The Mystery of the Lost Cezanne (18 page)

V
erlaque stared at the small Japanese house and thought of Fabrizio Orsani.
Dedans/dehors
. Inside/outside. He regretted never having visited Japan as he looked at the features the best 1960s Western architects had borrowed from the Japanese: sliding wood and parchment doors that could be opened to their fullest capacity, letting the garden come inside; no furnishings save a low wooden table, cushions, and a shelf or two where Verlaque knew the inhabitant would have displayed small porcelain bowls. The opposite of his parents' stuffy, closed-windowed, well-appointed home. Would his parents' relationship have been different if they had lived in a house like this one? Can architecture influence people's happiness? Yes, he thought. He imagined a series of color photographs of his parents—part of an exhibition in a modern-art museum—an artist's sociological experiment:
M. et Mme Verlaque in their Japanese-inspired home
.
Mme Verlaque pours out the tea
.
M. Verlaque prunes bonsai in the garden.

“Right,” Verlaque mumbled in English and he walked on, listening to the crunching noise his shoes made on along the pebbled path. Even in winter the garden was delicious; the path meandered around Japanese plants and led up over small arched footbridges painted red. The traffic noise reminded him that he was in a museum on the edge of Paris, and not in the Japanese countryside. He followed the path up a small hill; from there he could see the conservatory and a rose garden before it. A woman appeared at the edge of the rose garden, pushing a baby buggy, and Verlaque walked down the hill and made his way toward her.

She was arranging a small woolen blanket over a sleeping baby as he approached. “Commandante Barrès?” he asked, leaning down.

“Yes,” she answered, standing up and shaking his hand. “You don't have to whisper; Jeanne can sleep through anything.”

He smiled and said, “Jeanne. Lovely name.”
Joan of Arc.

“Thank you for coming down to Boulogne,” she said as they sat side by side on a wooden bench. “I'm on maternity leave, but I was . . . intrigued . . . when your call came through to the precinct. A colleague called me at home right away.”

“Really?” Verlaque asked, looking at sleeping Jeanne. “I had no idea that you're not working at the moment. I'm so sorry.”

She waved his apology away with a gloved hand. “No, no, don't be sorry,” she said. “My colleague called me because he knows how obsessive I can get. You see, Cézanne is my favorite painter. And given the sunny day, I thought we could meet here. I live around the corner. Jeanne is now six months old, so I'm just about to start back at work.”

“It's lovely here, even on a cold day,” Verlaque said, looking at the pruned climbing roses. “It's my first visit.”

“Ah. Albert Kahn was one of those great
nineteenth-century philanthropists,” Barrès said. “He was interested in a bit of everything: plants, as you can see; photography; science and medicine. He lost it all in the crash of 1929. We're lucky that the city of Boulogne-Billancourt bought the estate in 1940. Kahn's houses on the Riviera, where the gardens were even bigger, are now lost.”

He looked at the policewoman. She was tall and slender, although it was hard to see her figure as she was wrapped in a bright-pink woolen coat. She wore her brown hair cut short, which showed off her dangling silver earrings that looked handmade, a one-off. “How long have you been in the art theft division, Commandante Barrès?” he asked.

“Eleven years total,” she answered. “And I've been commandante for five. Our office is a mix of gendarmes and police; we work together.”

“Were you an art student before joining the force?”

“No,” she said, laughing. “I studied languages, which comes in handy on the job. But I'm studying art history now, part-time. I'm working on my MA at the Sorbonne. It's a challenge, though, with Jeanne.”

Verlaque had almost forgotten about sleeping Jeanne and looked at her tiny hands clutching the top of the blanket. “I'll tell you why I'm here,” he began. “We're investigating the murder of a man, René Rouquet, who lived in Paul Cézanne's former apartment in downtown Aix. About a week before Rouquet died he found a canvas that had been rolled up and hidden somewhere in the apartment. A portrait of a young woman—”

“And you think it's a Cézanne?”

“A local doctor who's an amateur art historian thinks so, yes,” he said. “But a retired art auctioneer from Sotheby's thinks it's a fake, although he seemed to me to be very taken with it.”

“You think he's lying?”

“Yes. But I don't know why.”

“What's his name?” Barrès asked.

“Edmund Lydgate.”

She wrote the name down in a small notebook and frowned. “His name rings a bell, but I don't know why. I'll look it up when I get back home.”

Verlaque refrained from telling the commandante that he had lost the canvas. “How easy is it to sell a stolen Cézanne?” he asked. “I'm trying to understand why Rouquet was killed, and if the killer was someone experienced in selling stolen art.”

“It would be impossible to sell a stolen Cézanne in the legitimate art market. That's why the Ashmolean Museum Cézanne has never been recovered. Paintings like a Cézanne, or van Gogh, or an Old Master, when stolen, go underground. They disappear.”

Verlaque leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Tell me about the Oxford theft.”

“We police who specialize in art theft share files, across the globe,” she said. “If I remember correctly, the Ashmolean theft took place on New Year's Eve, while all of Oxford was celebrating. The thief took advantage of some scaffolding on the building's façade and used it to get up to the roof. He broke one of the glass panes of a skylight and then lowered himself down using a rope ladder. On the way down he threw a smoke bomb on the floor, which set off the alarms, but the police officers who arrived on the scene weren't allowed to go in.”

“Because of the smoke.”

“Right,” she answered. “So he, or she, took one Cézanne, a landscape, and went out via the skylight.”

“Just one Cézanne?” Verlaque asked. “Was the theft an order from a collector?”

