Michelangelo's Notebook

by Paul Christopher

  Rolex Daytona, money clip with half a dozen twenties and hundreds, loose change, pinky ring with a big green stone in it, a wallet and a cell phone. Izzy didn’t know art, but he knew watches. The last time he’d looked at a Daytona they’d been ten or eleven grand. He stared at it, shook his head and sighed. Lovely but he’d never be able to explain it in a million years. Whatever, it hadn’t been a robbery. Someone had whacked the guy for something other than money.

  Izzy flipped open the wallet. Alabama driver’s license in the name of Carl Kressman, showing a birth date that made the corpse seventy-five years old. The issue date was five years ago with this address, which meant he’d been here for at least that long. He flipped open the other flap and went through five major credit cards, social security card and a laminated Gulf Shores Library card. There was a single lambskin condom tucked into one of the interior pockets and something behind it. He pulled. A New York State driver’s license in the name of Karel Kress. What was the guy doing with two names and two driver’s licenses? Weird, but at least it was getting a little more interesting than just another dead old man. He went downstairs and checked in on Kenny, who was bent over the Acer laptop in the study, pecking away.

  “Find anything?”

  “The guy was rich.”

  “Figured that out for myself.”

  “He collected art.”

  “That too,” Izzy answered, glancing around the room. Paintings everywhere . . .

  “He got them all from someplace in New York, the Hoffman Gallery.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, and he paid lots of money for them, look.” The younger man leaned back and Izzy leaned forward. There was a row of names and figures on the screen.

  The list continued on for half a dozen pages. There were at least two hundred paintings, far more than were in the cottage. Most carried a price tag well over a million. Kenny demonstrated the depth of the program by randomly picking a name on the list by clicking the cursor on the odd, underlined letter code:

  Renoir, Pierre-Auguste/awlohe 750,000

  Almost instantly the computer jumped to a digitized photograph of a painting showing a woman leaning on her hand with some sort of multicolored background, perhaps flowers.

  The title underneath read:

  Algerian Woman Leaning on Her Elbow

  1881

  Height: 41.3 cm (16.26 in.), Width: 32.2 cm (12.68 in.)

  Hoffman Gallery New York 1995

  Deaccessioned: Park-Hale Museum of Art 1993

  Grange Foundation bequest 1957

  “I don’t get any of this shit.”

  “It’s a list of paintings.”

  “You really must think I’m some kind of an asshole. I got that, Kenny, even though I didn’t go to college.”

  “The list is keyed into these records through the letter code.”

  “The letter code being the name of the painting, yeah, I got that too, Ken.”

  “The other stuff is what we call ‘provenance.’ ”

  “We?”

  “It’s the name for where the picture came from, its background and sales history.”

  “And?”

  “And so far they all ran through the same provenance. The same history. The Grange Foundation gives it to the Parker-Hale, who gets rid of it by selling it to the Hoffman Gallery, who then flogs it to private citizens like Kressman.”

  “Who winds up being sliced to ribbons in his swimming pool.”

  “You think the two things have anything to do with each other?”

  “Lot of money.”

  “But nothing’s been stolen.”

  “Any way you can add up all the figures on those sheets?”

  “I think so.” Kenny played with the computer for a few minutes. The figure appeared:

  $273,570,000

  “To one guy?” said Kenny. “Christ on a crutch!”

  “I think we’re out of our depth here, Kenny,” said Izzy. “In deep water, you might say.” And then he laughed. Kenny didn’t think it was funny at all.

  34

  Eric Taschen’s apartment on Fifth Avenue was on the top floor of a mid-1940s building, facing Central Park with a spectacular view out over the Sheep Meadow and the Ramble. From what Valentine could tell the apartment itself was modest enough, five or six rooms, one bedroom with a study, but the location, the view and the art on the walls were definitely high end. A Warhol John Wayne silkscreen in the foyer, a Roy Lichtenstein taking up almost an entire wall in the living room and a crockery-plastered Julian Schnabel facing it. There were no obvious clues to his domestic situation, no telltale feminine touch, nothing that spoke overtly about a male presence either. At a guess, Taschen lived alone.

  Taschen himself was slim, well-dressed in a white-on-white open-collared silk shirt and tailored jeans, his feet pushed into a pair of expensive loafers, no socks. The watch on his wrist was plain stainless steel; he wore no other jewelry. The man appeared to be in his fifties, dark-haired with a smear of gray at each temple. He was clean shaven, his face unlined. When he met Valentine at the door he was wearing red-framed reading glasses and holding a section of the New York Times. He led Valentine into the living room, sat him down on a butter-leather, not quite new sofa and dropped into a matching armchair with a glass-topped coffee table between them.

