by Noah Charney
What the hell is going on? He thought. Then he spoke. “What the hell is going on?”
“Pa-patience, Dr. Barrow.” The flaxen man spoke with a cool, aristocratic British accent. “All will be revealed. Literally.”
“So the computer hack was preparatory for the actual theft. The painting the thieves wanted to steal was not yet in the museum!” Wickenden was standing now, dancing, in the loosest sense of the word, in his slippers.
“That’s good thinking, Harry. How about some spotted dick?”
“Yes. Pull it out, Irma. This calls for celebration.”
“The next question is, it seems to me, at what time was the computer hashed…”
“…I believe the term is ‘hacked,’ dear…”
“Pardon—of course you’re right. I’d like to know if the…”
“…if the painting was purchased before or after the computer was hashed, of course! They’ll be about the same time on the same night.” Harry took a forkful of spotted dick and swallowed it dramatically, giggling as he did so. “The organizer of the theft must have known that the museum was going to buy the painting.”
“Or he was at the auction, and watched the museum buy it. Otherwise, it implies that the…Harry, you don’t think the auction was rigged, do you?”
“Do I?”
“No, I shouldn’t think so.”
“Probably not, Irma, but I leave no stone unturned.”
“You said that the fuse box in the utility room had been exploded open from the inside?”
“That’s right.”
“And the computer picked up movement in the utility room during the night it was hacked, last Wednesday?”
“Aye. Wait a second! That would explain it. The explosive was planted during the first breach, but only detonated after the painting was in the museum, ready to be stolen!”
“You’re quite sexy when you’re on the case, Harry.”
“Ta, luv.”
“The other night you said that you needed me to identify a…”
“A moment, Dr. Barrow. Pa-please continue, Petra.” The blue-suited man gestured to the woman in the lab coat. Barrow could not understand. He had never before seen the two paintings that stood on easels before him.
One was a hideously ugly abstract Suprematist work.
The other was all white.
“I’m just telling you, I don’t know anything about these. I’m a seicento man. An Early Modernist. I don’t know anything after 1800. I don’t even know what day it is.”
As Barrow spoke, one of the flanking men answered a mobile phone and handed it to the gentleman in the blue suit. Phone in hand, he walked out of sight, melted into the colossal darkness of the warehouse.
Barrow turned his attention to the paintings before him. One was truly atrocious, a diseased mess of incompatible colors that suggested very old cheese. To Barrow, it looked to be early twentieth century, Suprematist style, Russian probably, somewhere between 1915 and 1930. That was as much as he could muster. He could not see what Petra, in her white lab coat, was doing to the lower left-hand corner of the canvas.
The other painting was completely white. Not white on white, Barrow thought, recalling the recent, highly publicized sale at Christie’s of a famous painting by Kasimir Malevich. This painting was just plain white.
On longer inspection, Barrow found the cause of this appearance. The top layer of paint had been removed from the canvas, revealing the raw gesso beneath: the preparatory white mixture of plaster and glue that is put on canvases as a base layer, before the real painting begins.
The top right corner of the gessoed canvas was a slightly different shade of white, and had a texture to it. The painting, it seemed, had been white in its completed state, but it had been scraped down, and only one corner of the original work remained. But why?
Then Barrow saw what Petra was doing. On her lap, she held a small tray containing jars of chemicals, brushes, and palette knives. Barrow leaned to see around her. Whatever chemical she used, it was dissolving the paint on the surface of the ugly Suprematist work. The lower left corner was now exposed, revealing smooth black paint beneath.
It was a hidden painting.
Barrow stood there, in overcoat and pajamas, realizing to what he was a party. Chemicals had dissolved most of the ugly Suprematist painting. It was being worked from the bottom up, revealing the treasure beneath with aching slowness.
The bottom half of the painting was black. A smooth, unpainterly shade. Evidence of brushstroke had been painted out, so the darkness was velvety, and coated the canvas like night water. There seemed to be the torsos of two figures, but they had not been painted from the waist down. They seemed to melt away into the amorphous black background. Then the base of a wing emerged.
