“Who’s dead? What do you mean?”
“You have no idea what you’ve set into motion with your meddling. No idea whatsoever.”
“I want to know what you mean. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to your father. I was in Seattle.”
“He’s dead, isn’t he? And a woman saw your stupid pictures and now she’s dead, too. But what do you care?”
“You’re crazy,” sputtered Elinore. “If anybody’s dead, it’s because of Perry Mannerback. Perry Mannerback killed your father. That’s what the police think. They called me at my daughter’s in Seattle. I know all about it.”
“Perry had nothing to do with my father’s death. Just leave him out of this.”
Elinore pounced at the opening.
“Aha!” she shouted. “Now I understand. Now I see what this is really about. He’s talked to you about more paintings, hasn’t he? Perry must have killed your father because he knew it would make his own painting more valuable. And now he’s convinced you not to let me sell any others so you can sell them to him directly without cutting me in! I’m sure the police will be really interested in this. It gives Perry a motive and everything. I’m going to call them. What do you think about that?”
This time it was Jane who hung up the phone with a bang. She had made it back to the bathroom and had one foot into the shower when the phone rang again. For a moment, she tried to ignore it. Then she stomped backed into the living room and grabbed the receiver.
“Now you listen to me, you miserable …”
“Are you still so mad at me?” said a male voice with a smooth British accent.
“Valentine!”
“I felt very bad after we spoke the last time. You know, you really have misunderstood this whole situation.”
“I suppose you can explain everything,” said Jane, happy to hear his voice despite herself.
“I can.”
“Well, that’s very nice, but I just was about to step into the shower.”
“Sounds interesting,” said Valentine. “Going out somewhere tonight?”
“Only to bed,” said Jane, too embarrassed to resume shivering.
“More interesting still. I was hoping that I could persuade you to come over to the Carlyle. I think we can clear everything up. There’s someone here who has a very proposition for you.”
“Nice try,” said Jane. “But I’m not up to being propositioned tonight, thank you very much. I’m still on London time and I’ve had a day that you wouldn’t believe.”
“Oh, I’m not the one with the proposition. At least not tonight. It’s my employer, Mr. Bogen.”
“Willie the Weasel?”
“That’s a very misleading and cruel nickname,” said Valentine. “Mr. Bogen’s really quite a decent chap; he just happens to be cunning in financial doings, which has engendered a certain amount of envy.”
“I’m sure.”
“He wants to explain to you about your ceramic clock. It will be greatly to your advantage.”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“I’m afraid that it has to be now,” said Valentine. “Mr. Bogen had intended to stay the entire week, but emergencies have come up in London and he has to fly back tonight in our company plane.”
“Sorry, Valentine. There’s nothing you could possibly say that is going to get me to come out tonight.”
“Please?” said Valentine.
“I …”
“I’d like to see you, too, Jane. I definitely want to see more of you.”
“Would you?” said Jane, reaching over and taking another sip of wine. As she did the towel around her slipped loose, leaving her naked and vulnerable in the draft.
It was a little before five-thirty when Jane stepped out of the cab in front of the Carlyle. The grand hotel took up the entire block of Madison Avenue between Seventy-sixth and Seventy-seventh streets. The tallest structure in the East Side historic district, it towered thirty-four stories above the smart shops and boutiques of the avenue. Somehow, however, the hotel was so quietly tasteful that from street level at least it seemed like nothing special. There wasn’t even a grand entrance on Madison, just a small doorway with a discreet marquee on the side street.
Inside, too, the hotel stood out for what it was not rather than what it was. There was no soaring lobby, no symphony of brass and velvet like the opulent hotels downtown. The Carlyle rated its five stars simply for being perfect. The large floral bouquet in the entry way was perfect. The Gobelins tapestries, the Louis XV-style furniture, even the window treatments, all perfect. Further inside, Jane could see a perfect dining room full of perfectly behaving guests. Somewhere off to the left was the bar that Ludwig Bemelmans of Madeline fame had decorated with perfect fanciful zebras to settle a bill and where jazz singer Bobby Short had held court for years.
