Madonna and Corpse (2 page)

“This is very ...”
Mme.
Clergue began vaguely, but Descartes was already out the door, moving at a ponderous, middle-aged jog toward the spiral stairs. When
Mme.
Clergue caught up, he was in the middle of Gallery 11 staring at the wall. Hanging directly in front of him, where it had hung for years, was Botticelli’s
Madonna and Child.
Hanging alongside it was ... Botticelli’s
Madonna and Child.

“Your mystery donor has a knack for copying,” Descartes said finally, alternating his gaze between the museum’s new acquisition and the original. The likeness was so perfect that the detective could not have said which was Botticelli’s handiwork and which was the copy. And it wasn’t just the images; even the frames—gilded wood with ornately carved borders—were twins. “A remarkable knack.”

“Indeed,” spat
Mme.
Clergue.

Descartes turned his attention from the Madonna’s face to
Mme.
Clergue’s. The inspector was intrigued; the director seemed furious. “What’s wrong, Madame? You still have your Botticelli, and now you have a superb backup, if something happens to the original. Why the sour face?”

She glowered at the freshly hung painting. “But what’s he
doing
?” she finally snapped. “Is he just having fun at our expense? What if he comes back and
does
take something valuable?”

“Madame, a word in private?” It was a command, not a request. She shot him a look, then spun and walked toward the doorway. “Very well,” she said. “My office is just around the corner.”

“Everyone out,” Descartes ordered over his shoulder. The two uniformed police officers, Pascal, and another museum staffer whom Descartes had successfully ignored so far looked at him blankly. “Don’t touch anything. Don’t even look at anything. Everybody go back downstairs.” They stared, unmoving, as rooted as Michelangelo’s
Prisoners
in their blocks of marble. “Out,” he barked. “
Now
.” They scurried like shooed pigeons.

In her office, Madame Clergue sank into a high-backed chair behind the library table that served as her desk. Descartes drummed his fingers on the edge and studied her face, his eyes narrowed. Suddenly he demanded, “Who is ‘he,’ Madame?”

She blinked and shifted in the chair. “Who is
who,
Inspector?”

“Don’t play games with me. A moment ago, in the gallery, you said, ‘What’s he doing? What if he comes back?’ Who did you mean by ‘he,’ Madame?”

A deep crimson penetrated the chasmic depths of her wrinkles. “I ... I meant ... the thief.”

“There was no theft,” Descartes pointed out. “Therefore, no thief.”

“Very well, the intruder, then,” she snapped, “if you want to split hairs.”

Descartes lunged forward in his chair, as if to hurdle the table and shake her by the throat. “I
don’t
want to split hairs!” he roared, slapping the table with a sound like a rifle shot. The old woman gasped and shrank back, and her right eye began to twitch. “I want to know the truth, Madame. You were thinking of someone. Some particular ‘he.’ Tell me who.”

“I was not,” she quavered, slowly drawing herself up. They glared at each other. Finally, steeling her voice, she said, “Since, as you say, there was no theft, there is no need for an investigation. I do not wish to press charges for the break-in, Inspector.”

Descartes’s surprise gave way to suspicion. Only a fool—or someone with something to hide—would drop the matter here. “That’s not how it works, Madame. If I suspect a crime—and I do, criminal trespass—I am obliged to investigate. And you are obliged to cooperate.”

“I have no information that could possibly help.”

“What are you keeping from me, Madame?”

“Nothing, Inspector.”

“Then why is your eye twitching like that? And why are your hands shaking?”

She turned her face to the right, so he could no longer see that eye, and folded her arms resolutely across the raincoat.

Descartes glowered. Finally he rose, anger emanating from him in waves. “Stay,” he commanded sternly, shaking a finger at her as if she were a wayward spaniel. “If you move from that chair before I get back, I’ll arrest you for obstructing an investigation.” He spun and stalked from the room. Ninety seconds later he returned. “Now come,” he said harshly. He led her back to the gallery.

Both paintings were gone.

She seized his arm with both hands, a pair of buzzard’s claws clutching at a tree branch. “What have you done?” she gasped.

He pointed through the doorway to the adjoining gallery. The two paintings rested in the far corner, leaning against adjacent walls. Madame Clergue shuffled toward them, her feet—in slippers, Descartes noticed for the first time—rasping across the varnished floor.

“So, Madame Director,” he said coldly. “Which is your original, and which is the copy?” Standing wide-eyed before them, she looked from one painting to the other, back and forth, back and forth, as if the Madonnas were engaged in a tennis match. “Well? Which is which?”

