White Lead

by Susan Daitch

  “Give me your hand,” she pleaded. “This suit alone is worth what you make in a month. I’m wearing one-of-a-kind Blahniks, custom-made. They’ll be ruined.” She hadn’t even mentioned her emeralds and diamonds, which, if they came off in the water, would be very difficult to find.

  “Andrija, I’d like to help you out, but if I do you’ll have me killed. We both know that.”

  “I swear, I’ll leave you alone. I’ll let you go. I have the elevator card in my pocket, but if I spend too much time here the water will ruin the security card and we’ll both be stuck.”

  “The phone has been invented.”

  “But there are only two key cards. The other one is in Zurich.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “I’m not a strong swimmer.”

  “What’s under those paintings?”

  This she did not want to tell me.

  “You know.” She gulped.

  “Okay, I have a pretty good idea, but who scratched them?”

  “Ms. Hammersmith, I can’t tread water for much longer.”

  “Who scratched them?”

  “Something Lunelli. I don’t remember his first name. He was some kind of male-female pasteup job Mr. Grilke felt sorry for.” She spoke with barely concealed distaste. “Mr. Grilke is a very kind man, and thought someone in that state had needs we could meet, and could therefore be trusted. He would owe us. He would be loyal.”

  “Do you mean Sandro Moonelli?”

  “Yes, that’s the name. Help me out now.”

  “Not yet. We’re not finished. If you ever want to dry off in this lifetime, Andrija, keep talking.”

  “Sandro was hired to paint over pictures that could be smuggled offsite and out of the country. Grilke uses the paintings the way most people use cash in large quantities. This way, banks and money trails and taxes can all be avoided. The paintings can’t be sold. They’re too well known, but they have enormous exchange value. In some ways, a storehouse of valuable art is better than money. We have Vermeers, Rembrandts, Picassos—some real, some not, all taken from a variety of sources. Once the painting changes hands, the white overpainting can be removed. Now help me out.”

  Ashby’s forgeries and petty pilferings were small potatoes compared with this. Money laundering on a massive scale.

  “Why was Sandro killed?”

  “I’ve told you too much already.”

  “I think you’ve just scratched the surface.” My hands were clasped behind my back. My instincts were to help her out of the water, but I needed to hear from her how and why the Dagbents operated that night.

  “Sandro was set up to meet with Jack Ashby. It was very deliberate. After arranging the meeting at Claiborne’s, he was supposed to get Ashby to lead him up to the studio, open the door using the code, of course, and, while he was doing whatever he would do with Ashby, Per and Ove would take care of both of them and acquire Las Meninas.”

  “He didn’t count on being rejected by Ashby as not being a hundred percent male.” I raised my voice so that it could reach the end of the pool. The word male echoed and bounced back at me.

  “Apparently not.”

  “You didn’t know I worked at night, did you?”

  Andrija shook her head. The movement, desperate and frantic, as if they would have spared me, momentarily buoyed her neck and shoulders above the surface of the water. Spared me—yeah, right. I would have been one more body in the Hudson.

  “But why kill Moonelli? He was useful. He was doing what you asked.”

  “Actually, no. Sandro wasn’t entirely on board with the white overpainting. He didn’t like the setup, not convinced he wasn’t destroying the pictures he painted over. He was paid more than handsomely, I can tell you. The little ingrate. The money Grilke paid Moonelli was his health insurance, his post-op future, his everything, but he wanted more. He threatened to expose Grilke. The paintings would be returned to the institutions or private collections from which they originated if they were genuine. The fakes would be revealed. When Grilke refused, Sandro scratched the overpainting to prove that he meant business. Grilke really is not an entity a little half-man can threaten. The Dagbents did everything they were supposed to do that night. Now get me out of here.”

  “If Sandro wasn’t ‘on board,’ as you say, with the white painting, why would he agree to the theft of the Velázquez?”

  “He had no choice.”

  “But he was killed anyway.”

  “He was the man who knew too much and intended to use what he knew. He thought he could extort Grilke. Grilke’s mistake was thinking that anyone cared about Moonelli’s trans status. He thought Sandro had a secret that could be used against him, but no one cares about gender here or there anymore. Moonelli laughed in our faces.”

  I wasn’t sure if Andrija’s English was slipping or she did, in fact, mean faces, plural.

  “So Moonelli met Grilke?”

  “No, of course not. There was no need to tell the head chef what the gardeners were weeding. Grilke doesn’t meet with people who work for him at that level. Why would he? I’m the intermediary. Moonelli made a big mistake, genderless pissant. Now get me out of here.” The need to tell me the story kept her head above water, but she couldn’t stay afloat for long. I kept pushing. There was more to get out of her, I was certain.

  “So Sandro was set up to set Ashby up, and then it was curtains for him. How did you know about Ashby?” That was the last piece, maybe.

  “One hears things when one is buying art, or even when having it stolen for you. The curator at Claiborne’s stages random encounters at night and so on. It would have worked out if you hadn’t gotten in the way.”

  “Why did they kill Kronstadt?”

  And then she screamed, eyes half popping out of her head in terror.

