“I see three women in a room—” and here I borrowed off the title to make what I thought was an impressive-sounding assumption—“giving a little concert in the way they used to do.”
“Yeah,” he said. He repeated that, saying, “Yeah,” softly, slowly, and then in that same absent voice, “You really are an ass, aren’t you?”
I didn’t think so, but mine is a subjective view. Before I could reply, Mongillo said, “First off, that figure in the middle with his back to us, that’s a man.”
I peered more closely at the painting and saw from the robes and possibly the long, flowing, Christlike hair that Mongillo was indeed correct in his gender identification.
“And you’re right, there is a, ahem, little concert going on, but there’s so much more. It looks so innocent, doesn’t it, but it’s not.”
He paused here to stare harder still at the painting, and I did as well, though he seemed to be seeing things that I couldn’t find.
He glanced at me for a flicker of a moment and said, “Look at the depth of light, at the richness of color, at the enormous meaning.”
I saw a few people playing a song.
“It’s so serene on one level, isn’t it? And yet, the serenity is a mask for the turbulent, sexual undertone that nearly engulfs the entire work.”
I, again, saw a few people playing a song.
I asked, “How the hell do you know all this?”
“I know,” he said, “because it’s beautiful.” He paused for a moment and added in words that were now hardened by some frustration, “You don’t see the meaning, do you?”
“Well, I, I think—”
“Look,” he said, cutting me off, “at the Van Baburen on the wall, The Procuress. Look at what it tells us about these three people. Look at the sexuality it exudes.”
At that point, Mongillo reached out his hand as if to touch the part of the canvas where The Procuress was depicted, and poor Edgar, standing sentry, slapped his arm up and barked, “No touch.”
Martin, seeing an opening, piped in, “Can we can the art history lesson while I ask just one very plebeian question: Is it real?”
Mongillo looked at Edgar and then at Martin and finally back at the painting. All around us, reporters stood on tiptoe or climbed up on desks for a view of the proceedings. Ringing phones, including mine, went unanswered. Emails sat unread. All eyes were now on Mongillo as he was set to explain whether one of the most significant treasures ever stolen in the refined world of art sat right here in the Record newsroom.
He said, “Only experts, trained chemists, could tell you for certain. They’ll test chips of paint scraped from the perimeter. But I’ve got to tell you, it looks real to me.”
There was an audible buzz in the room. Edgar, God bless him, moved closer to the painting, as if to protect it. Martin called out for all to hear, “People, we publish 365 days a year, and tomorrow would be one of those days. Don’t you have stories you need to write?” And then he added, “No one, and I mean absolutely no one, is to tell anyone anywhere outside of this room what we correctly or incorrectly believe we might or might not have. That’s a job-dependent order.”
Then he looked at Mongillo and at me with a cross of anger and intrigue. “You two, in my office. Edgar, please carry the canvas in with us.” And the ever-efficient Peter Martin turned and walked away.
Roughly six years before, a reputable reporter for the rival Boston Traveler was driven along a “circuitous and somewhat paranoid” route under the cover of dark by an informant who was never named in print. He was taken to what he would only describe as a “run-down warehouse” in a “barren and forsaken” district somewhere in the Northeast.
There, the informant opened a pair of airtight caps at each end of a heavy-duty poster tube, then unfurled what he claimed was Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, another treasure stolen in the Gardner heist. The only illumination in the warehouse was the informant’s flashlight. No photographs were allowed, no fragments of the painting could be taken, and within fifteen minutes, the reporter was sent on his way.
At the time, it was widely believed that the informant was working for a pair of convicted swindlers and thieves who were trying to broker the return of the stolen paintings and drawings in return for legal immunity and the $5 million reward posted by the museum.
A couple of months later, the Traveler obtained photographs and some minuscule paint chips which, when tested by art experts, were deemed not to be from the stolen Rembrandt. At that point, the negotiations dissolved into a fit of accusations and name-calling.
And now this. Edgar had placed the canvas back into the tube, sealed it up, and sat in a chair in the corner of the office with the tube between his legs. The three of us—Mongillo, Martin, and myself—sat around a cheap, circular conference table. Martin immediately broke the ice with this memorable line: “What the fuck.”
“Five minutes,” Mongillo said, apropos of nothing. “Just let me hang that thing in my apartment for five minutes. Let me revel in it. Let me luxuriate in its presence. For Christ’s sake, let me die a happy man, and this is the only thing that can possibly allow for that.”
Martin looked at Mongillo, opened his mouth as if to say something, then thought better of it. Instead, he looked from one of us to the other and said, “Okay, before we get lawyers and all the bullshit involved, let’s just hash things out for a moment. From my quick review of our situation, we have two broad options. First, we keep the painting and figure out what to do with it. Second, we immediately turn it over to authorities.”
He paused and looked down at a legal pad he had in front of him and scratched out a couple of notes in the brief quiet. “Under Option One, we run a story in tomorrow’s paper saying this painting—what the hell did you call it, Vinny, The Concerto?”
“The Concert,” Mongillo replied urgently, as if Martin had just mispronounced the name of his girlfriend. “Vermeer’s The Concert.”
