Inside the fence, the property seemed more botanical garden than yard, with riotous red beds of poppies, dangling clusters of violet wisteria, and enough lavender to turn the whole yard purple-blue and supply the Chanel perfume factory, come midsummer. Somewhere behind all that foliage, he felt sure, was a house.
When he found it, he rapped the weathered brass knocker three times without getting an answer. He peered through a side window, saw no signs of movement, and cocked his head to listen. Rock-and-roll music—an English band, Dire Straits, if he wasn’t mistaken—floated up from somewhere behind the house. Descartes followed the sound around to the back, through an orchard of blooming fruit trees, and up to the door of a building that was simultaneously rustic and sophisticated: rough stucco walls into which large, many paned windows had been set, the roof composed of clay tiles, supported by exposed rafters whose carved ends curved upward slightly: a French peasant of a barn that had acquired an aristocratic Japanese accent somewhere along the way.
Descartes held his police credentials in his left hand and rapped the door with his right—moderately at first, to no effect, then harder, so as to be heard over the throbbing bass and drums of the music. Putting on a stern face, he rehearsed the steps that would lead Dubois slowly but inexorably into his snare. Dubois beat him to the punch, though, flinging himself into the trap the moment he opened the door and saw Descartes’s credentials. “Welcome, Inspector,” he said with a smile that actually seemed genuine. “I’ve been expecting you for hours. Have you come to ask why I was crazy enough to sneak a fake Botticelli into the museum ... or why I was stupid enough to return an original masterpiece I’d managed to make off with?”
Descartes was taken aback, but only for a moment. He gave a half smile, a compliment to an adversary whom he realized he’d been underestimating. “Which question should I be asking?”
Dubois shrugged. “If I knew that, it would mean I knew which painting was which. And the sad truth is, I don’t.”
“Excuse me? Don’t what?”
“Don’t know. Come in, Inspector. Take a look around my studio. Have a cup of tea, or a glass of wine. And hear my mortifying confession.”
Two hours and two bottles of wine later, the inspector’s head was spinning with pigments, fixatives, sizings, solvents, brushstrokes, and discourses on the unique, unmistakable, inimitable, yet easily aped techniques of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and—last but not least—Botticelli. “Botticelli was the Andy Warhol of his day,” pronounced Dubois. “You’ve seen Warhol’s posters of Marilyn Monroe’s face, yes? He transforms her into a cartoon character with rainbow-colored skin. Look at Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. The goddess is almost a cartoon. A beautiful, sexy cartoon, but a cartoon nonetheless. I tell you, Inspector, if Botticelli were alive today, he’d be making his art with cans of spray paint on city walls.”
Descartes tried to recall the trap he’d designed for Dubois, but the vision was gone, dispersed by the painter’s preemptive strike of erudition and wit—or erased by the second bottle of wine—a delicate rosé that packed a deceptive punch. “But wait,” the detective said, raising an index finger to halt Dubois. “What about Madonna and Child? You said you had a confession.”
“Ah, yes.” Dubois looked chagrined. “The terrible truth, Inspector, is that I abused Madame Clergue’s trust.”
Descartes leaned forward eagerly, taking the notepad and pen from the inner pocket of his jacket. “In what way? Tell me everything.”
“I talked her into letting me bring the painting here to do the restoration. I convinced her that I couldn’t do as good a job there, in that horrid shop of theirs.”
Descartes pounced triumphantly. “And that was a lie!”
“No, no, that was completely true. Have you seen the shop? Dreadful! Those fluorescent lights would have given me the shakes in a matter of minutes, Inspector. No, I did a beautiful job of restoration here, just as I said I would. I’ve brought at least a dozen of their paintings here to work on. But—but—once I finished restoring the Botticelli, I took the liberty of making a copy. As exact a copy as was humanly possible.”
Descartes’s eyes shone in bloodshot triumph. “And you gave the museum the copy and kept the original!”
“Here’s the thing, Inspector. I just don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? One was five centuries old; the other had a ‘wet paint’ sign on it. How could you not tell them apart?”
Dubois shrugged. “I’d just removed the old varnish from the original and put on a new coat, so it looked and smelled new. And I treated the copy to make it look older than it was. Then, disaster struck. The day before I was to return the Botticelli to the museum, the wind tore the roof off my studio. Remember how fierce the mistral was last March? It blew down buildings all along the Rh?ne Valley.”