Barrow pieced things together. He took the handkerchief out of his overcoat pocket and mopped his matted white brow. The cuff-linked gentleman returned. His face betrayed anger. Taut hands ran through his yellowy locks.
“Ap-pologies for my absence. Business.” He spoke, then whispered into the ear of one of his associates. Barrow barely caught some words: “I’m so sick of these fucking games…look up…”
The man turned to Barrow. “I presume that you’ve deduced why I woke you so abruptly this evening. Your judgment is invaluable, and you will be rewarded for the inconvenience.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“Imp-pressed or distressed, Dr. Barrow?”
“A little of both, I think. I’ve not quite decided yet.”
The last portions of paint flaked off the canvas, and the hidden painting was now fully revealed. A young woman in blue, surprised by a winged figure behind her. She turns, her neck gently curved, her pale skin and brown teardrop eyes sublime and graceful.
Barrow wiped the back of his neck and his cheek. He just stared at the canvas, unsure as to what he should do. The handkerchief was damp. He clutched it inside his pocket, feeling the wet against his slick palm.
“How did you get it?”
“Now, now, Doctor, you’re not being pa-paid to provide questions. Only answers.” The gentleman paused, significantly. “I’ve consulted extensively, Dr. Barrow, and you are generally considered to be the world’s foremost authority on Baroque Roman painting, the Caravaggesque, and the Caravaggisti. Your colleagues have written of your pre-preternatural sense for correct attribution. I am no scholar, but neither am I a fool. I am concerned that I have not been fairly dealt with. I need an authentication.” He crossed his arms over his chest and drummed his left forearm with a flurry of right-hand fingers.
Barrow felt his heels fall out from under him, as he stumbled backward a moment. His fists were tight thrust into both pockets. His breath came short.
“Relax, Dr. Barrow. I’ll only shoot you if you lie.”
Barrow knew the answer, but did not know what to say. His dilemma was not moral, but corporeal. His full mind whirred in vacillation. Then he chose the truth.
“I’m sorry. It’s a fake.”
The gentleman waited a very long time, before he spoke.
“You are certain?”
“No question. I’m sorry.”
“So am I, Dr. Barrow. May I ask how you can be certain, so quickly?”
“I’m sorry, I knew before she had cleared all the paint off.”
“How?”
“Would you recognize me?”
“I see. You did not, then, pre-presume your answer before corroboration?”
“Look, I told you! I’m…”
“…sorry. I know. You may stop your ap-pologies. I’m not going to shoot you. The explanation doesn’t matter, right now. At least, you’re not the one with explaining to do. Give me the phone.”
One of his burly accomplices handed over the mobile phone. He dialed. As the phone rang, he waved his hand in dismissal. “Take Dr. Barrow back to his home.”
The two silent associates walked Barrow out of the warehouse cavern. Before his egression, Barrow heard a few
words spoken into the telephone. “There’s nothing under the one I bought, just plain white gesso. There was a Caravaggio under Grayson’s painting, lot thirty-four. But Barrow said it’s a fake. Of course, I believe him, why would he lie? Well, we may know who pa-painted it, but there’s not much we can do now. No, I don’t think we should confront…Not yet. I’ll think of something. But we still need him for the…” And the door slammed shut.
Barrow was outside, as he had been not long before, on the street, in the midst of a canyon of anonymous warehouses. In the aquatic night, the reflected blue sheen of the metal buildings seemed like great sea turtles floating in a darkest trench, leagues deep. Barrow had not noticed that one of the men with him had left, and now pulled up in the black Land Rover. Seems to be my mode of involuntary transport, he thought. The door was opened for him, and he entered. During the ride home, the front-seat passenger turned around and presented Barrow with a fat white envelope.
