Cezanne's Quarry (33 page)

“And, may I ask, what happens to your frustrated artist—the one in your novel—at the end?”

“Oh, it’s sad. He commits suicide.”

Anger and frustration turned against himself instead of against another human being.

“And ‘the problems with women’?”

“Oh, dear,” Zola sighed and sat back in the chair. “As soon as I said it, I knew I should not have brought it up. I’m always too eager to talk about my work. And you, you’re good. That’s what Hortense and Paul told me. A pouncer, like any examining magistrate worth his salt should be. Well, then let me tell you why Cézanne could not have killed Solange Vernet.”

Martin waited through the dramatic pause.

“He could not have killed her because he loved her. She was the love of his life.”

Surely the great portrayer of human passions knew how easily love could turn to hate. “You know that because?” Martin could hardly believe that he was challenging the great Zola.

“When we met in July, she was all that he could talk about. She understood him. She understood what he was trying to do. Hortense and all the other women had always been a burden to him. He told me that Solange Vernet could be his muse.”

Muse? Like the woman with her legs spread for the assorted men in Cézanne’s obscene painting?

“I understand that you received some letters for Cézanne in July,” said Martin, trying to move Zola from pious generalities to specifics.

“Actually, I did not. They did not come. I’m sure it was a great disappointment to him.”

“Then this love of his life may have been on the verge of rejecting him, and what would that mean to a sensitive soul given to temper tantrums?” asked Martin, pushing himself to keep pressing the famous writer.

“Not murder.” Zola’s face was grim. “Besides, I am his best friend. And I can tell you that in all confidence.”

“How?” The author, the legendary investigator, still had not offered any evidence.

“I asked him. I was quite upset by Hortense’s telegram. That’s why I came. So I had to ask. We were standing on the banks of the Arc yesterday, where we had dreamed our boyhood dreams together. For us, for our friendship, this place is almost sacred. He swore to me there,
swore to me,
that he did not do it. Cézanne is not capable of lying. Everything shows in his face.”

Zola’s word. That should be enough to convince a novice judge in this backwater provincial, petit-bourgeois, aristocratic-ridden town.

Martin got up, in part to relieve the tension caused by what he was about to do. In exchange for eliciting information about the artist’s past, he was going to have to reveal Solange Vernet’s secret. The only question was, how to begin. “Let me show you a few things,” Martin said to Zola, who had taken out his watch to check the time. “Perhaps you can help me with them.” He reached into his cabinet for the two small canvases that he had taken from the Jas de Bouffan.

“Did you know,” he said, as he unrolled the first of them, “that Solange Vernet had golden-red hair?”

“Yes.” Zola placed his pince-nez on his nose and rose to examine the pictures.

“This one,” Martin held down the small painting of the worshiped woman on his desk, “is this what you would consider a ‘muse’?”

Zola smiled broadly. “I remember this. It was a kind of a joke. I love the bishop standing there, being one of the ‘inspired.’” The author removed his glasses. “I’m afraid that Cézanne has grown much more pious since then. He would not do anything so iconoclastic these days. In any case, my impression is that Cézanne had a much different relationship to his Solange. I doubt if he even saw a bare shoulder. At least not from what he told me.”

“And this.” Martin rolled out the depiction of the young woman being strangled. Zola peered at it and nodded.

“They are very early. They have nothing to do with what Cézanne is painting now. He could not have known her then.”

“When do you think these were painted?”

Zola shrugged. “The late sixties. I own one from that period. A striking painting of a muscular man, almost red in appearance, carrying away a woman whose skin is so white it’s almost luminous. With dark hair, let me add. White-skinned with dark hair. Both nude, in the middle of a forbiddingly dark canvas. I call it ‘The Abduction.’ Cézanne gave it to me almost twenty years ago. He was very obsessed by the human drama then. Now he does not seem to be at all interested in showing human passions. Quite the contrary.”

Martin rolled up the canvases and set them aside. “You say he was obsessed by the human drama in that period,” he said quietly. “Would that include rape and murder?”

