Descartes suddenly looked self-conscious. “I was wondering ... Obviously you have quite the knack for copying. Could you do a copy of that one?”
Dubois smiled, again almost flirtatiously. “Come.” He led Descartes to a stack of paintings leaning against the studio’s back wall. When he’d flipped halfway through the stack, he motioned for the inspector to look.
Descartes was stunned. The picture leaning so casually against a wall, in a jumble of other paintings, was a perfect likeness of the one in the museum. “Would you consider selling it to me? Not that I could afford it, I’m sure.”
Dubois laughed. “Ah, Detective, this is my own personal copy. It has, shall we say, sentimental value to me.” Seeing the detective’s crestfallen expression, he added, “But I expect I could dash off another copy without much trouble. Maybe not quite this good, but close. I suspect you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.”
“What would it cost?”
The artist smiled. “For you, Inspector? No charge. Consider it my initiation gift.”
Descartes raised his eyebrows, puzzled. “Initiation?”
“Your initiation into a new addiction, Detective. Art. Its joys and its sorrows.”
Descartes laughed. “I won’t get addicted. I just happen to like this one painting.”
“It always starts with one painting, Detective. That’s the gateway drug. Soon you’ll be coveting others. Other portraits of Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist. Other works by Puccinelli. Works by later artists he inspired. A Madonna and Child by Botticelli, for instance.”
The next day at noon, the inspector, Mme. Clergue, and Devereaux took the two Madonna and Child paintings to the Radiology Department at Avignon Hospital for an X-ray examination, which the museum lacked the equipment to perform. One painting—the painting Dubois had hung on the wall thirty-six hours before; the painting the inspector had tagged with his used chewing gum—looked uniformly gray in the films. The second painting—the one the museum had displayed proudly for two years since its “restoration”—lit up, the word DUBOIS in white block letters. “I’ll be damned,” said Descartes. “You had the copy and he had the original. And he brought it back. He actually brought it back.”
Once more Madame Clergue cried, with a mixture of humiliation and relief—humiliation at having been fooled, relief at having the lost masterpiece restored.
Chapter 6
Dubois
A less skilled, less confident artist would have begun by sketching the Madonna’s outlines in pencil, then painting over them meticulously. The result might have been close to the original in all its dimensions, yet it would have been patently inferior: clearly the work of a cautious, tentative copyist. From years of experience, Dubois knows that it’s not enough to imitate Botticelli; no: he must boldly become Botticelli, just as a skilled actor temporarily loses himself in the character he’s portraying.
So he begins by sketching a collage of disjointed, deconstructed images atop the brilliant white lead: A pair of downcast girlish eyes here, another pair there. A rosebud of a mouth, floating freely in one corner of the panel. A baby’s pudgy arm and outstretched fingers, reaching for nothing but the edge of the panel. Dubois dashes off these images swiftly, with the bold strokes of a limbering-up exercise not meant for any eyes but the artist’s alone. As he sketches, he moves in an almost balletic dance with the panel, accompanied once more by the intricately entwined voices of “10,000 Virgins.” In his mind the trappings of the modern world blur and dissolve, like the paint he’s scraped off the panel, and he travels back and back and back: back to a time when Lorenzo de Medici—Il Magnifico—ruled Florence with an iron hand and a golden purse; back to a time when Michelangelo and Leonardo and Botticelli blazed across the starry firmament like dazzling comets. The sketches are the perfect way to warm up. But more than that, they’re also a brilliant part of his plan.