Bruno walked through the open door to the balcony where monsieur sat waiting in his wheelchair, a plaid rug tucked around his legs. A flimsy chair of wood and metal, like the ones at outdoor cafés, awaited Bruno. To the side of the wheelchair stood a small table with two glasses, a decanter of wine and a large ashtray half filled with cigarette butts. The old man was staring out over the valley, a filtered cigarette smoldering in fingers that were brown with nicotine. As Bruno stepped in to take the spare chair, he saw that while the old man’s dense and spade-shaped beard was white, his mustache had been stained to a youthful russet by his smoking.
“I bring bad news,” said Bruno.
“I know. Claudia is dead, drowned.” The old man held up a modern smartphone. “It’s on the Sud Ouest website. I hope you don’t share their foolish belief that it was an accident involving some damn cat. The Claudia I knew was far too shrewd for that.”
“You think it was no accident?”
“I don’t know, of course, but I very much doubt it. My former colleagues at the Louvre don’t send me many aspiring young art historians, but when they do, they’re usually impressive. Claudia was the best of the lot. And she was by far the richest. Do you know of her background?”
“We only just found her body. There hasn’t been time. From her credit cards I gather she’s connected to a financial trust that carries her family’s name, but that’s all I know. What else can you tell me?”
“You’ll find it all on the Internet,” Bourdeille said, dropping the still-lit cigarette into the ashtray and at once lighting another from a pack of Royale filters he took from the pocket of his jacket. Quilted velvet, in a bold burgundy with silk lapels, it was a garment Bruno had seen only in ancient photographs or historical films.
“Her father is chairman, founder and chief shareholder of a financial firm in New York,” Bourdeille went on. “If he’s not a billionaire, he must be close to it. He’s also politically active, a member of the finance committee for the campaign of that man who sits in the White House, so I imagine we’ll all be overrun by agents of the FBI.”
“Do you always check out art students on the Internet?”
“Yes, when they interest me. When her adviser wrote suggesting I see her, she sent along a copy of Claudia’s master’s thesis on Clouet. Nothing original, of course, you don’t expect that for a master’s degree. But it was very well informed and thoughtful. She’d done a lot of research into the allegories he used and knew the difference between the religious ones and folktales. I certainly didn’t expect that from an American.”
“I see you respected her. Did you also like her?”
“At my age, respect and liking tend to be synonymous. But I have never been able to take much interest in women since I had my encounter with the milice. Our young American knew something about that, enough to ask me about it, which suggested she had researched me just as I had her. That impressed me. And she had certainly read all my books, which I don’t expect you to do. From what I read in our local newspaper, mon cher confrère, you are far too busy. Or should I call you Lieutenant these days? I gather you’ve been promoted.”
“Bruno will do.”
“Good, and in that case why don’t you pour us each a glass of that Château Ausone 2000, the wine I was going to offer Claudia yesterday evening if she hadn’t left early. We can drink it in her honor.”
“She told me you had taken her wine education in hand. I gather you had shared a bottle of Château Margaux.”
“It was a pleasure for me to meet a young woman, particularly a young American, who appreciates good wine enough for me to enjoy sharing it.”
“I’m honored to be included. Even on duty, I couldn’t possibly refuse such a wine,” Bruno said, lifting the decanter and pouring two glasses. He swirled the wine and sniffed, deeply and with appreciation, before taking a long sip. He let the wine rest in his mouth to reach the less-used taste buds near the rear of his tongue and then swallowed.
“That’s a wonderful wine,” he said. “Is the vineyard really on the site of the villa of Ausonius?”
“Who knows?” Bourdeille said, dabbing at his lip with a white silk handkerchief from another pocket of the garment Bruno suddenly recalled had been called a smoking jacket in its day. “But it makes a damn good story, a Roman governor who was also a notable poet as the first recorded connoisseur of the wines of our region. And a very fine wine it is.”
“Did Claudia know much about wine?”
“A great deal, although naturally she knew more about American wines. On her return from Paris she brought me a bottle of an extremely luscious Napa Valley Cabernet called Screaming Eagle. She claimed to have acquired it from the American ambassador’s own cellar but didn’t say whether she’d been invited to do so or just made off with the bottle. She told me that the ambassador’s an old and close friend of her father.”
“Did you always see eye to eye with her, or did you ever argue about anything—art, for example?”
“We had some delightful arguments. That’s why I enjoyed her company so much. She disputed two of my lesser-known attributions, then retracted handsomely when I made my case. And then she gave me something which she’d been sketching as we argued back and forth, hammer and tongs. I could never do two things at once, but Claudia certainly could.” He gestured to the magazine rack beside his wheelchair. “Take a look inside that leather folder.”
Bruno opened it to see a pencil sketch of the old man, wearing his smoking jacket and holding a glass of wine in one hand, a cigarette in the other, a roguish glint in his eye. A background of hills and trees had been artfully captured with a few almost careless lines. Bourdeille’s face had been portrayed in a level of detail that seemed to convey the depth of each individual wrinkle around the eyes.
