Angelo said, “What’s the worst fucking thing could happen?”

  And sure enough, the next morning a messenger from the museum’s mail room came out into the cold to find me and give me a note. It was a nice-looking item, on heavy stock, in a thick envelope. It was from Porterfield. He was inviting me to come over at my earliest convenience, to discuss an important proposition.

  His place was ten blocks south, on Fifth, accessed through bronze gates that probably came from some ancient palace in Florence, Italy. Shipped over in a big-bellied boat, maybe along with the right kind of workers. I was shown to a library. Porterfield came in five minutes later. He was twenty-two at the time, full of pep and energy, with a big dumb smile on his big pink face. He reminded me of a puppy my cousin once had. Big feet, slipping and sliding, always eager. We waited for a man to bring us coffee, and then Porterfield told me about his grace-period theory. He said he had always liked Renoir, and he wanted one. Or two, or three. It would mean a lot to him. He wanted me to go to France and see what I could find. His budget was generous. He would give me letters of introduction for the local banks. I would be his purchasing agent. He would send me second class on the first steamship out. He would meet all my legitimate expenses. He talked and talked. I listened and listened. I figured he was about eighty percent the same as any other rich jerk in town, with too much bare wallpaper in his dining room. But I got the feeling some small part of him really liked Renoir. Maybe as more than an investment.

  Eventually he stopped talking, and for some dumb reason I said, “OK, I’ll do it. I’ll leave right away.”

  Six days later I was in Paris.

  It was hopeless. I knew nothing and no one. I went to galleries like a regular customer, but Renoir prices were already sky high. There was no grace period. The first guy in the chophouse had been right. Not Porterfield. But I felt duty bound, so I kept at it. I picked up gossip. Some dealers were worried Renoir’s kids would flood the market with canvases found in his studio. Apparently they were stacked six deep against the walls. The studio was in a place called Cagnes-sur-Mer, which was in the hills behind Cannes, which was a small fishing port way in the south. On the Mediterranean Sea. A person could get to Cannes by train, and then probably a donkey cart could take him onward.

  I went. Why not? The alternative was passage home, to a job I was sure was already gone. I was absent without leave. So I took the sleeper train, to a hot and tawny landscape. A pony and trap took me into the hills. Renoir’s place was a pleasant spread. A bunch of manicured acres, and a low stone house. He had been successful for many years. No kind of a starving artist. Not anymore.

  There was no one home, except a young man who said he was a good friend of Renoir’s. He said his name was Lucien Mignon. He said he lived there. He said he was a fellow artist. He said Renoir’s kids had been and gone, and Renoir’s wife was in Nice, staying with a friend.

  He spoke English, so I made sure he would pass on all kinds of sincere condolences to the appropriate parties. From Renoir’s admirers in New York. Of which there were many. Who would all like to know, for reasons I made sound purely academic and even sentimental, exactly how many more paintings were left in the studio?

  I figured Mignon would answer, being an artist, and therefore having a keen eye for a buck, but he didn’t answer. Not directly. Instead he told me about his own life. He was a painter, at first an admirer of Renoir, then a friend, then a constant companion. Like a younger brother. He had lived in the house for ten years. He felt despite the difference in their ages, he and Renoir had formed a very deep bond. A true connection.

  It sounded weird to me. Like why people get sent to Bellevue. Then it got worse. He showed me his work. It was just like Renoir’s. Almost exactly copied, in style and manner and subject. All of it was unsigned, too, as if to preserve the illusion it might be the master’s own product. It was a very odd and slavish homage.

  The studio was a big, tall, square room. It was cool and light. Some of Renoir’s work was hung on the wall, and some of Mignon’s was hung beside it. It was hard to tell the difference. Below the pieces on display, there were indeed canvases stacked six deep against the walls. Mignon said Renoir’s kids had set them aside. As their inheritance. They were not to be looked at and not to be touched. Because they were all very good.

  He said it in a way that suggested somehow he had helped make them all very good.

