I RETURNED TO MY work. I was glad to be free of those long hours at the atelier, but I missed our old group and the Egyptian mummy dryness of Pankratov’s humor.
I completed another set of sketches, these ones charcoal studies of several works by Gauguin, and handed them over to Fleury.
He had them all sold within a week.
I felt more fortunate than ever to be working with him.
We were good friends now. I did not measure my words before I spoke, the way I used to do in his company.
Having put aside my worries about paying the rent, at least for now, I grew more confident about my chances of remaining in Paris without some imaginary boundary between staying and leaving. The more time I spent here, the less I thought of my old home and my mother and my brother. When we met up again, we would pick up where we left off, as we always did. But for now, the vast silences that stretched between us were proof to me of the different worlds we had come to inhabit.
Aside from Fleury, I hadn’t made many friends in Paris. I missed the company of women. In the past, I had thought no good would come from beginning a relationship when I would have to break it off and disappear as soon as the Levasseur grant ran out. I didn’t want to get involved simply for the feeling of being involved. When I first arrived, I had promised myself no entanglements that would take away from my work. Keeping that promise had proved hard enough even without the distractions of a romance. I hoped all that might change from now on.
I’d been figuring this out one Saturday afternoon, when Fleury and I had gone to see a movie at the Cinéma Coloniale on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. It had been a matinée show, and afterwards we were dazed to find ourselves back in the daylight. It had been stuffy in the theater and I said I wanted to get some air. We walked down the Avenue de l’Observatoire to a fountain that lay in a shaded area of the Luxembourg, just in from the café called La Chaise Bleu on the Rue de Vaugirard. The stone of the fountain was damp and peppered with algae, and the statues that spat water from their mouths looked bleary-eyed and ancient, as if they too had just found their way back into the light from centuries spent underground. With each gust of wind, leaves blew down from the trees in flickering browns and reds and ambers. They settled on the surface of the fountain, skimming around like little boats in the breeze until they became waterlogged and rested flattened on the surface of the water like confetti left over from a wedding.
We sat down on a bench to have a smoke. Fleury liked English tobacco, which he bought from a tobacconist in the foyer of the Hôtel Continental on the Rue de Rivoli. He smoked a brand called Craven A, which came in flat red tins with a black cat on the front. I had brought a few packs of Chesterfields with me from the States, but I didn’t often smoke and the tobacco went stale before I finished it. So now I was trying the French stuff, Caporals, which took some getting used to.
I opened my mouth to ask Fleury what he had thought about the movie, but never had the chance to speak, because a voice called to us from behind.
We both turned and looked past the dappled bark of the trees.
A man stood behind some tall black railings that separated the street from the park. He was waving to us. He was tall and wore a big hat.
It seemed to me I had seen him someplace before, but I couldn’t recall where and his face was in the shadows.
“Monsieur Fleury,” the man called down. “I have been meaning to speak with you.”
“Yes,” said Fleury, his voice strained. “Call me tomorrow.”
The man laughed. “No. I mean now. I will only be a minute.” He was already on his way.
Fleury smiled and waved and then slumped back on the bench. The smile had been sliced off his face.
“Who is it?” I asked.
Fleury cleared his throat. “Lebel. A collector. You met him once. At that opening I took you to.”
I had some vague memory of his grizzled gray hair, sweat coming through his starched shirt and being told that he owned a cabaret. “Why don’t you want to see him?” I asked.
It was too late for Fleury to reply, because Lebel had already arrived. He had a dog on a braided leather leash, which was wrapped around his hand like knuckle straps on a boxer. The dog was a tough-looking little schnauzer with bushy eyebrows and gray fur.
Lebel and Fleury shook hands.
“This is David Halifax,” said Fleury, rising to his feet.
“Excellent,” said Lebel and stared right through me, just as he’d done the time before. He let the leash fall to the ground. The dog sniffed at my shoes with busy jerking motions of his nose.
Lebel turned back to Fleury. “It’s working out so well,” he said. “You remind me that there is still quality work to be found. Work by the great masters that hasn’t yet been gobbled up by museums or millionaires. It is out there!” He waved his hand expansively over the pond. “Monsieur Fleury, you have given me hope. I see in you a partner of many years.”
“Yes, well,” said Fleury, hands in pockets, looking down at his shoes. “I’m glad it’s all working out.”
I wasn’t paying much attention. I stayed sitting on the bench. I bent down and scratched the dog’s ears. The leash trailed behind him. The leather braid reminded me of the pattern on the back of a copperhead rattlesnake.
“Those Gauguin sketches. Such a trove,” said Lebel, wrapping his lips around the word.
For a moment, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Looking up, I saw a sudden grayness in Fleury’s cheeks as the blood left his face. Then I knew that I hadn’t misunderstood. Fleury had been selling my sketches as originals. I felt suddenly nauseous.
Lebel grasped Fleury’s hand and shook it violently. “Thank you,” he exhaled. Then he turned to his dog and snapped, “Bertillon!”
The dog gave my feet one last sniff and scuttled off, the leash slithering behind.
