A Masterpiece of Revenge Page 5

  Jean-Louis, a mere toddler, kept me from giving in to terror and despair. With time I experienced a sort of rebirth, the kind that comes when the heart, wrung dry, finds another reason to live.

  I began loving Jean-Louis like a mother and a father. Sophie’s love for him had become part of my love for him. Through him, she lived in me. Sometimes the sensation of her presence is physical. She is sitting on the bed. I can feel the weight of her head on my shoulder. I can caress the folds of her dress while talking to her, even smell her perfume.

  Slowly, brush stroke by brush stroke, my life after her death regained some of its fullness. I had two missions, two guiding lights: Jean-Louis and art. Everything else meant nothing. I had few friends, no hobbies. I concentrated only on what was essential, on what lay at the heart of my existence. With that kind of focus, I almost had no choice but to become famous.

  The disdain with which I treated my growing renown made me all the more renowned.

  I became France’s best-known expert on seventeenth-century painting by dint of sheer hard work, intuition, and a steady eye. “Only the eyes of the master can really see,’ says La Fontaine. I not only learned to see, I learned how to listen to art.

  I thought again about this mysterious, recently surfaced Lorrain. Eventually the final pronouncement of its authenticity would be mine to give — or withhold.

  4

  The minute I returned home from the airport I discovered a fourth white envelope in my pile of mail. The postmark was Brussels.

  Instinctively, I ran out onto the sidewalk, believing I might see whomever had mailed it lurking there. When I got into the elevator with my luggage I half expected to find someone there. I felt watched.

  Once inside my apartment I double-bolted the door and pulled close the curtains. My heart was beating erratically.

  Three times I picked up the phone with the intention of calling the police. Three times I put the phone back in its cradle. Meanwhile the envelope remained as it was. I held it in my moist hands for fifteen minutes, then finally opened it.

  A photo of Jean-Louis at a picnic under a tree with friends.

  There was something else in the envelope. A yellowed newspaper clipping that read “Mysterious Death of Onassis’s Son.” Part of an article recounting the famous plane accident followed.

  My chest tightened in panic. The threat was real now. The photographs were but suggestions, intimations. The clipping was a direct threat.

  I felt as I had the morning after Sophie’s death — desperately alone, teetering on the brink of some gaping pit. My thoughts spun. I needed something to keep me from falling.

  Remain rational, I told myself. What would the police have done? Looked for fingerprints on the envelope or on the photograph.

  I found some pencil lead and ground it into a fine graphite dust, spread it across the back of the envelope, blew on it, then did the same thing with the photo and the clipping.

  The envelope revealed two or three muddy-looking fingerprints, which I knew must belong either to the concierge or to me. In any case, what would I have done had I found someone’s fingerprint? Gone to the police and asked them if it belonged to some criminal? The whole idea was absurd.

  I called a photographer. He told me that it was impossible to determine where a standard roll of Kodak film had been developed, unless there were a name or address on the back of the print. Of course there wasn’t. There was only a series of numbers.

  “The date of manufacture and the date of development are usually fairly close together,” the photographer told me. “Film doesn’t keep very long. It loses its sensitivity to light.”

  I’d learned nothing. The person who’d photographed Jean-Louis had probably bought the film this year, and probably in the United States. The back of the photo read “This paper manufactured by Kodak.”

  I was thrown back into despair, into a realm of utter helplessness where thoughts ran riot. I’m told the best thing is to let it all wash over you, rather than trying to stare it down.

  There was nothing to do but wait. Batten down the hatches and point my prow into the wind. I would have to end up somewhere.

  Had I been the one in danger, this would have been easy. The press clipping proved that it was my son’s life that was being threatened. I was no Onassis, of course, though it was probably public knowledge that I was well off. That I would have enough cash to pay a ransom. I thought of famous cases of kidnapping. Some victims were released after payment. Most were killed. Plenty of kidnappings went unreported. Families quietly paid what was asked of them by mafioso types.

