Page 19 of A Death in Cornwall

“Pleasantly surprised.” She removed a packet of cigarettes from her handbag and lit one. “You mentioned that you were a friend of Hannah Weinberg.”

“A close friend.”

“She never spoke of you.”

“At my request.”

The late Hannah Weinberg had been the director of the Weinberg Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism in France. Located on the rue des Rosiers in the Marais, the center was the target of one of the deadliest terrorist attacks carried out by the Islamic State. Naomi Wallach, a Holocaust restitution specialist focusing on issues related to art, should have been among the dead and wounded. But she was running late that morning and arrived to find the building ablaze and her friend Hannah lying in the ruins. A photograph of the two women, one brutally murdered, the other tearing at her garment in anguish, would become the atrocity’s defining image. Consequently, when the director of the Louvre was looking for an outsider to at long last purge the museum’s collection of looted works of art, Naomi Wallach was judged to be the perfect candidate.

She turned her head and expelled a stream of smoke. “Forgive me, Monsieur Allon. A filthy habit, I know.”

“There are worse.”

“Name one.”

“Buying a painting that belonged to someone who perished in the Holocaust.”

“A great many Frenchmen were afflicted with this habit during the war, including a curator from this very museum.”

“The curator’s name,” said Gabriel, “was René Huyghe.”

Naomi Wallach regarded him over the ember of her cigarette. “It sounds to me as though you know a good deal about the Nazi looting of France.”

“I am by no means an expert on the subject. But I was involved in a case many years ago that led to the recovery of a considerable number of looted paintings.”

“Where did you find them?”

“They were in the hands of a Swiss private banker whose only surviving child just happens to be the world’s most famous violinist.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Not the Augustus Rolfe case?”

Gabriel nodded.

“I’m impressed, Monsieur Allon. That was quite a scandal. But what brings you to the Louvre?”

“A favor for a friend.”

“You can do better than that, can’t you?”

“The friend is a detective for the Devon and Cornwall Police in England.”

Her expression darkened. “Charlotte Blake?”

Gabriel nodded. “The detective asked me to review some papers that she left on her desk the afternoon of her death. It looked to me as though she was conducting provenance research on a Picasso.”

“Untitled portrait of a woman in the surrealist style, oil on canvas, ninety-four by sixty-six centimeters?”

“You knew about the project?”

She nodded slowly.

“May I ask how?”

Naomi Wallach smiled sadly. “Because I was the one who asked her to find that painting.”

***

They crossed the Place du Carrousel and set off along the Allee Centrale of the Jardin des Tuileries. The limbs of the plane trees lay bare against the evening sky. The dusty gravel footpath crunched beneath their feet.

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