“With compliments and appreciation,” said the anonymous henchman. “You will be called upon at least once more. If you inform anyone about this, you will be killed. If you continue to cooperate, you will receive more. On behalf of our employer, we apologize for the threatening and melodramatic way in which you have been treated. We also apologize, in advance, for future such situations. That was a joke, Dr. Barrow.” The man wasn’t smiling.
Barrow opened the envelope. It was stuffed full of cash in large denominations. Barrow mustered an upturn of lip.
Bizot hunched over his desk. A gauze of lamplight spread over him, as the rest of the office lay dark. The Formica tabletop bore the crushedash remains of old, unswept cigarettes. A plain black ashtray was overfilled and brimming with thin, white, stubbed-out carcasses of thoughts long past.
Bizot stroked down to the southernmost tip of his scraggly graying beard. He looked over at the framed photograph perched on the edge of his desk. First mother, then father the following year. Empty wheelchairs and leftover oxygen tanks, still full. He glanced to his own cigarettes piled into a barrow in the ashtray. Now he was alone. The burden of care gone, replaced by the hollow weight of their absence. Too much, now too little. It was their time, he supposed. But when would it be his? He looked away. Then back. Then down to the open file between his elbows, bent in support of his weighty chin.
A pile of closed files was stacked to his left, and the junk-shop-recovered radio on a shelf across the room sung a treble-topped twangle of some piece or other of classical music. Bizot didn’t listen. He ran his eyes over page after page, and noted in his Moleskine journal, until the last page of the last file was folded over and shut. Bizot pushed it forward, spilling a few loose ashes from the cigarette fossils onto the pages. He didn’t bother to blow them clean. Bizot slouched in his chair, the foam beneath his generous posterior exposed in places, and flattened beyond form. He slung his foot up onto his chair. His elbow rested on his knee, his chin in his palm, head in hand. He tongued the current cigarette to the left corner of his mouth and tilted his notebook to better read. The page spoke up to him.
Luc Sallenave was the thirteenth comte de Vieuquont and inhabited the eponymous château, built by his ancestor, the third comte de Vieuquont, in the fourteenth century. He was a Knight of the Order of St. John, an honorary position in current times, but a post held by countless prominent figures throughout history, from Diego Velázquez to Paul I, emperor of Russia, to Caravaggio, since the inception of the order in the eleventh century. He was also a Freemason, always highly suspect. Every president of the United States had been a Freemason, and the Masonic symbol of the eye inside a triangle adorned the American dollar bill, so rooted was this secret cult organization in positions of world power. The eye in the triangle could be found haunting the background of works of art throughout Western history. It meant that Sallenave could move and shake, and probably did, in subterranean circles with roots that sprang into powerful trees aboveground.
Sallenave was an avid collector of butterflies, as well as Old Master prints and rare books, particularly those printed before 1501, so-called incunabula. He had a buying record with all the major auction houses, but nothing that he was on record of having bought dated from after around 1700. He owned a small army of Rembrandt etchings, as well as Dürer, Goltzius, and very early religious woodcuts. He bought books, none of which Bizot recognized, but the number and prices were impressive, beyond what he could fathom. Bizot did feel intimately connected to Sallenave in one way: he had gotten drunk, on many occasions, on Château Vieuquont wine.
But Bizot had circled only one cluster of notes: Luc Sallenave’s charitable donations. As far as Bizot could tell from the tax write-offs, Sallenave had given enormous sums of money, every year on file, to several known Christian organizations that may, or may not, put money to charitable means. They were the institutions that were known to lean to the far right, more political than ecclesiastical. They wielded the cross, rather than paid penance to it. Bizot circled these donations. His pencil ran heavy around them, and around again. One of the institutions listed was unfamiliar to him. Le Pacte de Joseph. The Brotherhood of Joseph. Its address was listed, without a number, as rue de Jérusalem. The same street as Sallenave’s gallery.
That’s enough, thought Bizot. On verra. We shall see.
