by Joseph Flynn
Mulchrone needed no more than a glance to confirm that Brock was going to lose the contents of his stomach, possibly from both directions, any moment now. They’d mutually agreed to decline the full coverage insurance at the car rental agency, both promising not to smoke in the vehicle as the cleaning fee was exorbitant.
God only knew what the charge would be to scour regurgitation and a flood tide of loose bowels. It might be cheaper just to purchase the car.
But Mulchrone made excellent time in reaching the filling station at a Walmart Supercenter. Brock bolted to the men’s room and mercifully found it unlocked and unoccupied. He was in there long enough to make Mulchrone think he might have lost consciousness. Might be lying in his own foul mess.
The pastor had almost been forced to conclude it was his moral duty to see if his fellow traveler needed aid when the congressman emerged. He was pale but his face looked as if it had been splashed with water. His hair was freshly combed, and he’d popped a breath mint.
As far as Mulchrone could see, Brock hadn’t stained any of his clothing. His suit was a bit rumpled but no more than could be explained by a highway drive. The pastor braced himself for an olfactory assault as Brock entered the car but he needn’t have worried. All he smelled was the congressman’s aftershave, which he had applied a bit thick.
“You’ll be all right to continue, Philip?” Mulchrone asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“And you’ll be up to speaking?”
“Must have eaten something before I left home that disagreed with me. What’s strange is, my digestive tract is normally tough enough to digest pig iron. Maybe somebody poisoned my groceries.”
Mulchrone gave Brock a look.
With what they were up to, any number of people might want to stop them.
The priest drove on and the two of them arrived an hour late. Not a soul among the five hundred attendees in the conference room had left. Their breakfasts had been served on time and the pastries and coffee had kept coming. A spirited greeting welcomed the two visitors.
More than might be expected for two Yankees, one of them a Democrat, visiting Virginia, the cradle of the Confederacy.
But then George Mulchrone, retired Catholic priest, liked to emphasize that he’d been born in South Boston. He believed in the sanctity of life. Of the intrauterine sort. Leaving him free to preach that capital punishment was acceptable in the eyes of God who, after all, had set the example by flooding the world, drowning the wicked wholesale and sparing the lives of only Noah and his family. The pastor also condemned all sodomites and everyone who refused to see the evil of their vile ways.
His sermon and blessing were big hits with the crowd.
Congressman Brock, the first Democrat to represent Pennsylvania’s ninth district in many years, began by asking the crowd, “You know what people say about Pennsylvania? It’s Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.”
The audience laughed and slapped their knees.
“Now, I don’t live in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh and my momma and daddy were born in Alabama.”
Ma and Pa Brock were also graduates of Carnegie Mellon and Penn respectively, but their black sheep son didn’t mention that. So he got another round of applause.
He went on to curry the audience’s favor by castigating Patricia “Darn Her” Grant, the new leader of his party, for every sort of misdeed, maybe even stealing candy from babies. That got a laugh. But what she hadn’t done, Brock said, was steal the last presidential election from True South and Senator Howard Hurlbert. The crowd wasn’t expecting that and sat mute.
“It just looked like she did,” he said with a wink.
Now, the audience rose to its feet and roared.
Among their number was Merilee Parker, one of Galia Mindel’s spies.
But she wasn’t included in the small group who met after the brunch.
To discuss regime change in Washington.
McGill Investigations, Inc. — Georgetown
McGill had a surprise for Pruet before they got down to cases. He gave the magistrate a Martin Golden Era 1937 Sunburst guitar. Pruet took the instrument gently into his hands, sat in the chair McGill offered him and looked as if he might cry.
“I can’t let you keep that one,” McGill said. He wrote off Pruet’s obvious emotion as a French thing. “I borrowed it from a kid working at the White House. There’s the case for it over in the corner. I thought you might enjoy playing in your spare time. While you’re in Washington.”
Pruet was a master classical guitarist. McGill had replaced the cherished instrument the magistrate had lost in Paris to his ex-wife’s temper tantrum. The gesture had won him Pruet’s heartfelt friendship.
“You are too kind,” the magistrate said.
He couldn’t resist plucking the strings and tuning the instrument. In a matter of moments, he began to play. McGill recognized the song immediately, “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
McGill had suggested the Peter, Paul and Mary classic when Patti had asked for a duet, Pruet playing and McGill singing. The magistrate had rolled his eyes at the time, and they’d gone on to perform “Jail House Rock.”
“You remember that, do you?” McGill asked with a smile.
“I learned it after you left Paris. I play it for my grandnieces and grandnephews. They are quite taken with it.”
Pruet cleared his throat, got up and carefully placed the guitar in its case.
He returned to his seat opposite McGill and told him, “I need your help to find a painting that was stolen from my father’s country house in Avignon.”
McGill said, “Must be some painting, you and Odo coming all this way to get it back.”
“It is a picture of my great-grandparents’ wedding.”
“Okay, I can see how you’d want that back,” McGill said.
Pruet told him, “Its value is more than sentimental. The painting was done by Renoir.”
