The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter, page 7
We kept pace with them, staying well back from the road. Vernet navigated among copses and hedges and garden walls, keeping us virtually invisible. He had a marvelous knack for moving from cover to cover, that seemed almost instinctual, like Natty Bumppo in the stories.
But we weren’t the only ones shadowing the funeral. As we dodged among the tombstones in the cemetery, we caught sight of another figure standing spectral in a curtain of yew between ourselves and the mourners verging the grave. He was a big, broad-shouldered man with unkempt dark hair, dressed in a suit of dark velvet that had seen better days. Vernet moved up behind him. I hung back a step.
“You were a friend?” Vernet asked quietly.
The big man whirled around, startled. “Ah! No, monsieur. Had no idea. Just out for a stroll.” He gave a wink as though he was taking us into his confidence. I had no doubt that Vernet was no more taken in by his nonchalant air than I was. This was one of the men from the train, the men who had threatened Mademoiselle Gachet.
Now that I could study his face up close, there was something that put me in mind of Mongols plundering across the steppes, scything a trail of death and destruction in their wake. Perhaps it was only the drooping black moustache and the pendant lip, or perhaps it was the eyes, slits curved like scimitars against the dazzle of the August sun.
“You live in the village?” Vernet asked him idly.
“God, no, Paris. Just up here for the day. A little country air. Who was he?” He nodded toward the funeral.
“A painter named Van Gogh. No one you would have heard of. You’re a painter yourself, though.”
“What put that in your head? I’m a stockbroker.” He extended his hand to shake. “Name’s Schuffenecker. You?”
Vernet took his hand and turned his wrist. “Tell me, Monsieur Schuffenecker, how does a stockbroker get flecks of cadmium yellow and Prussian blue on his sleeve?”
The other man snatched back his hand, then chuckled, trying to make light of it. “You one of those carnival palm readers?” He lodged a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and struck a match. “Guess my weight?”
“By your gait, I would say you were a sailor for a time, and by your wrist I’d say you were a fencer.” Schuffenecker dropped the match in the grass and stared, as if he had seen the devil in Vernet’s eyes. Vernet stepped toward him and stamped out the flame.
Schuffenecker returned the cigarette to his pocket. “Found me out. Good eye. It’s true, I’m a weekend painter. Just a few daubs. Nothing like that fellow.”
“You’ve seen his work?”
“Should I?”
A wail rose up from the gravesite. Dr. Gachet had been stumbling through a maudlin eulogy, but had become so overcome with emotion or drink that he had to be led away. They began lowering the coffin into the grave, a chancy proposition without the help of a proper church sexton. The girl in white strayed toward us from the crowd, in pursuit of a flock of purple gentian. Schuffenecker took the opportunity to doff his hat and back away. Vernet did not attempt to detain him.
We could hear the sough of the spades. “Shall we go pay our respects to Van Gogh?” I asked.
“No need. He is coming to us.” Indeed, the Dutchman had broken away from the group he was talking to and was coming to meet us. I blenched to think what Vernet might say to the man this time.
But Vernet rose to the occasion with unlooked-for grace. “Monsieur, let me offer my profoundest sympathy. Your brother’s paintings affect me deeply. I wish I had known the man,” he said simply, taking Van Gogh’s hand. I offered my sympathies as well, in more conventional tones.
Van Gogh cast his eyes to the ground. “Monsieur Vernet, you appear to have made a few acquaintances among my friends. They tell me that you may not be what you seem. That you’re in fact a detective of some kind.”
I had no doubt it was Mademoiselle Valadon who had put that flea in his ear.
Vernet was unruffled by his unmasking. “I represent a consortium that has certain interests in the Parisian art world, and suspects those interests may be threatened by a criminal conspiracy.”
“And you believe my brother was involved?”
“I believe your brother was no suicide. Whether his death has any connection to my investigation, I cannot venture to say. But I am not a great believer in coincidence.”
Van Gogh had approached us with something particular to say, and now decided to say it. I prepared for a tongue-lashing. “My brother once said that to commit suicide was to turn one’s friends into murderers. I am no murderer, messieurs. Please, do what you can to discover the truth. If I can be of any assistance, don’t hesitate to call on me.”
Needless to say, it was not what I had expected. He turned away, suddenly shy, and retreated to the safety of the crowd. I started to register my surprise, but Vernet put a finger to his lips. He led me away, taking another road, and we were soon walking among the beeches and the drowning willows down by the river, taking a half hour’s holiday from the world. One question nagged at me.
“Did you mean what you said?” I asked Vernet. “About Vincent’s paintings?”
“I did. But I have been told by experts that my taste in art is execrable.” He chuckled at some private memory.
“Yes? And how do your tastes tend?”
“I’m fond of the Belgian moderns. Karel Ooms. Jan Verhas. My friend Du Maurier introduced me to their work a few years ago, and I was smitten.”
Verhas! A man who’d made his name painting portraits of the apple-cheeked children of the petite bourgeoisie. I tried to picture this man, whose daily work was blood and depredation, passing his hours in front of Children Blowing Bubbles. The idea was so grotesque as to be laughable. I recommended Constantin Meunier, another Belgian, to him; he promised to acquaint himself.