I didn’t wait for Lebel to meet my eyes in some blind gesture of farewell. I was staring at the ground.
Fleury sat down beside me. “That’s what I love about Lebel,” he said. His voice was falsely jovial. “When he is happy, he just can’t stand the thought of keeping it to himself.”
I watched Lebel disappear across the park, his footsteps crossed by the wandering paths of others. His shape blurred amongst the rippling shadows of the fountain and the trees, like a cat-lick figure in the background of an Impressionist painting.
“You son of a bitch,” I said very softly. “You lied to me.”
It was quiet for a long time.
Fleury sighed. “Yes, I did.”
At that moment, I was too stunned to feel anger. Instead, I sensed a rushing static all around me, sealing me off, so that Fleury’s voice reached me as if down a long cardboard tube.
Fleury had his hands in front of him now, as if weighing in his palms the air that came out of his lungs. The cigarette was wedged between the first two fingers of his right hand, smoldering patiently. “The moment I saw those sketches,” he said, “I knew I could pass them off as originals to someone who wasn’t an expert. Lebel was the first person I thought of. He lives on our street, you know. That’s how I met him. Lebel may know how to run that cabaret of his, but he’s not the art expert he believes himself to be. The more I praise his intelligence, the less intelligent he becomes. I knew he would buy them. At a glance, and even at a second or third glance, it would be assumed that the sketches were original Gauguins. The paper was old, and you were probably using old pencils, too, and your sketches were very good. Very fluid.” He was touching his lips with the tips of his fingers as he spoke, as if trying to stop the words from coming out.
“Where did you tell him they came from?” I asked.
He sipped at the smoke from his cigarette and stared straight ahead. “I made up a story about how the sketches came out of the private collection of a family friend who had passed away and that the other family members were letting me buy the work rather than putting it out on the open market themselves.”
“And everything you told me about them being sold as decorative pieces…” As the numbness of shock wore off, anger was taking its place.
“You should take it as a compliment.” Fleury tried to find his way around the lie. “I knew you’d never agree to it.”
“You’re damned right I wouldn’t,” I snapped. I was suddenly conscious of his physical frailty, in a way I never had been before. Rage glanced off my bones in coppery sparks.
“Look,” he said. “I know I had no right…”
“You had no damned right at all!” I shouted. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
Fleury got up slowly and walked over to the edge of the water. He stood for a moment, hunched over like a man grown suddenly old. “Do you want to stay in Paris?” he asked. He spoke so quietly that it was as if he were talking to his own reflection in the water.
“Of course I do,” I said.
Fleury straightened up. He spun on his heel and walked back to me. His face had lost its grayness. “Then you ought to thank me!” he said. “I did you a favor. You said yourself that if I hadn’t sold those sketches, you’d be on the boat home by now. And if I sold them for what they’re really worth, I could have bought you a week or two. A month at the most. But I knew I could get more for them, so I did. And that’s the only reason you’re here now.”
I stared at him in disbelief. “But what about the risk you took with my career?”
He slapped his hand against his chest, bouncing his palm off the thick, rough tweed. “Mine, too! I took the risk just the same as you did.”
“Yes, but you knew you were taking it! My part of that risk wasn’t yours to take and you can’t deny that!”
“What would you have done if I’d told you the truth?” he asked. “Would you have let me sell those sketches as original Gauguins?”
“Of course not!”
Fleury paced in front of me, stirring the gravel with his shoes, yellow dust coating the spit-shined toecaps. “Exactly. You’re too high and mighty. You have no idea how things work. What to do when an opportunity comes along. How to balance it against the risks. And you can’t just not take risks. I know what you want more than anything else in the world. I know, because I want the same thing. To be here. To be making a go of it and doing well for yourself. And did you honestly think you could get what you wanted without paying some kind of price?”
I didn’t answer. I stood and walked past Fleury, heading for the street.
Fleury stopped pacing. His anger seemed to leave him. His hands found their way into his pockets. “What are you going to do?” he asked.
I walked right by him and still gave no reply.
He made no move to stop me. “You have what you want,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”
I shuffled through the fallen leaves, my mouth and eyes dried out, noticing nothing around me.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, I woke as usual to the sound of the men lining up outside the Postillon warehouse. They were mostly older men now, the younger ones having been called up for military service.
For the rest of that week, I worked on my paintings. All my confidence had gone now. I worked only out of a grim stubbornness to get the job done.
Fleury kept his distance, which took some doing, considering we both lived in the same building. I tried not to think about what had happened, but of course this didn’t work. If the word got out that Fleury was selling forgeries, and that I was the one who had made them, we would both be finished in Paris. And wherever the story spread—New York, London, Rome—we’d be finished there, too. I realized that even if we seemed to have gotten away with it, I couldn’t forgive Fleury for taking the risk.
When I thought about it that way, it all seemed clear. I would have nothing to do with Fleury from now on. If I happened to run into him, which seemed inevitable if we were both to work in Paris, I would fend him off with a freeze of politeness.