  Perhaps it wasn’t money that they were after. What does a blackmailer want besides money? A deed, a tide, a promise, a signature, a painting, a jewel, a secret formula, a manuscript? Anything was possible. I was dealing with a criminal and a sadist, someone who knew what was most precious to me in the world.

  That meant someone who knew me — a relative, a neighbor, a colleague, a friend. Someone nearby, watching me, playing with me, teasing me. Hating me.

  Having spied upon my son, this monster would not suddenly stop. He would neutralize me by forcing me to soak in my own fear. He would contact me, probably by phone. Perhaps he would come to the front door. Or send a telegram. I needed to stay home and stay alert, eyes looking both outward — watching others, and inward — watching me, to keep myself from going mad.

  There are people who draw strength from the direst of circumstances. I do not count myself among them. I was completely out of my depth. My mind was like a wheel spinning in mud. I was skating. Every image my mind formed sent me skidding. Every effort to think only dragged me further into misery.

  What could I hold on to? The phone. The only thing I could do was call Jean-Louis. It was six in the morning in Berkeley, but too bad. He had told me to call when I got back to Paris to tell him Pd arrived safely.

  By the second ring I knew that he wasn’t going to answer. I knew that from the tone of the phone’s ring. It sounded as if it were ringing in a void. Jean-Louis hadn’t bought an answering machine, so it would keep ringing. Finally, I hung up and dialed again. Maybe I’d dialed the wrong number. No, of course not. I hung up. All I could hear was a rumbling in my ears.

  That is perhaps the worst moment of all — the moment when tragedy and sorrow are upon you, and there is nothing you can do to stop them. You stand and wait, passive, resigned, doomed.

  I stared terrifiedly at the phone, hoping it would ring, hoping it wouldn’t. I unplugged it and sat in silence.

  Something was ringing somewhere. Not the phone. The doorbell? I found I was unable to move. Danger may have been waiting for me on the threshold, but it took more strength than I could summon to face it.

  The bell rang a second time. This time, in a sort of spasm, I ran to the door and placed my ear against it, my heart pounding — then, with a jerk, I pulled it open.

  There I found not unthinkable horror but daily life — in the form of a messenger from my publishing house. He was delivering the proofs of my latest book. I managed to smile at him and scrawl my signature onto a piece of paper.

  I was calmer when I closed the door. The interruption gave me some detachment. A voice somewhere inside was telling me that I was still myself.

  Then, perhaps following from that detachment, I was overwhelmed by outrage and by anger. Someone was trying to push me over the edge. Enough! Fd had enough! It was time to turn things around.

  Someone was setting a trap for me? All right! I would set one right back. Someone was threatening me? Fine. I would go straight at him. Someone wanted me to break down? Surprise! I would break him down. Someone was baring his teeth at me? He would get bitten. Someone thought he had me down? Never.

  I had to sketch out a plan. These photographs were precursors to murder — either mine or my son’s or both.

  Feeling resolved, I plugged the phone back in and opened my address book. My first determination was to come up with a list of suspects. Who could wish such evil
upon me?

  Two hours later I had come up with a list. On it were three people.

  First was Egon Adalbert, a German colleague I had humiliated on a number of occasions. Six months before, in fact, I had lacerated Adalbert publicly about a Dürer imitation he had insisted, wrongheadedly, was authentic. My language had been a little strong. Actually, when I examined the piece in question, I found it very handsome. It had been done by an ingenious copier named Luca Giordano. Giordano amused himself by concealing his signature in his works the way children’s book illustrators conceal faces in trees. I had had little difficulty in exposing Adalbert’s ridiculous supposition.

  Had someone done the same to me, I too might have felt murderous rage.

  Second on my list was Michel Calmette, my financial planner. Calmette and I had known each other since grade school, and he had heartily despised me his whole life. Why? God knows. It started with some childish resentment and kept growing. He was of that species of humanity constitutionally envious of everyone else. He had become quite a successful stockbroker, but nothing had changed between us. My professional success exasperated him. I enjoyed rubbing his nose in it from time to time. This was an old game between us, going back years. Calmette was basically a good-hearted fellow, and, in his own particular, bilious way, loyal.

