Old Scores (Chris Norgren 3) (28 page)

Charpentier was peering at me, as if to see how bad off I was. My appearance must have been satisfactorily dismal, because he raised the pike, tightened his grip, and set himself for a final thrust. When I'd gotten hold of another one of those one by twos I didn't remember, but it was in my hand, and almost automatically I swung it up and around, as hard as I could, cracking him on the side of the head just over the left ear.

I must have been improving with experience because he froze this time, then growled and shook himself—not just his head, but all over, like a bear. And he fell back—a single uncertain step to keep his balance. If I was going to get myself out of this alive, now was the time to do it. I dropped what was left of the one-by-two—it had broken when I hit him—and made a grab for the pike. This time I managed to wrench it out of his hands and had already started to bring the butt end around for another whack at his head when I sensed a change in him.

The heart had gone out of him. His shoulders drooped, his eyes had lost their crazy brilliance and turned opaque. I couldn't begin to read his expression except to know he had given up the fight. There was blood welling from his ear, where the skin had split. He touched it abstractedly but never bothered to look at his fingers, then turned his back on me and walked into the kitchen, heading for a back door that opened onto a row of off-the-street vegetable and flower gardens running the length of the block.

No, I didn't try to stop him. What was I supposed to do, yell at him to halt? And if he didn't (and he wouldn't have), what then? Run up and club him unconscious with the butt of the damn pike? Impale him with the point, perhaps transfixing him to one of the heavy wooden tables for safekeeping? Sorry, not my metier. Besides, the fight had gone out of me, too. I was woozy and nauseated, and my head had started hammering, and I'd had enough.

When he disappeared through the back door, leaving it open behind him, I sank back against the stone wall of the corridor and closed my eyes. I realized that I'd been hearing the sounds of pounding feet for the last few seconds—people running down the stairs—and opened my eyes to see Inspector Lefevre, accompanied by Sergeant Huvet and another man, burst into the corridor and practically skid to a standstill when they saw me.

I gestured toward the kitchen. "Jean-Luc Charpentier," I said, surprised to find myself short of breath. "He just went . . . out the back. He's your murderer."

Lefevre and Huvet looked at each other.

"... tried to burn the painting," I said, or rather panted. "... caught him . . . tried to kill me with this . . . this ..."

But I couldn't think of the word for it, and besides, the blackness had begun to dance at the edges of my sight again, and with it came another sickly wave of dizziness. I tipped my head back against the wall, closed my eyes, and tried to steady myself. I would have put my head between my knees but I didn't want to do it in front of Lefevre.

"All right, have a look out there for him," I heard him tell his subordinates.

"... gone by now," I said.

"If he's not there," Lefevre told them, "go to his hotel."

After a few more seconds the queasiness passed. I opened my eyes to find Lefevre silently studying the litter of wood strewn across the floor. Then he looked at the painting lying on its face, its frame knocked awry. Finally, he looked at me, clutching my medieval pike and leaning, bruised and battle-weary, against the stone wall.

He sighed. "Some things don't change, do they, Mr. Norgren?"

Chapter 19

Lefevre led me a few steps down the corridor into Pepin's office, sat me down in Pepin's padded, high-backed chair behind the desk, and took a wooden armchair for himself. He telephoned upstairs to ask Madame Guyot to see that we weren't disturbed, and to request a cup of coffee laced with cognac for me, then waited for it to come before starting in on the inevitable grilling. He'd been upstairs himself, talking to the domestic staff, when he'd heard the commotion down below, he said. Now, if it wouldn't be too much trouble, perhaps I would tell him what all this was about?

"And I think you can put your pikestaff down now. You're safe with me."

I wasn't so sure about that, but I put it down anyway, surprised to find that I'd hung on to it all this time.

"Are you all right?" he asked when I took another sip without speaking.

I was all right—the brandied coffee was helping considerably—I was just trying to figure out where to begin. It had been no more than fifteen minutes since I'd put all the pieces together myself, and I didn't know yet what kind of a fit they made.

"Let's start with the painting," I said.

