I don't."

"You were telling me about a book of Monsieur Vachey's; a blue scrapbook . . . ."

She watched me impatiently, one plucked eyebrow slightly raised. "I do not recall it," she said coldly. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Madame, are you telling me the police haven't been in touch with you about this?"

Her mouth tightened. "So I have you to thank for that. Well, I'll tell you what I told them. If I indeed said what you said I did, I'm afraid I have no idea at all what was in my mind. I may have had something more to drink than was good for me. When that happens I have been known to become a little, shall we say, fanciful."

No, I thought, that wasn't it. The difference between now and Monday night wasn't in her blood-alcohol level, it was in her feelings toward Vachey. Last Monday she had thought he was giving her treasured Duchamp to someone else, and she had burned to destroy him for it. Now she knew that in almost his last act he had lived up to his old promise, and like Clotilde Guyot she was determined to protect his memory.

"I'll tell you what I think, madame," I said bluntly. "I think there are records in it of his purchases during the Occupation. I think you're trying to keep them from coming out to preserve his reputation, and I think you're making a mistake. It was fifty years ago, a lifetime away."

"You may think as you please, monsieur," she said. "And now, if that is all . . . ?"

I made a last try at keeping her from shutting the door in my face. "The music—it's beautiful."

She warmed slightly. "Thank you. You like grand opera?"

"Very much," I said, wondering why I hadn't started this way. I tilted my head, the better to hear the music. "I've always loved Verdi, and that soprano is wonderful—" I let a slow smile come to my face. "Why, that's you, isn't it?"

Contemptible, I admit it, but it was a desperate stab. Who else was there who could fill me in on that damn scrapbook?

Madame Grémonde's face iced up again. "The composer is not Verdi but Bellini. And the singer is not me, it is Lily Pons." She pursed her crimson lips, lifted her several powdered chins, and swung the door closed. A second later she opened it a crack. "
I
 
had no trouble with my lower registers. Good evening, monsieur."

* * *

So, after almost a full day in Paris, after hustling in and out of taxis to hunt down Julien Mann, Gisèle Grémonde, and M. Gibeault of Top Souvenirs, I had come away with next to nothing. Well, with nothing.

There was still one person left on my Paris agenda: Ferdinand Oscar de Quincy, former director of the Seattle Art Museum, former captain with MFA & A, the U.S. Army's art recovery squad, and the man who had once found and returned a dozen of Vachey's own paintings, thereby sowing the seed—so Vachey had claimed—for his eventual donation of the Rembrandt to SAM. I was hoping de Quincy could help me get straight in my mind just who René Vachey was. But that wouldn't be until tomorrow morning, when we were to meet at the Louvre. For the moment, I was at liberty, alone and with nothing to do in the City of Lights. Nothing I felt like doing, anyway.

There comes a time in most foreign trips, especially when things are not going as well as they might, when one craves the solace of one's native food, and this felt like it. From Madame Grémonde's condominium I walked a block to the Champs Elysées, then turned right for two more blocks until I came to the huge, multifloored Burger King. There, surrounded by black- and-white photographs of American movie actors looking curiously Gallic—a tousled Clark Gable with a woebegone and philosophical half smile, a sleepy-eyed Gary Cooper in three-quarter profile, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth as if he were doing an Yves Montand imitation—I made a solitary, satisfying dinner of
le chicken deluxe
(a double-order),
le milkshake au chocolat,
and
les frites,
earning a pitying look from the server when I asked him to hold the mayo and give me some ketchup to go along with the fries.

Afterward, I walked a few steps to a movie theater and watched Kevin Costner emote in dubbed French as
Robin de Bois, Prince des Voleurs.