“Convoluted,” Rita said.
“It is,” I said.
“But you can’t ignore it,” Rita said.
“No, I can’t.”
“Is it a real serial number,” Rita said. “The tattoo?”
“It looks right,” I said. “You know, the right amount of numbers and such.”
“Maybe it can be traced.”
“Quirk’s working on that,” I said.
“You ID’d the two guys who tried to kill you?”
“Not yet.”
“You got any physical evidence linking the attempt on you to the Prince killing?”
“No.”
“But you know it is,” Rita said.
“Yes,” I said. “You were a prosecutor. You know when you know.”
“I remember,” Rita said.
“Prince was Jewish,” I said. “His real name, according to his wife, was Ascher Prinz. His father was in a concentration camp.”
“Which one?”
“His wife doesn’t know,” I said. “They all sound the same.”
“The concentration camps all sound the same?”
“What she told me,” I said. “She’s a poet.”
“The hell she is,” Rita said.
“She’s writing an epic poem, she says, about how her husband’s death has impacted her.”
“Can’t wait,” Rita said.
I was having a lobster club sandwich. Rita had a big plate of wienerschnitzel and a glass of wine. How she could drink two martinis and a glass of Riesling and eat a large plate of fried veal for lunch was a puzzle to me.
“How can you eat and drink like that,” I said, “and continue to look like you do.”
She smiled.
“Sex burns a lot of calories,” she said.
“Wow,” I said.
She smiled.
“I’ll help you with this any way I can. I’m a good lawyer, for a girl.”
“ ‘For a girl,’ ”I said. “When you were prosecuting in Norfolk, them defense lawyers used to call you Rita Shark.”
“They were referring to my sleek and sinuous grace,” she said. “But I mean it. I don’t like people trying to kill you. If I can help, I will. We have some pretty good resources at Cone, Oakes.”
“And you’re one of them,” I said.
She cut off a smallish bite of wienerschnitzel and chewed and swallowed and smiled at me again.
“I know,” she said.
32
After lunch, Rita went back to work, and I went to see Quirk. Belson was with him in his office.
“Got an ID on your two assailants,” Quirk said.
“And they are?” I said.
“Two Dutch nationals,” Quirk said. “Mercenaries. What’s the names, Frank?”
“One’s Joost. The other one’s Van Meer,” Belson said. “You care which is which?”
“Not right now,” I said.
“Joost is thirty-four, Van Meer is thirty-five. They weren’t in our system, so we tried Interpol and there they were.”
“You dig that up?” I said to Belson.
“Yep.”
“Frank Belson,” I said, “international detective.”
“Long-distance phone caller,” Belson said.
“And you’re still a sergeant?”
“They don’t promote you for doing a good job,” Belson said. “They promote you for scoring on the lieutenant’s test.”
“So take the test,” I said.
“He won’t,” Quirk said.
“No?” I said.
“I am what I am, and if that’s good, I should be promoted. I’m not taking no fucking test,” Belson said.
Quirk grinned.
“Frank’s a great cop,” Quirk said. “But nobody’s arguing he ain’t a hard-on.”
“I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone argue that,” I said.
“You want to hear about these two guys you killed?” Belson said. “Or you and the captain want to keep having fun?”
“Joost and Van Meer,” I said. “Tell me.”
“Served in the Royal Dutch Army. Airborne brigade. Fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“There were Dutch troops in Iraq and Afghanistan?”
“What am I,” Belson said, “Meet the Fucking Press? That’s what Interpol told me.”
“Learn something every day,” I said.
“Probably not in your case,” Belson said. “They got out, served with the Israeli army, some kind of commando unit. Maybe covert ops. Got out of that and started a private security agency, Joost and Van Meer. Then they went off Interpol’s radar.”
“Why is Interpol interested?” I said.
“They’re wanted for questioning in the murder of some French guy, owned an art gallery,” Belson said with no expression.
“Art,” I said.
“Yep,” Belson said.
“What do the French cops tell you?” I said.
“Guy had their name on an appointment calendar for the day he was killed.”
“Not much,” I said.
“Enough to want to interview them,” Belson said.
“True,” I said. “Anybody got any thoughts about the tattoos?”
“Nobody knows anything about that,” Belson said.
“Puts us in good company,” I said.
“We’re talking with folks at the Holocaust Museum in D.C.,” Quirk said.
“Progress?”
“They’re trying to run down an outfit in Germany. Supposed to have everything about the Third Reich.”
“Is that hard to do?” I said.
“Apparently,” Quirk said. “And it’s not just a matter of locating the stuff. It’s getting access to it with somebody fluent in German.”
“American embassy?”
“I’m sure mine would be the first call they’d take,” Quirk said.
“We got art, and Dutch stuff, and Jewish stuff, and German stuff, and Holocaust stuff, and a guy got killed on Route Two, and a guy got killed in France,” I said. “We figure this out, I’ll get promoted to lieutenant.”
“Maybe not,” Quirk said.
“Not if you don’t take the freakin’ test,” Belson said.
Quirk smiled.
“Excellent point, Frank,” he said.
