The Unknown Masterpiece

by John Brooke

  ‘Robert, those men will hurt you!’

  It was a voice in a cranky upper register that effortlessly broke the sound barrier erected by the music in Hubert’s headphones — and to which he reacted instinctively. Maman. Not his. But they all sounded the same and Hubert heard her loud and clear.

  This mother wanted the world to know. Those men would hurt her Robert.

  A guy and his mum were in checkout line number three. He was clearly very pissed at his mother. She didn’t care that the woman at the cash and five bored shoppers behind them were tuned right in. She nattered at him in high volume while she transferred groceries from the cart to cash conveyor belt… He was taking dangerous risks! And those men would hurt him!

  Hubert Hunspach knew the feeling. Really nice to have your life spilled out for the pleasure of everyone waiting in line, spilled out by someone who’s supposed to be on your side. Hubert raised the blue-tint shades for a better view. He saw a deathly white face under an oversized grey training hoodie, partially obscured, but not so Hubert couldn’t see the anger there.

  And Hubert was not surprised when the poor guy lost it. He bellowed,‘Bordel! Maman! Bordel!’ and he grabbed a jug of milk from the cashier’s hand and whipped it.

  French milk is well packaged in strong plastic, the jug did not break. But it smashed through a floor display of wine like a bowling ball through pins. Bottles exploded. The cashier screamed. Robert’s maman stood there, stupid. Two male store employees raced to the scene.

  The boy called Robert hesitated for an instant. Then ran.

  He sprinted past the sunglasses display, hood falling back from his pure white face and off his longish, darkish hair. Hubert Hunspach was stunned, sure that he recognized the angel of the river, the same white face he’d marvelled at from a secret distance late one windy night. Hubert had to follow.

  But the sunglasses he was trying on were secured to the display with a wire that constrained him. He heard the clattering. Because he was more than slightly stoned, it took him a step or two to understand he’d yanked the entire glasses display over. The blue aviators lay on the floor. One arm of the frame lay near them, broken off.

  Oh fuck!… A security guard trod on both pieces as she rushed to secure Hubert.

  Mall security escorted Hubert Hunspach and Robert’s mother into separate rooms in an office between the public washrooms and the key cutter’s kiosk. It took an hour, but Hubert managed to calm the sunglasses guy’s rage and avoid a call to the gendarmes by forking over thirty-five euros for the aviator shades. And by agreeing he was totally lucky there was no real damage to the rest of the stock on the display. And by agreeing he was totally stupid. Agreeing was always the best strategy. ‘Yes, I do have the brain of a tired goldfish. I saw a friend. I reacted, man. I was not thinking. I mean, how could I steal them? They’re attached, right?’ And being totally, totally sorry. And totally grateful. ‘Merci, monsieur, it will never happen again.’

  Whew! Lucky.

  Robert’s mother was being let go at the same moment. She was still pretty wobbly, wiping tears when she emerged, a security officer dutifully patting her arm. Hubert wondered what kind of deal she’d cut. He supposed she had paid for the wine destroyed in Robert’s outburst. Or maybe they’d been sympathetic. Mothers got away with things in a way that wasn’t fair… He followed Robert’s maman to the parking lot. Not so high anymore — no matter the quality of your weed, an interrogation in a windowless Security office will dampen the effect. He took note of a bashed-up navy blue Opal hatch-back, scribbled the plate number in one of his school exercise books. And then, not to push his luck, Hubert Hunspach returned to school in time for his last two classes, where he spent the entire time lost in space trying to devise an organized way of searching the town for that car. It would surely lead him to Robert. The angel.

  And debating with himself. Should he call that cop? His cousin, Aliette.

  …Well, that’s what a cousin does, monsieur. It’s an agreement. The police are waiting.

  Hubert thought perhaps he would investigate a little first. Zero in. Then call.

