The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter, page 20
“A busybody.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” I said, trying to appease him.
“I’m very busy this morning, monsieur. Is this an official visit?”
“I seek your advice. Not for myself. A friend.” It was weak, but my mind was in a whirl.
“The busybody? Send him for a rest cure. The Swiss Alps. Pardon me, please.”
I had been feinting left and right, trying to block the door, but now I was obliged to stand aside. He set the key in the lock. At first he had trouble turning it—he was trying to unlock a door already unlocked—but eventually he got the door open.
I laid a hand on his arm. “I’ve grown close to Theo van Gogh these last few days. His condition grieves me.”
“Theo is a man of delicate constitution. The stress he underwent with his brother’s death has no doubt laid him low.” Gachet opened the door. I slipped into the outer room ahead of him, looking about wildly for a sign of the detective. I whirled round and interposed myself between the doctor and his surgery door.
“It’s far worse than that!” I cried. “I fear he may be following his brother into madness.”
Gachet could hardly be less concerned. “If he wants to consult with me, I should be glad to examine him,” he said, pushing past me into the surgery.
“Oh, but I’m afraid he won’t be willing! Van Gogh’s faith in the doctors was shaken by his brother’s death.” The surgery was empty. There was no one at the desk, no one near the couch, no one anywhere at all.
Then I saw it. The north window stood slightly ajar. Vernet, madman that he was, must have decided to repeat his roof-walking trick of the day before. But had Gachet seen it, too? It was imperative I keep him distracted long enough for Vernet to get away. He might be a master of disguise, but he was too large to impersonate a pigeon.
There were some rather awful etchings on the wall behind the doctor’s desk, which I hadn’t noticed the day before. I squinted up at the signature. “Who is this Van Ryssel? Another Dutchman?”
“You like those?”
“They’re remarkable,” I said, skirting a lie.
“My own work. Amateur stuff.” But even as he said it, he beamed with pride.
“Amateur! So modest. Your use of line smacks of Ingres.” If he were as vain as every painter I had ever met, I knew I could play upon those strings forever.
Gachet sighed like a girl. “Sometimes I wonder what I might do if I devoted myself solely to painting.”
“But a nerve specialist and a painter both? Extraordinaire!”
“I find art a relief from the mundane cares of medicine. The great Leonardo da Vinci was also a renowned anatomist, you know.”
Would he dare to lecture me on Da Vinci? I turned around, looking for another diversion. “And that? That must be a Monet!” It was a picture of a haystack, hanging above the couch. I was taking a reasonable chance.
“It’s a copy, actually. I’m sure you could tell.”
He was sure? How could I possibly tell? How does one tell a copy of a haystack from the original when every stalk is painted a different color? How does one even begin? I stared at it, witless.
“My student, Mademoiselle Derousse, made that. She’s remarkably talented, for a young woman.”
Blast, he’d noticed the open window! He was moving toward it. What now? Thinking furiously, I turned to the Oudin coil, running a hand over the shining copper tubing.
“You use this apparatus to treat your patients?”
He turned from the window without looking out. “Electrotherapy can be effective in treating cases of melancholia. Also, it is beneficial for those who suffer from syphilis. I’m something of a pioneer in this field.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. The man’s vanity was a lever that could move the world.
“Perhaps we could convince Monsieur Van Gogh he has syphilis. He keeps going on about an assignation with some woman named Olympia.”
I hadn’t meant to mention the name; it had simply slipped out. But there was no question of its effect on Gachet. He stared at me, the blood draining from his face, his lips working, but not a whisper emerged.
“How does this thing work?” I asked, patting the condensing couch.
I had gone too far. A look kindled in his eyes that may have been professional enthusiasm but struck me more as sadist’s delight.
“Here, let me show you. Give me your coat. Sit there. No, no, sit, you’ll find this fascinating.” I did my best to beg off, but now he had the bit between his teeth, he was going to run with it. “Lie back and grasp the electrodes—there and there.”
