He'd been in a hurry to get off the telephone, and I had instinctively said the Louvre, which isn't what you're supposed to say, not if you're a visiting cognoscente. You're supposed to name some charming little museum that ordinary people have never heard of: the Musee Cognacq-Jay, for example, or the Nissim de Camondo. Just as in New York it's bad form to tell anyone your favorite museum is the Met on Fifth Avenue. You're supposed to say the Cloisters, or the Cooper-Hewitt.
But the Louvre is my favorite museum in Paris, and I said so, and de Quincy had been agreeable, and here I was. And there, unless I was mistaken, was de Quincy, a tall, patrician-looking old man in a well-cut double-breasted suit, who was glancing around him-looking for me, I supposed-with some impatience. I know quite a few Americans who've lived abroad for a long time, and there is a certain look they get, an expatriate manner, proud, defiant, and forlorn all at once. And however Italianized or Frenchified they become, there is always an indefinable kernel of something that gives them away as displaced Yanks.
I went downstairs and walked up to him. "Mr. de Quincy? I'm Chris Norgren. It's a-"
"Pardon, monsieur, " he said politely, "je ne parle pas anglais. " He edged away to do his waiting somewhere else.
A few yards away the other old gentlemen still stood there, tugging reflectively on an oversized earlobe and eyeing me.
Could it be? I approached tentatively. "Er, Mr. de Quincy?"
He grinned and stuck out his hand. "Call me Fuzzy."
Well, it had been a natural mistake. With a name like Ferdinand Oscar de Quincy, the image that comes to mind does not include Day-Glo jogging shoes and double-knits. But, it turned out, they suited him perfectly. At a time when it was almost a given that the directors of art museums would come from the cosmopolitan East Coast, be scions of art-collecting families, and have Ivy League degrees, de Quincy had been born on a wheat farm along the Idaho-Washington border (so I hadn't been so far off), and gotten his education at Gonzaga University in Spokane.
He had come to the Seattle Art Museum as a part-time bookkeeper and business manager, developed an interest in art, and gone to the University of Washington in his spare time for a master's degree in art history. He'd enlisted in the Army in 1941, fought his way through France and Belgium in the infantry, and then been transferred to MFA amp; A, where he'd worked for three years, in the thick of the most exciting and successful art recovery operation in history. Afterward, he'd returned to SAM, and when the directorship became vacant, he'd been a shoo-in.
All this I learned inside of ten minutes, in the mezzanine cafe, where de Quincy ordered a croque-monsieur -a toasted ham-and-cheese sandwich-and I had a plain omelet with fried potatoes. (The French breakfast croissant, tasty as it is, is not long on staying power.)
Ferdinand Oscar "Fuzzy" de Quincy was a friendly, lively chatterbox of a man. All I had to do was raise an interested eyebrow or murmur an encouraging monosyllable, and he would happily take the ball and run with it. After the day I'd spent yesterday trying to pry information out of one suspicious, close-mouthed individual after another, he was a pleasure.
He'd read with sadness about Vachey's death, he'd heard about Julien Mann's claims, he even knew that I was looking into Vachey's background, and he was delighted-"just tickled pink"-that I'd sought him out. I'd come to the right man, he assured me.
He explained that he'd been part of the MFA amp; A team that had been assigned to Neuschwanstein, the fairyland Bavarian castle in which the Germans had stored the bulk of their French loot. While there, he'd identified and supervised the return of twelve eighteenth-century French paintings taken from Vachey's personal collection. He'd met Vachey for the first time shortly afterward, and the overjoyed Vachey had talked about repaying him. De Quincy had suggested that he give something to the Seattle Art Museum some time when he-
"Could we just hold up a minute, Mr. de Quincy?"
"Fuzzy."
"Fuzzy. You're saying the Nazis took these paintings from him, right?"
"Sure did. Confiscated most of his collection. Trumped up some charge or other. Consorting with Jews, something like that." Voluble though he was, de Quincy didn't believe in wasting words just to make complete sentences.
"If that's so, it suggests that he wasn't working for them at all, that Mann's story isn't accurate."
He snorted. "Story's piffle. Vachey was trying to help those Hebrew folk, not hurt 'em. Couldn't stand the Nazis. Fella's all mixed up, take it from me."
I put down my fork. This was what I'd hoped to hear. And it came from a man who had no ax to grind. I felt a tingling in the muscles of my shoulders, as if a weight that had sat on them for a long time had begun to lift.
"So what Clotilde told me is true," I said, more to myself than to him.
De Quincy, chewing, watched me with interest. "Gallery manager? Depends on what she told you."
I told him what she'd said: that Vachey had bought pictures during the Occupation and re-sold them to the Nazis-out of compassion, not avarice-that he'd made no profit and had meant to make no profit, that often the Germans had "paid" him not in money but in worthless paintings they'd forced him to take, or in almost equally worthless Occupation francs.
De Quincy waved a corner of his sandwich until he got his mouthful down. "Story's piffle too," he said.
My shoulders stopped tingling. "But-"
"You happen to know a Swiss dealer named Gessner?"
"I don't think so."
"Zurich. You ought to talk to him sometime. If he's still alive. Bought a bunch of those worthless paintings from Vachey in forty-four. Nice little odalisque by Matisse, couple of Vlaminck still lifes… let's see, Dufy, Rouault, Pierre Bonnard-"
"I don't understand."
De Quincy smiled. "Well, what do you mean by 'worthless'? Depends on who's doing the valuing, wouldn't you say?"
I almost asked him if he'd been talking to Lorenzo, but he quickly explained what he meant. Hitler had detested modern French art so much that he had forbidden the shipment of it into Germany. Thus, when the Nazi "collection agencies" in France found pieces of twentieth-century French art in their hauls, they were unable to do anything with them but try to sell them in a virtually nonexistent French market-or, as in Vachey's case, trade them for art that met the Fuhrer's aesthetic standards. So Vachey was able to buy up, say, a Flinck at negligible cost, trade it for, say, a Matisse from the Germans, and then make a huge profit in the Swiss market, which had remained active through the war. This he did more than once, and according to de Quincy, the proceeds had provided the nest egg from which he'd built his fortune.
"In Switzerland, you see," De Quincy said, "he could get some real money, not the play money they had here during the Occupation."
"Yes, I see," I said woodenly. I saw that Vachey, after all was said and done, had been what Mann had said he was: a parasite who'd fed on his countrymen's helplessness in the most terrible of times.
"Now don't go off all half-cocked," de Quincy said. "My opinion, Vachey was an honest-to-Jesus hero, Chris. Took some real risks-I mean stand-him-in-front-of-the-firing-squad risks-to help people get away before the Nazis got them. Helped them get rid of their collections, helped them get out of the country-"
"And made a killing doing it."
"Sure he did, why shouldn't he? Guy wasn't a professional hero, he was a businessman, what do you expect? I'm telling you, he did a lot of good. More than you know. Lot of sides to the man. Come on, you want to walk through the museum or not?"
I had a final, half-hearted bite of the cooling omelet. "Sure, let's."
But the Louvre is not a museum you walk "through," not unless you have three days to do it. You have to pick your area, and I chose the first floor of the Denon wing, where the main European painting collection was. As we slowly climbed the broad staircase past Winged Victory -the full-size marble version-de Quincy told me about an aspect of Vachey's endlessly varied life of which I'd known nothing.