Chasing Cezanne (13 page)

The two men settled at one end of the bar, far from the uproar made by the reading member turning the pages of his
Wall Street Journal
. Pine deliberated over his Scotch for a first long swallow, indicated his appreciation with a sigh, and settled himself on a barstool. Andre listened to the room. The loudest sound was the clink of bourbon against vodka as the bartender rearranged his bottles. “I get the feeling,” he said, his voice low, “that we should be passing notes to each other, or whispering.”

“Good Lord, no,” said Pine. “This is lively compared with a place I sometimes use in London. You know? One of those really ancient clubs. Disraeli was a member—I dare say he still is. Let me tell you a quick story, supposed to be true.” He leaned forward, his eyes bright with
amusement. “The reading room there has a
very
strict rule of silence, and the armchairs on either side of the fireplace are traditionally taken by two of the oldest members for their afternoon meditations. Well, one day old Carruthers totters in, to find the equally old Smythe already in his chair, fast asleep, a copy of the
Financial Times
over his face as usual. Carruthers reads his paper, has his nap, leaves the reading room at gin time. Smythe still there, hasn't moved a muscle. A couple of hours later, Carruthers comes back. History doesn't relate why—probably left his false teeth under one of the cushions. Anyway, he finds Smythe in exactly the same position. Hasn't budged. Odd, thinks Carruthers, so he taps Smythe on the shoulder. Nothing. He shakes him. Nothing. He lifts up the newspaper, sees staring eyes, wide-open mouth, and puts two and two together. ‘My God!' says he. ‘One of the members has died! Fetch a doctor!' Comes a stern voice from another member, snoozing in the shadows at the far end of the room: ‘
Silence
, chatterbox!' ”

Pine's shoulders shook with mirth, his head nodding as he watched Andre laugh. “You see? Compared with that, what we have here is Rowdy Hall.” He took another sip and dabbed his lips. “Now then, to business. Tell me something,” he said. “Last time you saw this Denoyer fellow, did you get the impression that he was thinking of selling the Cézanne? A tear in the eye when he looked at the photographs? An unguarded remark? A quick call to Christie's? Anything like that?”

Andre thought back to the evening of anticlimax at
Cooper Cay. “No. As I told you, the only thing that seemed not quite right was the fact that he wasn't surprised. Or if he was, he did a good job of hiding it.”

“Does he strike you as an undemonstrative man?” The bushy eyebrows jigged up and down. “No disrespect to the French, but they aren't exactly famous for hiding their feelings. Impulsive, yes. Dramatic, often. Inscrutable, hardly ever. It's part of their charm.”

“Controlled,” said Andre. “I think that might be a better way of putting it. Perhaps it was just that I was a stranger, but I felt he always took an extra moment—just a second or two—before he answered a question or reacted to anything. He thought before he spoke.”

“Good God,” said Pine, “that
is
unusual. Where would the world be if everyone was like that? Luckily, it's not a habit shared by many people in the art business.” He glanced up at the bartender, using a circling finger to semaphore his need for another Scotch. “I made a few calls this afternoon, not entirely truthful calls, I have to admit. Said I was acting on behalf of a serious collector—name withheld to protect my commission, naturally—who was in the market for a Cézanne. Client of outstanding probity, significant funds available, payment anywhere in the world, all the usual guff. Ah, thank you, Tom.” Pine paused and sipped. “Now, here's the interesting part. Normally, when you dangle a worm in the water like this, it takes quite a while before there's a bite. But not this time.”

Pine paused, cocked his head, and looked at Andre's attentive face for a few seconds in silence. The inspection seemed to satisfy him. “I'm going to be quite candid with
you. If there is a deal to be done here, I'd like to be in on it. I'm not getting any younger, and these things don't come along every day of the week. And as you brought it to me, it's only right and proper that you take a share.” Another pause, while the two men looked at each other.

Andre wasn't sure what to say and took refuge in his wine as he tried to gather his thoughts. Money had never crossed his mind; all he wanted to do was to satisfy his curiosity. “Do you really think that's likely? A deal?”

“Who knows? I could find three buyers tomorrow for that painting, if it was available—and if Denoyer would let me handle it.”

