Restoration (14 page)

Sorry, said the elderly docent, but I would need to schedule an appointment with the curator to view the Asmore portrait, and unfortunately Dr. Perret was traveling in Europe and wouldn’t be returning for two more weeks. Could I come back at a later date? Or perhaps call and arrange a meeting?

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered. “I’ll do that. Thank you.”

“It’s a beautiful painting,” she said. “It’s in Gilbert’s office. I know you’ll be thrilled to see it. It gives me goose bumps every time I go in there. You know what else it does? It makes me smile. It really does. It makes me smile.”

She was probably eighty years old but her voice sounded younger,
almost like a girl’s. “Do we know each other?” I said. “You look familiar to me.”

“I don’t think we’ve met,” she said. “I only know a few people under the age of fifty and we’re all related. Isn’t that terrible? Shows you how old I am.”

“Any way you could show me the painting now, ma’am? I won’t touch it or anything. All I want is to have a look.”

“Funny,” she said, “another gentleman asked me the same thing only about an hour ago.” She laughed and shook her head. “It’s not possible. Gilbert keeps his door locked.”

Another man was there? I wondered about this person, this other seeker of secrets, th
is fool
, as I walked up to Chartres Street and the Williams Research Center. Was he like me, someone with way too much time on his hands? Or did Rhys Goudeau and I have competition in our pursuit of Asmore?

I checked in at the desk, climbed to the reading room on the second floor, and requested the files for Wiltz Lowenstein and Levette Asmore. The librarian returned with only the one for Asmore. “I’m sorry, but we don’t have anything for a Wiltz Lowenstein,” she said. “Are you sure you have the spelling right?”

“Pretty sure,” I said, then wrote out the name on a slip of paper.

She shook her head. “Nothing on that one.”

I sat at the table near the big windows in front and spread out the clippings and photographs. Although I carefully read over every news account in the file, I could find no reference to Wiltz Lowenstein. A housemate of Asmore’s, who himself was identified as a former student at the New Orleans Art School, was mentioned in a couple of stories, but in none did his name appear. I studied the Laughlin photograph of the Saint Philip Street cottage the two men had shared, imagining the collection of paintings that must’ve once resided past the old doors and shuttered windows, and also imagining the life that Asmore and his housemate must’ve lived there. Before World War II rich young Americans from the East Coast journeyed to Paris for adventure in neighborhoods like the Latin Quarter, Montparnasse and
Montmartre. But in the Deep South, where people had less money and fewer privileges, the young had sought their freedom in the bohemian district of old New Orleans. I quickly grew frustrated by my search for information about Wiltz Lowenstein. Had such a person really existed? In none of the photos was Asmore shown with a young man who might’ve qualified as a housemate. In fact, from the pictures one easily could have concluded that Asmore was a loner suffering from a social phobia. There were fewer than ten photographs, and in each of them he was the only figure in the frame. But then I recalled that there had been another, a small snapshot showing him painting on the street with Alberta Kinsey. I searched the file, turning over every page and scrap of paper, but the photo was nowhere to be found.

“May I have your file on Alberta Kinsey?” I said to the librarian, as I filled out yet another request form. Perhaps, it had come to me, a duplicate of the photo was included in the information on Kinsey.

Minutes later the librarian returned with an accordion file twice the size of the one for Asmore. I returned to my desk and sorted out the material, first examining the photos, none of which was the one showing her with Asmore, and then reading the newspaper and magazine profiles about the artist and reviews of her exhibitions.

In a story published a year before her death in 1952, Kinsey had broken a long silence and spoken on the record about Asmore. “It’s very painful to talk about Levette,” she was quoted as saying. “I loved him so and I was hurt by his passing—I tell you, I’m still not recovered, ten years later. Levette told me once that he felt as though he was born in the wrong time, and although I argued with him then I believe it to be true now. Most of us dream about going back in time to when things were simpler. Levette dreamed of leaping forward. He thought the world would accept him there—not only his work but the kind of man he was.”