  I asked him if he knew of any other canvases as yet unspoken for. Anywhere in France. In answer he pointed across the room. Against another wall was a very small number of items the kids had rejected. Easy to see why. They were all sketches or experiments or otherwise unfinished. One was nothing more than a wavy green stripe running left to right across a bare canvas. Maybe a landscape, started and immediately abandoned. Mignon told me Renoir didn’t really like working out of doors. He liked being inside, with his models. Pink and round. Village girls, mostly. Apparently one of them had become Mrs. Renoir.

  One of the rejected canvases had the lower half of a landscape on it. A couple dozen green brushstrokes, nicely done, suggestive, but a little tentative and half-hearted. There was no sky. Another abandoned start. A canvas laid aside. But a canvas later grabbed up for another purpose. Where the sky should have been was a still life of pink flowers in a green glass vase. It was in the top left of the frame, painted sideways onto the unfinished landscape, not more than about eight inches by ten. The flowers were roses and anemones. The pink colors were Renoir’s trademark. Mignon and I agreed no one did pink better than Renoir. The vase was a cheap thing, bought for a few sous at the market, or made at home by pouring six inches of boiling water into an empty wine bottle, and then tapping it with a hammer.

  It was a beautiful little fragment. It looked done with joy. Mignon told me there was a nice story behind it. One summer day Mrs. Renoir had gone out in the garden to pick a bouquet. She had filled the vase with water from the pump, and arranged the stems artfully, and carried it into the house through the studio door, which was the easiest way. Her husband had seen it and was seized with desire to paint it. Literally seized, Mignon said. Such was the artistic temperament. Renoir had stopped what he was doing, and grabbed the nearest available canvas, which happened to be the unfinished landscape, and he had stood it vertically on his easel, and painted the flowers in the blank space where the sky should have been. He said he couldn’t resist their wild disarray. His wife, who had spent more than ten minutes on the arrangement, smiled and said nothing.

  Naturally I proposed a deal.

  I said if I could take the tiny still life for myself, purely as a personal token and souvenir, then I would buy twenty of Mignon’s works to sell in New York. I offered him a hundred thousand dollars of Porterfield’s money.

  Naturally Mignon said yes.

  One more thing, I said. He had to help me cut the flowers out of the larger canvas and tack the fragment to stretchers of its own. Like a miniature original.

  He said he would.

  One more thing, I said. He had to paint Renoir’s signature on it. Purely for my own satisfaction.

  He hesitated.

  I said he knew Renoir had painted it. He knew that for sure. He had watched it happen. So where was the deception?

  He agreed fast enough to make me optimistic about my future.

  We took the half-landscape, half-flowers canvas off its stretchers, and we cut the relevant eight-by-ten rectangle out of it, plus enough wraparound margin to fix it to a frame of its own, which Mignon assembled from wood and nails lying around. We put it all together, and then he squeezed a dot of paint from a tube, dark brown not black, and he took a fine camel hair brush and painted Renoir’s name in the bottom right corner. Just Renoir, with a stylized first capital, and then flowing lower-case letters after it, very French, and very identical to the dozens of examples of the real thing I could see all around.

  Then I chose twenty of his own canvases. Naturally I picked the most impressive and Renoir-like. I wrote him a check—one hundred thousand and 00/100—and we wrapped the twenty-one packages in paper, and we loaded them into the pony cart, which had waited for me, per my instructions and Porterfield’s generous tip. I drove off with a wave.

  I never saw Mignon again. But we stayed in business together, in a manner of speaking, for three more years.

  I took a room in Cannes, in a fine seafront hotel. Bell boys brought up my packages. I went out and found an art store and bought a tube of dark brown oil, and a fine camel hair brush. I propped my little still life on the dresser and copied Renoir’s signature, twenty separate times, in the bottom right corners of Mignon’s work. Then I went down to the lobby and cabled Porterfield: Bought three superb Renoirs for a hundred thousand. Returning directly.

