The Cézanne Chase (26 page)

Aukrust's response was to move closer to the cabinets.

“I said open the fucking lock!” LeToque made a quick jerk of his head, and Cat moved in front of Aukrust. Now they formed a triangle: Aukrust halfway between the safe and the cabinets, Cat positioned four feet ahead of him, LeToque the same distance away, but on his left.

“Checkmate, you bastard,” LeToque said.

“It's an old safe and an old lock,” Aukrust seemed to say wearily. Then he flung the search warrant at Cat's face and leaped past him and got his hand on the cabinet door, but Cat reacted instantly and sent a fist into the side of Aukrust's jaw, followed by his other hand in a fierce blow into the lower ribs on his left side. Either punch would have sent a smaller man to the floor but only turned Aukrust around, and he swung wildly at Cat, catching him with only a glancing blow, pulling himself off balance and making him an easy target for another series of punches to his side and stomach that Cat delivered with brutal precision. Aukrust tried to recover and half lunged, half staggered toward LeToque, who with his hands together like a tennis player about to return a backhand volley sent both clenched fists in an uppercut, catching Aukrust across his chin, knocking him heavily onto the floor, where he lay with half his body under the big framing table. Next to him was a wooden box filled with scraps from the materials he used to frame pictures, odd lengths of frame made of wood or plastic, discarded mats, wire, hardware, and glass. Glass!

He remained still, curled in the fetal position as if he were unconscious, his cheek flat against the floor. Suddenly the sharp toe of a shoe slammed against his shoulder blade, and he was kicked again in the lower back. He grunted then made a sound that was more nearly a soft moan and gripped the table leg so tightly that it caused a terrible new pain that shot from his hand up into his shoulder. Cat's shoe poked again as if he were testing to be sure a dead dog was actually dead. Aukrust opened the eye that was an inch off the floor, allowing him to see the legs of LeToque and the man named Maurice, both standing in front of the vault. He slowly raised up so he could see into the wooden box. A piece of glass lay atop other odd scraps, and he took it out and
put it under his chest then lay on top of it. He estimated it was four inches wide and nearly twelve inches long.

Maurice assessed the lock, talking in a quiet jumble, speaking slowly, pausing at certain words. It was a Boulgner combination lock: sixty years old, no longer made; a good lock, but not the best. The dial was large, requiring him to stretch his fingers to the fullest to grip and turn it. There was a grating sound that meant it might be a broken lock, that Aukrust had not lied.

Aukrust moaned softly and moved a leg a few inches, testing Cat's reactions. He steeled himself, waiting for another kick. Nothing.

Maurice rested his hand for several seconds. He turned and heard a click, not an ordinary sound but it caused him to smile. “C'est bon,” he said more to himself than the others. He dialed in the other direction until a tumbler dropped. Once more, and Maurice said, “That's three. Two more.”

Aukrust heard the quietly spoken words. Maurice was obviously capable of opening the vault, his job made easier because someone long ago had set the combination to a series of easily remembered numbers, and anyone proficient with locks could anticipate that the final two numbers might relate to the first three. The first three numbers had been: ten, twenty, thirty. The next two might be forty then fifty. Maurice tried that combination but the lock did not open.

The number combination might be: ten . . . twenty . . . thirty . . . twenty....ten. If Maurice tried that combination the lock would open.

Aukrust pulled the glass toward him. He would have to break it to create a weapon, and it might crack into a dozen useless pieces. If only he could reach the glasscutter on top of the table.

“I think it will come now,” Maurice exclaimed. “The combination was made for someone with a poor memory.”

Time had run out. Aukrust struck the glass against the side of the box. It broke into three pieces. One was like a miniature stalactite, tapered to a needle-sharp point. When he gripped it the jagged edges cut his hands. He jumped to his feet and lunged at Cat, intent on taking out his most dangerous opponent. Cat reacted by instinct, putting up his hands, setting himself to wrestle Aukrust down or hit him as he had before, like a boxer. He didn't see the glass until it pierced the palm of his left hand. He pulled away but Aukrust's weight bore ahead, and the glass knife snapped. Blood spurted from Cat's hand, and the big man stared at it, curiously, strangely confused.

