The Forger (15 page)

“No.” I shook my head. “That’s not possible.”

“She told me herself,” insisted Pankratov. “Right before her husband arrived. She came right out and told me.”

“Why did she do it?” I asked.

“She didn’t tell me, but I know all the same. This way, they never have to fall out of love,” said Pankratov. “Now it will always be the war that drove them apart. I suppose you could think of it as merciful, if you thought about it long enough.”

I recalled the strange calm on Marie-Claire’s face when Balard had been dragged away, calling out obscenities through his charcoal-blackened teeth. She had known all along, despite any promises made in their long waking dream, that it could not last. But Balard had not known. She found it necessary to show him. Now Balard would learn things the hard way.

I said good-bye to Pankratov.

He treated me with a distant formality, as if he had already said all the good-byes he was ever going to say in his life. It was almost as if he no longer recognized me and my face had become part of the past, fragmented by time.

I was quietly miserable about leaving the atelier. In my time there, I’d persuaded myself that I knew Pankratov. Now I realized that I didn’t and would never have the chance to know him better. “I’ll come spy on you at the Dimitri,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.

“I’ll be waiting,” he replied. “Same as always.”

Chapter Six

I
RETURNED TO MY
work. I was glad to be free of those long hours at the atelier, but I missed our old group and the Egyptian mummy dryness of Pankratov’s humor.

I completed another set of sketches, these ones charcoal studies of several works by Gauguin, and handed them over to Fleury.

He had them all sold within a week.

I felt more fortunate than ever to be working with him.

We were good friends now. I did not measure my words before I spoke, the way I used to do in his company.

Having put aside my worries about paying the rent, at least for now, I grew more confident about my chances of remaining in Paris without some imaginary boundary between staying and leaving. The more time I spent here, the less I thought of my old home and my mother and my brother. When we met up again, we would pick up where we left off, as we always did. But for now, the vast silences that stretched between us were proof to me of the different worlds we had come to inhabit.

Aside from Fleury, I hadn’t made many friends in Paris. I missed the company of women. In the past, I had thought no good would come from beginning a relationship when I would have to break it off and disappear as soon as the Levasseur grant ran out. I didn’t want to get involved simply for the feeling of being involved. When I first arrived, I had promised myself no entanglements that would take away from my work. Keeping that promise had proved hard enough even without the distractions of a romance. I hoped all that might change from now on.

I’d been figuring this out one Saturday afternoon, when Fleury and I had gone to see a movie at the Cinéma Coloniale on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. It had been a matinée show, and afterwards we were dazed to find ourselves back in the daylight. It had been stuffy in the theater and I said I wanted to get some air. We walked down the Avenue de l’Observatoire to a fountain that lay in a shaded area of the Luxembourg, just in from the café called La Chaise Bleu on the Rue de Vaugirard. The stone of the fountain was damp and peppered with algae, and the statues that spat water from their mouths looked bleary-eyed and ancient, as if they too had just found their way back into the light from centuries spent underground. With each gust of wind, leaves blew down from the trees in flickering browns and reds and ambers. They settled on the surface of the fountain, skimming around like little boats in the breeze until they became waterlogged and rested flattened on the surface of the water like confetti left over from a wedding.

We sat down on a bench to have a smoke. Fleury liked English tobacco, which he bought from a tobacconist in the foyer of the Hôtel Continental on the Rue de Rivoli. He smoked a brand called Craven A, which came in flat red tins with a black cat on the front. I had brought a few packs of Chesterfields with me from the States, but I didn’t often smoke and the tobacco went stale before I finished it. So now I was trying the French stuff, Caporals, which took some getting used to.

I opened my mouth to ask Fleury what he had thought about the movie, but never had the chance to speak, because a voice called to us from behind.

We both turned and looked past the dappled bark of the trees.

A man stood behind some tall black railings that separated the street from the park. He was waving to us. He was tall and wore a big hat.

It seemed to me I had seen him someplace before, but I couldn’t recall where and his face was in the shadows.

