Dirty Fire

by Earl Merkel

  “Kind of hard to blame them,“ I ventured, this time openly looking at my wristwatch. “As I recall my history classes, the Germans killed millions of Russians. Devastated their country.”

  “What does it make you when you steal from a thief?” Jerome asked, his tone making the question anything but rhetorical. “You’re still a thief if you don’t return it to the rightful owners. And the scale of this particular theft is enormous, Mr. Davey. You are interested in collections of artwork? The Russians won’t even admit to all the works of art they’re still hiding—famous pieces, some of them, lost to the world.”

  “And quite valuable, I guess.”

  “You want a conservative estimate? The artwork alone is worth perhaps ten times, perhaps twenty times all the gold that was stolen. Perhaps even more. I’ve seen estimates of $140 billion.”

  “In artwork,” I repeated, and my attention was no longer on the clock.

  Jerome’s voice turned scornful. “Of course, all this was addressed in 1998—oh, so fully and completely. There was an international conference in Washington, D.C., a very impressive gathering of more than forty nations hosted by our government. During this meeting, our former secretary of state—a very sincere lady, I am certain—announced a ‘breakthrough.’ The Russians, she said, had agreed to return all art that could be proven to belong to Holocaust victims.”

  Jerome looked at me expectantly for several seconds, his expression that of a man waiting for someone else to supply the punch line.

  “Proven, Mr. Davey—as it turned out, that was the key word,” he said. “The Russians made a great show of pledging cooperation, and all the conference delegates were very excited. So excited that they failed to listen to the rest of what Moscow’s representative was saying. The gentleman cautioned the conference that it would be quite difficult to separate ‘victim art’ from the rest of the so-called ‘reparation art’ that the Soviets had taken from the Nazis.

  “As I recall, the Russian delegate asked for what he termed ‘international research assistance’ as a first step. Of course, nothing substantive could be done in the interim.”

  He snorted loudly and derisively.

  “It turned out to be typical Russian stonewalling,” Jerome said. “Purely for the purpose of manipulating public opinion. It was no coincidence. The same day their pledge was made to the art conference—the very same day, sir!—the head of the International Monetary Fund was in Moscow. Russia wanted immediate aid. Remember? They were in their worst economic crisis since Communist rule ended.”

  The rabbi smiled coldly. “Modern Russia has become quite adept at public relations. If the looted artwork is a barricade to getting IMF cash, defuse the issue! Promises are cheap. Much cheaper than surrendering billions in real assets. ”

  “And it worked?” I asked.

  “It worked,” Jerome said. “It’s working today. Look at the headlines. The Russians still lurch from financial crisis to the next; the West is still holding the purse strings. The Russians hold perhaps a hundred billion dollars in stolen art, like a kidnapper demanding a ransom. At the same time, the conservatives in the Russian Duma have passed a law that officially claims the ‘confiscated’ art as Russian national treasure. And aside from a few minor art pieces turned over to the heirs of Holocaust survivors, the ‘research’ is still unfinished. My guess—it won’t be finished in my lifetime. Failing something dramatic, that is.”

  The intercom buzzed. “That’ll be your taxi,” Jerome said. “I’ll walk you out.”

  I snapped off the tape recorder and dropped it in my pocket.

  We passed the white-haired secretary’s sentry post in silence. I was about to break the silence when Jerome seized me by the arm, startling me with the strength of his grip.

  “So there you have the real outrage, sir,” Jerome said. “The Russians are still hiding many billions of dollars’ worth of stolen art, a lot of it taken from Jews. Everybody knows it, but nobody has ever been able to present any legal proof. And for political purposes, no Western government has ever had the courage to demand a real accounting. Even the United States prefers to maintain the fiction. To say that this artwork was destroyed in the war or is simply ‘missing.’ It’s moral cowardice on an international scale.”

  He again fell silent, almost abruptly. In the sudden stillness, I could think of nothing to say.

  “Well, just listen to me,” he said suddenly, and a carefully jovial tone had replaced the previous heat. “See what happens when you get a rabbi talking?” He laughed, not quite apologetically.

