The Fifth House of the Heart

by Ben Tripp

  Two factors came into play with every antique: quality and time. A masterpiece was valuable the day it was created. Add five hundred years, it became even more valuable. If it could be known what happened to the masterpiece during the intervening half millennium, and it was a jolly good story, the value reached whatever maximum the market would bear.

  Sax wrote out a list, consolidating his notes into a thesis. Here he had an unknown collector, probably European, believed to be a woman. Sax hadn’t asked Jules how that was known. Presumably one of the proxy bidders had used the feminine pronoun when speaking of her client—if they spoke of their client at all. He would have to take Jules’s information as given, for the time being. Desires to remain anonymous. Why? Many collectors so inclined. Any reason out of the ordinary? Consider possibilities. Meanwhile: objects sought after appear to be unconnected. Those of which Sax was aware, at least, didn’t seem to come from a common source. Sometimes that was a factor, as the newly prosperous descendants of fallen, once-great families attempted to reassemble their patrimonies. Tilting at windmills, that lot. Bless ’em.

  The objects the mystery buyer had accumulated were from all over the place, of all periods, no apparent common thread. Prewar history identified amongst perhaps half of the pieces in question (such as Sax’s ormolu clock), the rest, origin unknown. Purchased by proxies in Europe and the US, possibly with additional buyers elsewhere, as yet unrecognized. It seemed like an entirely random event.

  There were only two common elements: price was nearly no object, and everything had dropped briefly out of sight during the war.

  Sax underlined the last part again and again until the paper was wet with ink. That was the key—the war gap. He belched champagne gas and his eyes watered.

  Many of the great families had lost everything when the Germans made their play for a thousand-year empire. Italy, France, Poland, everywhere but Switzerland and England had seen a great churning up of the sediments of heritage. It had settled back down like so much sand deposited by a swift tide, in entirely new places, creating a new landscape. What did that suggest? How did that inform the particular interests of Sax’s unknown collector?

  Sax made himself an espresso with the ominous black Italian machine his niece Emily had given him for Christmas the previous year. It was simple to operate: water in here, coffee in there, batten the hatches, and press the button. It made a terrifying noise and dispensed the brew with explosive force. There was a steam-emitting milk-foaming attachment as well, which Sax would under no circumstances attempt to use.

  He fetched his woolen motoring rug and moved his operations into the living room, which was ample and magnificent. He spread the rug over his knees, his slippered feet propped up on the Art Deco Wolfgang Hoffmann coffee table that he irrationally despised but that so perfectly suited the room that he couldn’t get rid of it. Then he continued working at the problem, filling pages in his notebook. Three times he scorched himself another tiny espresso, once with biscotti to tamp down the rebellious pâté, which seemed to be in a revolutionary mood despite its bourgeois origins.

  Rummaging amongst the books, he was able to narrow down his list of possibilities until he had something like a theory. The linchpin of the idea had to do with the postwar period. Great private collections suffered twin indignities during the wartime era: First, the collections were broken up, sold, hidden, or appropriated, reflective of the misfortunes of the original owners. Second, the objects from the collections were liberated from their new possessors, mostly Nazis. Precisely the same breaking up, selling, hiding, and appropriation was visited upon them again. As nobody wanted to be accused of looting, provenances were fabricated by the thousands. Forgers made expert during the war were then out of jobs; they turned to fake letters, receipts, and other documents created to support the false provenances. It was a disaster, from a historical perspective.

  Sax had known all of this in a strictly professional way; he would frequently play both sides of the fabricated-documentation issue, sometimes passing the provenance off as authentic when he rather suspected it wasn’t, and other times exposing the faked papers in order to get a better deal. It was a part of his moral code that he never attempted to tamper with an authentic provenance. He had been an infant when all this collection-bashing and forgery was originally going on. Consequently, the details of the period had always been of less interest to him. It was within his lifetime, but not the bits with which he had any personal associations.