  My third suspect was Frederic Silberman. Now here was a piece of work. He was suspected (and rarely prosecuted) of all sorts of thievery, every manner of trickery. Silberman was a professional and highly successful fraud. He was a parasite who fed off the art world, having already fed off other fields and then moved on. The world was his stage and his only pleasure was in acting out every part he could.

  To Silberman, duplicity was the highest form of self-expression. In his way he was quite an artist. He had been, in turn, a lawyer, a psychiatrist, a restaurateur, a management consultant, and a diplomat — changing his name and credentials as the role demanded.

  At one point Silberman was a conman at a casino. He got people to bet against him. He was arrested and banned for life from all casinos and gambling establishments in Europe. No matter: he moved on to other schemes.

  He had sold small swatches of a shirt he maintained had belonged to Rudolph Valentino. For a while he shopped phony Louis XV cabinets, replete with certificates of authenticity, around Geneva. He had gone into publishing, printing late works by known (and deceased) writers, claiming the manuscripts had been discovered in a trunk.

  Lately he had been pretending to be an art dealer, and was involved, I felt sure, in all sorts of dubious deals. He claimed to find masterpieces — not all of them were fakes, actually — and then sold them at the Dompierre Gallery in Paris. He had exhibited three handsome seventeenth-century fakes at the Wright-Hepburn gallery in London. There was talk at the time that they had been painted by a mysterious and highly gifted copier, examples of whose works had not yet fallen into my hands. He was apparently enormously gifted. A Hungarian, I believe.

  You might wonder why a distinguished art historian such as myself had anything at all to do with a shady character like Silberman. The answer, truthfully, is that contact with such people is inevitable — as inevitable as a corrupt clergyman in the Age of Enlightenment. He turned up everywhere — at auctions, openings, exhibits, lectures. Every time he saw me he greeted me like his oldest and dearest friend.

  I confess that I found him amusing and distracting. He knew his pretenses were a joke on the rest of the world. Besides, every time I saw him he had fresh gossip and new information. I took whatever he told me with a grain of salt, of course; everything he said or did was inspired by self-serving motives. Using hidden microphones he taped conversations he had with people.

  “I am a voyeur of life,” he told me once. “I love to observe hidden emotions. I love finding weak spots.”

  Weak spots. I wondered about that now. That sort of motivation made him a prime suspect. Perhaps too prime a suspect. The classic red herring?

  Besides, what possible motivation could Silberman have to torture me? To uncover the agonizing truth behind my mask of civility and calm? Did he want me to authenticate something? This I doubted. Blackmailing me would not have been Silberman’s style.

  All these vague suspicions and cloudy motives. No hard proof of anything.

  The entirety of that terrible day was spent trying to establish some kind of basis, however far-fetched, for an investigation. Throughout it, I must say I felt very much alive. Every nerve tingled. In this frame of mind, the least thing can suddenly seem like a mortal threat. Sounds become amplified and ominous: someone sweeping in the hallway, distant footsteps, a car’s brakes squealing in the street, the muted thrum of someone’s stereo.

  By the time night had fallen, I had tried, in vain, to call Jean-Louis twenty times at least. Why in God’s name hadn’t I bought him an answering machine? My fear was alive, voraciously alive. My agony was acute. Despite all the resolutions I’d made that morning, I abandoned myself to fear. There is nothing worse than that.

  Staggering into the bedroom, I collapsed onto my bed and fell into a troubled sleep.

  I dreamt I was in the street, looking around wildly for a phone booth so that I could call Jean-Louis. When I found one, and tried feverishly to dial his number, the buttons cracked and crumbled to the ground like rotten teeth. I got down on all fours and tried to pick them up and stick them back on, but they kept slipping between my fingers. Finally, just when I thought I’d done it, another one was missing. When I found it, and began desperately to push it, it dissolved into marshmallow beneath my finger.