  Part 4

  En novembre

  29

  Invitation

  Inspector Aliette Nouvelle received an email communication from Basel Lands Police, Criminal Investigations Brigade: FYI: We now have a solid majority expert opinion as to the authenticity of J. Aebischer’s first commission for the Federer family: Caresses, F. Snyders, Antwerp, c.1625. We will be holding a press conference at the Oberwil garrison Wednesday next at 11:00, at which time we will be making an announcement re. positive identification of the piece returned by J. Aebischer to the Federer collection as a reproduction of the original work. Hildegarde Federer, registered owner of the work in question, has fully consented to a public announcement of this finding. I believe this act of stepping forward in public could lend new support to our investigation. I note Marcus Streit was right in his original suspicion. I am taking this as circumstantial proof that Streit was not part of the scheme and is therefore not absconded but dead. We owe him a debt of gratitude and will ensure the public is made aware of Streit’s contribution. You and interested colleagues will be most welcome.

  Inspector Hans Grinnell did not ask how she was. He did not even bother to add his name. That stung, though not much. The man was a soccer coach, with a wife and two sons. This was work. Well into dreary November in Alsace now, the Martin Bettelman case had gone quite dormant. Regular calls to Zup had yielded no sign of Greta and/or Fred. Her shoemaker remained unknown as he made his slow return to life in the studio of Gregory Huet. Grinnell’s case, murders included, was not her case. She had been coming to accept that, if only because he had not communicated and she been feeling too guilty, soul weary, whatever, to force the issue. But she was needing something to kickstart the spirit and she would go.

  But Wednesday next was tomorrow!

  …So she was an afterthought. That stung too.

  So what? She would go. She even managed a positive thought — Good, Hans, good work — before calling to cancel her scheduled hour with J-P Blismes.

  30

  Misgivings on Service & Discretion

  The same widely disseminated communication from Basel Lands CIB found its way to a quiet flat somewhere in Klein Basel, provoking differing takes on service and discretion, and misgivings that led to a difficult night.

  ‘I’ve been getting calls. Much worry about our guarantees of confidentiality.’

  ‘Our guarantees all stand. There are many countervailing points of view. Five experts? We have an entire community. This will be stated clearly and forcefully.’

  ‘Forcefully, herr?’

  ‘Subtlety is force. Discretion is art — fortunately, the right people appreciate it. The rest of them? …You know me. The machine’s much bigger than one wretched frau, five so-called experts, four not even Swiss. Will our friends allow a worried woman and a bumpkin policeman to throw a spanner in such elegant works? I think not. It just needs the right words.’

  ‘Or one bullet.’

  ‘Please stop worrying.’

  ‘Maybe two…You make me worry. At the end of the day, what are we without integrity?’

  ‘The gutter press will be with him. The media that matters will stay with us.’

  ‘The client is sacred. And the client is scared.’

  ‘You are scared. And I have to say it makes you less than beautiful.’

  ‘I’m Swiss. I know the value of service and discretion. And our word. Ours more than most.’

  ‘I can handle this. I will. I have to. I will do what’s necessary.’

  ‘We all have to do what’s necessary.’

  ‘Your tone bothers me.’

  ‘It’s because I care, mein herr.’

  31

  Hans Down

  Inspector Hans Grinnell stopped in early at the Basel Lands Oberwil detachment to collect fresh copies of the necessary warrants, then drove up to the city. At 08:25 he turned
into the secluded street and parked in front of the baronial gate shielding the residence of Attorney Frederik Rooten from the world. Not that there was much to be threatened by in the immediate vicinity. The district known as Gellert in the southeast area of Basel proper was the most highly sought, certainly the most expensive, a mini-world of spectacular design, from coolest Bauhaus to grand early twentieth-century and all things ostentatiously up-market that fell between. Extensive green spaces. Peaceful. Grinnell had been in the area a few times on police business. Many of the city’s top advocates and solicitors lived in the quarter. And he had enjoyed showing some of the more beautiful homes to his wife and sons one Sunday after a visit to the Basel Zoo. This home could have been included on the tour. He smiled at the memory but could not remember — the Grinnell family had wandered from one street to the next, and with autumn’s colour, new space where bushy green had shielded views, it all looked slightly different. Grinnell gazed through the gates at a renovated chateau surrounded by elegantly landscaped grounds, carefully planned patches of fall garden only now beginning to die. He waited five minutes.

