White Lead

by Susan Daitch

  In 1994, The Scream was stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo. In the security footage, the thieves had been a little slapsticky, like Buster Keaton trying to drive a train with no fuel. They put a ladder up against a museum wall, fell off, tried again, broke a window, gained access, and grabbed the painting. The job took less than a minute. They left a note that read, “Thanks for the poor security.” Charley Hill, a detective from Scotland Yard, had said, “That’s Norwegian organized crime: two men and a ladder.” But it was the opening day of the Lillehammer Olympics. The painting was gone. If that wasn’t embarrassing enough, an anti-abortion group claimed they had the painting and would return it if The Silent Scream, an anti-abortion film, was shown on Norwegian television. But it turned out that the group didn’t have the painting. Pictured above is Karl Dagbent, suspected but never convicted.

  “Father of the twins?” Demetrius asked.

  “He looks like them.”

  Was Svalbard directly involved in the theft? I doubt it, but by knowing Dagbent, he has links to the gang responsible. He pays me a small amount every month, cash, which you will find in a hollowed-out copy of The Heart-Healthy Diet. This is also to go toward the Arizona treatment.

  The tape ended.

  “So he was attempting to blackmail the gallery for its money-laundering practices, and poor Svalbard because he knew a guy?” I said.

  “Svalbard is like the guy who rents the getaway car. He has a toe in and would rather be out, but once you’re in, you’re in, even if you just lent your credit card under duress and were nowhere near the bank.”

  “If Linda found the cash in the book, she would have no idea where it came from, but it’s possible the book and the money are still on a shelf somewhere in that house. When Birdwell disappeared, Svalbard could happily stop making payments.”

  “Who at the Ludwig-Sinclair Gallery was Birdwell dealing with, exactly? Can we find a name?” Demetrius popped the tape out.

  “It may be a consortium of owners, a shell company. There may be no Mr. or Ms. Ludwig-Sinclair.” This I vaguely knew from Claiborne’s. Sometimes you didn’t know who owned a painting, only what it was worth, and the former piece of information might be impossible to acquire. “All to save his son…” My voice trailed off. “Poor guy. He was in so far over his head.”

  I felt sick, but we weren’t done.

  “And then there’s this.” Demetrius inserted the second tape, the one in the black case.

  Linda had told us that Tulp’s Anatomy Lesson, more correctly known as The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, painted by Rembrandt in 1632, intrigued Rodney. Apparently, his murderers knew this, too. They dressed like the seventeenth-century doctors and students standing over a corpse while Dr. Tulp made incisions. Historically, no cutting instruments were used, but for the Birdwell version this fact was overlooked. Their faces were obscured. The corpse was Rodney Birdwell. Except that he wasn’t a corpse. He was still alive. For a while. Until he wasn’t anymore.

  Chapter 29

  The little plastic trolls glued long ago to the top of the monitor began to shake, as if we were in the middle of an earthquake, followed by the blast of a car crashing into brick. We ran out of the office to find that a van from Valentine’s had careened into what remained of the structure. Two men jumped out and began pouring gasoline over the conveyor belts, the ovens, everywhere. They were so busy, they didn’t see us until one looked up. Demetrius was very quiet, watching them, gun in hand. They had shaved heads and tattoos at their eyes, like ancient Egyptian royalty, which they most definitely were not. I wasn’t close enough to determine which animal launched into or sprang from their faces. Either Valentine had somehow overcome DeJesus and sent his thugs here or the order had gone out earlier and the gang took their time getting to the job, stopping to grub up at Mickey D’s or to admire the sunset over the Verrazano Bridge. In any case, I wasn’t about to interrogate them.

  Demetrius told the two to drop their weapons into what must have been the last vat of batter standing. It was encrusted with mold around the edges, smelled beyond normal yeasty, and a drowned rat lay on the top—dead from too much of a good thing, in rat terms. I could hear the two guns hit the bottom of the stainless steel. Then he told them to stand against the wall, and they shuffled to what remained of it. One looked back and up, just for a second, and I turned to follow his gaze. Too late. A man standing on top of one of the ovens jumped down on Demetrius, sending his gun skittering across the floor. It was Jimmy DeJesus.

