“I’m afraid he is not here, madame.”
Elise felt a rising sense of desperation. “Do you know when he’ll be back?”
The man shook his head and took a step toward Elise, waving in her direction with the backs of both hands, shooing her away. “As I said, he is not here.”
Elise took a few steps backward as he stepped closer, but then she stopped. She was done with being pushed out, done with having things taken from her. The world had stolen her husband, her daughter. She would not let it take her dignity, too. “Monsieur, I am Elise LeClair. Monsieur Bouet was keeping my apartment for me in my absence. He is expecting me.”
The man’s expression immediately changed. “Elise LeClair?” Something flickered in his eyes, and his mouth twitched. “You’re the widow of Olivier LeClair.”
Even two years after his death, he defined her. “Yes.”
He stared at her for a moment more. “Monsieur Bouet left word that you might return, but I didn’t expect…” His voice trailed off.
“You thought I was dead.” Elise took a step toward him. “But I am not. I am alive, and I am here, and I want to go home. Now, I will ask you again: Where is Monsieur Bouet?”
The man held her gaze. “He departed just a few weeks ago. For New York.”
Elise blinked at him, sure she had misunderstood. “New York?”
“Yes. He is planning to open a gallery there.” He said it as though it was as reasonable and expected as Constant having gone to the market to buy milk. Instead, he had apparently immigrated to another continent while a world war still raged.
“But how is that possible?” Elise sputtered.
The man rubbed his thumb over the tip of his index and middle fingers, the universal sign for money. “He has acquired much valuable art, which has earned him some influence.”
Elise looked around the store and realized for the first time how empty the walls were. Her vision blurred for a second as she turned back to the man. “He took my husband’s paintings with him.”
The man had the decency to look away. “Many of them, yes. But of course he paid for them years ago, didn’t he? That was his arrangement with your husband.” His gaze slid back to her. “Now, shall we find your apartment key?”
He turned without waiting for an answer, and she watched as he slipped behind the desk in the main room and unlocked a drawer. He rummaged briefly before emerging with a key in his hand. “This is it, I believe.”
Elise stepped forward and plucked it from his grasp. It felt hot and unfamiliar, a portal to a life that had long since vanished.
“Your daughter?” he asked, breaking the silence between them and startling her.
“Pardon?”
“You have a daughter, yes? She is all right, too?”
Elise couldn’t look away, though she wanted to. “No. She is dead,” she said, and the sudden pity in his eyes burned a hole in her.
“Madame, I’m terribly sorry. If there’s anything I can—”
“I—I’ll need your assistance with the doorman,” she said quickly, cutting him off. She didn’t want any of his sympathy.
“I see. Let me just close up, and I will accompany you.”
Five minutes later, he had closed the gallery doors and flipped the sign. Olivier’s painting seemed to watch them from the window. “I did not introduce myself,” the man said as they began to walk. “My name is Roland Vasseur. I never had the chance to meet you or your husband, but Monsieur Bouet spoke of you. I joined the gallery as his business partner in November of ’42.”
“Not long after I left.” Elise pushed away thoughts of what she was doing in the fall two years earlier. She had been huddled beneath blankets in Madame Roche’s guest room, crying herself to sleep, dreaming of returning to Mathilde.
“Yes.” Monsieur Vasseur cleared his throat. “He had just come into possession of an artist’s collection, and he needed someone to manage the gallery for him while he showed her art to various clients and tastemakers. She made him a fortune. He hired me at first as a manager, but when he left for New York, he sold his gallery to me with the condition that I keep his name on it.”
“You’ve done well for yourselves, it seems,” Elise said. She did not mean it as a compliment, and it irked her to see his chest swell with pride. “Who was the artist whose work made him such a success?”
“A woman named Anicette Rousselle. Did you know her? I believe she was part of your husband’s circle.”
Elise ticked through Olivier’s acquaintances and shook her head. “No. But I wasn’t very included in my husband’s world during the last years of his life.”
Monsieur Vasseur looked sad. “I’m sorry, Madame LeClair. You have lost much.”
She bowed her head. The exclusion from Olivier’s social group paled in comparison to the loss of her daughter.
“In any case,” Monsieur Vasseur continued after a few seconds of silence. “Madame Rousselle died during the war, leaving behind a great trove of art that came into Monsieur Bouet’s possession.”
“I see.” Other people’s misfortune, it seemed, had been Constant’s enormous gain. “How sad for her.”
“How sad for all of us. So many great artists lost.”
They turned the corner onto her block, and Elise stood back while Monsieur Vasseur exchanged words with her doorman in a low tone. He ushered them past without looking at her, but she stopped in front of him and stood there until he was forced to make eye contact. “Bonjour, Madame LeClair,” he grunted.
They took the lift to the sixth floor, and as they approached her door, her hand was shaking so uncontrollably that after a few seconds, Monsieur Vasseur took the key from her and inserted it into the lock himself. He opened the door and stood aside to let her enter first.
She was hardly aware of him as she walked into the dark, shadow-cloaked apartment. Dust hung in the air, and furniture was draped in blankets, making the interior look ghostly, haunted. As if sensing the same, Monsieur Vasseur strode across the floor, his shoes clicking against the polished wood, and rolled up one of the heavy curtains, flooding the space with light. “No need for these anymore,” he said brightly, gesturing to the blackout shades, but Elise hardly heard him.
She was immediately aware of the emptiness, the spaces where her belongings should have been. The dining table and sofas were still there, under sheets, along with a few lamps, the outline of beds in the bedrooms. But the place had been stripped of everything else: books, the old typewriter she had once used to write letters, even the family pictures of Olivier, Elise, and Mathilde that had once graced the end tables. Most striking, though, was the lack of art. The walls had once been lined with Olivier’s work, framed paintings and sketches, and the shelves had been filled with her wood carvings. Now, it was like they had never existed at all.
“Where is everything?” she asked, turning to Monsieur Vasseur. Perhaps he and Constant had moved the things for safekeeping.
But his expression was blank. “Everything?”
“The art,” she whispered. “All the art. My life.”
He looked around, confused, and she could see him registering the blank spaces. “Madame LeClair, I have been in this apartment only once, and it looked just as it does now. Monsieur Bouet mentioned that there had been a German raid in this arrondissement in the fall of ’42, and that he lost several paintings himself. It is likely, I’m afraid, that your art was taken.”
“Taken?”
He nodded. “The Germans sent teams of art experts to, er, borrow works to take back to Germany. That is what they called it when they came. Your husband’s address was almost certainly on their list because of his renown.”
“But those paintings were ours. The sculptures were mine.” In a daze, she crossed the parlor to her studio and opened the door. A few of her pieces remained—a few attempts at Juliette’s birds, a side profile of her father’s face. But every carving she’d made of Mathilde—the sculpture of her hand when she was a newborn, the dozens of times Elise had coaxed her daughter’s face from wood, were gone. She moaned and felt her knees give out.
“Madame LeClair?” Monsieur Vasseur was at her elbow, helping her up. “I understand that this is a lot to take in. Let’s get you seated, shall we?” He helped her back into the parlor, where, still supporting her by the arm, he used his other hand to whisk a sheet from the sofa. Dust flew everywhere as the faded blue of her familiar furniture emerged, and she allowed herself to be guided onto a cushion. “Now, what is missing? Perhaps we can make a list, and I can assist you with a formal claim.”
She shook her head, looking around at the emptiness. It was the final droplet of water that had broken the dam. “Please, just go.”
He looked startled. “You’re certain? I can stay and help you get things in order.”
“I only want to be alone.”