Michelangelo_s Notebook fr-1

by Paul Christopher

  “Interesting stuff,” he said, blinking.

  “Don’t keep us in suspense,” said Valentine.

  “Where would you like to start?”

  “The beginning would be good.”

  “That would make it the so-called Carduss Club at Greyfriars Academy.”

  “Okay.”

  “It originated in 1895, the year the school was founded. That was back in the days when clubs and secret societies were actually encouraged in schools. The name comes from the thistles on the school crest, which in turn relates to the school’s Scots-Calvinist origins.” He grinned at Valentine. “Sort of like the school you and I went to, Michael, remember?”

  “Vividly.”

  “Carduss means thistle, as in Scotland,” said Finn.

  “That’s it. At any rate, the Carduss members based their club on the English Order of the Garter, which has the thistle as its emblem. Twelve knights as in the twelve disciples. Twelve members in their club.”

  “But it grew into something else.”

  “Yes. By the early nineteen hundreds with the first graduating class, it turned into a benevolent society, like Skull and Bones at Yale. If you were a banker, you lent money to a fellow member in real estate. If you were in government, you passed laws that would help a member expand his business.”

  “An early form of good-old-boys networking,” said Finn.

  “Something like that.” Kornitzer paused. “In the end it was the twelve members of the original club who bought the school out of bankruptcy during the Depression. For some reason they decided to go underground just after World War Two-that’s your Delaware corporation. They used the firm of their lawyers to buy up a shell company that also owned an entity called the McSkimming Art Trust in Chicago. They changed the name to the Grange Foundation, which has offices here in New York. St. Luke’s Place in Greenwich Village.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Nothing, apparently. They have no legal mandate: It’s a private trust. It doesn’t have to make any kind of report except to the IRS. According to their tax records they’re a nonprofit organization that facilitates museum and gallery research into particular works of art and artists. What they really are is an art agency. As far as MAGIC can tell they have several major clients, in particular the archdiocese of New York and the Parker-Hale Museum of Art. From what MAGIC tells me, nearly every transaction has been handled commercially by the Hoffman Gallery, which has its head office in Berne, Switzerland.”

  “We’re getting closer.”

  “Closer still. Your James Cornwall was a member in good standing of Carduss before the war. So was Gatty, so was a man named McPhail. Cornwall and McPhail were officers in G5, which in turn was a division of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. They were part of a group of art specialists attached to the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives unit in Germany at the end of the war.”

  “And Gatty was the OSS liaison in Switzerland, working for Dulles.”

  “It gets better. According to MAGIC there’s a clear line of documentation in OSS records that shows that Gatty organized the movement of Cornwall and his men through the so-called Vatican ‘ratline.’ He also got them transportation out of Italy through the port of Sestri Ponente just outside of Genoa. The Bacinin Padre, which was renamed the USS Swivel. You can trace them all the way to an address on Hudson Street and a company called American Mercantile.”

  “This is getting very strange,” said Finn.

  “American Mercantile went belly-up in 1934. They made work clothes. The building was empty from then on. The real estate company leased it out as warehouse space.” He grinned. “Ask me the address on Hudson Street.”

  “I’ll bite. What was the address?”

  “Four twenty-one. It’s a condo building now, but it’s right across the street from James J. Walker Park. Eight-story Italianate. Fancy for a commercial building. Built in the 1800s.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Finn. “Why is that important?”

  “Because the street that looks into the park from the south side is St. Luke’s Place-home of the Grange Foundation. It can’t be a coincidence,” said Valentine.

  “It’s not,” said Kornitzer. He punched a key and stared at the computer screen. “The United States Quartermaster Department Archives show that the shipment underwritten by Gatty turned up at 421 Hudson and was stored on the main floor of the building, sealed and under guard for eighteen days from July 27 to August 15, 1945. On August 16, 1945 the guards were removed. There’s no record of the shipment after that.” He paused again. “Whatever Gatty had shipped for Cornwall just vanished.”