  At the temple entrance, we shook hands.

  “If I can be of any further help, don’t hesitate.”

  “I appreciate it. I’ll watch the newspapers to see how you’re doing with the Swiss, and the rest of them.”

  “Temple B’nai Abraham has formed a committee,” he said solemnly. “I suspect we’ll organize a letter-writing campaign.”

  Then he winked.

  “Oh, yeah,” the rabbi grinned, “I really miss Stan.”

  Chapter 13

  About the time I was leaving Rabbi Jerome’s office, a conversation was taking place in The Winery, a tavern located conveniently closed to the Lake Tower Municipal Center. It was late in the afternoon, and the darkened room was populated mainly by off-duty cops and other city employees making a decompression stop before heading to their homes.

  Concealed in the majority of the booths along the wall are small microphones. This is not generally known, except to the agency that installed them and the establishment’s owner; the latter allowed the installation in exchange for an agreement involving interstate gambling charges.

  I would not know any of this until later that day, when I listened to the recording. It was played for me by an FBI agent who had been sitting in a booth with a view that commanded the barroom.

  • • •

  “The guy is a real asshole,” Terry Posson was saying.

  She stared stonily into the smoky depths of a drink she held in a loose two-handed grip on the table. “He thinks I got lead on this case by screwing Nederlander.”

  Across from her, slouched on his side of the booth, Mel Bird grunted sympathetically.

  “Prick,” he agreed.

  “He sits there, tells me to my face that I’m the reason the case turned into a flameout.”

  “Dickhead,” Bird nodded. He sprinkled a few grains of salt into his beer glass, and watched the trails of tiny bubbles rise through the amber liquid in unerringly straight lines.

  “Hell, he practically accused me of torpedoing the investigation!”

  “Dumbshit jerk.”

  There was a silence from the other side of the table. It amplified the background sounds of the room. Bird again reached for the saltshaker, and looked up to see his partner glaring at him.

  “What?” Bird said defensively.

  “What?” she mocked. “I’m telling you how this bent son of a bitch we’ve got to work with says we’re morons. Thinks we fucked up the biggest case the city’s ever had. And do you have anything to add? Hell, no! You can’t even look me in the eye! What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “Look, Ter—there’s a simple answer here,” Bird said. “Why don’t you just tell him? Or better still, tell Cieloczki.”

  “I can’t—not without clearing it through Nederlander first,” she said. “Mel, I don’t know what the hell is going on with this thing. We’re cops, right? So all of a sudden, we’re working for the fire chief…on a homicide. And he decides to bring in a crooked ex-cop—a guy who dodged a bribery beef by this much. I mean, what the hell?” She raised her glass and drank.

  “Yeah, well,” Bird said, “I’ve been asking around about Davey. You know something? There’s a lot of people in the shop who aren’t too sure that bust was on the up-and-up. Nobody wants to come right out and say it. But, dammit, I get the feeling that they think maybe the guy was set up to take a fall.”

  Posson looked at him, incredulous. “
What do you mean, ‘set up?’ Set up by who? For what?”

  “Right,” Bird said. “Like I got any answers for that. I tell you, nobody wants to talk about it. Even his old partner blew me off—you know, that Trombetta guy. It’s like they’re all relieved that his case fell apart when it did. As in, it could have led to some deep shit in the department.”

  “Like what?”

  Bird looked at his partner with irritation.

  “C’mon, Terry—you can’t tell me you haven’t felt something is a little…off around here. Jeez, you’ve got to have noticed it. Hell, there’s two kinds of cops on the job around this place—the guys who have been around forever, like Nederlander, and the people who have been hired in the last year or so. You. Me.”

  He took a deep swallow from his glass.

  “Hell, I know you’ve felt it. That’s why you jumped at that little arrangement when Nederlander gave you the chance to get on the Levinstein case.”

  “All I did—”

  “I know what you did. I went along with it too, remember? I want a gold shield just as much as you do—explaining I’m ‘just’ a plainclothes cop is getting real old, okay? But when Cieloczki took over the case, everything changed. And this Davey thing—everybody knows it wouldn’t have happened without Evans’s go-ahead.”

