The Mystery of the Lost Cezanne (10 page)

“Me, too,” Verlaque said. “Well, add your handiwork to my bill. And thanks.”

“No problem. Have a nice night.”

Verlaque opened his apartment door and set the bags on the kitchen counter. He quickly took out the wine and set the bottles in his wine fridge. He smiled, thinking of the conversation with the Alsatian shop owner, thankful that he could have interesting chats such as the one they had just had, with people he didn't know intimately.

He walked into his living room and pulled a thick Cézanne book off of his bookshelf. It had been a gift from his brother, Sébastien, when Verlaque had moved to Aix. He opened it to the first page and read Sébastien's inscription:
To my brother. Good luck in the South. You'll need it. Love, Séb.
Turning to the index, Verlaque scrolled down to look for Rebecca Schultz's name; it appeared a half-dozen times, on pages 6, 23, 25, 67, 218, and 219. He was glad that Paulik was paying Dr. Schultz a visit, and not him. He didn't have the time.

He quickly lit a fire in the fireplace and took a small Partagas out of his humidor and lit it, sitting down in a worn club chair with the book on his lap. He flipped through the book, looking at some of the color plates, then turned to a chapter entitled “Portraits and Figures.” As Marine's father had said, there were few female portraits save of Mme Cézanne, and no young redhead. He read that the painter had complained that Mme Cézanne pined for her mountains and only liked “Switzerland and lemonade.” Verlaque laughed, as he disliked both the drink and the country. He stared intently at the portraits, mesmerized by
Man with a Pipe
; the sitter's brown clothes, painted in vertical lines of color, disappeared into the brown background. The man's white pipe glowed, matching his bright-white shirt. The painting was in London, at the Courtauld, and Verlaque made a mental note to go and see it.

The author wrote that Cézanne was at ease with the workers of Aix—Verlaque could see that in the man smoking the pipe—and that the painter, especially toward the end of his life, became a recluse, speaking mostly to his maid and gardener. The author went on:
“These people had, for Cézanne, a bygone view of Time and Life.”
Verlaque appreciated that the Time and Life were capitalized, and he sat back, smoking, thinking of his grandparents Emmeline and Charles, whom he had watched, despite their wealth and education, having remarkable conversations with their staff, and waiters, and shopkeepers. These sitters in the later portraits, the author wrote, were at harmony with nature and at peace with themselves. Much like Emmeline and Charles.

Verlaque looked at a portrait that Dr. Bonnet had mentioned, of Vallier, the gardener, painted just before Cézanne died. The judge could see that here, despite having been a
quarrelsome man his whole life, the painter was at peace. Verlaque's cell phone beeped and he looked at it; it was Marine texting that she was on her way. He flipped to the back of the book, where a timeline of the painter's life covered the last few pages. He turned to the year 1885: Cézanne had been in L'Estaque, near Marseille, in the spring. He visited Auguste Renoir with Hortense and Paul Jr. in the summer. Verlaque then let out a “
C'est pas vrai!
” and reread the passage out loud:
“June and July: with Hortense and Paul chez Renoir at La Roche-Guyon, regaining his composure after a mysterious affair with an Aix woman.”

•
JANUARY 15, 1885
•

C
ézanne remembered Monet's gentle words, and the judge's wife's kind “bonjours,” and so this time he forced himself to smile at Philippe's sister, Manon. It was their second meeting, and all week he had hoped he would see her again. But before he could say something, she spoke.

“Oh, M. Cézanne! Aix is changing so quickly,” she said, throwing her arms up and then letting them fall against her thick striped skirt. “First they put an ugly eight-sided spire on the cathedral, then the same year they tear down our walls!”

He, too, had been saddened when the ancient walls that for centuries had surrounded and protected Aix were demolished. He was charmed that she referred to them as “our walls,” for he also thought of Aix as “his” town. He said, “They took the walls
down so that people could build homes in the countryside. Better for their health.”

Manon nodded but didn't reply. Only rich families could move houses; her mother would always remain in her narrow four-room house on the rue des Guerriers. Her brother, Philippe, had always made fun of their street name, “the warriors.” “That's the story of our parents' life,” Philippe had recently told Manon. “They left Italy young to live; they came here and had to fight for survival; and then they die. The real life of a warrior.”

“How long have you been painting outside, monsieur?” she finally asked.

“Since this morning.”

