Caravaggio's Angel (24 page)

It made sense. The autopsy had told the truth. He hadn’t actually killed her – not in the sense of laying hands on her. When she said he’d made her ill, he’d assumed she was talking metaphorically:
You make me ill.
But in fact she really was ill. She was old and frail and he’d made her so angry and frightened that she had a heart attack. He’d scared her to death. And he knew all right, he knew. I’d seen him. But he told himself what he told himself, and let himself off the hook. It was the start of an election campaign, life was a string of urgent engagements – that was why he’d had to change his plans in the first place. It wasn’t the moment to quibble about details.

And when I’d gone? What happened – or didn’t happen – then?

I said, ‘Yes, the front door was locked when I went back. The whole place was shut. I thought he must have taken her off with him.’

‘Managed like a true politician,’ Manu pronounced. ‘Guilty as hell, but technically in the clear. To our future President.’ He lifted his glass.

I said, half-jokingly, ‘Let’s hope he doesn’t make a habit of it,’ and thought again of Delphine.

‘But that’s the trouble,’ Manu said. ‘He does.’

I stared at him.

‘My uncle Antoine,’ he said.

‘But I thought he committed suicide.’

‘Maybe . . . People don’t just commit suicide like that. Why would he do it? He had a good life. Everything was going fine.’ He picked up his glass again, but it was empty. ‘Another?’

‘Just a small one.’ I noticed his hand was shaking. ‘We should really get something to eat . . . Are you saying that had something to do with your father?’

He shrugged unhappily. ‘I don’t know. What I do know is that Antoine was as horrified as me when it became clear he might really become President. We were in the apartment, watching television, when he announced it. I feel this is something I owe the French people blah blah. Antoine said, He can’t, and I said, Oh yes he can, you just watch. So Antoine said, No, I’m going to stop it. I asked him how, but he wouldn’t tell me. He just said he could. He said, This is something I owe the French people, and we laughed. But then, a few days later, when it came up again, he looked very serious and shook his head and wouldn’t discuss it. All he’d say was, I can’t bear to talk about it, your father is a very wicked man. And two weeks after that he was dead.’

‘And you thought it was to do with the picture. Isn’t that why you gave me your grandmother’s address? You’d promised your uncle you wouldn’t, but you felt that let you off the promise.’

Manu sighed. ‘The thing is, I heard them arguing about it. Antoine and my father. It was some family do, a wed-ding, those were the only times we all met. Antoine mentioned the Caravaggio, there was obviously something he wanted to do, and my father was shouting at him. Whatever it was he wasn’t having it. He was really angry. Have you taken leave of your senses, don’t you understand what that would mean, telling him it wasn’t his to do what he liked with, it belonged to the whole family, on and on. But I can’t bear that kind of thing, so I went off and left them to it.’

‘When was that?’

‘It must have been when my cousin Jeanne got married. Sometime in May.’

‘This year?’

He nodded. ‘Why, what difference does that make?’

I was thinking. May. That figured. TM had given me the go-ahead in March. I’d been in touch with the Louvre and the Getty, and they’d both said yes. Subject to conditions, obviously, but in principle, yes. And then, at the beginning of June, the Louvre’s permission was withdrawn. Just like that, no reason given. Of course Antoine Rigaut must have suspected I’d be round, trying to persuade him to think again. And it was not impossible I’d find my way to Manu. So he’d exacted his promise.

Yet in April he’d been all for it. That phrase in his letter about having some suggestions to offer – it must mean he’d intended to send me to St Front. So what could have happened between April and June to change his mind?

What would you do, if you were Rigaut and a letter like mine arrived, requesting the loan of a picture for an exhibition? It’s obvious: unless it was very familiar, you’d take a look at it.

I was willing to bet that it was a while since Rigaut had spent any time in front of the Louvre St Cecilia. Caravaggio wasn’t one of his main interests. True, he’d grown up with another version of that very picture, but that didn’t mean he was particularly fond of it.

So perhaps this was the first time he’d looked at it hard. He would quickly have seen that it wasn’t actually very good, and being human, would surely have felt rather pleased that the family version was better. But once he’d got interested he probably wouldn’t have left it there. Could that really be a Caravaggio? All artists have their off-days, but . . . He’d have had some tests and X-rays done, and he’d have done some reading round. The Louvre must have had a copy of the Surrealist pamphlet – Rigaut probably had one himself, perhaps more than one. After all, it had been put together by his uncle and his father. And looking at it again, perhaps more attentively than before, he’d have noticed the flower detail, and realized that the pictures had been exchanged, and that the substitution must have happened when the Louvre picture was ‘borrowed’.