Jane glanced at herself in a rococo mirror. Her hair was still Raphael Renaissance Red, but she looked remarkably good considering that she had begun the day more than fourteen hours ago in London, had knocked out a woman with a refrigerator, and had interfered with a police investigation in the meantime. She ascended the elevator. A few minutes later, she was poised outside the room on the twenty-eighth floor that Valentine had directed her to.
Jane found herself worrying again whether this was a good idea. She still didn’t know what Valentine was really up to, and Willie Bogen, according to Perry Mannerback at least, was some kind of monster. It didn’t seem likely that any harm could come to her in such posh surroundings, but after recent events she wasn’t sure of anything. How had she let herself be talked into this, she wondered, pressing the doorbell.
“Jane,” said Valentine, opening the door. He had on a gray sweater and looked gangly, goofy, and happy to see her.
“Hi.”
“So good of you to come,” he said, taking her arm and leading her from the vestibule into an elegantly appointed suite, all French furniture and endless views of Central Park from picture windows. “I’d like you to meet. …”
This was as far as he got. The answer to all Jane’s questions was sitting on a tufted sofa by the baby grand piano. He was a round little man who looked as if he might make his living helping Santa.
Jane blinked, expecting the illusion to disappear and be replaced by a fire-breathing dragon. It didn’t. The man’s cheeks were still chubby and dimpled and red. His nose was still a cherry. The heavy black frames of his glasses magnified eyes the color of robin’s eggs. A fringe of grayish hair stopped an inch above his pink little ears.
The butterball was in movement the instant they came into the room, leaping up from his perch to greet them, happily pumping Jane’s hand, all the while bouncing up and down like a six-week-old puppy.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome!” said the elf, speaking as rapidly as a machine gun in an accent somewhere between British and Yiddish, his face crinkled in merriment around an enormous smile. “Valentine, dear boy, now I can see why you were so impressed. Such a beautiful creature, a goddess, an ethereal goddess. Such skin! Such a face! Sheyna punim! That means ‘pretty face’ in Yiddish, which is obviously not your native tongue, you vision of loveliness and grace. And you found her on an airplane, Valentine, you clever boy? Oy, such a doll! But here I am going on without even properly introducing myself. William S. H. Bogen, investment counselor and financial manager extraordinaire, at your service—but you, my tall and gorgeous darling, you may call me Willie!”
Seventeen
“The name wasn’t originally Bogen, of course,” said Willie the Weasel, munching a smoked salmon canapé, one of an assortment that room service had provided, along with several chilled bottles of Piper Heidseck. “It was Katzenellenbogen. Papa had to shorten it when he embarked upon his stage career in Berlin before the first war. Try fitting Katzenellenbogen on a marquee.”
“Your father was an actor?” asked Jane, intrigued.
“My father was everything. You name it, he did it. Song and dance. Knife-throwing. Female impersonatio
n. Papa was a riot. European Jewry’s answer to the Ziegfeld Follies. In 1925, he moved to Budapest, so he could get into the movies. He ended up playing László, the Hungarian cowboy, in a whole series of silent pictures. Yippie-eye-o-kai-yay!”
Jane was trying not to fall under the little scoundrel’s spell, but it was difficult. Willie Bogen was charming, funny, and ridiculously generous—at least as far as hors d’oeuvres were concerned. There was enough smoked fish and caviar in the spacious suite to feed a significant portion of New Jersey.
“I was named after the famous American silent movie cowboy, William S. Hart, Willie rattled on after taking an appreciative sip of champagne, “but the Katzenellenbogens are actually a rabbinical family of great importance. They were descended from twelve Jews who settled originally in the town of Katzenelenbogen in Germany in 1312. The family moved to Padua toward the end of the fifteenth century and then to Poland a few generations later. I’ll have you know that Karl Marx was a descendant of Aaron Lvov of Trier, who was married to the daughter of Moses Cohen of Luck, who had married Nessla Katzenellenbogen and—”
“This is all very interesting, Mr. Bogen,” said Jane politely, “but I don’t see how it has anything to do with me.”
