Paris Stories (24 page)

He got up and began turning out lights, leaving just a spot in the window. To have been anti-American during the Second
World War in France had a strict political meaning. Any hope of letters from Louis Aragon and Elsa withered and died: Hubert Cruche had been far right. Of course, there was right and right, thought Speck as he triple-locked the front door. Nowadays the Paris intelligentsia drew new lines across the past, separating coarse collaborators from fine-drawn intellectual Fascists. One could no longer lump together young hotheads whose passionate belief in Europe had led them straight to the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen-S.S. and the soft middle class that had stayed behind to make money on the black market. Speck could not quite remember why
pure
Fascism had been better for civilization than the other kind, but somewhere on the safe side of the barrier there was bound to be a slot for Cruche. From the street, he considered a page of Charles Despiau sketches—a woman’s hand, her breast, her thigh. He thought of the Senator’s description of that other, early Lydia and of the fragments of perfection Speck could now believe in, for he had seen the Bellefeuille nudes. The familiar evening sadness caught up with him and lodged in his heart. Posterity forgives, he repeated, turning away, crossing the road on his way to his dinner.

Speck’s ritual pause brought him up to St. Amand and his demon just as M. Chassepoule leaned into his window to replace a two-volume work he had probably taken out to show a customer. The bookseller drew himself straight, stared confidently into the night, and caught sight of Speck. The two greeted each other through glass. M. Chassepoule seemed safe, at ease, tucked away in a warm setting of lights and friends and royal blue, and yet he made an odd little gesture of helplessness, as if to tell Speck, “Here I am, like you, over-taxed, hounded, running an honest business against dreadful odds.” Speck made a wry face of sympathy, as if to answer that he knew, he knew. His neighbor seemed to belong to an old and desperate breed, its back to the wall, its birthright gnawed away by foreigners, by the heathen, by the blithe continuity of art, by Speck himself. He dropped his gaze, genuinely troubled, examining the wares M. Chassepoule had collected, dusted, sorted, and priced for a new and ardent generation. The work he had just put back in the window was
La France Juive
, by Edouard Drumont. A handwritten notice
described it as a classic study, out of print, hard to find, and in good condition.

Speck thought, A few years ago, no one would have dared put it on display. It has been considered rubbish for fifty years. Edouard Drumont died poor, alone, cast off even by his old friends, completely discredited. Perhaps his work was always being sold, quietly, somewhere, and I didn’t know. Had he been Walter and superstitious, he might have crossed his fingers; being Speck and rational, he merely shuddered.

Walter had a friend—Félicité Blum-Weiler-Bloch, the owner of the Afghan hound. When Walter complained to her about the temperature of the gallery, she gave him a scarf, a sweater, an old flannel bedsheet, and a Turkey carpet. Walter decided to make a present of the carpet to Speck.

“Get that thing out of my gallery,” said Speck.

“It’s really from Félicité.”

“I don’t want her here, either,” said Speck. “Or the dog.”

Walter proposed spreading the carpet on the floor in the basement. “I spend a lot of time there,” he said. “My feet get cold.”

“I want it out,” said Speck.

Later that day Speck discovered Walter down in the framing room, holding a vacuum cleaner. The Turkey carpet was spread on the floor. A stripe of neutral color ran through the pattern of mottled reds and blues. Looking closer, Speck saw it was warp and weft. “Watch,” said Walter. He switched on the vacuum; another strip of color vanished. “The wool lifts right out,” said Walter.

“I told you to get rid of it,” said Speck, trembling.

“Why? I can still use it.”

“I won’t have my gallery stuffed with filth.”

“You’ll never have to see it. You hardly ever come down here.” He ran the vacuum, drowning Speck’s reply. Over the noise Walter yelled, “It will look better when it’s all one color.”

Speck raised his voice to the right-wing pitch heard during street fights: “Get it out! Get it out of my gallery!”

Like a telephone breaking into a nightmare, delivering the sleeper, someone was calling, “Dr. Speck.” There on the stairs
stood Lydia Cruche, wearing an ankle-length fur coat and a brown velvet turban. “I thought I’d better have a look at the place,” she said. “Just to see how much space you have, how much of Cruche you can hold.”

Still trembling, Speck took her hand, which smelled as if she had been peeling oranges, and pressed it to his lips.