If that was true – if the picture hadn’t been borrowed but stolen, and an inferior picture, the one bought by his grandfather, substituted for it – his position was potentially rather awkward. However, before making any move, he’d have wanted to be absolutely sure of his facts. The obvious thing would be to do what I’d done, and check in old books to see if there was any record of the picture between its acquisition and the theft. The Louvre library would probably have the book I’d found – I could ask Marie-France, or check in the catalogue. If he’d seen that, the last vestige of doubt would have been removed. There was the picture he’d grown up with at La Jaubertie, and there was the caption –
Caravaggio, St Cecilia and the Angel, The
Louvre, Paris
.

In such a situation, what would any conscientious curator do? All the ones I knew would have given the same answer. He would want to exchange the pictures back again. A member of his family had committed a crime, and he was in a position to set it right. No scandal, no lawsuits, no unpleasantness – just a quiet switch. Or perhaps not so quiet. It was just the kind of story to draw in the customers: new light on a famous Surrealist exploit.

But Jean-Jacques wouldn’t want that. He was planning to run for President – to run as an independent, if necessary – and where was the money coming from to finance his campaign? He wasn’t a rich man, and he led an expensive life. When you move among the wealthy and powerful, you need to keep up appearances. If other wives dress at the couturiers’, so must yours; you must be seen in the right places, live in style, entertain as you are entertained. No mere salary, however relatively generous, would be enough – let alone to support the expenses of an inde-pendent election campaign. And there, hanging on the wall of La Jaubertie, was the answer. What did a Caravaggio fetch these days? Five million? Ten? Twenty? Enough, in any case, to set him up nicely, even after the roof had been mended, even if the proceeds had to be shared with his brother.

Had Antoine shown him the pamphlet? Probably – that was the proof of what Robert de Beaupré had really done. If he really had proposed switching the pictures back, how appalled Jean-Jacques must have been! And even if he could be dissuaded, the exhibition I proposed would put everything together, side by side, including the pamphlet.
A particularly interesting small show
, my letter had said – and so it was, more interesting than I’d ever imagined. Thousands of people would see it all laid out there, the whole story before their very eyes. Anyone might draw the obvious conclusion. It was virtually certain someone would.

So the show must be stopped. And that wouldn’t be hard. No hint of the Jaubertie picture, no loan from the Louvre –
et voilà
: no show. He’d leant on Antoine, and the family had been warned: if I came sniffing round, they were to keep quiet. No hints, no interviews. Nothing.

And then Antoine died, and Manu declared open season on his father.

‘How exactly did Antoine die?’

‘Shot himself. The gun was found by the body. There was no note. Some homosexual scandal. That was the story,’ he added contemptuously.

‘Is that so unlikely?’ I thought of Charlie Rey, who had the apartment key, and Manu’s own assumption that his father had suspected him of being Antoine’s boyfriend.

‘I suppose what I mean is that these days it’s hardly a matter of life and death. But scandal seemed the only rea-son he’d do something like that, and what else was there? Not money, certainly not paternity . . . And there was no sign of violence, no sign of an intruder.’

‘So how can you say your father did it?’

‘Like my grandmother. You don’t have to actually commit the crime.’

It made sense. Keeping his hands clean had to be better in every way – less unpleasant, easier to live with. And safer. Get rid of Juliette: that would get him the money. Get rid of Antoine: he wouldn’t have to share it. And there’d be no danger of embarrassing revelations.

But why should Antoine oblige?

‘Did your father have some hold on Antoine? Any way he could say, If you do this I’ll make sure they know that?’

‘That’s what I’ve been asking myself. There was some old scandal they were both involved in . . .’

‘To do with pictures from Russia?’

He nodded. ‘I remember years ago some book came out and everyone was very nervous. But it all blew over and nothing happened.’

According to Tim Salisbury-Newall, Jean-Jacques had been far more involved with that than Antoine. But per-haps Antoine had dipped in deeper than his virtuous public pronouncements let on. Jean-Jacques might have had proof to that effect – a letter, a tape – he wasn’t a man to let that kind of evidence slip through his fingers. He’d have kept it and, where necessary, used it. Maybe the brothers had played a game of mutual blackmail – threat and counter-threat: if Antoine put a spoke in Jean-Jacques’ political wheel and destroyed his presidential prospects, Jean-Jacques would take his revenge and get Antoine ejected from his job.

