Pictures at an Exhibition (25 page)

Here I stopped, as if fixed to the flagstones. The church bells began their banging and echoing. My hands were clenched. My palms were sticky with sweat. A girl with sticky hands had danced with me before
Almonds
, singing a nonsense song—or the garbled speech of an imprisoned brain. She had not been a dream at all.

I returned to Chaim's apartment and, as I unlocked the courtyard gate, saw the concierge's liver-spotted hand draw back her curtain. I walked up the five flights, resting at the fourth, and wondered how Chaim had found my Morisot's hiding place. I had shoved the monstrous armoire in his hallway with all my might in order to squeeze the picture behind it, and then forced it back into place with my shoulder.

When I entered Chaim's hallway, there were his wife's lavender gloves waiting on the table, next to a note in Chaim's left-handed
scrawl that said he had found a man to drive him to Pithiviers, near Orléans, where he hoped to find word of his wife and son. I felt like weeping but told myself it was only the fatigue.

Pithiviers, Pithiviers, Pithiviers
, I chanted as I studied the armoire to see how far Chaim had moved it in order to extract the Morisot. It was nearly flush against the wall and there were no scrapes on the floor. How hard I had to push to move the armoire! I thought. I heaved against it again, for good measure, and heard a crash. When I withdrew the broken object, I held the Morisot that Chaim had sold, the
Woman in White
, ever averting her eyes, receding further into her quiet mysteries.

He had sold something else, then. But what? I looked out the window, into the courtyard, and saw a man in a felt hat checking the sky for rain. Standing where he stood, I had seen Chaim's face in this window days before. I had returned home from my second visit to Madame de La Porte des Vaux. That day we had burned one of the chairs from the kitchen table because we had not had sufficient fuel, and we argued and I threw a teacup against a wall and it did not break. I recalled thinking that Chaim was rummaging through my luggage but had not concerned myself with it further, because the valise had nothing of more than sentimental value inside. I threw open the case. There were the playbills of my mother's performances, a comic book of Rose's, her first letter to me, and my father's scarf with the moth hole at its hem. And then I understood: Chaim had sold the
Ham.
The fake Manet. The talisman of my hubris and failure. Someone had bought it for a handsome sum because he believed it was real.

Chapter Twenty

M
Y NEXT VISIT TO MADAME DE LA PORTE DES
Vaux was brief. I found her sitting at her tall desk with a liquor bottle beside her. I knocked at the window, she reached out of sight to press the buzzer, and the door clicked open.

“Have a drink with me,” she said. “Courtesy of the Russians. They admired my suit. They're my dead husband's suits. Not a bad one in the lot.” She fingered a lapel. “Didn't you behave poorly at the Cailleux Gallery opening! I had to hear all about it from his wife. Why are
you
here again?”

“He has
Almonds.”

“Oh?”

“But it's already been sold.”

“So you buy it back. No one wants a row, that I can assure you. It will be easy. That Mademoiselle Clément, she is causing messy scenes.”

“I haven't spoken with her since before the war.”

“She's crazed—a vigilante. Accuses everyone: Christians, Jews, art dealers, buyers, the prime minister. Now, share some of this with me.” She slid the vodka bottle toward me. I touched the violent Cyrillic on its label.

“I haven't the money to
buy Almonds.”

“Bah.”
She rolled her eyes and poured more vodka into her glass.

The Russians’ drinking glasses were pushed to the far edge of the high table. She swept them over its rim and they shattered in the dustbin below. “Look what you've made me do,” she said.

I ignored her.

I figured whoever had bought the
Ham
from Chaim might have bought another Manet—
Almonds
, for symmetry's sake. But there was an additional symmetry for me. The
Ham
could lead me to
Almonds.
I could circumvent Cailleux.

“Have you heard of another Manet for sale?” I asked.

She twirled a silver pen between her fingers. “I don't know anything about what you are asking, but here's an intuition. An American opened a new gallery on the Right Bank. Only Americans have money these days. Goodman, Gutman, Gutfreund—you figure it out.” Her voice seemed to pick up. She was pleased, I suspected, to have me off haunting another dealer. “Yes my boy, try him ….”