  I awoke with a start, sweating profusely yet chilled to the bone. I cast my eyes around the room, expecting to see some horrific sight. I heard someone groan. It was me — I had groaned. Tears were streaming down my cheeks.

  I went to the window and opened it wide. Morning was dawning, beautiful but chill. Paris was still there, spread out against the crystal and cloudless sky.

  For a second I was prepared to find solace in this view, when a crow suddenly swooped down and landed on the ledge of my balcony A bad sign, this angular, ungainly bird, this harbinger of evil tidings and unanswerable questions.

  I realized, with the clarity of the growing dawn, that I would have to watch myself carefully, or else fall deeply, irrevocably perhaps, into paranoia.

  5

  Anguish. Hate. Rage. Fear. Confusion. Most of all, confusion. On the dawn of this new day, where was I to start?

  There was always my work, my professional evaluations — those page proofs, which my publisher expected me to finish going over by mid-October. That left me with barely two weeks to reread what had taken me years of painstaking work.

  The book was called The Last Works of the Greatest Painters, or. The Magnificent Trembling of Age. The subtitle was from Chateaubriand, who, while discussing The Deluge, one of Poussin’s final works, was reminded of “something letting go.” The paintings, he said, showed “the hand of an old man.”

  Poussin was well acquainted with tremors of the hand. He wrote about them in his last letters, in which he complains of “the infirmity of my trembling hand, which will no longer do my bidding.’’

  He was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. How I had tried to find the right way to express his tragic struggle for control.

  An artist’s final work very often marks the advent of something new. My book argued that only at the end of his life was Poussin finally beginning to express his true self. This is precisely what Corot suggested on the eve of his own death: “I perceive things as I never have before,” he wrote. “Suddenly it seems to me that not until now have I known how to paint the sky.”

  Themistocles and countless others have often said that man takes his leave of life when he is finally and truly ready to do so.

  There was nothing ennobling about the shaking of my own hand, however. As I read over the proofs I was shocked at what I found. My reflections about these twilight works now appeared as confused as the words I was spew
ing out to express them. Rather than holding to a central theme, I was spinning my rhetorical wheels. It seemed to me, as I reread the pages, that they were crammed with febrile, flighty metaphors.

  My eyesight had also changed. I looked at things differently. Studying the various reproductions scattered across my desk, all I could see were dark and evil omens. In van Gogh’s Church at Auvers, a wonderful painting, my eyes focused on the crows with wings black as night.

  In The Deluge, my eyes riveted on the drowning man, seen extending his arm helplessly and hopelessly toward a sky streaked with lightning. Then on the shipwreck, the black rocks, the bolt of lightning splitting the darkened sky.

  Death, in everything and everywhere.

  I was descending into madness. What was there to stop me? That silly list of suspects? Adalbert, Calmette, Silberman. I repeated them over and over like mantras.

  Adalbert. Where would I find him? At an auction, of course.

  Putting on my coat, I hurried to Drouot’s, Paris’s premier auction house. I knew I would find him there. On that particular Monday, they were selling one of the thousands upon thousands of “authentic” Corots floating about in the world.

  He was indeed there, in the company of a German client. He looked nervous. The sale had put him into a full sweat. He clearly knew the thing was a fake. That tic he had of shrugging one shoulder was more pronounced than usual.

  How flabby his cheeks looked. I’d never noticed that before, and I found it slightly revolting. He hurried toward me, his hand extended in greeting. A descriptive adjective for the man came to mind: “servile.” He was one of the most unctuously servile and cowardly men I had ever met.

  I became aware that I had become suspicious and ungenerous. Perhaps the time had come for me to let this side of my character speak for me. Perhaps it would lead me out of this mess.

  We chatted for a few minutes, then he was called away. Nothing he said raised any suspicions. He seemed his normal, servile self. He didn’t even mention the matter of the Dürer.