The Forger (43 page)

There was a muffled moan from somewhere in Dietrich’s office.

“Out you come,” commanded Dietrich impatiently.

“Has the shooting stopped?” asked a nasal, terrified voice. “My ears are still ringing.”

“Of course the damned shooting has stopped!” barked Dietrich. “Now come out of that damned closet and do your job and then you can go home. Come along, Sniffles.”

Then I knew it was Touchard who had been hiding in the closet. I felt the familiar out-of-control pounding in my chest.

Touchard appeared in the doorway. His suit was crumpled. One of the sleeves was torn at the elbow. “But I don’t want to go home!” wailed Touchard. “I want to go to Spain! And I expect it’s too late now, anyway. You’ve never treated me fairly!”

“Stop blathering.” Dietrich gave him a shove with the barrel of the Schmeisser. “Just get on with it.”

Touchard caught sight of the dead Fabry-Georges man on the landing. He cried out and stepped back into Dietrich, who pushed him forward again.

“Tell me if it’s right,” said Dietrich, holding out the painting to Touchard. Then he looked at us and smiled. “Just a formality, you understand.”

Touchard stepped forward to take it, bony hands held out.

The Schmeisser dangled in Dietrich’s hand. The black tip of the barrel with its covered gunsight swung like a pendulum just above the level of the floor.

I didn’t look at Pankratov. I kept my eyes on Touchard.

Touchard squinted at
The Astronomer.
He held it close to his face and then held it out again. His eyes were narrowed. Then he looked up from the painting and right into my eyes.

It was the first time he had acknowledged our presence in the room, and in that moment, I knew he had seen through the forgery.

“What’s the matter?” asked Dietrich. His face seemed to change, as if his body would at any moment crack like glass and something terrible would step from the brittle shell. What he really was. What I’d known all along in my heart. He would kill everyone. Me, Touchard, Pankratov. His rage would overtake him. “What is it, Touchard?” he asked.

I tried to breathe in but couldn’t.

“Nothing,” blurted Touchard. “There’s nothing wrong with it. I’ve just never seen it so close up before.” A nervous laugh slithered out of his mouth.

I looked down at my shoes. My eyes had dried out from staring.

Pankratov cleared his throat. He looked around the room, blinking as if he had just woken up.

Dietrich took the painting and propped it against the wall.

Touchard wiped his nose, which had started to run. “Can I go now?” he asked.

“Not yet,” said Dietrich. “Hold out your hands.”

Hesitantly, Touchard held out his cupped hands, as if he expected Dietrich to cut them off at the wrists. “What is it?” he asked in a whisper.

I thought of the statue back at the warehouse. The one Dietrich had smashed. I imagined Touchard’s brittle fingers rattling to the floor.

Dietrich reached into his pocket and pulled out a fistful of coins. They were gold. He set them in Touchard’s hands. The heavy sovereigns clunked as they settled in Touchard’s palms. “Now you can go,” said Dietrich.

Touchard pushed past us, avoiding our glances. At the head of the stairs, he turned to Pankratov and me. “I have always been…” he began.

“Go!” shouted Dietrich.

Touchard ran down the stairs and out into the street. His footsteps faded away.

I wondered then whether Touchard might have seen through more than just this one painting. Perhaps there had been many that he let slip through. The little man had paid back Dietrich after all, for five long years of ridicule.

Holding
The Astronomer
with one hand, Dietrich reached into his other pocket and pulled out an old iron key. He chucked it to Pankratov, who caught it as it slapped into his palm. “There you go, gentlemen. The Gottheim Collection is in the basement. It’s all there. I’ll be leaving now. Perhaps you’d be kind enough to see me off.”

Pankratov and Dietrich fitted the painting back into its crate. They tapped the nails back in place with the butt of the Schmeisser. Then Dietrich shouldered the crate. He rolled his shoulders, settling the splintered wood against his spine. He tucked the Schmeisser under his arm. Then, from his pocket, he pulled a white armband. On its band was a poorly drawn Cross of Lorraine and the letters FFI. He tugged the band up his sleeve until it rested over his bicep. “About time I joined the Resistance,” he said. “In the last twenty-four hours, everybody else has.” He plucked the party badge from his lapel. He lifted the dead man by the hair and hooked the needle clasp of the badge right through the dead man’s lips. Then Dietrich let him go again. The head thumped back onto the floor.

