White Lead

by Susan Daitch

  “There are cases where a missing person turns up years later.” Demetrius was trying to be sympathetic, but I knew this outcome was extremely rare. “I had a case of a woman who’d been missing for fifteen years and reappeared in Canarsie, working in a sporting-goods store.”

  “I’m so pleased the police have taken a renewed interest in the case. At the time, they asked me about his friends and associates, his comings and goings, but came up with nothing, and I don’t believe in nothing. He’s got to be out there somewhere. At the time, our oldest son had leukemia. We wanted to take him to Arizona for a treatment that our insurance wouldn’t cover. We couldn’t find a bone-marrow match. Nothing was working, so we were desperate to try this other treatment. It was very expensive. He died a year after Rodney disappeared.”

  Demetrius and I both expressed how sorry we were. I didn’t know how we could go on asking her questions. She poured more coffee. Amid the shelves of stuff, I noticed photographs of two little boys, and then pictures of only one graduating from high school, from college, on a beach, skydiving, sitting in a restaurant with his mother and friends.

  “Was he always interested in museums and galleries, Mrs. Birdwell?” Demetrius asked gently.

  “Please, call me Linda. No, not at all. He had no formal training, but, as you know, Rodney was an insurance adjuster, and sometime in the nineties he was looking into a claim for a stolen painting worth somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and twenty million dollars. He couldn’t let go of the claim, even when it was settled and the money had been paid to the owners. The theft had been so easy. There had been a party at an estate in Connecticut, and the thief, or thieves, just walked in and out. It was a large party, and it was possible the thieves had been on the guest list and were known to the owner, but there were so many people coming and going who had access to the house that night, it was impossible to say for certain. The police interviewed the staff: caterers, parking attendants. Can you imagine?” Linda waved her hand around her gym/living room as if it could magically represent that kind of luxury and largesse. “Rodney thought it might have been a scam, but then again it might not have been. So the company paid, but, beginning with that claim, he became interested in pictures—certain pictures, ones that told a story: Vermeer, El Greco; he was fascinated by Tulp’s Anatomy Lesson. He didn’t understand abstract art. That stuff he skipped.”

  “Yeah, like who would pay for something my three-year-old could do?” Demetrius said, nodding.

  It was a familiar refrain, but then I wondered, Did Demetrius have a three-year-old child? For all I knew, it was possible.

  “Then something happened, and he did begin to see meaning in art that was presented as a series of plywood boxes, a scattering of boulders, a urinal. I’m glad we never had millions to spend, or he might have bought some of that shit.”

  I looked up a moment from taking notes.

  “I’m sorry. I’m a retired New York City third-grade teacher. I’ve spent my whole life believing you should use whatever word is available.”

  “I didn’t mean to give the impression that you can’t say whatever you want to,” I apologized.

  “What else can you tell us?” Demetrius got us back on track.

  “Well, Rod was a very trusting fellow, like someone from Disneyland’s Main Street, except he was a chain smoker, which doesn’t entirely fit that profile.” She glanced at a much younger picture of herself with her husband. She was wearing black tights and an oversized sweater, tousled blond hair, so that she might have been someone who wandered into CBGB in the seventies, then wandered out and met her husband, a skinny guy with big eyes who didn’t care what he wore but was nice and decent, and so it seemed okay to leave the East Village behind. “At some point, Rod became depressed and withdrawn.”

  “You said he believed museums were the right place ‘for a while.’ What happened?” I asked.

  “He just became very cynical, that’s all. I can’t really explain it. He was still working on the Connecticut case on his own time. As far as the company was concerned, they’d paid. Case closed. On Labor Day, about a week before Rod disappeared, he made a comment that the mushroom is biologically closer to the shrimp than to photosynthesizing plants, closer even, DNA-wise, to us humans than to, say, a rhododendron. Meaning, some things aren’t such strange bedfellows as you would think.”

  “Do you have any idea who he may have been referring to?”

  The house went completely quiet for a moment. Linda fiddled with a Cézanne mug.