“Oh, I see,” Manon replied, biting her upper lip. He was as gruff as Philippe had said, but he hadn't understood her question. She tried again, “What I meant was, have you always painted like this, standing outside?” She remembered seeing a painting in the Musée Granet of a white-haired man painting, and he was clearly doing so
inside
. Her father had worked outside; some of her sisters worked outside; farmers and vintners worked outside; but here was a banker's son working outside. For there was one thing she knew: this was work for him, as it was for Philippe. It wasn't a hobby.

Cézanne found himself laughing. “Twenty years now. It's something they don't teach you in art school. I had to figure that out for myself. How long have
you
been walking
outside
?”

Manon laughed. “Since I was a little girl.”

“You've always liked plants, Mlle Solari?” he asked,

“
Oui,
” she answered. “
La nature
. There's more color here than in town.”

“All the same, there is a lot of orange and yellow in Aix,” he said. “Paris is gray.”

“Philippe told me that about Paris, too. But out here,” she said, looking at the scene before them, “there's green.” She boldly walked toward his canvas and looked closely at it.

Cézanne said nothing. He couldn't help staring at her. Her curly red hair was tied back because of the wind, and her features were clear and strong. She had a long, thin nose, high cheekbones, and big blue eyes. Her face was scarred, but it didn't make her ugly, only distinctive. He realized he was being rude by staring, but she hadn't seemed to notice, so intently was she staring at the painting.

She said, “You've taken the blue from the sky and put in the needles of the pine.”

Cézanne looked at his work. “Nature isn't just one flat color.” He hadn't meant to mumble, but that was how it came out.

“No, monsieur,” Manon replied. “It certainly isn't.” She remembered as a young girl being fascinated by some dark purple flowers she had picked, later noticing that the same hue existed in the plants and the sky all around her. He thought like she did, this M. Cézanne, and she knew that he had been ridiculed in Paris, laughed at by the public, critics, and journalists. She, too, had been mocked, for her poverty, her scarred face, her enthusiasm for art.

She glanced at the painter—who was looking at his painting, arms folded—and wondered if under his felt hat he had any hair. He wore a patterned handkerchief around his neck, bright red with tiny yellow bees on it. It was the same kind of handkerchief her brothers-in-law wore, for fêtes. She tried to imagine Cézanne wearing it in Paris, as the girls at Michaud's gossiped he did, along with a bright-red flannel taiolo tied around his waist.

Philippe had told her of a disastrous weekend Cézanne had
spent at Zola's mansion in Médan, outside of Paris. Zola had tried, in vain, to introduce his old friend to the “wide world”: successful writers, established painters, and wealthy collectors. There had even been a famous actress present. But Cézanne had stayed silent, fearful of being misunderstood, or ridiculed. Instead, Cézanne took Zola's boat—
Nana
—out across the river to a small island, and from there he painted the scene of Zola's bourgeois house and its neighbor, Médan's castle. Philippe had loved the painting—he had seen it on display at the art supplier Tanguy's—and another painter, Monsieur Gauguin, had purchased it. “That landscape shimmered,” Philippe had told Manon, trying to sketch it out for her with his hands. “Greens and ochres so intense they gleam like silk!” She looked down at the half-finished painting before her and now understood Philippe's excitement. “When I saw your painting from the forest, it looked alive. As if it could jump off of the canvas,” she said. She then added a word that Philippe had taught her: “three-dimensional.”

For the first time since they had begun speaking, Cézanne found himself smiling. “And when you look at it up close?”

“It's more flat, but that isn't bad.” She bent to get a closer look. “The way you put the paint down,” she said, pausing, “it reminds me of Bibémus.”

“The quarries?” Cézanne asked.

“Yes, the way the rocks are cut. My father was a stonemason. Those hatching marks in the rock are like your hatchings here.” She pointed to the brushstrokes.

Cézanne couldn't wait to write down what she had just said. Here was someone who understood his art. Zola still thought Cézanne was trying to be an Impressionist; his mother and sister, no matter how smothering their attention, did not
understand his art. And his father, he knew, hated it. He'd write to Zola when he got home and tell him of Mlle Solari's obeservations. Zola was furiously trying to finish a novel, so they hadn't been writing as much as they usually did. It was Zola who had taught him the value of never giving up and working until exhausted.

Manon looked at the bearded painter, who seemed to be lost in thought. She slapped her forehead and said, “I've interrupted your work. I'm so sorry, M. Cézanne.”

“It's fine—” He had wanted to add “I'm glad you came again,” but didn't. After two meetings they had shared so much.

“But the paint, it will dry, no?”