  But now that he was putting together a picture of the people and events that precipitated the chaos, those years became much more vivid in his mind. As usual, he best witnessed human affairs through the objects amongst which those affairs were conducted. This crash course in midcentury events made things downright exciting. However, the suspicion he’d had at the auction at which he had procured Cocteau’s clucking golden clock was borne out by what he’d discovered. This disturbed him.

  He began a new page of notes. At the top he wrote:

  VAMPIRE

  Then he scratched out a timeline. Vampires might live indefinitely, so he could assume a single individual was involved throughout the period in question. Sax’s original idea was that someone was reassembling an earlier collection that had been looted during the war. Now he thought the truth was something far more repulsive. The vampires had prospered during both twentieth-century European wars (as in every war), attaining high rank, feeding with impunity, amassing tremendous material wealth. They did especially well with the Nazis, who had the kind of mind-set the vampires could best use—and one closest to their own way of thinking. Sax had heard this long ago from another collector, one who knew his vampires.

  What must have happened, as Sax indicated on the timeline, was a reversal of fortunes for one of the vampires. Its hoard had been liberated. Right after the war, from 1945 through around 1949, and long afterward, in some cases, zealous survivors of the conflict had searched out every hiding place in Europe, determined that no malefactor should prosper by evil. Even the vampires, some a thousand years old, could not resist such resources flung against them. Not all of them were discovered, but those that were lost everything—often including their un-lives.

  Sax thought he knew what was happening now. One of these creatures had recently emerged after what—to a thing that measured time in decades, not days—was only a sensible interval of eighty years or so. During that period it had amassed a new fortune, as vampires easily do. With this wealth, it was attempting to reassemble its old glory. Such monsters, after all, might have acquired a piece from Napoléon Bonaparte himself, or Queen Nefertiti, for that matter. There were memories attached to such artifacts. It was the memories they cherished.

  Vampires dwelled in the past. It was one of the things that most distinguished them from human beings. For a vampire, the future is nothing, despite the centuries they can expect to survive. For men, the opposite is true: men live always for the future, of which they may claim so little. Robbed, as a vampire would see it, of its rightful trove of mementos, the creature would work diligently to reclaim every last piece. And for a vampire to work at all was a terrible sacrifice for it. They were lazy creatures, dragons content to sleep on their hoards. It was a compelling motive, Sax believed.

  So it might be a vampire. On the other hand, it could just be some reclusive nouveau riche Chinese tycoon buying up a mansion’s worth of clutter to make it look like he had a pedigree. It all came down to the ormolu clock, and whether or not that poor young fellow Raymond Radiguet—poet and novelist, friend of Great Artists—had been killed by a vampire.

  Sax had found a book to address that issue as well. Lives of Paris, it was titled. Radiguet got half a page, including a eulogy written by Jean Cocteau that Sax thought rather lachrymose. Cause of death was typhoid. Which, of course, could be a misdiagnosis, or the doctor might have cited typhoid to spare the deceased’s loved ones the indignity of a less flattering illness.
But Cocteau’s words held a clue. In the eulogy to Radiguet was a quote from the poet’s deathbed, spoken in a fever:

  There is a color that moves and people hidden in the color.

  Victims of systematic vampirism died in a fever, boiling with lymph, bleeding within, their flesh broken out in poxy rashes. And hallucinated toward the end. Sax had witnessed it with his own eyes. It would look much like typhoid. Radiguet was only twenty, too dreadfully young, Sax thought. A color that moves. Sax ran the words through his mind. People hidden in the color. He knew something about that.

  Despite the woolen rug across his legs and the lusty clanking of the steam radiators beneath his windows, Asmodeus Saxon-Tang felt a chill spread over his flesh. It was the damp cold of newly turned earth in an autumn graveyard. He felt terribly old and weak and tired. He knew his wild conjectures were right. He might be the only man alive who could put together the scattered bits of information to discover what he’d found.

  There was no vanity behind the thought. In his cleverness, he’d made a fool of himself, and possibly a target. He had exposed himself to the vampire when he outbid the blonde for that accursed clock. What was it Nietzsche had said? When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.

