The Forger (12 page)

“He’s coming back,” said Valya.

The man stepped to one side in a quick, fluid movement. All his brave talk was finished, as if perhaps they’d not been joking about the lethal instincts of the brown-eyed man.

I felt suddenly ashamed to be spying on her like this. It was just what she would be expecting of one of her father’s pupils. I walked the two steps down into the bar.

From the expression on Valya’s face, it was clear she didn’t want to start a conversation.

Obligingly, I pretended not to know who she was.

I found a table to myself and drank my coffee. I started thinking about Fleury again. I wondered if I ought to tell him about Valya being here tonight and hoped there might be some way he could find out on his own. Fleury might thank me for bringing him the news, but he would always remember that I was the one who brought it. For now, I tried to push it from my head. I sat on the plush green chair and felt the music swirl around me as if it were part of the smoky air.

*   *   *

E
ARLY THE NEXT DAY
, Fleury met me outside my apartment as I was heading to Pankratov’s.

I had dropped off my sketches the night before. I slid them under his apartment door in a manila folder.

He was holding the folder now. His face was serious.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him.

“I think I can sell these,” he said.

“But they’re just sketches,” I told him.

“I may have a buyer.” His glasses made him owlish. He lifted his head back, as if trying to see out from under the heavy lenses. “So you’ll allow me to represent you?” he asked. “Just to make it official?”

“Sure,” I told him. “I’d be glad to.”

“And on your painting series as well, when they’re ready. I’d like to have that be a part of the arrangement.”

I thought about it for a second. “All right,” I said. “And after the paintings, we can see how it’s going.”

“Fair enough,” he said and held out his hand.

I shook it.

Madame La Roche appeared, carrying her chair. She grunted as she stepped by us and out into the sun. The chair’s old hinges creaked as she sat down. She brought out her pipe from her apron and clamped it, unlit, between her teeth. Then she folded her arms and stared into space.

I looked down at the ground, stubbing the toe of my shoe against some imaginary bump in the pavement. “I saw Valya out with some other man last night.”

Fleury was silent for a moment. “Well,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant, “there was bound to be someone, wasn’t there?”

I glanced up. “Sure, I suppose.”

“Don’t count me out,” he said. “Haven’t even thrown my hat in the ring yet.”

I couldn’t help smiling. “Good man,” I said.

He raised the manila envelope. “Let’s get these sold, shall we?”

“Lots of luck,” I told him.

“Luck will have nothing to do with it,” he replied. Then he beamed a smile at Madame La Roche. “’Morning, Madame.”

She creased her porridge face into a smile.

When he had gone, I stood for a while in the sun, eyes closed, feeling the warmth on my face. I thought about how things were in motion now, about how there was nothing for me to do but get on with my work. I tried to prepare myself for the fact that the sketches would most likely be rejected. I knew the precise acidic heaviness in my guts from times it had happened before, and how I would try not to let it show.

Madame La Roche breathed in deeply, which she did whenever she was going to make some pronouncement.

I opened my eyes.

She was watching me. She took the pipe from her mouth and pointed it at me. “Monsieur Fleury is going to sell your paintings?”

“Yes, ma’am. He’s going to try, anyway.”

“It is just as well. We will need some paintings to look at, now that the museums are closing.”

I had been hearing rumors about this for some time. A few days ago, it became official. Due to the threat of war, the museums would close on August 25. I gave a gloomy sigh at the prospect.

“If Monsieur Fleury likes your paintings,” said Madame La Roche, “then everyone will like them.”

“Thanks,” I replied.

Madame La Roche looked down the road after Fleury. “The compliment is not for you,” she said.

*   *   *

A
S
M
ARIE
-C
LAIRE
, B
ALARD AND
I came out into the street at the end of the day’s classes, I declined Balard’s halfhearted offer to join them at the Dimitri. By now, they were hopelessly in love, beyond all practicality and sense. They were like characters in a pointillist dream, fragmented by late summer’s hazy light.

I stepped through the doorway of my apartment building and into the shadows. I was clutching a portfolio to my chest, heading for the elevator at the end of the hall.

There was an explosion.

