So, Mr. Norgren, it seems that once again you've been the inadvertent agent of justice." He tucked in his chin and made some more gargly noises. "Thank you for your efforts."
I didn't know about the "inadvertent," but I wasn't going to do any better than that from Lefevre. He'd had enough trouble getting that much out.
"You're welcome, but there's more I'd better tell you."
He nodded. "Better to do it at the prefecture, I think, unless you don't feel well enough…"
"No, I'm perfectly fine," I said, getting up too. I felt more fluttery than sick, and the pounding had almost subsided. "Let's go."
But Lefevre's attention had been caught by the painting again. "A forgery on top of a forgery," he mused, bending over it. "The one underneath-it's a portrait of some sort, abstract but not quite abstract, no? Isn't this an eye? Ah, and here's the corner of the mouth…"
"It's a portrait, all right." I reached over and used my fingers to pull away a little more of the overpainting so that both eyes were visible, an arresting, smoky gray dappled with hazel.
After a second, Lefevre barked a brief note of laughter. "Vachey! It's a portrait of Rene Vachey."
"A self-portrait," I said, and laughed a little myself. "Beautifully done… in the unmistakable style of Fernand Leger."
Chapter 20
Vachey was a forger?" Anne said, looking up from unwrapping a hunk of goat cheese.
"An extraordinary forger," I said. "He could do all the Cubists-Leger, Gris, Braque, Picasso. Not for a livelihood, you understand; more as an avocation, something he played away at once in a while as a matter of-well, of pride, I suppose."
"An avenue of self-actualization, you might say," Anne said dryly.
"Lorenzo might say," I said with a laugh, helping myself to cheese and bread.
We were in a little park a block from the hotel, one I'd often looked down on from the room; a square of prettily regimented greenery, with a formally laid out pond, and terraces and balustrades done in the ornate Italianate manner that had been popular in the time of Napoleon III. I'd come back from police headquarters looking, according to Anne, like something the cat dragged in, and although I hadn't felt like going anywhere, she had insisted on some fresh air and a pique-nique. Now I was glad she had; I'd been eating nonstop, not even waiting for her to get everything laid out between us on the bench.
"That's what the scrapbook was all about," I said, chewing. "His own record of all the fakes he painted, described in loving detaiclass="underline" pigments, techniques, materials. Right up to and including 'Leger's' Violon et Cruche."
"I don't understand. I thought it was a record of the paintings he'd bought." She frowned. " 'Les peintures de Rene Vachey'…"
"Right, 'The Paintings of Rene Vachey.' Well, think about it. If you're talking about a collector, it means the paintings he owns. But if you're talking about an artist, it means the paintings he's created. It's the same in English; 'The Paintings of J. Paul Getty II and 'The Paintings of Pablo Picasso' are two different things. I guess Vachey thought of himself more along the lines of Picasso. I misread it completely."
"Well… all right, but how do you know you've got it right, now? Did they find the book?"
"No, it looks like Charpentier got rid of it somewhere. But Lefevre called in Clotilde Guyot while I was there, and she verified it all."
The book, Clotilde had said, contained comprehensive material on counterfeits by Vachey dating back to 1942; his own notes, plus newspaper clippings and magazine articles. Like many self-admiring forgers before him, he'd wanted to be sure that in the end he could prove the paintings had indeed come from his own hand.
I'd asked her rather pointedly why she hadn't told me that when I'd asked the day before. "Because," she said just as pointedly, "you neglected to mention the small fact that the book had been stolen." Indeed I had, and so Clotilde had understandably assumed that it was still in its usual place in Vachey's office, that no outsiders had any idea of what was in it, and how then could it have had any relevance to Vachey's death? I absorbed a sidewise, stinging look from Lefevre and let the matter drop.
"But how did you know what was in it?" Anne asked. "Before she verified it, I mean?"
"Oh, hell," I grumbled. "I should have figured that much out a long time ago."
Yesterday afternoon, anyway, when I was looking right at those Cubist paintings in Vachey's basement, the ones Christian had so obligingly unwrapped for me. Why, I should have asked myself a little harder, would anyone have kept authentic paintings by Gris, Derain, and the rest of them, a collection worth a fortune, stowed away in dusty wrappings in the cellar? And only a minute earlier I'd walked blithely by that alcove set up with paints and easel, and never had it occurred to me to wonder what it was doing there and who'd been using it.
But by that time, as I explained to Anne, I was no longer thinking forgery, not even about the Leger-not so much because of Charpentier's seeming confidence in it, but because of Vachey's. He had been so transparently shocked, so startled, at Charpentier's suggesting that it was anything but an absolutely first-rate Leger, that it had seemed impossible that he was perpetrating a fake. Now, of course, I understood: he hadn't been shocked, he'd been offended. Who the devil was Jean-Luc Charpentier to assert that a Leger by Vachey wasn't every bit as good as a Leger by Leger?
Anne had continued to lay out food while I spoke: two cheeses, a couple of baguettes, a slice of smooth liver pate with truffles, a plastic tub of green olives and another of string beans and peppers in vinaigrette, a split of red wine with two stemmed plastic wine glasses. And I had continued to gobble it down. She began to pour the wine.
"Not for me," I said. "I was drinking brandy at eleven o'clock this morning."
She stuffed the cork back in. "Me neither. I just thought maybe you could use it. Chris, how could Vachey have done the Leger so beautifully? Didn't you tell me he hadn't painted in twenty years?"
"Sure, and who told me? Charpentier. That's what he'd thought himself for twenty years, and he wanted me to keep thinking it. He'd just misattributed an outright forgery by Vachey, he'd killed Vachey over it, and he didn't want even the thought of a Vachey forgery to cross my mind." I found a bottle of mineral water in the paper sack and poured us some. "And it didn't."
"Mm." She chewed thoughtfully on an olive. "But how did you know it was Charpentier who killed him? I mean, I know how you know now, but how did you know before? When Pepin stuck his head in the door to say Charpentier had the painting off the wall, you were out of there so fast-"
"That's what gave it away. Until that minute I didn't have a clue. But why would Charpentier dash off and take the painting down the minute he heard about the gesso? The only reason I could think of was to somehow keep the evidence that it was a fake from coming out." I gestured with a bread slice. "And there you are."
"I am? Where?" Anne said with a tinge of annoyance. "I hate to sound dim-witted, but do remember, yesterday morning I was still in Tacoma with my mind full of job-reentry problems."
I accepted the rebuke. My mind had been on Rene Vachey for a week, I'd been right here in France, I'd been aware of a hundred details she knew nothing about, and still I hadn't been able to put them together until they'd been handed to me on a platter. No wonder she was a little confused.
I put down the string beans I'd been working on and gathered my thoughts. "All right. Charpentier made a beeline for the painting the second he heard there was a problem with it. Why? Because he knew it was a fake. But he hadn't known it was a fake on Monday night or he'd never have gone into his speech about its being a Leger, but not a very good Leger, etcetera, etcetera. Question: When and how had he found out it was a fake? Answer: When-"