by Susan Daitch
The most recent file in the Caravaggio folder was a week old. I clicked on it. If I were Ashby, I would have deleted this file immediately, but I wasn’t Ashby, and part of what gave him pleasure was knowing that other people were watching—or could watch in the future, if they so choose. Moonelli had been standing where I now sat.
“Look, I put on the clothes just as you asked me to. I want to see that famous painting you said was upstairs.” The speaker, Moonelli, was a short man dressed as one of the figures from Las Meninas. He looked like Sal Mineo.
“This isn’t a good time. The conservator is there. She works at night.”
“So you didn’t get exactly what you asked for, you think. Okay, I can take a hint. I can be on my way. I just want to see the Velázquez.” Moonelli took a step closer to Ashby, who backed away. “Jack, I really don’t think that’s too much to ask.”
“I’ll pay you. Clearly, this isn’t going to work out.” Ashby’s face exposed how repulsed he was by Moonelli, whom I felt sorry for, though I don’t think Sandro took it personally. Moonelli looked at a thin wad of bills Ashby extended and sniffed.
“I’m used to a lot more than that, honey. Really, you have no idea.”
“That was the price we agreed on. Here’s the money. I’m leaving, and you need to do the same.”
Then the picture disappeared, and the screen went black, but the voices continued. Ashby must have turned off the webcam, but the sound was still being recorded. The door to the office could be heard opening, more footfalls. I couldn’t see if Ashby had left, and I don’t think he would have left Sandro alone in his office, but I couldn’t be sure. Moonelli made muffled sounds that could have been ‘Per’ and ‘Ove,’ but did he know their names? More screaming. In a few minutes, I would leave the door to my studio open and begin to descend Stairwell B. Ashby and the Dagbents, assuming they never met, were moving separately in Stairwell A and the elevator, respectively. Or did they meet? The recording wasn’t telling me. After being strangled, Moonelli would be moved up to my studio, where I would arrive a few minutes later, having decided not to go into Ashby’s office.
I had to keep the sound low, but I listened to the recording over and over. It was impossible to be certain whether Sandro was saying the names of the Dagbents or not, but Ashby was clearly present. Even if he didn’t murder Moonelli, he lied to the police. If I sent the file to Garfield, it would clear me but implicate Ashby.
I opened my email and attached the file to a post I planned to send to Demetrius and myself. It was easy. Then I would go to “History” and erase any trace that I had ever sat at this desk. Unless you worked for the NSA and had that kind of capability, no one would know I was ever there.
Until something came down very hard on my right hand: a Renaissance baby Jesus. Attached to the baby was the hand of a man whose head resembled a lightbulb tucked into a shirt. The force of the wooden statue against my fingers sent the email on its way.
Chapter 11
Lit only by the light of the computer screen, Fieldston loomed overhead like Nosferatu in a bow tie. His rage was incandescent. I don’t know how much of the Ashby recording he overheard, if any. The baby Jesus fell to the floor as he grabbed me by the front of my plumber’s jacket and hurled me across the room, or tried to. The jacket tore in his grasp. I picked myself up, grabbed one of Ashby’s uncapped Montblanc pens, and plunged it into his neck. The idea of being physically close to the director of Claiborne’s was nauseating, as if he were made of radioactive gold dust and diamond chips that could sicken and sever arteries just with a glance, but I did what I felt I had to. Towering and pale, he was terrifying, but there was no way the act of stabbing him couldn’t involve my hands touching his shoulder and waist. There is an intimacy in killing someone this way. Your bodies are so close. I felt nothing but extreme revulsion. His hand grabbed at mine, pulling the pen out before he fell to the floor. He didn’t die. I only intended grave injury. In a second, the assault was over. Ink and blood poured down his white shirt. The director put his hand to his throat, eyes bugging out as he lay on the floor. I said nothing to him. Nothing at all. I hadn’t wanted to injure him or anyone, but I did want to get out of the offices alive. I needed Fieldston to black out, to not remember what he’d just seen or heard. He fell to the floor, and I bashed his head with the statue. Not bashing in terms of brains on the floor, just enough head damage to make him lose consciousness. Then I took his cash from his wallet to make it look like a robbery. A feeble gesture, but I didn’t have a lot of good choices at the moment. Fieldston didn’t have much in his Prada wallet, mostly credit cards, because for someone like him cash was too proletarian, and a question of who knows whose hands have touched the paper before you. I tossed the wallet into the hall but didn’t hear it land.
