“Why didn’t you want to tell me this? And why did the appearance of the copy upset you so much?”
She’d looked down at her desk, unable to meet his gaze. “Against my better judgment, I allowed Dubois to do the restoration at his studio. With lesser works, we don’t worry so much, but the Botticelli was a treasure. I was afraid it might be stolen. But Dubois was adamant. He insisted that the restoration wouldn’t be as good if he had to work in our ‘soul-sucking, fluorescent-lit circle of hell’—that’s how he described the museum’s conservation shop. I also knew there was bad blood between him and Monsieur Devereaux. So I agreed to let him take the painting. When I saw the copy, I felt ... it seemed a betrayal of our trust. And the mocking way he hung the copy. It was a slap in the museum’s face.”
Descartes had felt sure there was more to the story than she was telling, but it was clear she was prepared to stonewall. He decided not to press the point—for now. But he would get to the bottom of it sooner or later. Was it possible that she and Dubois were in cahoots—colluding in some sort of scam—and that he was setting her up to take the fall? Descartes had good instincts—a good nose, he called it—and beneath the scent of the old lady’s baby powder or face cream or whatever the hell it was, the detective caught a strong whiff of fear.
Chapter 4
Dubois
As he changes the CD in the Bose and begins squeezing white lead from a tube, Dubois laments the changing of the times. In the years since health agencies have banned lead-based paint in homes and offices, white lead—artists’ favorite primer for millennia, a white so dazzling it makes paintings glow from within—has become virtually impossible to obtain. It remains perfectly legal, of course, for expendable artists like Dubois to risk lead poisoning, but alas—in dutiful obedience to the law of supply and demand—paint manufacturers no longer find it profitable to make the meager amounts of white lead required by artists, and so stockpiles go steadily down and prices go swiftly up. The single tube he’ll use to reprime this one panel cost him a week’s grocery money, and he had to grovel to get it at all. Soon he may be forced to make his own white lead, the same way the ancient Greeks did, by suspending thin sheets of lead above a vat of vinegar (encased in fresh horse dung, for warmth!) until the lead is covered with white corrosion, then scraping off the corrosion, grinding it, and mixing it with linseed oil. A damned nuisance, he fumes, and all because a few stupid babies ate too many paint chips.
Once he begins applying the white lead to the panel, though, he forgets his irritation and, as always, falls under the spell of the work: the velvety feel and silky sound of the white lead gliding onto the panel. He turns and touches the Bose, and angelic voices fill the studio—a women’s quartet singing an eleventh-century polyphonic chant, “10,000 Virgins.” The soaring melodies infuse his studio and his paint and his soul with sublimity. At this moment, anything is possible; on this luminous, immaculate surface, he can be a Michelangelo, a Da Vinci, a Rembrandt, or any other genius of the ages. As it happens, he will be Botticelli, specifically, the Botticelli who painted the sweet Madonna and Child. This one, his third, will be his best yet—far better than the two that he’s foisted off on the old bat at the Petit Palais—for this time, he has a buyer willing to pay a price worthy of the work.
It’s taken three years to reel in the buyer, a British art dealer named Felicia Kensington. It began when she wrote to express her admiration of a Caravaggio painting—Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist—that he’d cleaned and retouched for the National Gallery in London. “The painting now glows with Caravaggio’s genius and your own,” she said. Dubois responded with an equally effusive thank-you note, and they passed a few more flattering messages back and forth. Eventually he mentioned, oh so casually, that occasionally he got lucky enough to unearth a work by an old master—a painting or drawing languishing, unsigned and unrecognized, in some junk shop or attic.