He nodded regretfully at me, telling me, in essence, that all of what I just said was true. He said, “Jack, we can work together, or we can compete—”
“Last time we worked together didn’t turn out so well,” I said sharply, cutting him off.
“Which is why we need each other now.”
“You used me, Agent Jankle, or your Bureau used me. You set me up so that a young woman, an innocent, died. Now you offer nothing in the way of making amends. When you decide to give me something, let me know, and maybe at that point we can help each other out.”
I knocked my fist on the table, much as I had done when the conversation started. I stood and walked away, catching a last glance at his enormously sad eyes as I made my way past him. He just sat there, still resigned, making no attempt to stop me. A voice called out to me from the practice green, “Hey Keebler, have time for a quick nine?”
Would it be that life was so easy, a leisurely little round of golf, straight drives, the occasional five iron onto the green, make a few putts, have a beer in the clubhouse before heading back to work. Instead, my job, my life, my world, seemed ready to explode, if it hadn’t already.
It was Juan, from San Juan, who had extended the invitation. “Soon,” I called back, never breaking stride for my car.
As I was pulling out of the lot, the music on the stereo stopped and the news began at the top of the eight o’clock hour. There wasn’t a farmer in the nation that had anything on me in terms of early-morning work today. Anyway, the anchorman all but called out my name when he said, “Police have questioned the estranged boyfriend Charles, better known as Chuck, Hamlin, in yesterday’s Boston Common Garage slaying of his former girlfriend, Hilary Kane, sources tell WBZ News…” I listened for more, but there wasn’t any, this being the soundbite way of drive-time radio.
I thought of poor Chuck, probably that dislikable soul from the turned-over photos in Hilary’s apartment, his hair all thick and his chin strong and his face too pretty in a prep school kind of way. I thought of him getting arrested—printed and photographed down at headquarters in Roxbury, tossed into a holding cell without the dignity of his leather belt or the laces on his Kenneth Cole shoes, his $400 an hour family lawyer rushing in to threaten civil rights violations at a bunch of cops who wouldn’t bother stifling their collective yawn.
Chuck wouldn’t do well in the Big House, despite the fact that I’m sure he lives in one now. Lucky for him, he’s got nothing to do with the murder. I knew that. He knew that. The federal agent I had just left behind at the Franklin Park Golf Course knew that. Question was, did the Boston police know that? At a time when it suddenly seemed that anything goes, when shots are fired in Copley Square, when newspaper stories lead to the slayings of young women, when sisters are forced on transatlantic runs for their lives, how was anyone to know? All of which placed yet another burden on the already strained life of Jack Flynn.
“Chuck,” I said to the radio dial, “be nice to those detectives, or you have no idea what you may get yourself into.”
Chapter Fifteen
T he Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is one of these uniquely Boston places that we all claim as our collective own, but truth is, precious few of us ever knew we had—at least not until we woke up to the headlines screaming of the brazen heist of some of our most beloved treasures.
I was working in Washington at the time of the crime, in the paper’s D.C. bureau, and I remember having two questions the day the news broke: How dare they, and where the hell’s the Gardner? It’s not easy to feel a loss over something you never knew you had, but still, you manage. It’s another part of the human condition.
More than a dozen years had passed—more than a dozen years of hopes and frustrations and sweat and tears, a dozen years of dogged search and inevitable failure, a dozen years that either froze the trail toward the suspects or periodically reignited the possibility that somewhere, somehow, someone would tire of the wait and say something that would lead to the return. Paintings couldn’t be spent. They’d have no currency if they were destroyed. They were stashed someplace, the optimists always said, and at some point, they would find their way home.
Who knew the route home would come through the Record newsroom, specifically my desk, at least for Vermeer’s The Concert? Certainly not Stephen Holden, the chairman of the board of trustees of the Gardner Museum. He met me on the top steps of the ancient brick building, shook my hand as if it were a piece of molten rock too hot to grip, and led me inside the enormous double doors. For a guy who lives for life’s aesthetic, who derives all his purpose, his raison d’être, as he might say, from the visual world, he wouldn’t look me in the eye for even a passing fraction of a single second, a fact that quietly, inexplicably, infuriated me. But I kept my anger in check as we walked into the cavernous lobby, gazed up at the tall ceilings, and said to him in an unintentionally rubish kind of way, “Quite a place this is, Stephen.”
“Steph-an,” he said, nearly looking at me, but not quite. He pronounced his name like a Newbury Street hairdresser might. I’m sure I saw in the Record’s old clips on him that it was spelled Stephen, and I’d bet some pretty good coin that his parents intended it to be pronounced Stephen, but what are you going to do? Well, here’s what I did: When he introduced me moments later to the museum’s media affairs director as Jack Flynn, I smiled and said, “Jacques.”
The director, an accessibly pleasant-looking middle-aged woman named Betsy, smiled curiously back at me. I caught Steph-an staring me full in the face for the first time with something that actually resembled respect. Then I said, “Just kidding. My mother was a big Cousteau fan, but she wouldn’t make me pay the price.”