  Sax could almost feel the eyes upon him, out there in the darkness beyond the brittle panes. He shivered. The telephone rang. Sax leapt at the jangling noise, the convulsion of his buttocks popping him a foot into the air. He clawed the instrument to him and clapped the handset to his ear.

  “Saxon-Tang,” he gasped. His heart was pounding.

  “It’s Barry, Mr. Tang. I’m sorry about the late call, but . . .” It was Barry Lions, Sax’s foreman in the New York warehouse.

  “But what?” Sax prompted when Barry failed to continue.

  “Somebody broke in,” Barry said. “The night watchman?”

  The night watchman what? Sax urged in his mind. What? Barry was obviously beside himself; he couldn’t seem to get through a sentence tonight.

  “The night watchman what?” Sax prompted at last.

  “He’s dead,” Barry said. “I mean real dead.”

  The police were out in force with their flashing bubblegum lights and barking radios, milling around examining the ground. A detective with very dark skin introduced herself to Sax as Millicent Jackson. She had one of those faces that Edward Hopper would have painted: enduring boredom with a patience born of hopelessness. Sax suspected she had never laughed in her life. She didn’t seem to believe his name was real.

  “Asmodeus Saxon-Tang? Sounds like a sports drink.”

  Sax found himself babbling out his brief cocktail-party speech on the subject: “Saxon is my father’s surname, the Tang being an embellishment at my mother’s insistence—it was her family surname. From Étang, French for ‘pond’ or ‘bog.’ It sounds better in French. Don’t ask about the Asmodeus part.” He handed her his passport, as he lacked a driver’s license.

  She nodded without looking convinced, walked away, and made him wait.

  Sax detested the police for every possible reason. And no reason at all. He just didn’t like them. Putting aside the fascistic tendencies, the aggression, authoritarianism, paranoia, vendibility, and fear, they were also the only people in the world who could make a uniform look bad. Even the UPS man looked dynamite in a uniform. Is that why you became a cop? Because you didn’t look good in shorts? The phenomenon applied worldwide. London Metropolitans dressed as tram drivers with glans-shaped helmets. The Parisian flics with their elastic-cuffed tracksuits and oversized pillbox hats. Italian carabinieri kitted up like hotel doormen, Tokyo cops who ought to be delivering mail. The only exception Sax could think of was the Royal Bahamas Police. They turned out with smart white tunics and pith helmets and had the jaunty look of an Edwardian marching band. Sax realized he was letting his thoughts run away. He was anxious.

  At last, the detective came back and ushered him beneath the crime-scene tape stretched around the front of the warehouse. It was past two a.m. The warehouse was in Yonkers, not far from the Amtrak station. It was an area of industrial decay where men were dwarfed by big machines, a landscape of heavy, grimy things that beetled along amongst ugly cavernous buildings like the carcasses of beached whales. To step inside the warehouse, as Sax now did, was a revelation. He always enjoyed the effect of it. Always except tonight.

  Detective Jackson walked at a funeral pace into the warehouse ahead of Sax, eyes on the floor, and spoiled the grand entrance.

  It was a wonderland in there. Sax allowed very few of his clients to see this place, preferring the presentational control his local shop provided. Nothing here was cleaned, staged, or dressed for sale. It was exactly as it had been found.

  The ranks of priceless and beautiful things rose up all around them for three stories, a treasure worthy of the Smithsonian or some great European museum, but all for sale. Cabinets, cupboards, beds, chairs, tables, mirrors, desks. Acres of carved paneling. Church fixtures, including a Christ on the cross at least twelve feet tall in brutal, wet-wounded polychrome. Fifteenth-century German, of course, writhing on the nails. An entire manor’s worth of Louis XIV furniture in ebony and gold. A forest of candlesticks in gold and stone and wood. Windows, doors, medallions, and milled trim of every style. In one far reach of the place, it always appeared to be raining: here hung the dozens of crystal chandeliers that couldn’t be safely put away in crates.

