Page 88 of Portrait of an Unknown Woman

“After I told Toussaint that we were leaving him.”

“How much did he pay you to stay?”

“Two million.”

“I assume you banked the million the Spanish woman gave you.”

“Oui. And six months later Lucien was dead. He was working on another Cézanne when he was killed. The police never found it.”

“I don’t suppose you told them that Lucien was an art forger or that he had recently received a visit from a mysterious Spanish woman who called herself Miranda Álvarez.”

“If I had, I would have implicated myself.”

“How did you explain the thirty million at Credit Suisse in Geneva?”

“It was thirty-four million at the time,” admitted Françoise Vionnet. “And the police never discovered it.”

“What about the villa in Saint-Barthélemy?”

“It’s owned by a shell company registered in the Bahamas. Chloé and I keep a low profile here in the Lubéron. But when we go to the island...”

“You live well on the proceeds of Lucien’s forgeries.”

She lit another Gitane but said nothing.

“How many are left?” asked Gabriel.

“Fakes?” She blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “Only the Chagall. The others are all gone.”

Gabriel laid his phone on the table. “How many, Françoise?”

Outside, Chloé was stretched like a Modigliani nude across the sunbaked paving stones next to the pool. “If only someone would pay her for doing that,” said her mother judgmentally. “Chloé would be the richest woman in France.”

“You were a front woman for a forger,” said Gabriel. “You didn’t exactly set a good example.”

She led them along a gravel footpath toward Lucien’s atelier. It was a small building, ocher in color, with a tile roof. The door was secured with a padlock, as were the wooden shutters.

“Someone tried to break in not long after Lucien was murdered. That’s when I got the dog.”

She unlocked the door and led Gabriel and Christopher inside. The dank air smelled of canvas and dust and linseed oil. Beneath an overhead skylight stood an ancient studio easel and a cluttered old worktable with shelves and drawers for supplies. The paintings were leaning against the walls, perhaps twenty to a row.

“Is this all of them?” asked Gabriel.

Françoise Vionnet nodded.

“No warehouse or storage unit somewhere?”

“Non. Everything is here.”

She walked over to the nearest queue of paintings and leafed through them as though they were vinyl record albums. Reluctantly she extracted one and displayed it for Gabriel.

“Fernand Léger.”

“You have a good eye, Monsieur Allon.”

She moved to the next row. From it she unearthed a pastiche ofHouses at L’Estaqueby Georges Braque. The next row of paintings produced a Picasso and another Léger.

“Surely the police searched this place after the murder,” said Gabriel.