33
Susan and Pearl came for breakfast on Saturday morning. “Hurry up,” Susan said. “Eat something quick. Otto and his mom are in town, and they’re going to meet us for a playdate.”
“What time?” I said.
“Eleven,” Susan said. “She e-mailed me. Isn’t that great? Said we should meet by the little bridge in the Public Garden.”
“I don’t think we have to hurry much,” I said. “It’s eight-thirty. You want coffee.”
“Yes, but let’s not dawdle over it.”
Pearl had gone directly to the couch and assumed her normal position. Which was prone. She looked to me as though she would be content to dawdle the whole day. Despite her excitement, Susan was able to eat some homemade corn bread with blackberry jam and drink a cup of coffee. I had the same thing, only more, plus some orange juice. Susan checked her watch every couple of minutes. Otherwise, she was very civilized. Susan in a hurry can be something of a tempest.
“How,” she said quietly, looking fully at me, the way she does, “is your case coming about the murder and the stolen picture.”
“It gives me a headache,” I said.
“Do they know who the men were that tried to kill you?”
“Couple of Dutch mercenaries,” I said. “Joost and Van Meer.”
“Do you know why they wanted to kill you?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, they probably wanted to kill me because they’d been employed to. But who employed them and why?” I shook my head.
She sipped her coffee and looked at her watch.
“Is there any way I can help,” she said.
“Actually, yeah, maybe,” I said. “I need to talk with an expert in seventeen
th-century low-country art, somebody got no stake in this case.”
“I don’t know anyone like that at this minute,” Susan said. “But I have a Ph.D. from Harvard.”
“So you’ll find somebody.”
“Of course.”
She checked her watch. According to the clock on my stove, it was five minutes to ten. Actually, the clock, being digital, like they almost all are, read nine-fifty-six. But I was pretty loyal to the old ways, and I translated and rounded off, just as I had in the happy years before digital. On the couch, Pearl was snoring calmly.
Susan put her coffee cup on my counter.
“I think I’ll get her started,” Susan said.
“Good idea,” I said. “How long you think it’ll take you to get there?”
“Oh, I don’t know, five minutes maybe?”
“Which will make it approximately ten o’clock,” I said.
“Yes, but I don’t want to be late.”
“You’re always late,” I said.
“Not on Pearl’s second date,” Susan said. “What kind of a mother would I be?”
She was playing, and we both knew she was. And we both knew also that she wasn’t altogether and entirely playing. We cleaned up the breakfast, put the dishes in the washer, and headed over to the Public Garden. It was ten-fifteen.
34
At eleven-oh-three Susan and I were leaning on the railing of the bridge over the frozen pond where late the sweet swan boats plied. Pearl was snuffling through the vestigial snow at the Arlington Street end of the bridge, alert for a discarded doughnut. No one would, of course, discard a doughnut, so I knew her search was aimless. Still, I liked to let her cultivate her hunting impulse. I didn’t want to impose our realistic limits on the soar of her imagination.
“‘To strive,’” I said to Susan, “‘to seek . . . and not to yield.’ ”
“Of course,” Susan said.
Pearl stopped suddenly and lifted her head. She did an olfactory scan of the air, head lifted, short tail out straight, body motionless and rigid, one forepaw raised. Then she put the forepaw down carefully, posed like that for another few seconds, and exploded on a dead run toward Boylston Street. Coming like a tidal wave through the gate from Boylston Street was Otto. They met in exuberant collision somewhere near the far end of the frozen swan boat pond. Otto bowled Pearl over and then tripped over her and fell down, too, and they rolled on the ground, mock fighting, with their tails wagging ferociously. Otto’s mother was there, with a good-sized man, who turned out to be Otto’s father. Otto’s father had a definite New York City look about him.
Both dogs got their feet under them and faced each other with their back ends elevated, front paws extended, chests near the ground, growling lasciviously, and head faking at each other. Then suddenly they straightened and began to dash in widening gyres about the Public Garden as pedestrians dodged and some cringed. Susan and I and Otto’s mom and dad stood watching like chaperones at a freshman dance.
“They’re adorable,” Otto’s mother said.
“Absolutely,” Pearl’s mother said.
There was a Scottie and a Jack Russell off leash in the garden as well as Otto and Pearl, and they made a kind of halfhearted attempt to get in on the frolic, but they couldn’t keep up, and neither Pearl nor Otto paid them any mind.
“We take him almost everywhere,” Otto’s mom said. “Do you like pictures?”
“I love pictures,” Susan said.
Otto’s mom took out a digital camera and began to click through the stored pictures as Susan leaned over, looking at them and saying “Oh my God” and “Totally adorable,” and things like that. What made me smile was that I knew she meant it. She loved looking at other people’s pictures, especially pictures of Pearl’s first real romance.
“Stop there,” Susan said. “Where is this?”
“Oh, that’s a gala we took him to,” Otto’s mom said. “We posed him in front of that painting because we thought it looked a little like him.”
Susan said to me, “Look at this.”
I looked. It was a picture of Otto, beaming and self-confident, in front of the painting of a prosperous-looking seventeenth-century merchant who did, in fact, look a little like Otto.
“Frans Hals?” I said.