I stood and hurried to the door. “Thank you, Madame,” I said, from a safe distance. “You are always so kind to me.” She poured more vodka from the garish bottle and lifted the glass to me.

“Santé,”
I said.

“Dosvedanya,”
she replied. “That means
You have a pretty face
in Russian.”

AS MADAME DE LA PORTE DES VAUX HAD PREDICTED
, my path was easy, or nearly so. That same afternoon I found the new American dealer, Hans Gutman, who was not American at all but Swiss. He was plump with gray hair drawn across his scalp and bifocals perched low on his nose. I explained who I was. He seemed happy to see me. Yes, he had bought the
Ham.
No, he didn't know anything about
Almond's
buyer.

“Cailleux sold it, right? I assume you asked him. And I assume he didn't tell you. This is happening everywhere.” I was silent. He told me that he had always admired my father's taste in the avant-garde.

“The man who brought me the painting, he is who exactly?” Gutman asked.

“My uncle,” I said. “Of a sort.”

“Your uncle,” he repeated. “How is his health?”

I told him it was much improved, and he said he was glad. We stood in the gallery's main room, each waiting for the other to speak. At last, he motioned me into his office, where a Rembrandt portrait of a young woman in a fur collar was propped against an easel. The desk itself filled much of the room. It was as long as an operating table and twice as wide. Four odd lamps stood at each of its corners: a Deco gooseneck, one with a fringed shade, a kerosene Rayo lamp, and a plain metal light such as one might see on the bench of a chemist in his laboratory.

Gutman stood by the door with his hand on a switch. “Let me begin by demonstrating my latest technological curiosity.” He turned off the lights and passed behind me in the darkness. “I thought this would be of particular interest to you, because, if the rumors accurately retell the Manet's history, when you bought it at Drouot's everyone thought you were a fool. They judged it a fake, and with good reason. The poor painting has more varnish on it than the string section of an orchestra. Nor is its perspective altogether convincing.”

The room went dark except for the glowing purple bulb of the chemist's lamp. “I have here a black light,” he said. I looked up at Gutman, who gave me a violet and toothy smile.

“Remarkable, isn't it?” I agreed. Next, he lifted the Rembrandt portrait from the easel and held it flat beneath the light.

The signature,
Rembrandt
, with its wide swooping
R
, seemed to float above the surface of the painting and shone with the same purple light as Gutman's teeth. “We say it
fluoresces
,“ Gutman said. “Anything illuminated indicates new paint.” The fur collar, too, shone. Dimly visible beneath it was painted a plain white strip of fabric. Ghostly lines shimmered around the woman's mouth and eyes. “Someone has tried to give this woman more of the famous Rembrandt sensibility and to dress her up as a noblewoman rather than a housemaid. Hence the fur collar, lightly painted on in later years. To the naked eye, it maintains the same
craquelure
as the older parts of the painting and hence seems all of a piece.”

“A forgery,” I said.

“Yes, which I can say with certainty because of this miraculous light. My economist friends tell me fakery is a market response to a demand.”

“Why do you keep it?” I asked.

“I can't destroy it, and to sell it would be irresponsible. It makes an excellent teaching tool,” he said. “This forgery has been in my possession since before the war. The director of a museum in Berne was so dismayed to discover it was a fake that he gave it to me practically for free. I've performed all other sorts of experiments on it. Linseed oil, for example, dissolves the newest paint pigments—it's a mystery why. I haven't a degree in chemistry, but it works.”

I asked to see a
Ham
under the light. Gutman's breath was audible. “That was sold the same day your friend brought it to me.” He turned on the lamp with the fringed shade.

It seemed obscene to me, like the short dresses of the women at Le Chat Noir on the evening of my birthday and my rift with Bertrand. The wrinkled man continued. “Surely your father had the same arrangements with his collectors as I do—that I will buy any Boucher or Fragonard or, as in this most recent transaction, Manet, that appears on the market. My client accepts it sight unseen.”

“Everyone at the auction told me it was a fake,” I said. I remembered the crooked white number 6 over the auction hall door at Drouot's, and Rose's shame on her pale cheeks. I touched my own cheeks, and they were fiery.

Gutman nodded in a pleasant, comfortable way, unaware of my growing agitation. “Your picture had new canvas stretchers and that horrid varnishing. But the black light showed me that nothing new had been painted onto it. “

“Perhaps you'd prefer not to know,” I said. “A lawyer visited the forger in prison, who confirmed it was his work.”