We followed him downstairs. On our way out of the building, Dietrich stopped to look down at the body of Grimm. Then he kept walking, out to a metal storage shed in the courtyard at the back. Inside was a large Zundapp motorcycle. He rolled it off its kickstand and out into the courtyard. Then he straddled it and fired up the motor, revving hard.

“Where’s Valya?” Pankratov shouted over the rumble of the engine.

“She left me two days ago,” he said. “I expect she’ll turn up at your place before long.” Dietrich smiled his old confident smile. “I never should have doubted you. I’m ashamed to say that I did. My mistake,” he said. “Gentlemen, I will see you on the other side.” He gunned the Zundapp’s engine, roared out into the street and sped away.

When the sound of his engine had become indistinguishable among the other sounds of the city, I turned to Pankratov. “What did he mean when he said he’d see us on the other side?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Pankratov.

“I thought we were finished,” I told him.

Pankratov breathed out, composing himself. He held up the key. “Shall we take a look?”

The narrow stone staircase spiraled down to the basement. High, gloss-white walls rose up on either side of us. The stairs ended abruptly at a door, which had a large bolt across it, held in place by a bronze padlock. Pankratov fumbled with the key, then opened the padlock and slid back the bolt. He set his shoulder against the door and pushed it open.

The first thing I saw when the door swung wide was Fleury. He was hanging from a hemp-rope noose, his feet only a few inches above the floor. The rope was attached to the iron railings that spanned the ceiling. A chair lay on its side underneath him. Fleury’s head was slumped over onto one shoulder. His lips were blue and his eyelids puffy and red. He wore the armor of his smoking jacket.

I ran across the room and grabbed his legs, holding him up, while Pankratov set up the chair, climbed up onto it and cut through the rope with his penknife. By the time we got him down to the floor, I already knew he was dead.

It was only then that I took in the walls of the room. Filling almost every inch of space were the paintings of the Gottheim Collection. My eyes fixed on one small painting on the back wall. It showed a little girl in a dark blue dress, holding a basket of flowers. It was Pankratov’s painting of Valya.

I sat down beside Fleury. Everything around me slipped in and out of focus. The colors of the paintings seemed to shimmer.

Fleury’s glasses were in his top pocket, where he always put them. I took them out and held them.

Pankratov was standing over me. He was looking down at Fleury. His eyes were filled with tears.

I thought about what Dietrich had said—that he had been sure we weren’t coming. This was Fleury’s punishment for having failed him. I knew he would have done the same to me and Pankratov if we had been there at the time.

Pankratov went over to his painting and took it off the wall, where it had been hung on a nail. He held it close to his face. Behind where the picture had hung, on a nail driven into the soft wall, were the same ghostly handprints I had seen the time before.

We were startled by the sound of footsteps and shouting up at street level. Then someone came running down the stairs.

We stayed frozen. There was no place to go.

The man was so shocked when he saw us that he fell over backwards in an attempt to get out of the way. He was also carrying a Schmeisser, and the gun fell back hard against his chest. The man pressed himself against the wall, but there was no cover.

I recognized him. It was Tombeau.

His teeth were bared and his heavy leather coat was torn from the fall. He aimed the gun into the room. It was a second before he realized it was us. “Where’s Dietrich?” he shouted.

“Gone,” I said.

“How long ago?”

“Ten minutes,” I told him.

“On foot?”

“Motorcycle.”

Tombeau gritted his teeth, then kicked a hole in the wall. “Damn!” he shouted. Then he noticed Fleury. He walked over to the body, bent down and took Fleury’s jaw in his hand. The rope was still around Fleury’s neck. Tombeau turned Fleury’s head from side to side, then let him go and rose back to his feet. “Madame Pontier just found out what you did with
The Astronomer.
You’d better know exactly where it is or you’re all going to end up like your friend here.”

“The Astronomer,”
said Pankratov slowly, “is in my warehouse. Dietrich left with a forgery.”

Tombeau paused. “You actually forged it?”

“We did,” Pankratov told him.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Madame Pontier said you didn’t have the guts.”

