I let him warm up long enough to allow me to swallow some of the croissant, then held up my hand. 'Lorenzo, believe me, I'd like nothing better than to argue this out with you, but I have to catch a train in a minute. You know what I mean: Did he ever knowingly try to sell you a fake?' I drank some coffee. 'Or unknowingly, for that matter.'
The struggle was apparent in his face. Answering a yes-or-no question with a yes or a no didn't come naturally to Lorenzo. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down. 'No,' he said, practically sweating with the effort.
'Do you usually run your own tests on the objects you buy?'
'Certainly not. You don't need tests if you know what you're doing.'
Maybe not, but did Lorenzo know what he was doing? In all the years I'd known him, I'd never resolved that question to my satisfaction. As a professor of art criticism and as a collector, he demonstrated formidable breadth. On the other hand, if you really believed that there wasn't any difference between fake and genuine, then how were you supposed to tell one from the other? Someday I'd have to pursue that with him.
'Once, years ago, my father began to have questions about a Ferdinand Hodler we'd gotten from Vachey,' he admitted.
'They were unsubstantiated, as it turned out, but Vachey offered at once to take it back, without hesitation. This was five years after it had been purchased. So I think we can say he was a man of honor, in that regard at least.'
Maybe yes, maybe no. A willingness to take back a dubious painting didn't say much one way or the other. Art dealers necessarily work hard to protect their reputations. They flinch from even the insinuation that a fake has ever passed through their hands. Rather than let the issue publicly arise, they will leap to refund money or make a quiet exchange at the first sign that a buyer is beginning to have doubts.
Naturally, that doesn't mean the next pigeon won't get stuck with it.
But at least I knew that Lorenzo and his father, who between them had been buying from Vachey for three decades, had never found anything, explicit or otherwise, to link Vachey with a fake, and that was something.
'However-' Lorenzo said, and I knew by the quickening of his voice that our descent into the concrete was over; we were off and running again, Lorenzo-style. 'However, doesn't the very framing of your question assume, a priori, the existence of a unidimensional pole of reality entirely at odds with the precepts of Einstein's theory of the unified field-'
I was saved from the unimaginable consummation of this thought by the appearance of Jean-Luc Charpentier, who dragged Lorenzo off for the Lyon train. I waved them on their way, gulped the last of my croissant, and ran for the train to Paris.
Chapter 15
The Rue de Rivoli is one of Paris's great avenues, a broad and gracious thoroughfare bordering the Louvre and the Tuileries, designed under Napoleon and completed in the reign of Louis-Philippe. Elegant, block-long porticoes front massive, classical buildings crowned with striking mansard roofs. The arcades are crammed with smart shops, bookstores, and art galleries, and three of the world's most stately hotels-the Crillon, the Inter- Continental, and the Meurice-front it within three blocks of each other. Architectural historians generally describe this pleasing, harmonious boulevard as one of the triumphs of nineteenth-century urban design.
They are talking about the western half of it, from the Place de la Concorde to the Louvre. The other half doesn't get much play in the urban architecture journals. East of the Louvre, the Rue de Rivoli turns abruptly proletarian, becoming, in the space of a single block, a bustling, hustling center of gimcrackery and tourist schlock. Here is where you come when you want to purchase a scarf emblazoned with a map of the Paris Metro system, or when you've broken your gilt model of the Eiffel Tower and need to replace it, or, when you're looking for a good buy in Taiwanese Levi's.
Would you care to hazard a guess in which part of the Rue de Rivoli I found number 89-the address at which Vachey had supposedly purchased the Rembrandt? Correct, but why not, inasmuch as Vachey had never called the Atelier Saint-Jean anything but a junk shop?
The store shared a small, off-the-street arcade with a money exchange, a place that seemed to specialize in used issues of Paris-Match, and a snack bar called Le Snack Bar. L'Atelier Saint-Jean itself had changed its name to Top Souvenirs, which I did not regard as an encouraging sign, and now seemed to specialize in plasticized place mats with pictures of Paris street scenes on them, and miniature, plastic-resin reproductions of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo, and other treasures of the Louvre. There wasn't a piece of original art in the place, old or new.
I asked the clerk if she knew where I could find Monsieur Gibeault.
'Alphonse!' she yelled at the top of her voice, and a moment later a bald, preoccupied man in a dirty yellow shirt came out of a side room, closing the door after himself. He peered at me, rotating a dead cigar stub in his mouth, then took me aside, a few feet from some browsers, and lifted his chin, watching me through narrowed eyes.
'You're Monsieur Gibeault, the proprietor?' I asked in French.
He nodded.
'I'm trying to find out about a painting you sold to a friend of mine a while ago.'
'I don't sell paintings.' He gestured at the shop. 'You see any paintings?'
'I'm sure he bought it here-'
'Not from me. From my cousin.'
'Your cousin?'
'He owned the place before me. He sold some paintings, stuff he picked up at auctions. Not me, they're a pain in the ass, not worth the trouble.'
My confidence level continued to fall. 'Could you tell me where I can get in touch with him?'
He laughed. 'Sure, try the Montrouge Cemetery.'
'He's dead?'
'As a baked codfish.'
Somehow I got the impression they hadn't been close. 'You wouldn't know where his sales records are?' Shrug.
'If I could see them, it might, er, be worth something to you.'
It isn't the sort of line I'm very good at, and he just laughed some more. He spit some tobacco shreds onto the floor. 'What kind of painting was this?'
'It may have been a Rembrandt.'
He stared at me. 'This guy-your friend-says he bought a Rembrandt here?'
I had to admit, it didn't seem very likely. 'Well, it didn't look like a Rembrandt at the time. It was covered with grime-'
But he was laughing too hard to hear, real belly laughs of amusement. He clapped me on the shoulder. 'Hey, I'll tell you what. If your friend's interested in some more Rembrandts, send him around. I'll give him a good price, he won't beat it anywhere. Van Goghs too, Michelangelos, you name it.'
He laughed all the way back into the side room. 'Unbelievable,' I heard him splutter as he shut the door. He was wiping tears from his eyes.
If nothing else, I had certainly enlivened his day.
This unproductive encounter had been my first enterprise in Paris. I'd taken a taxi directly from the Gare de Lyon to the Rue de Rivoli. Now I hoisted my shoulder bag, found another taxi, and went to my hotel on the Ile Saint-Louis to check in and drop off my things, telling the cab driver to come back in twenty minutes.
The Hotel Saint-Louis is another one of those quiet, homey, unassuming little places- sans pretensions, as they like to say-at which I've been staying since my college days, but which Tony grumbles are no longer