Other times, it didn’t seem clear at all. The other half of my brain was telling me to shut up and face the fact that the only reason I was still here was because Fleury had sold those sketches. He had been right when he said I wanted to stay here more than anything else in the world. I asked myself what I’d have done if Fleury had come to me first and asked me what I wanted him to do. Would I really have told him not to sell the sketches, and then just packed up and left Paris? I would have run out of money by now if it weren’t for the sketches. I could only have taken on a job illegally, since I had no papers, but any job like that would have paid me so little and worked me so long that I would never have gotten any more painting done. I honestly didn’t know what I would have said to Fleury. I didn’t have the right to dismiss so easily the wrong that he had done.
These separate voices clashed so furiously inside me, warring back and forth across the tundra of my brain, that it seemed to me my sanity was fracturing in hairline cracks across my skull. I couldn’t sleep, hearing the volcanic rumble of the city. The wind blew in off the rooftops, carrying the smell of baking bread and the distant clank of trains. I wondered how many others out there were like me, among the hundred thousand sleepers, hounded through their dreams by such confusions.
* * *
LATE FRIDAY EVENING, I finished the last of the paintings.
All Saturday, I sat with the canvases set up around me, trying to decide what to do.
Before it all happened, I’d never have thought I could stay friends with someone who pulled a stunt like this. Now it didn’t seem so black and white. You start out with some image of how things will need to be, clear-cut and defined, and it all seems reasonable to you at the time. But when the image gets dented and scarred, as it always does, you remember the promises you made yourself about what you would do and what you wouldn’t. Maybe you never do find out what is in another person’s heart, or in your own. It boils down to whether you can live with the uncertainty, and in some ways want it even as you fear it, just as you want and fear the few things that are certain in a life.
By the end of the day, I had made up my mind.
That evening, I wrapped up each of the paintings in brown paper and string and brought them downstairs to Fleury’s apartment. I had to make several trips in the elevator, and found myself hoping he didn’t hear the racket I was making in his hallway.
He answered the door wearing a smoking jacket made of lurid red and black velvet. “Ah,” he said, tilting back his head the way he always did.
I waited for him to say something else, but that was all he said. A breeze blew in the window of his apartment and past him and into my face. I smelled soap and aftershave. I looked into his apartment and saw how small and clean it was. I had stopped by a few times to pick him up before we headed out to the Polidor, but mostly he liked to meet in the hallway downstairs. I thought he might be a little ashamed of his place, since he liked to give the impression of living more grandly than he did. The windowsills were busy with flowers in tiny white pots with designs painted on them in orange and blue. An empty red glass bowl stood on the kitchen table. His polished shoes were lined up just inside the door—one pair of black and one pair of brown—and he wore a pair of fancy slippers on his feet.
“You’ve brought your paintings with you,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said.
His eyebrows bobbed. “I thought you’d had enough of me.”
“I kind of thought that, too,” I said.
“I wondered if perhaps you were coming down to rough me up a bit. For my crimes and misdemeanors.”
“I didn’t come here to rough you up. Look,” I told him, “if you still want to work together, there’ll be no more going behind my back.”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.” He scratched at the back of his neck. “I’m sorry. I made a mistake.”
I helped him carry the paintings into his apartment. We opened them up and I told him what they were about.
“Do you think you can sell them?” I asked.
He breathed in sharply. “I’ll do my best,” he said.
I was very tired now. As I said good-bye to him, he insisted we shake hands. I walked down the corridor and pressed the elevator button. When I turned to look back, he was still standing in the hallway. “Where the hell did you get that jacket?” I asked.
He looked down at his chest, then back up at me. “This is my armor,” he said.
“Armor?”
“Oh yes,” he replied. “It’s a different kind of armor. But it is armor, all the same. And it never fails me.”
* * *
MY PAINTINGS WERE SHOWN at Fleury’s gallery the following month. I sold eight of them during the time they hung in the show, and all but one sold soon after that. They didn’t go for a great deal of money, and it made me realize that even if I was successful here, survival in this place would not come easily.
I had, by now, taken over the rent payments on my apartment. Madame La Roche seemed impressed. “You’ve given up painting?” she asked me. “You have taken up employment?”
“Painting is my employment,” I replied.
She blinked in slow astonishment, unable or unwilling to make the connection.
In the weeks that followed, she treated me with grudging respect, even introducing me to one of her landlady’s friends as “a painter of things.” This other woman, Madame Coty, was a near duplicate of Madame La Roche, in her flower-patterned housecoat and thick, fleshy stockings. The two of them used to sit outside the front door in the sun, perched on rickety chairs, smoking their pipes. Their expressions reminded me of two old jack-o’-lanterns that had been left out on a doorstep after Halloween. Their once savage faces had sagged like the slowly rotting pumpkins. Now they just looked drawn and ornery, with only rudeness to chase demons and children away.
