“Anything?” she said to Hugo, knowing what the answer would be.
The receptionist was on the phone. He shook his head briefly.
“Thanks for the bathroom,” Finn whispered gratefully, giving the man a smile. She added a brief wave, then fled. A few minutes later she was on Hudson Street, looking for somewhere to get keys cut.
45
Michael Valentine moved through the stacks of Ex Libris, following his own arcane system of notation that was about as far from the Dewey Decimal System as you could get. He’d been working for most of the morning and part of the afternoon, consulting a dozen different encyclopedias of New York, old insurance plat books, ancient subway blueprints, the church records of half a dozen parishes and a complex sociological treatise on Greenwich Village from the 1930s that listed every single place of business and institution, street by street throughout the entire neighborhood. As Valentine made his way through the gloomy tiers of books and records he began to put together a picture of what the area around 421 Hudson Street had once been.
Originally of course it had been on the very edges of New York in the small rural village of Greenwich on the shores of the Hudson River. By the early 1800s the fields belonging to the Voorhis family had been sold to Trinity Church, who in turn leased the property to the St. Mary Magdalene Benevolent Society. By that time the two-block square of property bounded by Hudson Street, Clarkson, Morton and Varick was already being used as a burial ground for the Episcopal Church of St. Luke’s in the Field a little to the north. In the 1820s a Roman Catholic Church, Holy Redeemer, was built on the property and a stark, redbrick convent and home for “disadvantaged” girls built across Hudson Street. It was at this time that Edgar Allan Poe lived in the area, and his dour, stooped figure was regularly seen plodding through the tombstones of the burial ground. As time went on the burial ground property was subdivided and the first town houses on what was to become St. Luke’s Place were erected, the road being an extension of Le Roy Street to the west and running through to Varick. Holy Redeemer Church burned in 1865 and burials in the area were taken over by St. Paul’s to the south and St. Luke’s to the north. By the 1870s the first elevated trains were appearing, infringing on the property owned by the convent at 421. A fire in 1877 forced the closure of the building and the ruins were demolished in 1881 to make way for the eight-story warehouse building that presently occupied the site. By 1900 there was no trace of the convent, the church or the cemetery. The graveyard was a park, St. Luke’s Place was home to the Mayor of New York and streetcars and horse-drawn trolleys rumbled up and down Hudson Street.
Nothing about the building containing American Mercantile seemed to be special in any way but there had to be a reason Cornwall and his cohorts from the Grange Foundation had chosen it as the storage facility for their shipment. Clearly it had something to do with the foundation’s choice of an office but according to the plat books and Valentine’s ancient, dusty collection of Manhattan reverse directories the foundation hadn’t moved into the old brownstone on St. Luke’s Place until long after the shipment had disappeared.
After carrying a half dozen reference books back to his office, he dropped down into his chair and closed his eyes, trying to see the problem in some kind of rational order. What did Cornwall know about the location that wasn’t immediately obvious to someone browsing through the history books, or more directly through the thousands of volumes and books of records surrounding him now? Irritated by his inability to figure it out for himself, he turned to his computer, booted up the ISPY program Barrie had custom-built for him and punched in Cornwall’s name. A brief biography appeared almost immediately.
Name: Cornwall, James Cosburn
Date of Birth: 1904
Place of Birth: Baltimore, Maryland
Date of Death: 2001
Place of Death: New York, NY
HDescrip: Cornwall was born to Martin and Lois Cornwall, the latter a prominent interior designer and teacher at the Baltimore School of Art. The young Cornwall attended private schools, where he was especially interested in monastic and church architecture. He studied in Europe before college for two years at the École Sebastien in Paris. In 1922 he returned to the United States, attending Yale University the following year. He graduated cum laude from Yale in 1927 and joined the Parker-Hale Museum the same year as an assistant in the department of decorative arts. He was assistant curator 1929-32 before being advanced to associate curator. Beginning in 1930, he worked with Parker-Hale director Joseph Teague (1885-1933) in planning the new medieval extension to the museum. Cornwall was named assistant curator of medieval art in 1934 after Teague’s death. He was named curator of the medieval department the same year. He married Katherine Metcalfe in 1942. In 1943 he joined the army and quickly rose to an appointment as lieutenant in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the Seventh United States Army, Western Military District. His chief responsibilities were the discovery and preservation of art treasures hidden by the Nazis. Cornwall was responsible for seizing the looted collections of Goering, Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg, among others. Returning to the Parker-Hale, he was made director in 1955. In June of 2001 he suffered a fatal heart attack after a particularly contentious board meeting and was succeeded by his protégé, Alexander Crawley (q.v.).
The biography didn’t tell him very much he didn’t already know but a notation in the bibliography of Cornwall’s published works leapt out at him. A reference to his PhD thesis at Yale: “Giovanni Battista de Rossi and the Catacombs of San Callisto: A Biographical and Architectural Evaluation.”