That was because someone caught it.
A hand, also gloved, but still smelling of linseed oil and turpentine appeared along the jamb.
“Don’t scream or security will get both of us.”
He picked up my injured hand and pressed it between his as if that would press bones back into place. Masuji. Like an apparition, as if no time had passed and we were both still working at Claiborne’s. Except we weren’t. His reflection in the polished marble floor looked like a Ninja double, as always, and there was something light about him, as if he could somersault through air vents and land on his feet, evading motion detectors and cameras, the blunt instruments of security. At the same time, he was definitely human. He tossed the wallet back into the office, lit a cigarette, careful to put the burned match back in his pocket.
“You have blood on your jacket,” he commented, as if it was yesterday’s tomato sauce. He reached out for me, but I shook my head. He stepped back but kept talking in an ordinary voice. Given the circumstances, I would have preferred a whisper. “You want to know how I got in, why I’m here? I could ask you the same thing.”
“Most of all, right now I want to get out of this building. You can tell me on the stairs.”
“We all have our reasons. My guest ID, of course, got me in. The magnetic strip was never turned off, turns out. I didn’t know you’d left Claiborne’s until I saw you at Kronstadt’s, and with you no longer punching in it’s empty at night, no? So I thought, why not come back and look around? The black-tie auction for the day is long over. Everyone’s gone home. My ID swiped with no alarms going off. It was a chance I took, the security guard didn’t look up from his game, whatever he was playing on his phone. I came up to the office floor and saw the door open.”
I had to admit it was the kind of thing Masuji would do, go someplace forbidden at night. When he heard about the high-school student who climbed one of the pylons of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge so that she could see the curvature of the earth firsthand, he replicated her quest. He saw the earth, the river, and came back down. He was never caught. Risks were there to be encountered and challenged, and Claiborne’s at night presented more than a few. I understood that. If you had access, it was full of all kinds of rarities. Those Picassos that were about to be sold to a Saudi prince or a Russian oligarch would never be seen again, and as Marnie had observed, the wait in lines could be hours long just to catch a glimpse of them. He’d wanted to see them firsthand, but these were under security codes that couldn’t possibly be accessed. He must have known that, and, of course, he was wearing gloves.
He looked into Ashby’s office.
“Security isn’t going to believe someone broke in to steal his wallet. No one could break in. It would have to be an inside job, and there are far more valuable things to steal here than some nominal amount of cash. As a recently fired employee, you’re going to be a suspect.”
“I’m already a suspect. How did you know I was fired?”
“You can’t afford to leave your job without another one in hand, without already working at the new whatever. Were you looking for a way to cash in on Ashby’s shenanigans? Demanding cash or you’ll tell everyone about what he did in the Rockefelle
r Micronesian canoe? That’s out of character for you.” He paused, knocked ash into his hands, and rubbed them on his pants. “I’m not going to ask what you were doing in Ashby’s office, but you’ve got a problem.” He jerked his head at Fieldston, breathing but bleeding slightly onto the floor.
“Maybe they’ll think he hit his head.”
“And just happened to land on a Montblanc pen standing upright all by itself?”
“There’s nothing I can do. No prints. No memories.”
“A plumber will appear on the security tape.”
“A plumber is not me. I kept my face away from the camera.”
“It was self-defense. It’s okay, Stella, I saw it.”