  “Look, I’m going to give you something that is probably connected to Rodney’s disappearance.”

  She went into the back of the house and returned a few minutes later holding two video cassettes—one black, one blue.

  “This tape”—she held up the blue cassette—“was in a safe-deposit box that only came to light about a month after he disappeared. I opened the envelope and there was a note that said it should be watched in the event of his death. The black one came in the mail about a year later. Anonymous. It was just there in the mailbox, addressed to me.”

  “Why didn’t you try to access whatever he recorded?”

  “Because I have no proof Rodney is dead.”

  “Why didn’t you show it to the police?”

  “Did you ever see the Werner Herzog movie Grizzly Man?”

  Demetrius shook his head. I nodded. “You must respect ze bear,” I said in a German accent, imitating the director. Marnie and I had seen the movie in Chicago. It had been such a cold night when we left the theater, we felt we were on Grizzly Island and all the bears were hibernating but might emerge any second. Linda Birdwell was the kind of person who could manically take a conversation from Vermeer to mushrooms to grizzlies. She had spent a lifetime trying to keep third graders with ever-shorter attention spans (and herself) interested.

  “Well, let me tell you, Detective Pitt, it was a documentary about a man who was obsessed by grizzly bears, and he spent part of every year for thirteen years living among them in a remote part of Alaska. One year he stayed longer than usual, into the fall, when bears are hungry and preparing to hibernate. A bear did find him and his girlfriend at their campsite. He had left his video recorder running, but all you could hear was screams and whatever it sounds like when two humans are killed and eaten. Apparently, the audio is so bloodcurdling horrible that hardly anyone has ever been able to listen to it. It sits inaccessible in a bank vault. For me, this video is like that audio recording. I never watched it, and now I can’t. Who has a VHS player that could run this little dinosaur?”

  Linda reminded me of some of the relatives of the passengers on the plane that vanished over the Indian Ocean. They refused to believe the worst. Until a body is found, the world is a big place. The passengers could have landed in the Gobi Desert, the Yukon, an island seen on satellite—okay, but no one has ever set foot on it, so they don’t know that a few people actually live in this imaginary remote place. Amnesia happens. Others cited the story of the two children who were swept away by the 2004 tsunami. They were found ten years later on another island and reunited with their parents.

  “Some people will turn over every stone,” Linda went on. “I wouldn’t, or let’s say I was more selective. Call it denial. I needed to go to work every morning all these years and teach third grade, or my children and I would be homeless. Then my oldest boy died. I knew what kinds of information I could handle, what would enable to me to put one foot in front of the other and what wouldn’t. Rodney was an innocent. I think it was really easy for him to get in way over his head. I’m going to give you this tape, but I don’t want you to tell me what’s on it, and then I never want to see or hear from either of you two again. I don’t mean this in a hostile way. You seem like nice people, and I appreciate your concern, I really do, but that’s just how it is for me.”

  We let her get back to her exercises and set out to find a VHS player that would allow us to watch “the little dinosaur.” I knew where we could find o
ne. Svalbard’s office.

  “Piece of cake,” Demetrius said, back at the car.

  I wish we hadn’t.

  Chapter 28

  When we arrived at the bakery it was deserted, as if it had gone out of business and been abandoned years ago. The graffitied gate shuttered the front, and the back was locked with a chain and a padlock. Demetrius retrieved a bolt cutter from the trunk of his car and cut through the metal in no time. Though Demetrius was unaware of it, Werner Herzog has twenty-four maxims. Number nine is: Carry bolt cutters everywhere. Number twenty-four is: Get used to the bear behind you.

  “Are you always this prepared?” I asked.

  “Always.” He tucked the bolt cutter under his arm and hoisted up the door.

  “What do we do if anyone shows up?”

  “We’re here on police business.”

  “Without your badge and a warrant.”

  “You’d be surprised how rarely people ask to see those.”

