The Episode of the Nine Monets: A Crime of Le Fantôme

  THE EPISODE OF THE NINE MONETS

  Copyright © Jamie Probin, 2020.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are either the products of the author’s imagination or else used fictitiously.

  THE EPISODE OF THE NINE MONETS

  The three men stood side by side, staring at the wall and doing a passable imitation of the three wise monkeys.

  Henri Toussante, if asked, would have said that nobody actually rubs their eyes in disbelief, and that it was just a turn of phrase. He would certainly be surprised to find that it was essentially what he was doing now, and in doing so he bore a similarity to the monkey that sees no evil. Next to him Patrick Larsan had his fingers locked together behind his head in a pose of bewilderment, so that his wrists covered his ears, making him a viable understudy for the monkey that hears no evil. However the last man, Alain Noble, was as far from speaking no evil as possible. The colourful descriptions gushing forth from his lips would have made a sailor blush.

  Most of these adjectives described his opinion of Le Fantôme, the master criminal who, over the last few years, had become a greater and greater source of frustration to the Sûreté, and to these three policemen in particular. They had no proof that the scene before them now was the work of Le Fantôme, but case after frustrating case had conditioned them to the point they now automatically attributed any baffling crime to this felon.

  This particular example seemed more obviously attributable than most: an ornate frame containing a plain canvas, all white save for a childish outline of a ghost etched into the centre with a few simple strokes of black paint. Until recently this rectangular space had been instead been filled by “Oak Tree at Dawn”, an early work by Claude Monet which was the private property of the millionaire banker Jacques DuFresne. The piece was originally painted for a friend of the great impressionist, and never exhibited publicly. DuFresne, a man who knew what he wanted, and accustomed to his egregious wealth ensuring he got it, had bought the work a few years ago, which explained why it had hung in pride of place in the corridor of his Paris townhouse. What was far less explicable was how it was no longer doing so.

  What Jacques DuFresne lacked in patience and stoicism he more than made up for in belligerence and bullying. It was usually lackeys in the finance world that bore the force of his brutish personality, but he was broad minded and prepared to let others share in the brunt of his dissatisfaction, should the opportunity arise.

  ‘That painting was priceless, Toussante. What are you going to do about it?’ He peered with myopic aggression through his thick glasses. ‘I pay my taxes so you can keep law and order, so why aren’t you doing your job?’

  There were many responses dancing on the tip of the tongue of Henri Toussante, chief of the Sûreté. He wanted to point out that the painting clearly was not priceless, since DuFresne had paid half a million francs only two years earlier; he wanted to point out that, at least according to reliable information, DuFresne had found enough legal loopholes to pay very little tax at all; most of all he wanted to point out that the banker had only contacted the Sûreté three hours earlier and presented them with an apparently impossible crime.

  According to DuFresne, when he had gone to bed at eleven last night his prized painting had hung as usual in its prime spot, admired by the banker before he went to his room. By this point the door to the townhouse was locked and bolted, and only DuFresne and his valet, Laurent Giraud, remained inside. Yet this morning, instead of “Oak Tree at Dawn”, a crude drawing of a ghost gazed mockingly down at the corridor. The policemen had already established from the doorman to the building that nobody entered the building after eleven until the time Giraud rose this morning, and even if someone had, they could not have opened the bolted door from outside. There were exterior windows in the corridor, including one across from the painting to provide light, and they were even unlocked and could be cracked open a few inches. Being on the ground floor, however, they all had iron grilles on the outside, rooted firmly in worn stone, that prevented them opening any further, nor any person or large object passing through even if the windows could be opened fully. DuFresne derided any attempt to suspect the valet Giraud before the policemen had chance to do so, stating the old man had served him for thirty years and had the absolute trust of his master.

  ‘Look at it, Toussante!’ thundered DuFresne. ‘It would be bad enough that this phantom you seem to be in awe of stole my painting. But he goes and replaces it with this ridiculous daub. He’s mocking me!’ added the banker, as though this alone was a criminal offence of the highest order. ‘What is the point, eh? Why would anyone leave this behind?’

  It was a good question, and one that bothered all three of the policemen. In fact it was one of several things connected to the disappearance of the painting that defied explanation, but none wished to voice such a thought in front of Jacques DuFresne. The banker was clearly itching for a reason to shout angrily at someone.

  Instead Toussante addressed his colleagues directly. ‘Alain, I want you to work on finding how the painting was stolen. If we can discover the way in which it was taken it may give us a lead. Patrick, I want you to focus on where it might have been taken. Explore whether we know of anyone who might be behind this, anyone with previous involvement with stolen art.’ He turned to the erstwhile owner of the painting. ‘M. DuFresne, I’d like to ask you further questions about any visitors you’ve had or unusual activity recently. If this is indeed the work of Le Fantôme then one thing we can be sure of is that he planned it carefully, and may have been doing so for some time.’

  The next day the three men reconvened at the Sûreté to report their initial discoveries.

