Caravaggio's Angel by Ruth Brandon Read Free Book Online

than what I’ve told you.’
    ‘Will you go and see the old lady?’
    ‘I suppose so.’
    ‘You suppose so! Where’s the spirit of the chase?’
    ‘She’s just lost her son. It hardly seems the moment to say I want to talk to her about the Surrealists.’
    ‘The Surrealists?’ Joe sounded mystified.
    ‘The Surrealists,’ I assured him. ‘She was married to one. Her brother was one. It’s to do with my exhibition. Remember?’
    ‘Yeah, of course, your exhibition. Well, if you do go, don’t forget to keep your eyes open. I kind of feel we may be on to something rather interesting.’
    He didn’t suggest we met. But at least we were on terms again.
    Next morning, when I opened the paper, there was Rigaut’s obituary.
    Antoine Rigaut, who has died aged 58, was a fixture of Parisian cultural life. His father, the Surrealist photographer Emmanuel Rigaut, made his living after the war as a picture dealer, so that Antoine grew up surrounded by art and artists. He himself would have liked to be a painter, but although he had some facility, it quickly became clear that he was not talented enough to make his living in this way. Although it would have been easy for him to enter the fam-ily firm, Antoine preferred instead to devote himself to scholarship. He soon established himself as an expert on the baroque, and by his mid-forties had become head of Italian paintings at the Louvre, a post he held until his death.
    Rigaut showed a particular facility for spotting master-pieces in improbable settings, and although some aspects of his career were controversial, leading to occasional fallingsout amongst his colleagues, all would agree that he left the collection distinctly stronger than when he arrived.
    Rigaut never married. His mother and a younger brother survive him.
    I tore the page out. Naturally, it didn’t say how he’d died. For some reason, obituaries never do. You have to translate: ‘suddenly’ probably means an accident, ‘after a long illness’ equals cancer or alcoholism. But this one was giving even less away than usual. An accident, Manu had said. But what kind of accident? Perhaps the French press would be more forthcoming.
    When I got to my computer at the office, I googled Rigaut’s name. There were a number of other obituaries, longer, but almost as uninformative. The French style is less direct than the English, oblique, allusive, given to tailing off in suggestive ellipsis . . . Both Le Monde and Le Figaro hinted at an edgy attraction to rough trade. But they didn’t imply that this was related to Rigaut’s death. In any case, why would a quarrel with a boyfriend have prompted Manu to give me his grandmother’s address? There was also a short paragraph from the news pages of Le Figaro , stating that the body had been found at Rigaut’s home, and that foul play was not suspected – a phrase which probably meant suicide.
    Despite this frustrating lack of direct information, I did manage to glean a few references to old scandals – pre-sumably, the ‘controversial’ career aspects mentioned in the English obit. There was a dubious provenance regard-ing a Titian – Rigaut had insisted the painting was genuine, a view which had eventually prevailed, to the extent of its being bought by the Louvre, but which was still, it seemed, strongly contested in some quarters. Also, there had been a string of lucky finds in Switzerland, apparently an improbable venue for such serendipities. Why, I could not quite make out. If you were rich and wanted to conceal the extent of your wealth, wasn’t Switzerland the place to go, or at any rate to send the excess, knowing that no awkward questions would be asked? And why, in that case, should the odd escaped picture not find itself floating around Zurich, waiting to be identified by a knowledgeable eye? But these were hardly more than hints – a sense that all was not what it might have seemed. Whatever the story (and maybe there was no story) I would not