She opened her mouth to speak, but all that came out was a choked sob. Madame Madeleine Clergue wept, burying her face in her hands. When at last she looked up, her face had aged another ten years. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “God
damn
that son of a bitch.”

Chapter 2

Dubois

Jacques Dubois dips a clean cloth in turpentine and drapes it across the painting, stretching and smoothing the fabric to remove all wrinkles. The white cloth—cut from an expensive linen bedsheet—is virtually transparent. Through the fine weave of fabric, as if behind a veil, a homely Virgin Mary cradles an even homelier Jesus. The baby’s head is far too small for his body, his face more like a middle-aged man’s than an infant’s, his body bizarrely muscled like a miniature weightlifter’s. Dubois smiles at the pair and murmurs, “Soon you will be so much prettier. You’ll thank me.”

In his early years, Dubois felt guilty about taking solvents or a heat gun to ancient paintings simply so that he could recycle an old canvas or wooden panel for his own works. By now, though, he knows he’s performing a service: ridding the world of mediocrities and replacing them with masterpieces. It’s as if he’s buying up dreadful shacks on spectacular lots, then knocking them down and erecting architectural gems in their stead.

After washing his hands in the paint-stained sink, he leaves the studio, crossing his backyard through clouds of blossoming plum and pear trees. In the kitchen of the old farmhouse, he assembles a simple lunch: fresh goat cheese, briny black olives, baby arugula drizzled with olive oil and lemon, a crusty baguette, and a glass—then another—of a delicate, apricot-hued rosé from a nearby vineyard. He eats slowly, savoring both the food and the latest auction catalog from Sotheby’s of London, which includes one of his works, a “Gainsborough” landscape he painted two years ago. “A previously unknown work, this is a particularly fine example of the simple style Thomas Gainsborough favored in his later period,” the catalog informs him. Once Dubois has finished with his modest portions of food, wine, and triumph, he washes, dries, and puts away the dishes before recrossing the backyard.

When Dubois bought the farm—
what was it, twenty years ago?
no, my God, nearly thirty!
—the studio was a roofless set of walls, crammed with broken-down tractors, rusted plows, and God-knows-what-other ruined implements. The house was no prize, either, but Dubois focused solely on the barn for the first year, transforming the cavernous ruin into a bright, airy workspace.

For years now, every morning he’s brought his coffee out here, gazing across the Rhône as the rooftops of Avignon catch fire in the rising sun. The light paints the grim gray towers of the Palace of the Popes a delicate shade of pink and sets the cathedral’s towering gold statue of the Virgin blindingly ablaze. Dubois has tried to capture this magical morning alchemy of light and stone in paint on canvas, but even his prodigious skills are not up to the challenge.

Inside the studio, Dubois inspects the Madonna and the Christ-child. Their features have softened, as if the two glasses of wine are blurring Dubois’s vision. Folding back one corner of the turpentine-soaked cloth, he presses a thumbnail to the paint and feels it yield. “Perfect,” he purrs. He puts a CD into the Bose player and presses Play, and Mick Jagger laments, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Nodding his head in time to the beat, Dubois begins to deconstruct the ancient painting.

Peeling off the veil of fabric, its fibers smeary with reds, blues, and golds from the painting, he lays it on the table and picks up a putty knife. Starting at the bottom-left corner of the panel, he scrapes upward and across in a series of short, swift strokes, taking care not to dig into the soft poplar wood beneath the paint. A moment’s carelessness, a single gouge, and the panel, for which he paid half a year’s income to a rapacious dealer in Rome, would be ruined, useless except as firewood or a tavern sign. The cost of Dubois’s raw materials—mediocre medieval paintings exhumed from attics and junk shops; blank paper and vellum, sliced from the flyleaves of ancient volumes beneath the noses of dozing librarians; boards pilfered from unguarded old chapels and fortresses—has risen a hundredfold during his career. Luckily, his own prices have increased a thousandfold, at least for showpieces like the one he’s about to create.

With each push of the putty knife, the paint glides another fraction of an inch up the blade, accumulating in thin, rippled ridges like multicolored cake frosting. Back and forth, left and right he works, pausing each time he reaches one side or the other to wipe the knife with a rag. After several hours of rhythmic strokes, he is approaching the base coat of white lead. He soaks another clean piece of linen in turpentine and lays it on the panel, then steps back to stretch. When he straightens up and arches backward, the ache in his back makes him groan.
Oh, shit, I’m too old for this,
he thinks, then,
Good thing I’m getting out.
Twisting his torso from side to side, he wrings a satisfying series of cracks from his spine and smiles slightly.
Not with a whimper, but some bangs,
he thinks. After a few more stretches, he removes the cloth and gently wipes off most of the white-lead primer, taking care not to rub all the way into the gesso, the underlying mixture of animal-hide glue and chalk dust used to fill the grain, smooth imperfections in the wood, and create a rigid, perfect surface on which to paint.