"The Léger?"

"It's not a Léger. It's two paintings, one on top of the other, and neither one of them is a Léger."

"Not a Léger?" Frowning, he went out to the corridor and brought the picture back, laying it on the desk and leaning over to study it. In addition to its being twisted from the rough treatment, some more of the overpainting had flecked away, and much of it had slipped an inch or two, crinkling up like the skin on a pan of scalded milk. The
violon
could have passed for an
accordéon.

Gingerly, Lefevre pushed at the film of paint. "Let us hope you're right," he said. "No one could repair this." He looked up. "It's a forgery, then?"

"An extremely good forgery—painted on top of another extremely good forgery."

He leaned back in his chair, pulled a pack of Gauloises from his pocket, and lit up. "I feel confident that there is a reason for this, and that you are going to tell me what it is."

"I can tell you what I think it is." I had another swig of the fortifying liquid and told him what I believed had happened. The underlying painting had been covered with a coat of gesso to create a satisfactory working surface for the
Violon et Cruche
that would be painted on top, a common enough procedure in overpainting. The difference was that this particular gesso had been purposely
made
to slough off. My guess was that a thin coating of linseed oil had been put on the surface of the original painting before brushing on the gesso, which would tend to make the gesso slip. Then, the gesso itself had been applied as a single, thick layer instead of building it up in several thin coats, which would make it tend to split and curl—especially in a warm environment, as many a fledgling artist has discovered to his grief.

Lefevre listened skeptically. "And Vachey knew this?"

"Vachey
planned
it. That's why he ordered the gallery kept so warm. Otherwise it could have taken months for the gesso to start breaking up. But he didn't want it to happen later, he wanted it to happen right when it was getting the most publicity—during the two weeks of the exhibition. And the way to do that was to turn the heat up. The warmer it was, the faster it would deteriorate."
 
I shook my head ruefully. "I noticed right away that the temperature was too high. Damn, I should have figured out what was going on."

Actually, I didn't really believe that
anybody
could have figured out what was going on, but I thought Lefevre would appreciate thinking that I'd missed something obvious.

"And to what end," he said, "would Vachey go to so much trouble?"

"To make a fool of Charpentier. The gesso would come off in the middle of the show, followed by consternation and disbelief, and accompanied by loads of publicity. And when the experts got a look at the painting underneath, they would see beyond a doubt that it had been made in the last few years—which would mean that the overpainting couldn't possibly be from Léger's time. After the way Charpentier had come on about its being genuine, he'd be finished; his name would be a joke."

Through a shifting veil of cigarette smoke, Lefevre appraised me. "And all this is your own rendering of the way it is? Or is there perhaps some factual corroboration?"

"Factual—?" I laughed. "Well, there's the fact that Charpentier ran down here and tried to burn the thing the minute he heard about the gesso slipping. And there's the fact that he did his damnedest to do me in when I caught him at it."

He picked a shred of tobacco from his lip. "No, no, Mr. Norgren, these things support the hypothesis that Charpentier wished to keep the underpainting from being seen, yes; they are hardly proof that he murdered René Vachey."

"Well, no, but there are other things—"

The telephone on Pepin's desk chirped. Lefevre picked it up. "Yes, put him through."

He was on the telephone for two or three minutes, saying little, but issuing brief, inspectorish queries: "How? Where, exactly? When? What procedure have you followed?"

In the meantime I was trying to arrange my thoughts. Lefevre was right; I didn't have any proof that Charpentier had killed Vachey, but I had enough collateral evidence to sink a battleship. What I needed to do was to put it in cogent form. With my head still pounding, that was proving hard.

Lefevre gave a few brief commands over the telephone and hung up. "Charpentier is dead."

"Suicide?" I said automatically, less a question than a statement. It was odd. I hadn't given a moment's speculation to where Charpentier had been going or what he'd intended to do, and yet the news was so unsurprising it was almost as if I'd already heard it. I guess I'd been able to read that private, cloudy expression better than I'd thought.