“Well, as much as any of us.” Zola pursed his lips. “Even before my work, although my critics would not admit it, there was a lot of violence in the theater and serial novels.”

“Would you say that Cézanne was obsessed by violence during those years?”

“Obsessed? No.”

If Zola was here to prove Cézanne’s innocence, he was unlikely to have answered that question in the affirmative.

“Do you have anything else to show me? Any current paintings of Cézanne’s?”

Martin shook his head. He did have the quarry fragment, but that would only be a diversion. “What about his relationships with women?” he persisted.

Zola sat down again. “At that time, we were both very shy with women.”

“Would you characterize Cézanne as being afraid of them? Of having ‘problems with women’?”

Zola hesitated before answering. Martin guessed he was not thinking about whether Cézanne did have a fear of women, but, rather, what he should say about it.

“Shyness, yes. Fear may be too strong. Besides, you certainly cannot base any of these assumptions on what a man paints. I write about depravity and murder, but I would never engage in them.” Zola was trying hard to close the door he himself had opened with the description of his new novel.

“Then you do not think it unusual that a young man, as Cézanne was in those days, would paint pictures of women that show them to be either overwhelmingly powerful or cruelly overpowered?”

“No.”

Having said his piece, Zola put his pince-nez in his breast pocket and took hold of his walking stick, preparing to leave.

“I realize you are in something of a hurry,” Martin said. “But I think there is one more thing you can help me with. We must keep it between ourselves. I need to be able to question Cézanne without his being aware of it.”

Zola arched his eyebrows, his curiosity piqued. “You mean something you are going to confront him with after I leave?”

“Confront may be too strong. But I do not want to taint his testimony.”

“Yes, then. Yes.” Zola sat back again, ready to listen. “We won’t have time to do anything but say good-bye anyway.”

“This goes back to those early days that we were just talking about. I understand that when you were young men, you spent part of a summer or two in town on the Seine called Bennecourt.”

Zola nodded.

“Did you hear about a rape of a young woman at that time?”

Zola shook his head. “Surely you do not think that Cézanne—”

“No, no, nothing like that. What I think may have happened is that Cézanne witnessed such a crime.”

Zola shrugged. “He never said anything to me.”

“What if he had?”

“What if he had what? You yourself know that all of us have ‘witnessed’ that kind of thing. It’s common. Particularly among the lower classes.”

Martin was taken aback by the great writer’s response, which was meant to protect his friend. Nevertheless, what Zola said was true. It was a fact, recited by droning law professors, that the abuse of young women was by far the most commonly committed and least prosecuted crime in all of France. The implication of these statistics had been that new judges were not to waste too much time on these cases. That was before Martin knew Solange Vernet’s story.

“I am talking not just about abuse, but an obvious rape, by two individuals on a helpless young woman. Do you think that witnessing such a crime could have unbalanced your friend enough to cause the kind of obsession that I see in these paintings?” Martin knew he was not on solid ground in claiming to “see” anything in the paintings, but he wanted to push Zola.

“If that were so, I think I would have known about it.”

“And if he could have helped her and he did not, wouldn’t he have been too ashamed to tell you? To tell anyone?” The words came out sharp and heated. The thought of one of these privileged young men not coming to the aid of the helpless sixteen-year-old Sophie Vernet had suddenly got Martin’s blood up.

“I don’t know,” Zola responded, unperturbed. “None of this seems likely. Cézanne is a man of such simple passion and tenderness. So much tenderness, in fact, that he often acts the crude peasant in society in order to protect himself. I can’t imagine him harming someone or watching while someone else did so.”

“You mean to say that Cézanne comes off much rougher around the edges than he really is?”

“Indeed. Like all of us, he is a man of classical learning.”

“I see.” No wonder the artist despised Westerbury and his pretensions so much. No wonder Westerbury hated the man who had been given all the opportunities that he did not have.

“In any case,” Zola asked, rather aggressively, “what does what happened in the sixties have to do with this murder?”