“And you think it is available?”

Pine laughed, causing the member opposite to frown and look up from paying homage to his martini. “You're dodging the issue, dear boy. We won't know that for sure until we do some homework.”

“We?”

“Why not? I know the art business, you know Denoyer. I have the impression that you're an honorable young man, and I am an absolute pillar of rectitude, although I say it myself. Two minds on the problem are better than one. All in all, it seems like a reasonable basis for collaboration. Let me get you some more wine.” Pine kept his eyes on Andre's face while the finger circled once more at the bartender. “Well? Are you in? It might be fun.”

Andre found Pine a difficult man to resist and couldn't immediately think of any reason why he should try. “I wouldn't be doing it for the money,” he said. “The money's not important.”

Pine's reaction was a clench of the face—so severe that his eyebrows almost collided. “Don't be ridiculous. Money's always important. Money is freedom.” The eyebrows resumed their normal position, and Pine's face relaxed into a smile. “But if it makes you feel any better, you can do it for a good cause.”

“What's that?”

“My old age.”

Andre looked at the silver hair, the twinkling eyes, the jaunty, slightly lopsided bow tie. It might be fun, Pine had said, and Andre had a feeling that it probably would. “All right,” he said. “I'll do what I can. But I have to work as well, you realize that.”

“Good man. I couldn't be more pleased. We'll fit the work in, don't you worry. Now let me tell you what I heard this afternoon.” Pine waited for the bartender to replace Andre's glass and glide back to his bottles.

“We mustn't get too excited,” Pine said, “because this isn't even a grown-up rumor; more of a gleam in the eye than anything else. But as I said, the reaction was very fast, within a couple of hours of my dropping the word. There's a dear old soul who works at the Met—I give her lunch two or three times a year—and she has the longest ears in town. According to her, I imagine after listening to some conversation she wasn't supposed to hear or reading a memo upside down on somebody's desk, there is the merest breath of a hint that an important Cézanne will be coming onto the market within the next two or three months. Nothing firm, of course, and no details.” Pine leaned forward for emphasis. “Except this: The painting is
privately owned, no museums involved, and it hasn't made the rounds for a long time. Which fits our bill, doesn't it?”

Andre had instinctively leaned forward as well and caught himself looking over his shoulder. “There might be others, mightn't there? I mean, he was quite prolific.”

“He certainly was. Must have done sixty paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, for a start, and practically died with a brush in his hand. But this is too much of a coincidence.” Pine looked at their empty glasses and then at his watch. “Can you stay for dinner? Drinkable wine, good nursery food. Unless you're out on the town tonight?”

“Cyrus, if I told you about my social life at the moment it would put you to sleep. The only girls I spend any time with these days are the ones who tell me to fasten my seat belt.”

“Really? You should give Courtney a whirl. Tasty little thing, but she doesn't have much luck with young men. I've met one or two of them—middle-aged at twenty-five, and thrilled with themselves. Dull beyond belief.” Pine signed the bar chit and stood up.

“Suspenders and striped shirts?”

“Matching underwear, too, I'm sure. Let's go in, shall we?”

They left the bar and entered a double-level room that could easily have accommodated three hundred of Harvard's finest, with parking space to spare for a small army of flunkies. The decorative style fell somewhere between a baronial hall and a hunting lodge, with a profusion of stuffed and mounted trophies, many of them, so Pine explained, the victims of Teddy Roosevelt's hunting expeditions—heads
of elephant and bison, horns and tusks, a gigantic rack of elk antlers. Human trophies took the form of portraits, men of substance with dignified expressions: “Either presidents of the club or presidents of the U.S.,” said Pine, as they made their way through the main room. Above them, a wide balcony accommodated more tables, and Andre noticed several women among the diners, somehow surprising in such masculine surroundings. “We were the last of the university clubs to admit them, I think it was back in '73. Good thing, too. Makes a pleasant change from looking at all the wildlife on the walls.”

Pine saluted an acquaintance at a nearby table—a tall, dapper man wearing an emphatic mustache with a fine Ruritanian twirl at each end. “That's Chapman, brilliant legal mind, plays the clarinet. The bushy-haired fellow with him runs one of the Hollywood studios. Hardly recognized him without his sunglasses. I expect they're up to no good. Now, what are you going to have?”