“And why would a forger ever tell the truth? He was in prison, no? What did he have to lose by telling you the Manet was his own? His reputation as a copyist could only be improved when others learned he fooled the house of Berenzon. Satisfy yourself with having recognized a master when others could not.”

“It was Baron von Horty,” I said. “He's infamous.”

Gutman smiled. “That daft fellow's a hero now. During the war, a woman who worked in the Louvre—or was it the Jeu de Paume?—sprang him from prison to paint fake Vermeers, van Eycks—anything Dutch. Goering and Hitler bought them up, every last one.” Rose? I was seeing her hand everywhere.

“I'd like to offer you another rare piece from my collection,” I said hastily. Gutman sat back in his chair. “A Morisot. It's only fitting to buy a Manet with a Morisot, is it not?”

He sniffed and nodded at my satchel. I withdrew the painting. He offered me a good price. I asked for thirty thousand francs more. He nodded silently. “It does make a man look twice to see a painting in which one woman has drawn another undressing.”

“I've never seen a Morisot nude,” I said. Gutman's voice lowered. He was as excited as I by the
Woman in White.

“Cézanne could barely paint them either,” he said. “You'll do well to take eighty thousand,”—which was twice his original offer. We stood and shook hands. His fingers were damp and fleshy.

“You're a fine young man. I'm pleased to do business with you,” he said. “I shall certainly tell your father as much when we see each other next at the association meeting.”

“Association meeting?” I asked.

“Of Art Dealers, at Drouot's, on June thirteenth.”

“I had forgotten,” I said. A lie. I had heard of no meeting, of course.

Unbidden a well-dressed young man appeared and wrote out a draft for the Morisot. I did not know if I had enough money for the price Cailleux would name, but I hoped that I was close. Gutman and I bid each other good-bye.

I had sold my first painting, I was ready to purchase my second, and yet I felt desolate. I went to the bank to exchange Gutman's check for currency, and then to the Louvre to find Rose. She was not there, so I returned to Chaim's and washed my shirt, shaved, nicked my upper lip, brushed my teeth, ironed the shirt, and dressed in it again, though the collar was still wet, bought a bottle of cologne and
some flowers, and appeared again on the stoop of Rose's apartment on rue de Mézières. It was May 24 and eight o'clock at night. I would meet Cailleux at eleven.

After several minutes, Rose came to the foyer to greet me. As unwell as I had felt, she looked worse. There were dark circles under her eyes and her clothes looked like they were hung on a metal fame.

“Have you been eating enough?” I asked.

“Doubtful,” she said.

“My God,” I said. “Please, let's eat dinner.”

“Is it dinnertime?” She looked up at the pale solstice sky. There was a restaurant still open along the Luxembourg Gardens, and I practically carried Rose there. When she first looked at the menu, her eyes welled up. “Only the crème brûlée sounds good,” she whimpered.

“You're absolutely right,” I said, and we ordered two of those, and wine, then omelets. Rose devoured hers, then much of mine. I drank my glass of cloudy water. Color crept back into Rose's cheeks. Her eyes shone at me. If she were not half-mad over the food, I would have mistaken the light for passion.

“We're in a medieval calendar,” Rose said, and her laugh too was a sound from another time. Bright clementines dotted the trees around us, and the sky unfurled like a blue fan.

The air smelled like rain while the park's keepers watered the garden's dusty paths. I hummed the Satie
Gymnopédie
that my mother had taught me to play as a child. Rose peeled apart the bread in the basket and gave me the crusts while she ate the soft parts.

Rose tipped back in her chair. “This is pretty, old man,” she said, using Bertrand's nickname for me, as if she could replace him. My friend, I wondered, where are you? I imagined my father, sitting on the lowest rung of the ladder that led to Monsieur Bickart's root cellar. Where was he now, in Le Puy? In the South? Would he forgive me when I returned?

“In a month I will have to go away again. Back to Germany.”

“Stay here,” I said. “I found
Almonds.
I am going to buy it back tonight. It belonged to a little sister—or an older sister, really—who died before I was four. She was kept a secret from me. Her name was