I returned the file to the librarian and asked her to make copies of some of the stories. “They’re twenty cents for each sheet of copy paper,” she said. “This is at least ten dollars here.”

“I’ll pay it.”

“Fine, but I’ll need a few minutes.”

She collected the material and left the reading room, disappearing past a door leading into a hallway. There was a window shaped like a diamond in the door and I watched her walk to the end of the hall and turn the corner. I looked back at the reading room. Only two people were there today, both of them seated at tables on the other end.

The librarian’s station was neat and orderly, and squarely centered on the surface of her writing desk were a pair of index cards listing visitors who’d checked out the Kinsey and Asmore files. I glanced over at the door for another look at the hallway past the glass. Finding no one in sight, I stepped around the desk and read the short roster of names and dates chronicling when the material was checked out and returned. My name, penciled in like all the others, was the last on the card. And just ahead of mine was Rhys Goudeau’s, her most recent visit being the day before.

“Rhys, you thief,” I mumbled under my breath.

As I was walking back to the other side of the desk a name on one of the cards suddenly came clear in my consciousness. It hadn’t registered when I first looked, but it popped up now, as if to announce itself. One day last week, at ten o’clock in the morning, Tommy Smallwood had checked out the Asmore file.

“All done,” the librarian said, cradling twice as many papers as she’d left with.

“Oh, wonderful,” I replied.

Next day at the studio of the Crescent City Conservation Guild, Joe Butler escorted me up the stairs to Rhys’s office. He was no friendlier than the first time I met him, but no ruder either. I tried to beguile him with small talk but he would have none of it. He didn’t even respond to my enthusiastic characterization of the day’s weather. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” I said, pressing him for the smallest utterance.

“Yeah, it’s all right.”

“I don’t think it can get any prettier.”

“That may be true.”

I’d arrived half an hour early, intent on confronting Rhys about the missing photograph before we went for my haircut. But as usual she was way ahead of me. Joe shoved her office door open and poked his head inside. “Boss, it’s Mr. Charbonnet.”

The overhead lights were off, the windows shuttered against the daylight. In the middle of the room Rhys was sitting on a swivel desk chair with all four casters missing, looking up at a large screen holding the image of Kinsey and Asmore painting on a French Quarter street. On a table next to her stood a projector of some kind, throwing light that replicated the photograph. “Come grab a chair, Jack.” She gave the one next to her a kick.

I studied the picture on the wall.

“What do you think?” she said.

“What do I think? I think you’ve lost your mind. That’s what I think.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You could’ve examined it under a loupe or a magnifying glass, Rhys. You didn’t have to walk out with the thing.”

“What thing?” she said. “And walk out of where?”

“Cut it out. You stole that picture.”

“Stole it?” She looked back up at the image. “I did nothing of the kind. I had one of the librarians make me a photocopy. That’s why it’s so blurry. You think I’d steal from the HNOC? You’re full of shit, Jack. They’re good to me and they’re one of my best clients. I’d never do that.”

I took a seat and told her about my visit to the Williams Research Center and the purloined photograph and seeing Smallwood’s name on the library card. “You think Smallwood stole it?” I said.

“You’re making a leap in assuming it’s been stolen,” she answered. “Someone in the building, a staff member, might’ve been using it for research or some other purpose. Did you notice anything else missing from the files?”

“No, just the photograph.”

“I’d worry more if you’d been unable to find the old clippings about Levette’s mural. Did you notice if they were still there, by chance?”

I shook my head. “Didn’t notice. But I wasn’t looking for them. What is that thing, Rhys?” I pointed to the contraption on the table.

“Oh, it’s called an episcope. Basically what it does is let you project a positive image, like a photograph, without having to first reproduce it as a slide or a transparency. Ever see a movie called
The Moderns?
It’s about a struggling artist in Paris in the twenties who forges paintings—he makes fakes—and he does it with the aid of an episcope, just like this one. There’s a scene in which he copies a painting by Cézanne by projecting the image onto a canvas tacked to the wall. Even today a lot of portrait painters use episcopes. Photorealists, too.”

