The Forger (11 page)

I was no longer thinking about Valya. I was thinking about what Pankratov had said. About being forgotten and accepting it. I thought how hard Pankratov’s knowledge was to come by, and harder still to live it out. The way Pankratov explained things, he had merely adapted to a series of coincidences. But I knew there must be more to it than that. Pankratov was not a man to be swept along by circumstance.

I felt an idea taking shape inside me. It was there, but I couldn’t see it clearly. I became afraid it would slip away. I squinted into the murkiness of my own mind and gradually it began to appear. It was as if Pankratov had held out a handful of dust on the flat of his palm and had blown it in my face, and now the dust had settled. “You set the fire,” I said. “You burned your own paintings. Is it true?”

He didn’t answer.

“But how did you do it?” I demanded. “Did you pile them all up and cover them in turpentine? What did you do?”

“Much simpler than that,” he said. He took the cigarette from his mouth and almost without thinking he flicked it away. It bounced in the street and glowed and then blew out.

Now I knew why he spat into his ashtray at the Café Dimitri. “But what about the ones that had been sold?”

“I got them back. They were all being gathered for a retrospective.”

“Are there no paintings left?” I asked. “Not one?”

He shook his head. “The only one I didn’t get my hands on was in a German collection and it was burned by the Nazis in that fire I told you about.” He spoke in a low voice that matched the thrum of the city and vanished into it, indecipherable, except in the close space between us.

“Why did you take me to see the Géricault?” I asked. “Why tell me the secret?”

He smiled. “You wanted to know who I am. It’s why you spied on me at the café. You needed me to earn your trust, so that’s what I’m doing now. I’m earning it by telling you the truth. Do you see?”

“Yes,” I said quietly.

He held out his hand.

For the first time, we shook hands, as if this was our first meeting, and everything that had gone before was just some long illusion.

That night, I dreamed of Pankratov setting fire to his paintings. I saw them vanish into an upward-flowing stream of multicolored flame as the different paints ignited, the blaze contained for a moment in the wood of the frames, dripping fire, each thread of canvas crumpling brittle into black dust, then the frames collapsing in on themselves, even the nails curling over like fingers drawn into a fist. I saw the tubes of paint exploding and shimmering gargoyles emerging from the floor where old turpentine had soaked into the wood and now ignited. Glass melting out of the windows. The guttural furnace roar of the fire eating through Pankratov’s life. It was as if I stood there in the center of that blazing room, and felt the heat and saw, through the smoke and poppy red of flames, each object that burned and disintegrated. I felt that if I opened my mouth, smoke might pour from my lungs, gathering behind my eyes like cataracts and boiling the blood in my skull. The sound of it was deafening.

Through all this, the pigeons dreamed on my window ledge. The city grew quiet but not still. The sky that night was filled with meteors, cartwheeling above the chimneypots.

Chapter Five

I
WAS ON THE
streetcar again, on my way home from seeing Rocco, the King of the World. The pads of paper I’d bought were heavy and dusty on my lap. They gave out a smell like an attic in the summertime.

A man and a young girl got on at Château Rouge. The man wore a brown wool suit with a black check pattern woven into it. The little girl, who was about three years old, had on a black velvet dress and black patent leather shoes. On one hand she wore a white glove. The other hand was bare. I guessed she had lost the other glove and that her father had not yet noticed. I imagined the slightly exhausted look on his face when he found out, more because of what his wife would say than the cost of a new set of gloves.

“Ocean?” the girl was saying. “Oceanoceanocean?”

“No, puppy,” said the man, “we’re not going to the ocean today.”

“Ocean coming!” she announced, as if it would be there when she called it.

The father motioned for the little girl to take the seat next to mine. But then he took a closer look at me, and his expression changed. He motioned for his daughter to take the other seat, and sat next to me himself, turning his shoulder away from me.

I looked at my tie, with its paint splatter at the end and the knot worn at the throat. I looked at my unpolished shoes. My jacket smelled. Worse, it smelled of someone else’s sweat because I had bought it at a secondhand shop in Clignancourt. My other jacket had become so filthy from charcoal dust that the cleaner said he could do nothing for it. I didn’t have enough money for a new coat.