I found myself on my back, staring up at the ceiling, remembering prayers from my childhood—dein Reich komme; dein Wille geschehe, wie im Himmel so auf Erden. To say I didn’t trust the man was wildly understating the case. I was putting my life in the hands of a charlatan who might also be a murderer. I wanted to run howling from the room, but I knew I must give Vernet time to make good his escape.
“Ready, then?” He clapped his hands. I nearly jumped to the ceiling. “Oh! The lotion! Mustn’t forget the lotion!” He squirted some kind of lotion on my palms, then wrapped my hands round the electrodes again. I braced myself for the shock.
A switch was thrown. There was the hum of the transformer, and the crackle of voltage. Violet sparks crackled from one coil to the other in a danse macabre. I felt a jolt, or imagined one, and then a warm thrill pervading my entire being.
“Are you comfortable?”
I tried to nod. My muscles were numb, or at least too far distant to call upon. I may have shivered. A bird may have passed. Gachet’s eyes were drawn to the open window. I was sunk in a torpor. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t lift a finger; I had no means of distracting him. He went to the window. He would shut it, that would be an end of it—no, he looked out! To his left, to his right, he must have seen Vernet inching across the tiles! He shut the window, secured the catch, and turned toward me. He shot a piercing glance at me. The game was up! My palms were sweating, even with the lotion, but I was unable let go. He glided over to the control panel, his back to me. Would I be electrocuted? The hum of the transformer soared to its highest pitch. My ears popped. The noise stopped. Silence.
“Was there anything else?”
“Eh?” I found my hands sliding off the electrodes. I drew myself up to a sitting position.
“Was there anything else? I’m very busy today, Monsieur Lermolieff. If there’s nothing else?”
And now I was back from the medieval torture chamber of my imagination, in the quotidian world of a doctor’s office in Paris on a summer morning, wiping the lotion from my hands with my handkerchief. I could hear pigeons cooing outside the window. I put on my coat, bade the doctor good morning, and left—fairly flying down the stair.
I stood out in front of the building, shivering in the morning sun, not knowing whether to mount a search for Vernet or find a cab and simply return to the hotel to wait, when a four-wheeler actually stopped in front of me. I was attempting to wave it on when Vernet leaned out and invited me to join him inside. I climbed in. Vernet called to the driver and we were once again in motion. Always in motion with Vernet.
“How was your stroll?” I asked.
“I’m afraid the diamond-cutter down the hall from Gachet will discover he’s had a break-in. He’ll be relieved to find nothing missing, however, and may take this as a warning to have bars installed in his skylight. How did you find Dr. Gachet this morning?”
“Nervous as a cat.” I relayed the gist of my interview with the doctor, including his fraught reaction to the name “Olympia.”
Vernet beamed. “We’ll make a detective of you yet, Lermolieff. And now we must take steps to smoke out our friend Gauguin.”
“How do we accomplish that?”
“We’ll offer him something he can’t refuse.”
Chapter Fourteen
With this object in mind, once we had breakfasted we made our way again to see Theo van Gogh. Theo’s exertions of the day before had taken their toll on his fragile health. Today he was confined to an armchair, generaling Madame Van Gogh and her brother, Monsieur Bonger, in the never-ending inventory and cataloging of Vincent’s canvases.
“Messieurs, forgive me if I don’t get up,” he said as we entered the drawing room. “Do you come with greetings from Gauguin?”
Gauguin had not returned to Schuffenecker’s, nor had he been spotted in any of the familiar haunts of his crowd. “Your client has managed to make himself scarce.” Vernet said nothing about the duel.
“One of his talents. I should have warned you. We’re quite busy here, however—”
“Theo, this isn’t one of Vincent’s, is it?” asked Bonger, holding up a canvas for his inspection.
“No, of course not. It’s a Cezanne. It should have been framed. I said so to—”
Vernet broke in. “Monsieur, I have a particular favor to beg. Could you send word to Gauguin that you’ll advance him the necessary funds for his passage to Madagascar?”
Van Gogh turned his attention back to us, astonishment in his face. “I’m not in the habit of lying to clients, monsieur. I couldn’t raise a sum like that if I wanted to.”