Using that as a starting point Valentine skittered around through the Internet putting the pieces together. Cornwall’s interest in the subterranean world hadn’t ended with his doctorate. Over the years he’d published a dozen articles on the subject, edited and compiled several scholarly works and had even been an advisor on a series of History Channel programs about crypts, mausoleums, cemeteries and catacombs all over the world. The last program in the series was called “New York Dead.”
Within an hour the pieces had all fallen into place and he had the answer. He searched through the sociological history of Greenwich Village to confirm his theory.
“My God,” he whispered, as the reason for Cornwall’s choice of the Hudson Street warehouse became blindingly clear.
What was now a park where young children played had once hidden the underground crypt of Holy Redeemer Church, connected to the convent on the other side of the road by a “priest’s hole” tunnel so the nuns and “disadvantaged” girls would not be seen in daylight as they made their way to prayer. Cornwall and his fellow conspirators, along with two hundred twenty-seven tons of crates and boxes—six truckloads of looted booty—had vanished under the streets of New York.
And it was still there.
46
The false priest moved through the cluttered rooms of the dank, verminous-looking apartment on Ludlow Street, far below the trendy stores and salons that lined the narrow one-lane thorough-fare above Delancey. As he examined the pitiful rooms, he carried the Beretta at his side. Rooting through the old woman’s apartment in Queens had led him here, but the place was empty. There were only terrible ghosts and memories left behind. The floor was covered with stained and cracked linoleum that might have been blue once. The ceiling sagged in seams and lumps, threatening to split open like overripe fruit. With each step, shining roaches scuttled greasily toward the open baseboards and silverfish fled under the scraps of old carpeting that lay here and there.
It was, without a doubt, the horrible den of a madman. The crumbling plaster and ancient floral wallpaper were covered with newspaper clippings, drawings, pictures from magazines, annotated maps, scrawled letters in script so small it could barely be read, reproductions of paintings and here and there the broken pieces of plaster or plastic saints and angels, glued, tacked, nailed or simply placed in niches dug with spoons into the soft spongy walls themselves. It was a museum dedicated to
the insane meanderings of an obsessed heart, the obsession impossible to penetrate or analyze except that it concerned the old war and people who had taken part in it, artists, art and the deaths of a hundred nobodies in a score of countries and most of all the life and times of a single hawk-nosed man in steel spectacles wearing the robes and mitred headpiece of a pope. The man from Rome had lost his faith long ago and sometimes found himself agreeing with the cynics that man had been placed on the earth to do no more than eat, fornicate and excrete but being here he knew there was something else: this man had been created to prove that hell existed. This place was a petri dish meant to provide a culture of the damned.
There were more rooms than he would have expected, as though perhaps two or maybe even three of the decrepit tenement apartments had been joined together. The only thing new in the place was the metal-clad front door and the locks that guarded it, easily picked. The kitchen lay in the middle of the apartment in the old-fashioned style with a pass-through into the small, dark parlor beyond. It was a horror, the chipped enamel sink resting on its own plumbing, open without cabinetry, stacked with crusted plastic plates and bowls and cups, a jar of grape jelly open and moldy on the counter along with a box of cornflakes, a soured pint carton of milk and a half-empty mug of coffee. A choked twist of old-fashioned flypaper hung from the overhead light fixture. Reaching up with thumb and forefinger the false priest tried the dangling pull cord but nothing happened.
He went into the parlor. An old rag rug, brown and curling at one side. A drawing in ink directly on the left wall: Christ on a cloud above a grotesque Calvary below and words beneath the triple crucifixion:
THOU WILT SHEW ME THE PATH OF LIFE
IN THY PRESENCE IS FULLNESS OF JOY
AT THY RIGHT HAND THERE ARE PLEASURES
FOR EVERMORE
A closer look and the man saw that the figures on the crosses were women, bleeding from breasts and eyes and that there were strange inscriptions in faint winding circles above Christ’s head, vague and indecipherable.
There was a short hall and then another door, old and scarred but painted bright, fresh, robin’s egg blue. Inscribed on the door was a single word:
TSIDKEFNU
The Old Testament word for “Righteousness,” one of the thousand names of God.
The man from Rome eased back the slide of the Beretta with his free hand, took a breath and held it. He pushed open the door and went into the room beyond, the end of his journey. He reached up to shade his eyes with one hand, almost blinded by the light.
47
Behind them in James J. Walker Park Finn and Valentine could faintly hear the sound of children jumping rope, singing a counting song that became faster as they skipped.
“I am the Baby Jesus,
Marching to the cross.
I am the Baby Jesus.
My daddy is the Boss.”
“Are you sure this is the right thing to do?” said Finn, sitting on the bench beside Valentine. Between his feet was a bag of equipment. They were both dressed casually in running gear. It was past seven and dusk was falling, the rush hour traffic on Hudson Street thinning.