“Jesus!” I shouted. I dropped to my knees, hard on the tiles of the floor, and then sprawled onto my face. The portfolio flew out of my hands. It slapped onto the floor, spilling paper like a fanned-out deck of cards.

In the silence that followed, I heard laughter.

It was Fleury. He was sitting on one of the benches that stood on either side of the door. No one ever sat on them. It was too gloomy there. He was holding a bottle of champagne and had just fired off the cork, which bounced off the ceiling and came to rest, spinning, right in front of my face. “Did you think someone was shooting at you?”

“What are you doing there?” I asked, as I gathered up my scattered portfolio.

“I am about to drink this,” he said quietly. “And then, perhaps, quite a bit more.”

It took a second for this to sink in. “You sold something?”

He drank some champagne from the bottle, and when he lowered it, the champagne rose up and spilled down over his hand and wrist. From the top pocket of his jacket pocket, he took out a wad of money, neatly folded and held with a brass clip. He tossed it onto the floor in front of me.

I looked at the money but didn’t touch it yet.

“You doubted me, didn’t you?” he said. “Go on. Admit it. You doubted me.”

“It wasn’t you I doubted. It was the work.” I reached over and picked up the bills. I slipped off the paper clip and counted the money. I calculated roughly one month of expenses, including food and rent and painting supplies. This money had come just in time. The Levasseur grant expired in two weeks. “Did you sell all of them?” I asked.

Fleury set down the champagne bottle and pushed it gently across the black and white tiled floor so I could reach it. “Actually, I sold only three of the eight you gave me, to a man who is a private collector.”

“I don’t understand. Three pictures?” I held up the wad of bills. “For all this?”

He sat forward and clasped his hands together. “What you don’t understand is how little work of genuine quality is out there. And you don’t know how much quality artwork actually goes for. If you think you’re worth very little, so will everyone else.”

“Why didn’t you sell all of them?” I asked. “Didn’t he want the others?”

“I didn’t even show him the others. I gave out just enough to make him hungry and to keep him that way. He’ll get the rest when I’m ready.”

“You can’t tell me his name? I mean, I’d like to thank him.”

Fleury ground his heel into the tiles. “You do your job and let me do mine.” Then he smiled, to hide the force behind his words.

I put the money in my pocket.

*   *   *

Y
OU ALWAYS WONDER WHAT
you’ll do when you get your first break in a new place. The break isn’t always about money. It’s more about the first vote of confidence. You feel as if everything you have done to get to this place has been worthwhile and that all of the miserable days of doubt will have inverted into something glorious. You wonder what momentous thing you will do to mark the event. Maybe you will climb to the edge of some jagged cliff above the clouds, like a character in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, and watch the sun come up on this new universe of yours. Or maybe you will do a painting to mark the event, the one you will never sell or give away.

Here is what I did instead. I bought a pair of socks. I walked around, aimless but contented, and got lost somewhere between Rue St. Dominique and the Avenue Bosquet. I asked an old woman for directions. She had set herself up at a little table, on which she placed handknit sweaters, socks and gloves. She had made them herself and was knitting a new sweater while she sat there in the street, with a pile of old newspapers for a chair. The wool was thick and nubby, and when I pressed it to my face, I smelled the calming fragrance of new wool. She showed me the way to get home.

On the way back, the night cold found its way along my sleeves and down my neck. I strolled down the Rue Racine and the Boulevard St. Germain, peering into shop windows at the wistful-looking mannequins. If I sold some more pieces, I might be able to buy myself a few new shirts, maybe even a suit. I peered in at the restaurants, and made a mental note of the ones that looked inviting. Places I would go when the money started coming in—to the bar at the Hôtel Meurice and La Cremaillière and Le Boeuf sur le Toit.

I went back to thinking about the sketches. I had sold work before. That wasn’t what made this so different. What made it different was that this work had been bought in Paris. I realized just how many of my daydreams had been about this moment.

When I got home, I rolled up the money, tied it with string and stashed the bundle at the bottom of a box of oatmeal.

I set some breadcrumbs out for the pigeons, then put on my pajamas and the new socks. Lying in bed, I wiggled my toes in the socks. This drew a smile across my face. For the first time since I reached France, I wouldn’t wake up with cold feet.

