Old Scores (Chris Norgren 3) (7 page)

We arrived a few minutes late at the Rue Rameau entrance to the palace courtyard in the midst of a swirl of dark, expensive cars dropping elegant couples at curbside like luminaries at a Hollywood premiere. A few tourists hung about on the sidewalk, not sure what they were watching. Across the street, more comfortably placed at outdoor cafe tables in the Place de la Libération, locals observed the goings-on over carafes of burgundy or chablis. There was even a French TV team that coaxed aside some of the incoming guests (it didn't take much coaxing) for a few words on camera.

The pomp and ceremony came as no surprise. Calvin had spent some time that afternoon with Madame Guyot, Vachey's gallery manager, and learned that we would be dining with an illustrious crowd indeed. Among the hundred invitees were France's most influential art critics, editors, and reviewers, along with some high government officials, including the Minister of Culture himself.

The show, Calvin had told me, was a much bigger affair than we'd thought. In addition to the Rembrandt and the Léger, there were another thirty-four Dutch and French paintings on display; the cream of Vachey's collection. Many were familiar to me. Some were justly famous. As far as I knew, none of them had any controversy attached to them. And all thirty-four would be donated to the Louvre on Vachey's seventy-fifth birthday, the following year—his way of expressing gratitude to the splendid country that had allowed him, the son of an illiterate Lithuanian immigrant, to achieve success far beyond the most fantastic dreams his father had had for him.

Calvin and I, evoking no interest from onlookers or TV people, made it unimpeded through the courtyard to the palace wing that held the old kitchens. There our invitations were taken, and we were bowed through the massive oak door by a liveried flunky straight out of a Thomas Rowlandson drawing—knee britches, lace cuffs, and all.

"This," Calvin said with approval, "is going to be fancy."

* * *

Possibly it seems odd to you that a fancy dinner, thrown by a cultivated and flamboyant man like Vachey, for an exalted crowd like this, should be held in a kitchen, even a palace kitchen. If so, that's because you don't know the kitchens of le Palais des Dues et des Etats de Bourgogne.

These were probably the greatest kitchens the Western world has ever known, surpassing even those of Louis XIV at Versailles because the Sun King, whatever his other attributes, didn't come within miles of the dukes of Burgundy when it came to good eating. It was here, in these kitchens, that the great culinary traditions of Burgundy—of France, really—began in the fifteenth century, with the legendary banquets of Philip the Bold.

They didn't eat in the kitchens in those days, of course, but the old ducal dining rooms are gone now, or rather they, along with the rest of the palace, have been converted to the personal offices of the mayor of Dijon, which is a good deal for
le maire,
but a bad one for the rest of us. Fortunately, with proper French respect for gastronomic history, the kitchens have been preserved, and are still used as a reception and dining area for affairs of state and high society.

They were more than large enough for Vachey's hundred guests, consisting of a huge chamber with pitted stone columns, somber Gothic arches, and a floor of worn stone slabs that looked as if they'd been in place since Philip had laid them down in 1433, and probably had been. Back then, they had been able to roast not merely one but six whole oxen at the same time (and often did), but the six gigantic, vaulted fireplaces along the smoke-blackened walls, each with its own enormous chimney, had since been knocked down to open up even more space.

Inside, people were sitting down to tables of four or six, smooth and elegant in their gowns and tuxedos. Eyes shone, laughter trilled, voices were keen and excited—many of them raised in lively dispute. I heard Vachey ardently praised on one side of me, passionately damned on another. It was impossible not to feel the sense of anticipation in the air, and of privilege. This was the
corps d'élite
of the French art establishment; they knew it very well, and they also knew that they had been invited, almost by right, to an event that would be covered in the world press the next day, and possibly, given Vachey's reputation for dramatics, for some time to come.

Almost as soon as we got inside and paused to get our bearings, I noted a telltale, glittery bulge in Calvin's beady eyes. Following his line of sight, I saw a table at which sat a stern-looking middle-aged man and woman and a flashy younger woman with a wandering eye of her own—Calvin's type, all right—who looked as if she might be their daughter. The fourth chair was vacant.

"Go ahead, Calvin," I said.