It was only after months of living here that I began to find myself on friendly terms with the people who lived on my floor. I rarely saw them. We seemed to live in completely different schedules, like employees of some nonstop factory, all working different shifts. On those rare moments when we did pass in the cramped hall, or rode the elevator down to the street, our greetings were so filled with awkward flinching that it seemed easier, even more humane, to pretend the other person wasn’t there at all. I hated the silence in the black cage of that elevator, as it seemed to close in around me like some complicated torture device, while the other person seemed to be expanding until there was no place for me to look. Eventually, I took it upon myself to start conversations. To my surprise, it worked. An old man with the watery eyes introduced himself as Laurent Finel. He had been invalided out of a job in a coal mine ten years earlier and had come to live in Paris with his sister. The sister died and Finel continued to live in the apartment. He was one of the men who stood outside the Postillon warehouse every morning, more I think because he wanted something to do than because he needed the money, as he had a disability pension. From then on, I recognized him when I looked out the window at the line each morning, the stoop of his back and the type of floppy cap he wore.
There was a young family, the Charbonniers, who had a six-month-old son named Hubert. At first, when I knew there was a baby on the floor, I had worried that the child would keep me up at night with his crying. But the little boy was so quiet that I started hoping he would make some noise, because I had begun to worry that there might be something wrong with him. It turned out that there wasn’t. He was just fat and cheerful and quiet. And there was a woman who worked as a dance instructor. She was originally from Norway, a little place called Krossbu that I never could find on the map. She had flaming red hair, lots of it, and huge bright eyes which made her look, depending on whether her eyebrows were raised or lowered, as if she were either in a state of realizing something very important or having just forgotten what it was. Her name was Madame Lindgren. She never did let me know her first name, which I took to be a signal that she didn’t want to get involved. One day, in the elevator, she showed me a couple of dance steps. “It’s jazz,” she said, pronouncing it “tchazz.”
“Not when I’m doing it,” I told her.
From then on, whenever we bumped into each other, she would teach me new steps and I would mangle them and we would laugh about it.
With each of these people, I developed a small but consistent list of topics, which would last us the forty-five seconds it took to travel up or down the elevator. Even if that didn’t amount to much, at least I didn’t find myself listening to the door to see if the hall was empty before venturing out.
All through the winter of 1939–40, I made more paintings and Fleury was able to sell them. There was a moment when Fleury joked with me about making a new series of sketches and selling them as old originals. I pretended he was joking. He got the message, and we left it at that. Sometimes I worried that the sketches would be exposed as forgeries, but as time went by, the chance of that seemed less and less likely. After a while, I stopped worrying about it altogether. Instead, like everyone else, I worried about the war.
By the beginning of October, the Polish army had been defeated. The Germans were torpedoing ships all over the Atlantic, but lost their big battleship, the Graf Spee, in December. In that same month, the Russians invaded Finland. The Germans didn’t attack the Maginot Line. After a while it became possible to think that they might not.
In Paris, the war still seemed a long way off, but its presence could be felt in higher prices for things like bread, bacon, butter, sugar, milk. Some foods could be sold only on certain days, like baguettes, while croissants, for reasons I never understood, could be bought any time. Cafés could serve alcohol only three days a week. Tobacco prices went up sharply and coffee became almost extinct. Instead, the cafés began serving something called Café National, which was made of roasted acorns and chickpeas. The only way it could be drunk at all was if you didn’t try to pretend it was coffee. There was very little gasoline, and because of this, fewer cars in the street. Officially, the government was rationing all these things, but in the beginning you could still buy what you wanted. This was lucky for me since although I was granted a ration card, mine took longer to process because I was a foreign national. I received two eggs a week, about three ounces of cooking oil and two ounces of margarine. The only food that could be found in any quantity was turnip. I boiled it, mashed it up like baby food and forced it down without thinking.
It was a very cold winter. Madame La Roche turned down the heat so that the radiators were barely warm to the touch. She turned them up for only one hour a day, right before dawn, when the building would fill with grumbles and hisses and clanking, as if some midget were crawling through the heating pipes with tiny hobnailed boots. Other landlords turned off the heat altogether.
The snow that fell was thick and wet. It froze against the manes of horses pulling carts along the Quai d’Orsay. I saw people being towed around on skis behind cars whose tires were wrapped with chains. The river froze on either side of the Isle de la Cité and bargemen hit the ice with huge and hollow steel balls attached to the ends of bamboo poles. The sound they made was like the ringing of a cracked bell, echoing past the ice-bearded windowsills and shop signs. Paris bums, the clochards, froze to death beside the Pont d’Austerlitz and the Pont de Tolbiac, where they had set up huts made from cobblestones and canvas sheeting stolen from barges moored on the banks of the Seine.
One day I noticed that Madame La Roche’s heavy, wooden family crest was missing from its perch in the front hallway. When I asked her if it had been stolen, she flapped her hand at me and frowned. “I burned it,” she said. “There was three days’ worth of fuel in that old thing.” She tottered off toward the elevator on her stiffened legs. “It wasn’t my family crest, anyway,” she called back without turning around.
“Whose was it?” I asked. I was thinking maybe an uncle or something.
She climbed into the black cage and closed the door. “I don’t know,” she said. “I bought it for ten francs at Clignancourt.” She laughed as the elevator rumbled her up out of sight.