No one had ever given me that kind of look before. It was the kind of look you give a tramp when you can’t help staring at the filth that burnishes his skin and clothes. I wasn’t angry at the man, only ashamed at myself because I was dirty and my clothes were so shabby.

At home, I took a bath and scrubbed my skin raw with coal tar soap. I put on clean clothes and just sat there, feeling revulsion like an oily shiver around my ribs.

*   *   *

T
HAT EVENING
, I
RAN
into Fleury outside our building. He liked to chat with Madame La Roche in the evenings. He would squat down on his haunches and smoke cigarettes while she smoked her pipe.

“Why don’t you come out to dinner?” he asked me. “I’m heading over to the Polidor again.”

I had been on my way to the corner store to get some bread and cheese for dinner and maybe an apple for dessert. I told him I wanted to keep painting. My work had gone badly that day. I needed a break, but it was hard to set myself loose from the canvas when I didn’t have anything to show for the hours I’d put in. The other thing was that I didn’t want to owe him.

“It’s only dinner,” said Fleury. “Believe me, I want you to be producing work as much as you want to produce it. But you have to eat sometime.”

I couldn’t afford to go out to dinner, but I had to get out of that apartment or I thought I would go crazy.

As we set off down the street, I turned to wave good-bye to Madame La Roche.

She was watching us. She looked old and sad.

It occurred to me that maybe she had wanted Fleury to invite her along, too, but I doubted it had ever crossed his mind.

The Polidor was crowded, warm with the heat of elbow-to-elbow people, each group locked in their own conversations. Outside, the light had faded from the streets. The air that blew in through the open windows carried with it the smell of rain about to fall.

We ate cassoulet and started out with heavy Dordogne wine, an almost blood-thick Château Pineraie. Then we switched to the house red, which tasted acidic and papery in comparison.

I had been waiting for the right moment to let him know about Valya and Pankratov. Now my patience gave way and I told him.

As Fleury listened, he took off his glasses and stared at me across the table. Then he put his glasses back on and stared some more. He gritted his teeth and scratched at his neck as if he had some kind of skin condition. “Good God,” he said. “I must admit I did not see this coming.” He squinted at me. “Are you sure you’re not joking?”

“No joke,” I assured him.

“And to think all this time…” His voice trailed off. He sat his elbow on the table and rubbed his fingers hard across his forehead, leaving red marks.

“But you know, Fleury, Valya…” I narrowed my eyes. “She’s a hard case.”

“She certainly is.” Fleury sat back, crossing one leg over the other.

I noticed that, although his brown ankle boots were highly polished, the soles had both worn through and the heels were ground way down. I looked up at his face, in case he saw me staring at those boots.

“Here’s the thing, about Valya and me,” he said. “You know how it is when there are beautiful people all around, but their beauty does nothing to you.”

“I guess,” I said awkwardly.

“You recognize that they are beautiful,” continued Fleury, “and charming and intelligent, men and women both, but when you look at them you feel a certain emptiness. It doesn’t occur to you that you may never see them again, and if it did, you wouldn’t care. It’s as if we each have some kind of coding device inside us. Sometimes our codes partly match with the codes of other people. Mostly they don’t match at all. But”—he pinched the air—“in the rarest moments, the codes will match completely. There is even a feeling of a lock clicking shut. It isn’t love or lust. It’s something entirely different. It’s some unnamed recognition that makes you want to be near them, no matter what the circumstances. It makes you want to tell them secrets. You don’t care what kind of fool you make of yourself. The idea that you might not see this person again sends panic clattering through your head. That’s the way I am about Valya. And I tell you, there isn’t a damned thing I can do about it.”

“Poor you,” I said.

“Poor me is right.” His face took on a mixture of deviousness and hope. “But perhaps not as poor as all that, now that I know things are different.” His eyes narrowed as the possibilities took shape in his head.

