The Mystery of the Lost Cezanne (7 page)

R
ené Rouquet's apartment, for the first time since he bought the flat in 1963, was full of people. Eric and Françoise Legendre had quickly dressed and were now passing around mismatched mugs of tea. The police arrived soon after the ambulance and began to mark off the apartment as a crime scene.

Dr. Agnès Cohen leaned over Rouquet's body, her hands on her hips.

“I thought Bouvet would have come at this late hour,” Verlaque said to the coroner, who was slightly younger than himself, wore expensive bright-blue glasses, and wore her thick, prematurely white hair short and tidy.

Cohen smiled. “He has seniority,” she replied. “I get the late-night calls.” She glanced over at Rebecca Schultz, who was sitting in a corner, sipping tea, and staring at the wall. “Quite a suspect,” the doctor whispered.

Verlaque shrugged, not wanting to respond. “How was M. Rouquet killed?”

Dr. Cohen kneeled down. “Head injury.”

Verlaque looked at the marble fireplace, as did Dr. Cohen, who then said, “I'd say he hit the corner of the fireplace on his way down.”

“So he was pushed,” Verlaque said. “Or drunk?”

Cohen shook her head back and forth. “You have to be pushed with a lot of force to die from a fall like this,” she said. “But he's old, and by the looks of it in poor health, which doesn't help.”

“Time?” Verlaque asked.

She sat down on the floor, drew her knees up against her chest, and looked more closely. It seemed to Verlaque an odd position, more like she was at the beach than beside a dead body, but it
was
the middle of the night. “Very recent,” she said. “No more than two or three hours ago.”

“Thank you,” he said. He reached out a hand to help the doctor up.

“I'll let you know if I can be more specific once I examine the body at the morgue,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You already said that,” Dr. Cohen said, putting on her coat. “But I appreciate it. Bouvet never says thank you.”

Verlaque walked over to Pierre, who was sitting on a wobbly wooden barstool, said good night, and told him to try to sleep. Pierre slowly slid off the stool, walked to the door, opened it, and, taking one last look at his former neighbor, walked out. Verlaque pulled a chair over to Rebecca Schultz's side. “If you answer all of my questions, you'll be able to go back to your hotel tonight and not sit in jail,” he said.

Dr. Schultz did not hide her surprise. “You can't think I did
that
,” she said, gesturing with her head toward the body.

“Then perhaps you should tell me what you were doing in an old man's apartment after midnight. And we'll speak in English, if you don't mind.” He wanted to hear her side of the story in her native tongue. He immediately thought of Beckett.

“My French is fine.”

“I know.”

She sighed. “I'm an authority on Cézanne's works,” she began. “And I've spent the past five years researching his life.”

“His life?” Verlaque asked. “And not his work? You're an art historian.”

“I'm interested in both, naturally,” she replied. “But I've been commissioned to write his biography. Biographies are hot right now. They sell much better than art history books.”

Verlaque smiled slightly, as he was a lover of biographies. “And so you know that twenty-three rue Boulegon was the artist's last residence.”

She nodded and sipped some tea. “I booked into my hotel, on the rue Cardinale, at around five p.m. I showered, then walked around Aix, following those bronze Cs embedded into Aix's sidewalks. There are quite a few missing, by the way.”

“They get stolen.”

Rebecca Schultz sighed again. “Incredible.”

“And you didn't come to Boulegon straightaway?” Verlaque asked. “Given that Cézanne died here.”

“I was saving it for last,” she replied. “Like the best candies, when you're a kid. Do you understand?”

Veralaque nodded.

She went on, “After strolling through Aix, I stopped for a Moroccan dinner on the rue Van Loo. It was just before eight p.m.”

“Van Loo?” Verlaque asked. “That's off the beaten track,
isn't it?” He knew the restaurant and it wasn't one tourists could easily find, or would choose.

“Cézanne was married in the church on Sextius,” she answered. “I wanted to go in, but it was locked, no doubt due to theft.” She looked at Verlaque as if he were to blame for his countrymen's faults. “And then I spotted what looked like a very quaint North African restaurant. Small interior, handwritten menu, with beautiful Moroccan pottery on the tables. I've been in Aix enough times to know that it's hard to find a good restaurant here.”

“Would the restaurant staff remember you?”

“Yes, certainly.”

Verlaque stayed silent, waiting for her to explain why. They might remember her for her exotic beauty alone, which she was no doubt aware of.

“They'd remember, because the restaurant was run by a couple, and we spoke in some detail of the food, especially the desserts. There was one—I can't remember its name—made from dates. The woman—she was the one who cooked—was in the middle of making another batch in their tiny kitchen and led me back there to show me.”

“What time did you leave?”