“I can take a break, mademoiselle,” he said, trying to smile to put her at ease. “It's not as if I can finish one of these in a day. It sometimes takes me months or years to finish—or to be content with—a canvas.”

“Then how do you know that a painting is finished?”

Cézanne looked at the scene before him, unable to meet her inquiring gaze. He finally said, still looking ahead at the giant green pine, “When I'm sure that I have conveyed not what I see, but what I believe in.”

S
o you've done a bit of reading in a book on Cézanne and now you're an expert?” Marine asked, dipping a piece of frankfurter into mustard.

“Don't you see?” Velaque asked, opening a second bottle of Riesling. “A mysterious woman. 1885. In Aix.”

“I get it, I get it,” Marine said. “But the person who forged that painting may also have the same book.” She winked.

“You're so cruel sometimes,” Verlaque said, smiling. “I think that our portrait is the real thing. This evening I sat here, smoking, mesmerized by Cézanne's portraits, and by his life.”

“Not you, too! I grew up traveling with my parents across Europe to see Cézanne's works.”

“I thought you guys visited Romanesque churches.”

“That was my mother's passion,” Marine said. “Cézanne was Papa's.”

“To think that he lived, worked, and walked here—” Verlaque gestured with his arm around the apartment.

Marine raised an eyebrow.

“Aix, I mean, not in my apartment.”

“You never know,” Marine said, holding out her empty glass. “Maybe their tryst was here, in your flat. Although I'm not convinced that he had an affair.”

“Dr. Bonnet, are you challenging my thesis?”

“Not at all,” Marine replied. “I agree with you that the girl in our painting may have been very special to Cézanne. But who says they slept together?”

Verlaque rolled his eyes and gave a suspicious grin. “Well, I've always thought that this apartment has good karma.”

“I'll agree with you there. I love the new addition, by the way.” She pointed to a large, colorful ceramic plate hanging on the wall above the door between the dining room and kitchen.

“Ah, Arnaud, my faithful handyman, hung that for me today,” Verlaque said. “It was Emmeline's.”

“I love those fat yellow lemons,” Marine said. “They dance around the plate. Is it Tuscan?”

“Sicilian,” Verlaque said, turning to look at it. “I remember her buying it, in a tiny shop in Ragusa.” He poured Marine some wine and went on, “Poor Cézanne. How did those guys keep on painting?”

“You mean the Impressionists?”

“And Post-Impressionists,” he said. “People hated their work, and they kept on painting.”

“Luckily they were rich,” Marine said.

“Not all of them,” Verlaque replied. “Van Gogh didn't have a pot to piss in, as my grandfather would have said. And even if Cézanne
did
have family money, he still had no one buying his art. How do you go on? Do you know what Henri Dobler, the guy who owned the Pavillon de Vendôme in Cézanne's day,
said about Cézanne's works? He called them
la sale peinture.
Dirty paintings! What an idiot!”

“You're using hindsight,” Marine said, sitting back and rubbing her stomach, regretting eating the second saucisse de Morteau. “Perhaps
we
would have said the same thing. Can you imagine, seeing those weird hatchings, in the late nineteenth century? Then again, you did buy a Pierre Soulages painting long before he was fashionable.”

“Thank you, my dear.”

“Oh, before I forget to tell you, I picked up your mail downstairs,” Marine said. “It's on the kitchen counter.”

“Thanks,” Verlaque said. “I saw it sitting in the entryway, but my hands were full. Anything interesting?”

“What looks like a personal letter from the director of the Pompidou in Paris,” Marine said. “Do you owe membership dues?”

“Certainly not,” Veralque answered. “I'm all paid up. That's the second letter Philippe has sent me.”

“First-name basis with the director of France's most important contemporary art museum? Impressive.”

“We went to boarding school together. He wants the Soulages painting for a retrospective they're organizing next year.”

“Wow, Antoine,” Marine said, lifting her glass for a toast. “That's incredible!”

“No, it isn't,” Verlaque said. “And I told him so.”

Marine shook her head back and forth. “Come again?”

“I can't let it leave here,” Veralque said. “No way.”

“I don't believe you,” Marine said, setting her glass down. “You'd hog that gorgeous painting all to yourself? Not let anyone else have the pleasure of seeing it?”

“It would be a paperwork and insurance nightmare. They've got plenty of others.”

“What if everyone said that? What if no one had ever donated, even for a few months, a painting to a world-class museum? You're selfish, do you know that?”

