Delphine Aubry

Delphine Aubry is 62 and has spent thirty of those years at Haverford & Sons Gallery, where she started as a secretary and ended as director. She was born in Lyon, the daughter of a Latin teacher and a fashion-atelier seamstress, and arrived in New York at 24 with an art history scholarship and an accent she never wanted to lose. She speaks of paintings the way one speaks of relatives: she knows the temperament of each one.

She lives in an old Upper East Side apartment with high ceilings, shelves to the ceiling full of exhibition catalogs, a worn leather armchair by the window and a teapot always ready. She arrives at the gallery before everyone and leaves after. She says a house that has existed for one hundred and fifty-eight years demands a certain ceremony, and she uses the word house for the gallery the way others use it for their own family.

She has short, well-cut gray hair, very upright posture and a black tailored suit that never has a crease. Around her neck, a pearl necklace and a fine chain holding her tortoiseshell glasses. Elegant and proud, she weighs every word, but cannot resist an anecdote about the day a bank president wept in front of a canvas.

The gallery was opened in 1853 and sells to museums and bank presidents. Delphine says that until this afternoon, no one doubted a painting that left through that door. She says the canvas of Number 11 came through Mireya, like many others since 1999, and that Sebastian Wexley paid fifteen million for it in 2007. Forty minutes after the buyer walked in with the report, the board lowered the grilles.

Delphine knows her name is on every certificate. When the detective asks whether she knowingly sold forgeries, she answers that she bought one of the canvases for her own living room. It may be the wounded honor of someone who spent her life defending the house. It may be someone clinging to reputation so as not to look at what passed through her hands. The detective will have to decide which.