There were times that winter when I wished I’d had my own fake family crest to burn. I got used to sleeping in my overcoat and with a wool blanket under the bottom sheet as well as on top of me. I wore my wool socks until they fell apart and then I learned to darn and repair them myself.
Military uniforms were everywhere, along with rumors of soldiers abandoning their posts, less out of fear than the crazed boredom which the French called le cafard. The French army took these incidents very seriously, remembering the mass desertions that had taken place in the last war. There was also widespread drunkenness among the soldiers. Each French poilu was issued with two liters of strong wine per day. They called it “Pinard,” and would riot if the wine did not arrive. The train stations had special rooms set aside for soldiers to sleep off their hangovers before heading back to the front, where nothing seemed to be happening, except for the occasional firing of heavy guns for the benefit of visiting officials.
I made no plans to leave the city and remained optimistic about my luck. I had a stubborn faith it would not fail me.
In those harsh months, I came no closer to expanding my circle of friends. I was so near to being broke most of the time that I didn’t get out to the places where I might have met people. Slowly I grew used to the idea. I didn’t get too worried about the fact that I didn’t have a girlfriend, or that I wasn’t invited out to parties, the way I might have been in normal times. The war had set everything off balance. There was no such thing as normal any more.
* * *
“MR. HALIFAX!”
I had just walked into my building when a voice called to me from the street.
“Mr. Halifax,” said the voice again.
I turned to see a man with short-cut hair and a tweed sports jacket with a white polo-neck sweater underneath. He had the dented nose and shallow eyes of a boxer. It was a face built for taking punishment. The daylight blinked as he stepped inside the foyer.
“What can I do for you?” I asked cautiously.
“My name is Tombeau. I’m with the French police. I was wondering if I could have a word with you.”
“Go ahead,” I said, sudden worry hollowing me out inside. “What’s it about?” But I knew what it was about.
His face showed no expression. His hands stayed by his sides. “I need you to come with me.”
“Now?” My throat had dried out so quickly that I could barely talk.
“Now,” he said. “We’re pressed for time.” He turned and looked out to the street.
I followed his gaze to a car that was waiting at the curb, its engine still running.
For a moment, I felt panic scattering inside me, like small birds startled from their grassy hiding place. Then I felt myself giving up. I had nowhere to run. Part of me even felt a little relieved that it was over now.
Tombeau seemed to know what was going on inside my head, as if my thoughts had passed like shadows across the angles of my face. “Come along,” he said softly. “It won’t take long.”
We climbed into the back and the car pulled out into the stream of traffic. I could smell the driver’s cologne and the leather of the seats. Nobody spoke on the short ride. We pulled up outside an alleyway, at the end of which was a large green wooden gate and above it a sign which read: Préfecture de Police. Commissariat du Quartier des Halles. Above the sign was a French flag, hanging limply in the damp cold air. The alley was dirty and the walls that bordered it were unpainted and slapped with the tatters of old theater bills.
Tombeau got out of the car. Then he looked in after me. “Let’s go,” he said.
As I walked up the heavy cobblestoned alley, I had a sudden urge to run. I didn’t know where to. Just to bolt like a frightened animal.
Tombeau opened the gate, which led into a courtyard. The courtyard was much cleaner than the alley. It was lined with windows and doors, each of which had numbers done in blue and white enamel above the doorway. He seemed to relax as soon as we got inside the building. He walked me down three flights of stairs to a corridor with many doors. The further down we went, the more helpless I felt. Electric bulbs with green-topped glass shades lined the center of the corridor with a harsh glare. People bustled in and out of rooms. It all looked very busy.
Tombeau showed me into a waiting room, which had a table and a bench and a standing coat rack with brass hooks in the corner. There was a door at the end of the room which was closed. “Sit down,” said Tombeau. He opened the far door and ducked into another room and was talking to someone as he closed the door behind him.
In the few seconds that I spent alone in that room, my lips became chapped and even the skin on my knuckles seemed to have dried out. I wondered whether there was any chance this might not be about the sketches Fleury had sold. I wondered if there might be any point in trying to deny it. That was an idea I should have fixed in my head long ago if I had any hope of it working. I had left it too late for that. The only thing I could do now was to hold on to some kind of dignity.
When Tombeau returned, he had taken off his sports jacket. The white polo-neck glowed like marble in the light of the bulb. He had with him a large cardboard folder. He sat down at the other side of the table. The toes of his shoes brushed against mine and I tucked my legs under my chair. He set the folder down and pressed his hands together, laying them flat on top of the folder. “Well,” he said. “Mr. Halifax.”
I nodded.
He opened up the file. And there were my sketches, just as I had feared. He took one out. “Is this yours?” he asked.
My guts twisted. I took the sketch from him and looked at it for a couple of seconds. It was a study of a fox’s head which I had made of a Gauguin called Young Girl and Fox, which was itself a study for a painting he did called La Perte du Pucelage. I had done the sketch on yellow paper in charcoal and white chalk, just like the original. The fox was lying on top of the woman’s naked chest the way a cat might sleep on its owner. I felt the paper soaking up sweat from my fingertips. “I drew it,” I said, and handed back the sketch.