  “Glad to see you again, Stella,” he said, letting me know that he had learned my real name since we met at the elevator, when he was en route to deliver a meat package. “I have a message from Per.”

  I raced to grab the gun, but one of his colleagues had the same idea. We toppled on impact, and rolled around on the floor, but the gun was just out of reach, as if it had a mind of its own.

  Demetrius had DeJesus in a choke hold. Illegal for the police to use, but then he was no longer part of any force in any city. The other guy came up from behind and pried Demetrius’s arms off the semiconscious DeJesus, who dropped to the floor. Demetrius punched the guy under the jaw, which seriously disabled his second assailant. Down but not out, he elbowed Demetrius in the stomach, causing him to fall into a wheeled metal table that slid into a storage container full of plastic bags. Demetrius grabbed one and quickly tied it over the man’s head as he charged toward him. Like bagging a cabbage, I would say, but a cabbage with two hundred pounds of force behind it. The man, so sure of his short trajectory, shut his eyes in meditative confidence, not seeing the THANK YOU, HAVE A NICE DAY plastic casing that was about to engulf his breathing apparatus. He struggled to get the bag off his head, fighting Pitt off at the same time. But, working at lightning speed, Demetrius tightly wrapped bakery twine around the man’s neck.

  That might have been the end of it, but I was now standing near what was left of the entrance with a gun to my head. DeJesus motioned for both of us to go through the door that led from the bakery to the shop. The shop itself was empty of anything that had ever been baked. The cash register lay smashed on the floor. The door to a fridge that had once contained milk and juice swung open on broken hinges. Shoved into the horizontal display case where bread and cakes had once been displayed was Svalbard’s body—shot three times, it looked like, through the chest.

  Our jailer tried to lock us in, but the door didn’t have a self-locking feature. Holding the gun in his right hand, he kept fiddling with the door, finally slamming it in frustration, but it still swung open. He kept the gun trained on us as he backed away. I’m guessing his intention was to leave as quickly as possible, but he backed into an overturned baking rack, hitting his head on a cast-iron column as he fell. The spirit of the Three Stooges was alive and well here. He was out cold. I picked up the gun and handed it to Demetrius. It was his, after all. But DeJesus wasn’t out for long. We tied him to that same column in the center of the mess. His pants were smeared with dried blood—from what creature, human or simian, I could only imagine—but his cobra eyes were open and alert.

  “How did you know my name?” was the first thing I asked him.

  “While I was up in Valentine’s office relieving myself on that balloon dog, which, by the way, the monkey had left in no condition to be sold for even four-ninety-nine, much less four million, I called Per, and learned a few things. He’s very upset with you, Stella, but then so am I. I figured you owed me, but I didn’t know you were here. Such a sweet surprise.”

  “What are you doing at Svalbard’s?” Demetrius asked him.

  “Picking up a dozen cupcakes for the crew.”

  Demetrius smacked him across the face. More blood leaked from his mouth.

  “Okay, okay, you win. I’d dropped by earlier looking for something Jake promised me if I let up on the chimp.”

  “And you didn’t find it.”

  “Nope. But I had some unfinished business. Hence the rerun.”

  “What were you lo
oking for?”

  “Ordinarily, I make it a policy never to answer questions like that, but since you have a gun in your hand I’ll tell you. Meth stash that, like four and twenty blackbirds, was baked into pies that were then flown out via Kennedy or shipped or trucked to wherever. Valentine said the last batch was about to ship out, and it would be all mine, but when I got here the place was almost totally abandoned. It’s been one of those days. People promising me high-end shit that turns out to be over the rainbow, like I’m some kind of dumbass.”

  I almost felt sorry for him. I’d spent a lot of time at Svalbard’s recently, and seen no evidence of such an operation, though that didn’t mean it wasn’t in place. Valentine might have been buying time and saw DeJesus’s greed as a way of getting rid of him.

