"When he stole the scrapbook."
"Right. Apparently, when Gisele started ranting about it at the reception, and throwing around those innuendos about Vachey's 'great discoveries,' Charpentier started wondering if he'd been had, after all, the same way I had. So while she was still raving, he got away from the crowd and snuck off to Vachey's study-"
"To which you had snuck off only minutes before-"
"Me and Christian, only I suppose he wasn't sneaking, strictly speaking, since he lives there. Well, Christian found me with the book, heaved me through the window, stuck the book in another case, and got out. Whereupon-"
"Charpentier came in, snatched the book, and also got out?"
"Yes. You're doubtful?"
"Well, yes. It's just that it has the feel of-I mean, it sounds like The Three Stooges, Chris-everybody following everybody else."
"I don't think anybody was following anybody. We were all after the book. We were probably the only ones who had what you'd call a pressing interest in it."
She tore a slice of bread into pieces and offered them to a pair of small, softly honking white swans, handsome birds with black throats and red bills, that had paddled hopefully up to us on the pond we sat beside. When they wouldn't come near her outstretched hand, she tossed them some, and turned back to me.
"How did Charpentier know where to look for it? He could only have had a second before the crowd got there."
"Probably the same way Christian knew I had it. By looking through the glass door of the study while Christian was hiding it."
"You're guessing, though, aren't you?"
"Sure, I'm guessing. Charpentier's dead. Vachey's dead. What else is there to do but guess? I'm also guessing-but Lefevre agrees-that when Charpentier found out from the book that the Leger was a fake, he caught Vachey on his predawn walk the next morning. Maybe he tried to find out what Vachey had planned-remember, it was pretty obvious the guy had something tricky up his sleeve-maybe he tried to reason with him, maybe-who knows? Anyway, he wound up shooting him. With his little pocket pistol."
She was shaking her head. "No, I'm sorry, it still doesn't make sense. What good did it do to kill Vachey? That wouldn't stop the gesso from slipping."
"Ah, but Charpentier didn't know the gesso was going to slip."
"But he had the book-"
"All he knew was that it was a fake. There wasn't anything in it about the gesso. I have that straight from Clotilde. The entry wasn't complete. Vachey was waiting for the newspaper clippings that were sure to follow. So, as far as Charpentier knew, if he could just keep the picture from being scientifically tested- which was what Vachey wanted anyway-he'd be safe."
That was another little clue that I'd missed-how vehemently Charpentier had been against testing when we were talking to Froger at the Barillot. And how he'd been so much more negative about the painting than he'd been the evening before, advising Froger to stick it out of sight-and, he hoped, out of mind-in one of the Barillot's darkest corners.
"Attaboy," Anne said. One of the swans had waddled a few steps out of the water, made a tentative peck at the bread on her palm, and run back with it. The other had remained where it was, gobbling nervously.
She tossed it a chunk. "Go back a little. I can see what Charpentier's motivations were, but I don't understand Vachey's. Why was he after Charpentier's neck? Froger's, yes-they'd been enemies for years-but what did Charpentier ever do to him?"
I plastered a last slice of bread with pate and bit into it. "To Rene Vachey, the feud with a windbag like Froger was nothing. I'm sure he looked forward to making him look a little silly over the Leger, but Froger was small fry, and anyway he never claimed to be a Cubist expert."
I swallowed, full at last, and wiped my fingers on a paper napkin. "But Charpentier…"
Charpentier, on the other hand, did claim to be a Cubist expert, and Charpentier, unlike Froger, had deeply wounded Vachey. It had started when he'd twice ridiculed Vachey's early "neo-Cubist" efforts. "Derivative, shallow, pallid, uninformed," he'd called them, but that much Vachey might have lived with; honest criticism from a straightforward if curmudgeonly critic. But a few years after that, he'd praised Vachey's controversial Turbulent Century show, his collection of works purportedly by Braque, Picasso, and others.
Why should that upset Vachey? Because, as several of the other reviewers had surmised, some of the attributions in The Turbulent Century were suspect. In fact, Clotilde had told us, they were more than suspect: all four of the Cubist paintings- a Braque, a Picasso, a Leger, and a Gris-were actually by Vachey; a one-man tour de force that was afterward relegated to the basement, where they'd probably remained concealed until I'd made Christian show them to me the day before.
And several years after that, Clotilde had gone on, Charpentier had verified the authenticity of that unknown Leger in Basel, only-and by now, of course, I was ahead of her-it wasn't a Leger, it was another Vachey counterfeit. It had been given to a friend in fun, but somehow wound up a few years later on the wall of a restaurant, and subsequently on the block at one of the big London auction houses. According to Clotilde, Charpentier had later verified a second Vachey-cum-Leger that had found its way into the art market in Vienna, valued at several million dollars.
Where these paintings were now, God only knew (which is, of course, why we straight arrows get so exercised even about forgeries made in fun).
Thus, Charpentier had consistently valued in the millions of francs the excellent forgeries to which Vachey had affixed the signatures of Braque, or Gris, or-especially-Leger. Equally consistently, he had heaped contempt on the paintings Vachey had produced under his own name. It was more than enough to rouse the ire of any painter-forger who had a high regard for his own merits, which Vachey most assuredly had.
"And so," I said, "he set this whole thing up to bring Charpentier down a peg. He knew Charpentier would accept the Leger as real-"
"How could he possibly know that?"
"He'd fallen for every one of Vachey's 'Legers' up till then. Why should this be any different?"
"That's so. And he was right."
"Yes, it would have worked. When that self-portrait came to light, Charpentier's reputation would have been in worse shape than that gesso."
Wordlessly, she offered me the remains of the baguettes. When I shook my head, she threw them to the appreciative swans. "But what about Vachey's reputation?" she asked. "Everyone would find out he was a forger."
"No, what everyone would know was that he was good enough to make a chump out of France's most eminent Cubist authority. Nobody would think of him as a forger, any more than people thought of him as a thief when he stole those paintings from the Barillot. He was having another one of his jokes, that's all."
"Only Charpentier didn't see the humor in it," Anne mused. "And now they're both dead."
A dreary gray cloud sheet had moved in, and with it had come a cold, fitful wind. Piles of neatly raked brown leaves at the junctions of the paths began to come apart and skitter over the gravel. We both got to work gathering up the food.
"One more thing, Chris. I see why Vachey couldn't let the Leger be tested, but why keep you from testing the Rembrandt? You don't think there could be something…"
"Not a chance. No, he applied the restrictions to both pictures because if he did it to one and not the other, it would have given the show away. Charpentier wouldn't have gone near it."
"Well, I still don't understand what SAM has to do with all this. Why-really-did he donate the Rembrandt?"
I shrugged. "I suppose, for the reason he said. To make good on that old promise to Ferdinand de Quincy."