  ‘There’s very little to report from DuFresne’s house,’ said Noble, despondently. ‘We searched the entire place from top to bottom but, for all its luxury, it’s small, and DuFresne goes in for pretty minimalist décor. There wasn’t anywhere the painting could have been hidden, nor anywhere I think the replacement painting could have been stored for long without being found.’

  The previous day Noble had expressed the opinion that the only explanations were either that the valet Giraud had already stashed the new painting in a secret place within the townhouse some time earlier, and had switched the two during the night, planning to sell the Monet later; or that DuFresne had done so, planning to commit insurance fraud. Now he seemed resigned to these suggestions being non-starters.

  ‘I also spoke to Giraud at length, and I can’t imagine any way he is our criminal. He’s not in the best of health, can’t see or hear too well anymore, and he’s quite infirm. He certainly can’t be Le Fantôme.’

  ‘I agree,’ replied Toussante. ‘His background is clean as a whistle. And I’m not prepared to accept the idea of this being an insurance scam by DuFresne. It’s just not who he is. The man has more money than anyone could need, and is all about buying ostentatious art and telling everyone about it. The painting is much more important to him than any insurance money. Anything else suggestive at the townhouse?’

  ‘There was one odd thing,’ replied Noble, but there was no optimism in his voice. ‘There was a slightly damp area on the rug underneath the spot where the painting was. Neither DuFresne nor Giraud had any explanation for it. It could be irrelevant, but it was the only other thing out of the ordinary.’

  Toussante nodded and made a note. He was sitting at the b
izarrely oversized desk in his office, with his two deputies in chairs on the opposite side. The office allocated to the chief of the Sûreté was cramped for such an illustrious position, and the inexplicably large desk swamped the floor. It might also have swamped some men sitting behind it, but Toussante cut an impressive figure, tall and broad with steel in his temples and his eyes. His was a bearing that inspired confidence and undoubtedly contributed to his popularity with his subordinates. The other men were dwarfed by his presence, figuratively if not literally. Noble was also tall, but had allowed middle age to ambush his waistline and chin, growing the former and making the latter weaker. Larsan, while of average height, was lean and trim with crisp, clean features; he would have been handsome if only he had possessed even a single distinguishing feature. Any kind of distinctive characteristic – a cleft chin, a high cheekbone, a broader nose – would have drawn the eye enough to appreciate his looks, but somehow his total blandness overshadowed the absence of any flaws.

  It was Larsan who spoke now.

  ‘I’ve done some research and I think there are eight potential buyers for the painting in the Paris region. I haven’t looked further afield, thinking that it would be quicker and less risky to conduct the sale without leaving the city.’

  ‘Any ideas about which is more likely?’ asked Toussante, in a voice that did not sound like it expected a positive response.

  ‘No,’ admitted Larsan, ‘but fortunately I have something on all of them.’

  Patrick Larsan was young to have risen to such heights in the Sûreté, but one of the things that had drawn Toussante’s attention to him and persuaded the chief to place such faith in his protégé, was Larsan’s resourcefulness. After only a few months in the job Larsan had amazed his superior by producing a dossier he had compiled under his own initiative, detailing skeletons big and small, awkward or outright devastating, lurking in the cupboards of many of France’s most important people. Quite how Larsan had learned of these Toussante did not know, nor wanted to know. But he saw the value of such a dossier, not to be used vindictively or legalistically (many of the secrets were simply uncomfortable for the person involved if exposed in the wrong place, rather than of an illegal nature), but to persuade a person to cooperate if they were feeling reticent.

  The current situation was exactly what this resource was created for, and the discovery that Larsan knew disagreeable facts about those who might currently or soon be in the possession of the stolen painting lifted Toussante’s spirits. Someone conducting the questionable business of purchasing a rare painting on the black market, even if criminal intent was hard to prove, was unlikely to be cooperative with the police. The mutually beneficial exchange of information (Toussante preferred not to use the word “blackmail”) was likely to grease the wheels of that particular machinery.

  ‘Excellent Patrick,’ nodded Toussante. ‘Get going with that as quickly as possible.’

  ‘It makes no sense to me,’ commented Noble. ‘The theft of the Monet is going to be all over the news. Nobody could display it without the law eventually finding out and taking it back. Why buy a painting you can’t tell anybody about?’

  ‘There are all sorts of people in this world,’ shrugged Toussante, with a typically Gallic philosophy. ‘For some it is simply owning a painting that matters. They don’t need or even want others to know about it. They just want to be able to look at it and know that nobody else can.’

  ‘Unfortunately for us,’ added Larsan. ‘If everybody thought like we do, and considered the idea of owning a painting you can’t show off to be ridiculous, there wouldn’t be a black market for art.’

  Noble ran his hand through his thinning brown hair.

  ‘Hell, I’d settle for just knowing why someone would go to all the effort of replacing a stolen painting with a child’s drawing of a ghost. It must have made the operation much more difficult. What is the significance?’

  ‘A kind of signature?’ suggested Larsan. ‘Our phantom seems to have a bit of an ego.’

  Noble nodded in acknowledgement of this possibility. ‘What about you chief?’ he asked. ‘Anything useful from DuFresne?’