Andre chose clams and salmon hash from a list of simple, unfussy dishes and watched as Pine wrote his selection down on an order form. It was Andre's first experience of dining in an American university club, and he found it old-fashioned and immensely soothing. There was none of the hovering and the breathless recitation of the specials of the day from an out-of-work actor that seems to be obligatory in many New York restaurants. The red-jacketed waiters murmured, if they spoke at all. They were deft and unobtrusive. They knew their business. Andre rather wished he had gone to Harvard, so that
he could escape here whenever the racket of Manhattan became unendurable.

With the edge taken off their appetites by the first course, Pine resumed the conversation where he had left it in the bar. “Step one,” he said, “or so it seems to me, is to find out where the painting is. What's your guess?”

“Well, we know it's not where Denoyer said it was, in a gallery in Cannes. I suppose it might have been sent somewhere for cleaning.”

“Most unlikely,” said Pine. “It's not that old, and the lady and her melons looked very healthy in the photograph you took for
DQ
. Next guess?”

“Reframing? It wasn't framed when they put it in the van. Sent up to his house in Paris? Stuck in a bank vault? God knows. It might easily be back in Cap Ferrat by now.”

“Indeed.” Pine nodded. “It might be. Or it might not. That's all we have to go on at the moment, and I think that's where we have to go. Very agreeable at this time of year, as I remember.”

“Cap Ferrat? Are you serious?”

“Where else, dear boy? If the painting's not where it should be, we might be onto something. If it is where it should be, we go down the road to Beaulieu and drown our sorrows at La Reserve. Haven't been there for twenty years.” Pine looked like a schoolboy at the end of term. “I told you it would be fun.”

Andre couldn't argue with the logic and didn't want to. It would be fun to take off with this amiable old rascal; in any case, he was leaving for Europe tomorrow. And so
it was decided that they would meet in Nice, after Andre had finished his stately home assignment. The rest of the evening, which included some memorable cognac of great antiquity, was spent working out how they might get into the house on Cap Ferrat without encouraging the French police to join them.

HEATHROW on an early-spring morning. Fine, persistent drizzle leaking from a low gray sky; a frieze of sleep-deprived faces lining the carousel to watch the crawl of other people's luggage; announcements turned into gibberish by the scrambling devices that airports build into their loudspeaker systems; late arrivals; missed connections; anxiety attacks—the start of yet another day dedicated to the joys of travel.

Andre felt surprisingly fresh, having avoided alcohol and slept for six hours. If the traffic wasn't too bad, he could be down in Wiltshire before lunch, spend the afternoon and the following morning shooting, and be back at Heathrow in time for an evening flight to Nice. Encouraged by this cheerful thought, he made the mistake of smiling at the customs officer as he was going through the green channel. And was, of course, stopped.

“Open that one, sir, if you don't mind.”

The customs officer looked at the array of equipment in the bag and lifted an eyebrow. “Amateur photographer, are we, sir?”

“Professional. I take pictures for magazines.”

“I see.” The voice flat and unconvinced. “Been at it long?”

“A few years, yes.”

“But not with this equipment.”

“No.” Why did he feel guilty? “My stuff was stolen. I bought all this last week in New York.”

A chilly smile, and permission to proceed.

Swearing never again to make eye contact with customs officials, he headed west in his rented Ford, among cars that looked like toys after the road monsters of America. He wondered how many smugglers were caught and what they were caught with. Care packages of China White? Items prejudicial to public safety? Or was it more likely to be a wicked extra bottle of duty-free brandy and a bootleg laptop? How would one smuggle something bigger, something like a painting? He pushed the car up to eighty, anxious to be done with the job and off to meet Cyrus Pine.

The drizzle gave way to heavy, windblown rain as he left the suburbs behind and reached the plump green hills and neat small fields of Wiltshire. What a beautiful country England would be if someone turned off the water. Andre peered through the metronome sweep of the windshield wipers, looking for the side road that led to the village where he was to ask for directions to his final destination.