“Right. Okay, so we can run a story saying that someone delivered this canvas to the Record and we’re trying to ascertain if it’s real. Or Two, we wait and have it tested and base any story—if it warrants one at all—on the results.”
I nodded. Martin locked in on me for a moment. Then he continued, “Under Option Two, we lose control of the painting, but legally, we’re probably on safer footing, no? And if we’re good doobies and relinquish control, the FBI and the museum might feel the obligation to play ball with us as the story unfolds. And whoever sent us the painting, we should assume, will still continue to use us as a conduit, giving us better bargaining power with the Feds.”
You know, you go through too many days listening to too many ridiculous ideas from too many self-indulgent people who know far less than they could ever possibly imagine, and half the time protocol requires that you sit there and nod with an occasionally murmured “Sure.” And then every once in a rare while, you come across pure genius like this. Understand, Martin can be as skittish as a rodent. He can be shortsighted, recklessly impatient, and just plain aggravating. But time and again, in the toughest of situations, he can distill the most complicated situations down to their most basic ingredients, always with a mind toward getting the story into print.
He looked at me here and said, “What’s your take?”
My take was that the first half of Option One wasn’t a viable option at all, and I sense he knew that. You can’t ramble into print with raw speculation, especially when you’re putting the good name of the newspaper on the line in more ways than one. Option Two wasn’t much to my liking either because of the level of control that we’d lose. I’d rather be the one gunning for birdies than sitting in the clubhouse hoping that the final players on the eighteenth green miss their putts for par.
That left Option One-b, so to speak, which I liked very much. Find out what we have or don’t have. Keep our hand on the wheel. Be the public’s agent in a case that the government has failed to solve for thirteen years. Have we received
stolen merchandise, in this case, a priceless painting? Maybe, but we can’t and won’t know that until we get it tested. There would be a proper time to turn the canvas over to authorities, but right then wasn’t it. For all we knew, the canvas we had contained little numbers beneath the paint.
So I said all this, and concluded, “Keep it and test it.”
Martin nodded and turned to Mongillo, who said, “What he says. And I’d be glad to hold on to it until you find a suitable expert.”
Martin, looking down again at his legal pad, said, “I’ll run interference with our company lawyers. We’ll run no mention of this in tomorrow’s stories.” He turned and looked at Edgar. “You’ll stay with me and the painting will stay with you. Do you have relief who you can pass it on to?”
Edgar replied with great certainty, “I don’t pass this on to anyone. I’m with it until I’m ordered to give it up.”
I never again looked at him in the same way. Before I could stand and make my escape, Martin said to us, “So what do we have for tomorrow’s paper?”
My mind flashed back to the scene in Hilary Kane’s apartment, to my lunch at the University Club, to the single gunshot in Copley Square. No sense in lying to him, so I explained to Martin how I had essentially squandered my day in pursuit of a hunch that hadn’t yet panned out.
Barely able to contain his frustration, he said to me, “Well then, I guess we’ll just lean on Smitty and Hasbro”—our federal court and FBI reporters—“to write the investigation story. Let me know if something falls in your lap.”
That last phrase, for anyone keeping track at home, is an insult in my business, implying that to break something on this story, it would have to just be effortless luck. Ah, the difference a day makes.
Vinny and I walked out of the glass office together, and halfway toward our respective desks, with the buzz of deadline all around us, he said to me in a tone of uncharacteristic earnestness, “Fair Hair, I really need to talk to you. Today.”
“Vin,” I replied, not even looking at him, “my whole world is caving in. Don’t get too close or you’ll be gone with it.”
And I kept walking, knowing the enormous pit in my stomach had less to do with Vermeer or the Kane sisters than the events of the night ahead.
Chapter Eleven
W e pulled up to the airport, Elizabeth sitting stone-faced in the passenger seat, Baker sprawled in the back with his chin resting on the seat between his front paws. He was, the dog that he is, taking his cue from us in regards to his mood, and the cue was—very decidedly—to be forlorn.
The ride from the waterfront to Logan, in terms of total miles, encompassed about three of them. So why then, one might logically wonder, did I feel like a member of the Donner Party who had just eaten one of their relatives on their endless journey across the snow-covered cliffs of the Continental Divide?
Along the way, we tried to keep the sparse conversation on completely safe terrain—when would the movers arrive in San Francisco with her stuff, when would she report to work, what might her first story be, where was the art museum story headed. But during one of the many lulls, I said to her, sincerely but incorrectly, “I love you.” I paused and added, “You know that, right?”
The polite answer, the easy one anyway, would have been for Elizabeth to say, “Of course I do, Jack. And I love you too.” But Elizabeth, being every inch a woman, and a wonderfully strong one at that, instead replied, “Sometimes I do. But mostly I don’t—not anymore.” She said this while blankly staring out the front window as the narrow environs of the Callahan Tunnel slapped past.
I remained quiet for a moment, partly in contemplation, partly to make sure this farewell didn’t ignite into unnecessary trench-to-trench combat.
She stepped into that cold and barren expanse and said, “But I understand.”