  I was home seven days later. First stop was a framers for my still life, which I then propped on my mantelpiece, and second stop was Porterfield’s mansion on Fifth, with three of Mignon’s finest.

  Which was where the seed of guilt was planted. Porterfield was so fucking happy. So fucking delighted. He had his Renoirs. He beamed and smiled like a kid on Christmas morning. They were fabulous, he said. They were a steal. Thirty-three grand apiece. He even gave me a bonus.

  I got over it pretty fast. I had to. I had seventeen more Renoirs to sell, which I did, leaking them out slowly over a three-year span, to preserve their value. I was like the dealers I had met in Paris. I didn’t want a glut. With the money I got I moved uptown. I never lived with Angelo again. I met a guy who said RCA stock was the thing to buy, so I did, but I got taken for a ride. I lost most everything. Not that I could complain. The biter bit, and so on. Sauce for the fucking goose. My world shrunk down to a solitary life in the uncaring city, buoyed up by the glow of my roses and anemones above the fireplace. I imagined the same feeling inside Porterfield’s place, like two pins in a map. Twin centers of happiness and delight. He with his Renoirs, and me with mine.

  Then the heart attack, and the guilt. The sweet dumb fuck. The big smile on his face. I didn’t write a letter. How could I explain? Instead I took my Renoir off the wall, and wrapped it in paper, and walked it up Fifth, and through the bronze Italian gates, to the door. Porterfield wasn’t home. Which was OK. I gave the package to his flunky, and said I wanted his boss to have it, because I knew he liked Renoir. Then I walked away, back to my place, where I continue to sit, just waiting for the second episode. My wall looks bare, but maybe better for it.

  NEW BLANK DOCUMENT

  This all was about ten years ago, back when I didn’t get many cold calls at all. Maybe I would get two in a month. Sometimes three. Random assignments, because I was cheap, and I was always available. I was a new freelancer making his name, fully aware that for a long time pickings would be slim, so I was also always willing. I was happy to go anywhere and do anything. A couple thousand words here or there would pay my rent. Another couple thousand would put food on my table.

  My phone rang and I answered it and heard faint whistling and scratching. Not a local number. Turned out to be a magazine editor in Paris, France. A transatlantic call. The first I ever got. The guy’s English was accented but fluent. He said he had gotten my name from a bureau. The place he mentioned was one we all signed up for, in the hopes of getting a little local legwork for a foreign publication. Turned out my hopes had come true that day. The guy in Paris said he wanted to send me on just such an assignment. He said his magazine was the biggest this and the biggest that, but in the end what it boiled down to for me was he wanted sidebar coverage about some guy’s brother.

  “Cuthbert Jackson’s brother,” he said, reverently, like he was awarding me the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  I didn’t answer. I pecked out Cuthbert Jackson one-handed on my keyboard, and the search engine came back with an obscure American jazz pianist, an old black guy, born in Florida but for a long time permanently resident in France.

  I said, “Cuthbert Jackson the piano player?”

  “And so much more,” the Paris guy said. “You know him, of course. My magazine is attempting a full-scale biography. We plan to serialize it over thirteen weeks. Recently, for the first time ever, Monsieur Jackson revealed he has a living relative. A brother, still in Florida. Naturally we need to include his point of view in our story. You must go see him at once. Am I correct you live near Florida?”

  As a matter of fact he was correct, which I guess explained how he picked me out of the bureau’s list. Simple geography. Less mileage.

  I said, “Florida is a big state, but yes, I live right next to it.”

  “Ideally you should obtain biographical detail about their family situation. That would be excellent. But don’t worry. Worst case, we can use anything you get, as purely sidebar coverage if necessary, as if to say, by the way, Monsieur Jackson has a brother, and this is where he’s living, and this is what he’s doing.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “This is very important.”

  “I understand,” I said again.