  I turned to see what she was looking at. I hadn’t heard his footsteps. A monster with a melted face ran from the hall that led to the kitchen and toward the pool. Andrija’s expression changed to one of recognition. Then even I could read her face.

  “Ove? Ove! Darling, what has happened to your beautiful face?”

  “Andreeya.” The name came out garbled but pleading. “I come to pack up the paintings.” He was still contracted to Valentine. Andrija shuddered.

  “We can take you to the best plastic surgeon in Rio. We can make this right. You’ll look just as you did before.”

  “No one can give me back my left eye, Andree-ya.” He had trouble with all the syllables.

  “Ove! Darling, we can do anything.” She was having more trouble treading water.

  Andrija was in love with a man who surely had to take the service entrance. I didn’t want to turn to see what hot syrup had done to his eyes, from tattoos to corneas, but then I couldn’t even if I’d wanted to. Ove was holding a knife to my throat.

  “Vu owe me, beetch. Vu finished.”

  Andrija gurgled, sinking, trying to get her heavy shoes unbuckled.

  “Can you keep swimming?” he screamed at her.

  “Take care of her first, she knows everything.” Her mouth was just above the surface of the water.

  The monster paused and shouted something at Andrija that sounded like “I will come for you.”

  “He won’t let us live, either, if she gets out of here. Do it!” Andrija screamed.

  Then Andrija’s head was no longer above the surface of the water. Ove dived in to rescue her. Swimming toward the end of the pool, where she was now submerged, he looked as if he were flying through water into the sky.

  A gray object with orange housing lay on the white Mies van der Rohe table. It was the remote that controlled the crane, the jib of which bisected the triangulated lattice of its mast visible just beyond the cantilevered pool. Actually, the jib was at the same elevation as the pool. It was a luffing boom crane with a short tail swing and extreme hook height, necessary for working in a confined urban space. It’s known as an agile machine, with impressive hoist-winch speed and small s
lewing radius. There was something swanlike about the metal monster. I’d seen them all over the city on construction sites that would have looked totally foreign and invasive as older, smaller buildings gave way to towers. But cranes I knew. They were old friends that had a reputation for sometimes making cutting comments. Or worse. This was a bigger tower crane than the one I had been familiar with, but there were some basic similarities, and in relation to the pool this giraffe’s swing radius was perfect.

  The remote control eliminated the need for a foreman or a crane operator to climb up, and it was a thing of beauty, quiet and clean. I played with the toggle switches and the joystick, rotating the crane back and forth for a few seconds. The short arm was just a dumb piece of metal, but it did look sort of like a bird’s head. I moved the stick in one jerky motion, which maneuvered the crane with smoothness and precision of movement. That was how it worked. Like a giant telescope that could lift steel girders and panels of concrete without dropping so much as a chip. Should there be a mechanical failure, should those objects drop, death to anyone below would be as instant as it would be random.

  Ove was swimming toward me, knife in his teeth, Andrija in tow. The remote had a radiomatic display screen, to aid with navigating the massive crane. I swung the joystick to the left. With an up-close-and-personal thunderclap-like sound, the steel head collided into the glass. At first, the impact created a wave that separated Ove and Andrija. Andrija tried to paddle, to keep her head above water, as waves propelled her toward my end of the pool. Despite his strength, Ove was pulled to the far end of the pool. He was a strong swimmer and plowed through the water, zigzagging toward me as fast as he was able. He couldn’t see well, in any case, and it was night. I swung the crane arm out, away from the building. I could have remained still, but for the second time I pushed the joystick and repeated the blow to the pool. The glass cracked, slowly shattering. I resisted moving the crane head again, administering the coup de grâce. Andrija floated close to me. I knelt at the edge of the pool and reached out my hand.

  “Give me your hand, Andrija!” Her cobalt-lacquered nails were inches away.

  Then the glass pool broke off the side of the building, pulling her away with the force of the falling water, and she went over the edge.

  It was by now the middle of the night. As it would turn out, no one was below when the cascade of water, the two swimmers, and a shower of glass hit the street, but I didn’t know that yet. Shaking, I replaced the remote on the table and picked up my phone from the tansu.

  A cool breeze swept through the apartment, bringing shreds of clouds and fog. I heard someone yelling, “Delivery.” The voice came from the service elevator, which I could now find by following the voice to a part of the apartment that was used for storage. It was a groom from a stable—I didn’t ask which—placing fifty pounds of horse manure, sealed in sterile plastic containers, from a hand truck onto the floor. The groom had been in the elevator when the crane hit and had no idea what had happened. Andrija had left the elevator open for him, and had probably planned to lock it after the delivery.