To the uninitiated, this might be cause for celebration, a woman, a good woman, essentially saying that it’s okay to act the way I have, to be the person I’ve been, because she in some way understands the forces behind it, the very cause. But by now, I knew that would be a gravely naïve, even stupid read, an invitation to a much more strident fight.
I said, “Then I should tell you more often.” Notice the effective use of the present tense, keeping everything forward-looking and harmonious and all that other good stuff.
“You should love me more.” She said this without a moment’s hesitation, her words coming out flat and plain like distant rifle fire.
We were heading out of the tunnel now into the dusk of a September night. The lighted billboards along the side of the ramshackle highway pictured exotic places like Paris and a sugar-sand Caribbean beach, including one with a slogan, Closer Than You Think…. Yeah, maybe, but not even the recently retired Concorde could have effectively whisked me away from the helpless moroseness of this farewell scene.
I stayed quiet again as I pulled into the airport. My eyes absently followed a jet silently ascending above the terminal buildings and floating toward destinations unknown, all those lucky passengers rising to the clouds, leaving so much of this behind, looking down at this world in all of its relative inconsequence.
She said to me, for the second time now, “But I understand.”
I knew where she was going. I knew where she was going because we had both been there before, and I’ll readily admit, I’d rather be on my way to Paris or the Caribbean.
“You tried, Jack, you did, and I appreciate that. I love you, and you know that. There was a time, a long time, when I wanted to marry you and make babies with you and grow old and spoil grandkids and travel the world, and to always come home to a place, a big old drafty house, that we liked more than anyplace else. And we’d like it because we were in it together, always.”
I’d never actually been kicked in the stomach by a shod horse, but I imagine this is how it might feel. I lost my breath for the briefest of moments as my mind raced toward a scene involving an eternally shapely, fashionably dressed and graying Elizabeth Riggs picking up a grandchild in the kitchen of our suburban home and resting her on the counter while she cooked the type of dinner that she never even considered in her first forty years on Earth.
She said, “You tried, Jack, but you can’t do it, at least not with me. You lost more than your wife and your baby in that delivery room a few years ago. You lost a part of your soul. It makes me love you even more, but it also makes me crazy that there isn’t a damned thing I can do to help. I always thought I’d be able to, but now I’ve come to terms with the fact that I never will.”
It’s funny what happens in these fights. The optimistic part of me, which I’d like to think is the biggest part of me, thought that by opening the door to a confrontation, what I’d find on the other side was something so simple as a back and forth over why we had been noncommunicative over the past few weeks. We’d talk about it, we’d both apologize, we’d make plans for me to fly out there in early October for a quiet weekend of relationship rebuilding by the Bay. Big kiss, have a good flight. Maybe we didn’t get at the core of the issue, but the core of anything is often too hot a place to be.
And then this. The door flings open and what you find is a veritable cauldron of unfathomable female emotion—stunningly practical at one level, devastatingly complicated at another, all told with Elizabeth’s admirable economy of words. She might be tough, but she was never melodramatic.
We were pulling into the garage by now. This was not an occasion when I could zip right up to the terminal, yank her luggage from the trunk, and tearfully kiss her good-bye, all as a pesky state cop hollers something about me idling in a no-parking zone. So I found a space and said, “I don’t agree with that.”
That’s what I said; the reality, I’m not so sure. Elizabeth had a knack for being right in these things, and tended to be a scholar of all things Jack. I had a tendency to block so much of the emotion out, mostly because if I didn’t, I feared it would swallow me whole.
It was four years before that Kat
herine and I rushed through the doors of Georgetown Hospital on the day that we were to have our first baby, which was going to be one of the truly great days in our already blessed lives. Six hours later, I staggered from that hospital completely, unequivocally, incomprehensibly alone, in many ways forever changed, in other crucial ways always stuck in the awful moments of that single day. Katherine died that afternoon, of what the exhausted doctor explained to me was a placental tear. The baby, our daughter, died as well, literally drowning on the blood that had nourished her for all those pregnant months.
When I got back to our empty town house that afternoon, if I had owned a gun I probably would have loaded it. If I had a garage, I would have pulled the doors shut and sat in my car. I’m not saying I would have killed myself. In fact, I can reasonably say that sound judgment would have prevailed. But never in my life had I ever felt such utter, inconsolable loneliness, not just for what had just happened, but for the ache of what did not.
Instead, I sat on the couch, Baker mournfully, nervously at my feet, and cried like I never have before and hope never to again. I cried until I couldn’t see. I cried until I couldn’t think, until I didn’t have any tears left to shed. On my way to bed, our bed, I pulled the door shut on the nursery that we never got to use. I opened the pocket doors of Katherine’s closet, and her familiar smells, calm smells, beautiful smells, gently wafted out. I ran my hand down the back of my favorite black dress of hers, the one she wore to our favorite restaurant, La Chaumière, the night she gave me the news. We had ordered dessert and were waiting for it. I leaned over the table and told her in no uncertain terms what I was planning to do with her once we got home.
She said to me, “Jack, I owe you an apology for being something of a bitch lately, but it’s all your fault.”
Truth is, she had been something of a bitch lately, somewhat short, tired, put upon. I said with sincere curiosity, “What the hell did I do?”
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