I held mine up and touched it to his, then we threw back the drinks. He filled the glasses again before we spoke.
“I know everything now,” I told him. “Everything.”
He nodded slightly. “I’m sorry you had to find out.”
“Why?”
“So many reasons, son. So many reasons.” He didn’t wait for me as he drank down the second shot. “Can’t fly on one wing,” he said.
“Guess not,” I agreed, and lifted my glass. “To truth,” I said, and drank it off just the way he’d shown me years before, when we got drunk together, a few weeks after Blackie died.
“I loved your father, you know. I loved him very much.”
“I know you did. For whatever that’s worth.”
He eyed me expectantly, as if there was something else to say about it.
“So,” I asked again, “why are you sorry I know?”
His posture was very straight, as it always was because of his stiff back. He placed his palms flat on his thighs, as if he were in the military, sitting at attention in the presence of a commanding officer. “Your father loved you more than you can know. He wouldn’t want you to think badly of him.”
“Why should I?” I asked. “We all make mistakes. He paid for his.”
Uncle Vincent couldn’t look at me now. He said, “We all pay for our mistakes, one way or another. Some of us just have to live with them longer than others.” Then he leaned forward and lifted the bottle to fill our glasses.
I told him I’d like to talk a little more before I had another drink.
“All right,” he said, setting the bottle back on the table.
I looked around the room, watching as the ghosts gathered close around us. I said, “You’ve always known the truth, haven’t you?”
He didn’t move, didn’t look at me. “Whatever we think that truth is, yes, I’ve known since a short time after.”
“A short time after my father died?”
He inclined his head forward as if he was nodding, then seemed to have trouble sitting back. When he did, I could see he was crying.
“You should have told me,” I said.
He was silent for what seemed a long time. “How could I?” he finally replied.
I reached out and poured us each that next drink. I lifted my glass and waited for him to do the same. “I miss him,” I said, my voice giving way to my feelings.
“So do I,” my uncle said. “Every day of my life. Every single day.” Then we drank again.
I put down my shot glass, feeling the warmth of the scotch course through me. Then I said simply, “I think you have something for me. That’s why I’m here.”
He didn’t say anything in response. He got slowly to his feet and walked out of the room. When I heard him going down into the basement, I stood up again, having another look around the room. That’s when I heard the front door to the house open and close. I turned, not completely shocked to see my cousin Frank.
“Well,” I said, “the gang’s all here.”
Frank showed me his pearly whites. “Yeah cuz, ‘bout time we settled this thing, don’t you think.”
“Oh yes,” I agreed.
We stood there in silence for a moment, until we heard my uncle coming back up the stairs from the basement. He was holding a green metal cylinder, a couple of feet long and a few inches in diameter.
When he saw his son in the entryway he said, “Frank,” somewhere between surprise and relief.
Before anyone spoke again, I walked over and took the container from my uncle’s hand. The metal was cold. The ends of the cylinder were crudely sealed with wax, a Blackie move if ever there was one, like something from a gothic novel. Whatever was inside had been locked in there for a long time.
“You’ve had this for all these years?” I asked.
“Since a couple of weeks before…before he died.”
“Why didn’t you give it to me?”
My uncle uttered a long, uneven sigh. “He told me never to open it and never to give it to anyone except you. But only if you asked for it.”
I nodded. “And you’ve kept it for all these years, without opening it, without ever telling anyone about it.”
“No one,” he said. When he looked at me, his eyes moist and sunken and sad. “I never told anyone. It was the least I could do. Once I knew what happened, it was the least I could do, to keep that promise.”
“So,” Frank asked, “what the hell is this thing?”
I ignored my cousin, for a moment trying to imagine what it must be like for my uncle, knowing that his brother had come to him for money, that he turned him down, and then living with how that ended up. I told Frank, “It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s over.”
My Uncle Vincent took a deep, halting breath. “I feel like I killed him,” he said. “You understand that? I might as well have beaten him to death myself.” He was sobbing now, and I watched him cry without saying anything. He steadied himself, then said, “Frank, you’re my son, but he’s right, this has nothing to do with you.”
But Frank didn’t care about what happened to Blackie, what his own father had to do with that, or anything other than what I was holding in my hand. “This has everything to do with me,” my cousin said, giving me a look that was supposed to worry me.