“I left just after nine p.m., then walked back to the hotel and collapsed on the bed. But I awoke around midnight—the people next door had just come back and were banging around in their room—and so I got dressed and went out for a walk. I naturally came up to Boulegon, as if my feet were leading me here. I knew that I should be seeing it in the daylight, but I couldn't stay away.”

“Did you ring downstairs?” he asked.

Dr. Schultz raised her eyebrows. “No, of course not. I was
leaning against a shop opposite, staring up at the building, trying to imagine Cézanne's life on this street, in these rooms. I was about to go back to the hotel when I saw him.”

“The deceased?”

“No. A guy—he was short and bald—running out of the building, carrying something, a painting, or a mirror, in his arms, wrapped up in a throw.” Verlaque thought that the features “short” and “bald” described half the men in his cigar club. Schultz then pointed to the wall she had been staring at earlier. The dusty outline of a painting remained above the sofa. “I would imagine he was carrying the painting that had been hanging there.”

“That sounds like a good guess,” Verlaque said, looking at the bare spot. “But M. Rouquet wouldn't have had an expensive painting on his wall. He was a retired postman. Why would a thief steal some cheap painting owned by an old man living off his meager pension?”

“Do you know for sure that it was a cheap painting?” Dr. Schultz asked. “I've seen some strange art collectors in my day.”

Verlaque gestured around the room. “Look around you,” he said.

“Still—”

“You haven't told me why you came into the apartment.”

“Curiosity. And because I had just witnessed a theft. I speak French—I come to France often—and I love this town, so I thought I might be able to help in some way.”

Verlaque made a mental note to have Alain Flamant, one of his sergeants, check the dates of Dr. Schultz's previous trips to France.

“So you came in the apartment and didn't call the police or an ambulance when you saw M. Rouquet lying there.”

“I was about to,” she answered. “I didn't have my American cell phone with me, and it took me some time to find his home phone.” She paused, and then said, “It was when the phone rang, just before you came in, that I was able to find it, buried under a heap of newspapers.” She pointed across the room and Verlaque saw a small 1960s rattan table, indeed covered in newspapers, with the phone's black cord falling out and disappearing along the baseboards. Verlaque looked at the Beauty and knew that she could have been rehearsing her speech while he had been busy with the police and Dr. Cohen. The art historian, from where she had been sitting, sipping tea, would have had time to look around the living room and spot the table with its phone buried underneath the papers.

“That was us calling,” Verlaque finally said. “From just outside the door. But my friend Pierre said he tried, too, before we came, and there was no answer.”

“It must have been before I came in,” she replied. “And I doubt the bald thug would have picked up the phone.”

“And the apartment was in this state when you arrived,” he suggested.

“Of course,” she replied. “What would I want in an old man's apartment?”

“Perhaps you, too, were here to steal,” Verlaque said. “Even in an old man's apartment. As you said, there are some strange art collectors.”

•
JANUARY 8, 1885
•

A
s he walked into town he thought of how different his life would have been if he had followed his first dream of being a poet. Physically it would have been easier, no doubt; poets don't have to walk across the countryside, with an easel and paints strapped to their backs. They need only carry a quill and an empty book, and can work indoors, almost anywhere. The last time he saw Zola in Paris it was clear that his old friend didn't walk as much as he used to. Writers sit. And think.

He couldn't help walking. He loved it; it took him places where nature's shapes showed him what to put on the canvas. How could he get to the Trois Sautets bridge without walking? Or the Bibémus quarries? He would never paint in town, as some of his Parisian friends did. Buildings could be present in
the scene, but only in their relation to the surrounding natural forms. They would never be the focus. The last time he was in Paris, Monet had showed him a series of canvases of the same scene in Bordighera, a fine house by the sea, painted at different times of day. He knew he had been rude when he had asked Claude how he managed to stay awake and not fall over from boredom when setting up his easel before the same building, day after day. He now sighed loudly, remembering with shame their argument, and Claude's gentle words in the face of his own loud and heavily accented ones.

He picked up his step, knowing that the sooner he made it to the druggist in the Hôtel du Poët, the longer he'd have to paint. He had that in common with Claude, and Auguste, and Camille, and even the intense Dutchman he had briefly met: the need to paint was relentless. If one was thinking of a scene, or planning out a composition in one's head, it was almost impossible to think of anything else. That's why he had offered to fetch his father's medicine—the usual boy who ran errands was off with his own family as his sister was ill—and at least while walking he could think over his next composition, with that bridge in Gardanne the focus. His father—now near death—had finally accepted his son's determination to be a painter. But he hadn't accepted Paul's relationship with Hortense; even after the birth of their son, Paul Jr., Hortense and Paul Jr.—now thirteen—were living in Marseille, in an apartment he rented for them, while he stayed at his father's house. He would paint Paul again, soon, but didn't want to see Hortense as yet. Every time they were together they argued. She missed her native Jura and its mountains, and her family, and although she would sit to be painted, she asked no questions of his work.