  “You collect sixties and seventies,” said Valentine, looking over Taschen’s shoulder at the huge Lichtenstein. The canvas showed a sofa and a chair not unlike the one the man was sitting in. Some kind of small joke; an art collector’s pun. Taschen shrugged, then cleared his throat.

  “She left the web, she left the loom,

  She made three paces thro’ the room,

  She saw the water-lily bloom,

  She saw the helmet and the plume,

  She look’d down to Camelot.

  Out flew the web and floated wide;

  The mirror crack’d from side to side;

  ‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried

  The Lady of Shalott.”

  He grinned. “You live with William Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones and all the rest for the better part of ten years, you want to put anything else but on the walls.”

  You still work as a curator?”

  “Still?” said Taschen. “Is that some reference to the Parker-Hale?”

  “Peter called you?”

  “I wouldn’t have seen you otherwise. I’ve dealt with the Newman Gallery for a long time. He told me you were interested in stolen art—war plunder.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what?”

  “George Gatty.”

  “It amounts to the same thing. Gatty bought and sold stolen art; everyone knew that.”

  “What’s the relationship to the Parker-Hale, or is there one?”

  “Sandy bought and sold from Gatty.”

  “Sandy—meaning Alexander Crawley?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were colleagues.”

  “Contemporaries, yes.”

  “As I understand it you were in line for Cornwall’s post, but Crawley finessed you.”

  “Finesse isn’t a word I’d use. Slander is more like it.”

  “You resigned.”

  “It was the classic case of resign before you’re fired.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “None. Fabricated. According to Sandy my relationship with James Cornwall was . . . unsavory.”

  “So he was slandering Cornwall as well?”

  “Something like that. Most people knew James was gay but no one really cared. On the other hand, having a sexual relationship with the director was seen as too delicate, for public relations reasons.”

  “This was Crawley’s reasoning?”

  “The reasoning he used with the board of directors.”

  “Was it true?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not to me, but as the lawyers say, It goes to motive.”

  “Whose?”

  “Whoever killed hi
m.” Valentine paused. “I assume the police saw you as a suspect.”

  “Sure.” Taschen smiled. He got up and went to a small, black-lacquered, Art Deco-style wet bar at the far end of the room. “Get you something?”

  “No, thanks,” answered Valentine. Taschen mixed himself a Scotch on the rocks and came back to his seat. He sipped the drink slowly, not speaking, looking out through the large window that faced the park. The set of his jaw was tense and Valentine could see the strain showing around his eyes. A lot of restrained anger.

  “I had an alibi,” said the man. He smiled tightly. “I was in Prague on a buying trip.”

  “Buying trip?”

  “I work as a private consultant for collectors, corporations, foundations, that sort of thing. There’s a lot of interest now in eastern European avant-garde art from between the wars. Alois Bilek, Karel Teige, Capek’s set designs—he’s the man who invented the term ‘robot’—people like that. Collectible but not prohibitively expensive.”

  “A long way from Burne-Jones and the Lady of Shalott.”

  “People change. So do tastes.”

  “And circumstances.”

  “Peter Newman told me who you are, Mr. Valentine, or should I call you Doctor? You’ve got more than one PhD, as I understand it. You know that the art on my walls is outside the means of most people, as is this apartment. I didn’t need the job at the Parker-Hale but I wanted it, and I deserved it. Being born wealthy doesn’t make you ineligible for academic scholarship.” Taschen frowned. “I’m no trust-fund dilettante.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting that you were.”

  “Then what were you suggesting?”

  “Nothing. But I would like to know the reason for Crawley’s evident dislike of you.”

  “It wasn’t personal. There was no reason for it to be. Sandy was part of a ring; James Cornwall knew it and wouldn’t have suggested Sandy for the job of director for all the tea in China.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why he went after you like that.”

  “Sandy was making money from deaccessioning particular works from the permanent collection and giving particular dealers first crack at them. Kickbacks. A lot of galleries do it, but they’re usually more discreet. I had proof of what Sandy was up to. By discrediting me he discredited anything I had to say against him.”

  “As I understand the timeline of events, Cornwall appointed Crawley while you were still at the gallery. Why?”

  Taschen shrugged simply. “Because Sandy was blackmailing him.”

  “You sound awfully sure of yourself.”

  “I am. James told me. He showed me a letter Sandy had sent him stating the situation. He was left without any choice.”

  “So who do you think killed Crawley?”