  ‘Not really,’ replied Toussante. ‘Five weeks ago he had a Scottish laird to stay, which was odd. He didn’t know the man, but heard he was in Paris and invited him to spend a night. Apparently DuFresne has a bit of an obsession with Scotland and the Highlands. Probably something in his ancestry I imagine. Either way his bookcases are stuffed with Burns and Walter Scott. There might be something in that I suppose, although the painting was obviously still there after the laird left. That was the only visitor DuFresne had to the house in months.

  ‘He also was out of Paris for the first two weeks of this month, staying at his chateau in the Languedoc, and he had someone come to repair the pipes, but it’s hard to see a plumber being our master criminal.’

  ‘And, again,’ said Larsan, ‘the painting wasn’t stolen while DuFresne was away. It was stolen last night, from a locked townhouse.’

  Noble wordlessly lit a Gitanes, which somehow managed to say more about his feelings than an Englishman could express in a ten minute monologue.

  ‘I’ve half a mind to call Harris and ask his opinion, see if he has any ideas,’ commented Toussante. Dr Samuel Harris, allegedly a professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge (although the master of his college frequently expressed doubt that there was evidence for this) had helped in the battle with Le Fantôme several months earlier. Already having the trust of Scotland Yard, he made the acquaintance of Toussante, Larsan and Noble when Le Fantôme spread his net further afield and stole an eighth century Persian dagger from the British Museum. The dagger was never recovered, but Harris had earned the respect of the Sûreté.

  ‘Give us another day or two at least, chief,’ said Noble. ‘I’d like to catch the devil myself.’

  ‘Well, keep going,’ sighed Toussante. ‘I’m not looking forward to telling Jacques DuFresne we haven’t any clue how his precious Monet was stolen or where it is, but I’m damned if he’ll be able to accuse us of failing to turn every stone.’

  Patrick Larsan stepped outside the house, buried deep in the exclusive 16th Arrondissement of Paris, and glanced back at the door closing behind him with an ambiguous expression. He looked like he couldn’t decide whether the last fifteen minutes had been an example of amazing luck or of something being too good to be true.

  This house was his first port of call following up his list of potential buyers for the stolen Monet, and the visit could not have gone better. For some reason, rather than pleasing him, this fact was causing serious misgivings and a growing unease. In the last two years, interactions with Le Fantôme had produced this sensation with unnerving frequency, and it usually proved well-founded.

  He looked down at his notebook detailing the interview that had just transpired. The owner of the house, Pierre Martin, had shown little inclination to speak to a policeman, and even less once the subject of the Monet has been introduced. However Larsan’s delicate mention of a certain establishment near Montmartre and a compromising photograph of Martin at said establishment had persuaded the man to be more forthcoming. A few promises of discretion later and Larsan stood in a secret room, gazing alongside the owner at Monet’s strokes of genius.

  He now had details on the exact nature of where, when and how the painting was acquired, enough to give hope that the criminal may thus be traced. His task should now be over, successful beyond any reasonable expectations, and at the first hurdle no less. Larsan should be heading straight back to the Sûreté, flush with triumph, to mobilise a search for Le Fantôme.

  Yet, inexplicably, he instead walked briskly in the opposite direction, to the second residence on his list.

  Henri Toussante and Alain Noble stared open mouthed at their colleague.

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  Larsan nodded. The previous twenty four hours had taken them all from the confines of Toussante’s office into the various
worlds of Paris, both respectable and less so, and only now had they regathered to share the results. But while Toussante and Noble had depressingly little to report, the account told by Larsan sounded like a fairy tale.

  ‘All eight?’ repeated Toussante, apparently not trusting his ears.

  ‘All of them,’ nodded Larsan.

  ‘Every one of them had a copy of the Monet in their house?’ asked Noble, as though there had been some potential ambiguity in Larsan’s report.

  Toussante looked down at the reams of paper Larsan had brought, transcripts of his eight interviews of the day before.

  ‘It seemed incredible I should find the painting on my first try,’ said Larsan. ‘Something told me to keep going for some reason, and of course the second man I interviewed also had the painting in his cellar. After that I began to suspect what I was going to find and so, before continuing to the third house, I contacted the Louvre to borrow an art expert for the afternoon. She confirmed the first two paintings were forgeries and came with me to visit the other possible buyers. Not every suspect was quite so keen to talk, but by the end it was certainty rather than suspicion that each had a copy. Besides, when an expert confirms they have been the victim of a hoax, and what they own is a very good forgery rather than the original, they become more bullish and interested in helping track down the seller. And of course the purchase of a copy of a painting is not illegal, so they suddenly had nothing to fear from the law.’

  Noble shook his head. ‘It’s astonishing. You have to be impressed really.’

  ‘And it answers our question about why someone would steal a painting when there are so few people who would buy something they cannot display,’ added Toussante. ‘If the buyer will never tell anyone else they own it, then you can sell eight different counterfeits and make eight times as much money. Not to mention still owning the original at the end.’