  “How big was the shipment?”

  “Two hundred twenty-seven tons. Assorted crates and boxes.”

  “Two hundred twenty-seven tons of what?” asked Finn.

  “It doesn’t say.” The pudgy hacker shrugged. “The records of the group passing through the Vatican ratlines mentions six sealed trucks traveling through Switzerland into Italy, then down the coast to Genoa, that’s all.”

  “It’s the Gold Train,” Valentine murmured.

  “What’s that?” Finn asked.

  “It’s one of those World War Two stories nobody quite believes,” he explained. “A book came out about it a couple of years ago. According to the book a shipment of looted treasure was put onto a train out of Budapest right at the end of the war by a man named Arpad Toldi, the SS Commissioner of Jewish Affairs in Hungary. He made sure there was no inventory made of the material on the train-three or four billion dollars’ worth of gold-and sent the train off to Germany. It never got there. It fell into the hands of the U.S. Army.”

  “Then what happened?” Finn asked.

  “It disappeared,” said Valentine. “Just like Cornwall’s six truckloads. It’s all part of that World War Two Nazi-treasure mythology. Nothing’s ever been proven.”

  “There’s more,” said Kornitzer.

  “Tell me.”

  “You remember the name Licio Gelli?”

  “The man who was involved in the Vatican Bank scandal. Some kind of backroom boy.”

  Kornitzer checked the screen, chewing on the end of a pencil now. “His name’s all over the Vatican documentation. A direct link with Dulles as well. Something called Operation ‘Left Behind.’ Among other things Gelli was helping Nazis get out of town back in 1945. The later stuff relates to something called Propaganda Due, P2, some kind of neo-fascist group in the Vatican. It fits.”

  After World War II, the race was on between the Soviet and western blocs to apprehend Nazi war criminals, or recruit intelligence and other assets. The Vatican used its resources to provide passports, money and other support for church-run underground railroads that transported former Nazis and supporters out of Europe to safer havens in the Middle East, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and South America. Organizations like ODESSA (Organization of Former Officers of the SS) and Der Spinne, “The Spider,” took advantage of this service. By some accounts the Vatican ratline provided support to as many as 30,000 Nazis. Among the beneficiaries of the Holy See’s largesse were former Gestapo operative Klaus Barbie; Adolph Eichmann; Dr. Joseph Mengele, the “White Angel” or “Angel of Death” of the Auschwitz death camp; Gustav Wagner, deputy commander of the Sobibor camp; and Franz Stangl of the Treblinka extermination facility. Members of the Waffen SS “Galician Division” were resettled as well.

  “Where’s Gelli now?”

  “He died in jail. Heart attack. A lot of people say he was killed by an overdose of digitalis, just like Pope John.”

  “It sounds like we’re moving into Dan Brown territory here: weird cults, Catholic conspiracies, Leonardo da Vinci painting in code. Sounds like a lot of white supremacist David Duke twaddle to me.”

  “Call it what you want, but there’s something running all through this information like a thread you can’t quite see, that even MAGIC can’t cut through, and that’s saying something, believe me.”

 
“Give me your best guess.”

  “I don’t have one. There’s not enough to go on except for this strange kind of itch, the kind you can’t quite get at. Something else going on, something underneath all the other stuff.”

  “It’s the killer,” said Finn, suddenly seeing it all. The whys and the wherefores could sort themselves out later, but beyond a shadow of a doubt she knew that Kornitzer’s itch, the thread running through everything they’d uncovered was the identity of the killer.

  “Explain that,” said Valentine.

  “I can’t, not really. But I’ll bet if you looked hard enough, looked at the names of all these people, you’d find more deaths, killings. Somehow he knew about the Michelangelo, knew about Crawley firing me, knew that it might start a chain of events that would lead to his being discovered, and that’s why Peter died. It was supposed to be me.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” said Kornitzer. “He kills your boyfriend, but he hires someone to kill you-that Asian kid on the bicycle you mentioned?”