  —

  Back on earth, on the street, standing behind a yellow taped-off area for the second time in a week, sirens echoing in my ears, whom did I talk to? I wasn’t in shock, but could only admit to what I’d done. The rest, the white paintings still hanging in a luxury apartment that served as a cash box, weren’t a priority for the first responders. As Giacometti would say, why should they be? What mattered were injuries: there were none. A couple of people got wet, and falling icicles, daggers of glass smashed a few car windows. Had it been the middle of the day, things would have been very different, but as it was, as far as could be determined of deaths: there were two. There was a filter in terms of first responders. The first ones on the scene—police, firemen, EMTs—had no connection to the Las Meninas investigation, but soon those faces I was familiar with and those who were familiar with mine appeared. Ove and Andrija had no more functioning brain cells or body parts of any kind, and with them went the confession regarding Sandro’s murder. I had one more crane accident to my name, and Garfield—no relation to the late actor—kept a pair of handcuffs and a cell with my name on it. I could have killed or seriously injured many. I would, at the very least, be charged with reckless endangerment. Had you even considered that? His voice seemed to come from far away. Apparently not.

  Chapter 37

  “So tell me again what you were doing on the ninety-something floor besides going for a swim. I understand self-defense and the no-exit elevator in fire-code violation—all this is verifiable. Paintings were recovered, true, and that’s your bailiwick, but, between you and me, you have a history with cranes that makes me just a little uneasy.” Garfield pushed away from his desk like a man who was satisfied with himself despite expressing skepticism. “There’s still no hard evidence linking your Dagbents to Moonelli’s murder. Also, Grilke, again speaking through a representative, has never heard of the Dagbents, and is not concerned that paintings his associate acquired for him were stolen and sometimes not even real. She was, he claims, a free agent, and wasn’t working on his behalf.”

  “I’m not sure it’s more correct to say she’s taking the fall for him or she took the fall. What about Ove Dagbent? He was in the pool.”

  “We don’t even know where to send Ove’s remains—and remains, I can tell you, is the operative word. After that fall, not much is left: a finger here, maybe some vertebrae or a shred of a kidney there. No face to speak of. And Andrija, who also took a red-eye flight to the sidewalk, thanks to your quick thinking with the construction equipment, is in the same state, or nonstate.”

  “What about her phone?”

  “Her phone was smashed to infinitesimal water-logged smithereens scattered across a seven-block radius. Every device in her apartment or in the luxury condo had been wiped clean from afar. There’s nothing on her personal devices apart from some searches for movie times and purchases from Amazon for odds and ends: earbuds, large orders of paper towels, environmentally friendly lightbulbs. All email and social media have been evaporated.”

  “Why don’t you look more closely at who she was working for? The Koch Brothers don’t know the identity of the person who orders illegal dumping at a Monsanto plant, though they, at their Park Avenue or Hamptons residences, approve the policy. But doesn’t it seem odd to you that Grilke is so quick to wash his hands of the whole thing and shift the whole business onto someone else?”

  “Those kinds of assumptions aren’t part of my job.” Garfield wasn’t a bad guy, really, but the homicide detective’s map of the range of human miscreants was pretty much limited to the Nineteenth Precinct. Whatever the opposite of a conspiracy theorist might be, that was him. He didn’t believe in overarching plots with plague-like corporations, government proxies, and realistic but paranoia-inducing surveillance networks.

  “Now listen, we’re looking at the pictures retrieved from the luxury tower you denuded of a recreational swimming facility.”

  I wouldn’t give him Masuji. Not for anything.

  Chapter 38

  At the third-floor desk I was able to sign in as Stella Da Silva, though my signature looked like a scribble lifted from a Cy Twombly painting. Marnie and I made quite a pair as we walked along the hospital corridor. Both of my hands were bandaged, and she was shuffling in slippers that had a devil on one foot and an angel on the other, our reflections wavering on shiny white linoleum. She spoke in bursts but had no memory of the assault, and was anxious to get out of the hospital.

  “Before I could speak again, when all I could do was lie in that bed and think, I was afraid my life was going to be a ‘short and sweet’ situation.” Marnie quoted the suicide note stuck to the window frame with a Band-Aid by the Theresa Gionoffrio character in Rosemary’s Baby, who, it turned out didn’t jump but was pushed. “Sounds and images come and go. One minute I think I see Roy standing by and doing nothing, just standing there, but can I say for certain it was hi
m? No, I can’t.”

  “But if you’re remembering correctly and he was a witness but did nothing, then he’s just as guilty.”

  “But why would he just watch? Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know, Marnie. He was the kind of guy, if you’re going to spend time with him, you have to know where all the exits are.”

  It was possible Marnie hadn’t looked Roy up before she went out with him, though that was completely unlike her. I took my laptop out of my bag. It was like encouraging an obsession or a vice, but even if I didn’t have a laptop with me there was always the phone or some other device, and so there was really no stopping her. We sat in the hospital lounge, and I handed it to her, and her hands flew over the keys.

  His last name was Lawrence, and he was married to a Gaby Freeman, a doctor. Their wedding announcement in the Times was recent, and according to it he wasn’t a lawyer, only attended law school; whether he was a graduate it didn’t say. He was part owner, along with his friend and best man, Luke, of a business described as “facilitators and experts in tenant relocation.” Larger real-estate developers would hire them to “encourage” tenants, both residents and small businesses, to vacate buildings in order to make way for higher-paying occupants. What the Times did not say: guys like them were small-time bottom-feeders. Their work made the bigger fish possible, and they probably weren’t even totally aware of the upper echelons of the city’s real-estate web that they, in part, shouldered.