“Lying is not a habit but an art. Monsieur Gauguin would tell you that if he were here. But he’s gone to ground. It’s imperative for his own safety that we find him quickly.”
“When did you become concerned with Gauguin’s safety?”
“Gauguin has cultivated some dangerous connections. Lately they have tired of him. They’re clearing their ledgers of all red ink. Jean Poulet was murdered three nights ago outside of Le Mirliton. Gauguin may be next, if we cannot find him soon. I want him alive and well.”
Van Gogh took a moment to consider this new intelligence, and weigh it in his own scales of morality. “What would you have me do?”
“A freighter leaves Calais for India tomorrow night. It stops in Madagascar. Tell him you’ve booked his passage, and you’ll remit the rest of the money when he makes landfall. We’ll be waiting for him at the train. Trust me—it’s the only way to keep him safe.”
“He won’t be deceived. Unless”—an idea presented itself to Theo—”unless he has the money in hand. Nothing but bank notes will convince him.”
“Gauguin’s no fool. He’ll wonder where you got the money from, Theo,” said his brother-in-law.
“Tell him you sold a few of his paintings,” Vernet suggested.
“Gauguin’s prices are not such that a few paintings would do the job,” said Bonger. This brother-in-law was a po-faced stick of a man whose only admirable quality seemed to be his solicitude for his sister and her husband.
“We shall trust to his vanity, Andries,” Theo replied.
“How much, then?” asked Vernet.
“I think three thousand francs would be sufficient to bait the trap.”
Vernet did not blink at the sum. “I’ll wire my principal for the funds, and have a courier deliver them to you.”
“That should satisfy Gauguin.”
“But where will you send the money to, Theo? If Monsieur Gauguin has disappeared?” asked his wife.
Van Gogh’s eyes appealed to Vernet.
“Send it to Schuffenecker’s. I have no doubt his good lady wife can get a message to her friend,” Vernet said acidly.
Bonger held up his canvas again. “Theo, this Cezanne, I think the paint’s cracking.”
“Cracking? Where?” He squinted at the painting. “Damn his eyes!” Van Gogh flew into a sudden fury. “I told him it must be framed!”
The sound of an infant crying broke from the bedroom.
“Theo! You’ve woken the baby!” Madame Van Gogh threw an accusing look at him and hurried into the bedroom.
“Blame Gachet! Blast him!”
The name turned the tumblers in Vernet’s mind. He gestured imperiously for the painting in question. Bonger hesitated, then handed it to him. He studied it close up, even went so far as to sniff it. “Monsieur Van Gogh, you say this is not one of your brother’s paintings?”
“No, of course not. It’s a Cezanne. If Gachet had had it properly framed—”
“Would the sight of a cracked painting have angered your brother, too?”
“Vincent would have thrashed Gachet for this.”
“A Cezanne, you say, not a . . . Guillaumin, perhaps?”
Vernet stared off into the distance. For once I could follow his exact train of thought. He was casting his mind back to that night at Ravoux’s, the conversation with Gachet:
“Vincent was fussing over a painting I’d acquired that hadn’t yet been framed, he claimed the paint was cracking—”
“One of his paintings?”
“No, no, a friend of his—a Guillaumin, I think it was.”
Vernet put the painting in my hands. I knew at once what he was asking. But could I manage it? Had I seen enough of Paul Cezanne’s paintings by now to make the necessary judgment? A swarm of images leapt to mind.
The painting was a mess, something dashed off in an hour, I’d guess. It seemed to depict a buxom nude, draped coquettishly across a bed, or perhaps it was a cloud. A servant girl has just stripped the bedclothes from her body, revealing her nakedness. In the foreground, a bearded, balding gentleman seated on a divan, surely her client, is seen turned away three-quarters from the viewer, drinking in her pink flesh. I searched my memory, reimagining the Cezannes I had seen before. His singular technique was hard to forget.
“I cannot be definitive, of course . . .”
“But you’ve arrived at a verdict,” said Vernet, pleased with his trick pony.
“It’s not Cezanne.”