“Ah, but it has everything to do with you, dear girl,” said Willie, his eyes twinkling. “In that article about your father in the New York Times which Valentine so kindly brought to my attention, did I not read that the name of your paternal grandmother was Luria?”
“Yes, but …”
“In the sixteenth century, Isaac Katzenellenbogen married the daughter of Zeisel and Eliezer Shernzel of Lvov. Zeisel was the daughter of Jehiel Luria, whose family were descended over the previous two hundred years from none other than Mattithiah Treves of Provence.”
Jane stared blankly at him.
“Don’t you see?” demanded Willie. “The Treveses, the Lurias, the Katzenellenbogens. We’re all related! In fact, each of our three families can trace its respective line back to Rashi, the famous Talmudic scholar, whose lineage, it is well documented, goes back through the great rabbi, Hillel, to King David, and ultimately back directly to Adam!”
“Fascinating, isn’t it?” said Valentine Treves, flashing an amused smile. “Genealogy is one of Willie’s hobbies.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Willie, raising his hand. “But I want to reassure you, Cousin Jane—may I call you Jane?—I want to reassure you, Jane, that I cannot believe that you and Valentine will have idiot children should you choose to marry, which seems a reasonable possibility judging from the way that Valentine is admiring you at this very instant. No, the genetic connection is simply too remote.”
“Mr. Bogen …” sputtered Jane, struggling for words.
“Willie, please call me Willie,” he said, pronouncing it with more of a “V” than a “W.” “Everyone calls me Willie. Don’t be shy. We’re mispocheh.”
“Mispocheh?”
“Family,” interpreted Valentine. “The extraordinary thing is that somehow Willie manages to be related to practically everyone he’s ever met. No one in my family even knew that Grandfather John had been born a Jew until Willie rooted out the birth record.”
“Now, Valentine,” said Willie, shaking his finger. “How many times have I told you? Connections between people are a blessing from God. We need to find the things that bring us together, not lead us apart. You have to forgive Valentine, my dear. He has an overdeveloped sense of irony because his mother named him after a song. Her funny Valentine. What kind of name is Valentine for a nice Jewish boy, I ask you?”
“What kind of name is William S. Hart?” replied Valentine in a mild voice.
“Mr. Bogen,” said Jane. “Villie. Willie. I’m sure that whatever may have happened in the thirteenth century is all very interesting, but it’s not what I came over here for. If you want to tell me about connections, why don’t you start with how you’re connected to Isidore Rosengolts?”
“I will tell you anything you’d like to hear, anything,” said Willie. “Are we not mispocheh?”
“The truth is all I want.”
“And so you shall have it, my dear, so you shall have it,” said Willie, rapping the table decisively with a knuckle. “But first have some fish.”
He picked up a tray of appetizers and held it out to her.
“Mr. Bogen, please,” said Jane, pulling back.
“I can see why you like her, Valentine,” said Willie. “She’s relentless, just like you. The two of you will have wonderful fights in your old age. Come on, my dear, just a little piece so it shouldn’t go to waste.”
Jane reached over and begrudgingly popped a piece of salmon into her mouth.
“Okay?” she said, her mouth full.
“Good, isn’t it?” said Willie. “And please try the champagne. It’s very nice.”
“Delicious,” said Jane, taking a gulp. It was.
Willie winked at Valentine, then sat back on the couch, making himself comfortable for what apparently would be a long story.
“Okay,” he began. “So here is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I met Isidore Rosengolts in the Swiss detention camp where I spent most of World War Two. William S. Hart notwithstanding, my father had wanted a more stable life for me than the theatre, and I had begun apprenticing as a watchmaker with a cousin of my mother’s. Somehow I had managed to get a visa and was in Switzerland buying mainsprings when the war broke out. I never heard from anyone in my family again, but this is another story.”