We left Auvers on the afternoon train and stayed the night in Paris. The detective had some mysterious business to see to there, which he did not invite me to join in. I opted for dinner with some German friends, whom I hadn’t seen in years, not since our old days at the court of Prince Frederick. I tried to dismiss Vernet’s investigations from my mind for a few hours; I failed miserably. I found myself paying attention to the minutest details of my surroundings, the waiter’s fingernails, the weave of the tablecloth, the drape of my friends’ dinner jackets, as if the world were a problematic canvas. Though my dinner companions, both members of the German diplomatic corps, had moved to Paris shortly after the fall of the Commune twenty years earlier, they spoke of nothing but Germany, the shocking fall of the Iron Chancellor, the surprising pick of Caprivi as his successor, and the inevitability of his failure. Since we were dining in the Brebant, at the base of Eiffel’s iron tower, and none of us had visited Germany in years, it was the idlest speculation. The saddle of lamb was uninspired. The conversation turned awkward when they asked me what business had brought me to Paris. I sated their curiosity by telling them I had been called in to authenticate some paintings in a collection. I omitted to mention that the collection was the Louvre.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the face of the dying Dutchman, every pause in the conversation whispered the enigmatic name “Olympia.” I wanted to ask them if they’d ever known a man who’d shot himself. Self-destruction was not so rare, especially in Germans of a certain class, that it would have shocked either of them. If a man wanted to shoot himself, Vernet had said, he’d put the gun to his temple, or his mouth. He might even shoot himself in the heart; cast-off lovers often did. But it should be obvious to anyone that to shoot oneself in the abdomen would be extremely painful, without necessarily leading to the desired result. For a right-handed man to shoot himself in the left side would be absurdly awkward. And then the path of the bullet had showed a downward trajectory. Vincent had been shot from above. Perhaps he had been on his knees in front of his executioner? And the fact that the bullet had not gone through could only mean the shot had been fired from a distance. Only a foot away perhaps, but how does a man shoot himself from a foot away, and from above? Or perhaps it was perfectly possible, for all I knew. I had learned human anatomy from Da Vinci and Raphael, not Galen or Vesalius.
I might not have been so fractious had I been able to pose my questions to Vernet, but he had been singularly uncommunicative in the train, warning me repeatedly against forming theories in advance of data. I agreed it was a reasonable admonition in the forgery case; there was a great deal more to learn from the consortium in Montpellier. But the mystery of the painter’s death had begun to prey upon my mind. Had we left a killer behind us in Auvers? Might he kill again? Vernet seemed entirely indifferent.
Next day at break of dawn we were boarding the train at Gare de Lyon for the south. I was bleary-eyed after too late a night and too much Bénédictine, but the detective appeared buttoned down and eager for the journey. We would not arrive in Montpellier until late morning of the following day. I had convinced Vernet to book us berths on a Wagon-Lits coach, and let his cousin, Monsieur Lecomte, foot the bill. I don’t think the luxury appealed to him per se, a man so careless of his own comforts, but the chance to annoy his cousin most certainly did. I expected to recoup my rest during an uneventful journey.
It was not to be.
It happened as I was returning to my sleeper after lunch, anticipating a nap. I noticed the door was ajar. I assumed the porter was inside, putting things in order. As I pushed the door open, powerful arms pushed back, sending me flying across the passage. The door was flung open and a stranger erupted into the corridor. I had but a moment to capture his features: short and stout, moon-faced, with a shock of fair hair and muttonchops—the other ogre from the Auvers train! He was hugging my Gladstone to his chest. I grabbed for it, spilling some of its contents yet again, but he drove a fist into my sternum, slamming me back against the partition wall. I must have cried out; Vernet appeared in the doorway of his own compartment, just down the passage. He took it in at once: me gasping for breath, the drawings on the floor, the intruder’s wild eyes flashing between us. Then the intruder was on the run with my bag, Vernet flying past me in pursuit. One after the other they slammed through the door at the end of the carriage. I hobbled after them, wheezing like a bellows.
I pursued them through one carriage after another, stopping at whiles to reach down and retrieve some of my sketches the thief had let drop in his wake. I arrived at the luggage van just as the far door slammed. I made my way dodging among steamer trunks and stacks of crates that swayed and threatened to spill on top of me with the rocking of the train. I opened the far door.
Vernet stood on the observation platform, leaning against the rail, his pipe clenched between his teeth. Schuffenecker lit a match with a steady hand, shielding it from the wind, and helped the detective to a light. They might have been two old Etonians lounging in the foyer of a Pall Mall club.
“Ah! Dr. Lermolieff! You remember our acquaintance from Auvers, Monsieur Schuffenecker?”
It was a small platform with the three of us standing there. There was not an inch of concealment. The thief had vanished with my drawings. I saw pages flying in the wind behind the train. I nodded dumbly toward the Frenchman.
“You cut short your stay in the country?” Vernet asked pleasantly.
“Business called me away.” Schuffenecker was not a man of elaborate explanations.
“One of your Parisian clients?”
