Read Chapter 17: The Forger's Apprentice

The address Inès Marchand kept was a painter’s studio above a print shop in the Eleventh, a narrow walk-up that smelled of turpentine and cold cigarette smoke. Julien climbed the stairs slowly, listening for footsteps below, for the particular click of a Ministry heel or the heavier tread of Corsican muscle. The street had been clean. He’d doubled back twice. Still, his hand was damp on the railing.

He knocked. Nothing. He knocked again, harder.

“He’s dead,” came a voice through the wood. Young. Female. Flat.

“I know,” Julien said. “That’s why I’m here.”

A pause. A chain slid. The door opened six inches and a pair of dark eyes examined him from a thin, paint-flecked face. She was maybe twenty-five, with cropped black hair and a smock stained in ochres and ultramarines. She looked at him the way you look at a stray dog that might bite.

“You’re the dealer,” she said. “The one who got him killed.”

Julien didn’t flinch. “I’m the one who found him. That’s not the same thing.”

“It’s close enough.” But she opened the door.

The studio was chaos in the way only a working atelier can be—canvases stacked like fallen dominoes, rags stiff with dried oil, a sink crusted with pigment. In the center, on a wooden easel, stood a half-finished copy of a Titian, the underdrawing confident, the flesh tones still in their first layering. Julien recognized the hand immediately. Anton’s students had never matched his speed, but this one had his eye.

“You were with him long?” Julien asked.

“Four years.” She crossed her arms. “He never mentioned you by name. Just ‘the desperate one.’ ”

Julien allowed a small, tired smile. “That’s accurate.”

Inès didn’t smile back. “The police came. They asked questions. I told them he painted religious scenes for churches. They believed me because I cried. I didn’t cry for him. I cried because I knew someone like you would show up eventually, wanting something.”

“I need his notes.”

Her chin lifted. “What notes?”

“On the Caravaggio. The Vignon commission. He worked from photographs, from memory, from whatever Paul Moreau gave him. He kept studies—compositional notes, pigment formulas, the flaws he deliberately built in. I need them.”

Inès walked to the far wall and pulled aside a curtain of drop cloth. Behind it, a locked steel cabinet, the kind a cautious man buys secondhand and bolts to the floor. She worked a key from a chain around her neck.

“He told me,” she said quietly, “that if anything ever happened to him, someone would come. He said that person would have a reason that sounded good, and a promise that sounded better.” She turned. “You’re that person. So what’s your promise?”

Julien met her eyes. “There’s a painting of his. A real one, not a copy. His own work—a Crucifixion, he finished it last month. He’d taken it to a man named Dupont as a gift, to smooth a business arrangement. When I found Anton, that painting was on Dupont’s wall.” He paused. “I can get it back. But I need to finish what Anton started first.”

Inès’s expression didn’t change, but something behind it did. A flicker. Grief and calculation meeting in the same narrow space.

“Dupont,” she repeated. “The Corsican.”

“You know him.”

“Anton mentioned him once. Said he collected things that didn’t belong to him.” She pulled a thick manila folder from the cabinet and held it against her chest. “These notes are the only record of how the Caravaggio was faked. The layering, the craquelure pattern, the specific umber from a batch that hasn’t been made since 1972. If you have the real painting now, and you want to sell a copy instead, you need this. Or you’ll be caught inside the first five minutes of laboratory testing.”

“I know.”

“So you need me,” she said. “Not just the notes. Me. Because Anton’s shorthand is illegible to anyone who didn’t learn to paint in his shadow. If you want to read these, you need me to translate. And if you need a copy made in two weeks, you need another pair of hands. His hands are cold.”

Julien studied her. She wasn’t bargaining out of greed—her price was the painting of her master’s, yes, but there was something else. A hunger. She’d spent four years learning from one of the greats, and now she was alone in a rented studio, painting Titian copies for a gallery that paid her a fraction of what they’d sell for.

“You understand what this involves,” he said. “The forgery itself. The provenance. The lies we’ll have to tell a Swiss buyer with a laboratory full of equipment and a network of people who kill inconvenient witnesses.”

“I understood the moment you said his name.” She tucked the folder under her arm. “Anton taught me that a painting is a conversation between the dead and the desperate. I’ve been the dead part long enough. I’d like to try the other side.”

Julien nodded slowly. “Then we have a deal. You help me read Anton’s notes, you help me execute the copy, and I get you your painting back.”

“When?”

“Before the sale. Dupont doesn’t know it has value to me yet. That’s the advantage.”

Inès studied his face with an intensity that reminded him of Anton’s, that way of looking at a surface and seeing what lay beneath. “You’re lying about something,” she said. “But I don’t care. I’d rather work with a liar who keeps his promises than an honest man who breaks them.”

She handed him the folder. It was heavier than he expected, thick with years of observation and craft. He opened it. The top page was a sketch of the Caravaggio’s composition, done in red chalk so accurate it made his chest tighten. Beneath it, notations in Anton’s cramped hand—pigment ratios, drying times, the exact temperature the linseed oil had reached before he’d mixed the first layer.

“He was a genius,” Julien said quietly.

“He was,” Inès agreed. “And geniuses leave footprints. If Keller’s lab has a spectrograph worth anything, they’ll find the trace of Anton’s hand inside any copy he made. Unless we learn to walk the way he did.” She tapped the folder. “That’s what this is. His footprints. We just have to step exactly where he stepped.”

Julien closed the folder. “There’s another step first. My father left a safe-deposit box at Crédit Lyonnais. There’s something in it that might change what we know about the painting’s history—and about the people who want it. I need to collect it before Rousseau’s people put the bank under surveillance, if they haven’t already.”

“When?”

“Tonight. The bank opens at nine. I’ll be there when the doors unlock.”

Inès shook her head. “If the Ministry is watching you, they’ll have your photograph at every branch within a kilometer of your gallery. You go in looking like yourself, you don’t come out with anything except questions.”

She walked to a rack of finished canvases and pulled one out—a portrait of an elderly man, done in the manner of a forgotten nineteenth-century academician. She flipped it around. The frame was sturdy, the canvas taut. She looked at Julien with Anton’s calculating patience.

“I can make you look like someone else,” she said. “But you’ll have to trust me with your face for an hour.”

Julien looked at the folder in his hands, at the red-chalk outline of a masterpiece that had already cost one man his life. Then he looked at the woman who had lost her teacher, her patron, her only connection to the craft she’d dedicated herself to.

“What’s my new name?” he asked.

Inès smiled for the first time. It was not a warm smile. “Let’s start with your posture. The name can come later.”