Chapter 39
Emma
The discovery of a new Van Gogh has Paris buzzing.
Lucie, Colette, and I have been back in classes at the école des Beaux-Arts for a month, and it’s all anyone there can talk about.
No one knows many details, not even what the painting is of, or where it came from.
But there’s plenty of speculation and lots of rumors.
My favorite is that a woman from Virginia bought it for seven dollars at a junk sale in America.
It’s everything an auction house could hope for.
While we were still in Amsterdam, Stella revealed the long-lost Sunflowers painting to Mare, Eliza, and Amy and explained how she came to have it, producing all the letters between her grandmother and Jo van Gogh, including the ones she recently discovered in the back of the canvas, as proof.
The Van Gogh Museum agreed to quietly authenticate it and reach out to Sotheby’s, keeping the owner of the painting a secret.
There was no need for Colette to pretend she found the painting in her family’s dusty countryside basement after all.
When we returned to Paris, I asked Stella what she would have done if Caroline hadn’t come to us or agreed to collaborate. I was still trying to figure out my way around our relationship and asking every question that popped into my mind was part of it.
“Colette would have been the one to sell the painting and we would have taken the money and then found another way to destroy Louis Swanson,” she’d said matter-of-factly. “That was my plan B.”
“How many plans did you have?”
She bit the inside of her cheek and squinted, as if trying to recall. “I went through plan F. Always pays to be thorough. But what you need to know is that in all of the plans, in each and every one, you girls would have been taken care of. That was always my priority.”
I want to believe her. I haven’t forgiven her, not completely, and maybe I never will. But I love her. It’s impossible not to. And plan A has been successful. Until now.
Leading up to a big auction, a painting will typically go on a road show, sometimes all the way around the world, to stoke the interest of major collectors.
In this case the mystery has been the key to driving interest. What has been released to the media is that the Van Gogh Museum has already authenticated the painting and approved its provenance, much to the ire of Louis Swanson, who has been complaining endlessly to his daughter about being cut out of the process.
My roommates and I arrive together for the big sale at the Sotheby’s in the prestigious but stuffy eighth arrondissement.
I’ve been here a couple of times before for shows.
Pascal once brought me to lunch at their in-house café where I ate the most delicious truffled ham-and-cheese sandwich of my life.
His involvement in all of this has continued to eat away at me.
I waited outside his office on the first day of classes this term, but the room remained dark.
Same on the next day. I eventually learned from a teaching assistant that he had been asked to leave the university after an anonymous tip that he had been carrying on inappropriate relationships with his students.
So I’m taken aback when he walks into the auction hall with a willowy young woman on his arm. I only notice him when Caroline’s head twists around from her front-row seat as though she sensed his presence.
For the briefest of moments, her emotions betray her, and I see a flash of rage in her eyes as she examines the young woman with her familiar shiny black heels and flowing Pre-Raphaelite locks.
I catch Caroline’s eye and we’re both able to smile at the absurdity of our shared emotions.
We’re unlikely allies now, for better or worse.
Today has nothing to do with Pascal and everything to do with the man strutting in behind him.
This may seem like an ordinary auction, albeit one that isn’t playing by all the typical rules, in truth, it’s nothing of the sort.
Everything about today is an elaborate plot to arrest Louis Swanson and make sure there’s no way he can escape.
Caroline has been in constant contact with Interpol for the last month.
They’ve also been in touch with the FBI and the local Direction Générale des Finances Publiques.
Stella was right about it all. What Louis did could be the largest case of tax fraud ever committed in Europe.
It is most certainly the largest one involving the sale and donation of billions of dollars’ worth of priceless art.
Louis walks in behind Pascal with all the swagger of a man who believes he can buy and sell everyone in this building, chin tilted at the precise angle of someone accustomed to looking down at the world.
He’s oblivious to the subtle eye rolls from many in the room.
His latest wife is a long stride behind him.
