A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,10

and carried a black, seemingly empty briefcase.

“Ahh, café,” he said by way of greeting.

Gabriel handed him the tasse without speaking and unscrewed the percolator, retracing his steps. Édouard flipped through the morning mail, leaving it in an untamed pile on the counter.

“So,” he said, acknowledging Gabriel with a flick of his chin. “Today we have an appointment at noon.”

Gabriel leaned against the counter; his tight black jeans didn’t allow him to sit down fully. He had worked for Édouard longer than any other assistant, longer than he should have. On his ten-year anniversary with Édouard, his boss bought him a cake and gave him a miniature drawing, some scrap of a Piranesi sketch. It was easily the most valuable thing Gabriel owned.

“He was recommended to me through Jean-Marie as a dealer of some importance,” Édouard continued.

“You should have told me,” Gabriel said. “I would have dressed.”

“You’re fine the way you are.” Édouard smiled approvingly. The wrinkles around his eyes grew deeper. They sat in bags of skin, like a Shar-Pei puppy, while the rest of his face remained unlined, as though his eyes were older than the rest of him. “If you could prepare some of our pieces for inspection …”

Gabriel nodded, tossed back his coffee. He knew the stock better than Édouard did, better than the inventory list. He walked into the storeroom and put on the white cotton gloves. He should pull out a representative sample of their good work, not their best. Something should be held back. A little reticence could be sensed. It would not do to seem overeager.

The visitor’s appointment would explain Édouard’s outfit. This was someone to impress. But Édouard had dressed flamboyantly; obviously Jean-Marie had told him that the dealer’s taste admitted novelty. From the locked cabinet, Gabriel removed a couple of eighteenth-century drawings from the Italian School, a sketch after Rubens, and two well-preserved seventeenth-century etchings of a Brueghel drawing. He complemented the selection with a lesser-known Corot and a not entirely successful landscape by a young Cézanne.

Nearly every time he performed this task for Édouard he remembered the Rembrandt preparatory sketch for a self-portrait the artist completed the year he died. It was early in Gabriel’s extended apprenticeship, and he had fingered the yellowed paper carefully, holding the watermark up to the light. The paper itself was beautiful, thick and uneven, rough like a winter beach. Worms had eaten through the page in a couple of places, and when Gabriel turned it over, despite the thickness of the paper a faint ink line showed through. Also on the back was Rembrandt’s signature, the pregnant R and the perfectly aligned letters, followed by the date: 1667.

And, ah, the drawing itself. The sure, strong lines centered the bulbous face. The background was cross-hatched into a darkness the artist would later imitate in oil, his gray hair curled from underneath his cap. In the sketch, the artist wore a wry smile, which he replaced with a tired grimace in the final portrait. Gabriel had eased off one of his cotton gloves and lightly traced the rounded chin, imagining, for a minute, the complete confidence of the master’s hand. He was not supposed to touch the drawings—the oil from his fingers could compromise the graphite or the paper, but just being that close to such a master draftsman sent a frisson of pleasure that was not unlike a sexual thrill down his back.

In comparison, these sketches were anemic, and Gabriel found the task menial, rote. As he arranged the chosen stock on the light table, he was confident that his choices would please Édouard. He hoped the collector would be interested in the pieces; someone, at least, should have a good day.

Despite his best efforts to ignore the hype, it was clear to Gabriel that Didier’s show at Galerie de Treu was eagerly anticipated by art critics and collectors. There were actual advertisements in L’Officiel des Spectacles, which Didier showed him proudly at the studio, and a short article in Paris Match. Gabriel had debated whether to go to the vernissage at all, but Didier had come to his studio, his smile making him look like the kid he had been when they had met more than twenty years ago, telling Gabriel how much this show meant to him and how it was a triumph for everyone who didn’t sell out or quit. At de Treu’s gallery, Didier’s career seemed suddenly assured. Gabriel assumed that Didier could look forward to enough income from sales of