“Toulouse. An elderly countess who requires the personal touch.”
The train gave a sudden jerk. Vernet stumbled against Schuffenecker, then righted himself. The broker patted his coat with a look of dismay.
“Some clients are easily alarmed by sudden shifts in the market,” Vernet remarked pleasantly.
There was more desultory conversation about the journey, about the weather, about nothing at all. Yet harmless as it all seemed, I had the feeling of watching two bare-knuckle brawlers trading body blows, till they were at an impasse. Silence overcame us, save for the clicking of the wheels and the buffeting of the wind. After a decent interval, Schuffenecker made his excuses and retreated back inside the train.
“Vernet!” I burst forth, as soon as we had seen his back. “What happened to the thief? How did he elude us?”
“He didn’t. I followed him to the end of the train. But he had already disembarked.”
I looked at the steep embankment along which we were thundering. “He threw himself from the train?” I asked in horror.
“Was thrown, more likely. Schuffenecker is a man of quick decision and ruthless application.”
We were thundering along at nearly fifty miles an hour. A fall like that could break a man’s neck.
“You think they were in league together?”
“I’m certain of it. They were the two men who visited Mademoiselle Gachet. And I extracted this item from Schuffenecker’s lapel pocket.”
He handed me a diary, the very diary this account is taken from. It had resided in the bag with my sketches. I seized it eagerly.
“You’d have made quite the Artful Dodger,” I said, admiringly. But then I was stricken by a terrible realization. “All my drawings, all my documentation—gone! I have nothing to show the consortium.”
“A bad business that,” Vernet agreed with perfect equanimity. “But your conclusions are more important than your proofs, which would hardly be admissible as evidence before a magistrate. And the fact that someone felt it necessary to purloin those proofs validates them.”
His points were logical as always, but cold comfort. I pointed out the forced lock of my compartment to the porter, who brought in the conductor to adjudicate, who in turn practically accused me of breaking down the door myself, before finally giving in and moving me to another compartment. I bolted the door on the inside and dragged my trunk across the door as a barricade in case there were more attackers lying in wait. Then I composed myself for my long-delayed nap. And found myself wide awake.
I don’t think I’m a physical coward. I have done my service in the military. But the cloistered world of galleries and museums affords one little chance to test one’s mettle. I hadn’t expected to risk life and limb in this enterprise, even when the possibility of murder had been introduced into the equation. I considered my wife and children, and my responsibilities to them. Was this playacting at being a detective not a betrayal of their trust? Once I had delivered my report to the consortium—and what a fiasco that would be, now that I had been robbed of my studies!—I would return home to my family, no matter what questions remained unanswered. I tossed and turned through the night, wrestling with my decision. The miles clicked by in the dark.
By early next morning, we had truly arrived in the south, the shimmering valley of the Rhône, in which each blue atom of the sky jostles against the one next to it. But with the south came also the mistral, the furious wind that blows from the mountains to the sea. It’s a rare occurrence in the summer months, so our attendant in the dining car told us, but all the more dangerous for that; it withers the crops and can turn the spark of a wagon wheel on paving stone into a raging fire. But watching the wind slam doors shut and spin the dust of the street into cyclones was oddly exhilarating, as though there were devils in the air. When the train stopped in the town of Arles to refuel, we learned we had an hour’s delay. Vernet suggested we get out and do battle with the elements. I was tired of the stale air in the compartment, and readily agreed.
I rued the decision almost immediately upon disembarking. The wind howled at us, slapping our faces red and raw. There were women in the streets moving side to side in a slow ballet, sprinkling water on the cobbles to keep down the dust, the wind playing mischief with the hems of their skirts; all they effected was to turn the dust into spiraling sprays of mud.
Across the road the station café beckoned. I put my head down and bulled my way toward it. Then I realized Vernet was not with me. I turned around; he was standing in the middle of the street, oblivious to the elements, staring up at the tobacco shop next to the café, his coat flapping about him. A perfectly ordinary shop, painted bright yellow with a green door. The shutters were locked; it was too early for business. I called out, but my words were thrown back at me by the wind. I gestured emphatically toward the café and pushed toward it. Damn the man anyway.
I tripped over the threshold into the café, cutting a slice out of the early-morning silence. An old billiard table commandeered the center of the room, the baize worn down to the slate. It was flanked by a dozen granite-top tables. One of last night’s patrons was passed out facedown at a table near the door, with the reek of vomit rising from him. A small bar stood at the far end of the room beneath an old station-clock; its drip-drop tick-tock was the only answer to my call of good morning. Next to it stood a potbelly oven, a battered pot of coffee on top sending up a curl of steam. Eventually I heard slippered feet on the stair, and the café owner, as I assumed he must be, appeared in the doorway.
He was a small man with thinning black hair, watchful eyes, and a face coarse as a slab of beef. He was holding his boots in one hand; perhaps he feared to wake the house. He said nothing, but looked at me askance. There was that look in his eye, common to southerners, as though poised between taking the stranger into his heart or stabbing him in the ribs.
“Coffee, please,” I said, and then added, “and a brandy.” The mistral gets into one’s bones.