That evening, Speck called the Senator: Would he be interested in writing the catalogue introduction? No one was better fitted, said Speck, over senatorial modesty. The Senator had kept faith with Cruche. During his years of disappointment and eclipse Cruche had been heartened, knowing that guests at the Senator’s table could lift their eyes from quail in aspic to feast on
Nude in the Afternoon
.

Perhaps his lodge brother exaggerated just a trifle, the Senator replied, though it was true that he had hung on to his Cruches even when their value had been wiped out of the market. The only trouble was that his recent prose had been about the capital-gains-tax project, the Common Market sugar-beet subsidy, and the uninformed ecological campaign against plastic containers. He wondered if he could write with the same persuasiveness about art.

“I have taken the liberty of drawing up an outline,” said Speck. “Just a few notes. Knowing how busy you are.”

Hanging up, he glanced at his desk calendar. Less than six weeks had gone by since the night when, by moonlight, Speck had heard the Senator saying “…  hats.”

A few days before Christmas Speck drove out to Lydia’s with a briefcase filled with documents that were, at last, working papers: the list of exhibits from the Bellefeuille collection, the introduction, and the chronology in which there were gaps for Lydia to fill. He still had to draw up a financial arrangement. So far, she had said nothing about it, and it was not a matter Speck cared to rush.

He found another guest in the house—a man somewhat younger than he, slightly bald and as neat as a mouse.

“Here’s the doctor I was telling you about,” said Lydia, introducing Speck.

Signor Vigorelli of Milan was a fellow-Japhethite—so Speck gathered from their conversation, which took up, in English, as though he had never come in. Lydia poured Speck’s tea in an off-hand manner he found wounding. He felt he was being treated like the hanger-on in a Russian play. He smashed his lemon cupcake, scattering crumbs. The visitor’s plate looked cleaner than his. After a minute of this, Speck took the catalogue material out of his briefcase and started to read. Nobody asked what he was reading. The Italian finally looked at his watch (expensive, of a make Speck recognized) and got to his feet, picking up car keys that had been lying next to his plate.

“That little man had an Alfa Romeo tag,” said Speck when Lydia returned after seeing him out.

“I don’t know why you people drive here when there is perfectly good bus service,” she said.

“What does he do?”

“He is a devout, religious man.”

For the first time, she sat down on the sofa, close to Speck. He showed her the introduction and the chronology. She made a number of sharp and useful suggestions. Then they went upstairs and looked at the pictures. The studio had been cleaned, the light repaired. Speck suddenly thought, I’ve done it—I’ve brought it off.

“We must discuss terms,” he said.

“When you’re ready,” she replied. “Your cold seems a lot better.”

Inching along in stagnant traffic, Speck tried one after the other the FM state-controlled stations on his car radio. He obtained a lecture about the cultural oppression of Cajuns in Louisiana, a warning that the road he was now driving on was saturated, and the disheartening squeaks and wails of a circumcision ceremony in Ethiopia. On the station called France-Culture someone said, “Henri Cruche.”

“Not Henri, excuse me,” said a polite foreigner. “His name was Hubert. Hubert Cruche.”

“Strange that it should be an Italian to discover an artist so essentially French,” said the interviewer.

Signor Vigorelli explained that his admiration for France was second only to his intense feelings about Europe. His career had been consecrated to enhancing Italian elegance with French refinement and then scattering the result abroad. He believed that the unjustly neglected Cruche would be a revelation and might even bring the whole of Western art to its senses.

Speck nodded, agreeing. The interview came to an end. Wild jungle drums broke forth, heralding the announcement that there was to be a reading of medieval Bulgarian poetry in an abandoned factory at Nanterre. It was then and then only that Speck took in the sense of what he had heard. He swung the car in a wild U-turn and, without killing himself or anyone else, ran into a tree. He sat quietly, for about a minute, until his breathing became steady again, then unlocked his safety belt and got out. For a long time he stood by the side of the road, holding his briefcase, feeling neither shock nor pain. Other drivers, noticing a man alone with a wrecked car, picked up speed. He began to walk in Lydia’s direction. A cruising prostitute, on her way home to cook her husband’s dinner, finally agreed to drop him off at a taxi stand. Speck gave her two hundred francs.

