As soon as he knocked on Gregory’s apartment, the door opened. How he wished it would be Gregory, hungover, doing his passive-aggressive thing, refusing to get the painting done on time. Yes, Ryan would still be furious the fraudulent Expectation of Time was gone. But at least Gregory hadn’t gotten killed in the bargain.

  The wife’s long, frizzy hair was even wilder, and her face pale without the lipstick. “Where is he?” she asked, putting her hand on Ryan’s arm and pulling him into the apartment.

  “When did you last see your husband?” Ryan asked.

  “Not since yesterday morning. He left after the breakfast. About midday he called. I asked if he was coming home—au moins pour avoir quelque chose à manger—”

  Something about eating, Ryan understood that much. Lunch?

  “He said non. He wanted to keep working.”

  She hadn’t seen him since yesterday. “Do you know what he was doing?” Ryan asked.

  “He said he couldn’t tell me such things.” Her face creased into lines of worry. “What happened?”

  “That’s why I came here—to find him.”

  “It is your fault, eh? Ever since you come, he has been drinking more the wine.”

  Ryan ignored the blame for now. “Has anyone else been here? Who has he been hanging around lately?”

  “Non.” The wall behind her was covered in prints. Gregory had not been putting up copied canvases of the masters here.

  “Something about your running away together to start a new life?” Ryan was taking a multiple-choice approach to questioning. She would eventually pick an answer as he read her reactions to each one.

  She frowned. “Non, jamais…”

  “Something like it? That you could quit your job and move somewhere nice? He would start contributing?”

  She was still frowning but nodded. “I did hear such things from time to time. But I didn’t think he was sérieux, vous comprenez? He could not work here for years. Deux.” She held up two fingers to indicate.

  Kevin has researched this factoid. If a U.S. citizen married a French national in France, he could not work for three years.

  “Do you know what Gregory did in the U.S.?” he asked gently.

  “The gallery.” She waved her hands around as if to conjure up the words out of the air. “Gregory looked after the gallery in New York City.”

  “Uh-huh.” She could believe what she wanted to about her beloved Gregory. “Did he say he was coming into some money?”

  She seemed to consider, hunching in a baggy mushroom-colored sweater, and nodded without looking at him. “I thought it was the job he was doing for you.”

  “Did he talk about trying to pull one over on me?” With her look of confusion, he realized it was an American idiom. “Trick me?” he clarified.

  She cocked her head to the side, thinking, then shook her head no.

  “I am not the enemy, I assure you. If someone else comes by asking after him or if you hear something, please call me.” He handed her a card.

  She studied it. “Exporter?” She looked up at Ryan with imploring eyes. “What has happened to him? You must tell me.”

  “I’m sorry, but I think he got himself into trouble. Call me when you hear. I can only help at this point.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Menaced Assassin, Rene Magritte (1927)

  “How did you know?” Gerard demanded. “About my mother?”

  Underneath spicy notes of an aftershave, she detected unwashed skin. After the episode with Francois, she realized she had to fight back to survive. Instead of answering Gerard, she whirled. Before she could shove him away, the blade sunk into the soft, vulnerable skin of her neck.

  “Ow!” A sting swarmed into pain. Her hands went up to tend to the wound. The pain resounded in waves on her nerve endings.

  “Hands behind your back. Maintenant!” Gerard Luc ordered. She prepared to push away until warm wetness hit her shoulder. She was bleeding! Gerard had not released the blade from her skin, and it dug in farther.

  As her head cleared, the wave of pain receded. He was serious with the knife. Perhaps the best tactic was to engage him in conversation. “Your mother was an artist, too.”

  “That was the times, vous comprenez?” His voice was a growl. “Women did not have the career.”

  She scanned the space of the shelter. Was there something to grab, to plunge into Gerard? Her gaze flicking around, she began to speak. “The photo your nephew sent me. He said it was your father’s work.” The items in the storage room were bulky—canvases, frames, paint-spattered wooden chairs. Unfortunately, nothing was within reach. She went on. “No signature, as you pointed out.”

  “When I was not older than eight, I went into the studio where my father was working, even though I was forbidden.”

  Yes, she would let him talk. She stood still, her muscles tense, waiting for an opportunity. His breath, as he spoke, was like rotting soil, far underneath. The smell and the pain was turning into nausea. If she threw up, would that make him release his hold? Fear of being overcome by nausea was her worst fear when she made presentations or took over one of Dr. Roche’s lectures. Never before had she realized a swallow was such a pronounced and prolonged activity. It had always seemed automatic before without a weapon to define it.

  She realized that she had dissociated—with the pain of the wound and the horror of the situation—and that Gerard Luc was still talking. “My mother was in the studio, alone, painting. She said, ‘I am just playing, darling. Your father and I are doing a contest—who can do the nicest blue.’ It was after that my father rented a studio.”

  As Gerard continued, his English improved, and he relied on fewer French words. “My father needed the quiet, he said, away from a clamoring, noisy child, away from his friends and fellow artists who would visit during the day to talk about Le Surrealism.”