There’s the smallest of baby bumps visible beneath her form-fitting shift dress.
It’s hard to tell if she’s trying to keep up, hiding in his shadow, or avoiding him.
There’s a seat reserved for Louis in the front row, right next to Caroline, who manages a surprisingly cheerful wave in his direction.
Matthew rushes in behind him, still oblivious to what is about to happen.
Caroline said she just couldn’t take the chance that he wouldn’t warn their father in the hopes of getting into his good graces for once.
“I’m protecting my brother. You must trust me,” she’d said. When Matthew spots me, he waves enthusiastically. I’ve been avoiding his calls. Lying isn’t my strong suit and I can’t keep up the charade with him. I wave back though and match his smile.
The twins, in identical red velvet three-piece suits, are already here.
They sit on the opposite side of the aisle from Caroline, as if on competing sides of a wedding.
No sign of their mother, but they’re joined by a small army of imposing Bruneian royals.
Each twin is talking loudly into a massive cellular phone and ignoring the rest of the room.
I breathe in slowly and stare straight ahead. On either side of me Colette and Lucie are doing the same. If everything goes to plan, we will walk out of here very rich women. But there’s always the chance we could still leave in handcuffs.
Needless to say, the Orsay was outraged to learn Louis had donated forgeries to them and kept the real ones to sell off to the highest bidder.
But once they were assured that they were only one among dozens of institutions duped by Louis Swanson, they were more than willing to collaborate in the investigation.
So far, they have been able to identify that six other Swanson donations to their museum are fakes.
There are also three in the Louvre, four in the Tate Modern, thirteen in various institutions in New York, and probably a few in the Hermitage, but the Russian officials have yet to cooperate.
The case, especially with Caroline as the key witness, and one who is very willing to lay this blame squarely at her father’s feet, is airtight.
She’s managed to negotiate leniency for herself in return for being a cooperating witness.
And in hindsight I don’t know how we would have done this without her.
Stella knew it all along. She’s here, in the building, but not in the audience.
I bet she’s sipping Dom Pérignon in the directeur général’s office, where we left her when we came down here.
The authorities are also well aware that she did not indeed perish in the Pitié Salpêtrière Hospital, but since no actual death certificate was ever filed, no crime was committed.
Something else poor Matthew still doesn’t know and yet another reason I had to stay away from him.
There’s no way I could let him continue to mourn his grandmother to me after everything I’ve been through with her.
The buzz of frivolous chitchat fades to silence when a formidable woman in her sixties appears on the stage, the directeur général, Helene Moray.
She speaks in French, but her words are being translated into a dozen other languages through corded headsets provided to anyone in the audience who needs them.
She makes a clucking noise directly at the twins to stop chattering to each other.
Artem and Anton sigh loudly in irritation but comply.
“It’s an honor to hold this position today.
Events like this are what every art lover dreams of,” Helene Moray begins.
“Just when you think you’ve seen it all, when you think that the canon of one of the great artists is complete, something new emerges and it reminds us that art history is constantly evolving, that our work is never finished.
I am pleased to be the first to reveal to you a lost, and now found, masterpiece of none other than Vincent van Gogh. ”
With that, Stella’s Sunflowers is wheeled into the room like a chariot entering the Colosseum.
It has been reframed and mounted against a stark white background to highlight the vibrance of the yellow petals.
Once the impact of the flowers themselves has worn off, that’s when the man in the window finds his way into your field of vision, when the self-portrait comes into focus, his gaze as deliberate and austere as a monk’s.
Vincent once wrote that he hoped all his portraits, the ones he did of himself and of others, would appear as apparitions a century after he painted them. That’s exactly what this one does.
The room releases a collective gasp. Caroline nudges her father and points out Vincent in the window, keeping up the charade that she has never seen this before.
I think she’s enjoying the tension of the moment.
It was Caroline who determined that this sale would be the best place to trap her father.
Now we’re all just waiting.