“Did you know that Solange Vernet was a servant in Bennecourt in 1866 or 1867? Do you think Cézanne knew?” Martin pressed on. “Do you think he knows she was the victim of this rape?”

“No.” Zola’s mouth formed a perfect O on the inside of his beard and mustache as he communicated his surprise. “No.” His mind was obviously at work. “So you think there is a connection.”

Martin nodded. Just then, Joseph, who had been diligently recording the interview in his alcove, turned around. How many other people would know about Bennecourt before the day was up? Martin glared at his clerk, who returned to his notes without making a sound.

Zola pressed down with both hands on his walking stick, considering. “A connection?”

Martin moved to capitalize on his interest. “M. Zola, can you think of anything that happened during those years in Bennecourt, anything at all, which would help us to find Solange Vernet’s murderer?”

“And the murderer of the boy.”

Martin caught his breath. Cézanne had told Zola about that, although he had been instructed not to tell anyone. If they were truly the oldest of friends, having only a few hours in which to trade confidences, Martin did not find this damning. “And the boy,” he conceded.

Zola got up and began pacing, tapping his walking stick with each step. “There is something. Not the rape of a servant. That is too common. It would not have made the newspapers. But something that I read about at the time that happened during the off-season at Bennecourt or in Gloton, the village across the river. In the early spring, I think. A murder, perhaps? I can’t quite remember. As you say, it was almost twenty years ago.” He paused and turned to Martin. “Do you think that Solange Vernet could have taken part in some heinous crime?”

“No,” Martin said quickly. That is not at all what he was thinking.

“I do know this,” the writer continued, “whatever it was, was not resolved. I brought my mother and wife to Gloton to get them away from Paris during the Commune uprising and, having a lot of time on my hands, I asked around.” He pressed his fingers to his forehead as if trying to squeeze the memory out of his brain. Evidently to no avail. “I even thought of making it an episode in Rougon-Macquart.” He looked up at Martin. “No, no. I can’t remember.”

There was no telling whether a second crime committed near Bennecourt would have any bearing on the Vernet murder. In his desperation, Martin was not above grasping at straws.

“You understand that so far there are only two suspects in the case.”

“And Cézanne is one of them.”

Martin nodded.

“Then I must do what I can. I cannot let Paul be dragged through the mud, falsely accused.”

This made Martin bristle. False accusations were not his style. And whatever Cézanne found himself mired in was not the fault of the judiciary.

Zola must have noticed Martin’s irritation. He offered a conciliatory smile before adding, “I know you have your job to do. And I wish you luck. Let us agree that we are both men who seek justice.”

“Yes.” The fact that Zola was treating him as a kind of equal gave Martin a flush of pleasure. His embarrassment at being so easily flattered flustered him even more. Zola began pacing again.

“This is what I can do. I am taking the train to Paris—it’s too hard to get back from here to the spa, where my wife is staying, anyway. Easier to go through Paris. I keep my old files there, the ones I use for research on my novels. I’ll have some time. A day. I’ll look through them. And if I find the articles, I will telegram the essential information to you immediately.”

“Thank you.” If only he would follow through. If only there would be some new piece of evidence.

“Should I send the telegram to your home or to the Palais?”

“My home.” Martin did not want anyone else to read the information before he did. He tore off a piece of paper, quickly wrote down his name and the Picard address, and handed the note to Zola, who folded it and put it in the breast pocket that held his pince-nez.

“Very well.” Zola held out his hand. Martin took it eagerly. He was relieved that he had gotten through the interview with a modicum of dignity, and that the great man had not fallen below his expectations. Martin would be the last person in the world to condemn Zola for his loyalty to Cézanne. He knew only too well the lengths to which friendship and loyalty could make a man go.

He ushered Zola out of his chambers and watched as he and Cézanne hugged and kissed each other good-bye. Their parting was full of emotion, as if they were saying farewell for the last time. They were an odd pair. The one rich and confident, the other shabby and vulnerable, despite the gruff exterior. Martin wondered, as he prepared to do battle with the artist, if Zola’s efforts to save his friend would be as futile as his own efforts to save Merckx had been.