Treasure of Saint-Lazare

by John Pearce

  “I have a friend in the rental business. I’ll see if he has something in a locked building, or at least with cameras.”

  Eddie turned back to Thom. “Arturo gave me a good description of Deus Lewis. I found him on the corner just where he was supposed to be, along with three of his buddies. All of them were wannabe tough guys.

  “Deus saw the whole thing. It wasn’t supposed to be a murder, but a kidnapping. Two men tried to hold Roy until they could push him into the car — that’s theory. Fact is that Roy recognized one of them and broke free. The car hit him as he was trying to run across the street. It can’t have been moving very fast, but it weighs probably 1,500 kilograms.”

  He stopped to do a quick mental conversion. “More than 3,300 pounds, so it was enough. And then his head hit the curb, and that was that.”

  “I agree,” Thom said. “That makes it murder, or something close — now two murders. But who did it?”

  Jen interrupted, “In all the time I’ve been with Roy, I don’t recall him having a fight with anyone. He told me more than once that life is too short to carry grudges.”

  Thom continued. “I should have been more precise. We are pretty sure who did it. That is, we found one of the men on security video at the airport. We know he arrived in Sarasota two days before Roy was killed and two other men were with him. We know they were foreign, probably Germans. What we don’t know is who they are or what they intended to do with Roy. And Eddie, I’m in agreement that it was supposed to be a snatch, not a murder. But where were they going to take him for questioning? And where did they stay while they were here? If we learn that, we’ll probably know who’s behind it.”

  “How did they get here?” Eddie asked.

  “Train from up north somewhere, we’re still trying to find out where. We circulated the surveillance picture to cab drivers and yesterday one remembered picking them up at the Amtrak station in Tampa. It was a lucky fare for him, since he’d just dropped off a couple who were taking the train to New York. Afraid to fly.

  “There were three men together, two tall and one short, and they spoke German with each other. The cabbie studied German in high school so he’s sure that’s what is was. He dropped them at a motel near the Interstate, but they didn’t check in. The desk clerk thinks someone picked them up in a private car, but he didn’t get a make or model.”

  “Did you send the picture to Philippe?”

  “It’s not one of the two he has locked up. A witness thinks it resembles the one that got away, but on the other hand maybe it doesn’t. And we didn’t get any usable prints, so there’s nothing Philippe can use to compare with the car they used in Paris. And it was rented using false ID.”

  Jen leaned forward, glanced at Eddie, then looked at Thom to say, “We picked up a lead this morning that may be worth something. Roy had been getting threatening letters from a German, demanding that he reveal the location of a valuable painting the Nazis stole during the war.

  “They came from a man named Erich Kraft. I knew him as a very unpleasant boy my age in Frankfurt. My mother was married to his father for a couple of years.

  “The letters ended just before Eddie’s father was killed. He says in them that the painting and some gold belonged to his father, and he meant to have them. It’s probably the gold that has him interested now, since it’s gone up in value a lot recently.

  “Roy wrote back once to say he’d looked for the painting for more than twenty years but never found it, and had given up the search. Kraft wouldn’t take that for an answer. He said he knew for a fact Roy could find the picture, because the Nazi who stole it first had told him.”

  Thom stood up, a quizzical expression on his face.

  “Whoa.” He waved his hands. “What’s all this really about? Did this start with the letter you found?”

  “It did,” Jen answered. “Roy asked me to deliver the letter to Eddie’s father in Paris. Either he didn’t know Mr. Grant had died, or he knew and just forgot to change the instruction on the envelope. It could be either, because we don’t know when the letter was written.”

  “And it said what?”

  Jen signaled for Eddie to explain.

  “It was very vague. It was written in a rough code, more like jargon, but the import of it was that he was giving up the search. He gave a couple of suggestions to my father but we don’t know yet what they all mean.”

  “But what were they looking for?”

  “The most famous and valuable painting still missing. It was painted in the early 1500s by one of the Italian Old Masters, Raphael, and is usually called ‘Portrait of a Young Man,’ or sometimes ‘Portrait of a Gentleman.’ It was the pride of a family-owned museum in Poland but it spent the war hanging in the home of Hans Frank, who was the Nazi party lawyer before the war but the governor-general of Poland after the Germans invaded. That’s when he wasn’t fighting over it with other Nazi bigwigs.

  “The painting was destined for the grand museum Hitler planned to build in Austria after he’d won the war, but of course things didn’t go their way. As the Russians got closer to Cracow in 1945 Frank had the most valuable pieces of his stolen art packed up and shipped to his home near Munich. A Leonardo and a Rembrandt arrived, but the Raphael didn’t, and hasn’t been seen since. My father and Roy interviewed Frank just a week or two before he was hanged and they came away with a certain respect for his intelligence. They got the impression that he’d already sent the Raphael out of Poland.”

  Thom stopped him and asked, “Does this really trace back to something that happened seventy years ago? And a painting?”

  Eddie thought a moment and answered carefully. “The painting plus, possibly, some gold. The painting would be more valuable but harder to sell. But Americans live for the here and now. We want instant gratification, short sound bites, results now, not later. Or at least that’s what I keep reading in the newspapers.