  Bird shook his head vehemently.

  “Anyway, the guy’s right and you know it. Hell, we advanced the investigation more in that one meeting with Cieloczki than we did in the past two and a half months. We had the same information available as he did—we just ignored it and spent all our time shaking the wrong bushes.”

  Bird drained his glass and looked around to signal the woman behind the bar. She held up two fingers and raised her eyebrows. Bird glanced at Posson and nodded.

  “Morons?” he muttered. “Hell, he’s being kind.”

  “Jesus, what a mess this is turning into,” Posson said. “I even threw the bastard out of my car today, on the way over to re-interview that rabbi. I was so ticked off I was ready to go to Cieloczki and quit the case right then.”

  “Whoa!” said Bird. “This case is the biggest game in town. I want to stay in, even if we have to eat humble pie for a while.”

  “Yeah. Me, too, I guess.”

  “So?”

  “So I guess I apologize and kiss his ass tomorrow,” she said. “Not that I have much of a choice. Nederlander wants to be filled in on everything Cieloczki’s got us doing. Especially, he wants to know what that shit Davey is up to. I am to, quote, ‘report in detail who, what, when, where and why.’ So now I’m undercover on my own investigation, for God’s sake.”

  “Well,” Bird said, “you know I’m with you. Any way you want to play it, okay? But I gotta tell you, I think Gil’s got the right ideas. Don’t forget it was Nederlander who was telling you what doorknobs to try the past couple of months. And we were going exactly nowhere with it.”

  “Yeah, but now it’s a question of who I want to piss off the most,” Posson said. “The guy who’s heading up the investigation? When you get down to it, he only runs the fire department. Or I can get in the crapper with the police chief—our boss, a guy who’s been around so long he’s also Director of Public Safety. Which, by the way, makes him the fire chief’s boss, too. Sweet suffering Christ!”

  The barmaid brought over the two fresh drinks and picked the correct change from the bills and coins on the table. Terry waited until she was gone before speaking again.

  “And when this is all over, we’ll still be working for Nederlander.”

  Bird looked into the foamy head of his beer as if he could, with just a little more effort, read the future in its opaque depths.

  “Glad to hear you think so,” he said. “Me, I’m not so sure about anything anymore.”

  Chapter 14

  The Lake Tower Health and Racquet Club caters to the bottled water and designer sweatsuit crowd. In addition to indoor tennis and racquetball courts, it features exercise machines in gleaming chrome. The club can accommodate the radically different needs of the aspiring triathlete or the poseur, here more to socialize than to risk salt-staining his Spandex.

  Like most such facilities, it is frequented throughout the day by several distinct groups. There are the early morning crowds who time their workouts to the schedules of trains that take them to their downtown jobs. There are the young mothers, the senior retirees and the assorted work-at-home types who make up the bulk of the banking-hours crowd. And there are the evening exercise habitués of both sexes, many of them optimists on the prowl who see one type of sweat and heavy breathing as foreplay to another.

  At 6:15 p.m., I pulled into a space marked “GUEST” in the parking lot. The club was at that slack-water period between tides, one cycle having ended and the next not yet begun. I hoisted the gym bag I had collected from my apartment and walked inside. There, a smiling woman barely out of her teens checked my name against a list on a clipboard and buzzed me through.

  “Men’s locker room to the right,” she said, handing me a thick white towel embroidered with “LTHRC” in discrete blue script. “Our juice bar is upstairs on your left, just past the meeting rooms.”

  I waited until the door closed behind me before turning to the left. At the top of the stairway, I opened a conference room door and stepped inside.

  Talmadge Evans and Gil Cieloczki sat talking at the oak-veneered table that filled most of the available space. At the back of the small room, looking through a window at a hardwood court below, stood a well-dressed man with carefully combed dark hair. He turned when I entered, and gestured a welcome with a glass of a pale liquid, stringy with pulp.