“Monsieur Fleury,” the man called down. “I have been meaning to speak with you.”

“Yes,” said Fleury, his voice strained. “Call me tomorrow.”

The man laughed. “No. I mean now. I will only be a minute.” He was already on his way.

Fleury smiled and waved and then slumped back on the bench. The smile had been sliced off his face.

“Who is it?” I asked.

Fleury cleared his throat. “Lebel. A collector. You met him once. At that opening I took you to.”

I had some vague memory of his grizzled gray hair, sweat coming through his starched shirt and being told that he owned a cabaret. “Why don’t you want to see him?” I asked.

It was too late for Fleury to reply, because Lebel had already arrived. He had a dog on a braided leather leash, which was wrapped around his hand like knuckle straps on a boxer. The dog was a tough-looking little schnauzer with bushy eyebrows and gray fur.

Lebel and Fleury shook hands.

“This is David Halifax,” said Fleury, rising to his feet.

“Excellent,” said Lebel and stared right through me, just as he’d done the time before. He let the leash fall to the ground. The dog sniffed at my shoes with busy jerking motions of his nose.

Lebel turned back to Fleury. “It’s working out so well,” he said. “You remind me that there is still quality work to be found. Work by the great masters that hasn’t yet been gobbled up by museums or millionaires. It is out there!” He waved his hand expansively over the pond. “Monsieur Fleury, you have given me hope. I see in you a partner of many years.”

“Yes, well,” said Fleury, hands in pockets, looking down at his shoes. “I’m glad it’s all working out.”

I wasn’t paying much attention. I stayed sitting on the bench. I bent down and scratched the dog’s ears. The leash trailed behind him. The leather braid reminded me of the pattern on the back of a copperhead rattlesnake.

“Those Gauguin sketches. Such a trove,” said Lebel, wrapping his lips around the word.

For a moment, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Looking up, I saw a sudden grayness in Fleury’s cheeks as the blood left his face. Then I knew that I hadn’t misunderstood. Fleury had been selling my sketches as originals. I felt suddenly nauseous.

Lebel grasped Fleury’s hand and shook it violently. “Thank you,” he exhaled. Then he turned to his dog and snapped, “Bertillon!”

The dog gave my feet one last sniff and scuttled off, the leash slithering behind.

I didn’t wait for Lebel to meet my eyes in some blind gesture of farewell. I was staring at the ground.

Fleury sat down beside me. “That’s what I love about Lebel,” he said. His voice was falsely jovial. “When he is happy, he just can’t stand the thought of keeping it to himself.”

I watched Lebel disappear across the park, his footsteps crossed by the wandering paths of others. His shape blurred amongst the rippling shadows of the fountain and the trees, like a cat-lick figure in the background of an Impressionist painting.

“You son of a bitch,” I said very softly. “You lied to me.”

It was quiet for a long time.

Fleury sighed. “Yes, I did.”

At that moment, I was too stunned to feel anger. Instead, I sensed a rushing static all around me, sealing me off, so that Fleury’s voice reached me as if down a long cardboard tube.

Fleury had his hands in front of him now, as if weighing in his palms the air that came out of his lungs. The cigarette was wedged between the first two fingers of his right hand, smoldering patiently. “The moment I saw those sketches,” he said, “I knew I could pass them off as originals to someone who wasn’t an expert. Lebel was the first person I thought of. He lives on our street, you know. That’s how I met him. Lebel may know how to run that cabaret of his, but he’s not the art expert he believes himself to be. The more I praise his intelligence, the less intelligent he becomes. I knew he would buy them. At a glance, and even at a second or third glance, it would be assumed that the sketches were original Gauguins. The paper was old, and you were probably using old pencils, too, and your sketches were very good. Very fluid.” He was touching his lips with the tips of his fingers as he spoke, as if trying to stop the words from coming out.

“Where did you tell him they came from?” I asked.