Then he went through a small stack of sketches. I noticed that Gauguin’s signature had been added to some of the pieces, and that there were small signet ring–sized stamps on the back, the kind that some collectors have for marking ownership.
“I didn’t sign anybody’s name to them and I don’t know where these stamps came from, either.” I sighed. “But I suppose I could guess.”
He grinned. “If you guessed Fleury, you’d be right.”
I sighed and licked my dried-out lips.
When we had been through all the sketches, Tombeau closed the file. He took a packet of Caporals from his pocket, tapped one out of the pack and lit it. Then he inhaled deeply and set it down carefully on the edge of the table, the smoke rising cobralike toward the green-shaded light. “You have to understand,” he said, “that you are guilty of forgery. They’re getting ready to throw you in jail. I’m here to try and prevent that.”
“I’m not a criminal.” I croaked out the words. I had no spit left to talk.
“You’re a forger,” he told me, raising his voice. “You pollute the marketplace and galleries and museums with everything you do. You fill minds with doubt when there should be no doubt. We happen to need you at the moment, so you have become a necessary evil. But if you don’t do exactly what you’re told to do in the next couple of hours, I can guarantee that you’ll be put away in a French prison for three to five years. Now, whether you think you deserve that doesn’t make any difference to me. You owe the people of France a debt for not locking you up. Monsieur Fleury was very understanding about this fact when we explained it to him.”
“Where is Fleury?” I asked.
“We already let him go home. You could be home soon yourself, if you’re helpful.” Tombeau got up and walked over to me, resting his hand on my shoulder. “I want you to talk to someone,” he said. The door opened again. I heard Tombeau say, “Three minutes! That’s all. Or we do this a different way.”
The door closed and I sensed that I was no longer alone. My head stayed down. I looked at the grain of the wood and the sweat stains on the table’s old polish.
“Hello, David,” said a voice. It was Pankratov.
I looked up. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He lowered himself into the other chair. “If you had listened to me about Fleury, you wouldn’t be in this mess now.”
I just stared at him. I felt like telling Pankratov that if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t even be in Paris.
“Well, I guess it’s too late for that now,” said Pankratov. “What I don’t understand is why Fleury even bothered. He sells a lot of paintings. Some major works have passed through his hands since he first opened his gallery. He didn’t make a fortune off your sketches. He didn’t need the money. I don’t understand why he did it.”
“Because he could,” I said. “He did it because he could.”
Pankratov shook his head and sighed, as if to show that he would never understand what went on inside the mind of Guillaume Fleury. He gestured at the door behind me. “The people in that next room are waiting to find out whether you will agree to help. It’s all or nothing, you see. If you don’t cooperate, none of this is going to work and you’ll both end up in prison.”
I smoothed my thumb across my lips, back and forth, feeling more helpless with every new thing Pankratov said. “What cooperation?”
“They have asked me to explain it to you,” said Pankratov. “They need your help.”
“Who?” I squinted at him. “Help with what?”
Over the next few minutes, Pankratov told me that a group had been formed to deal with the safekeeping of works of art in the event of Germany invading France. The Germans were planning to establish an “art capital” of Europe in the Austrian city of Linz. Plans for a museum there had already been approved by Hitler. The Germans were going to remove as many works of art as they wanted from the countries they invaded and then sell off or destroy the rest. Pankratov told me they had a long list of Impressionist, Expressionist, Cubist, Futurist and Dadaist art that they considered “degenerate.” He said arrangements had already been made by French authorities to hide as much of the art as they could within France, or to get it out of the country. “But we won’t be able to hide all of it,” explained Pankratov.
“You’re talking as if the Germans are already here,” I said.
“It would be foolish for the French people not to take precautions. Don’t you agree?”
“How should I know?” I rocked back on two chair legs, not wanting to listen. “I’m an American.”
“It seems”—Pankratov drilled his pinky into his ear—“that the American Embassy has been very cooperative in allowing you to volunteer for temporary French citizenship.”
“Volunteer?”
He nodded, looking away. “A request I suggest you follow.”
The door flew open again and Tombeau filled up the doorway. “Get on with it, Pankratov!” he yelled. He banged two heavy fingers against his wristwatch. “We have no time!”
“I was just finishing up,” said Pankratov, without turning to face the man.
The door banged shut.
“Why is he in such a hurry?” I asked.
“Never mind that now,” said Pankratov. “David, they want you to make forgeries. They came to me and asked if I thought you had the skill and I told them you did. And you do, even if you don’t yet believe it yourself.”
“But if the Germans are putting together one vast European art museum, they’re going to rip out half the paintings in this country! You can’t fake all of those and expect to get away with it.”
“We’re not trying to. It’s more complicated than that. Everything will be explained very soon.”
At that moment, I was positive I would be absolutely no use to them, despite what Pankratov was saying. “What makes you think I could do it?”
“With training…” he began.
“And who’s going to train me?” I demanded.
“I will.”
I clicked my tongue with irritation. “Why don’t you just do it all yourself, then?”
