All the Devils Are Here
- Автор: Пенни Луиза
- Серия: Chief Inspector Gamache #16
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: St. Martin's Publishing Group
- ISBN: 9781250145253
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «All the Devils Are Here». Краткое содержание книги:
On their first night in Paris, the Gamaches gather as a family for a bistro dinner with Armand's godfather, the billionaire Stephen Horowitz. Walking home together after the meal, they watch in horror as Stephen is knocked down and critically injured in what Gamache knows is no accident, but a deliberate attempt on the elderly man's life.
When a strange key is found in Stephen's possession it sends Armand, his wife Reine-Marie, and his former second-in-command at the Sûreté, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, from the top of the Tour d'Eiffel, to the bowels of the Paris Archives, from luxury hotels to odd, coded, works of art.
It sends them deep into the secrets Armand's godfather has kept for decades.
A gruesome discovery in Stephen's Paris apartment makes it clear the secrets are more rancid, the danger far greater and more imminent, than they realized.
Soon the whole family is caught up in a web of lies and deceit. In order to find the truth, Gamache will have to decide whether he can trust his friends, his colleagues, his instincts, his own past. His own family.
For even the City of Light casts long shadows. And in that darkness devils hide.
“How do you know?” Reine-Marie asked. They hadn’t told him.
“The collection. He’s a huge financial contributor to the Louvre, and every now and then we’d hear rumors of another of his acquisitions, mostly through auctions. He was never named, but the world of high-end collectors and collections is small, tight-knit. I heard the news, but I thought it was a car accident. Not…” He looked at the outline on the floor.
“That wasn’t Stephen,” said Gamache. “We need you to be discreet about what you’re seeing.”
“Do you know what I’m seeing?” The curator turned from reexamining the Vermeer to examining Gamache.
“I believe I do, but tell us.”
Professor de la Coutu rested his critical gaze on them. “I take it you asked me here for an evaluation. In the event of his death.”
Armand remained silent.
“I’m afraid these are all copies. Excellent ones, certainly. Able to fool most people, though I’m surprised they fooled Monsieur Horowitz. Worth thousands each, even as copies, but not tens of millions. Not priceless as I first thought.”
“All of them?” Reine-Marie looked at Armand and saw that he looked grim, though not surprised. “You knew?”
“I suspected. I knew that most originals from the Renaissance, as many of these would be, don’t have framing paper at the back. And the frames themselves, while clearly good, aren’t old. Even if Stephen had them reframed, he’d make sure they were from the same era.”
“That’s what made me suspicious, too,” said the curator. “The fake Vermeer has a staple in its frame. Monsieur Horowitz would never stand for that, for an original.”
Armand walked over to the smallest painting and, taking it off the wall, handed it to the curator. “Is this original?”
“It’s nice,” said de la Coutu, bending close to it. “Watercolor. Landscape. Probably from the early to mid-twentieth century. Signed VM Whitehead.” The professor turned it around. “Funny that it has a nylon thread at the back and plastic eye hooks.” He handed it back to Gamache. “Probably original, but worthless.”
“Not completely,” said Armand as he replaced it on the screw.
“What a shame,” said the curator. “Someone must’ve come in while Monsieur Horowitz was away from Paris, and methodically replaced originals with copies. Probably done over time. I’ve never seen anything like it. What a loss. Did the dead man surprise the forger, do you think?”
“And was killed,” said Armand. “Could be. Any idea how much this would all be worth, if they were originals?”
The curator frowned, thinking. “Vermeer did very few paintings. This one? In London or Hong Kong, probably close to a hundred million.” He turned full circle. “All told, there might be half a billion dollars’ worth just here, never mind what he must have in his other homes and offices.” Now he turned shocked eyes on Armand. “You don’t think—”
“That they’re all fake?” Armand nodded. “I’ve asked his assistant to have them evaluated. She’s at his home now with the curator from the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. When they’re finished there, they’ll look at the art in his office.”