‘How important was the Louvre job to your uncle?’

‘Everything. It’s the top job in that field. There were hints he might quite soon be nominated for the Académie Française.’

Betray everything he believed in, or lose it all. Faced with a choice like that, suicide might easily seem the logical way out.

‘What’s going to happen to the picture? Is your father going to sell it?’ In my mind I was already running through the possible buyers for such a thing and wondering how amenable they might be to an approach. We wouldn’t get it, that was for sure – it would fetch about five times our annual purchasing budget. Possibly more.

Manu burst out laughing. ‘You’re not going to believe this. It’s the only really good thing to have come out of the whole ghastly business. My grandmother left it to the Louvre!’

21

Proof: London, October

By the time Manu and I stopped talking, I’d long missed the last train. I spent a sleepless night on one of his several sofas and crept out of the apartment before he got up. At 7 a.m. the building was silent. But the concierge was vis-ible, a thin, overalled woman in her late fifties, putting out the rubbish bags. As I’d hoped. We exchanged Bonjours, and I asked her to keep a bit of an eye on Manu. ‘If he doesn’t appear for a couple of days, perhaps you could find some excuse to go up and check he’s all right?’

She agreed she would, and added, ‘Very like his papa, isn’t he?’

‘Does he come here? The Minister?’

‘No, no, but you see him on the television. As far as I know he’s only been here the once. Not long before his brother died. Monsieur Antoine. What a nice man. Tragedy, really.’

‘You mean the Minister was here before his brother was found?’

She looked at me uncomprehendingly. For her, of course, Antoine’s death and the finding of the body were one and the same event. ‘Two days before, yes. I’d never seen him but I recognized him from the television. He was just leaving. He was in such a hurry I don’t think he even noticed me, but you’d know him anywhere, wouldn’t you?’

‘Did you tell anyone about this?’

‘No, why would I?’

Why, indeed.

Remembering Delphine, I took particular care crossing the road. But no one seemed anxious to run me down, and soon I was in the metro headed for the Gare du Nord. As the Eurostar swayed northwards, I thought about the concierge’s revelation. However superficial, there must surely have been some sort of inquiry into Antoine Rigaut’s death? If someone is found dead of gunshot wounds, then the police are brought in. And in that case, surely they’d ask the concierge about who’d come and gone at the relevant time?

Not if the verdict was suicide. Why would they?

So leave it alone, said a voice inside my head – David’s voice, I recognized it at once, ballasted with the successful lawyer’s weary, unshockable calm. Learn a lesson, why don’t you? So Jean-Jacques Rigaut seems always to be on the spot when a close relative dies. Fine. What’s that to you? You weren’t there, you aren’t a member of the family, you aren’t even French, so he won’t be your President. You’re English, and your job is to curate pictures. You’ve just discovered something rather significant in the curating line. And now that the Louvre owns both the pictures, why shouldn’t they lend them?

‘Charles? It’s Reggie Lee.’

‘I thought we’d had this conversation. I can’t help you.’

‘Ah, but things have changed. D’you know what I’ve just heard? Madame Rigaut left her picture to the Louvre.’

‘So I understand.’

‘Well, then, there’s no more problem, is there? You own them both, you can lend them both. Monsieur Rigaut hasn’t got anything to do with it any more.’

‘I’m sorry, Reggie,’ he said flatly. ‘The answer’s still no. Don’t ask why. You’ll just have to accept it. It was bad luck, the wrong moment, these things happen. That’s the way it is, and too bad.’ And he rang off.

The wrong moment? Still? For what? For Charlie’s career, was what it came down to. Even now it was more than that career was worth to reverse the decision without checking back. I wasn’t unsympathetic. The prospect of asking Rigaut to change his mind on this particular topic at this particular moment would have daunted a better man than Charles Rey. In his place I’d probably have done the same.

Unlike Charlie, Joe sounded gratifyingly pleased to hear my voice. ‘Recovered from your little misadventure?’

For a moment I couldn’t remember which misadventure he was referring to. ‘I’ve got my passport back, if that’s what you mean. Look, I’m on to something rather interesting. D’you want to meet up?’

‘You’re still pursuing this Caravaggio stuff?’