Van Gogh and Bonger exchanged skeptical looks.
“I caught the odor of beeswax. Is there any reason a painting should smell of beeswax?” asked Vernet.
Van Gogh thought for a moment. “It may have been relined.”
“Relined? What does that mean?”
“It’s a method of flattening the surface of a painting while strengthening its support. Sometimes the entire painting is transferred to a second canvas. The beeswax is used to attach the original primer to the new canvas.”
“Is it possible you can show me?”
“If my wife will heat an iron . . . Johanna! Andries, we’ll need a flour paste, enough to cover the canvas. Doctor, the canvas must be removed from the stretcher. Bring him some pliers, Andries. Monsieur Vernet, I believe there are some newspapers in the cupboard there.”
We all sprang to work under Theo’s direction. Bonger dragged a table into the center of the room and set the painting on it. He went to the kitchen and came back with a pair of pliers. I set to work separating canvas from stretcher.
“Where did this painting come from?” asked Vernet, spreading newspapers on the table.
“Gachet’s collection. He and Cezanne are old friends. Gachet asked us for a painting of his garden that Vincent had made. He promised to send me a Guillaumin nude in return. He sent this instead. It’s a rather notorious parody of Manet’s Olympia, if you’ve seen that? Cezanne dashed it off on a bet. It’s called—”
Vernet sucked in his breath. The name hung in the air.
“It’s called A Modern Olympia.”
Soon Bonger had the flour paste ready, and used it to stick the newspapers to the canvas. Madame Van Gogh brought in a hot iron, and Bonger began moving it across the back of the canvas according to Theo’s instructions. The tension crackled like the lightning bolts from the Oudin coils. We could all smell the wax growing warm, melting. Then, unexpectedly, two canvases, one peeling away from the other.
“Now, Andries. Slowly.” It was a whisper.
Bonger lifted the second canvas with infinite care. It peeled off, revealing another painting entirely. Madame Van Gogh dabbed away the liquefied wax with a cloth, revealing a painting whose copy I had uncovered in the Louvre only two weeks ago: Watteau’s The Judgement of Paris—but this, this was the original!
“Not mad. Not mad, Doctor!”
Vernet laughed a long, hearty laugh, slapping my back. Somehow we found ourselves in a bear hug, laughing and pounding each other’s backs, almost dancing with glee. We remembered our dignity and drew apart. Our staid Dutch friends were watching us, astonished. They were even more astonished when it was borne in on them that they had a Jean-Antoine Watteau original lying on a table in their modest family room.
“Monsieur Van Gogh, I’ll arrange for the police to remove this painting as soon as humanly possible. Until then, I fear you and your wife may be in some danger. Please take this.”
Vernet tugged a revolver from his coat pocket. The rest of us drew back at the sight of a firearm. It was as if children around a Ouija board had summoned an actual demon. He handed the gun to Van Gogh, who took it as if it scorched him.
“It’s more intimidating if you point the muzzle away from yourself,” Vernet cautioned.
“Why should we be in any danger?” asked Madame Van Gogh, her voice quavering.
“Vincent saw this same painting at Gachet’s and berated him because it was cracked. Three days later he was dead.”
We left the Van Goghs with admonishments on both sides. Vernet immediately fired off a cable to his brother in London, arranging for three thousand francs to be sent to Theo van Gogh without delay. It seemed a sizeable chunk of cheese, but I supposed it would be recovered when we trapped the rat. We then returned to the Palais de Justice to inform Goron of our discovery, and arrange for the Watteau to be returned to the Louvre. Goron congratulated us and promised to see to the painting’s retrieval himself.
“That leaves us idle as tinkers until we spring the trap on Gauguin tomorrow night, Dr. Lermolieff,” said Vernet. “How shall we occupy our time? Shall we take in a museum?” He was joking, or so I hoped.
“If I may make a suggestion? Sybil Sanderson is singing at the Palais Garnier tonight,” said Goron.
“Good sir, you drop manna in the way of starvéd people,” replied Vernet. Thus we were decided, without, of course, a yea or nay solicited from me. But I was not displeased.