He paused, matter-of-factly took a sip of champagne, then resumed.
“The course of Isidore’s life had been interrupted by events far beyond his control, too, so we had a certain amount in common. We were both young, both displaced in a strange land, and we spoke a common language: Yiddish. We became fairly friendly, as friendly as you can become with a person like Isidore.”
Jane heaped a generous helping of caviar onto a little toast round and added some chopped hardboiled egg. Willie beamed and continued.
“The Swiss in their typical fashion had figured out how to make a profit from their refugees. Rather than murdering Jews as the Germans did, the Swiss put us all to work building roads, maintaining farms, this sort of thing. It was hard work, but a considerably better fate than what would have befallen me if I had stayed in Hungary. It was with a pickax in my hand that I first heard from Isidore about a very special ceramic clock, decorated with back-to-back handless faces, that his grandfather had made for a physician in Antwerp just before the war began.”
Jane stiffened.
“Mr. Rosengolts didn’t seem to think it was all that special,” she said.
“Mr. Rosengolts is a big fat liar,” Willie replied with a smile. “Izzie was always a big fat liar. He once convinced me that butterflies had pupiks.”
“Bellybuttons,” said Valentine, who seemed to have absorbed a significant amount of Yiddish on the job.
“Another time,” Willie went on, “he had me believing that every Catholic in Belgium had a twelve-foot-high cross in his upstairs closet that had to be shpritzed with red wine twice a week to symbolize the suffering of Christ. After a while I stopped believing anything Izzie said. I was sure he was lying when he told me about the clock for the first time, it was such an unlikely story. You can see why I was more than a little skeptical when two Sundays ago he rings me up out of the blue, after I hadn’t heard a word from him in twenty years, and offers to sell me this very same clock.”
“He didn’t have it,” said Jane flatly.
“And I didn’t believe it even existed,” said Willie, nodding happily. “Then the next day, Valentine rings me from Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. So we’re chatting about this splendid Simon Willard lighthouse clock that I have practically stolen from underneath the goyische nose of Peregrine Mannerback, the famous American idiot. I tell Valentine about this make-believe clock that Rosengolts now proposes to sell me. Valentine tells me to pick up a copy of that Sun
day’s New York Times. In it, he says to my amazement, is a painting with just such a handless ceramic clock.
“So I get the article, and sure enough, there is a picture of a clock exactly like the one Isidore had described to me in Switzerland more than half a century ago. And the article says that the painter of this picture had a mother who fled Antwerp just about the time that Izzie Rosengolts’s grandfather is supposed to have made his clock.”
Jane glanced over at Valentine. He winked, licked his lips, and popped a canapé in his mouth. Flustered, Jane returned her attention to Willie.
“This past Thursday, I hear from Izzie again,” the little elf went on cheerfully, not having missed the exchange. “We have spoken a few times on the telephone in the meanwhile, but now he actually shows up on my doorstep, demanding to know if I am going to purchase his clock. I am interested, I say, but by this point you, Jane, have come to England and have claimed to Valentine that the clock is in your possession. So I tell Izzie that I do not believe he even has this clock. He gets very insulted. He will produce something that will prove he has the clock, but there will be a price. There is always a price with Izzie. He swears that now he will never in a million years sell me the clock unless I pay him five thousand pounds that very day for this.”
Willie reached into his pocket and held up a shiny object. Jane gasped. It was her mother’s dragonfly cross.
“By this point, the existence of the clock seemed more believable because of a certain document that had turned up,” said Willie. “I wasn’t sure who had the clock, but sometimes you have to take a gamble in life. So I paid his little extortion.”
“I guess Mr. Rosengolts’s dragonfly medal wasn’t as precious to him as he said,” said Jane.
“Medal?” said Willie with a laugh, following Jane’s eyes to the object in his hand.
“He said it was a medal his grandfather had won at some decorative arts fair,” said Jane. “I always thought it was a cross.”
The Girl in the Face of the Clock Page 19