‘It’s connected.’

‘How about the Rigaut story?

‘It’s connected with that, too.’

Joe said he’d buy me lunch and I could tell him all about it. I explained that I’d been away from the office a lot recently – a long lunch at this juncture might not be tactful.

‘So make it dinner. Eight? I’ll see you at Sapori’s,’ he said.

Sapori’s, an echoing ex-warehouse in Drury Lane that combines considerable discomfort with the best casalinga cooking in London, had been one of our favourite haunts in the dear dead days. It isn’t exactly the venue for romance, but if you want a private conversation it’s got a lot going for it – there’s so much noise that you can hardly hear what the person opposite is saying, let alone anyone at the next table.

Joe was there when I arrived, making inroads into a bottle of Montepulciano and dipping raw vegetables into a little dish of olive oil, which he was spreading liberally over the table. It was odd, seeing him and knowing he was waiting for me. I’d run across him once or twice since we’d split up – at a couple of parties, across the room in a pub – and each time my stomach had done a sort of somersault. Now, however, it stayed put. Olivier’s doing? Or perhaps its previous antics had been the result of unpreparedness.

Joe waved, wiped his fingers, stood up and kissed me formally on both cheeks, mwa mwa. He’d put on a bit of weight, though not enough to make him discard the ancient brown corduroy suit I’d tried so often to chuck out. I sniffed its well-remembered bouquet with a mixture of annoyance and nostalgia.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Exciting life you’re leading these days.’

‘Much too exciting,’ I agreed. ‘If I fall asleep don’t take it personally.’

‘You won’t,’ he assured me. ‘Not in these chairs.’

He poured me a glass of wine and we considered the menu. As usual, I chose the seafood spaghetti. ‘Nice to see some things don’t change,’ Joe said. He ordered the same thing himself and asked for a half-bottle of white Orvieto to go with it. When the stuff about twenty-one units of alcohol a week being the healthy maximum first came out, and we tried comparing it with his normal intake, we just laughed. Hollowly, and slightly tipsily. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Shoot. Tell me all.’

So I did.

By the time I finished, our table was littered with dead bottles, most of the other customers had left, and I felt so tired that I had no idea whether or not I’d spent the entire evening talking gibberish.

Joe signalled for the bill. ‘I don’t know if I’ve got the detail right,’ he said, ‘but if half of this is true that’s your man’s career up the spout.’

‘Not so’s you’d notice. That’s the terrifying thing.’

He sat with his elbows on the table tapping his teeth with a teaspoon, a signal that he was deep in thought. ‘There must have been an inquiry into Antoine’s death. An old lady of eighty-eight’s one thing, but he was a public figure.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Thing is, how do we get hold of it?’

‘No idea.’ Now that I’d stopped talking I was fading fast.

‘Poor old Reg, you don’t look as though you’ve got much idea about anything just now. Let’s get you home.’

Drury Lane is undoubtedly one of the nastiest streets in London, but fortunately it’s always full of taxis that will take you somewhere nicer. When we got to my house Joe didn’t suggest coming in, but kissed me chastely and said, as I’d hoped he might, ‘Why don’t you leave it with me and I’ll look into a few details?’ Then he rolled away into the city, a happy journalist in pursuit of a hot new story, while I fell into my bed and a dreamless sleep.

For the next week I got on with my work and tried to put Caravaggio, the Rigaut family, and everything associated with them, out of my mind. Then Joe phoned, and all that good work was instantly undone.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Things may be moving.’

‘Things?’

‘I’ve been beavering on your behalf,’ he said. ‘To prove your gratitude you can make me dinner this time. What sort of wine shall I bring?’

It seemed we were back on terms, though exactly which had yet to be negotiated. I wasn’t sure that any of them included the assumption that I was automatically available just because he happened to have a spare evening. ‘How do you know I’m free for dinner?’

‘Aren’t you?’

I sighed. ‘As it happens I am.’

‘Fine, then I’ll bring a St Emilion.’

He arrived just after nine, with the wine in one hand and a rather unattractive bunch of flowers in the other – those spray chrysanthemums in dreary white and pink that look half-dead before they’ve begun. I have rules about things like that. There are the fruit salad rules – no oranges, no apples or pears, and absolutely, under any circumstances, no bananas – and the bunch of flowers rules, in which pink spray chrysanths figure in the banana position. Still, the wine looked excellent.

