for starters-thrown in to avoid too parochial a flavor. The elegant, arched ceiling is punctuated every 250 feet or so by an ornate, marble-columned cupola. At the far end, you go around a crick in the floor plan, and there you are, looking down an additional 300 feet of Flemish, Dutch, and Spanish masterworks.
All this is one half of one floor of one wing. And there are three wings. Some museum.
While we walked slowly through it, pausing occasionally to look at a particular painting, I told de Quincy about the puzzling restrictions that Vachey had placed on both the Barillot and SAM, and about the generally queer goings-on that had followed them.
By the time I'd finished, we'd walked the entire floor-the lengths of four football fields, as an American guidebook predictably puts it-and were sitting on a stone bench at the head of the east staircase, surrounded by El Grecos, Murillos, and Riberas.
'Interesting,' de Quincy said when I was done. 'What do you make of it?'
'That's what I was going to ask you. What do you suppose he could have been up to?'
He shook his head slowly back and forth. 'Got me.'
'Look, Fuzzy, I have to come to a decision tomorrow. If you were in my place, would you take the painting?'
'If what's holding you back is worrying about what he did or didn't do in the forties, I'd say yes, for damn sure, take it.'
'That's the main thing, but those weird conditions of his make me nervous too. You knew him pretty well-'
'Not so well.'
'But you liked him, you admired him.' He nodded. 'Fair statement.'
'Well, would you say you could take him at his word?'
'Well-'
'If he told you what he told me-that there was nothing tricky behind the restriction on testing, or behind the time limits he set up, or behind anything else, would you trust him?'
De Quincy pulled thoughtfully at his earlobe. 'About as far as I could throw him.'
Chapter 17
I got back to Dijon at 3:00 p.m., which left me just twenty-seven hours to make up my mind about the Rembrandt. If I didn't sign off on Vachey's conditions by the close of business Friday, the offer would be void, and the painting, presumably, would revert with the rest of Vachey's 'residue' to his son, Christian.
Christian, who had tried to keep me away from the Rembrandt, and Froger away from the Leger. Christian, who had tried to wrest the Duchamp from Gisele Gremonde. Christian, who was so little trusted by his father that the older man had kept his new will secret from him, and in it had aced him out of the ownership of the Galerie Vachey and removed him as executor besides.
However, Christian had also been living in the same house with his father for the last six months. Disappointed in his son or not, it seemed probable that Vachey would have let him in on whatever game he was playing with the paintings, and even more likely that Christian would know something about that scrapbook. Until now, however, I hadn't even tried to talk to him. I didn't think he'd see me, for one thing (he had done his best to keep me out of the house altogether), and for another, how could I trust anything told to me by a man who was in line to get the Rembrandt if I turned it down? So I had started with likelier sources, and struck out. Pepin claimed he knew nothing about anything; Gisele knew about the book but wasn't telling. And Clotilde knew about the book and about Vachey's intentions, but she wasn't telling either. That left Christian.
'Okay, I'll say it one more time,' Christian said with a sort of nonchalant irritation. 'One: I don't know anything about any blue scrapbook, I never heard of any blue scrapbook, I never saw any blue scrapbook. Two: I was born in 1956, so do you want to tell me how I'm supposed to know anything about my father's activities in the war? Three: I don't know what my father had in mind when he offered you the Rembrandt, why should I? Okay?'
He went back to what he'd been doing: arranging a carton of dog-eared papers and index cards into neat little stacks on the surface of an aged rolltop desk. His English was idiomatic and barely accented, the pronunciation American rather than British, with a slangy, choppy flavor that gave credence to the stories of mob connections in Miami.
'That's hard to believe,' I said. 'You're his son. You were living in the same house.'
He shrugged and stood up, stretching. There was a faint whiff of expensive cologne, dry and lemony. 'Well, I can't help what you want to believe. Look, I'm sorry, but I have a million things to do, you know?'
This was the way it had gone from the beginning. We were on the first floor of Vachey's house, at the end of a blind corridor that served as a small study. Christian, in a pin-striped gray suit, again with no tie, hadn't been out-and-out rude, but he hadn't bothered to stop his paper-arranging when I'd arrived either, and he hadn't offered me a seat. I wasn't sure if I'd ever quite gotten his full attention.
Now he smiled and held out his hand. 'Sorry, my friend. I wish I could have helped.' I could see that his mind was already back on his cards.
There wasn't much I could do but go. 'Well, thanks for your time,' I said. 'If you happen to think-'
And right then, as suddenly as that, one feature of the gluey, murky swamp I'd been sloshing around in for days popped into sharp, clean focus. I recognized his cologne. I remembered the last time I'd smelled it-a second or so before I went flying out the window of Vachey's study. At the time I'd had the impression that a faint, citrusy, distinctive smell had come from the opened pages of the scrapbook, but it hadn't come from the pages at all.
'You pushed me out that window,' I said.
I finally had his attention. He jerked his hand out of mine and took a step back, eyes startled. I had laughed when I said it-a sort of delighted cackle-because it felt so good to finally know something, and Christian probably thought I'd gone around the bend.
'Don't be dumb,' he said. 'What window? What are you talking about? Why the hell would I want to push you out of a window?'
'To keep me from seeing the book.'
'What book?' Finding that I didn't intend to strangle him after all, he'd managed to put some self-assurance back into his voice. He raised his eyes to the ceiling and tried an indignant laugh. 'I can't believe it. This guy has the nerve to walk in here-'
'The hell with it,' I said. 'I'm not going to stand here and fight about it. You tried to kill me, and I can damn well prove it, and as far as I'm concerned, I'm just as happy letting Lefevre get it out of you.'
I turned smartly and strode down the long corridor, the old wooden floor groaning at each step. I had made it all the way to the door that led to the public part of the house and gotten it open before he called out.
'Wait a minute, will you… Chris?'
I turned, still holding the handle. For a moment there, I thought I'd overplayed my hand.
'All right, okay, you're right,' he said. He came down the long hallway with his rolling, cocky stride, letting a sheepish, oily half-smile form on his face, confident that no one could fail to be charmed by his unassuming candor.
'You're right,' he said again when he reached me, 'what can I say? But believe me, doing you any harm was the last thing I was thinking of. I mean, I don't bear you any personal animosity, Chris. Far from it.'
'Well, that's a load off my mind.'
He laughed. 'Let me explain, okay? When I heard that damn woman start-'
'Gisele Gremonde?'
He nodded. '-start in with that stuff about the upstanding Rene Vachey, the great Rene Vachey, and she actually started talking about that scrapbook of his, I took off for the study to make sure the door was locked and the damn thing was out of sight.' He shrugged. 'Well, you beat me to it, and I saw you disappearing behind a