  That’s why Marc Luc didn’t write for The Surrealist Manifesto, Elle realized, like so many of his contemporaries. How could he write about a process that wasn’t his?

  With the knife pressed against her neck, her chin was raised, her mouth open. She realized she was breathing with quick, shallow inhales in her chest and forced herself into a slower pattern as she listened.

  “My father only wanted her, my mother, with him for companionship. My older brother had already left the house. Now I know why.” He made a movement behind her and then she heard the rip of tape. He planned to tie her up.

  He must release his grip on the knife to manage the tape, she thought, poised to act. If anything, he held the handle firmer, sucking in his breath.

  She appealed to his sympathy. “You have to stop hurting me. I’m bleeding.”

  He remained motionless. He saw her as prying, trying to find out the lurid secrets of his family. He did not want them exposed—he had spent his whole life burying them.

  When he didn’t respond, and that didn’t elicit a response, she went with a different angle. “You’ve done nothing wrong. Just release me. I’ll leave the country. You’ll never hear from me again.”

  He switched the knife to a new spot, and she felt her jugular vein in bold relief. “Put your hands behind your back before I slit your throat,” he said.

  …

  Ryan rode down the elevator with a skinny guy who kept nodding off as he stood. Heroin addicts were generally harmless, and this guy seemed in his own world far outside this fluorescent beige upright coffin of an elevator, but Ryan hurried off as soon as the doors opened.

  When he emerged from the tower block, a clump of young men standing on the pavement and wearing puffy jackets scowled through cigarette smoke at him. He checked his phone and saw two notifications from Kevin. Nothing from Elle. The calls must have come through while he was in the elevator.

  If he didn’t know any better, the sky looked full of snow as he listened to the messages with rising excitement.

  “Okay, be ready to move,” Kevin squawked as soon as Ryan called back. “We’re arranging to put money into the account.”

  Ryan strode away from the tower in the direction of the metro. “What happened?”

  “Giovanni and Lucia Esposito bought sketch number fourteen last year where it currently hangs in their Lake Como villa. So ask Babette for her versions of that one and say the money is ready for wire transfer. You’ll be coordinating with the French Central Office for Art Theft. I’ll email all the details.”

  When he hung up, Ryan put a call in to Inspector Fournier. This was the moment he’d been waiting for in Art Crime, staging a buy of counterfeit goods. But where was Elle? Why hadn’t she responded?

  …

  Gerard clasped her hands together like in prayer. Her palms were slippery with sweat as he wound the duct tape around her wrists with a deft movement.

  “Ah, oui,” he went on, the knife firm at her neck. “I was twelve years old when I knew the truth.” Gerard must have been wanting to tell this story for a long time. “I was with my friends on a jaunt to Montmartre. I was showing off—by then my father had made a name for himself. I wanted them to see my famous father at work. Instead, it was my mother—alone again. She banished my friends, but I wouldn’t leave. ‘Your father is lazy,’ she said. ‘I sometimes fill in his backgrounds just to finish a commission. How do you think we pay for the appartemente, this studio, the bread we eat? He would never finish anything without me.’ Bien sur, I wanted to believe her, mais I understood even then she wouldn’t receive the same respect for the exact work.”

  Of course, the current statistics weren’t much better, Elle knew. Only 10 percent of artists at the Whitney were female. The heightened alertness from the danger crystallized her thinking, and she said, “Finally, your mother had enough.”

  She sensed him nodding. “I remember the arguing. That photo—it was her last work.”

  “It was your mother’s.” The words were difficult to enunciate through a dry mouth. “She wanted credit.”

  “My father could not allow it. He went after it with a hammer in a drunken rage. It wasn’t many weeks after that she died. In the meantime, she sold Expectation of Time—to a Jewish family. There was already a lot of anti-Semitic feeling then. Perhaps she would get the money together to take me and leave. I wonder how it might have been different…”

  She sensed his shrug behind her as he paused.

  “He must have done it with the truffles made in white wine sauce.”

  “He killed her?” Tears stung her eyes. At the sadness of it, yes, and the pain of the slice to her skin. And most of all, that Gerard Luc couldn’t let her live after telling her this. Elle had to extend his story, and all she had were questions. “Was there an investigation?”

  He shook his head. “Non. Heart failure. Everything was heart failure then.”

  “The sketches that are for sale now at the Alain Gallery?” she asked.

  “Bah!” He made a sound of derision. “Those are not my father’s. And my mother—she drew on the canvas.”

  Anne-Marie Luc must have had an efficient process to work in secret as she did. “Then who did the sketches?” Elle asked.

  “Forgeries, the lot of them,” he said.

  “Did Jean-Pierre come to you with the photo?” she said.

  “My photo.” His words were clenched through his teeth. “You should not have had it. And neither should have Jean-Pierre. The little thief. He was always lazy, looking for the easy way. He wanted to live off my father’s fraudulent legacy.”

  “Did Jean-Pierre come to you for money?” Outside a child shouted and a scooter rattled by. Elle wished she had a scooter to escape from the terrible danger she was in.