The sight of the Rotonde's new fountain did not make the painter happy. He thought it ostentatious. What was happening to his little town? Would the same thing happen one day to Gardanne? He couldn't imagine not seeing old Bauvé leading his sheep across Gardanne's Place Gambetta. Or the fields of beets, or olive trees. And the stacks of hay, so wonderful to paint.

He walked around a team of street sweepers who were taking a break, leaning on their brooms, and then a knife sharpener, yelling up his prices to a maid who was leaning out of an upper-story window. A woman's “bonjour” took Cézanne out of his reverie. He attempted a smile and returned her “bonjour” with a wave of the hand. He recognized her, as he did most Aixois; she was a judge's wife, who evidently did not think him mad for walking up the Cours with his collapsible easel and box of paints strapped to his back. Other women laughed, and children pointed. But he was used to that.

He walked by the Café Oriental, then the Deux Garçons. Both cafés made him miss Zola, who would be soon publishing yet another book, its subject a secret. He passed number 55, where he had lived as a young boy, the family crammed into an apartment above his father's hat shop. Before his father had reinvented his life as a banker. Before they were rich.

Finally he reached the top of the Cours where the druggist, a man who not only was aware of modern medicine and science but also knew much about Provençal herbal remedies, kept a shop in the Hôtel du Poët. The Cézanne family had been coming to M. Alphéron for decades. The bells chimed as he opened the door and walked in.

“
Mon cher Paul
,” M. Alphéron said as he walked around the carved walnut counter and embraced the painter. His new
assistant, a shy boy who had just finished his
license
in chemistry, turned slightly away. M. Alphéron was sixty-three, and here he was embracing a man who looked to be in his forties, or even older, who carried his paints on his back. This man, Paul, did not dress as one would have thought of a Cézanne, the owners of a bank and a beautiful house on the outskirts of town called the Jas de Bouffan.

“How is your father?” M. Alphéron asked, keeping his hand on Paul's back.

“He suffers,” Paul said. “But, thankfully, in silence.”

M. Alphéron smiled. He knew how difficult Cézanne Senior could be. Demanding, impatient, opinionated. “I have bad news,” M. Alphéron went on. “I've mixed the first batch of medicine for your father. But the rest will have to wait until the end of the day; my shipment of morphine has been delayed.”

“Just my luck!” Cézanne exclaimed. “I had planned on going to Gardanne to paint!”

“I'm sorry, Paul. Had we decided to extend the train lines to pass through Aix, as they did in Avignon—”

Cézanne raised his thick hand in protest. “I've heard enough of that. We were right to protect our town from the coming industrialization. Have you been to Paris lately? Trains and smoke everywhere! The whole city is black from coal soot.”

“I've never been to Paris, Paul,” M. Alphéron said, smiling.

Cézanne went on talking as if he hadn't heard. “And L'Estaque, where I painted in peace for years . . . now look at it! It may as well be a
quartier
of Marseille! Factories and chimneys are cropping up along the shore—”

“Ah, that I'm truly sorry to hear. The last time I visited your parents at the Jas, they showed me three of your L'Estaque paintings. All wonderful.”

The assistant tried not to make noise as he dusted and
rearranged the heavy ceramic jars that lined the shelves of M. Alphéron's pharmacy. He had been to L'Estaque twice and only saw a few fishing boats, some fishermen's shacks, and the sea. What in the world could one paint there? And as for Paris, he dreamed of going. He thought about it day and night.

“Ah,” Cézanne said, grunting. He was thankful for the compliment but found it so hard to say so. “Well, there's nothing to be done. I'll be back later in the day.”

“Why don't you walk north of Aix today?” M. Alphéron suggested. “Up past my house the garrigue is still bright and green, despite the cold weather. And the sky is blue.”

Cézanne didn't like the suggestion of where to paint, or what to paint. He had been thinking of the bridge in Gardanne all the previous night. But if he had to be back at the pharmacy in the late afternoon, he didn't have much choice. “
Merci, mon ami,”
he replied, shaking M. Alphéron's hand. “I'll take your advice.” He would walk north of Aix; it was a part of town he was less familiar with, but there were fine views of the mountain from the hills, and, as the druggist had observed, the sky was blue.