He put his burdens down and looked around, checking to see what had changed since he lived here. Then, for the first time in over a year, we kissed. Properly.

I’d dreamed of this moment, its absence had for months reduced me to despair. And now my wish had been granted – but as in all the fairy stories, there was a catch. The kiss was too late: delightful and familiar, but not, as once, liquidizing.
Amour
, perhaps irrevocably, seemed to have transmuted to
amitié amoureuse
. I wondered if Joe felt it, too. Perhaps that was what he’d been waiting for before making contact again.

We let each other go; he looked at me quizzically, but didn’t say anything. Instead he made for the drawer where the corkscrew lived (that at least was still the same) and opened the wine. ‘What are we eating?’

‘Lamb chops.’ In the supermarket on the way back from the tube blankness had struck, and lamb chops were the result. I knew he’d be disappointed. A lamb chop is – well, a lamb chop. Eat one, you’ve eaten them all. But just for the moment, culinary imagination was beyond me.

‘Anything else? It’s a really good wine, this.’

‘Potatoes.’

He sighed. ‘OK, are you going to ask me what I’ve found out?’

‘What have you found out?’ I wished I didn’t feel so tired.

‘Well, I got in touch with my friend Pascal. I can’t remember if you met him? Does the kind of thing I do, for
Le Monde
. Anyhow, he knows people who know the examining magistrate – he was at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, and bingo, that’s it, even though he cut loose and became a journo. The top of that pyramid’s ridiculously small, if you make it that far the whole of French politics just seems like an old boys’ reunion.’

‘Nice for some. And?’

By now Joe had poured himself a glass of wine and settled into what had once been his usual armchair. He pulled a notebook out of his briefcase. ‘Hang on a mo . . . Yeah. The inquiry into your boy’s death.’

‘Antoine Rigaut.’

‘That’s the one. Apparently it was squashed. Orders from on high. The examining magistrate somehow gathered that if he was too persistent it wouldn’t do his career a bit of good. So he brought in a verdict of suicide and everyone was happy.’

I chopped some mint and mashed it with lemon juice into a lump of butter. I always enjoy economy, whether of thought or action, and mint butter served two purposes: it raised the gastronomic stakes, and making it was conducive to contemplation – rhythmic, without urgency. I thought of Charlie Rey, how he wouldn’t lend the picture, and wouldn’t say why – how he hated talking about it. He, too, had his career to consider. I wondered what he’d found, that day in Antoine Rigaut’s apartment. There must have been something, or Jean-Jacques would have left the examining magistrate alone. When, as with his mother, there’d been nothing to find, he’d been only too delighted for the law to take its course. Tampering is a risk even for the powerful – they have so much more to lose if it comes out.

‘How well does your friend Pascal know whoever told him this?’

‘No idea. Why?’

‘I just wondered if there might have been some photos. There must have been, mustn’t there? When the police first got there they must have taken some. They ought to be in the file. If the file still exists.’

‘You’re asking him to ask his mate to steal the
file
?’

‘Not the file. Just a photo . . . He needn’t even steal it. He could just copy it. Then we might be getting somewhere. Why don’t you see if he can work something out? Tell him there might be a big story in there. Come on, dinner’s ready.’

The photo arrived five days later. It was in a manila envelope with an English stamp and a central London postmark, the address computer-printed, no sender’s identification. There was no covering note, just the picture. The subject was viewed from above, the body of a man slumped forward over a desk. The right-hand half of his head was covered with blood, as was the desk. Near his right hand, on the desk, lay a pistol.

That evening I rang Manu. I didn’t bother with niceties but dived straight into the meat of it. ‘Manu, it’s Reggie. Do you have a computer?’

‘Yes,’ he said, sounding puzzled.

‘OK, I’m going to email you a picture, and I want you to tell me what you think.’

I sent it off, and when, half an hour later, no answer-ing email had appeared, rang him again. He sounded tetchy. ‘Yes?’

‘Did you get it?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s your uncle, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, it’s him. I was going to get back to you but it kind of got to me.’

‘Sorry. Yes, of course.’

‘Also there’s something wrong, and I’ve been trying to work out what it is.’

‘And?’

‘At first I thought the print might be the wrong way round, but then I went into the room and it isn’t, the window and everything’s in the right place.’

‘Yes.’

‘The thing is, the pistol’s by his right hand. And my uncle Antoine was left-handed.’