Just as he was pulling away from the window, something he’d glimpsed shifted from his subconscious, and he leaned back in for another look. For some reason, the cinema had a large print of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus hung over the refreshment stand, but the picture wasn’t quite right. Descartes stared, then laughed out loud. Instead of Venus, Marilyn Monroe perched on the clamshell, her feet in stiletto sandals, her pleated white dress swirling around the tops of her thighs, her mouth open in her signature vampish smile. It was an unprecedented experience for the detective: seeing a modern painting that was a playful riff on a classical masterpiece—one of the few classical masterpieces Descartes actually knew. With the force of an epiphany, he realized that art itself—like the museum he’d just left—was both more intriguing and more sexy than he’d ever dreamed.
After chasing his lunch with two strong hits of espresso, the inspector decided to forgo his nap and gut it out until bedtime, so as not to wreck his sleep cycle even more thoroughly. Instead, he spent several hours in Avignon’s library—a spectacular old building, he noted with newly appreciative eyes, housed in what had been a cardinal’s palace back in the fourteenth century, when the popes called Avignon home. Situated in the vast reading room, surrounded by ancient frescos, hand-glazed floor tiles, leaded windows, and an ornate coffered ceiling, Descartes scanned a stack of books about art restorers and art forgers. He learned, to his surprise, that the line between restoration and forgery was not as bright a line as he’d assumed, and that in practice, the two endeavors were often separated by only the narrowest and most slippery of slopes. A restorer hired to repair a flaked-off Virgin Mary here, a water-stained Jesus there, might eventually be asked to re-create entire scenes, repaint entire canvases ... and might well be tempted to sell similar re-creations for more than the paltry wages museums paid for restorations. The more Descartes read, the more flooded with fakes the art world seemed—and the more gullible and foolish art “experts” appeared. One British forger, a cheeky Cockney named Tom Keating, had such scorn for the experts that he planted blatant clues in his fakes. He used modern materials, included modern images in his backgrounds, and even went so far as to scrawl the word FAKE in lead-based paint beneath the primer of his “masterpieces,” so that any dealer, auction house, or museum that bothered to X-ray the work would see, instantly and beyond a doubt, that it was a modern counterfeit. Astonishingly, Keating managed to pass off some two thousand fakes before he was caught.
Another Brit, Eric Hebborn, became a one-man assembly line for “old master” drawings. Unlike Keating, Hebborn—a classically trained artist of considerable talent—was careful to use antique paper, centuries-old recipes for inks and paints and varnishes, and historically authentic techniques to create his pieces. By Hebborn’s reckoning—he published a boastful memoir shortly before he died—he’d passed off hundreds of his drawings as the works of old masters before he was exposed ... and hundreds more afterward, once unscrupulous dealers knew he was the go-to guy for high-quality forgeries.
Thus forearmed with knowledge of the wiles of fakers, Descartes felt prepared to take on Dubois. He would trick the artist, ensnare him in a trap from which there could be no escape. Leaving the library, which occupied a clogged artery in the ancient heart of Avignon, the detective threaded the Peugeot police sedan through the maze of streets, then out through a portal in the medieval city wall. He took the Daladier Bridge over the Rh?ne, then midway across, veered onto the exit ramp for Barthelasse Island—“the largest river island in France!” the Tourism Office liked to boast, though the competition was not particularly fierce, as best Descartes could tell. Still, the island—mostly public parks and private farms—was a pretty piece of pastoral land, with great views of Avignon’s medieval skyline, and Descartes had had good luck bringing dates here on pleasant weekends. Take the water taxi over—women love that shit, he reflected with a smile—and pack a picnic lunch. Plenty of wine and a big blanket, those were the essentials.
The GPS was worthless out here—there wasn’t a numerical street address for Dubois—and it took Descartes twenty minutes and a half-dozen map checks to find the artist’s place. It was a renovated farmhouse in the northern, less developed part of the island, set a half mile down a narrow lane that led to a handful of other farmhouses. The lane was tightly hemmed in on both sides by stone walls, and while Descartes wasn’t much prone to claustrophobia, he heaved a sigh of relief when the walls widened and Dubois’s property hove into view on his right. A semicircular drive arced past a wooden fence with trellised gate, and Descartes parked behind a rusting Citro?n that was pulled off the driveway just ahead of the gate. Descartes felt the car’s hood and found it cool, but he noticed that the tires had left fresh tracks in the mud, which meant the car had been driven home and parked sometime after yesterday’s rain shower.