  There were workshops at the back nearest the docks where restoration and repair were done, and offices at the front. An enormous walk-in safe near the offices, once a bank vault, contained objects of uninsurable value. Opposite the safe was a climate-controlled room for storage of paintings, paper, textiles, and other fragile things that required fresher air than the HVAC could provide. The river was a liability in warm weather, and Sax had been forced to spend a great deal of money on antihurricane measures as well.

  Detective Jackson led Sax past the offices. Barry Lions emerged from the last one in the row, mewling.

  “Thank God you’re here,” he said. “I’m losing it, man.”

  Sax liked Barry. A large, seal-like man, Barry knew the business and how to take care of people and things, and he liked to stay organized. This tendency was only a liability if you had a dead man in the warehouse. Barry was falling to pieces now, a plainclothes cop following him as he hurried to Sax’s side.

  “They asked me if I did it,” Barry said.

  “Which you did not, I presume?” Sax said.

  “Damn straight I didn’t. He owed me money on the football pool.”

  The attempt at bravado failed completely. Barry was frightened, not least because he’d had to wait for the police to arrive and was alone in the warehouse for half an hour with the corpse.

  They approached the locus of police activity: halfway down the central aisle of the warehouse beneath the old-fashioned bulbs (fluorescent light was terrible for antique finishes), sprawled at the foot of a mahogany William and Mary hutch écritoire with a double-dome cornice, was the night watchman. He lay facedown on the concrete. His blue uniform was soaked with blood that ran from beneath his chest, across the floor, and down a drainage grate. His name was Alberto, and prior to tonight he had looked very well in uniform, unlike the police. There was a small flashlight on the ground beside the body, a ring of keys, and Alberto’s baseball cap, turned up to the ceiling as if to accept pocket change from passersby. Each item had a small yellow evidence tent beside it.

  Sax hated the sight of death. He’d seen it before, death in peace and in violence. Hard to avoid at his age. The watchman looked vulnerable, one half-closed eye visible, his cheek pressed to the floor. It occurred to Sax that Alberto had become like everything else in the warehouse: a relic of past life, something precious in its workmanship. He had a provenance as well. Barry wouldn’t get closer to the corpse than fifteen feet and couldn’t bear to look at it. Sax approached,
waving away a couple of uniformed men who closed in as if to stop him falling across the body in his grief.

  “Please,” he said. “He worked for me.”

  Sax stooped stiffly beside the body under the watchful eye of Detective Jackson.

  “This is Alberto Robledo?” she said.

  “Yes,” Sax replied. He straightened his back and stepped away from the body. “If this is an opportune moment, I’ll tell you everything I know. Alberto’s shift begins at nine. There’s an alarm. It sends a call to Mr. Lions’s home in addition to yourselves. I received a telephone call from Mr. Lions tonight, stating he had received the alarm and driven straight over from his residence, which is relatively near. He phoned me from his office here. To the best of my knowledge, there shouldn’t have been anyone else present with Alberto. I have a staff of twenty-three people who work here full- or part-time. If you wish to inquire into their activities this evening, I can provide you with the necessary information.”

  Jackson recorded this statement with a finger-sized device. Then she raised it to her own lips and added Sax’s name and the time of the statement.

  “Thank you, Mr., um, Saxon-Tang.” She made a sound like there was something else she wanted to add, but she didn’t add it; instead, she took a new tack. “Can I ask if there’s anything you see missing? I mean there’s a lot of stuff, but I assume this was a burglary.”

  Sax made a slow turn where he stood, looking up and around at his stock of beautiful artifacts. Robbery made no sense, not in the warehouse. This stuff wasn’t jewelry. One would need moving trucks, dollies, and a dozen men to carry off a worthwhile haul, and selling it would be nearly impossible. The market was too small. Everybody knew everybody else. Although he kept rejecting the idea, there was only one individual object he could imagine might have led to this tragic circumstance. Sax considered not mentioning it. It would complicate the plans forming in his mind. But there was death here. He couldn’t obstruct whatever efforts might be made to solve the crime. Still, he hesitated. Who knew what his ideas would lead to? An open case, detectives—complications.