  Until a week ago, Frederik Rooten had advised his client to eat the loss attached to a possibly fraudulent painting and stay silent for the sake of future commercial possibilities. Worse, beyond Rooten’s best business advice, the notion of ‘going public’ was foreign to Hildegarde Federer. Call it a lifestyle issue, an instinct bred in the bone, what you will, Hans Grinnell had been fighting a losing battle. Now, a ‘Snyders’ declared to be a fake by a five reputable experts was a new starting point in his case. Proof of the fraud helped him convince the frau that Marcus Streit was surely as dead as Justin Aebischer and the crooked FedPol art cop. Once she accepted that, he had persisted mercilessly. Did she not feel any responsibility, moral, emotional or otherwise in helping track down the killer of the man who’d spotted the flaw in Aebischer’s brilliant copy? Her friend Marcus had done a service in the name Swiss patrimony, not just her family’s gallery.

  As was often the case, moral suasion turned on the results of discreet enquiries. Grinnell now knew the vanished Marcus Streit was much more than a ‘family friend,’ as described by the obstinate frau. They’d been lovers — the odds were good that Streit was the father of her youngest child, Maria. Of course, he did not come right out and say it. But he came close, and the lady heard him. And finally the better part of her dry old conscience got her to agree that justice for Marcus should be a priority. Going public would help the police confirm Streit’s good standing. She had to speak out. But though Frau Federer would be present at the media event this morning, it would be her lawyer, Herr Rooten, who would speak for the family. As was only fitting.

  Frederik Rooten tried to stonewall, threatening to sue the police for coercing his client into acting against her best interests. His client had wavered. Hans Grinnell had fought back with politely worded threats of turning the media against a well-regarded attorney who might be manipulating a client who was determined to do the right thing for the cause of both Swiss justice and Swiss cultural integrity. Rooten had relented, politely, smooth as you could want, but Hans Grinnell sensed fear, perhaps reasonably so after the cold-blooded elimination of Justin Aebischer and the hapless Agent Perella. He played on that, hard but subtle, quiet words a lawyer might appreciate, sealing the deal by offering to personally escort Herr Rooten to the media event in Oberwil, quietly or with an entourage: his choice.

  It was horrible how nasty you sometimes had to get.

  At exactly 08:30 the inspector got out of his car and touched the brass-encased bell fitted into the stone pillar supporting the gate. A few moments later there was a quiet buzz, the click of a latch, and the ten-foot gate moved automatically — not fully wide, but wide enough for Hans Grinnell to enter.

  A maid in uniform pulled the door open at his first knock. He nodded good morning and briefly flashed his warrant card. Leaving him in a sparsely elegant sky-lit foyer, she clacked officiously across the patterned tiling and disappeared behind a door, whence drifted the smell of coffee…and chocolate. Hans Grinnell put his hands in the at-ease position and waited, a step removed from a three-storey shaft of morning sunlight, beside a vase filled with velvety orange Asian lilies. He watched the sculpture. Or whatever it was. The thing reaching up through the winding staircase to the skylight was made of buffed steel. It moved, whether by mechanical perpetual motion or electricity was not immediately apparent, but it made no sound. To a simple cop’s eyes it seemed like two tall figures. They evoked the cartoonish metal things constructed from discarded mechanisms and strewn about the pool at Tinguely Park — he and the wife and kids had enjoyed that. But there was something vaguely sexual in the way these two figures interacted. If that was the right word. They made him think of the French inspector and himself. He had avoided thinking of her for the better part of a month. Was this the effect of art? Hans Grinnell shrugged and focused on the lilies. He knew a bit about flowers, still not very much about art. Or moments like that French woman had somehow induced…Aliette. A mystery.

  He was wondering if Inspector Nouvelle would be there today, and what that might bring, when Frederik Rooten emerged from the kitchen.

  The lawyer nodded a curt good morning. There was nothing cordial in recognition of a lovely day, nothing collegial in anticipation of a step forward in the resolution of a series of heinous acts, though both men were, in the broader sense, professionals in the service of the law. Grinnell did not take it personally. Rooten was none too happy with his client’s decision to share with the greater public, even less so with the role that fell to him. Nothing to be said between cop and attorney? That was fine. Hans Grinnell smelled aftershave and coffee as Rooten went past him and into the study. When Rooten emerged, briefcase in hand, Grinnell fell into step behind him.