Not feeling particularly worried, I said, “Too bad you feel that way, because you’re wrong.” Then to my uncle, I said, “I’m glad you never told anyone. I know my father would have been glad.”
He nodded slowly. “I never opened it, still don’t know what’s in it.” He tried to smile, but it didn’t work. “You need to believe that. It was like a matter of faith for me. I couldn’t bring myself to look.”
Frank took a couple of steps forward. “I think I’ll take a look,” he said. Then he held out his hand. “Let’s have it cuz.”
I stared at him. “You must be kidding.”
“Don’t make any more trouble for yourself. Just hand that over and we’ll figure out what we’re going to do with it, right here, right now.”
I thought of a lot of clever things to say, which would be my usual reaction to a situation like this, but I let them all pass because I also thought of Blackie, and how I hadn’t followed his advice when Sluggo got the drop on me in front of the casino in Monte Carlo. Determined not to make that mistake again, I didn’t say anything at all, waiting until Frank took one step closer. Then I swung the metal canister like a baseball bat, hitting him across the side of the head with a shot that would have been a double in any ballpark in the country.
He staggered back and I moved forward, driving the end of the container up under his chin, knocking him off his feet and onto the ground, flat on his back.
I stood over him, watching the blood begin to run from the side of his mouth. “Look out,” I said, “you’re going to stain your fancy white shirt, cuz.”
He muttered something like, “What the fuck,” then appeared to be on the brink of losing consciousness. His father hurried to his side and kneeled down. Then he looked up at me.
“What are you doing?” my uncle moaned.
I looked at the two of them, figuring fathers and sons get what they deserve in the end. “He’s lucky I don’t kill him,” I said, then walked past them and out the door.
I have to admit, I kept looking in my rearview mirror on the ride home, imagining guys pulling up alongside me, or worrying about what might happen later, if they came crashing through the door of my apartment in the middle of the night to take the painting and slit my throat. But I remembered what Inspector Durand had told Frank’s pals and decided my days of worrying were over.
I got home, parked the car in the basement garage and went upstairs, locked myself in, pulled the window shades closed and sat in the living room where I had first opened my father’s box of memories, just a week
before.
I broke the wax seal of the canister with a pocket knife and slowly pulled out the rolled up canvas. I flattened it out on the table, then stood over it, gaping at the most beautiful painting I had ever held, a Monet sunset on the water.
***
IT WAS TOO LATE TO CALL FRANCE, so I telephoned Gilles the next morning.
He asked how I was getting on with Donna. I told him I’d arranged a business trip to Las Vegas the following week, and that she would be coming back to New York for a long weekend after that. He was pleased, saying that the connection between us, having been made through Benny, gave the entire romance a special quality, particularly for him. He said I should never forget that she was a special lady.
I promised never to forget.
I did not tell him about the visit with the two men in the airport, not wanting him to worry about me any more than he already did. As far as I was concerned, all of that was over and done.
Then I explained, in the most cryptic terms, that I had located the item. He said he was happy, but sounded concerned about the trouble I might cause myself. I told him I had a plan, and that I had already deposited the article in a safe place.
“It has no rightful owner,” I said to him. “Not even you and me. But there has to be a certain order to things, don’t you think?”
He agreed.
When I told him my plan he said he was proud of me.
I thanked him.
He said my father would be proud too.
I told him I wasn’t too sure about that.
***
A MONTH AFTER THAT CONVERSATION, just a couple of weeks before Christmas, I received a package from Nice. Frederique Durand wrote to say that the cancer Monsieur de la Houssay struggled against for the past few years had finally won its grim victory, and our friend was no more.
The package Durand sent with his note contained a medal for valor that Monsieur de la Houssay had received in the war, and a sealed envelope. Inside was a letter from Gilles, telling me how much our coming to know each other had meant to him, and how he wanted me to keep this medal, his most prized possession, because I could now appreciate the significance it had for him. He also said again how pleased he was that I had found our mythical treasure and how happy it made him to know that I, as Blackie would say, was doing the right thing.
***
REMEMBER THAT RALLY I PASSED outside the United Nations? Well I started thinking about it as soon as I took the painting from my uncle’s house. I also thought about everything Gilles told me about their mission in France at the end of the war. He and my father and Benny had left it to me to figure out what to do with the Monet, so I did.