  “It would make sense if there was more than one killer,” Valentine said slowly.

  “I deal in hard-line mathematics. That just doesn’t compute.”

  “Of course it doesn’t, not mathematically, but I’ve seen enough killing to know that like attracts like,” said Valentine. “What if Finn is right? What if Killer Number One has been murdering people long before Crawley. We’ve had four deaths so far, four murders-Crawley, Finn’s boyfriend, Peter, Gatty, and Kressman in Alabama, all connected by art-looted art. The death of Finn’s boyfriend is like shooting up a flare, a signal that something’s out of kilter, the killer making himself known. That brings on Killer Number Two, who tries to cover things up by dealing with Gatty and Kressman, probably to shut them up. If this all goes back to that shipment, or maybe something even worse, there’s a lot at stake. Certainly enough motive to kill for.”

  “Nice hypothesis but I’m not buying it,” said Kornitzer, shaking his head. “Too much coincidence.”

  “Is there any way we can find out if other people on that list of names died unnaturally?” Finn asked.

  Kornitzer lifted his shoulders. “I could probably figure out a way to do it. Take me more than half an hour though.”

  “Start figuring it out,” said Valentine. “We’re running out of time.”

  43

  Woodside, still occasionally called Suicide’s Paradise for its wealth of third rails and speeding subway trains, is a New York neighborhood wedged between two cemeteries in northern Queens-St. Michael’s to the north and Calvary Cemetery to the south. La Guardia Airport is only a mile from the neighborhood’s northern edge and the entire area is crisscrossed by elevated commuter and subway lines. Once predominantly Irish Catholic, it now has an astoundingly diverse population of Koreans, South Asians, Mexicans, Dominicans and Ecuadorians. There are pubs everywhere, the majority still selling quantities of Cork Dry Gin, Jameson’s, Guinness and Harp in the broad flat accents of Derry, Dublin and Donegal.

  The priest drove his rental car into Queens and eventually found St. Sebastian’s, a huge, windowless tomb of yellowing brick in the dour basilica style of County Cork churches. The deacon there, a man named Wibberley who’d volunteered there for so long he thought he owned the place, took the man from Rome through the old records. Neither they nor his own memory could recall anything of Frederico Botte or his adoptive parents, Sergeant and Mrs. Thorpe. Young Freddie had not been an altar boy, communicant or even a member of the church’s famous basketball team. The only place Wibberley could think of that might know more was the funeral home a few blocks south along 58th Street, a Woodside institution since the early 1900s, when the area was still virtually rural.

  The funeral home had indeed buried a Mr. Brian Thorpe on March 18, 1963. A few questions and lunch in an Irish greasy spoon called the Stop Inn Diner by the Long Island Rail Road elevated tracks on Roosevelt Avenue sent him to Sunnyside and the archives of the Woodside Herald, a Queens community newspaper that had been in operation since the second world war. According to the microfilmed copies of the paper for the week of March 20, 1963, Brian Thorpe, a member of the American Legion, a decorated veteran and the owner of the D and D hardware store, was accosted and killed on his way home from a late night at Donovan’s on Roosevelt Avenue. The police report stated that he was stabbed repeatedly. No weapon was found at the scene. He was survived by his wife Annalise and his son Frederick. An address for his wife was listed on Woodside Avenue.

  He checked the Queens phone book but there was nothing for Anna or Annalise Thorpe. With no alternative he drove back into the neighborhood and discovered that the address in the Woodside Herald was for an apartment above the Chez Diamond Styling Hair Salon. The name on the scarred, grimy door was for A. Kurovsky. Finally, the circle closed: Annalise Kurovsky, the woman who had taken Frederico Botte out of Germany and to the United States on the Batory, married a man who had been murdered-stabbed, like all the others. He rang the doorbell. Almost immediately there was an answering buzz, as though he had been expected. He pushed his way through the door and went up the long, dark flight of stairs to the apartment above.