  There was a woman in a peignoir waiting at the kitchen door, mug in hand. She sipped her morning beverage and peered across the foyer. The cold distance in her gaze fit perfectly in the vast and elegant space. Grinnell could feel it. Could Rooten? She did not wave or utter a word. Frederik Rooten did not look back in leaving. He paused at the door, patted his various pockets — glasses, keys, wallet, hankie. Since it was Rooten’s house, it was for him to open the door and hold it for Hans Grinnell, who stepped out of that sumptuous vacuum and back into the bright and chilly tranquil Gellert morning. Silence held as they walked across the cobblestone courtyard and through the gap in the gate. Click. The gate closed behind them.

  …Perhaps this was part of the maid’s duties?

  Grinnell offered a muted professional smile and gestured to his car. It was just an old Audi but he had cleaned it of litter. And he was not a smoker. The man would survive the humble ride to Oberwil. As a courtesy, he moved to hold the rear door for his passenger. The click of the door latch coincided with a quick flat crack that cut through the ambient rustle of chestnut leaves. Somehow it produced an instant trickle of blood on the side of the lawyer’s well-groomed head.

  Frederik Rooten looked very surprised. In fact, he was dead before he fell.

  Hans Grinnell had his sidearm, of course, and he would have used it, although in which direction still wasn’t clear; but there was another flat crack and he fell too, aware of a burning point in his belly. Indeed, it started small, barely pin-sized. Then it grew, too fast, bringing much blood seeping through his shirt as he slumped against the car. At which point all he was good for was a frantic pressing of the emergency key on his remote, in a shapeless, hopeless kind of panic as he slowly blacked out. And maybe died. At a certain point, one doesn’t know.

  ***

  The event at Oberwil had drawn a crowd. Police, art people — both the sort in suits and the ones in jeans, including several from Zurich and Geneva, and even a tight-faced clutch of Basel bankers. With the grim news from the city, they would all have to turn around and go home.

  Not immediately. There was coffee, local pastry. People lingered, murmuring, surmising.

  Still
hampered by a cane and limping, Inspector Nouvelle had come with Chief Instructing Judge Gérard Richand. Despite the fact everyone in this particular crowd spoke perfect French, the inspector got nowhere as she worked the hall. Well, this was Switzerland. She caught a glimpse of Frau Federer, a stick-like, not-quite-old woman with good taste in clothes, clearly muddled by a tragic turn of events. She was being guided by a younger woman who was probably her daughter. Same bearing. Same subtle sense of colour for a morning in November. But they were well protected by larger men, and gone before Aliette could get near.

  Inspector Morenz of Basel City turned out to be a tough little man with rimless glasses.

  Inspector Hilda Gross was presented as Grinnell’s replacement. Aliette gave her a card.

  After an appropriate amount of mingling, Gérard said he had to get back. Aliette thought she should stay for a bit. She would get a ride to Basel, catch a bus from there. A somber Franck Woerli was silent on the ride back to the city in a requisitioned FedPol car. Rudi Bucholtz was driving. He was hyper-silent. She sensed Rudi was more afraid of her than angry.

  They dropped her at the hospital. Four hours later she left, hardly the wiser. They had taken a bullet from the gut of Hans Grinnell and were still working to save him. She gazed at his anguished wife (she had imagined Frau Grinnell almost perfectly) till the woman sensed her eyes and looked. Then she ordered flowers for his room and went limping off to catch her bus.

  By the time Aliette boarded the bus she knew. She could hardly read the headline in German, much less the columns and sidebars of reportage focusing on the travesty that morning in the quiet, exclusive Gellert street — but she didn’t need to. The front page photo of attorney Frederik Rooten revealed half of the extravagant couple who’d since disappeared from the happy scene at Zup. Frederik Rooten was the elegant Fred. Jokester. Half-assed dancer. Greta’s attentive man.