The Big Score

by Kilian, Michael;

  “Shouldn’t we put him to bed?” Matthias said, as Annelise closed the door behind them. They walked slowly down the hall.

  “The housekeeper will do that in the morning,” she said. “He’ll still be in that chair. We’ve put him to bed a hundred times, but he’s always in that damned chair in the morning.”

  Matthias frowned.

  “He can be quite competent, when he needs to be,” Annelise continued. “He still drives, you know. Takes that big car into the village, goes to the bank. Buys liquor when we try to keep it from him. Buys things. Bought a pewter chess set last week. We try to return things when he’s forgotten about them, but you don’t always get your money back.”

  “Does he show any interest in architecture?”

  “About as much as Christian. About as much as Paul. About as much as my dogs.”

  “Christian said he hasn’t been to the office. Not in months.”

  “He used to make quite a thing of it. Three-piece suit. Club tie. Briefcase. But all he’d do there was sit in his office and read books.”

  “He’s seventy-five years old.”

  She sighed wearily. “Let’s go out on the terrace.”

  They went through the huge sitting room, passing through the French doors to the warm night air outside. The moon glittered on the lake. Little waves splashed quietly at the foot of the bluff below.

  “God, I’m a coward,” she said. “I try to bring up money, and he just cringes, as if I were hitting him or calling him vile names.”

  As Matthias thought upon it, Annelise was the only member of the family who still had any money. Their maternal grandfather, Karl Albrecht, had settled $1 million on each of his three grandchildren. Matthias had put most of his back into the family architecture firm. Christian had spent his with astonishing swiftness. Annelise had put her money into sound investments and into her kennels, which had prospered.

  Matthias leaned forward against the railing, gazing unhappily out over the lake. He felt like a ghost, revisiting his own life.

  “I’d forgotten this view,” he said. “It could be the ocean.”

  “You’re damned lucky it’s still here for you.” She spoke quietly and matter-of-factly, but he could sense her bitterness. “Did you know Father bought land in Utah? Damned dry desert. He saw pictures in National Geographic and thought it would be nice to own some of it. And there’s a Rolls-Royce in the garage.”

  “What? Those damned things cost a fortune.”

  “It’s quite used. Barely runs. He called it a wonderful bargain. Said he bought it for Mother. For when she got well. Dear God. To think he was once a forest preserve trustee and president of the German-American Society.”

  Their father had attained those positions mostly because their grandfather had held them before him, but he couldn’t have served in them now. Matthias shook his head. He’d been doing that all night.

  “Did Chris fill you in on the particulars, on the way things stand?”

  “Yes. He didn’t explain how he’s kept things going, though.”

  “He makes some money with his portraits. His women customers are very generous, don’t you know. And I think he gambles.”

  “Gamblers tend to lose.”

  “Especially those who drink at the same time. He tried to quit this year. Stopped in January, for a fact. But he’s been nipping at it lately. And this weekend, God, it’s been just like the old days. I don’t hold out much hope for Christian.”

  Matthias caught himself as he began to shake his head again.

  “In any event, Matt, I think we’re at a dead end. If we sold this place and your house on Schiller Street—if we sold everything else, the furniture, that goddamn vulgar car, cancelled father’s club memberships—I think we’d have enough left over after paying off all the debts to get an apartment for him and keep him comfortable. In one of those residences, for people like him. That’s what Paul has been pleading with me to do. He thinks we should go to court and have Father declared incompetent and then sell everything. I begin to think he’s right. And it can’t be much longer before we have no other choice. Christian insists it won’t come to that, but I can only presume that’s vodka talking.”

  Matthias said nothing. He listened to the breeze in the tree leaves above. Their grandfather had had this house built as an anniversary present for his wife. Their father, a young man then, had been its architect. Big houses like this had been his specialty. No one built them anymore. No one wanted them.

  “You’re wondering why I haven’t contributed anything,” she said. “Why I haven’t thrown any of my money down this toilet.”

  “No, I wasn’t. Actually I was thinking about the dances they used to have out here.”

  He had danced with his wife on this terrace, and with Sally, and with others. With each, it had been a lovely moment.

  “Well, I’m not going to do it,” Annelise said. “And I don’t want you to give up another penny. I want you to go back to France and your painting. If you sell your house—and it’s costing Chris a lot to keep it up—I want you to use the money to live on until your paintings catch on.”

  He shook his head. “My paintings.”

  “The three of us can work on Father together. Get him to understand. If he won’t go into one of those residences, well, I’ll make a room for him at my place. We’ll find a way for him to keep some of his books. That’s all he needs, except for brandy and cigarettes.”

  “It would kill him to lose this house.”

  “He doesn’t have much longer anyway, not with his stubborn habits.”

  Matthias smiled gently, hoping she wouldn’t misunderstand what he was about to say. “If we did all that, it would be the end of things for you socially. The Social Register and all that. They’d find out. They’d drop you.”

  They stared at each other. Their faces were so much alike, it was the same as looking into mirrors.

  “Matthias, I don’t really give a shit. Do you?”

  “If you care, you shouldn’t be in there. Isn’t that what they say?”