He sipped at the smoke from his cigarette and stared straight ahead. “I made up a story about how the sketches came out of the private collection of a family friend who had passed away and that the other family members were letting me buy the work rather than putting it out on the open market themselves.”

“And everything you told me about them being sold as decorative pieces…” As the numbness of shock wore off, anger was taking its place.

“You should take it as a compliment.” Fleury tried to find his way around the lie. “I knew you’d never agree to it.”

“You’re damned right I wouldn’t,” I snapped. I was suddenly conscious of his physical frailty, in a way I never had been before. Rage glanced off my bones in coppery sparks.

“Look,” he said. “I know I had no right…”

“You had no damned right at all!” I shouted. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

Fleury got up slowly and walked over to the edge of the water. He stood for a moment, hunched over like a man grown suddenly old. “Do you
want
to stay in Paris?” he asked. He spoke so quietly that it was as if he were talking to his own reflection in the water.

“Of course I do,” I said.

Fleury straightened up. He spun on his heel and walked back to me. His face had lost its grayness. “Then you ought to
thank
me!” he said. “I did you a favor. You said yourself that if I hadn’t sold those sketches, you’d be on the boat home by now. And if I sold them for what they’re really worth, I could have bought you a week or two. A month at the most. But I knew I could get more for them, so I did. And that’s the only reason you’re here now.”

I stared at him in disbelief. “But what about the risk you took with my career?”

He slapped his hand against his chest, bouncing his palm off the thick, rough tweed. “Mine, too! I took the risk just the same as you did.”

“Yes, but you knew you were taking it! My part of that risk wasn’t yours to take and you can’t deny that!”

“What would you have done if I’d told you the truth?” he asked. “Would you have let me sell those sketches as original Gauguins?”

“Of course not!”

Fleury paced in front of me, stirring the gravel with his shoes, yellow dust coating the spit-shined toecaps. “Exactly. You’re too high and mighty. You have no idea how things work. What to do when an opportunity comes along. How to balance it against the risks. And you can’t just
not
take risks. I know what you want more than anything else in the world. I know, because I want the same thing. To be here. To be making a go of it and doing well for yourself. And did you honestly think you could get what you wanted without paying some kind of price?”

I didn’t answer. I stood and walked past Fleury, heading for the street.

Fleury stopped pacing. His anger seemed to leave him. His hands found their way into his pockets. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

I walked right by him and still gave no reply.

He made no move to stop me. “You have what you want,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”

I shuffled through the fallen leaves, my mouth and eyes dried out, noticing nothing around me.

*   *   *

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I woke as usual to the sound of the men lining up outside the Postillon warehouse. They were mostly older men now, the younger ones having been called up for military service.

For the rest of that week, I worked on my paintings. All my confidence had gone now. I worked only out of a grim stubbornness to get the job done.

Fleury kept his distance, which took some doing, considering we both lived in the same building. I tried not to think about what had happened, but of course this didn’t work. If the word got out that Fleury was selling forgeries, and that I was the one who had made them, we would both be finished in Paris. And wherever the story spread—New York, London, Rome—we’d be finished there, too. I realized that even if we seemed to have gotten away with it, I couldn’t forgive Fleury for taking the risk.

When I thought about it that way, it all seemed clear. I would have nothing to do with Fleury from now on. If I happened to run into him, which seemed inevitable if we were both to work in Paris, I would fend him off with a freeze of politeness.

Other times, it didn’t seem clear at all. The other half of my brain was telling me to shut up and face the fact that the only reason I was still here was because Fleury had sold those sketches. He had been right when he said I wanted to stay here more than anything else in the world. I asked myself what I’d have done if Fleury had come to me first and asked me what I wanted him to do. Would I really have told him not to sell the sketches, and then just packed up and left Paris? I would have run out of money by now if it weren’t for the sketches. I could only have taken on a job illegally, since I had no papers, but any job like that would have paid me so little and worked me so long that I would never have gotten any more painting done. I honestly didn’t know what I would have said to Fleury. I didn’t have the right to dismiss so easily the wrong that he had done.