He looked over to the desks of his coworkers, adorned with monogrammed coffee mugs and framed photographs. Then he stood up, switched off the desk lamp, and walked home.
A throbbing ring. Jean-Paul Lesgourges fumbled to turn on his bedside light, knocking over a clock and an empty glass. He pulled the telephone to his ear.
“Jean.” It was Bizot. “Jean, I…I just…”
Shudder-breath silence.
Lesgourges sat up in bed. “It’s okay. I’m here. I’ll be right over.”
CHAPTER 22
New morning filtered through the windows, refracted and broke over the warm, still bed. Soft cotton covers soaked the heat. As the light crept toward the headboard, the blankets stirred.
Coffin squeezed open his eyes. Whiteness burst through the windowpane. He rolled to his right, and graced his arm over her. She was warm and soft, like the sun and the blankets. She leaned in and kissed him.
“Buongiorno, bello.”
“Buongiorno a te. Come va?”
“Bene, con te, tesoro. Dobbiamo andare subito?”
“Non ancora. È meglio dopo. È troppo comodo a letto.”
Coffin nestled in close to her lips, and parted them with his.
“It’s like a conjugal visit, isn’t it?”
Daniela laughed. “It is a conjugal visit.”
“All the benefits of married life, without the muck.”
“Why must there always be muck? It’s rather like slogging through sandy seawater.”
“You have a delightful turn of phrase, Dani.”
“I got a lot of reading done, in there. Nothing much else to do, waiting for you to…”
“I always keep my word. If someone plays honestly with me, I’ll never break it. And for you, especially…”
Coffin ran his hand along her stomach, down over her hipbone, and softly clasped her thigh.
“You did work out in there, though. These are stronger than I recall.”
She threw him over onto his back with a smile, and climbed on top.
“You’re so confident in your memory?” She pressed her legs tight around his waist.
“I’m impressed.”
“And you’ve gotten a belly since I saw you last.”
“Well, I…um, yes, perhaps.”
“I still like you.”
“I’m glad. What’s for breakfast?”
“Oh, am I making you breakfast, now?” Coffin rolled her over onto her back, her black curls cascading over the white pillow.
Vallombroso laughed. “You know I could kick your ass.”
The bacon sizzled in the pan, next to two sunny-side eggs. Coffin wore his bathrobe and nothing else. He wielded his spatula. “It’s all in the wri
st,” he said.
“What the English eat for breakfast is just revolting.”
“What do you prefer? Pasta?”
“Don’t be silly, Gabriel. Although I wouldn’t put it past me.”
“Easy or hard?”
“What do you think?”
“No, I mean the eggs.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll like it any way you do it. Everything you do is just right.”
“Now see,” said Gabriel, “that’s what I think, too.”
Daniela picked up the newspaper from the kitchen table at which she sat. She looked out the window. “It was bright and sunny ten minutes ago! What’s wrong with this country?” Thunder echoed in the distance.
“Tell me, Dani, did you play any chess while you were, you know…”
“No, because I knew you would ask, and want to play with me once I got out, and then I’d have to put up with you when I beat you!” She giggled and poked at Coffin with her fork.
“Fair enough,” Gabriel said. “I am rather rusty. Been awhile. I stopped playing when I beat that computer game you bought me, where the animated pieces fight each other.”
“Your parents would be very proud.”
Coffin looked down at his plate. Daniela picked a piece of bacon off it. She looked into his eyes, then down quickly to the newspaper in her hands. “This headline reads that murder rates have gone down thirty percent this year, but the subheading says that shootings have increased. You know what that means, don’t you?”
“What?”
“It means that there are just as many criminals, but their aim has gotten worse.”
The empty plates were pushed aside, and the coffee was leaned over.
“Vuoi ancora del caffè?”
“No, grazie. Abbiamo qualcosa da fare, no?”
“Sì. I have to make a few phone calls, and then what shall we do before this evening?”
“This will all be sorted soon, won’t it? I mean, we’re on the right track.”