  Demetrius tossed the bolt cutter on the ground and pulled out a Smith & Wesson M&P, the same kind Knox Barkley had offered for sale, but whether Demetrius had acquired it from the car-trunk warehouse this was not the time to ask. I did for an instant wonder: If he had acquired it illegally, then what else might be true about him? Maybe he had planted evidence. I kept circling back to that swamp of uncertainty at the worst possible moments. I mostly trusted Demetrius, but I didn’t know why he was helping me—especially since, by his own admission, he had other demons breathing down his neck. I should have been reassured, but at the same time I was reminded of an accountant the scrap-metal yard had employed who used to say in a thick Boston accent, “If a bawdy is lying on their taxes, what else d’you think they’re lying about?”

  The bakery was total bedlam minus any living, breathing humans. Mixers and trays had been overturned, flour lay in piles like snowdrifts, heaps of molds, shattered jars of crystallized colored sugar and sprinkles, pools of rancid butter, chunks of industrial-sized bars of chocolate lay scattered in the landscape like architectural models of high-rises yet to be built. The place looked as if the Oompa Loompas had rebelled and destroyed the factory. What was left was only a banquet for squirrels, mice, and assorted bugs. Before we could touch anything, Demetrius handed me a pair of gloves. In fact, the boxes of gloves and hairnets, ripped apart and emptied on the floor, had their own corner.

  “Looks like hundreds of hands caught in a fishing net,” Demetrius said, pointing to the heap, which I thought could have been an artist’s installation piece.

  We threaded our way through the chaos to the office, a gray metal door in the back. Demetrius knocked it in with a couple of hard kicks. The bakery was so silent that the noise of splintering wood jarred me out of the optimistic belief that whoever had wrecked the place finished what they had set out to do and wouldn’t return. The office itself was untouched. Either the intruders hadn’t noticed the door or they believed there was nothing of value in there.

  “Is this a 1990s time capsule or what?” Demetrius waved his hand in front of his nose to fan excessive dust from the air in the universal gesture of futility, trying to clear the immediate atmosphere. He then gallantly gestured for me to take the chair while he sat on an upended milk crate.

  I had no idea if the VHS system would work, and even if it did, the tapes themselves could have degraded, though they had been unopened all these years. The power went on. The monitor’s screen turned blue. I put the blue tape into the slot. It clicked in with an ancient, almost satisfying sound. Demetrius pressed Play. It made some promising grinding noises, but nothing happened.

  “We need your friend Marnie for this job.”

  “Her skills don’t go back this far,” I said. “She’s not a paleontologist.”

  “The input and output cables are mixed up.” Demetrius fiddled around with the cables, plugging and unplugging.

  I pressed Play again. Like a flickering old television, there was something like static, then Rodney Birdwell’s face came into focus and he began to speak.

  It began like an educational program about art that might be shown to bored high- school students. Unlike Ashby, Rodney’s accent was pure Flatbush. He wore navy-blue pleated pants that hung on his thin frame, a plaid shirt, and aviator glasses. He stood in front of a Chelsea gallery to which he had been denied admittance.

  Most galleries are free and open to the public, but the Ludwig-Sinclair Gallery is like a very private, very exclusive hotel you have to be vetted to gain entrance to. Why? With art that sells for millions of dollars, this gallery is the purveyor of some of the most high-end luxury goods in the world. Their clientele range from Wall Street presidents whose feet rarely tread the earth to the kleptocratic despotic leaders of some Third World countries to princes and oligarchs.

  Despite sales numbers that must be stratospheric, there is actually very little written evidence of these transactions, which are often in cash only. Because of the absence of documentation, you might think you’re in a part of the world that doesn’t yet have written language, and, of course, if you thought that, you’d be wrong.

  At this point Rodney held up a newspaper to affirm the date and pointed to the sign for Zaki, a restaurant across the street that had been known to have its fish flown in from a sushi market in Japan. He pronounced Sinclair “Sinkler,” quickly, as if he didn’t want to spend too much time in front of the place.

  Or you might think we’re talking about a society that existed before the Code of Hammurabi, one that has no laws, or maybe a few selective ones, a society that’s unregulated, and, once again, if you thought that, you’d be wrong.