  * * *

  Ten years ago the net was not what it is today. But it was far enough along to give me what I needed. There were message boards and fan forums, and websites with old photographs, and jazz history sites, and some political stuff, mostly in French. Long story short, Cuthbert Jackson was born in 1925 in a no-account shit-hole in the Florida Panhandle. There was one piano in town and he played it all the time. He was such a prodigy that by the time he was four people were so used to it they stopped mentioning it. At the age of eighteen he was drafted by the US Army and trained up as a support engineer. He was sent to Europe with the D-Day invasion. He was sent to Paris to march in the GI parade after liberation. He never left. At first he was listed as AWOL, and then he was forgotten about.

  He played the piano in Paris, all through the grim postwar years, sweating in tiny downstairs clubs, for people desperate for something new to believe in, who found part of it in American music played by an exiled black man. He would have said he was evolving the music, not just playing it, perhaps faster and more radically because of his isolation. He wasn’t in LA or Greenwich Village. He wasn’t really hearing anyone else’s stuff. Which made some folks call his direction a school or a movement, which led to existential disputes with devotees of other schools and movements. Which led to growing fame, which in an adopted French way made him more and more reclusive, which made him more and more famous. What little he said, he considered plain common sense, but when translated into French he sounded like Socrates. His record sales went through the roof. In France. Nowhere else. It was a thing back then. There were black writers and poets and painters, all Americans, all living in Paris, all doing well. News weeklies did a couple of stories. Cuthbert Jackson’s name came up.

  Because of the political stuff. France was moving right along. It had aerospace and automobiles and nuclear bombs. Everyone was doing pretty well. Except Americans were doing better. Which led to a heady mixture of disdain and envy. Which led to criticism. Which led to a question: Why do your black people do better when they come over here?

  Which was kind of smug, and totally circular, because it wasn’t really a question, but a move in the game. Either way it was buried by the gigantic storms already brewing at home. By contrast it seemed quaint and civilized. People agreed a movie could be made. People wondered if a State Department memo could be optioned.

  Cuthbert Jackson himself generally ignored the issue, but if asked a direct question, he would answer, with what he considered plain common sense, though as he got older and terser the French translations came out more and more weird and philosophical. One guy wrote a whole book about Jackson’s five-word answer to a question about the likely future of mankind.

  His most recent CD was with his regular trio, and it had sold pretty well.

  His most recent public statement was that he had a brother.

  * * *

  On my map the address everyone seemed to agree on looked to be in hardscrabble country, most of a day’s drive away, so I left early. I was sure there would be no motels. I figured I would sleep in the car. Anything and anywhere. I had rent to pay.

  The town was as bad as I had expected. Maybe a little meaner. It was all low houses, grouped tight around what looked like the archaeological ruins of a previous civilization. Some kind of an old factory, maybe sugar, and the stores and the banks that followed, some in decent buildings, even handsome, in a modest, three-story kind of way, all abandoned decades ago, now overgrown and falling down. I got out of the car where I saw a group of men gathered. They were all waiting for something. There was a mixture of impatience for it and certainty it would arrive.

  I asked a guy, “What’s coming?”

  He said, “The pizza truck.”

  It showed up right on time and turned out to be their new version of a bar, since their last real bar fell down. The pizza guy had cans of beer in a cooler, which might or might not have complied with county ordinances, but which either way turned eating pizza into a standing-around event, like the best kind of place, with the beer playing the role of the beer, and the pizza standing in for the potato chips and the salted peanuts. I counted twenty people. I told one of them I was looking for Cuthbert Jackson’s brother.

  He said, “Who?”

  “Cuthbert Jackson. He played the piano. He had a brother.”

  Another guy said, “Who?”

  And then another. They all seemed interested. Maybe they ran out of things to say about pizza.

  I said, “He’s famous in France.”

  No reaction.

  I asked, “Who is the oldest person here?”

  Turned out to be a guy aged eighty, eating a pepperoni pie and drinking a High Life.

  I asked him, “Do you remember World War Two?”

  He said, “Sure I do.”