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Sunday tables of my father's friends whose names I often read in the newspapers, houses in which everyone watched to see if we would eat their roast.
    Rose had the palm of her hand pressed to her forehead. René thrashed in his seat, drew his finger across his neck, then stood to leave. “I won't watch you do this,” he said. I turned my face back to the painting and raised my hand to shade my eyes. The auction room's lights glared off the surface of the canvas. My father often said, “A beautiful painting makes me want to shield my eyes. I buy when I have to look away.”
    A man with the posture of a gendarme bid a few meters from me. He wore the rosette of the Legion of Honor on his coat, and Iwatched his jaw muscles clench and grind between each bid. He had bought several other paintings already—he would start thinking about the money soon, wouldn't he, the vast sum, with the auctioneer's fees on top of it? When he bowed his head and reached out to hold the hand of the woman standing beside him, I knew I'd won. “No more,” he said. His wife looked downcast. My boy! My boy! I could hear my father say, as he rose from his desk chair, beaming. Finally, I thought. Now it can all begin!
    The Drouot assistant strode toward me, arm outstretched, as if he would just hand off the sales slip that was my everything.
    “Your name?” he asked, eyeing a blonde in a thin blouse. When I told him, he said, “Of course,” and laughed when I withdrew the creased check from my pocket. I had to ask him for the amount, and when he said seventy thousand francs I felt my knees give. My hand shook as I wrote.
    I waited through the next six auctions. My mouth tasted of metal. Rose followed me out the door, where René lay in wait, talking to himself and making small angry gestures. He grabbed me by the wrist, sputtering.
    “Hello, René,” I said.
    “From ten rows away, it's a suspect object.”
    “We're at Drouot's.”
    “There are plenty in this business who are crooked. Like the Galerie Zola scandal.” I hardly heard René speak. “Think about Manet,” the curator pleaded. “He wanted to build up paint on the canvas in three dimensions. For the paint to emphasize that it is material. Gauguin mixed wax into his to dull it. Your Ham shines like a Dutch master.”
    Rose looked away and my lungs constricted. She agreed with René, then.
    “Varnished,” Rose said. “Licked.”
    René kept one hand over his forehead, as if when he let go of it his skull might fall apart into its bones. “Your father—” he faltered. “We have to see Arthur.”
    “Arthur?” I asked.
    “At the cash register,” Rose said.
    We hurried to keep pace with René, who had gone galumphing down the stairs, as much falling down them as running. “He's worried what your father will think,” Rose whispered, “knowing that René was present when you bought the painting. Your father supplements his salary, just like he does with mine and the director at the Jeu de Paume.”
    A gnomish man with a full beard and pointed ears greeted René from behind a pane of glass. CAISSE , read a gold plaque beside a sliding window, which the gnome raised. “René,” he said in a tetchy voice. “You never come to visit anymore.”
    “Arthur.” René was short of breath. “Sajan put a fake Manet on the block upstairs, and Daniel Berenzon's boy here bought it. You have to nullify the auction. The son's name isn't on the account, so to buy it in the father's name is the same as a stranger doing it. It's an illegal transaction through and through.”
    The gnome hummed while René spoke. “Now, now. The young man here seems perfectly calm. He is Daniel Berenzon's son, after all. Remember, we too are a family business. We welcome Berenzon's heir here as Ulysses was hailed by the Phaeacians. And we happily waive any paper-signing claptrap under such exciting circumstances.” The gnome turned his lamplike eyes on me. “In fact, we've all been wondering why he's