“It’s one thing to know the techniques. It’s another to be able to use them the way you can. You have skills I don’t possess. But I have knowledge that can make those skills stronger.”
“I stayed here in order to do my own work!” I leaned across the table toward his wide and complicated face, the gray hair swept back in crooked threads. “Not someone else’s.”
“I know what’s going through your head,” said Pankratov. “You’re caught up in thinking about your own career, making a living, all the little details that leave you too exhausted at the end of every day to see beyond your own small concerns.”
“They don’t seem small to me!”
“I know. But they will, one day. The work that lies ahead of you now is more important than your own career, more important than any one artist’s career. You might not understand this now, but in time it will become clear,” he said. “Some people wait their whole lives for a chance like this to come along.”
“What do you mean?”
“The chance to do something at which you are a natural,” said Pankratov.
“What did they threaten you with to get you to come in here?”
“Nothing,” he said. “They explained it to me and I volunteered.”
“And you’re asking me to volunteer as well? Why the hell should I? Just because you tell me to?”
“I know you don’t want to do this. We’re all doing things we don’t want to do, but you’ll feel a lot worse about it if the Germans wipe out entire generations of art.”
“But what’s the point in doing that?” I asked, frustration boiling over. “Why is an invading army going to put so much effort into destroying the artwork of another country? They might steal it—that I can understand—I’m sure France plundered Germany in the past. But what is the point in destroying it? Blow up the Maginot Line instead. Blow up the tanks and the guns. But paintings? That makes no sense to me.”
“They’ll do it,” he said, “whether it makes sense to you or not.”
I felt powerless to argue. If Pankratov believed it, he who seemed to care nothing about the order of the world outside the bone box of his skull, then maybe it was true.
He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes, as if he had not slept in a long time. “You once said you owed me a great debt for bringing you to Paris. You said you didn’t know how you’d ever repay me. Well, now you can. And you’ll be doing a lot more than that. You’ll see why it’s so important that we work together on this.”
There was a long time of silence. I did owe him a debt, it was true. But it was what he said about us working together that started rattling around in my head. This would be my only chance to know him as an equal. If I didn’t take this offer, I would spend the rest of my life in search of his grudging admiration. It wasn’t something he had done to me. I had done this to myself.
I wondered if, somewhere out on the frozen tundra, he had left behind his own unwilling master.
“You’re not exactly giving me a choice, are you?”
“Not exactly,” he replied.
“Then I might as well volunteer.”
Pankratov nodded, saying nothing.
Before I left, Tombeau walked me from the room and down the corridor. “They’re letting you go now because the Russian persuaded them that you wouldn’t cross us. Personally, I have my doubts. If you let us down, it’s going to be my job to come and get you. And when I find you, I’m going to blow your damned head off.” Tombeau smiled again, to show how insincere his smiling had been all along. “And then I’m coming for the Russian, because I’ll be holding him responsible. Until the day I say you’re free, I’ll be watching you. You can count on that.” He gave me one last slap on the back and walked away down the corridor, ducking the green-shaded lights.
* * *
PANKRATOV AND I REACHED the street and began to walk.
“Even if I have agreed to do the work,” I told him, “you know damned well I’m not skilled enough to make copies and for the fakes to go unnoticed.”
“It is precisely that kind of thinking that makes the art of forgery possible,” said Pankratov. “We are not talking about creating a masterpiece. We are talking about creating the illusion of a masterpiece. In our work, the painting or the drawing itself is only a part of the puzzle. You are right that someone can’t just pick up a paintbrush and start churning out Caravaggios. The great forgers, the proof of whose greatness is the fact that we’ll never know their names, study the materials that go into the work of art, and after that, methods of aging. I am not saying you are a forger now. But those sketches of yours are proof that you have the makings of a forger.”
I had no way to disagree with him.
“You won’t be making direct copies,” continued Pankratov. “That’s too risky. You’ll do work in the style of certain artists. Previously unknown paintings and drawings are always turning up out of private collections, or they could be works that were wrongly attributed.”
“What good will that do, anyway? How will it save the originals?”
“They’ll be looking for people like Titian, Botticelli, Vermeer. They’re not going to set fire to every Degas, Manet or Van Gogh they get their hands on. Those paintings will be used for trade.”
“And we’ll be giving them fakes?” I asked.
“For originals. Exactly.”
I found myself dodging cracks on the sidewalk, which I often did when I was preoccupied. “And you think this is going to work?”
“With enough of a head start, and enough skill, yes.”
“What was the rush back there?” I asked.
“If the Germans come in,” he said, “they’ll take over the police and security services before they do anything else. Some people will get dragged off to prison camps and others will be promoted because they’ll agree to collaborate with the Germans.”
That was the first time I heard the word “collaborate.”
“That man back there,” continued Pankratov. “Tombeau. He wanted to make sure you were brought in as part of a regular arrest. He wanted people to see that. But what happened once you got inside that room was something he didn’t want anyone else to see. He doesn’t know who to trust. That’s why he wanted you out of there so fast.”
“But why pick me? There must be a hundred other people in Paris who could do a better job.”