Steph-an, by the way, was an elegant guy of about sixty years of age in the kind of perfectly tailored black suit that you don’t expect to see outside of the fashion capitals of New York, Milan, or Paris. He was neither large nor small, tall nor short, fat nor thin, but someplace in the comfortable middle of all that and more. His close-cropped hair wasn’t so much white as colorless, almost like the pallor of his skin. Maybe he was gay or maybe he was straight or maybe like so much else, he fell somewhere in between. I just know that he appeared to exist so seamlessly in this museum life that he made me feel conscious of every one of my inevitably human traits. This was one of those rare times in an otherwise confident existence that I actually wondered what someone must think about my very practical shoes.
Now I’m not saying all this is necessarily bad, or that I felt a visceral dislike for the man. To Steph-an’s considerable credit, he had won raves as the extraordinarily passionate and tireless overseer of one of the world’s truly great institutions of art, and for that, he deserves a city’s appreciation, including mine. I also needed his help here, which was the purpose of this little sojourn. Just like I wanted to see the street that Hilary Kane walked down on her way toward an unacceptably early death, I wanted to see the scene of one of Boston’s most infamously unsolved crimes. Steph-an, for the latter, was a key to a proper understanding of the depth of loss.
Betsy handed me her business card and pleasantly peeled off. Steph-an, walking a couple of paces in front of me, led me from the museum’s lobby into one of the first rooms. I asked, conversationally, “What’s the price of admission?” and regretted the question even as it was coming out of my mouth.
“Ten dollars, but you don’t have to worry. We’ll cover you today,” Steph-an said coolly.
I wasn’t worried, I could have told him. My paper would pay for it, and even if I had to, I had an equity stake in the damn company from the time I almost brought down the president of the United States, so a ten-spot wasn’t really going to hit me all that hard. Instead, like a chastened boy, I said, “Thanks,” and vowed to myself to be good.
As we proceeded onward, he was silent, much as if he were walking his dog. I followed just behind him, much as if I were his dog. I finally said to him, at considerable risk of further embarrassment, “Like I said o
n the phone, I was hoping you could show me where the paintings once hung so I can get a visual image in my mind.”
“That won’t be hard,” he said to me cryptically, and I wondered for a moment if I should be in some way insulted. Probably, but who really cared? Well, me, kind of.
A moment later, Steph-an slowed down to allow me to catch up, and said to me, “The walls where the paintings and sketches once hung are still bare. Mrs. Gardner’s will specifically stipulates that if any treasures are inappropriately removed from the museum, the space from whence they came shall remain as was until the occasion of their return.”
He paused here before adding, “I don’t know if she intended it this way, but it serves as a daily reminder of the enormous loss that we in the art world all feel. It pushes us constantly to secure their recovery.”
I didn’t like the way he talked, very, for lack of a better word, uppity, his words too carefully chosen. At the same time, I saw no compelling reason to share this with him, so instead, I asked, “You mean, the walls simply stand bare where, say, The Concert used to hang?”
Condescendingly, he replied, “That’s what I just said.”
I wondered if any of the nice, pearl-wearing patrons of the museum would rush to his aid if I walloped him so hard in the face that he knocked over an ancient Chinese vase on his way to the floor. This was no time to find out, though. Not until I got more of what I needed.
He stopped in one of the ornate rooms, in front of a bare spot on an off-white wall and said, “This is where Storm was presented.” As he said this, he hung his head in sorrow like a churchgoer at Good Friday services.
We repeated this exercise another half a dozen times, each one of them in front of a blank space on an unassuming wall. I don’t know why it reminded me of the way I kept my infant daughter’s nursery intact for a full year after she died at birth, but it did, and consequently, it made me terribly sad, this loss of something so irreplaceable. It made me realize, viscerally as I disliked him, that these treasures were Steph-an’s adopted children, and lost in the theft was a big chunk of his heart.
It also made me think of Elizabeth, made me realize how she was so careful not to leave a damned thing behind in her move west, as if she’d never, ever have a compelling reason to return. I mean, she even took clothes that she never wore out of a storage closet. She took photo albums of her childhood stored in boxes that we rarely opened. She took some of the kitchen utensils that were hers that she knew I liked to use. She hadn’t just moved away. She was gone—forever. I knew it, and so did she, and damned the both of us for being incapable of having an adult conversation about what had gone wrong.
I thought of all this as I stared at the blank spot on the wall where Vermeer’s The Concert was supposed to hang. I should have felt something of a rebirth, knowing, as I did, that the painting had been returned, that it would grace this space yet again, sometime very soon. But all I really felt was loss—for Hilary Kane, for Maggie, for Katherine, for Elizabeth, for the great Mongillo who was leaving the sanity of journalism for the intellectual corruption of public relations. The world seemed filled at the moment with the hollow echoes of an irretrievable past, sad at a core that couldn’t actually be touched.
Steph-an looked at me and said, “Do you want to go talk?”
I thought for a passing moment he meant about my life, about my deep sense of unshakable sadness, and I almost hugged him, but not really. He instead meant the paintings and the museum’s efforts to recover them, so before making an ass of myself again I nodded my head in the affirmative and we made off for his upstairs office.