Aukrust swung the hand holding what was left of the dagger and a split instant before he landed the blow, he opened his fist and crashed the jagged glass into the right side of Cat 's face. Cat screamed, a terrible and frightening sound. Aukrust had continued in motion toward the cabinets. LeToque tried to pull him away, but a driving fist caught LeToque on the side of his head and spun him onto his knees. Aukrust opened the cabinet and wrapped a bloody hand around a tall aerosol can.

There was a terribly loud CRACK. A bullet zapped into the space where the aerosol can had just been.

“Please put that down, Monsieur.” Maurice was standing by the vault, a 9mm SIG-Sauer in his hand.

Aukrust was defiant and held up the can threateningly. Maurice fired again, the bullet even closer to Aukrust than the first one. “If I must, I will put the next bullet in your shoulder, I would say about here.” Maurice placed his free hand on the left side of his chest. He had spoken deliberately, stuttering only on the word “bullet.”

LeToque took the can from Aukrust. “Sit there on the floor,” he said, pointing at a stretch of bare wall.

Maurice opened the vault. On a shelf was a painting of a bald-headed man with a full beard. Sad eyes looked out from under a black cap with a wide brim. LeToque put the portrait on the framing table. “Voila,” he said with a self-satisfied smile, then helped himself to a length of brown wrapping paper and put it around the painting.

“Maurice fixed your fucking lock,” he said harshly, then added, “
pour rien
.”

He put the painting under his arm and followed Cat and Maurice into the shop and out to their car.

 

Aukrust sat on the floor with his back against the wall. He seemed frozen there, staring at the hand that was crisscrossed with cuts, each bleeding, making it appear that he had put his hand into a can of red paint. He got to his feet and went behind a partition where there was a basin and toilet. He ran the water and flushed the blood away. As he bent over, his back muscles stretched painfully where he had been kicked. Shards of glass, large and small were imbedded in the palm of his right hand, and they glinted in the white fluorescent light. Painfully he picked out the larger pieces and tried washing away the others. The same ear that had been cut by Pioli only days
earlier was throbbing, and he could do little more than bathe it and put an astringent on the wound until it stopped bleeding. He was less prepared for basic emergencies than for the complications and trauma his collection of exotic drugs and chemicals could cause or cure, but there were bottles of sterilized water and others containing alcohol. His medicine case yielded a pair of tweezers with which he slowly removed the tiniest of the pieces of glass. For the other pains in his ribs and the back of his head, he injected himself with 20 mg of Pantopan. Pain was replaced with euphoria. He had injected a drug that acted essentially in the same manner as opium.

All the while his thoughts were on the swift moving minutes that had just passed, on LeToque, on the one called Cat, and on the man who looked like a watchmaker and could handle a gun. He put all of them out of his mind and replaced them with a single image: Frédéric Weisbord.

He pulled down the shade and locked the door. He forced himself to ignore the pain and concentrate on his next steps. The painting was gone because Weisbord had out-maneuvered him. But the painting belonged to Margueritte DeVilleurs, who said that she cared about him and who actually meant something to him. Then a totally new thought struck him: When he got the painting back, he would not deliver it to Alan Pinkster.

Use of his right hand was restricted, and the deeper cuts were still bleeding. After changing the bandages, he found a white cotton glove. Next, he restocked his medicine bag, locked the shop, and went to his car.

He edged through the thick commuter traffic and headed north to connect with the super-autoroute to Nice. He knew the section of the city where Weisbord lived and had put the address on a piece of paper that was above the sunshade. He followed a huge truck carrying flowers to the perfumeries, an ironic counterpoint to the violence that surrounded him. He turned off at the first exit into Nice and followed signs to Saint Étienne, stopping once for directions to Weisbord's street. He drove past and saw the silver Porsche parked behind the house.

He parked a safe distance away, where he could see the front of the house and the driveway. A woman went to the garage, opened the wide doors, and went inside. There was no car in the garage. The woman reappeared carrying a large trash basket, which she was apparently going to put at the end of the driveway. He moved the car forward and pulled alongside just as she reached the curb.