In my dreams that night, it seemed to me that all the great paintings of the world filed past behind my closed eyelids. They seemed to have a kind of life in them that I could not identify. These paintings were not alive by themselves, but when I looked at them, it seemed that part of what was living in me passed through them. If I could only keep this vision in my head, I thought. If I could understand it the way I do now in my dream.

*   *   *

W
HEN
I
WOKE THE
next morning, the city was rumbling with a smooth even thunder like an engine as it reaches its optimum speed, when everything in the machine suddenly seems to settle and all vibrations stop. I went to class and made no mention of selling the sketches, since I didn’t want it to seem like bragging. I didn’t want to hear what Pankratov would say about my work and my friendship with Fleury, either.

About halfway through the day, there was a knock on the door of the atelier. A figure loomed strange and crumble-edged behind the rippled glass. Pankratov launched himself out of his chair and strode across the room. We had all stopped what we were doing. Valya was not there that day. Instead, Pankratov had built an elaborate still life consisting of the skull of a horse, pottery jugs, old dried-out branches, candlesticks, a bird’s nest and a German spiked helmet from the Great War.

Pankratov reached the door, then whirled around and glared at us. “Did I tell you to stop?”

We went back to work, scribbling or dabbing brushes or mixing paint with dirty palette knives, but as soon as he was at the door and had his back to us, we all stopped working again.

It was a boy at the door, in gray uniform with red piping around the lapels of his jacket and one thin stripe down the side of his trouser leg. He was slightly winded from climbing the stairs, which he appeared to have climbed on the run. He handed Pankratov a yellow envelope and made him sign for it.

Pankratov looked at the envelope, then turned and raised his eyebrows at me.

I felt bad news approaching, like the ground-shake of an avalanche. “What is it?” I asked.

Pankratov rummaged in the pockets of his baggy corduroys and hauled out a handful of change. Into the boy’s hand he dropped a coin, squeezing it as if there were moisture in the metal which had to be pressed out. Then Pankratov walked across to me. “Telegram,” he said.

The boy stood there a moment longer, peering into the atelier, then jogged away down the stairs, taking them in leaps.

With this news approaching, whatever it was, I suddenly wished I were the boy, and not myself in this paint-smelling room, with this man bearing down on me like a train, his gray hair like chugged-out plumes of steam from an overstoked engine. I wanted to be that boy, with nothing in my life but running and the pleasure and the need of it.

Balard and Marie-Claire had stopped working again. This time, Pankratov did not seem to notice.

The sound of me tearing open the envelope was unnaturally loud, all other sounds having vanished. I pulled out the yellow sheet, which was marked with a heavy, blurred stamp showing the time and place of destination. Stuck on the paper were little strips of white ticker tape on which words had been typed:

WAR IMMINENT STOP IMMEDIATE RETURN HOME

STOP ARRANGEMENTS TO BE MADE BY THE

COMMITTEE STOP LEVASSEUR

I was no closer to figuring out who the Levasseur people were than I had been when I arrived. Somehow, the fact of their secrecy made me believe for the first time that there might really be a war. I felt a terrible shifting of the air around me, in the entire mottled fabric of the world. There was not supposed to be another war. The last one was the war to end all wars. I wondered how many people like myself had clung to this idea.

Everyone was looking at me.

“War,” I said.

Nobody spoke.

Three days later, it started.

*   *   *

“W
HAT DO YOU MEAN
, you’re not going?” Pankratov stood in front of me, eyes wide with disbelief.

It had been a month since the outbreak of war.

In the first few days since the German invasion of Poland, Paris had been swept up in hysteria. Now, on the surface at least, life seemed to be returning almost to normal. The most noticeable difference on the Rue Descalzi were the black and white posters of an
Appel Immédiat,
the calling up of all military reservists. So many left their civilian jobs that whole sections of France had stopped moving. Trains. Streetcars. Restaurants had to close. Many reservists were released again. The yellow piece of paper on which my telegram arrived had been passed around our little group so many times that it eventually disintegrated, as if the war itself had disappeared.