“You’re not worried about Smallwood, Rhys?”

“No.”

“Then I won’t be either. But why aren’t we worried?”

“Simple,” she answered. “The mural’s been there for somebody to pirate for sixty years. The odds that Smallwood would discover it now, at the same time we found it, are pretty remote. I think I know why he wanted to see Levette’s file.”

“Tell me.”

“An Asmore is the one painting that’s eluded him since he started collecting. He’s been desperate to own one. From what I hear, he’s contacted owners of Asmores and offered obscene amounts of money for their paintings. They’ve all refused him. He’s also appealed to public and private institutions, in every case pleading with them to deaccession their Asmores. In consideration he’s promised huge donations in the upper-six-figure range. None went for it. Although it still hasn’t been consigned to an auction house yet, Patrick Marion has been talking around town about
Beloved Dorothy.
As you know, Patrick likes to entertain and when he entertains his tongue gets slippery—and not only about his Chambers stove, apparently. It’s even come back to me,” she continued. “Just yesterday a friend of mine who works at New Orleans Auction called and asked if I’d heard about a
Beloved
portrait that might be up for sale. I confirmed that I’d heard
the report. She then asked if I’d had the occasion to see the painting, and my answer was the one I always give when presented with a question that might compromise an existing relationship I have with a client. I said, ‘No comment.’ Which in this business is the equivalent of saying, ‘Yes. I not only saw the painting, I placed it flat on the floor and made wild, passionate love on top of it.’”

It was a good answer, but I still wasn’t mollified. “Why would someone at New Orleans Auction be looking for the Asmore?”

“That’s easy. The auction company that lands
Beloved Dorothy
stands to make an easy hundred grand in commissions if the painting performs as expected. The company also receives more valuable publicity and positive word of mouth than you could possibly calculate.”

“So if your friend knows about the painting, then it’s likely Smallwood does too?”

“A player that big? Come on, Jack. Smallwood probably was one of the first to hear about it. And that’s why he went to the research center and checked out Levette’s file. He’s fired up, he thinks he’s finally going to land an Asmore, and he’s casting about looking for information. My bet is that he’s already called Patrick and asked for a private viewing. It would be in Smallwood’s best interest to buy it privately, without the involvement of an auction house. If it goes for sale at auction, there is always the chance he could lose it.”

“Not from how you’ve described him. And not from what I saw when he went after the Walker.”

“Shit happens, Jack. What can I tell you? Maybe some guy with twice Smallwood’s personal wealth suddenly decides he’s going to build a collection of southern art and he determines to start with an Asmore. Or maybe a
Fortune
500 company wants the painting for its corporate collection, for the spot in the boardroom that heretofore was just a blank rectangle of shiny mahogany. In that event, Smallwood could come up short.” She leaned forward and planted her elbows on her knees. Her eyes went to the image being projected on the wall. “Old Levette was a good-looking sonofabitch, wasn’t he? No wonder all the girls were wild for him. But we’ve already established that, haven’t we, Jack?”

“We both know you don’t have that picture projected up there to look at Levette Asmore again, Rhys.”

“Don’t I?”

I shook my head. “You wanted a better look at the girl.”

“At Miss Bertie?”

“No. The girl standing behind Levette.”

She gave me a look that seemed to indicate she was pleased with me for making such an astute observation. She removed the photograph from under the episcope and replaced it with another, this one a black-and-white studio shot of a young woman who, but for her skin tone, hairstyle and manner of dress, could’ve been Rhys’s twin. The resemblance was beyond uncanny—it was startling to the point of being spooky. “My grandmother,” she said. “Jacqueline LeBeau, age seventeen. Kinda pretty, wasn’t she?”