Bruno nodded. “That’s very impressive.”
“I always told my pupils that they’ll never understand a painting until they learn how to draw. How else can one understand why an artist should compose his work as he did or appreciate the brushwork until he can at least command a pencil? And Claudia was a real artist as well as a scholar. You can see that at a glance.”
Bruno leafed through some other sketches, evidently by the same hand, of Madame Bonnet; of Bourdeille’s chartreuse; of the old man dozing in his library, the books on the shelves below him seeming to hold him up even as those above threatened to tumble down and overwhelm him. A sketch of the meeting of the two rivers at Limeuil was enchanting, ripples on the water coming together in a way that made the confluence almost lascivious.
“Did she ever paint?” Bruno asked.
“Not that I know of. She said she had done some watercolors in Paris and promised to send me one. I suppose I’ll never get it now. Will they send her body back to America?”
“If that’s what her family wants to do,” Bruno replied. “All that remains to be decided, and I’m not even sure the next of kin have been informed yet.”
“Has anyone told that young man of hers? Jack, I think his name is. I know they met once in Paris and another time in London. She took a flight from Bergerac. I think she was something of a romantic at heart.”
Bruno’s thoughts drifted back to the torn-up photo of a man signing himself Jack. “I don’t know anything about him,” Bruno said. “Is he American? English?”
Bourdeille lit another cigarette, shrugging. “He’s American, a lawyer, based in London with some international law firm. I got the impression that the two families had known each other for years, and she and Jack had played together as children on summer vacations at some place where I read in the papers that American presidents like to go for their holidays, somebody’s vineyard—was it Mary’s vineyard? No, it was Martha’s. Then they met again at Yale.”
“You don’t know his surname?”
“No, she never said, and I didn’t ask. It depressed me, the thought that she might marry and start having children, interrupting what would otherwise have been a brilliant career, some of which I might have had the pleasure of watching from afar. My last pupil, and probably my best.” Bourdeille asked Bruno to refill their wineglasses, and he complied but left his own glass almost empty.
“And you don’t think her death was an accident?”
“How would I know? But I don’t think she fell into a well while trying to rescue a cat, and I’m sure it wasn’t suicide. I suppose we can’t rule out murder. But that’s far too melodramatic, even if she’d been here long enough to make enemies. So I suppose some kind of accident is possible.”
“Why do you rule out suicide?”
“Because she had plans, goals to live for and the means to carry them out.”
“You mean getting her doctorate?”
“Not only that. She was confident of getting her way in a current negotiation.” He gave Bruno a teasing grin, enjoying the knowledge that he knew something that Bruno did not. “She was too confident, perhaps.”
“And what was this negotiation?”
“She was planning to buy my chartreuse, along with my library and my art collection, while offering to let me remain here rent-free for the rest of my life.”
“You were going to sell everything?” Bruno was more than surprised.
“Why the devil would I do that? What use would I have for money at my age? But every time I said so, she seemed to think it was a negotiating ploy to drive up the price. It became almost a game between us. She was sure she’d win.”
“Did she have money of her own, as well as her father’s?” Bruno knew that wealth would always be a plausible motive if an autopsy found Claudia’s death was suspected murder.
“She said she had her own funds.”
“How much was she offering?”
“None of your business, Bruno. But her initial estimate of the value of my collection was more than four million.”
“Mon Dieu, was that in euros?”
“Dollars. Would you like to see my collection?”
“Very much.”
“Take the stairs down to the hall and I’ll come in the elevator.” Bourdeille turned his wheelchair with the ease of long practice and rolled to the discreet wooden door where the elevator button was the navel of a small plaster cherub on the wall.
“We’ll start with the oldest works, early fifteenth century, mainly Burgundian, although in those days that meant Flemish.” Bourdeille led the way to the last of three rooms and then turned, gesturing at the wooden panels that had been fixed to the plain white wall and protected with thick glass screens. In the center of the room was a wooden Madonna with a lusty child on her lap, clutching at her breast and looking more like a cheeky cherub than an Infant Jesus.
“This was when wealthy merchants, usually from the cloth trade, began requesting that their faces be included in the religious scenes that custom required. I began acquiring them in the 1950s when they were quite cheap. Ten years later, I couldn’t have afforded them. Then these next two rooms are of sentimental value, works by young French painters who were working in the studios of Italian masters, late fifteenth century and early sixteenth. Again, they were cheap in the fifties when I found them, mainly in Italy and Germany. Then I published my book on the roots of the French Renaissance, and their value soared.
“This is my glory room,” Bourdeille said as he led the way across the hall, taking out a very advanced-looking key and, from a separate pocket, a small fob, which seemed to undo a separate electronic lock. “My insurance company requires these precautions for this room. There are only four works of art, but these are the ones that modern fashion deems the most valuable. I almost agree, but not quite. Money and art have always seemed to me such unhappy bedfellows.