“The Renoir?” McGill asked. “Pierre-Auguste?”
Pruet nodded. “My great grandfather, Antoine Pruet, was one of his patrons. The painting was a wedding gift, a token of appreciation. Renoir was still making his name at the time. In the years since, well, a conservative estimate of the painting’s value today would be in the millions of euros. More likely, it would bring tens of millions.”
That told McGill a thing or two.
The fact that the family hadn’t sold the painting after its value had soared meant they didn’t need the money. That it had been hanging in a country house, presumably a getaway from a main residence, likely meant that the painting hadn’t been protected by museum-level security.
Then again, McGill remembered reading that some museums, especially those in Europe, had a quaint idea of security. They housed billions of dollars worth of art and trusted a sleepy guard or two to keep it all safe.
“You have a photo of the painting?” McGill asked.
The magistrate took one from a coat pocket and passed it to McGill.
Who looked at it and gave a low whistle.
“Gorgeous, both the painting and the young couple.” McGill processed all the information he’d received thus far and said, “If this was my painting, I wouldn’t have exhibited it in any public place.”
Pruet bobbed his head. “From the day the artist presented it to my great-grandparents, it never left the family’s summer home. It was not hidden from guests but neither was it publicized. Most scholars of Renoir’s work have never heard of it.”
“But the guests who visited the house would have seen of it,” McGill said.
“Oui.”
“Forgive me for asking, but are there any black sheep in your family? Someone in need of a large sum of money?”
The magistrate shook his head. “There is only my father, my brother, my sister, their spouses, children, grandchildren and me. I am the pauper of the family and I assure you none of us was involved.”
“Is there any household help?” McGill asked.
He saw a flicker of pain, maybe even sorrow, in Pruet’s eyes.
There was something important in that moment, but before McGill could pursue it, the magistrate answered his question.
“There is help, the Louvel family. They have been with us for over a century. They are well compensated and completely loyal.”
If McGill had still been a cop, he would have pursued a line of questioning about the Louvel family. Under present circumstances, he simply flagged it in his memory, reserving the right to come back to it.
He said, “If it wasn’t the family, it wasn’t the help and the painting wasn’t publicized, then somebody visiting the house had to talk about what he’d seen, and the word got back to the wrong person.”
“Exactly the wrong person,” Pruet said.
“You have an idea who the thief is?” McGill asked.
“An idea, yes. A certainty, no.”
McGill said, “You’ll have to clear that up for me.”
“You remember when you visited Paris and you told me of an American myth? A man who wrestled bears.”
“Grizzly Adams. He was a real person but the stories about him became legendary.”
“Oui. I think what I am dealing with is a modern, French version of such a man. His name is Laurent Fortier. He is an art thief, but he doesn’t steal from museums, auction houses or art galleries.” Pruet paused to see if McGill could make the leap.
“He goes after easy pickings,” McGill said.
It took the magistrate a moment to digest the American idiom. Then he said, “Oui. Exactement.”
McGill followed up. “Your great-grandparents weren’t the only patrons of the arts who supported unknown artists, people who later became famous, whose work is now worth millions. Some of those other patrons were given paintings as gifts or bought them cheap.”
Pruet nodded.
“You didn’t know about Fortier before your family’s painting was stolen?” McGill asked.
The magistrate sighed.
He told McGill, “I heard his name but, as I said, I thought he was a myth. He is a phantom; no knows what he looks like. I thought this was ridiculous, until it happened to my family.”
“So how do you know his name?” McGill asked.
“In truth, I don’t. No one does. A car with a flat tire was found abandoned near the scene of one theft. It was registered to a Laurent Fortier. It was a false identity that led nowhere. The police use that name because they have nothing else.”
“What about the victims?” McGill asked. “Why haven’t they spoken out?”
Pruet said, “What would we say? A thief has stolen valuable art from our homes? That might give other brigands the idea there could be more to take.”
McGill had to concede that point. “So they asked the cops to keep things quiet.”
“Demanded there be no public notice.”
The next questions were hard, but McGill asked them anyway. “You didn’t know how real Fortier is because you’re still on the outs with your Interior Ministry? They don’t share information with you?”
“I remain in disfavor,” Pruet said. “Your dear wife won a second term in office. My good friend Jean-Louis Severin had to resign and flee the Élysée Palace one step ahead of a scandal placing him in the boudoir of the German chancellor, Erika Kirsch.”
McGill hadn’t heard that tidbit. Publicly, the former French president was said to have left office due to a serious, unspecified problem with his health. McGill wondered if Patti knew the real reason. Decided he’d need to find just the right moment to ask.
“So you lost your protector,” McGill said.
Pruet nodded.
McGill got back to the missing painting.
“What makes you think Fortier brought the Renoir here?”
“Our police assume he either solicits customers among the unscrupulously wealthy or they commission him to look for work by preferred artists.”
McGill said, “Okay, but wouldn’t his customer base be global?”
