I fell back against the wall. "Damn." Whether he was telling the truth or not, it was plain that I wasn't going to get to see the book. Another dead end, after all.
"Then I want to see those paintings in the basement," I said.
"Why? The Rembrandt's upstairs in the gallery where it always was."
"I just want to. Let's go, please."
He shrugged. "Whatever you say. I just want to cooperate."
He gestured me ahead of him down the hallway, but first I picked up the telephone in the vestibule and dialed Calvin's hotel. I may, as Tony says, not be the world's swiftest study when it comes to perceiving ulterior motives, but even I knew enough not to head off to the cellar, alone with a guy who'd shoved me out of a second-story window three days before. I wasn't going to give him another shot at me, with or without personal animosity.
"Calvin?" I said, when the hotel clerk had switched me to his room. "It's four-thirty right now, and I'm with Christian Vachey at his house. Just wanted you to know. I'll see you in an hour."
To make sure Christian didn't miss a word, I said it in French. As far as Calvin was concerned, I could have delivered it in New Caledonian, because he wasn't there. But this was for Christian's benefit, and I could see that he got the message.
We took the back stairs to the basement. At the rear of the house downstairs was a cheerless kitchen that hadn't changed much since the seventeenth century: flagstone floors, warped, scarred wooden tables, a huge, stone cooking fireplace, a few rusted, giant-sized cooking implements that looked like torture devices hanging on the soot-blackened walls. It was used for storage now, full of packing materials, paper, and disassembled picture crates. Next to it was Pepin's office, where we'd met for the presentation of the will. Pepin looked up from his desk in surprise, and was motioned by Christian to come along.
The three of us walked through to the front half of the house, past a small alcove set up as a studio with an easel and painting supplies, and then up to a steel door, which Christian unlocked. Behind it was a windowless room with insulated walls, in which thirty or forty glassine-wrapped paintings were neatly lined up in a two-layer wooden framework of carpeted bins.
Christian pointed to a group of ten or twelve wrapped pictures in the upper rack. "You want to unwrap those, Pepin?" To me, he said: "Those are the ones you wanted to see."
"No, I think I'd better see them all, please."
He didn't like it, but he spread his hands submissively and nodded to Pepin. "Do what the man says."
Pepin, predictably, didn't like it either, but he got to work taking off the wrappers and propping the paintings on the floor against the walls of the corridor.
He started with the ones in the lower rack. All were modern- early twentieth century. I thought I recognized some of the artists.
"Isn't that a Gris?" I asked. "And a Delaunay?"
"Sure are," Christian said. "And this one here is a Derain."
Could these be some of the "worthless" paintings de Quincy told me about? But why would Rene Vachey have kept them here in the cellar all these years?
"They must be worth a fair amount of money," I said.
Christian grinned. "I sure hope so."
By now Pepin, working quickly, had come to the paintings in the upper rack-the pictures that the young Rene Vachey had bought in the forties, according to Christian-and begun to lay them out. They were what Christian had said they were: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings of little value, some Dutch, some French, all age-darkened. Most of them appeared to be apprentice studies, many unfinished, the best of them no better than competent. They would have been right at home on the walls of the Barillot, if that tells you anything. They weren't worth the time it took to give them a second glance.
Except one.
I lifted it, examined it, checked the frame, and finally propped it back against the wall. Another piece of the puzzle had dropped into place. If this kept up, I might eventually figure out what was going on.
"Look familiar to you?" I asked Christian.
"What? No. Well, in a way. It looks a little like that Rembrandt."
"It looks a lot like that Rembrandt," I said.
Christian gave it a quintessential double take, eyes boggling, jaw dropping. "Rembrandt!" He stared hungrily at it, then at me, a laugh gurgling in his chest. "You're not telling me that this is actually a
… that all this time, down here in the cellar, there's been a-a-"
"A Flinck," I said.
" A flink!" he shouted back at me. "What the fuck is a flink?"
Pepin, who was standing quietly behind us, said thoughtfully to me: "You may be right, monsieur."
"You've never seen this before?" I asked him.
"I have never seen any of these before."
"Who the fuck…" Christian began again, and Pepin explained who Govert Flinck was.
"It took a few seconds to penetrate. "You mean this is the painting this guy Mann wants back?" he said to me. "Not the Rembrandt upstairs?"
"That's exactly what I mean. Look at it. Picture of an old soldier-obviously the same model, same costume, same pose. He probably copied it directly from the Rembrandt picture-or more likely from some other student's copy."
Christian leaned over from the waist to examine it, hands on his knees. "Show me where it says 'Flinck.' "
"It doesn't. Nobody would sign a picture like this; it was just an exercise. Look, it isn't even properly finished. But I don't see how there can be much question that it's Mann's painting. How many pictures of this particular model, posed this particular way, could your father own? And you've already said he got these in the forties."
But there was more than that to back up Mann's claim. A small part of the lower right corner of the frame had been broken off and been glued back on. Some of the gilt around the break had flaked off, and the repair was plainly visible. It even looked like a job done by a couple of frightened kids, with a dried spurt of glue protruding from the back. We were looking at Capitaine Le Nez, all right.
I held back from mentioning the crack to Christian, however. It would have been too easy for him to get rid of the frame and put a new one on.
"What's it worth?" he asked.
"Just what you said-not much. It's nowhere near as good as the one upstairs and wasn't meant to be. It's a student exercise, a long way from Flinck at his best. And I doubt if there's any way to prove it is by Flinck." I turned from the picture to look directly at him. "Why don't you give it to him, Christian? Nobody's going to give you much money for it."
"Give it to him? What for? His father sold it, didn't he?"
"Come on, you know what the situation was. It would be a generous gesture on your part."
But his loose-lipped mouth had firmed. "If he thinks he has a case," he said sullenly, "let him go ahead and prove it in court."
And there I had to let it rest, not very hopefully. Even with that repair on the frame, I didn't give Julien Mann and his lawyer brother-in-law much chance of convincing a court of law that he had a legal right to it. A moral right, maybe, but courts didn't deal in moral rights.
We left Pepin rewrapping the paintings and came upstairs, back to the front door.
Christian had his easy, male-bonding smile in place again, and even went so far as to drape an arm over my shoulder. This was not a good move on his part; I could smell that now-familiar, citrusy cologne again. Back came distinct and unwelcome memories of pitching nose-first into the night.
"Well, what do you say, friend?" he said. "I've been as honest as I know how. Everything I know, you know. What now?"
"What do you mean, what now?" I got out from under his arm.
"You know what I mean. What are you going to do now?"