  “On the other hand, I have a friend, a history professor at the Sorbonne, and she and her colleagues see nothing at all strange about wanting to find out what happened to a painting lost so long ago. To Europeans, art is a big part of our patrimony, and you have to remember that some of us are still trying to decide if the French Revolution was a good idea.”

  “And when was the Revolution?”

  “1789.”

  “I have to meet with the chief of detectives in a few minutes, to decide where we go with this next. But I think you two shouldn’t spend the night at Jen’s house until we have some of these people locked up, which may take a day or two.”

  Jen looked at Eddie and raised a questioning eyebrow. “No problem for me. How about that place my father and I stayed the last time we were here? The Hyatt, I think it was.”

  Thom said, “The Ritz is newer. The Hyatt is less formal.”

  “Not the Ritz,” Eddie said. “I haven’t seen the one here but they tend to be sort of heavy on the marble.”

  As they left the police station Eddie called the Hyatt and reserved two rooms on the same floor. They drove to Jen’s house to pack small suitcases for what both hoped would be a short stay. They drove separately to the hotel. During the drive Eddie placed a call to Paul.

  “This is turning odd and I don’t really know where it’s going to go. Can you come give me some backup?”

  “Sure,” Paul said. “There are some pretty good flights in the morning that connect into Tampa.”

  “Let’s do it a little different. Get a flight to Dulles and meet me there day after tomorrow. I’m flying up to talk to Icky, who seems to think he knows something about this art thing.”

  “I haven’t thought about him in a long time. Is he still CIA?”

  “Yes, and now he’s a division head. Let me know when you’ll arrive but do it by text. I’m not going to tell anyone here that you’re on the way, and I’d like you to keep it a secret on that end as well. Except for Philippe. I won’t have time to call him. You may have to hang around the airport a while.”

 
“Will do. See you then.”

  Eddie pulled into the hotel’s parking lot and parked next to Jen’s BMW just as she was closing the convertible top. They checked in and went to her room, where they pulled down the bedcovers to make it appear slept in. Then they went together to Eddie’s room.

  “Let’s go to the bar and talk about the next step,” he suggested.

  The lobby bar was half-full of singles out for a good time. The adjacent restaurant had a few tables of older couples. “Earlybirds,” Jen said. “But it’s almost 7, and the earlier birds have been in the restaurants for almost three hours.”

  Eddie responded with a smile. “At home we’d just be talking about where we should go to dinner. The restaurants wouldn’t be open for another hour at least, and wouldn’t be crowded until 9:30. You saw how that works when we had dinner with Margaux.”

  “I did.” The waitress brought their drinks — Johnny Walker Black on the rocks for him, a Cosmo for her.

  “Here’s to sorting out this whole affair in the near future,” he said, and held out his glass to her. She touched it with hers and added, “and with nobody else getting hurt. I hate to say it, but it looks more and more like the people who suffer in this world are the poor unfortunates caught in the middle, like those witnesses. One of them dead, the other homeless and scared to death. And Thom Anderson knows as well as we do who did it. We just don’t know how it all happened.”

  “And we’re not going to be able to do much about it tonight,” she said with a warm smile, sliding close to him on the banquette until they sat hip to hip. He put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her closer. He could feel her warm skin under the thin summer blouse she wore and it aroused him immediately.

  He whispered in her ear, “What say we go back upstairs and decide what to do for dinner?”

  “Outstanding idea.” She slid away from the table as he took out a twenty to leave the waitress. By the time he reached the elevator she was holding the door open.

  They sat on the edge of the bed as he slowly unbuttoned her blouse, stopping for a kiss between each button. He pulled the blouse out of her slacks and helped as she shrugged it off, leaving only a thin white bra with a small lace edge. He cupped each breast, then slipped the thin straps over her shoulders and pulled the bra down, kissing each of her nipples.

  “They come to attention for me,” he said, looking up with a mischievous grin. She was smiling happily. “I hope you’ll do the same,” she said, reaching for his belt.

  “That’s already a done deal.”

  An hour later they sat in bed wearing the hotel’s terrycloth dressing gowns.

  “You haven’t lost your touch,” she said with admiration.

  “Nor have you. It seems like twenty years ago was just last weekend. And now about dinner. The way I see it we have two choices, go down to the dining room or call room service.”

  “No doubt in my mind,” she said. I vote for room service. With that she rolled to him and put her hand between his legs. “You?”

  He gulped, then turned toward her and pulled the robe from her shoulders. “They’re open until midnight. Let’s decide in a few minutes.”

  Room service arrived finally at 11:30, during the Late Show. With it they shared a bottle of Burgundy — “not as good as yours,” was Eddie’s view. At 12:30 she pushed herself away from him and said, “Into the shower for me.” He started to get up and she said, “Alone. I can’t do any more. I’m sore.”

  When he had showered he climbed into the bed next to her. She put her head on his shoulder and moved his hand gently from her breast.

  He was almost asleep when she moved slightly and asked, “Eddie? Are you still awake?”

  “Sort of,” he mumbled.

  “Tell me about Lauren. Please?”