“Mon Dieu,” whispered the curator. Feeling light-headed again, he sat down and gazed around the room.
Then his expression turned quizzical.
“Have you noticed that all the works are either pastoral or domestic? Peaceful. No torture, no death. Not even any hunting scenes. Huh. It can’t be a coincidence. I wonder why.”
Armand was so used to the paintings that he hadn’t actually noticed this. Neither had Reine-Marie.
But now that the curator had pointed it out, they saw it. Stephen, the exorcist, had covered his walls floor to ceiling with scenes of peace.
“I’m sorry to have given you this bad news,” said de la Coutu. “Will you alert the authorities, or should I?”
“I will. Could you keep this to yourself for now?”
“Of course. Clara told me you’re a senior officer with the Sûreté du Québec. I hope you find out who did this. And, more to the point, who did that.”
He looked at the drawing on the floor.
They put Professor de la Coutu into a taxi and watched as it headed back to the Louvre.
“Poor Stephen,” said Reine-Marie as Armand took her hand. “He’s going to be devastated.”
“I doubt it,” he said, quietly.
She looked at him. Armand was coming to terms, she thought, with the reality that Stephen would almost certainly never return home, and never find out that his collection, the work of a lifetime, had been stolen.
They waited for a gap in the traffic on rue des Sèvres, then darted across the street.
Jacques led them to a secluded table in bar Joséphine. But Armand pointed to a table right beside a rowdy group of visitors speaking Spanish. “Over there, perhaps?”
The maître d’ raised a brow but showed them to the table.
Reine-Marie found herself glancing around the bar, trying to make out where those photographs she’d seen in the archives, from the war, had been taken. She felt a knot in her stomach and understood why Zora had loathed the place.
Was she one of the ones who’d been brought here straight out of the concentration camp? Had she searched for her family through these corridors? In the grand ballroom, in bars and restaurants, in guest rooms? In vain.
Once Jacques had taken their orders, Armand leaned close to Reine-Marie. But just as he opened his mouth to speak, another text came in.
His phone was on the table, and she could see it, too. It was from Mrs. McGillicuddy. At office now. We were right.
Armand typed. Same here.
“His whole collection is fake?” asked Reine-Marie, eyes wide. “Even the ones in Montréal? All of it stolen? What happened to it?”
“I don’t think those paintings were stolen,” he said, leaning close to her and keeping his voice low. “I think Stephen sold them.”
It took Reine-Marie a moment to take that in. “Why do you say that?”
“Because Stephen knew art. He’d know immediately if there was even one fake, never mind all of them.”
“Why would he sell them?”
“To quietly raise capital. And a lot of it. He couldn’t cash in hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of stocks or holdings without anyone noticing, but he could discreetly sell his collection. Then he had to have each painting replaced so no one would know.”
Reine-Marie’s mind raced. “Why would he need that money? Was he in financial trouble?”
“No, not at all.”
“Was he being blackmailed? That dossier? Was he paying to have it suppressed?”
Armand shook his head. “That file was found weeks ago. To quietly sell his collection must’ve taken years. Whatever he was doing, it was a long time in the planning.”
“You had Professor de la Coutu come, but it was just to confirm what you already suspected.”
“Yes. And I think I know where most of the money went. When I spoke with Mrs. McGillicuddy this morning, she told me she’d found papers in one of Stephen’s safety-deposit boxes. He’d been siphoning money to Alexander Plessner. And a lot of it.”
“What for?”
“Investments. Those papers were buy orders. Confirmations. It looks like he’d instructed Plessner to slowly accumulate holdings in several companies. But not all at once. The buys were spread over years, in relatively small amounts at a time so that no alarms would be sounded. When Mrs. McGillicuddy added it up, it came to slightly more than a billion dollars.”
“And no one knew it was Stephen?”
Armand shook his head. “This looks like a hostile takeover, done a millimeter at a time. Have you ever seen the game Jenga?”