  “You don’t mind if we leave you here for a little while,” Demetrius said. “There’s plenty of food. Yes, I know, just out of reach. Too bad. We’ll call the police for you later today.”

  He begged us not to, but cobra-eyed DeJesus was out of bargaining chips.

  “Per knows where I am. He’ll cut me loose and we’ll find you guys.”

  I believed him.

  Something combustible near one of the puddles of gasoline produced a spark, perhaps the wiring that dated back to the Empire & Gloaming Insurance investigation or from the crashed truck itself. First there were wisps of smoke, curling as if just smoldering, then growing in size and intensity. I could smell the smoke, but the flames, which were little sparks rather than a fireball, were obscured by the racks and piles of equipment left haphazardly every which way. The back entrance was soon engulfed. Jimmy started screaming for us not to leave him in Bay Ridge to fry, and without blinking Demetrius grabbed a box cutter and began to saw through the ropes. This took minutes that we didn’t have. Box cutters aren’t as efficient for that kind of job as a longer blade would have been. I yelled that we had to run, and, with a final jab, the blade went through the ropes to DeJesus’s arms, cutting him deeply, but he was free. We bolted in opposite directions. Demetrius grabbed my hand, and we jumped over flames that were still low near the smashed truck that DeJesus and his colleagues, stoned, drunk or whatever, had driven into the building.

  Jimmy ran toward the door that led to the bakery shop, where the gate was down and padlocked from the outside.

  Within a matter of minutes, the whole sorry place blew.

  Chapter 30

  “When we go in, let me do all the talking.” We were parked in front of the Ludwig-Sinclair Gallery, almost as far west as you could go on Twenty-fourth Street before you were in New Jersey.

  Demetrius wasn’t happy.

  “I don’t think you should use your Stella Da Silva ID from Claiborne’s,” he said. “You’ve been in the news. A simple Google search will turn up your face and no one else’s, first hit. Stick with the Hammersmith ID.”

  “The people within these walls, those whose financial institution we’re about to ingratiate ourselves into, they don’t besmirch themselves with reading about crude homicides. These things don’t enter their consciousness as either actual events or something they might see on the news. The news is for lesser mortals. Trust me. They’re clueless and couldn’t care less.”

  “What about Las Meninas taking a walk? They would care about that. As news, don’t you think?”

  Of that I wasn’t so sure, but it was a risk I’d have to take.

  “The Claiborne ID is the only thing that’s going to get me in and past the receptionist. Otherwise we can spend the rest of our lives sitting in this car. Please don’t say there are worse things you can think of.”

  I tapped my Louboutin knockoffs—black very high heels with red outsoles—as if they were the Ruby Slippers. It hadn’t been a straight line from the fireball in Bay Ridge to the hidden lavish corridors of Chelsea. We stopped at Marnie’s to take showers, but ended up in the same shower. If anyone asked, I would say we did it to save time, but I can’t think of anyone who might have asked who would believe that explanation.

  For our trip to the Ludwig-Sinclair Gallery, I once again borrowed from Marnie: a fuchsia pencil skirt and a black jacket, vintage thrift from the Jack Paar era. For where we were headed, it was probably better than what could be gleaned from chain stores on Atlantic Avenue. Demetrius got clean clothes from an Army Navy. For his role, that would be appropriate. None of this might work, but it was the best we could do.

  I often have the desire to stop the clock, to not take the next step, to delay, and to keep the music playing. We were starving, so at least we had to eat, though that would only delay the inevitable. On Atlantic Avenue, eating the food of my grandmothers: chicken with preserved lemons and olives, kibbe heavily spiced with roasted cumin seeds and smoked pepper, bourekas with khandraj (eggplant and tomato filling) crispy and hot, followed by Turkish coffee, cardamom seeds floating on top. I’m not sure I needed the coffee. I should have been asleep, but I was wide awake. For every bubble, there is a pin. It was time to become a kind of Stella Da Silva who bore little relation to the person I actually was, who had the same kind of professional knowledge but felt at ease in a place that, if Birdwell was right, made Claiborne’s look like a quaint relic from an era when Gertrude Stein sat for Picasso, who comforted her by saying that she would come to look like his portrait of her. It was all between friends. Only now that portrait is priceless. I needed to call the gallery, to make an appointment. It wasn’t the kind of place you could just walk in cold as if you were buying an extremely expensive pair of shoes.