“But here they are.” He opened the door with a flourish and then touched a small light switch, and three gentle spotlights lit one painting and three sketches that left Bruno feeling awed, less because of his artistic knowledge than because of the drama Bourdeille had infused into their presentation.
“Antoine Caron, François Quesnel and Valentin de Bourgogne, known as the French Caravaggio,” he said. “One came to me as a gift from a grateful client some forty years ago. Another was a bequest from a dear and lamented friend. The third I got cheaply because its provenance and authorship were both disputed. But I was certain and wrote an essay to explain why and gave a lecture on it at the Louvre. Not everyone was convinced, but most of those I respect were persuaded.
“I found the Valentin through pure luck at a flea market in Brussels in 1960,” Bourdeille said, and Bruno could hear both pride and glee in the old man’s voice. From an ornate table in the center of the room he pointed to a folder of soft dove-gray leather. “In there you will see a photograph of how it looked when I first saw it.”
Bruno took out a photo, the same size as the painting, and saw a drab and clumsy painting in the cubist style. The colors were lifeless, dirty yellows and dull browns with a small black oblong off-center. Bruno had never warmed to cubism as a style of painting.
“It belonged to a Jewish dealer who had covered it with this daub when the German army was at the gates of Brussels. He knew what was coming and entrusted this and some other paintings to his gardener, who later died in a bombing raid. Heaven knows what happened to the other paintings, but the moment I looked at this squalid little work in the flea market I felt an urge to turn it around and saw that the wood of the frame was hundreds of years older than it should have been. I got it for the equivalent of less than fifty euros, took it back to my workshop and cleaned it, and you now see what I found underneath.”
“Did the Jewish dealer have an heir?” Bruno asked.
“Not one. The dealer was originally from Vienna. He and all of his family were sent to Auschwitz. I advertised, of course, and contacted the office for the restitution of artworks in Paris and tried the Israeli embassy. There were no claimants and no evidence of the painting’s existence, so I could establish my own claim to ownership. Then I began my own research into its provenance. I’d like to bequeath this to the art museum in Tel Aviv in the names of the dealer and his family, but I doubt whether France would grant an export license.”
Bourdeille looked up. “Am I boring you?”
“Quite the reverse,” said Bruno, fascinated as much by the old man’s excitement as by the painting itself.
“I found it had belonged to Talleyrand, Napoléon’s foreign minister, and it was listed in the archives of his château at Valençay. But when Napoléon installed his brother Joseph as king of Spain, the real king was housed at Valençay. Doubtless in retaliation for the French looting of Spain, the Spaniards made off with several of Talleyrand’s treasures and sold them off in Austria to defray expenses during the Congress of Vienna that ended the Napoleonic Wars. Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, bought it, but it disappeared when his home was looted during the revolution of 1848, and it hung in a Viennese café until the Hapsburg Empire collapsed. Vienna was in chaos, and the father of the art dealer who later fled to Brussels became the owner.”
“What a strange journey it took,” said Bruno, peering closely at the painting. “You must have enjoyed the hunt almost as much as the painting.”
“Indeed I did. But there are so many wonderful stories and so many strokes of luck. I only knew about the Valençay archives because of another strange tale of the Congress of Vienna. Having betrayed Napoléon and maneuvered to restore the Bourbon monarchy, Talleyrand was France’s representative at the Congress of Vienna. In return for his services the Prussian king made him a duke of a minor German principality called Sagan. So when France was defeated in 1940, and Göring’s little band of art thieves in Luftwaffe uniforms came looking for loot, Talleyrand’s descendant was able to claim that because he was the Herzog of Sagan, the château of Valençay was German property and could not be touched. Disciplined as they were, the Germans accepted this, and the Louvre then sent some treasures, including the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace, there for safekeeping throughout the war. I was part of the team the Louvre then sent to Valençay to check that everything had been accounted for, which is how I knew Talleyrand’s archives.”
Infected by the almost boyish delight of Bourdeille as he recounted this story, Bruno was grinning as he said, “It would have been a loss to art, but you’re also a loss to my own profession. You’d have made quite a detective.”
The expression on the face of Bourdeille darkened suddenly into an angry glare, but then he shook his head, his features relaxed, and he said, “I’m sure you mean that as a compliment. Forgive me, I did not mean to be rude. But it was a policeman who put me into this wheelchair when I was just a boy.”
“Not a policeman, a Fascist thug from the milice,” Bruno replied. “But I understand. And I did mean it as a compliment.”
“Thank you, but the policeman was a Frenchman, nonetheless, acting under the authority of a French government with a claim to legitimacy.” Bourdeille took a deep breath and collected himself. “I’m tired and need to rest, but I hope to see you before long and show you the rest of the collection. Madame Bonnet will call you to arrange a suitable time. I enjoyed your visit, despite the sad death of Claudia which prompted it. À bientôt, Bruno.”