  “This time, he said a seller approached him about a ‘long-lost’ work that would ‘take the world by storm.’ All he needed was a little up-front money to get it back, and he would have it attributed by an expert when it arrived. Then we would all reap the profit.”

  And Elle herself was to be the stooge to attribute it—or be pressured into doing so. What she said was, “All of this was timed to the theft of Expectation of Time so the market value would be high. Was Jean-Pierre behind that, too?”

  “Je ne sais pas.”

  “Francois Gaillot.” More words would not form with no spittle to move her tongue.

  “What about him?” he asked in a waspish tone.

  She forced herself to speak. “Francois Gaillot had the copy of the painting in the photo.”

  A truck outside revved its engine and switched gears. Elle longed to be out on the street, free.

  “And how do you know that, mademoiselle?”

  “I saw it at his house, hidden away.”

  Her senses on alert with the danger she was in, she read Gerard’s reaction. Something she’d said surprised him. He hadn’t known about the copy his father had done? Or that Francois Gaillot owned it. Taking advantage, she said, “Come clean about what you know. I can take you to the Art Crime inspectors.”

  Suddenly, he pushed her down with one strong hand. Without her hands to balance, she staggered and fought to stay upward. He kicked out her leg, and she came down hard on the cement floor.

  Stunned, she felt his shoe stamp on top of her. The duct tape roll still dangled from where her hands were plastered together. She struggled against the binding as he cut the tape with the knife. He was now going for her ankles with the tape. She scissored her legs, fighting against being trussed up like a chicken.

  He panted as he struggled with her legs. “Arretez!”

  Pain blazed and she screamed. He had sliced into her calf, through her jeans. The denim immediately felt warm and wet.

  He muttered in French as he continued to wind the duct tape around her ankles.

  She shot her legs out together as one. She didn’t have to pretend anymore that she was sympathetic. “You were the one to send the man to attack me!”

  “Non, I had nothing to do with that,” he said, panting to get the tape around her ankles.

  “You killed your own nephew!”

  “Non, it’s whoever he got mixed in with.”

  “Then why are you doing this to me?”

  “Pourquoi—my father’s reputation. It must live on!” With that, he cut the tape and stood upright, breathing hard. He unwound another stretch of tape, cut it, and leaned over her face.

  She tossed her head from side to side, panicking at the prospect of having her mouth and nose covered. Gerard didn’t seem prepared to actively kill her. But suffocation would do the job just as easily. Was he waiting for someone else—the man who had attacked her the night after the gallery? He might not be so squeamish, or he might be stronger and more experienced at disposing of blood and her body.

  Despite her twisting, Gerard stuck a swath of duct tape across her mouth. She sucked in breath, panicky, and felt the adhesion on her lips as he cut the tape, scraping her cheek as he did so. More stinging as if a honeycomb of bees had been released onto her face.

  Gerard stood again, slowly, as if all this fighting had taken a toll on his energy. Slowly, he walked toward the stairs. She watched him ascend, his footfall heavy. She was going to die alone down here.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Mama, Papa is Wounded!, Yves Tanguy (1927)

  At the next intersection, a taxi pulled up at the red light. Ryan ducked his head, caught the eye of the driver, and, getting a nod of assent, jumped into the backseat.

  He read out Gerard Luc’s address. The driver allowed a small smile at Ryan’s pronunciation. They shot off at the green light, and the driver turned on the radio to a generic pop station, which his nerves could have done without. Everything was coming together at once.

  He tamped down the excitement from his voice as he called Babette. “I’m sorry for running out yesterday, but, as it turned out, I was able to tell my customer about the sketches, and he is ready to buy. Tell me which versions you have of the sketch of Expectation of Time foreground figures.”

  There was a pause. Ryan tried to contain his breathing.

  Finally, she said, “Ah, bon! We will have number three ready for him then.”

  “So the other two have already sold?” he asked.

  “We can talk about that when you get here. I will have much to do to get it ready for you.”

  After they agreed on a time—sooner than he would have liked given where he was heading—Ryan called the French Central Office. Faunier and Girod were on board to perform backup. Everything was going according to plan.

  But the question of where Elle was still nagged at him. He tried her again but the call once more went to voicemail and a generic robot message. She was too shy to leave her own voice, he guessed.

  As he was leaving another message, Kevin called again. “Okay, where are you now?”

  “In a taxi.” Out the window, pigeons lighted on a statue of what must have been a French political figure rising up from the middle of a busy traffic circle.

  “You can’t take taxis around Paris.” Kevin being predictable. “I can’t get you reimbursement for that.”

  “Whatever you need to do.”

  Kevin’s voice was sharp in response. “Where are you headed now?”

  “Gerard Luc’s.”

  “Why? You said he has nothing to offer.”

  “Elle might still be there.” Ryan braced himself as they veered around a turn.

  “Might? And you’re going all the way down there? You can’t interview him. You’re undercover.”

  “I can always call the Parisian inspectors if there’s a problem.” Hopefully, they would help.

  “There you go again, getting distracted, going in the wrong direction.”

 

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