  I stepped outside to make the call. I knew whom to ask for and how to tell my story, which was easier via the phone than it would have been face to face. I was prepared to be given an appointment sometime next month, and would have to persuade someone to let us in sooner, but a pleasant woman’s voice said that the work in question, the one I wanted to look at, had been sold and was going to be shipped within a few hours. I told her that I was in the neighborhood finishing lunch at Le Moulin Invisible, and I’d be there within an hour. It worked.

  “Okay, this is the story,” I said to Demetrius. “I’m from Claiborne’s—that we know—and I’m working on the upcoming auction of the Goldman-Rosen estate, which hasn’t yet been scheduled but is imminent. That way, it’s unlikely they’ll check.”

  “Who’s Goldman-Rosen?”

  “Nobody, but it sounds authentic, like Goldman Sachs. If I use an actual person or persons, that can easily be checked. The auction, I said, was private, not publicized. They believed me. The collection contains a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat that’s damaged and needs some work. Ludwig-Sinclair just had a show that included some of his work, and since it only came down a few days ago the paintings are probably still on the premises, in the back. I told them I’d like to look at what they have, to compare with the nonexistent Basquiats at Claiborne’s.”

  “Why can’t you tell them I’m your husband or your partner?”

  “Because we’d have to buy you new clothes for that part, and they would cost what you make in a year.”

  “Right now, that would be zero.”

  “Also, you’d have to talk the talk—a language that, after all my time at Claiborne’s, I can’t even speak with foolproof fluency. You have to be the kind of snob you can’t even imagine. Also, they’re all white.”

  “You don’t think I could pass as an aristocrat? The prince of Trinidad, for example?”

  “You told me you’d never been south of Perth Amboy.”

  “I’m guessing the receptionist is a young woman who will escort me to the back, where the paintings are kept until they’re shipped to whoever has paid millions for them. There will be serious security. When this happens, when she’s left her desk, see what you can find.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Thumb through catalogs. They’re usually on display. Look for names we know: Valentine, Ashby, Fieldston. If Ludwig-Sinclair’s laundering money, I need something that ties them to Claiborne’s.”


  “So if I’m not your partner, who am I? Your bodyguard?”

  “An art handler, my assistant in case anything needs to be moved. Though they have their own bonded and highly vetted art preparators, by bringing you I’m showing consideration.”

  “Nice. I feel like a mongoose in a Japanese tea ceremony.”

  “You kinda are. Watch out for snakes, the mongoose meal of choice, and they might be coiled underfoot. One more thing. You got those bruises from moving a Frank Stella sculpture that fell on you. It fell on me, too, come to think of it.” My face in the rearview mirror revealed that I hadn’t done a particularly professional job of covering up the black and blue marks.

  “Who’s Frank Stella?”

  I picked up Demetrius’s phone and showed him pictures of some large bright-colored metal sculptures. They looked optimistic and seemed worlds away, but they were heavy, and possibly unstable if not handled properly. It was an explanation for our injuries that would make sense.

  We left the restaurant, got into his car, and began to drive to Manhattan. There was a lot of traffic, and we’d be late, which was a problem, especially since I said we were in their neighborhood. We were nowhere near it. As the bridge’s gray pylons slipped by, I squelched a sinking feeling.

  “Why didn’t you make the appointment for later?” Demetrius asked. He was enjoying himself as the breeze blew into the car from the river. If we were lucky, all he would have to do was chat up a receptionist and look through a bunch of papers.

  “I don’t know. I just didn’t. You made me think of other things.”

  He laughed, but this lapse on my part could cost us the chance to look around the gallery. It was a crucial preparatory step I forgot that could have consequences.