  “I have no idea. He had some unsavory friends. I know that much.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  “Deiter Trost at the Hoffman Gallery for one. Mark Taggart at the Grange Foundation for another. You’ve already mentioned George Gatty—a man James Cornwall loathed, by the way.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not entirely sure other than the fact that the colonel is a particularly odious human being without a shred of morality. I think there was some connection to the war.”

  “Gatty worked for G2 in Switzerland. Intelligence.”

  “So did James Cornwall. Not in Switzerland, but he was in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives division of the OSS. The art-looting people.”

  “A tangled web,” said Valentine. “But it still doesn’t explain why Cornwall appointed Crawley to succeed him. You said you saw a letter.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Saying what?”

  “Saying that Sandy was aware of James’s involvement in some sort of secret club and if he wasn’t appointed to the director’s position he’d have no choice but to go to the press.”

  “And you assumed it had something to do with Cornwall’s sexual history?”

  “It must have. What else could it have been?”

  “Cornwall didn’t tell you?”

  “No. And I didn’t ask.”

  “Did this club have a name?”

  “Yes. The Carduss Club.”

  Valentine frowned. “Latin for thistle.”

  “I know,” said Taschen. “Strange name for a gay sex club. Sounded more like a college frat.”

  “Did he tell you anything about the group?”

  “Not a word,” Taschen answered, shaking his head. “Not a single word.”

  A telephone purred somewhere in the back of the apartment. Taschen took a last swallow from his drink, put the glass down on the coffee table and rose to his feet. He left the room, not in any hurry, and disappeared. The ringing stopped and Valentine was vaguely aware of the sound of the art consultant’s muffled voice.

  Valentine stood up and went to examine the crusty Schnabel on the wall. It showed a vaguely Ethiopian figure against a mountain background with a skull off to one side. The bottom half of the painting was full of broken crockery. He’d never much liked Schnabel’s work and this piece wasn’t changing his opinion very much. The broken plates always reminded him of Zorba the Greek. On the other hand, the artist had made his reputation on the basis of the idiotic potsherds. Obscurity as art.

  He turned as Taschen came back into the room. “That was Peter Newman.”

  “Yes?”

  “He knew you were coming here. He thought you should know. He just heard it on the news.”

  “Heard what?”

  Taschen let out a long breath. “George Gatty. He’s been murdered. Someone ran him through with a Nazi ceremonial sword.”

  35

  Lieutenant Vincent Delaney of the chief’s Special Action Squad stood in the middle of Colonel George Gatty’s living room staring at the body, spitted like a side of beef on the brown leather couch. Whoever’d done the ugly old man in had really outdone himself. According to Assistant M.E. Bandar Singh, twenty-three inches of cold steel had been shoved down the old man’s throat, the point poking through his perineum, which meant it had come out somewhere between his withered old nuts and his puckered asshole.

  Putkin the criminalist said that accounted for the smell; on the way through the razor sharp sword had sliced through half a dozen major organs, the stomach wall and both intestines. They knew it was a Nazi sword because of the big swastika between the talons of the silver eagle that made up the hilt. The worst part of it was that everything was there to see. Gatty had been murdered in his dressing gown and every inch of his old wizened body was splayed out in public. Flashbulbs popped as Putkin and his cronies measured and tested. A fucking Hollywood premiere for the dead.

  Billy Boyd came rolling up to him, notebook clutched in his beefy hand. “So I guess this fits with the other one?”

  “And the call we got from Deputy Dawg in Alabama.” Delaney shook his head. “I never knew Alabama even had a coastline.”

  “Me neither,” said Boyd. “I thought it was, you know, landlocked.”

  “Not that it has anything to do with the dead guy.”

  “This one?”

  “The one in Alabama.”

  “But there’s got to be a connection, right?” Boyd didn’t seem too sure.

  “Art creep gets a knife shoved down his throat on Fifth Avenue, the guy in Alabama is some kind of big-time art collector and gets stabbed with an Absolut bottle and the colonel here gets taken out by some kind of Nazi Vlad the Impaler? Yeah, Billy, I’d say there’s just the tiniest chance of a connection.”

  “Who’s Vlad the Impaler?”

  “A guy on Wide World of Wrestling.” Delaney sighed. “Go talk to Singh, Billy. Get me a time of death if you can.”

  “Sure, Loo.”

  Delaney didn’t really need the confirmation. From the way he was dressed it was obvious he’d been in bed or on his way when he’d been killed, which made the TOD sometime last night. The man’s butler, a man named Bertram Throens had an apartment in
the basement with his wife, the colonel’s cook, and neither one of them had heard anything out of line.