“Yes,” Otto’s mom said. “It was a benefit for a small museum in New York of seventeenth-century Dutch art.”
“Same period when they founded New Amsterdam,” I said.
“Exactly,” Otto’s mom said.
As they had on their last meeting, Pearl and Otto finally burned themselves out and came and flopped down with their tongues hanging from their mouths. Otto’s dad bent over and patted them both.
“Do you know people at this museum?” Susan said.
“Oh, yes,” Otto’s mom said. “I’m on the board.”
“Is there anyone at this museum with a specialized knowledge of Dutch art, and the art business?”
“Sure.” She looked at Otto’s dad. “That lovely man, with the salt-and-pepper beard. You know, Carl something?”
“Carl Trachtman,” Otto’s dad said. “Probably the leading expert in the world in low-country art.”
Susan nodded at me.
“Do you suppose he’d talk with the big ugly one here?”
“He talks to me,” Otto’s dad said.
I grinned at him.
“Then I’m golden,” I said.
Otto’s dad smiled and took out a cell phone.
“We’re practically in-laws,” he said. “I’ll give him a call.”
“See,” Susan said. “I told you I’d find somebody.”
The two dogs were lying between us, Pearl’s head resting on Otto’s.
“She has a Ph.D. from Harvard,” I said to Otto’s dad.
“Wow!” he said, and punched up a number on his cell phone.
35
The Museum of the Dutch Renaissance was on upper Madison Avenue in Manhattan, several blocks north of the Viand Coffee Shop. The museum was a lovely low building that had once been a church, and Carl Trachtman was the curator.
“Otto is a glorious dog,” Trachtman said when I sat down.
“So is Pearl,” I said.
Trachtman smiled.
“Proud parents,” he said.
“You have a dog?” I said.
“I do,” Trachtman said. “A Piebald dachshund named Vermeer. We call her Vee.”
“She glorious?” I said.
Trachtman smiled.
“Completely,” he said.
“Many dogs are,” I said.
Trachtman went around behind his ornate antique desk, doubtless of low-country origin, and sat down and smiled.
“Now that we’ve exchanged bona fides,” Trachtman said, “let me say that I’m very familiar with this case. I’ve followed it with great interest. My great hope is that it wasn’t Lady with a Finch that exploded.”
“Wasn’t enough left to test,” I said. “But for what it’s worth, I don’t think it was destroyed.”
“Its life has been so hazardous,” Trachtman said, “for the nearly four hundred years since Hermenszoon painted it.”
He looked at my card.
“You’re a private detective,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“What is your interest in the case?”
“I was Dr. Prince’s bodyguard when he got killed,” I said.
Trachtman nodded slowly. He was a smallish overweight man with a Vandyke beard and receding gray hair.
“And you wish to get what? Revenge?”
“You might call it that,” I said. “I cannot let people murder somebody I was hired to protect.”
Trachtman nodded.
“So it would be, perhaps, more about you than poor Dr. Prince,” he said.
“Probably,” I said. “But whatever it is, I’m on it, and I’m not going to let go of it.”
“Determination is not a bad thing,” Trachtman said. “Properly applied. H
ow would you like me to help you.”
“Tell me about the painting, tell me about Prince; you may correctly assume that I know nothing.”
“I suspect you know more than you pretend to,” Trachtman said.
“Hard to know less,” I said.
“Where shall I begin,” Trachtman said. “Background on seventeenth-century low-country realism? What makes this painting so special? What makes Hermenszoon so special?”
“Probably a paragraph of that stuff, so I can sound smart talking about the case,” I said. “But mostly I’m interested in the history of the painting and whatever you may know about Ashton Prince.”
Trachtman leaned back a little in his chair, as if he was about to enjoy a good meal.
“Frans Hermenszoon,” he said, “had he lived, would have been as widely known today as Rembrandt or Vermeer, with whom he was contemporary. He was in many ways an exemplar of the best of everything in seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Use of light, and meticulous realism, and an understated commentary on human, by which he would have meant Dutch, existence. Lady with a Finch, for instance, in its stillness and beauty and meticulous realism, seems permanent. Yet, of course, we know that the bird will fly off any moment. So with human life, Hermenszoon seems to suggest.”
“He died young?” I asked, just to avoid passivity.
“Not yet thirty,” Trachtman said. “Stabbed through the eye, apparently in a drunken brawl.”
“Like Christopher Marlowe,” I said.
“My, my,” Trachtman said. “You do know more than you let on.”
“I live alone,” I said. “I read a lot.”
“No wife?” Trachtman said.
“No,” I said. “Though I have kept intimate company with the girl of my dreams for most of my adult life.”
“But not married?”
“No.”
“Why?” Trachtman said.
“I don’t know.”
“It is good to have someone,” Trachtman said. “I’m glad you do.”
“How many paintings are there by Hermenszoon?” I said.
“In his lifetime there were perhaps eight. To the best of our knowledge, only Lady with a Finch survives.”
“How do you know there used to be eight?”
“Transaction records, diaries, letters,” Trachtman said. “Usual sources.”
“So being the one and only makes it even more valuable than it otherwise might be?”
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