If he works quickly for the next few days, he’ll be finished by the time François arrives from Marseilles, bringing Dubois the final piece of the puzzle. Dubois owes François for this—owes him both money and sex—but the investment will be well worth it.

Chapter 3

Descartes

“Thank God I stuck my chewing gum on the back of the copy.” Descartes’s proud announcement was not greeted with the outpouring of gratitude he’d expected.

The inspector,
Mme.
Clergue, and her chief conservator, Henri Devereaux—the museum functionary who’d been fluttering on the edge of Descartes’s vision since one
A.M.
—were huddled blearily in the museum’s workshop. They’d spent hours poring over the two paintings. They’d used their naked eyes, they’d used magnifying glasses, they’d even used ultraviolet light to search for the telltale fluorescence of modern pigments. They’d found innumerable minor differences—after all, each work was painted by hand—but absolutely nothing to indicate which painting was created in 1467 and which in 2012.

For a painting that was more than five hundred years old, the Botticelli—whichever the hell the Botticelli was—looked damned good, Descartes thought. The inspector had been raised Catholic, so he’d seen enough Madonna-and-child paintings to last him an eternity. This one, though, was different. For one thing, it wasn’t dark or gloomy; beneath a bright blue shawl, Mary wore a reddish-orange dress; the arched window opening that framed the mother and child was also a cheery blue. The Virgin—the mother—looked to be all of fifteen years old, Descartes thought; seventeen, tops. Her face was pale, with delicate, pretty features, large eyes, and a high, intelligent forehead. On her head she wore a sheer lace cap that allowed glimpses of golden hair; above the cap was a disk of gold filigree, so gossamer-fine as to be nearly invisible. Her neck was long, slender, and gracefully arched as she gazed down at the robust boy sprawled across her lap. Her right hand cradled his head; her left hand covered her right breast, and barely visible between the index and middle fingers was a nipple, all but concealed by the design of the dress and the modesty of the mother. Descartes had no children—he no longer even had a wife, not since that bitch Yvonne had dumped him for some German tourist she met in a bar—but somehow this painting evoked in him feelings of paternal protectiveness and tenderness he wished he could attach to a family.

After removing the paintings from the gallery wall, Descartes had kept the director twisting in the wind for hours, refusing to tell her about the telltale wad of chewing gum he stuck behind one corner of the copy’s frame—not until he’d pried the truth, or at least some of it, grudgingly out of her. Three years before, the museum had hired a restoration expert, Jacques Dubois, to clean and restore the Botticelli, she’d finally told the inspector. “People think that paintings get dark over time,” she said. “You’ve probably seen pictures like that—dingy old Rembrandts and Van Dycks that are almost black with age?” He’d nodded, though he couldn’t quite recall if that was actually true. “But it’s not the paint that’s darkened, it’s just the varnish. Strip that off, and a five-hundred-year-old painting is as bright as the day it dried on the easel.” The Botticelli’s varnish had dimmed the painting’s vibrancy, so they’d hired Dubois—one of the best restorers in France, living right here in Avignon—to strip off the old varnish and put on a fresh coat.

“Why didn’t you want to tell me this? And why did the appearance of the copy upset you so much?”

She’d looked down at her desk, unable to meet his gaze. “Against my better judgment, I allowed Dubois to do the restoration at his studio. With lesser works, we don’t worry so much, but the Botticelli was a treasure. I was afraid it might be stolen. But Dubois was adamant. He insisted that the restoration wouldn’t be as good if he had to work in our ‘soul-sucking, fluorescent-lit circle of hell’—that’s how he described the museum’s conservation shop. I also knew there was bad blood between him and Monsieur Devereaux. So I agreed to let him take the painting. When I saw the copy, I felt ... it seemed a betrayal of our trust. And the mocking way he hung the copy. It was a slap in the museum’s face.”

Descartes had felt sure there was more to the story than she was telling, but it was clear she was prepared to stonewall. He decided not to press the point—for now. But he would get to the bottom of it sooner or later. Was it possible that she and Dubois were in cahoots—colluding in some sort of scam—and that he was setting her up to take the fall? Descartes had good instincts—a good nose, he called it—and beneath the scent of the old lady’s baby powder or face cream or whatever the hell it was, the detective caught a strong whiff of fear.