I knew someone involved with plans to raise funds for a new museum that was being constructed—as it was explained to me, it was a memorial being built so the world would never forget. I shouldn’t say more than that, for reasons that should be apparent. The important thing was that the painting was going to be given a real purpose when it surfaced. The day after I got it from my uncle I placed it in a safe deposit box at a bank near my office. Then I did all the background checking I could about the museum project, making sure it was the right choice.
It was.
At my request, my contact arranged a meeting for us at the most prestigious auction house in New York. I collected the metal tube and headed uptown.
The art appraiser and my friend were pretty knocked out when I showed them the painting, which is understandable given how beautiful it is, so I allowed them a minute to catch their breath. Then I explained the conditions of the sale. The proceeds would be paid as an anonymous donation to the memorial fund. My identity would remain a secret, never to be revealed. And I had nothing more to say.
The appraiser obviously had about a thousand questions, especially about the painting’s provenance, but I assured him there would be no dispute over the ownership.
“Do what you need to,” I told him. “Whatever research, whatever background checking that has to be done.” I knew what he would ultimately find—there was no one around to contest the ownership.
My friend and the representative from the auction house assured me that the entire thing would be handled with both the utmost discretion and—in response to a little something that I also demanded—total security. After all, I am Blackie’s son, and I did not want to hear about the Monet getting itself stolen all over again. In fact, I had taken photos of the painting in my apartment, placing it beside a couple of daily newspapers, just in case it happened to turn up missing, or in someone’s private collection, without the money going where it should.
After all those arrangements were made, I called Benny.
It was a tough conversation for many reasons, the first being that I had to tell him about Gilles’s passing. Then, of course, was the fact that I was giving the painting away but, as Benny and I both knew, it was my decision, which was how all three of them wanted it. As the survivor of their threesome, I just wanted to be sure that Benny was all right with what I was doing.
He was.
***
THE PAINTING CAUSED QUITE A STIR in the art world, since it was a Monet that had not been seen by anyone for more than forty years. The evening of the auction I was offered a seat in the front row, but chose to sit in the back of the large room. I had already seen the painting close-up enough times, so I was fine there, waiting anxiously for the lot number to be called. As we approached the sale of my painting—which is how I will always feel about it—a sinister looking man in a dark suit sat down beside me. I glanced at his profile a couple of times and, when I turned toward him for a third glimpse, he was the one who spoke.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
He opened his catalogue to the page that featured the main event of the evening, my Monet. “Some painting,” he said as he showed me the picture.
“It is,” I agreed.
“I read about it in the paper. Missing since before World War Two or something.”
I nodded, my head bobbing up and down like it was on a spring. “That right?”
“Wonder where it’s been.”
I didn’t respond. I just looked at him, waiting for more.
But that was it. He never said another thing to me.
It got me wondering again what Frank and his cronies thought. They had taken their run against me and Benny, but came up empty, never realizing what they were after. Neither my cousin Frank nor my Uncle Vincent knew there was a Monet in the metal canister I used to break my cousin’s jaw, and they would never know how close they came to owning that prize. After all these years, I have never seen or spoken with either of them again.
The auction of the Monet was pretty wild and I won’t make you sick by telling you how much some wealthy art collector paid just to have the right to have it put on display in a museum with his name on a plaque beside it. It truly is beautiful, and you’ll probably see it some day in a Monet exhibition somewhere. The important thing, as far as I was concerned, was that the money went to good use.
Oh sure, I had some second thoughts, like maybe I should have gotten a finder’s fee, or a commission, or even some sort of charitable tax write-off for the next fifty years. But it was like Blackie said, straight shooters always win, and I think that’s the one piece of advice he’d really want me to hold onto. I’ve decided to stay with that and let the rest of it go—I figure I’ve already spent enough time wrestling with so many other lessons from the past.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeffrey S. Stephens is the author of the Jordan Sandor thrillers, Targets of Deception, Targets of Opportunity, Targets of Revenge, and Rogue Mission, as well as the murder mystery Crimes and Passion. A native of the Bronx, Stephens now lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, with his wife, Nancy, where they raised their two sons.
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Jeffrey Stephens, Fool's Errand
Fool's Errand Page 23