commensurate with my distinguished status as the representative of an important museum. Maybe not, but how many decent hotels are there in Paris, where you are a stone's throw-a literal stone's throw-from Notre-Dame, and yet able to sleep with your windows open for fresh air without getting a whiff of exhaust or hearing a single car all night long? Not many, I can tell you.
I got a top-floor room again (there is something about me that makes hotel clerks send me straight to the attic), unpacked the next day's clothes, and hung them in the closet. Actually, I like garret rooms. There is something about being under the eaves and looking out from dormer windows over the rooftops and chimney pots of an old city like Paris that puts you back a century or so. The shop windows four or five stories below have changed a lot over the years, and the people on the narrow streets are inescapably twentieth century, but the rooftops are right out of Daumier. I could have been looking from a nineteenth-century window onto a nineteenth- century roofscape. Well, I was, but you know what I mean.
But today my mind was firmly in the twentieth century; not the 1990s but the darker time of the 1940s. At four o'clock, in a little over half an hour, I was due at the apartment of Julien Mann, the Saint-Denis man who was claiming that the Rembrandt was no Rembrandt, and that Rene Vachey, Nazi stooge and profiteer, had virtually stolen it from his father fifty years before.
The efficient Calvin had gotten his telephone number for me, and I'd called him the previous evening after talking to Anne.
Getting him to speak with me, even on the telephone, hadn't been easy. I'd had to work hard to convince his wife, first that I wasn't a reporter, and second that, museum curator or not, I had no wish to do him out of a painting if it was rightfully his.
He'd picked up the telephone with undisguised reluctance. I had hoped, of course, that he would come across as an oily shyster who had seen a good thing and jumped at the chance to make a killing. Instead, he had been testy and curt, replying with crabby monosyllables to my long explanation of who I was and what I wanted to talk about. It had been all I could do to get him to agree to see me today, after he got home from his job at the payroll office of the Paris Metro.
Sad to say, he hadn't seemed remotely like a shyster.
The taxi took me north from the island over the Pont de Sully, past the blankly modernistic new opera house at the Place de la Bastille-state-of-the-art, they tell me, but about as cozy-looking as the infamous old prison that once stood there-and then up the Boulevard Beaumarchais, one of those lively streets that is everyone's idea of a Paris boulevard. Green-awninged cafes, brasseries, and restaurants follow one after another, most with calendar- scene tables and chairs out on the pavement. There are hordes of people who seem to have nothing more urgent to do than sit with a newspaper and a cup of coffee or an aperitif and watch the world go by. Even on a murky afternoon like this one, it was captivating.
But a little farther on, the character changes. The awnings thin out. The people do too. The buildings become more stark and functional, and by the time you pass the Gare du Nord and the railroad yards, you are in a crushingly bleak, low-rise zone of light-industry plants-window glass, mattress covers, food processing, electronics-with isolated ten- or twelve-story apartment buildings rising meagerly among them like skeleton fingers. On top of every apartment house is a huge neon advertisement lit in blue or red, even at 4:00 p.m. MINOLTA, the signs say, or MITA, or VOLVO, or SANYO; one towering word per rooftop, creating a weird, sparse forest of twisting neon. They are there to catch the eyes of train passengers coming into Paris. Thus, when you approach from Paris, they're backward: OVLOV, ATIM, ATLONIM. You begin to wonder whether you're in the outskirts of Paris or Smolensk.
Julien Mann lived in this charmless area, on the fourth floor of the OVLOV building. His wife, a self-effacing, slightly crosseyed woman in a simple, floral-printed dress-what used to be called a housedress in the United States before it went out of fashion forty years ago-let me into a foyer, then took me through an old-fashioned kitchen with a faint, greasy smell of lamb, and into a living room filled with heavy, dark furniture from the fifties. Everything was spotless, dustless, and in its place. I wondered if she had spent the day cleaning on my account.
Mann was sitting in one of a pair of overstuffed armchairs, waiting for me. According to the newspaper article he had been seven in 1942, so he was now fifty-seven. He looked seventy, and an old seventy at that-a frail, severe, schoolmasterish man in suit and tie, with a pinched nose, a long, narrow mouth, and fierce, squinting eyes behind thick lenses. His gray hair had retreated halfway up his scalp, but what was left stood up in two stiff waves reminiscent of the 'horns'-rays, actually-on Michelangelo's Moses.
He rose halfway and shook hands perfunctorily. 'Good day,' he said in clipped French. His nose was faintly blue at the tip. He gestured me into the corner of the massive couch opposite him and resumed his seat, inspecting me from under drawn-together brows.
'So he's dead,' he said.
Mrs. Mann murmured something and left us alone, closing the door behind her and going out-into the kitchen? The foyer? Silence followed. I had thought Mann was waiting for her to leave before continuing, but he just sat there, hunched alertly forward, elbows on the arms of his chair, squeezing the fingertips of one hand with the fingers of the other, scrutinizing me with unsettling directness. 'So he's dead,' it appeared, was all he meant to say.
'About the painting,' I said.
His attention was acute but he didn't move, didn't speak. This was going to be up to me.
'First,' I said, 'I want you to know that I'm not against you. If the painting is rightfully yours-if Vachey got it the way you say he did-then my museum would never stand in the way of your getting it back.'
He responded the way he had when I'd told him pretty much the same thing the night before, which is to say he didn't.
'On the other hand,' I went on, 'you can understand that since his story is so different from yours, I have to do my best to find out as much as I can for myself.'
Silence. His fingers continued to pinch each other.
'May I ask you a few questions, Monsieur Mann? About Rene Vachey, to begin with?'
A dip of the chin, wary and reserved. It was more than I'd gotten till then.
'According to the Echos Quotidiens article, you said Vachey bought up Jewish art collections at desperation prices, then sold them to the Nazis at a profit.'
Another minuscule nod.
'Aside from your own case, do you have any evidence for that?' I winced the moment the words were out. It sounded like an interrogation.
He stiffened. 'It was no secret. Everyone knew it was so,' he said sharply.
'But you were only seven,' I said, trying to seem less like a cross-examiner. 'I'm surprised that a child would be aware of such things.'
I didn't like pressing him, but I had to find out what I could about Vachey's wartime activities. If he had really built his collection on what he'd made as a Nazi middleman and profiteer, then-even if the Rembrandt turned out not to be Mann's Flinck-Christian Vachey was welcome to it.
'I know,' Mann said through clamped jaws, 'because my father told me. Later… in the camp.'
'Did you know Vachey yourself? Were you ever in his gallery?'
'I saw him when he came for the painting. A cold man, with a cruel smile. He frightened me; I clung to my father's hand.' He shook his thin shoulders, like a horse ridding itself of a biting fly. 'My father pleaded for a reasonable amount, but Vachey laughed in his face and told him he was lucky to get anything. I recall this with perfect clarity, monsieur.'
Did he? Or was it what Calvin had suggested-that he couldn't distinguish between what he remembered, what his father had told him, and what he had built up in his mind over the years? And what hope was there of my finding out after all this time?
'Maybe we ought to talk about the painting itself,' I suggested. 'You haven't actually seen it-that's right, isn't it?'
This was another important question Calvin had raised. Vachey's reception and showing were invitational affairs, not open to the general public. And no photos had been allowed. So how could Mann know what the picture looked like, let alone that it was the same one that had hung in his father's house?
'Not since 1942,' he said.
'No, I'm talking specifically about the picture that's now on display in the Galerie Vachey.'
His mouth set. 'Not… since… 1942.'