“There are other people, most with criminal records. But the Germans know their names. They won’t be able to make a move without the Germans knowing. They needed someone without a record. That’s why they picked you.”
“And what about Fleury?”
“They picked Fleury precisely because he is known. He’s suspected of being unscrupulous. They need someone like him because when he starts showing up with paintings that the Germans don’t know about, they’ll need to believe the work was stolen out of some private collection. If Fleury’s the man doing the selling, they’ll have no trouble believing it.”
“Who’s Tombeau working for?” I asked.
“I expect you’ll meet them very soon.”
“Are we the only ones?”
“No. I don’t know how many others there are. We’ve been split up into cell groups. That way if the Germans get one group, they can’t get to the others.”
“How are the Germans going to know the locations of all these paintings, anyway?”
“They sent in people as art students, all through the thirties. They called themselves the East European Commission. They catalogued paintings in galleries. When the war started, these students all disappeared. We’ll see them again, I expect, but next time they’ll be wearing army uniforms. Valya fell in love with one of them. I think she left when he did. I believe she’s been working for them.” He shook his head to show his helplessness.
I began to see a little more clearly why he had set aside his stubbornness.
We walked all the way to Café Dimitri and sat down together at a table. We drank his drink, a demitasse with steamed milk on the side, and each of us ate a medjool date to sweeten the coffee’s harshness. It was real coffee, too, for a change, and the last Ivan would serve for several years to come.
My earlier cynicism was starting to fade. We would be equals now, Pankratov and I. We would do the work, not for the reasons they gave us, not because of intimidation, but for reasons they might never understand. I thought about what Pankratov had said earlier—how sometimes you have to wait a lifetime before a chance like this comes along.
Pankratov sat back in his chair. “Do you trust Fleury?” he asked. “I mean, trust him completely?”
It would have been complicated for me to explain that I didn’t, not completely, but that he was still my friend. Pankratov didn’t force me to say it. He understood my answer by the silence.
“He could get us killed,” said Pankratov.
“We could get him killed, too,” I replied, “if we don’t get it right.”
“Yes,” admitted Pankratov. “That much is true.”
I realized it had not occurred to me to question whether or not I could trust Pankratov. I knew instinctively that I could. The same qualities that made him difficult to be around had also earned my confidence in him. Pankratov could not be intimidated by the threat of physical pain. One glance at him, and anyone could tell. He could not be beaten into submission by the threat of having his possessions confiscated. He owned nothing that anyone else was likely to value. Pankratov could not be bribed with money or tokens of social acceptance. He didn’t care enough about himself to be tempted. This was why I trust Pankratov. It was why I pitied him, too.
* * *
WHEN I RETURNED TO the apartment, Fleury was waiting outside my door. His face was pale.
We went inside and I filled two coffee cups with wine. We sat down at my kitchen table.
“Well,” he said. “What did you tell them?”
I sipped at the wine. “I agreed to do the work.”
Fleury’s shoulder slumped with relief. “Thank God,” he said. “They said they’d throw us both in prison if you refused.” He set the mug against his teeth and drank. His Adam’s apple bobbed twice as the wine went down his throat. “I felt sure you’d tell them all to go to hell.”
“It was Pankratov who convinced me,” I said.
“As long as somebody did.” Fleury finished the wine and helped himself to some more. Then he brought out his red tin of Craven A’s and lit one. Those weren’t Craven A’s he was smoking, not any more. He bought whatever he could get, and just kept using that red tin. “I can’t say I’m looking forward to working for this thug of a man, Tombeau, but I’d rather do that than end up in a French prison. Strange how your life can be moving along in one direction, and you even start to take that direction for granted, and you give yourself all these little matters to worry about, and then something comes along and changes everything. And it can happen”—he clapped his hands together; the ash from the cigarette floated onto the tabletop, like the downy feathers of a bird—“it can happen like that.”
I walked over to my bed and lay down, hearing the old springs squawk under my weight. I rested the heels of my shoes on the bed rail and tucked my hands behind my head. The bed was right beneath the windowsill, and I saw the silhouettes of pigeons on the roof of the Postillon warehouse. I was thinking that, all my life, I had been fighting against a current. Like water. Water deep under the ground that I struggled through even though I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t beat it and I knew I couldn’t beat it, but I didn’t know what else to do except keep struggling against it. Today was the first time that I felt as if I’d quit struggling.
Fleury pinched the burning end off his cigarette and then put the stub in his pocket. He was saving his tobacco these days. “Do you think we can do what they want us to do?”
“Do I think you can sell paintings to the Germans? Yes. Do I think Pankratov knows enough to teach me? If he says so, yes. But do I think I can learn it? Do I think I have enough talent to begin with?” I shook my head, feeling the pillow rustle. “I seriously doubt that.”
“If Pankratov says you can do it,” Fleury told me, “then you can.”
For the first time, I allowed myself to consider the possibility that Pankratov’s faith in me might not have been misplaced, after all. I closed my eyes and felt the current pulling me, smoothly and gently, down fast-running rivers, out toward the rolling of the jade green sea. I did not fight it. I would not fight it again.