He didn't bother pretending not to know what I was talking about. "Well, no, there's only one chair, Chris, and I wouldn't want to leave you—"

"Calvin, will you please go? There are bound to be some other people here I know. I can renew old acquaintances. Besides, I hate it when you drool."

"Well, if you really think so . . ."

And off he went. I didn't think he'd get very far right under mama's and papa's baleful gazes, but with Calvin you could never tell. I was on my way to join a French art professor I knew slightly when a snatch of conversation caught my ear over the general hubbub, probably because it was in English, not in French, and in heavily Italian-accented English at that.

"But aren't the very distinctions themselves simply the old, worn-out objectivist reifications?" the lilting, high-pitched voice was asking. "Surely you agree, ah-ha-ha, that terms such as 'real' and 'false,' 'authentic' and 'inauthentic,' are outmoded constructs whose validity was never more than contingent at best? Surely we can reject out of hand the notion that any field of existence has a 'reality' outside of its own system of reference?"

It may be that there were several people in the world who were capable of uttering such a statement, but I, personally, knew only one: the many-faceted Lorenzo Bolzano, collector-son of a collector-father, adjunct professor of the philosophy of art criticism at the University of Rome, and European editor of the staggeringly abstruse
Journal of Subjectivistic Art Commentary
(to which I had yet to encounter a single, solitary subscriber). The learned Lorenzo was surely the wackiest scholar I knew, with views ranging from mildly laughable to stupefyingly incomprehensible. Hearing his voice wasn't altogether a surprise. Lorenzo, like his father before him, was a longtime and no doubt highly valued client of Vachey's gallery, and I'd thought he might be on the invitation list for tonight's exclusive affair.
 

And here he was, astride, unless I was mistaken, one of his favorite metaphysical hobbyhorses, the mind-bending notion that there is no valid distinction between an original work of art and a forgery. If you're thinking, so what, that was merely the same thing Vachey had been telling me that morning, then you've missed the gist of Lorenzo's speech. (Don't blame yourself.) Vachey had been probing into the elements of perception that affect our attitudes toward art and forgery. An unsettling topic, considering the situation, but not unreasonable in itself. Lorenzo was carrying things a giant step further, maintaining that there was simply no difference—literally no difference—between authentic art and counterfeit art, and that any distinction we tried to impose was purely artificial, with no aesthetic, empirical, or other foundation.

Did he really believe it? As far as I could tell: yes. That and a lot of other equally goofy ideas. Or maybe he didn't quite believe them, but he was so in love with the words and the crazy, convoluted philosophical mazes they led through that it was the next best thing to believing them.

But if he was a crackpot, he was an amiable crackpot, fun to argue with, unfanatical, obsessed not so much with his cockeyed theories as with the pleasures of argument. He could even be lucid and down-to-earth for long periods—sometimes minutes at a time—and was, moreover, one of the gentlest, sweetest-tempered people I knew, always a pleasure to run into. And there he was, gesticulating over his plate, gawky and hollow-chested, bald and beaky-nosed, his button eyes shiny with the excitement of discourse.

He was at a table with two other men, both of whom I'd met before. One was the stout and self-important Edmond Froger, director of the Musée Barillot, and part-time art critic for the
Revue Critique d'Art.
The Barillot, you may remember, was the small Dijon museum from which Vachey had temporarily stolen—excuse me, had caused to be taken—six paintings, about a decade earlier. That incident, while amusing to many, had never struck Froger's funny bone, and his continuing antipathy to Vachey was no secret. What he was doing there as Vachey's guest was anybody's guess.

The other person was Jean-Luc Charpentier, a member of the
Chambre des Experts d'Objets d'Art,
one of several influential French societies of independent, certified art experts who valuated art objects and issued certificates of authenticity for dealers and auction houses. The
Chambre des Experts
was one of the more prominent of the
chambres
specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European art, with Charpentier's specialty being the latter.

A resolutely crusty and sharp-tongued man, he was at this moment devoting his attention to the
pâté de campagne
that had been laid out on the tables ahead of time, grumbling in an undertone to himself, or maybe to the paté, as he spread it on a slice of bread. Listening to Lorenzo for too long affected different people different ways, and talking to the chopped liver didn't really seem that extraordinary.

