A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,44
and then staring again at Gabriel. “No, three. I am good at communicating. Languages, puf, they just make sense to me. I am good at judging character. And I know art. My grandfather was a portrait painter to the aristocracy before they took his life. I inherited his eye, though not his talent. You, it seems, have inherited both.”
Gabriel shook his head. “I hoped that by now I would be better.”
“Paris.” Klinman pronounced the city the English way. “What is Paris? And now they say it’s all about Berlin. Tomorrow it’ll be about somewhere else. At some point it will be someone else’s turn, besides Europe. You, Monsieur Connois, have a choice.”
Klinman stopped speaking. He removed a cigarette from a silver holder and offered it to Gabriel, who shook his head. With affected slowness, he removed a lighter from his breast pocket. It looked heavy, in the shape of a lion whose mouth emitted fire. Its eyes were stones. Emeralds? Topaz? Glass? Klinman took another sip of his drink and then a long drag on the cigarette.
“I have high blood pressure,” he said. “I allow myself two a day. You don’t smoke?”
Gabriel shrugged. Klinman nodded his head. “Hmmm,” he said, as though this revealed something important about Gabriel.
There was a long pause. “Your choice, señor, is the following: make art, or make money. Maybe you will make money with art. Not likely. Maybe you will make art with money. More likely. It’s up to you.”
“I don’t understand.” Gabriel wasn’t sure if he wasn’t following the thread or if the man was not making sense.
“You are dating Colette. She likes fancy restaurants. And maybe you’ll fall in love with her, and will want to make French babies. French babies wear couture, have you not noticed? They eat organic vegetables. Not inexpensive.” Klinman opened his wallet and threw a few euros down on the table. “Come, I have something to show you.”
Gabriel had a brief moment of fear that Klinman was going to take him somewhere and expose himself. That had happened to him once, with a gallery owner, right after he got to Paris. The man actually said, “Would you like to see my etchings?” And Gabriel had followed him into the back room, where the man turned around, fly open, half-erect cock waving. But Klinman’s interest seemed solely artistic and avuncular.
They wove through the Marais, cutting across the Rue Bourgeois. The shops here were chic; their front bay windows abutted the tiny sidewalk, displaying mannequins that suggested figures rather than imitated them. Whimsical children’s furniture, a store devoted only to men’s cravats, heavy modern jewelry. Above the stores were the minuscule apartments of the old quarter, slanted floors and hallway bathrooms. Some were still occupied by elderly Jews who had returned after the war. The smaller side streets sold kosher food, hid yeshivas. From some second-story windows emanated Sephardic music, plaintive Moroccan wailing. Some of the other apartments held squatters: artists more interested in the bohemian lifestyle than in art. If they were real artists, they would live outside the city, as Gabriel did, in a rented room, with a separate studio. And the Marais was also the new place for wealthy Americans (“new money,” Édouard called it, using the English words).
They turned left onto a small side street and were in the garment district. The sidewalks were wider here, but no less crowded. Though the racks of clothing seemed to part for Klinman, they closed back up immediately, so that to follow him Gabriel kept having to dodge mobile wardrobes and cudgels of cloth.
Finally, Klinman ducked into a large courtyard. Flagstones surrounded a fountain in the middle, where the wan light drifted down from the cloudy sky. The fountain had obviously been functional rather than decorative at one time. The spray rose and then dripped down a symmetrical spindle with a wide base.
“This is my office. Paris office,” Klinman said, waving at the portière. He led them straight across the courtyard and pulled a set of antique-looking keys from his pocket. He unlocked the door and stepped inside, hurrying to turn off an alarm on the far wall. When he flipped the lights, they were thrown back in time.
The room looked as if it were transplanted from a nineteenth-century men’s club. The furniture was all burgundy leather, redolent of cigar smoke. A low mahogany table had been remade to double as a lightbox. Heavy brocade curtains suggested windows, but no light was in evidence.