A Brush With Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Netherlands. While he talked, I luxuriated in the splendor of the sitting room, enjoying the coffee and looking forward to the arrival of a private eye from the Discreet Detective Agency. This was how life should be—a mixture of luxury and intrigue and romance. And it was how it would be, as soon as I graduated and married John.
    In that ideal world, I wouldn't have an exam the next afternoon. Fortunately I was up on my Existentialists. Existentialism had seemed a sophisticated philosophy to me in my younger days, so l had read about it. I had a nodding acquaintance with Sartre through Simone de Beauvoir before starting my formal studies. I'd already read Camus's Le Mythe de Sisyphe twice, and knew that he claimed in vain to disassociate himself from the Existentialists. If only my professor didn't include a compulsory question on the dialectical materialism controversy, I was home safe. I tended to get bogged down there. Who doesn't?
    When John came back, he had taken off his jacket. I silently admired his expensive shirt, and enjoyed a mental picture of the chest (hirsute but not apish) beneath it. I was feeling amorous, and thought we might enjoy some romance before the detective arrived. I knew the gleam in John's eyes had a different origin and asked politely, “Did you learn anything from Amsterdam?"
    Instead of answering, he put his head back and laughed like a hyena. “We've got it! The Amsterdam connection."
    I felt a surge of adrenaline that had nothing to do with John's physique. “Somebody from the museum? Who?"
    “An assistant curator named Jan Bergma."
    “Do you know him?"
    “Nope, but I soon will. He's in Montreal."
    “Then he can't be helping Latour."
    “He helped before he left, and he'll help again when he goes back—in January. He probably provided the old canvases. He arranged a sabbatical working for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, to study American painting."
    “Wouldn't he have gone to the States to do that?"
    “Sure he would, if Latour spoke English, and if Latour had been going to the States. Check that phone book, will you, and see if Jan Bergma just happens to live on Côte des Neiges."
    My fingers were shaking with excitement now too, but I couldn't find any Jan Bergma listed at all.
    “Never mind; he must have an unlisted phone. I can check Bergma out at the museum."
    “I don't understand exactly how Bergma helped Latour. I mean I assume he's going to replace the genuine Van Goghs with Latour's copies when he goes back to Amsterdam, but why did he have to come to Canada to do that?"
    “Who knows? Maybe they're lovers. Or maybe Bergma followed Latour here and put the deal to him. Latour was here first."
    I considered this, and still wasn't satisfied. “If Bergma is a curator, why didn't he have Latour copy the most expensive pictures?"
    “That's the best part of it,” John said, nearly bursting with glee. “We were talking about the high cost of insurance and beefing up the safety at the museums a while ago, remember? Because Amsterdam has over two hundred Van Goghs, they're going to sell five to cover the insurance costs. Naturally they won't sell the best ones. They've had some pressure from the States to share the wealth, and insuring traveling exhibits is rapidly becoming impossible, so they're going to sell five outright. It's all very hush hush. Only a handful of top execs in Amsterdam know about it."
    “But Latour copied ten."
    “Yeah, the choice of which five to ditch hadn't been finalized when Bergma left, but the field was narrowed down to ten—the ten Latour's already copied. Bergma's got to be in on it. That's as good as an affidavit in my books. After he returns to the museum in January, Bergma will do the switch, and the five copies will be sold with full authentication from the museum. Nobody's going to question authenticity in a blue-chip purchase like that. Then he sells the real originals to a private collector."
    “The fiend!"
    “Your nice friendly