  Whatever she had been before, Annalise Kurovsky had become a very dry stick. In her eighties her flesh had shrunk in on itself until it was no more than a wrinkled parchment shroud for ancient bone and sinew. Her face was sagged and wattled, marked in places by sun blotches and reddened areas. Out of it all burned a pair of dark, angry eyes, glaring with intelligence and some deep bitterness. The road she had traveled to find herself above a hair salon in Queens had clearly been a long and very difficult one.

  The woman’s living room was dark and cluttered. A row of mismatched bookcases stood against one wall, crammed with knickknacks and photographs. More photos hung on the stippled plaster walls along with decorative plates and several official-looking plaques. In the middle of it all, bizarrely, was an oil painting over the mantel of a gas fireplace. The painting, large and ornately framed, showed a young Mary stooping over a cradle holding the infant Christ while several angels watched from the upper left corner. The painting, and the artist who painted it, were instantly recognizable.

  “Do you know what that is?” the priest asked.

  “Certainly,” the woman snapped, her voice as dry as her thin skin. “It is a Rembrandt. A study for the Holy Family, painted in 1645. The fully realized painting hangs in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “My husband gave it to me.”

  “Where did he get it?”

  “I can’t see that it is any of your business.”

  “No, perhaps not.”

  “You didn’t come to speak to me of paintings anyway. You came to ask me about my son Frederico, yes?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Don’t be coy.” The old woman smiled. She sat down on a worn couch under the window. The priest chose a seat where he could see the startling presence of the Rembrandt.

  “Yes, I came about the boy.”

  “I have been expecting you for a long time.”

  “Expecting me?”

  “Of course. With all this talk of making Pacelli a saint.”

  “You know a great deal.”

  “I know everything,” said the woman. “The whole story. It is a story that must be told, and I am the one to tell it.”

  “The priest smiled. “Not you, and not now.”

  “Who will stop me?” she asked, her voice snapping like twigs. “I have a duty to my son!”

  “I will stop you,” said the priest quietly. “And your duty is done.”

  The man from Rome had thought about using his gun but instead he rose to his feet, went around the cluttered coffee table that separated them, then leaned down, driving the palm of his hand under her chin, snapping her head back and breaking her withered neck. He let her fall face forward, breaking her nose on the coffee table. He checked her carotid pulse, found nothing and began to searc
h the apartment.

  44

  Finn Ryan sat on the bench directly across from 11 St. Luke’s Place in Greenwich Village and decided that Michael had been right: knocking on the Grange Foundation’s door to get a better idea of what they were dealing with was really stupid. Not only that, it was potentially dangerous, maybe even fatally so. On the other hand, Barrie Kornitzer’s MAGIC program could take them only so far. In fact it was MAGIC’s limitations that made places like Ex Libris so important: in the end, the Internet was nothing more than a seething, almost infinite cauldron of half truths, opinions, outright lies and lunacy. It wasn’t the Wild West of communications and information gathering; it was the twilight zone. Sometimes-and, in fact, more often than not-you had to go to the source.

  And there it was, right next to the Huxtable house of the Cosby Show, one of a score of three-story brownstones on a pleasant tree-lined street that looked into Hudson Park. A block west was Hudson Street and 421, once a warehouse, now a renovated yellow brick condo building. Beside it another red brick industrial building, this one with a forest of huge satellite dishes on the roof. There was a restaurant on the corner of Hudson and St. Luke’s but other than that the street was residential. Two blocks south she could hear the sounds of Houston Street. She was willing to bet there were fifty places within spitting distance where you could buy a five-dollar cup of coffee.

  Eleven St. Luke’s Place was much like its neighbors: black-edged windows, black wrought iron fence around the well leading to the basement floor, an outside central air unit and a brass knocker beneath the classic stone pediment over the front door. In the case of number 11 there was also a small brass plaque, blindingly polished. Even from here she could see the iron grilles over the basement window. The cars in front of the building included a dark green Lexus, a silver Mercedes and a black Jag coupe.