The idea of Masuji coming out of the shadows to testify on my behalf, to keep me from further charges, even though I was trespassing, solved the issue of Fieldston, but it was more important that no one knew I was at Claiborne’s. Calvin would lose his job, and I didn’t want to get Masuji involved. I appreciated his discretion or lack of curiosity, but the less he knew, the less we became entangled, the better. I had to get out of there and walked toward the Stairway B.
“Actually”—Masuji took my arm, and I let him—“I wasn’t here to look at the Picassos or anything else. I planned to access your studio. I’m working on a painting, and I need to X-ray it, to determine if there’s another image underneath.”
“I thought you only worked on drawings.” Conservators only work on paintings or works on paper, not both.
“It’s not for a job. It’s my own work. I’ve been buying old paintings at flea markets and painting over them, but I want to see if there’s something underneath this one. It’s very small.” He pointed to his backpack. “I figured if a stuffed shark is selling for twelve million dollars I could sell altered paintings for something.”
“It’s not that simple about the stuffed shark. Masuji, you are probably never going to sell a shark, taxidermied or otherwise, for millions.”
“I know.” He made a dismissive gesture, then stopped as we reached the door to the third floor. He took a small painting of a Hudson River scene out of his backpack. It looked old, but not that old, not an original Hudson River School painting.
“Run your hand over the surface,” he said. The texture tells you there’s an underpainting.”
He was right, but I doubted that there was anything of value there. I felt bad for Masuji, who escaped the dry-cleaning business in Montreal and, as talented as he was, would always be trying to hack through the ice that separated him from the world of museum shows and no money problems.
“You could have called me. I would have let you in. Until a couple of days ago, I was still working here.”
“I couldn’t call or text you.”
I didn’t ask why. I just let his answer lie in the space between us as we approached what had been my studio.
The yellow tape was gone, but the code had been changed. We weren’t going to be X-raying anything that night.
“How about coffee at Dondy’s?”
“No thanks, Masuji. I think we’re done.” I didn’t say I was seeing someone and, since I had lived to walk out of this joint, I was meeting him now. I wasn’t sure I was actually seeing Demetrius Pitt, but I was meeting him. I had what I’d come for—the file recording Ashby and Moonelli—but I wasn’t sure what I would do with it. I was innocent of Sandro’s murder, and I was pretty sure Ashby was, too, but once I sent this to Garfield it would be up to Ashby to clear himself. It would get me off but tip the spotlight onto him. It was like handing him a rotten egg. Sorry, buddy, it landed on you, but you can get yourself out of this. Did I want to hand him the stinking egg? I wasn’t sure, but at least I wasn’t throwing it at him. I needed to think about what to do next, not step back into the past, however much that possibility held its own temptations.
“You know the story of G. K. Chesterton, who went to the Dover cliffs to do some chalk drawings? He had with him red, black, and white chalk.”
I shook my head. The old masters, the kinds of drawings Masuji worked on, used only red, white, and black chalk, and for centuries those were the only colors that were available. Chesterton was a writer born into a time when multicolored chalk was available, so why he, too, would use only those three classic combinations I waited for Masuji to tell me.
“He soon used up his white chalk, and he was really annoyed, because he needed that color. He started to walk back to his boarding house, and then it dawned on him that he was sitting on more white chalk than anyone could use up in a lifetime. He dug up some ground, cut out a piece of chalk, and got back to work.”
“So what are you saying?”
“Sometimes you can be sitting on a ton of riches, on exactly what you need, and not even realize it.”
It was sweet, but it was just a moment. He still hadn’t apologized for disappearing on me or explained what had happened. I’d just nearly murdered one of the city’s most powerful men. He would recover, remember nothing, maybe, but in the meantime I couldn’t take in the White Cliffs of Dover, even as a metaphor for lost love.
Chapter 12
“Send Garfield the file, Stella. It’s important evidence. Ashby’s a big boy. He did what he did, and he can take care of himself. You have to worry about the Dagbents. They’ve seen you, they know where you live, but as far as Garfield is concerned they’re phantoms. No one’s seen the ghost in the photograph but you. Also, no prints on the photographs except yours.” Demetrius, sitting at Jacky’s Fifth, took a swallow of his Corona.