  “That wife of yours sure as hell liked being there.”

  “She’s no longer my wife.”

  “Christian cares about all that, the goddamned snob. Being dropped from everything would do him good. Make me feel damned good.” She turned away. “I have to get some sleep, Matthias. Tomorrow starts bloody early.”

  “Annelise. Would it help if I came back for good, to try to get the firm going again?”

  She hesitated. “I thought you hated that. What did you use to say? ‘Form doesn’t follow function in Chicago, it follows money.’”

  “Money is what we need.”

  “To be brutally frank, brother dear, I think it’s much too late for that. Chicago’s still got a lot of money around, but the town is run by people like that wretched Peter Poe. Have you seen that monstrosity of his on Michigan Avenue? That’s the kind of trash they’re putting up these days. They won’t want an aesthete like you. What would you design, houses? They’re tearing down the houses Father designed right and left. Go back to France. Go back to painting. Think of yourself. Be a little selfish. Everyone else is. All this will take care of itself.”

  “I’m not sure it will.”

  “It will. Paul will see to it.” She took his hand. Hers was rough and calloused. “I think you’re a wonderful painter, Matthias. Don’t waste it. Don’t throw it all away like Christian.” She kissed his cheek with a brush of lips. “Good night.” She was gone with a rustle of gown. He was alone with the moonlight. He felt like a drink, but he let the moment pass. He began to walk the long, wide terrace, thinking about his family, and how it had come to own such a terrace.

  The Curlands had mostly been farmers—in Germany, and in Michigan, where they had settled in the 1840s. Matthias’s father’s father had been the first Curland to attend college.

  The Albrechts were different—“special.” Not “better,” but different. Bold people who had gone through life snatchin
g up whatever they wanted. The first in America, Gottfried Albrecht, had been a Prussian-born lieutenant of Hussars serving with the British army in the American Revolution. After the Battle of Monmouth, he had taken most of his squadron of cavalry with him over to the American side.

  After the war, he settled in Pennsylvania. His son Johannes moved west into Ohio, establishing a small shipping line on Lake Erie. Johannes’s eldest son Rheinhard had taken the shipping line to the burgeoning little town of Chicago, buying land to the north of the river and selling it off in small parcels to the German settlers who followed. He started a brewery, a building firm, a ship chandler’s company, and a cooperage and lumber business.

  Rheinhard’s son Manfred was the richest and the worst Albrecht. He expanded the family holdings into railroads and financial trading. Ruthless and compulsively greedy, he prospered in panics that ruined thousands of others, emerging one of the wealthiest men in the city in the Gilded Age of the robber barons. Socially ambitious, he had adopted the Anglophile ways of Chicago’s social elite, marrying his daughter off to a knighted Englishman and sending his only son, Karl, to Harvard. Manfred’s death from a heart attack suffered in a brothel in the Levee District had caused a minor scandal.

  His son Karl, Matthias’s grandfather, had been the best Albrecht. From Harvard, he’d gone to Paris to study painting and then to Leipzig to learn architecture. When World War I broke out, he returned to America, enlisting as a private soldier and suffering severe wounds at Belleau Wood inflicted by his ancestral countrymen.

  The physical and moral carnage of the war appalled him, and he’d dedicated the rest of his years to efforts on behalf of civilization. Liquidating most of the family holdings, he’d built a settlement house and an orphanage, and donated large tracts of land for parks and forest preserve. He’d begun collecting art before the war, and renewed his acquisition with much passion afterward, building a small museum on the Near North Side. Prohibition and the Depression put the brewery and what remained of the family companies out of business, though the architecture firm Karl founded in the 1920s survived and flourished. He’d died a still wealthy man, not counting the value of the museum and its extraordinary painting collection.

  His daughter and only child, Hannah Albrecht, married a young associate in the firm, Rudolph Curland. Leaving the museum to her care and the architecture firm to Rudolph’s, Karl had gone to his grave content that these most beloved of his creations would endure. Especially his museum, which he’d left to a small foundation he’d established, to be administered by a board made up of his daughter Hannah, his son-in-law Rudolph, and his grandsons Matthias and Christian, who had pleased him by studying art and architecture as he had done. Annelise had shown no interest in the place.

  The art museum, still called the Albrecht Collection but also listed in the tourist guides as the German Museum, had an endowment, but its investments had been poorly handled and the interest was failing to meet expenses. When this happened to some museums, parts of collections were sold off to raise funds—often at great profit. But under the terms of Karl’s will, no painting in the collection was to be sold. Should the museum be forced to close for any reason, or the collection tampered with, everything was to be donated to the Art Institute of Chicago.

  If Christian was correct, the architecture firm could be out of business in the morning.

  Matthias leaned against the railing, inhaling deeply of the scented warmth of the night air, tilting back his head to stare at the moon. On just such a night, far too many years before, he’d proposed marriage on this spot to Sally Phillips. He’d been very young and worth at most $50,000. She was being romanced by a man much older who was worth a hundred times that. With a kiss and much sadness, she’d turned Matthias down.

  If his grandfather hadn’t been so eccentric, hadn’t become so obsessed with his museum, hadn’t put all his money into it, the Curlands would have been spared all these problems. He’d be a different person. He’d be rich.