Commandante Barrès shook her head back and forth.
“That's a common misconception,” she said. “Because of the movies, art thieves are imagined to be glamorous, sophisticated, and cunning. That couldn't be further from the truth. They are professional criminals, many of them very hardened. They, for the most part, steal whatever is most convenient, or whatever paintings they have seen on television. In 2003 two thieves stole two of van Gogh's early dark paintings from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.”

Verlaque looked at her. “I've been to that museum,” he said. “They didn't take the sunflowers?”

“No,” she answered. “I would have taken a self-portrait myself.”

Verlaque laughed. “So why two of his early works?”

Commandante Barrès smiled. “They were the first two paintings listed in the museum's catalogue.”

“You're kidding.”

“No, I'm not. So you can see, there's seldom a rich, cultured patron paying these men to steal. They're just thugs, often involved in organized crime.”

“What in the world would these guys do with a Cézanne landscape, or two van Goghs?” Verlaque asked. “They can't possibly sell them at Sotheby's.”

“The Mafia is a perfect place to ‘get rid' of masterpieces,” she replied.

“I read your article ‘To Catch a Thief,'” Verlaque said.

“Thank you!” she answered. “Well then, as I said in the article, stolen masterpieces are used as currency. Criminals use artworks to pay off fellow criminals—for example, to pay off debts. The Mafia has connections all over the world—”

“Making it so easy to use priceless artworks to pay for arms, or drugs,” Verlaque said. He thought of his quick dismissal from Orsani's house.

“Yes, and they have a built-in system of transportation. Crossing borders is usually no problem. Some of the objects
are
sold, and the quicker the objects are sold, the harder it is for us to trace them. We recently recovered a stolen gold clock from the seventeenth century; it was stolen from a château in Brittany on a Saturday night and on Tuesday morning was on the art market. But if it is sold illegally on the black market, an artwork can disappear forever.”

She reached down into the bottom of the buggy and pulled out a padded case, unzipping it to reveal an iPad. She turned it on and opened a file, flipping through the photos to show Verlaque.

“Those are all stolen objects?” he asked.

“Yes, ninety-two thousand of them, to be exact.”

He whistled. “What's your recovery rate?”

“Ten percent.” She pointed to a lamp made in the 1960s. “This was a rare prototype made by Gae Aulenti,” she said. “It was stolen from the minister of finance's office by one of his staffers. As elections come and go and ministers are changed, their staffs often leave with ‘souvenirs.'” Commandante Barrès found a photo of a painting being held up by two smiling policemen. “In 2005 a security guard at the Pompidou stole this Picasso worth two and a half million. It proved impossible for him to sell as he didn't have the right connections, and so it was recovered.”

Verlaque got a lump in his throat, thinking of the upcoming Soulages exhibition. “Do you have a photo of the painting you found in Aix?” she asked.

Verlaque got his cell phone out of his coat pocket and showed her the portrait.

“I don't recognize it,” she said.

Verlaque was about to interrupt and say that it had just been found when the commandante said, “Have you done a background check on stolen Cézannes?” she asked. “A small Monet landscape was stolen from a museum in Le Havre in 1974 only to turn up at Christie's forty years later.”

“The thief waited that long?”

“Yes; talk about patience. But we had photos of the painting on file, so it was easy to catch. A retired curator from the museum remembered it and called us when she saw its photograph in a Christie's catalogue. She still felt guilty, all those years later.”

“It hadn't occurred to me that the canvas we found in Aix could have been a Cézanne stolen years ago,” Verlaque said. Marine's father hadn't recognized it, but did he know
every
Cézanne painting? Lydgate he didn't trust; he hadn't even looked at it that long. And he now realized that they knew little about René Rouquet.

“What do you know about fakes?” he asked. Since he had canceled his meeting with Hippolyte and Hervé, perhaps the commandante could shed some light on the art of creating, and selling, reproductions.

“Ah, fakes are abundant and sold everywhere, from eBay to international galleries. Forgeries are getting better and better, which is why the provenance of your supposed Cézanne canvas is being disputed. These days it really
is
hard to determine the fakes from the genuine. The general public certainly has no idea, and even museum curators can be fooled. A Manet in a museum in Caracas was stolen and replaced with a copy. The copy was so good that the theft went unnoticed for years.”

“And by then the real Manet was long gone,” Verlaque suggested.

“Yes,” she answered. “Last night I read an essay written in the 1930s by the art critic Walter Benjamin. Homework.” She smiled and went on. “He predicted that in the new age of mechanical reproduction, the quasi-sacred quality of art would fade. He called it their ‘aura.' Artworks would no longer be precious cultural treasures but just images circulating freely all over the world. Their value would drop.”

“But the opposite's happened,” Verlaque said. Jeanne made a gurgling sound, signaling the near end of their meeting. “Prices of original art are insane.”

“Yes,” she said. “But he was right about their images being everywhere . . . reproductions in books, on TV, posters . . .”

“T-shirts, calendars,” Verlaque added. “It's as if all that reproduction drove the prices, and value, and desire, even higher. As Andy Warhol was all too aware of.”

Commandante Barrès smiled, impressed by the judge with the streaked black-and-gray hair and the broken nose. “And because of the ready availability of images of the originals,” she said, “fakes get better all the time.”

“Yes, we all know what the originals look like, as we stare at them every morning on our coffee cups. We're intimate with them.”

“And forgers are now using modern technology to make more-accurate copies. Digital scanning, for example. They can use those microscopic details to make exact reproductions. But there's something they can't reproduce—”

“The brushstrokes?”

“Exactly. Who can reproduce van Gogh's energetic brushstrokes? Or Rembrandt's?”