“I knew you'd pick a fight tonight,” Verlaque said, throwing his napkin on the table. “Just like that tantrum after the Pauliks' galette des rois.”

“And, guess what? It all has to do with the same thing!”

“Soulages?”

“No, you idiot,” Marine said, getting up from the table. “Your ego!”

 • • • 

The Hôtel Fleurie was the kind of hotel that Bruno Paulik and his wife, Hélène, liked to stay in when traveling around France. Always downtown, these small one-star hotels were family owned, quaint on the verge of faded and sometimes run-down, and without the amenities that the Pauliks didn't care about anyway, such as televisions and minibars.

Paulik paced around the waiting room and then began flipping through the guest book, its passages written in a variety of languages that included French, English, German, and what looked to him like Dutch. The hotel's owner didn't seem fazed by having a policeman visit, and she sat behind the desk reading a novel, looking up now and then at the commissioner and smiling. He turned the guest book's pages, stopping at small drawings that guests had left, one of them a quite good sketch of the sitting room that he could see from the lobby, full of mismatched, not-very-precious antiques. Some of the entries were too long, or in languages he didn't understand, but toward the end of the book was a French entry written only a
few days previously:
Room eleven,
one evening, one woman, one man. Bliss.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” a voice said from the doorway.

Paulik quickly closed the book, as if he had been caught looking at the lingerie pages of a La Redoute catalogue.

“I haven't been here long,” Paulik answered.

“Perhaps we can meet in the sitting room,” Rebecca Schultz said, turning to the hotel's owner for permission.

“
Oui, oui, oui
,” the owner said, gesturing to the sitting room. “
Allez-y.
”

“My room is the size of a postage stamp,” Dr. Schultz said.

Paulik laughed, amazed by the American's perfect French. He looked at the professor's long legs, which were clothed in pink woolen tights under an orange leather miniskirt, and he wondered how someone with so much leg could fit into a small French hotel room, or bed for that matter. Blushing slightly, as he had while reading the guest book, he opened his small notebook as they sat down, and asked, “What exactly are you doing in Aix, Dr. Schultz?”

If the professor looked surprised, she didn't show it. “It should be perfectly obvious,” she finally answered. “I'm here researching Cézanne, as I told Judge Verlaque.”

“Were you researching Cézanne when you walked into René Rouquet's apartment?”

“I saw that there had been a robbery in the building—”

“So you went in to investigate?”

“To help,” she answered, shrugging. “I was jet-lagged and not thinking straight. There I was, after spending years reading of Cézanne's last residence, able to go inside. Can't you imagine the temptation?”

“No,” Paulik answered. “I would have stayed outside and called the police. Especially given your excellent French.”

“I had forgotten my cell phone back at the hotel,” she answered. “That I also told your boss.”

If Dr. Schultz had attempted to belittle him by mentioning that he wasn't in command, Paulik thought, it hadn't worked. He was more than happy being commissioner and didn't have the law training to be an examining magistrate. But Dr. Schultz, despite her command of his language and expertise in art, obviously didn't understand how the French judicial system worked. He asked, “What did you do when you went into the apartment? What I don't understand is why you didn't call the police as soon as you saw M. Rouquet's body on the floor.”

“I was in shock,” Dr. Schultz replied. “Completely stunned.”

“Didn't it frighten you?”

Dr. Schultz paused before saying, “No. Given my fatigue, and the astonishment of being in Cézanne's apartment, it all seemed unreal.”

“Your fingerprints were found on a number of items in the flat,” Paulik said. “The wardrobe in the bedroom, for example. Why in the world would you go into the bedroom when there was a dead man in the living room?”

Dr. Schultz began picking at what looked like imaginary lint on her tights.
Jesus, the lint trick
, Paulik thought to himself.

“The wardrobe was nineteenth century, and I imagined it being Cézanne's, given the rest of the cheap '60s furniture in the flat,” she replied. “I opened it half out of curiosity, half from amazement.” Before Paulik could continue questioning, she went on, “The same thing for the kitchen cupboards. I guess I had hoped to see those ceramic pitchers and plates from his still lifes in there. But what you must know is that I was only in
there for a few minutes before I began looking for the phone to call the police. But then they came—”

“It took you a few minutes to decide?”

“Yes,” she replied, staring at Paulik and then crossing her arms across her chest. “And if you were a black Jewish woman who had worked all her life to finally get a white Anglo-Saxon man's job, and you were caught trespassing and entering where there had just been a murder, you, too, would have thought twice before deciding to phone for help instead of running straight out the door.”