“You’re the one who went in there today and took the keys.” Valentine smiled. “Besides, if we want to bring this thing to some kind of conclusion that will satisfy the authorities we have to have evidence. Right now everything’s circumstantial, Internet paranoia and conspiracy theory.”
“I just wanted to find out who killed Peter.”
“We will,” Valentine offered. “I promise you.” He kept his eyes on the house on the far side of St. Luke’s Place. The last lights went out and a moment later Hugo Boss appeared, locking the door behind him. The tiny Panasonic D-snap camera Finn had carried in her shoulder bag earlier in the day had given Valentine all the information he needed about the inside of the interior of the building including the name on the security panel just inside the front door. It appeared to be a relatively simple ADT system with a telephone line connection to a central security center. The system was almost ten years old and a single call to Barrie Kornitzer had given him the bypass code for the system within five minutes. Finn’s theft of the key ring had simplified things even more; after copying them at a locksmith’s shop on Carmine Street, she used the beeper on the ring of originals to find the car the keys belonged to, eventually finding a Toyota Camry on Varick Street that answered the call. She simply tossed the keys on the floor underneath the front seat and then manually re-locked the car behind her. When the owner eventually discovered them he or she would assume the keys had been left behind when exiting the car earlier in the day.
“I am the Baby Jesus.
I see every single sin.
I am the Baby Jesus
And I always win.”
Valentine checked his watch and then the darkened brownstone across the way. Nothing moved except the leaves in the trees. The traffic hummed a block away. Finn could faintly recall a few lines from an Edgar Allan Poe sonnet about some spooky dead love. She tried not to think about what lay beneath her, buried deep under the soil of the park. Old secrets. Older bones.
“Time to go.”
“All right.”
“I told Barrie most of what we know. If I haven’t called him by midnight he’ll let a friend of his in the Bureau know what we found.”
“That’s a comfort,” said Finn with a hollow laugh. They both stood up and headed across the street. Behind them, lost in the gloom, the children skipped.
48
They stepped into the dark house. Ahead of them and to the right was the ADT panel. A small, angry red light pulsed. Valentine punched in a set of numbers. The red light reverted to green.
“That was easy enough,” Finn whispered.
“This isn’t some high-tech heist movie,” Valentine answered. “After a while people get careless and they don’t bother with the basics.” He shrugged. “Besides, why would anyone break into a place like this? As far as anyone knows they’re just a bunch of paper pushers.”
“Maybe that’s all they are,” said Finn. “Maybe we’re wrong.”
“You said you thought your receptionist in the expensive suit was wearing a gun.”
“I’m sure of it.”
“Then we’re not wrong. You don’t need a gun to guard papers.”
Valentine paused for a moment to examine the painting behind the desk. “You do need a gun to guard something like that, however.”
They moved quickly through the reception room and down the hallway into the open area at the center of the house. Finn dropped the equipment bag on one of the desks and slid open the zipper. Valentine took out a heavy flashlight and switched it on, panning the beam around the room. He saw nothing any different from what the camera had shown him: a large rectangular windowless room with a flight of stairs against the right-hand wall. There were three desks and a row of filing cabinets. A doorway at the end of the room led into a comfortable conference area with a long table and a half dozen chairs. There was a painting over the mantel of an old-fashioned fireplace to the left. It was too dark to see clearly; a muted landscape of some sort. Another door led to the rear of the house. It was locked. Finn stepped forward with her set of keys and tried them until she found one that fit. She turned it and the door popped open. They stepped through.
“Now this is interesting,” Valentine murmured.
The room was completely empty. A window on the far wall had been bricked up and the original rear door had been replaced by something that looked vaguely like the sliding mechanism usually seen on garages. Instead of the cherry in the other rooms here it was wide oak planks, dark with age. It was the original floor.
“A loading bay,” said Valentine. “The insurance plat books show an old court-style alley in the back with an entrance on the Varick Street end. That’s where this must go.”
“That doesn’t make sense unless they’ve got something to load,” said Finn.
“Look.” Valentine pointed. In the center
of the floor there was a square seam in the planks. He swung the light around the walls. Beside the operating mechanism for the heavy rear door there was a single large button, much like the elevator call at Ex Libris. “Hit it.”
Finn crossed the room and slapped her palm down on it. There was a humming sound and a section of the floor six feet on a side pushed upward slowly. A large open cage appeared, finally thumping to a stop.
“What the hell is that?” said Finn.
Valentine played the beam of his light over the open cage. A stamped metal plate across the top beam read: OTIS BROTHERS YONKERS NY 1867.
“I couldn’t find anything out about the original owners of the building but it could easily have been some kind of tavern or small hotel. This would be the freight elevator they used to bring up beer barrels and food from storage down below.” Valentine stepped into the cage and swung the flashlight around. He spotted a switch on one of the cage uprights. “Looks safe enough.”
Michelangelo's Notebook Page 23