It was, by the way, a grand little enclave, graced with a richly colored Oriental rug and an ornate desk that surely hailed from some long-ago French period marked by a king’s name and followed by a Roman numeral that I undoubtedly wouldn’t be able to guess. Autumn sunshine streamed through the tall windows, and graceful modern paintings adorned the cappuccino-colored walls. The dentil moldings alone seemed an independent work of art.
Old Steph-an removed his black suit coat and settled behind his desk in an absurd position of authority. I took my place in an upholstered chair.
“Your story,” he began, “did not come as a surprise to us.”
Of course not. What would a peon like me be able to say to him that would ever be original, let alone surprising? Actually, how about this: Here’s your Vermeer back.
Here in the realm of the interview rather than in the world of art, I felt more comfortable, and replied with a rediscovered confidence, “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
“What I mean is that our private investigators have been pursuing an underworld connection in Boston for the last year. The FBI is fully aware of this. I was surprised that they’d leak it like they did to the news media.”
He said this last sentence, especially those last two words, with a coating of disdain all across his tongue. The truth is, they didn’t leak it generically to the news media that he so despises. They leaked it to the Record, specifically to me, with an alternative purpose that I now needed to learn—and quickly.
There was nothing for me to get out of a fencing match with him, or by putting forth a defense of my chosen profession, so I said, “You have private investigators?”
He gave me that look like I had just traveled east from one of the Dakotas and replied, “Since the day the paintings were stolen.”
“They work with the FBI?”
“They’re former FBI.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He hesitated here before answering, “Sometimes, our objectives are different. Government authorities, specifically the FBI, would like to make arrests and punish the perpetrators. Of course, we would like to see punishment meted out as well, but our principal goal is the return of the treasures. We view that as necessary beyond everything else.”
He was talking in a code here that I was supposed to understand, but I wasn’t 100 percent sure that I actually did, so I asked, “So how are you trying to achieve your—” and I paused for a fraction of a second here, not entirely on purpose “—objective?”
“Money.” Steph-an Holden, arrogant to the core, especially around a troglodyte like me, had no problem admitting that he was shirking the public code.
I asked, masking my surprise, “Ransom?”
“This is all, what is it that you people say, off the record.”
You people. He was just dripping with charm now. But more important, he was giving me information that I was sure would prove crucial; I just wasn’t so sure yet in what capacity.
He continued, “We’ve amassed a little more than $10 million in private donations from wealthy benefactors of the museum, and have made it very clear within known organized crime circles in Boston and New York that we’re willing to pay that amount for the safe return of the paintings.”
I remained silent, as I’m wont to do, waiting, hoping, for more. In an uncharacteristic bit of defensiveness, Steph-an added, “It’s a known and accepted practice among museums, paying ransom for priceless works. Insurance companies encourage it, and government authorities are quietly complicit in it.”
I wanted to point out that the works weren’t so priceless once you paid for them, but decided to hold fire. Instead, I asked, “So the FBI knows that you’re looking to pay for the safe return?”
“Some members within the FBI. The agency doesn’t necessarily work as a unified organization.”
Thank you, Steph-an Holden, for the lesson in the ways of the law enforcement world. I once again wanted to level the guy, but instead asked, “Is it Toby Harkins who you’re looking to pay?”
“Toby Harkins is a fugitive. We wouldn’t know how to pay him even if we tried. But we do know people who might be connected to him who are taking part in the negotiations.”
I asked the obvious question, as I’m also sometimes wont to do: “Who?”
Steph-an looked at me long and hard across his antique desk as he sl
owly, firmly shook his head. It occurred to me at that precise moment that he had already told me more than he wanted me to know—not necessarily because of my exquisite reporting skills, though those should certainly never be underestimated, but more because of his base conceit, that he could thrust and parry with a bovinelike reporter and never possibly come out on the losing edge.
I didn’t think that Steph-an Holden had necessarily done anything wrong, but I wasn’t so sure that what he was doing was actually right. The moral high ground upon which he believed he stood, the intellectual plateau, seemed to be sliding decidedly downward. Suddenly, we were eye to eye, and he had a newfound recognition of it.
For kicks, if only to subtly remind him that he had put himself in a precarious position, I asked again, “Who?”
He abruptly stood up and said, “I’ve had quite enough here. I’ll have my assistant show you to the door.”
He didn’t so much as offer me a shake of his flaccid hand. I wonder if he’d be as reticent the next day when he learned about the return of his famous Vermeer.
W hen I walked outside into the brilliant day, I couldn’t help but notice a rather large man in a black suit—this one looking like it came from the bargain rack at JC Penney—leaning against the passenger door of my car. He, too, was eating a lunch from McDonald’s, making it a little bit difficult to buy into the news reports of the tough business times in McDonaldland. I mean, these monsters I’ve seen today probably consumed the right side of a Nebraskan steer.
Anyway, he allowed a cheeseburger wrapper to float aimlessly away in the autumn breeze. I stooped and picked it up as it skittered past me, handed it to him and said, “You dropped this.”
He took the last bite of his burger and with a full mouth, said, “I’m about to drop more than that in a minute.”
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