  He was silent for a moment. He knew his mother had opened the door to this question by showing Jen the family picture and that there was no civil way he could avoid it, but he had no desire to display the barely healed wounds of his past life. But he suppressed a sigh and began to tell the story.

  Almost everyone has romantic ideas about Paris, he told her, but Lauren’s were stronger than most because her mother was French and had met her father there. As a young Army officer he’d learned to speak passable French, so he was able to talk to her parents. He insisted that Lauren study it as well.

  “We fell in love in college, just a few months before my graduation. It was sudden, a surprise to both of us. She wanted to leave school and go with me, which I thought was a mistake but I was so anxious to have her close that I didn’t fight it. She said she would finish college wherever I was stationed but for one reason or another that didn’t happen. And then when I was discharged she was anxious to get to Paris. We both were.”

  But she learned quickly how difficult it can be to adjust to life in a foreign country. She felt trapped in a sort of expat ghetto of anglophones who were even less fluent in French than she. Most of Eddie’s friends were French, and their quick dinner-table give-and-take was beyond her ability to follow. She became more and more withdrawn after Sam was born.

  “When they died we were making plans for her to move back to Florida with Sam. Her parents lived in Jacksonville, so she planned to go there. I suppose we were also talking about the divorce that was almost certain to follow, although we never said the word. The marriage really was over. She was desperately unhappy and you know what that brings.

  “I resisted because I didn’t want Sam to grow up in Jacksonville. In Paris he was a bright and promising student with a passion for soccer, who also happened to be part American. In Jacksonville he’d still be bright and promising but at another level he’d be just another black boy. Your town appears to be a suburb of the Midwest but Jacksonville, believe me, is Dixie. I didn’t want him to grow up that way.”

  He described the guilt he felt after their murder as a “big, stinking black dog sitting on my shoulders day after day after day. It influenced everything I did. It was all I could do to keep it from screwing up my business. It did screw up any number of relationships.”

  She asked him gently, “Was Aurélie one of those?”

  “She was the best one. But I ran her off, too.”

  “That is all so sad. I’m glad you’re better now. Thank you for telling me.”

  Neither of them moved again until the sharp chirp of Jen’s phone waked them at 5 o’clock.

  “Shit,” she muttered as she turned to the night table to silence the offensive noise. “Hello.”

  She sat straight up in bed. “When?” she asked, and then, “I’ll be right there.”

  “Eddie,” she said, eyes wide. “My house is on fire.”

  10

  Sarasota

  By the time they parked behind the yellow police tape only two fire trucks remained, their bright lights illuminating a half-dozen firefighters moving in and out of the open door. Thom Anderson stood at the curb in animated conversation with a tall man whose white helmet announced he was a chief.

  Jen jumped out of the car before it stopped moving. She lifted the yellow police tape and stepped under it, ignoring the single policeman across the street who shouted at her to keep out.

  “Thom! What happened?” she asked the detective, grabbing his arm to pull him away from his conversation with the fireman.

  “Ms. Wetzmuller,” he replied. “Let Chief Benson tell you some of what he’s just told me.”

  “Ma’am, I’m the battalion chief,” he said. “I can’t tell you everything that went on here, but it’s clear someone tried to burn down your house. We found a plastic gasoline can in the back yard, and the back door had been forced. There’s not a huge amount of fire damage, and it’s mostly in the kitchen. For that you can thank your neighbor, who heard the glass break and then saw the flames a few minutes later and called us.

  “You’re lucky you weren’t here. There was a lot of smoke. That’s usually what kills people.”

  Thom said, “I suggested they stay
at a hotel last night because of some problems with a case. You may remember — it’s the death of Roy Castor, who was run down on Osprey a couple of weeks ago. He was Ms. Wetzmuller’s father, and we now know his death was no accident. She and Mr. Grant pretty much confirmed that yesterday when someone tried to chase them on the road back from Arcadia. I’m glad now they didn’t stay here.”

  Eddie had been listening closely. He introduced himself and asked, “Chief, did the neighbor say how long it was between the broken glass and the fire?”

  “Several minutes. Maybe five.”

  Jen interrupted to ask Chief Benson to show her the damage. They walked down the driveway toward the back yard and after they were out of earshot Eddie turned to Thom. “Do you see the same pattern I see? First they try to kidnap Roy and fail. Next they try to kidnap one of us in Paris, and as I reflect on how that went down I come more and more to the conclusion they were after Jen. They were confused because I was with two blondes that night. They failed again.

  “And now they break into Jen’s house, then burn it — but five minutes later. Enough time to go to her bedroom to snatch her, or both of us. I doubt if they wanted to search the house. They must have done that while she was in Paris. They were here to kidnap her, and it’s probably the same people, or at least the same group.”

  Eddie kept to himself his thought that fire had been involved in Artie’s death, and after that the deaths of Lauren and Sam. “We’re dealing with something really evil here,” he told himself. “It’s gone way beyond a painting.”

  “I see the connection,” Thom responded. “First thing I’m going to do is call in the state fire marshal to do a complete investigation of just the fire, if the Chief hasn’t already done it. Our lab will look thoroughly at the house and interview the witnesses. The neighbor who called it in may be the only one.”