Lydia did not seem at all surprised to see him. “I’d invite you to supper,” she said. “But all I’ve got is a tiny pizza and some of the leftover cake.”

“The Italian,” said. Speck.

“Yes?”

“I’ve heard him. On the radio. He says he’s got Cruche. That he discovered him. My car is piled up in the Bois. I tried to turn around and come back here. I’ve been walking for hours.”

“Sit down,” said Lydia. “There, on the sofa. Signor Vigorelli is having a big Cruche show in Milan next March.”

“He can’t,” said Speck.

“Why can’t he?”

“Because Cruche is mine. He was my idea. No one can have my idea. Not until after June.”

“Then it goes to Trieste in April,” said Lydia. “You could still have it by about the tenth of May. If you still want it.”

If I want it, said Speck to himself. If I want it. With the best work sold and the insurance rates tripled and the commissions shared out like candy. And with everyone saying Speck jumped on the bandwagon, Speck made the last train.

“Lydia, listen to me,” he said. “I invented Hubert Cruche. There would be no Hubert Cruche without Sandor Speck. This is an unspeakable betrayal. It is dishonorable. It is wrong.” She listened, nodding her head. “What happens to me now?” he said. “Have you thought about that?” He knew better than to ask, “Why didn’t you tell me about him?” Like all dissembling women, she would simply answer, “Tell you what?”

“It might be all the better,” she said. “There’ll be that much more interest in Hube.”

“Interest?” said Speck. “The worst kind of interest. Third-rate, tawdry interest. Do you suppose I can get the Pompidou Center to look at a painter who has been trailing around in Trieste? It had to be a new idea. It had to be strong.”

“You’ll save on the catalogue,” she said. “He will probably want to share.”

“It’s my catalogue,” said Speck. “I’m not sharing. Senator Bellefeuille … my biography … never. The catalogue is mine. Besides, it would look as if he’d had the idea.”

“He did.”

“But after me,” said Speck, falling back on the most useless of all lover’s arguments. “
After
me. I was there first.”

“So you were,” she said tenderly, like any woman on her way out.

Speck said, “I thought you were happy with our arrangement.”

“I was. But I hadn’t met him yet. You see, he was so interested in the Japhethite movement. One day he opened the Bible and put his finger on something that seemed to make it all right about the graven image. In Ecclesiastes, I think.”

Speck gave up. “I suppose it would be no use calling for a taxi?”

“Not around here, I’m afraid, though you might pick one up at the shopping center. Shouldn’t you report the accident?”

“Which accident?”

“To the police,” she said. “Get it on record fast. Make it a case. That squeezes the insurance people. The phone’s in the hall.”

“I don’t care about the insurance,” said Speck.

“You will care, once you’re over the shock. Tell me exactly where it happened. Can you remember? Have you got your license? Registration? Insurance?”

Speck sank back and closed his eyes. He could hear Lydia dialing; then she began to speak. He listened, exactly as Cruche must have listened, while Lydia, her voice full of silver bells, dealt with creditors and dealers and Cruche’s cast-off girlfriends and a Senator Bellefeuille more than forty years younger.

“I wish to report an accident,” Lydia sang. “The victim is Dr. S. Speck. He is still alive—luckily. He was forced off the road in the Bois de Vincennes by a tank truck carrying high-octane fuel. It had an Italian plate. Dr. Speck was too shaken to get the number. Yes, I saw the accident, but I couldn’t see the number. There was a van in the way. All I noticed was ‘MI.’ That must stand for Milan. I recognized the victim. Dr. Speck is well known in some circles … an intimate friend of Senator Antoine Bellefeuille, the former minister of … that’s right.” She talked a few minutes longer, then came back to Speck. “Get in touch with the insurance people first thing tomorrow,” she said, flat Lydia again. “Get a medical certificate—you’ve had a serious emotional trauma. It can lead to jaundice. Tell your doctor to write that down. If he doesn’t want to, I’ll give you the name of a doctor who will. You’re on the edge of nervous depression. By the way, the police will be towing your car to a garage. They know they’ve been very remiss, letting a foreign vehicle with a dangerous cargo race through the Bois. It might have hit a bus full of children. They must be looking for that tanker all over Paris. I’ve made a list of the numbers you’re to call.”