 • • • 

Although the family desperately needed money, Manon was thankful not to have to work today. She had packed a lunch—some dried bread, a slice of the wild boar sausage that one of her brothers-in-law had cured and given to Manon and Mme Solari, and two dried figs. She would head up north of Aix and walk until she tired. She had, along with her lunch in a cloth bag, her book of Provençal wild flowers that Émile Zola had given her. It was winter, but all year long some plants bloomed in her beloved countryside. She wished that her love of plants could give her work; she so desperately wanted a passion as Philippe had with his sculpting. Even her sister Isabella was obsessed with tending her mulberry trees.

Manon had spent more time at home that morning than she had wanted to; her mother needed her help making ravioli. Her sister Clara had come, too, to help, and Manon had overheard them whispering about her. What would become of Manon? Would she ever marry? Why did she not weep for Jean-Auguste?

She walked quickly uphill and out of town. She knew every fine house, and every small one, by heart. Her brother, Philippe, always told her that she had one foot in nature and one foot in town. He was the only one who didn't tease her when she tripped over her own feet as she gazed around and counted the cypress trees in front of each house, or noticed that the family at number 9 had painted their shutters a brighter blue. When she was younger she had worried that her curiosity of the natural and man-made world might make her mad. But the more she read—Philippe still took her to the public library in the Hôtel de Ville—she noticed that the poets and writers and artists she read about were concerned with the same things. So she stopped worrying. Besides, she was thirty years old now, and as Clara had pointed out to Mme Solari in a not-so-quiet whisper, Manon was “over the hill” and would never marry. So she was free. Free to go on walks, to examine flowers, to run her fingers over Aix's sculptures whenever she pleased. And if people thought she was mad, it didn't matter, because she was too old for any young man to care. And what Isabella told her about passing the age of twenty-five was true. “You'll see,” Isabella had said, leaning over toward her youngest sister during one of their noisy family dinners. “No one looks at you after twenty-five. You become invisible.”

Before she knew it, Manon was in the middle of the countryside, walking through a row of vines, looking up at the sky and Mont Sainte Victoire in the distance. She waved to the
vineyard's owner, whom she often saw. He waved back and went on pruning. She smelled smoke and saw that he was burning vine branches in a neat pile at the end of one of the rows. She walked on, then, so as not to smell the smoke while she ate. She quickly walked through a small forest; she didn't like forests, even in the hot summer. They oppressed her, and there was no view. Only in the fall and early winter, when she looked for mushrooms with Philippe and her brothers-in-law, did she enjoy them. When she stepped through the forest, she stopped and squinted, putting her hand up to her forehead to see better, and then she saw him, only two meters away, painting furiously.

He turned quickly around and was about to complain when he saw Philippe's youngest sister.

“Monsieur Cézanne. I'm sorry to disturb you,” Manon quickly said, turning to go.

“Perhaps I'm the one disturbing you,” Cézanne replied.

Manon tried to smile but she was almost too nervous to reply. Here was Paul Cézanne, who had shown his pictures in Paris. And the Cézanne family was infamous; the father had begun his career selling hats and then had bought a bankrupt bank. Philippe told her that the Cézannes, despite their new wealth, would never be accepted by the Aixois nobility, but Manon was still in awe. And Paul Cézanne was almost as gruff as his father.

“I'm only out walking, M. Cézanne.”

“But Mlle Solari, you walk with a book,” Cézanne said, gesturing to her hand with his paintbrush.

Manon looked down at her wild flower guide; she had taken it out when walking through the vines to identify a small blue flower that grew in the rocky red soil. She was about to reply when she looked ahead and saw the view, and was mesmerized
by it: Mont Sainte Victoire shimmered, surrounded by a clear bright-blue sky. A peasant's
cabanon
—built in rough stone, a red-tile roof, and perfectly proportioned—sat proudly in a field in the distance. But what so impressed her was the giant umbrella pine in the middle of the foreground. It was as majestic as the mountain itself.

“I can see why you're painting this,” she said, almost in a whisper.

He stepped back from the canvas and Manon saw this as a cue that she could look at his painting. Philippe had described his friend's art to her, paintings that she knew only a few people liked. At first she saw only patches of color, but as she studied it more she saw the mountain, in gray and white and even pink shades, and the cabanon, and the sky that was nothing if not blue. “Monsieur, you don't sketch with charcoal first,” she said, still staring at the painting.

“No,” Cézanne replied. “I never have. I'm too impatient to get the shapes down.”

“Before they disappear,” Manon said.

Cézanne looked at her, perplexed. She spoke like someone who had studied art, like Claude's wife in Paris, not at all like a young Provençal woman who worked in a bakery. And certainly not like Hortense. But Manon Solari looked every bit a Provençale, from her layered skirts, the outer one in cotton with blue and white stripes, to her woolen cape and clogs. “
Ah, oui
,” he finally said. With his hand he gestured around the vista before them. “Before all of this disappears.”