"Yes," Lefevre said. "He was in his room. They knocked, they demanded entrance. And they heard a shot." He shrugged. "No more Charpentier." He was looking very thoughtful.

"Ah," I said. I wasn't feeling thoughtful. I was waiting to see what was coming next.

"The weapon with which he killed himself is a 6.35mm Mauser, the kind of thing that is called a pocket pistol in America, I believe?"

He was asking the wrong person about handgun terminology, but I thought I knew what he was driving at. "The same one that killed Vachey?" I asked.

"I have no doubt it will prove so. It's not a weapon one sees very often any longer." His Gauloises were lying on the desk, and he started to slip one out, but changed his mind and put them in his pocket instead, then cleared his throat and stood up abruptly.

So, Mr. Norgren, it seems that once again you've been the inadvertent agent of justice." He tucked in his chin and made some more gargly noises. "Thank you for your efforts."

I didn't know about the "inadvertent," but I wasn't going to do any better than that from Lefevre. He'd had enough trouble getting that much out.

"You're welcome, but there's more I'd better tell you."

He nodded. "Better to do it at the préfecture, I think, unless you don't feel well enough. ..."

"No, I'm perfectly fine," I said, getting up too. I felt more fluttery than sick, and the pounding had almost subsided. "Let's go."

But Lefevre's attention had been caught by the painting again.
 
"A forgery on top of a forgery," he mused, bending over it. "The one underneath—it's a portrait of some sort, abstract but not quite abstract, no? Isn't this an eye? Ah, and here's the corner of the mouth ..."

"It's a portrait, all right." I reached over and used my fingers to pull away a little more of the overpainting so that both eyes were visible, an arresting, smoky gray dappled with hazel.

After a second, Lefevre barked a brief note of laughter. "Vachey! It's a portrait of René Vachey."

"A
self-portrait,"
I said, and laughed a little myself. "Beautifully done ... in the unmistakable style of Fernand Léger."

Chapter 20

Vachey was a
forger?"
Anne said, looking up from unwrapping a hunk of goat cheese.

"An extraordinary forger," I said. "He could do all the Cubists—Léger, Gris, Braque, Picasso. Not for a livelihood, you understand; more as an avocation, something he played away at once in a while as a matter of—well, of pride, I suppose."

"An avenue of self-actualization, you might say," Anne said dryly.

"Lorenzo might say," I said with a laugh, helping myself to cheese and bread.

We were in a little park a block from the hotel, one I'd often looked down on from the room; a square of prettily regimented greenery, with a formally laid out pond, and terraces and balustrades done in the ornate Italianate manner that had been popular in the time of Napoleon III. I'd come back from police headquarters looking, according to Anne, like something the cat dragged in, and although I hadn't felt like going anywhere, she had insisted on some fresh air and a
pique-nique.
Now I was glad she had; I'd been eating nonstop, not even waiting for her to get everything laid out between us on the bench.

"That's what the scrapbook was all about," I said, chewing. "His own record of all the fakes he painted, described in loving detail: pigments, techniques, materials. Right up to and including 'Léger's'
Violon et Cruche."

"I don't understand. I thought it was a record of the paintings he'd
bought."
She frowned. "
'Les peintures de René Vachey'
..."

"Right, 'The Paintings of René Vachey.' Well, think about it. If you're talking about a collector, it means the paintings he owns. But if you're talking about an
artist,
it means the paintings he's created. It's the same in English; 'The Paintings of J. Paul Getty II and 'The Paintings of Pablo Picasso' are two different things. I guess Vachey thought of himself more along the lines of Picasso. I misread it completely."

"Well ... all right, but how do you know you've got it right, now? Did they find the book?"

"No, it looks like Charpentier got rid of it somewhere. But Lefevre called in Clotilde Guyot while I was there, and she verified it all."

The book, Clotilde had said, contained comprehensive material on counterfeits by Vachey dating back to 1942; his own notes, plus newspaper clippings and magazine articles. Like many self-admiring forgers before him, he'd wanted to be sure that in the end he could prove the paintings had indeed come from his own hand.