As always, a little inattention wasn't bothering Lorenzo. "If, on the other hand," he went blithely on, "we take as our starting point a postexistential, that is to say, a subjectivist and therefore multidimensional perspective, then we see, ah-ha-ha, that 'reality' is no more than a convenient metaphor for a many-layered . . . Christopher! Ha, I heard you would be here!"

He shouted this with a transparent joy that did my heart good, and jumped up, lanky arms outspread. After a clumsy Mediterranean embrace (Lorenzo wasn't any better at it than I was), he herded me to the one vacant chair. "Come, sit, join us!"

Froger grunted at me and extended a hand as I sat down. Charpentier merely grunted.

I watched regretfully as the waiters cleared away the paté before I'd had a chance to taste it, but cheered up when it was followed immediately by hefty but delicate salmon quenelles in a bearnaise sauce, with an artfully arranged border of curled, rosy shrimp. A round of Clos Blanc de Vougeot was poured—Vachey certainly wasn't cutting any corners—and we fell to. In Burgundy, one is expected to pay attention to the food.

But Lorenzo was one of those people who preferred talking to eating regardless of where he was, and in a minute or two he was back at it, gesturing with his fork as if to hurry the luscious dumplings down his gullet.

"Well, then, Christopher," he said, "you're just in time to settle an argument for us."

I laughed, not averse to a little Lorenzian hairsplitting. "What's the argument?" So far I hadn't heard any argument. Just Lorenzo.

"The issue is," he said, "do we defer to a false objectivist contextualism—"

"Objectivist contextualism," I heard Charpentier mutter, head down. Now he was talking to his quenelles.

"—contextualism that persists in confusing its own paltry, artificial system of reference with the universal dynamism of—"

"No, that's not the issue," Edmond Froger said with a burst of impatience. He leaned forward over the table, beefy and aggressive, perceptibly taking over the conversation. "The issue is, what is our friend Vachey up to?"

Lorenzo, who was actually quite easy to cut in on, once you found a place to do it, blinked and fell silent.

"Consider," Froger said. "This is a great day for France, yes? Everyone knows that tonight he will announce the donation of the greatest paintings of his collection to the Louvre. Unquestioned masterpieces all; I admit it freely. A magnificent gesture and worthy of unqualified admiration if that were all there was to it. But what does he do? He decides to use what should be an uncontroversial demonstration of generosity to 'reveal'—that is his word, gentlemen—two previously unknown 'masterpieces' that are by no means unquestioned. These he has kept a jealously guarded secret until tonight. Why has he kept them a secret?"

He paused to eye us all, one by one. No one offered an answer. We knew a rhetorical question when we heard one.

"And he refuses to permit any . . . scientific . . . testing of them whatsoever.
Whatsoever.
I ask you. Why?"

He lifted his wine to his mouth, drinking while he chewed. Small eyes watched us over the rim of the glass.

"I will tell you why," he said, as I hadn't doubted that he would. "They are inauthentic, that is why. Forgeries. I said so from the beginning, I say so now, and I do not doubt that I will say so after they are 'revealed.' I am not an underhanded man; I have said it openly, isn't that so, Jean-Luc?"

"Don't drag me into this, Edmond," Charpentier said crankily. "I'm not as accomplished as you are. I still find it necessary to see works of art before I judge them."

Charpentier's face went along with his manner: wild, beetling, devilish eyebrows that made him look as if he were scowling even when he wasn't; liverish lips that always seemed to be poised on the edge of ridicule or scorn; and a great, fierce, ruddy gunnysack of a nose, frequently used for contemptuous snorting. Despite all this, I must admit that I had always found him good company. Things rarely remained dull very long with Charpentier around.

Froger eyed him for a moment. "Pah," he said. "The trouble with me is that I say what I think, I don't pussyfoot around just because someone might be offended. Vachey knows very well what I think. It's a matter of public record."

So it probably was. Froger didn't miss many chances to denounce Vachey in the monthly columns he wrote for the
Revue.
I can't say that I blamed him, given the circumstances.