  He turned and pointed to a NO PARKING sign.

  Laws can be scoffed at, and when we’re talking about multimillion-dollar objects accounting can be creative—tax-wise. Let’s say you’re an art collector with a big tax bill. Donate your art to a museum, write it off, but then suddenly it’s back on your wall. Oops!

  The camera returned to Birdwell’s face in close-up, so he became a talking head.

  Money. Which, after all, is much easier to talk about than a painting of a balloon dog. It’s hard to say with certainty what this stuff is and who assigns value to it. A painting that looks like nothing more than a striped sheet might actually be a multi-million-dollar Bridget Riley. But that’s not a discussion I want to have right now.

  Seriously, let’s say you are a gazillionaire. Where are you going to put it all? There aren’t enough mattresses in the state of Texas for you to stuff. So how about real estate and art. Two top choices. They are, in fact, connected. Art makes you look glamorous, it’s portable, and has the aforementioned accounting benefits.

  The camera moved again. Rodney now stood in front of a luxury high-rise. A doorman looked out from behind a fountain, not sure what was going on, but Rodney ignored him.

  There are collectors who appear to be legitimate pillars of society, who get invited to the White House, dine with senators and museum directors. Then there is the flip side, the underworld criminal. Objects worth millions are, after all, just objects. They can be stolen and often are. If the hot art is well known, like a van Gogh portrait, say, they are impossible to sell but can still act like cash, and can be used to cover a debt. A painting can be swapped for a shipment of drugs or a cache of WMDs. Why not?

  Abrupt cut back to the street in Chelsea.

  That brings me, Linda, to the claim from the estate in Connecticut. The gallery behind me was listed as the owner of the estate. It was just one of their properties. They own many—in Tuscany, Paris, Tokyo. These aren’t homes like ordinary folks have, with mortgages and an ongoing list of needed repairs. These homes or properties are hardly ever lived in. They are cash boxes, investments, tax havens, just like the paintings. It was while trying to discover who stole their painting that I learned something about their business practices.

  Birdwell inhaled deeply and theatrically.

  You can smell the freshly laundered dough.

  My frie
nds here want me to keep quiet, and I’m happy to comply in exchange for certain monies to be deposited in my Astoria Federal banking account.

  Why am I doing this?

  He held up a picture of his son, the one whose photos in their Rockaway home ended after around age twelve. Then the recording went dark. It was over.

  “Birdwell never got the money,” Demetrius said. “He just got dead. His wife was right. He was naïve. Even if she had watched this recording and brought it to the police or the attorney general, or whoever, he supplied no proof to back up his statements.” Demetrius pointed at the monitor as if Birdwell could return and continue explaining himself.

  “But he clarifies why all kinds of people have an interest in stealing paintings that are too famous to sell. If you need a large sum, and find that resources are slim on the ground, you have van Gogh’s Irises or his ear or whatever. Problem solved.” I pushed away from the desk. “Thieves or collectors—it’s all the same to him. As far as he’s concerned, they’re all stealing from someone.”

  “Did you hear something?” I pressed Stop.

  “No. This place is full of feasting rodents.” He shrugged me off. “Look, Stella, there’s more. We should watch the whole thing.”

  I pressed Play, and the screen momentarily went black, then there was a close-up of a picture of a much younger Svalbard leaning on a boat with a couple of other guys. Under the photograph, text written by Birdwell scrolled:

  In July 1999, I was called to investigate a fire at the Svalbard Bakery in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, that had resulted in one fatality. Svalbard used to let a homeless man sleep in the back when they weren’t working, and he had succumbed to the smoke. The fire was not of a suspicious nature, finally. Svalbard was genuinely distraught, I believe, and he’s a decent fellow who only wanted to rebuild and get back to work. Case closed. But when I looked more closely at the pictures I took during my investigation this photograph was tacked up on a wall with some family snapshots and postcards. I enlarged it and saw a face that I recognized from another art theft just a few years earlier.