  “Hi, Davey,” said FBI Special Agent Ron Santori. “Good to see you again. So, you have a chance to talk to”—he looked at a pad on the table “—this Rabbi Jerome? Did we finally find a person who knows something relevant about this case?”

  I shook hands with Cieloczki and nodded to Evans. Gil pointed to one of the bottles of mineral water and raised his eyebrows. I nodded, and Gil passed it to me.

  “No coffee,” the firefighter said with an apologetic smile. “The health club fellow almost fainted when I asked for a cup.”

  Santori sipped at his glass and grimaced. “I got this from him. He said it was a very healthy drink. Good for my energy level.” He placed the glass carefully on the table and pushed it as far away as he could reach.

  “The rabbi said he didn’t know anything about an art collection,” I said without preamble. “He’s the kind of guy who likes to talk; he enjoys letting you in on all the inside details he’s picked up. If he knew anything about a Levinstein collection, he’d have made sure to mention all the times he’d seen it.”

  “There you have it,” Evans said. “It’s just like the other interviews our officers did when all this happened in the first place.”

  He looked at Santori, then around the table. “I suppose it’s not conclusive, but doesn’t it indicate that there is no police cover-up? After all, we’re basing all of this on the credibility of a convict—a known criminal, for God’s sake. Am I the only one here who thinks that this may all be simply the fantasies of a man in prison? Or a hoax he’s pulling for revenge, or because he’s bored?”

  Nobody responded. I looked at the ceiling, working at keeping my face impassive.

  Finally Santori broke the silence.

  “If there is any possibility that Lake Tower police are involved in murder, arson and felony theft,” the FBI man said, “then certainly we can’t afford not to investigate. Don’t you agree, Mr. Evans?”

  “That’s the only reason I agreed to participate in this,” Evans said flatly. “That’s why I let you talk me into taking Bob Nederlander out of the investigation. I’m cooperating, Agent Santori. But I also want to protect the reputation of my people and my city, as far as I can. To date, I see no evidence that this purported artwork ever existed, let alone was stolen. How do we resolve that question?”

  Again, there was a mo
ment of silence around the table.

  “Maybe it’s time to bring the artwork issue out into the open,” Gil said, finally. “I think it looks like the most likely trail to follow.”

  “Why not?” Evans responded. “After all, who are we keeping it from? Whoever killed the Levinsteins knows what was in there. Or, for that matter, what was not there.”

  “The house was burned to the ground to make sure nobody could be certain what had been in there or had been taken out of there. The killer may not know that we believe paintings are missing,” Santori objected. “And that gives us an advantage—the only one we have.”

  I shook my head. “I’m with Cieloczki. Look, we had to find out if the Lake Tower cops knew about the missing artwork and tried to cover it up. But the rabbi was the last name on the list of original interviews Posson and Bird did. I’ve re-interviewed every one of them. Not one knew about Levinstein’s art collection. It wasn’t pursued as a lead simply because it never came up in the original interviews. Without the Lichtman story, we wouldn’t know to ask about it.”

  Gil spoke up again. “Let’s assume there is some kind of cover-up of the theft aspect going on. Is there any reason to think whoever’s behind it is going to make the mistake of being impatient? I doubt it. He can sit back and wait. If no one even knows he stole the art, that works for him. Clearly, if nobody’s looking for it, nobody’s looking for him.”

  “We’re the ones making a mistake if we tip our hand.” Santori’s voice was stubborn. “This is the best opportunity we’ve had in two years. We have a real shot at breaking up the official corruption mess out here!” He turned his appeal to me. “Davey, I’d think you, especially, would understand that we can’t afford to waste the opportunity—not by moving before it’s time.”

  I stiffened.

  “Let me tell you what I understand, Ronnie. I remember when your people came to me with something called ‘Operation Centurion.’ Classy name. As I recall, the Justice Department was going to focus on public malfeasance and clean out the bad cops and corrupt officials out here in the ‘burbs. Just like Operation Greylord targeted the federal judiciary in Chicago. Just like Operation Silver Shovel caught all those city aldermen lining their pockets. A real, big-time investigation by the Feds.”