“I’m certain it is, but two things lead me to think your country is where I will find the painting. The first is that my great-grandmother was American. Her name was Jocelyn Hobart. She was betrothed to a wealthy American from New York named Hiram Busby. The summer before she was to marry Busby she came to Paris on holiday and met my great-grandfather.”
McGill grinned. “Adieu, Hiram?”
“Oui. But M’sieur Busby did not yield so easily. His marriage to Jocelyn was to be the cornerstone of a grand business alliance. Busby came to Paris thinking he would take his fiancée home by force if necessary. He was certain his wealth would allow him to have his way with any Frenchman who tried to thwart him.”
“But it didn’t work out that way,” McGill said.
“No. He hadn’t anticipated that he would confront a man of equal position and fortune, and one who was more than equal in his determination to have my great-grandmother. Theirs was a match of grand passion not business interests. Busby had also overlooked that my great-grandfather had all the political connections that wealth confers. When Busby tried to break into my family’s country home, where Jocelyn had taken refuge, he was given a thorough beating by the Louvels and the police put him onto a vessel carrying German immigrants to Texas. He jumped ship in New Orleans and made his way back to New York from there.”
“Carrying an animosity he bequeathed to generations of his family?” McGill asked.
“Oui.”
McGill could accept a multigenerational grudge, if not outright feud, as a reason to suspect the Renoir painting of the magistrate’s forebears had been brought to America. That left one more point to examine.
“What’s the other reason you think your family’s painting is in the United States?” McGill asked. “You said there were two.”
“Yesterday, Odo and I were in New York. We visited a number of art galleries there. In a handsome space called the Duvessa Gallery, I saw a forgery of my family’s Renoir.”
That took McGill by surprise.
“You could tell it wasn’t genuine?”
“Yes. I know it as intimately as the fretboard of my guitar.”
A detailed understanding indeed, McGill thought.
“Was it a good forgery?” he asked.
Pruet said, “It was skilled, yes.”
“When was the painting stolen from your father’s summer house?”
“A week ago today.”
“Is that enough time to do a skilled forgery?”
Another question to think about. Pruet said, “Je ne sais pas.” I don’t know.
McGill remembered enough French to understand. He said, “Neither do I. But I’d think a forger trying to copy Renoir’s style would take more than a week to do a credible imitation.”
“So do I,” Pruet said, “now that you’ve enlightened me.”
“I’m not personally involved,” McGill said. He was tempted to ask about why Pruet had reacted emotionally to his question about the Louvels. Maybe the loyal family retainers had produced a prodigal son. Someone who had needed cash in a pinch. But McGill didn’t get the feeling the time was right to ask that kind of question. Instead, he said, “Have you ever seen anyone, a guest I mean, use a mobile phone at your father’s country house?”
“Yes, of course. France is a very modern —”
Pruet caught up with what McGill was suggesting.
“Someone could have photographed the Renoir without being obvious.”
“Photographed it and emailed the picture to the forger.”
The magistrate drew a deep breath and let it go slowly.
“I was foolish enough to think Odo and I might handle this matter ourselves. Our conversation has destroyed that illusion. Do you have the time to help me, m’sieur?”
McGill thought about the need to find out how real the threat against Patti was.
That came first. If he took Pruet’s case, he might have to table it at least momentarily.
But the fa
ct that he’d be working for Pruet would give him cover, should anyone eventually ask if he’d been poking his nose into the affairs of the president’s political opponents. And then there was the matter of hospitality paying dividends.
“I can give you at least some of my time. Enough, I think, to help you.”
“Bon. Then there is one more thing I should tell you.”
“Okay,” McGill said, wondering what else was coming.
“Odo and I were visited by an agent of the FBI last night. His name, he said, is Osgood Riddick. He strongly advised Odo and me not to return to the Duvessa Gallery, even though I told him I’d put a deposit of one thousand euros down for the right to bid for the forgery.”
“You did that because?” McGill asked.
“Owning the forgery might be the first step to finding the forger.”
“Good idea,” McGill said. He felt better about working with Pruet than he had a moment earlier. The man might be distracted by something he’d yet to share, but he still had his moments.
“The other thing you should know about this Riddick fellow,” Pruet said, “he told Odo and me he is a member of the FBI’s art crime team.”
So, by coming to him, the magistrate was buying a little political insurance, too, McGill thought. Riddick, whoever he might be, could bully a foreigner, but he wasn’t going to push McGill around. Another example of good thinking.
If Pruet got over his funk, he might be a real help with this case.
Pruet told McGill that he and Odo had booked rooms at the Four Seasons.
McGill said the magistrate and his bodyguard should get settled in at their hotel. He would confer with his partner, Margaret Sweeney, and they’d take things from there. McGill gave Pruet the Martin guitar to take with him.
Might be good for Pruet’s mood, McGill thought.
But he didn’t tell the magistrate that Gabbi sent her greetings.
McGill thought there might be a covert role for her in this one.
The Oval Office
“You can go right in, Senator,” Edwina Byington, the president’s personal secretary, said to Senator Richard Bergen, Democrat of Illinois.