“Is Monsieur Weisbord at home?”

The woman looked curiously at Aukrust. “No,” was her terse reply.

“Will he be coming home soon?”

She shook her head blankly and shrugged her shoulders. He wondered whether she was telling him that Weisbord was not coming home soon or that she didn't know.

“I'm a business friend, but I've come to Nice for a brief vacation and want to pay Monsieur Weisbord a surprise visit. Will he be home this evening?”

The woman crossed her arms over her chest and when it seemed she was about to turn and walk back to the house, she replied, “I am the housekeeper. Monsieur Weisbord will be away for two days. I will tell him you were here.”

“I want to surprise him. Where has he gone?”

She once more seemed to be evaluating whether to answer or not. She shook her head slowly. “To Paris, maybe. Or Geneva.” Then she skittered off into the house.

C
hristie's auction rooms were at 8 Place de la Taconnerie, Sotheby's at 13 Quai du Mont Blanc. Precisely half-way between its rivals, on Rue Rousseau, was Collyers/Geneva. The location wasn't accidental. At every turn, Collyers's aggressive new management in London was out-maneuvering and out promoting the double doyens of the rarefied art auction world. Old-timers at Collyers referred to Christie's and Sotheby's as “the Cow and the Sow,” lumping them together in frequent attitudes of disdain, in an attempt to make up for decades of being the brunt of bad jokes. Collyers had been looked upon as an upstart, barely more than 150 years old, not yet dry behind the ears. But that simply wasn't so. Collyers, founded in 1837 by Thomas Collyers and John Constable—who had had the terrible misfortune to die in that same year, was a competitive force, upsetting the old conventions and setting new ones.

In Geneva, auctions at Christie's or Sotheby's had for decades featured jewelry and precious gemstones, with the smaller houses blindly following their lead. But tradition was about to be broken. Collyers's brazen announcement that it would auction a first-quality Cézanne was beginning to yield the expected results. Dealers and collectors were showing interest, proof that many would be willing to fly to Geneva for the auction then go on to their holidays in the Alps or escape to the Mediterranean and the sun. The extent to which buyers would be inconvenienced when submitting their bids was to have to dial new country and area codes.

The resident director was flamboyant, called an auction brilliantly, and was perfectly suited to Collyers's new image. Roberto Oliveira traced his bloodline to well-connected families in the north of Italy and in Austria and was a handsome man with fair skin and gleaming blue eyes. Oliveira was a man blessed with a splendid education: Eton and Yale; and an internship as an auctioneer at
Christie's in London, where he rose to the position of Director, Impressionist and Modern Paintings. Now at thirty-eight, he was the father of a teenage daughter, divorced, and having affairs in three capital cities. It was the “affair” in London who had tipped him off to the lawyer in Nice who was making inquiries into costs and commission arrangements for the possible sale of a Cézanne self-portrait. Oliveira promised heavy promotion and an elaborate catalogue, but it had been his offer to undercut the sales commission by three percentage points and the decision by management to guarantee a $27.5 million reserve that had clinched the deal with Frédéric Weisbord.

The unending stream of news stories and the outpouring of speculation on who was destroying the paintings and why meant that if Oliveira were able to bring the DeVilleurs portrait into the December auction, Collyers/Geneva would break the old record set by Sotheby's when a 101-carat D-Flawless diamond had sold for nearly $13 million, with the entire lot going for $31 million. More important, it would add to Oliveira's visibility and position him for the executive director's position that was to be filled in January. The anatomy of success often included such accomplishments.

Christie's was outraged that the painting was to be auctioned in Geneva and at Collyers's no less. Their legal counsel had written an outraged letter implying that Frédéric Weisbord had been physically coerced into the decision if he had not been intimidated, he had been showered with unreasonable and illegal inducements. The letter covered both extremes. “Kill or kiss,” Oliveira had characterized their argument. The fact was, Frédéric Weisbord wanted to sell the painting quickly, conveniently, and on the best terms.