  He’d tried to be an ordinary man. He’d failed at that as he had so much else. But to live according to the trivial tribal rituals of the rich, and think that was special, was a ridiculous illusion. Special was different. Perhaps that was why his grandfather had done what he’d done.

  Jill Langley had thought that. Jill would have married him rich or poor, had wanted to, but it was much too late to think about that now.

  Lighting his pipe, he paced the terrace some more, then stopped to lean back against the railing and look up at the great house, pondering ghosts, imagining who might be behind those windows if he could travel back in time. He thought of his grandfather, standing at the window of his dressing room in the morning, gazing out at the lake, as if it were one of his possessions or, at least, one of the public institutions in his beneficient charge.

  His own father had designed this house, approved every brick and cornice.

  Matthias found guilt in these thoughts. Annelise and Christian had made one thing perfectly clear. It was now up to him. If this house and all it represented was to be saved, he alone would have to do it. Annelise didn’t care and Christian was incapable. If Matthias refused to make the effort, and allowed this house and the history it embodied to vanish from the family’s present life and future, the deed would be his, and it would be a deed, a conscious act. This was not something from which he could walk away, as he had from so much. Walking away would be a conscious, deliberate, painfully consequential decision, and the blame and guilt for the consequences would be his.

  He would be undoing work—the labor of generations. Except for the museum and a few commemorative placques in public places, the house was all that testified to the achievements of two centuries of Albrechts. A little labor and effort on his part was all that was required to save it. Too many of the great families of this city had diminished to descendants who just didn’t give a damn, who let everything slip away.

  It wasn’t too late. He’d called his mother’s death a sign, and perhaps it was—a summons, come just in time.

  But how to do it? Art was no answer—not his, not any of the sacrosanct paintings in his grandfather’s museum. He was no good at investments and finance, his great-grandfather’s game. None of them was.

  It had to be architecture. Chicago had made many an architect rich, many more poor, even bankrupt. The trend in this lingering recession was to the latter. He’d heard that Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the city’s largest architectual firm, had laid off something like half its staff at the depths of the economic troubles, and since then had hired few back.

  He had at least to try. Something might turn up. That was his brother’s motto for life. Sometimes it did.

  Upon arriving home, Diandra went immediately to bed—in her own room. The separate sleeping chambers had been Poe’s requirement. He’d broached the idea early in their engagement, almost as a condition of marriage, but she’d raised no objection, though she’d seemed curious, as she still was about his peculiarities and idiosyncrasies. The arrangement was not intended as a limitation on sex. He took that when he wished, which was often enough. Rather, as with everything else in his life, it was a matter of his convenience. He did business at all hours of the day and night, and there were occasions when he wished sex with someone else and did not want to waste time leaving his apartment.

  Diandra’s bedroom suite was on the top floor of the Poe Place penthouse, looking north over the Gold Coast and up the lake shore. His was on the main floor, opposite his study and just down the hall from the wide gallery that opened onto his south terrace. It was to the study he went first.

  Poe had a half-dozen people to answer his phones for him. For his most private line, however, he used an answering machine that required a computer code to access and activate. He settled behind his desk, punched the requisite buttons on the desk console, and leaned back in his $10,000 Italian leather swivel chair to listen.

  There were calls from his accountant, a business associate in Michigan City, a
nd the governor of Indiana, among some dozen messages. These could wait until the morning. Another call troubled him. He jotted a brief notation, then used the same ultra-private line to dial a number.

  He let it ring some nine times, irritated that he was being made to wait in this manner, then terminated the call and placed another, taking the number from a directory in his desktop computer.

  This call was answered after just three rings. A soft, male voice came on the line.

  “Mr. Train, please,” said Poe.

  “Who?”

  “Laurence Train.”

  “What makes you think he’s here?”

  “Please. Mr. Train.”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “He’ll know.”

  The line went silent, for longer than pleased Poe. Finally, Train’s nasal, high-pitched, overeducated, and affectedly Eastern voice filled Poe’s ear.

  “What do you want, Peter?” he said abjectly.

  “You called me, Larry.”

  “Yes, I did. I got a little nervous about something. But it can wait.”

  “I don’t like to wait.”

  “I left my other number.”

  “I tried it. No one answered.”

  “How on earth did you get this number?”

  “You called me, Larry. What do you want?”

  “One of the paintings is missing. One of the Kirchners. The Red Tower. The one you liked so much.”

  Poe drummed his fingers a moment. “Missing from where?”

  “From the gallery. I had two cheaper paintings plus the Kirchner set aside in a box for you. It’s gone.”

  “Gone.”

  “That girl, Jill Langley, she’s sometimes there on weekends. I thought she might have taken the box to deliver it to you—it was marked for your yacht—just to do that little extra. She always stays late, don’t you know, doing the extra. But I can’t find her. You might want to check your yacht, in case she did bring it there.”

  “You should never have hired that girl, Larry.”

  “It wouldn’t do to have her at the German Museum now, would it? Under the circumstances? We talked about this. It was a good idea—get her out of the museum, keep an eye on her.”