The Modigliani Scandal Read Free

Still, there′s plenty of time. I′m only twenty-five.″
    Mike reached across the table and held her hand. ″Why don′t you come work for me? I′ll pay you a fortune-you′d be worth it.″
    She shook her head. ″I don′t want to ride on your back. I′ll make it myself.″
    ″You′re quite happy to ride on my front,″ he grinned.
    She put on a leer. ″You betcha,″ she said in imitation of his accent. Then she withdrew her hand. ″No, I′m going to write my thesis. If it gets published I could make some cash.″
    ″What′s the topic?″
    ″Well, I′ve been toying with a couple of things. The most promising is the relationship between art and drugs.″
    ″Trendy.″
    ″And original. I think I could show that drug abuse tends to be good for art and bad for artists.″
    ″A nice paradox. Where will you start?″
    ″Here. In Paris. They used to smoke pot in the artistic community around the first couple of decades of the century. Only they called it hashish″
    Mike nodded. ″Will you take just a little help from me, right at the start?″
    Dee reached for the cigarettes and took one. ″Sure,″ she said.
    He held his lighter across the table. ″There′s an old guy you ought to talk to. He was a pal of half a dozen of the masters here before World War One. A couple of times he′s put me on the track of pictures.
    ″He was kind of a fringe criminal, but he used to get prostitutes to act as models—and other things sometimes—for the young painters. He′s old now—he must be pushing ninety. But he remembers.″
     
    The tiny bedsitter smelled bad. The odor of the fish shop below pervaded everything, seeping up through the bare floorboards and settling in the battered furniture, the sheets on the single bed in the comer, the faded curtains at the one small window. Smoke from the old man′s pipe failed to hide the fishy smell, and underlying it all was the atmosphere of a room that is rarely scrubbed.
    And a fortune in post-Impressionist paintings hung on the walls.
    ″All given to me by the artists,″ the old man explained airily. Dee had to concentrate to understand his thick Parisian French. ″Always, they were unable to pay their debts. I took the paintings because I knew they would never have the money. I never liked the pictures then. Now I see why they paint this way, and I like it. Besides, they bring back memories.″
    The man was completely bald, and the skin of his face was loose and pale. He was short, and walked with difficulty; but his small black eyes flashed with occasional enthusiasm. He was rejuvenated by this pretty English girl who spoke such good French and smiled at him as if he was a young man again.
    ″Don′t you get pestered by people wanting to buy them?″ Dee asked.
    ″Not anymore. I am always willing to lend them out, at a fee.″ His eyes twinkled. ″It pays for my tobacco,″ he added, raising his pipe in a gesture like a toast.
    Dee realized what the other element in the smell was: the tobacco in his pipe was mixed with cannabis. She nodded knowingly.
    ″Would you like some? I have some papers,″ he offered.
    ″Thank you.″
    He passed her a tobacco tin, some cigarette papers, and a small block of resin, and she began rolling a joint.
    ″Ah, you young girls,″ the man mused. ″Drugs are bad for you, really. I should not corrupt the youth. There, I have been doing it all my life, and now I am too old to change.″
    ″You′ve lived a long life on it,″ Dee said.
    ″True, true. I will be eighty-nine this year, I think. For seventy years I have smoked my special tobacco every day, except in prison, of course.″
    Dee licked the gummed paper and completed the reefer. She lit it with a tiny gold lighter and inhaled. ″Did the painters use hashish a great deal?″ she asked.
    ″Oh yes. I made a fortune from the stuff. Some spent all their money on it.″ He looked at a pencil drawing on the wall, a hurried-looking sketch of the head of a woman: an oval face