I felt even more sorry for him than before. Fleury was not a handsome man. Not well built. He seemed to have a certain clumsiness around women, which he hid pretty well behind his sense of humor, but he could hide it for only so long. None of these things should have mattered, and maybe Valya should have loved him from the start because he was kind and intelligent and would have made a good companion—I supposed all that was true—and because of a dozen other reasons which didn’t matter in the end. They didn’t matter because Valya would not be seen walking out with a man like Fleury. That was a fact.

I figured there wasn’t a person in the world who hadn’t, at one time or another, sat down with a friend and listened to them go on about loving someone they would never possess. Rather than tell them the truth about their chances, and save them some grief down the road, you just sit there nodding and smiling and feeling bad about it, because that is a thing they’ll never believe until they find it out for themselves. So, for the rest of the meal, Fleury talked about Valya and I agreed with every damned thing he said, because he didn’t really want to know what I thought. The only thing I could do for Fleury, as a friend, would be not to remind him about all the things he’d said when he got to the point where he wished he’d never said them.

Finally, mercifully, Fleury changed the subject by asking me if I had any paintings for him to sell.

“They’re not finished,” I told him. “They’ll be done soon.”

“What about the sketches?” he asked. “You have some of those, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I have some studies I did at the Musée Duarte.”

He tapped at his chin with his index finger, thinking. “Those are the ones Pankratov was raving about.”

“He didn’t rave about them,” I said. “He just said he liked them is all.”

“If Pankratov likes them, that’s good enough for me.” Fleury crumpled his napkin and stood. The napkin stayed wrung in his fists like the neck of a small strangled animal.

I looked up, fork still poised over a piece of apple tart. “What’s the matter?”

“I have some calls to make. I’ll stop by your place tomorrow,” he said. “Pick up those sketches, if you don’t mind. We can make a start with those.” He was looking over my head and out into the street. A fine rain was falling. His thoughts had already moved on. They raced ahead of his footsteps and out into the dark.

After the meal, I went to the Polidor bar. It was connected to the restaurant through a doorway and down a couple of stairs. The wine hummed warmly in my head and I wanted to have a coffee before heading home to work for the rest of the night. A Japanese man in a tuxedo was playing jazz on the piano. His eyes were closed and smiling and his lips moved as if making up words for the songs he was playing. As I stood in the doorway watching people at the bar, I realized that one of them was Valya, in the company of a man I’d never seen before.

She wore a long black dress and an amber necklace, each marmalade stone held by a silver band and joined with silver links one to the other. Her hair was tied up on her head. She looked very beautiful. She was sitting up at the bar with a small thin glass of clear liquid in her hands. Beside her was a bowl of crushed ice with more thin glasses in it, almost like test tubes. She drank the clear liquid in one gulp, her head going back and her neck arching, and the man, momentarily not under her gaze, fixed her with predator’s eyes, which had vanished behind soft-smiling politeness by the time she looked at them again.

I remained almost hidden behind the mounds of coats hanging from the porcelain-tipped brass coat racks that jutted from the wall. Several of them were already broken off from the weight of too many coats. I breathed in the leathery smells of tobacco and strong coffee, mixed with the faint sourness of wine.

“I’ll be right back,” said the man. He headed for the bathroom, stepping past me on his way. The man was about six foot two, with brown hair cropped at the sides and longer on the top, which he combed back. He had a broad forehead and deep-set brown eyes the color of hazelnut shells. His shoes were spit-shined and cross-laced.

Now another man, who was standing at the bar, leaned across to Valya. He was broad-shouldered and round-faced, with his front teeth bunched too close together. “Why do you like Thomas so much?” he asked, teasing, as if to show he really didn’t care.

“I like him,” replied Valya, “because he doesn’t ask stupid questions.”

The man’s head rocked back as he laughed, but then he brought his face close to hers and was no longer laughing. His hands gripped the bar on either side of her. “Why didn’t we meet in another life, you and me?”

She rested the heel of her palm on the man’s head and gave him a gentle shove backwards. “He’d kill you if he heard you talk like that.”

The man shrugged to show he didn’t care.