“So you think I took the pictures myself?”
“They were smart enough to wear gloves. The Dagbents would seem to know what they’re doing. The twin brother’s name is Ove.”
“Thanks, Demetrius. Do they have any kind of record for anything?”
“Clean as a whistle, in terms of what’s on record, which is to say zero.”
“Can’t they be deported? Do you know anyone in Immigration?”
“I’m out, Stella. I can’t do anything more for you.”
I heard him. I really did, and I should have been more sympathetic, offered the kind of comfort he expected, but I could still hear Masuji telling me the story of Chesterton and his white chalk. What kind of person is seduced by the story of a long-dead fat man trying to draw the English Channel? Marnie would tell me I was hopeless, and she was right.
Chalk or no chalk, I had one more question for Demetrius. “The name Birdwell doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?”
Demetrius shook his head. I didn’t expect anything different. I’d looked up the name online but had no first name, so I tried it in combination with IRS, SEC, ATF, NRA, PTA. Nothing. I needed a first name or a definitive occupation. I had neither, and no idea what he looked like.
“Look, Stella, you’re on your own here. I’ve got my own problems. The DA thinks I flaked a gun on Jasper Fullem. Was the gun planted? Perhaps, but not by me, and everyone in the department knew he was guilty. Plus, it’s an election year and the victim came from money that wanted a conviction. That had nothing to do with me. As far as I was concerned, every party involved stank.”
Jasper Fullem, resident of Brownsville, indicted in the disappearance and probable murder of ordinary B-flat white boy who turned out to be the troubled son of someone—Mr. Goldman Sachs or Mr. Lehman Brothers or Mr. Citibank. I hadn’t paid much attention to the case, though it was all over the news. The kid had gone slumming where he probably shouldn’t have, developed a dope problem, and crossed Fullem. The body had turned up in the salt marshes off Avenue U, and found by park rangers, who called the police. He had been shot, but also eaten by an unknown animal or animals. Whether this had occurred before or after the shooting mattered and was difficult to determine due to decomposition. Fullem was foolish enough to be apprehended in the Nineteenth Precinct, selling to prep-school kids. Demetrius had been one of the arresting officers before he was made detective. Jasper was convicted, but his lawyer had reopened the case because of new
evidence that supported his claim of innocence, and then the charge of police flaking was brought up.
“If you’re innocent, it will come out.” I don’t know why I said that. It sounded not patronizing and insincere, but if anyone knew that wasn’t true it was me.
“No kidding. In the meantime, I’ll live off the interest from my investments, my diverse portfolio.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t know how police departments work. It sounds like the door was locked behind you on the way out, but if you didn’t do it…” Once again, the wrong answer. He let me know that of course I wouldn’t know how police departments work, that I got my ideas from television reruns and movies, that I worked for the Millionaire’s Club.
Is that how he saw me? A servant in the big house? I drew a face on one of Jacky’s Budweiser coasters, ink soaking into cardboard. His sarcasm was like a bucket of acid thrown at me, just missing, but still a few drops sizzled as they hit my neck. The silence between us was awful. I didn’t know what to say. I chose that moment to look around, and made eye contact with a familiar face.
Luke, as in Cool Hand, was standing at the bar looking straight at me, wearing the same “BQE” T-shirt as the last time I saw him. He strolled over to say hello in that noncommittal-on-the-fence way some guys have, so you can’t tell do they or are you only in their field of vision because that’s how rods and cones work. I asked him if he wanted to play another game of darts. I wanted to try to even the score. He said sure, so I got up, barely saying a word to Demetrius. While we waited for a target, he bought me another drink.
“So what actually is a tenant relocator?” I asked, trying to sound as blithe and nonchalant as Marnie. She had the ability to ask serious questions as if she were asking, “Do you want fries with that?”