There was the sound of footsteps. Someone was coming down the stairs.

Tombeau walked over to Pankratov. He jerked his head at the stairs. “You’re coming with me to the warehouse, and the original had damn well better be there.”

“Fine,” replied Pankratov.

Another man appeared in the doorway. He was tall, with a beer belly and a scrub-brush mustache. He wore a leather coat like Tombeau and carried a Luger. He glanced at us, then turned to Tombeau. “No sign of Dietrich.”

“Doesn’t matter now,” said Tombeau.

The man scanned the walls and whistled through his teeth. “Not bad,” he said. “This should make up for some of the money we’re owed.”

“I expect it will,” replied Tombeau.

The man jerked his head toward us. “What are you going to do with this lot?”

“Do what I have to,” said Tombeau.

The man looked at us for a second, then nodded and looked away.

“Go tell the others what’s down here,” Tombeau told the man. Then he waved a hand at us. “Move!” he shouted.

“What about Fleury?” I asked, still not getting up. I couldn’t stand to leave him here.

Tombeau crouched down beside me and whispered, his lips so close to my ear I could feel them touching me, “If we don’t leave immediately, these people are going to find out who you are. And if they do, you’ll never get out of here. Do you understand?”

“David,” said Pankratov.

His voice knocked me out of my shock. I got up and shuffled toward the door.

Pankratov was carrying his painting of Valya.

“You leave that,” said the man at the door. “That’s ours.”

Pankratov hesitated.

“Leave it!” shouted Tombeau, and his voice sank dull and echoless into the torture chamber walls.

Pankratov put down the painting and we filed up the stairs with Tombeau, just as a dozen Fabry-Georges were walking down. Each of us pressed our backs to the walls to make room. The men held their guns to their chests. We eyed each other curiously. I smelled tobacco, alcohol and sweat.

Out in the street, two black Renault cars belonging to the Fabry-Georges were pulled up on the curb. One had bulletholes in the windshield. Tombeau glanced back to see if any of the Fabry-Georges were behind him. Then he turned to us. “You,” he said to me, “you have to get out of here. Out of Paris. Until I can clear up this mess, there’s about five hundred people who’ll shoot you on sight.”

“What about me?” asked Pankratov.

“You’re staying with me until we get the Vermeer. When Madame Pontier gets that back, you’ll be all right with her.”

“What about the Gottheim paintings?” I asked.

“As soon as I get back here, I’ll take care of them.” Tombeau set his hand on my shoulder. “I told you I’d set you free one day and now you are free. Get out of here while you still can.”

I looked at Pankratov.

“Do as he says,” said Pankratov.

I shook Pankratov’s hand.

“No time for this,” hissed Tombeau and bundled Pankratov into one of the Renaults. He flicked his hand at the other car, the one with the holes in its windshield. “Take it,” he said to me. “The keys are inside. There are two cans of fuel in the back.”

Then Tombeau climbed behind the wheel of his other car. He started the engine, clanking it into gear, and sped off down the road. Pankratov watched me through the rear window until the car turned sharply at the corner, tires squealing, and disappeared.

I found myself suddenly alone on the Avenue d’Iéna. The smell of extinguished fires blew lazily into the street from the charred window frames of Dietrich’s building.

I got in the car and drove.

One hour later, I was heading through fields west of the city. Flowers were stuck under my windshield wipers from a street party I had passed through on my way out. My eyes watered from wind blowing in through the holes in the windshield. The August sun was hot on my knuckles as they gripped the steering wheel. Convoys of American trucks passed us, heading in the other direction. Large white stars were painted on their hoods.

I didn’t know where I was going. I just kept heading west. Late in the day, I was stopped at a military checkpoint near Carpiquet. An American military policeman walked over to my car and leaned in. The green paint on the rim of his helmet had been worn away, showing the bare steel underneath. Behind him, an old farmhouse was burning by the side of the road. Milky smoke poured like an inverted waterfall from the upstairs windows. “Taking a roadtrip?”

“Yes, I am,” I answered him in English.

He raised his eyebrows when he heard my accent. “Where you from?” he asked.

“Paris,” I told him.

“No.” He laughed quietly. “Where you from really?”

We talked for a few minutes. Then he told me I was free to go.