by Aaron Elkins
"Are you free now?" Alexandra Porter asked. Demanded.
"You mean this minute?"
"Yes. Well, unless you're tied up, of course."
I glanced into the living room, where I'd plumped up a couple of pillows on the sofa to make a daybed for myself in front of the TV. On the coffee table next to it was my dinner, a bag of chili-and-cheese-flavored Fritos and half-a-bottle of screw-top Chianti. (Yes, I know, a moderately assertive Puligny-Montrachet would have been the preferred accompaniment, but I was unaccountably out of Puligny-Montrachet at the time.) When the phone rang I had been lying back tossing chips into my mouth and absent-mindedly watching a skeet-shooting tournament from Spain on ESPN.
"No, I think I can make the time," I said. I hoped she couldn't hear the television. "Um, would you like to meet for a cup of coffee? A glass of wine?"
"That's fine. You name the place."
"Well, where are you calling from?"
"I'm just finishing up at my office. Anywhere would be fine. Someplace near where you live. You're in Back Bay, aren't you?"
"Yes. All right, there's an Italian restaurant on Newbury, near Fairfield. Outdoor tables—"
"I know the place—it's called Ciao Bella, right? Fifteen minutes?"
"Better make it thirty."
I hung up and went reluctantly into the bedroom to take off the sweats I was wearing and put on a shirt and a pair of chinos. People sure do change, I was thinking. Once upon a time the prospect of meeting an interesting-sounding new female over a glass of wine would have put a sparkle in my eye and a tune on my lips.
Now, all things considered, I'd just as well have watched the skeet-shooting.
Chapter 8
The avenue I live on, Commonwealth, is a broad, stately thoroughfare lined with handsome, turn-of-the-century apartment buildings (most of which, like mine, are now broken up into smallish condos), and with a parklike, lushly treed mall running down the middle, complete with pensive bronze statues of eminent personages—Alexander Hamilton, Leif Eriksson, William Lloyd Garrison, to name a few—at each corner. It was designed to look like an upscale Parisian boulevard and it does. Right around the corner and down the block, however, is sprawling Newbury Street, as American as they come, with wall-to-wall restaurants, cafés, boutiques, and art galleries at street-level, apartments for college students and not-yet-upwardly-mobile young professionals above, and on the sidewalks a never-ending flow of street life ranging from the trendy, to the eccentric, to the downright wacko.
Given my rather deliberate tread these days, I had allowed fifteen minutes to walk the block-and-a-half to get there, but I surprised myself by making it in less than ten, arriving early. So I lowered myself into a chair at one of the sidewalk tables, ordered a glass of Chianti and sat back to observe the Newbury fauna, always an absorbing occupation, and to wait for Simeon's niece to appear.
I'd been expecting a young exec on the rise, a businesswoman with an attaché case, someone lean and tightly put together, compact and decisive in movement and posture—a younger variant of Simeon, I suppose; or maybe of Trish, come to think of it—so that when the big, strapping, leggy woman in delicately faded, neatly pressed blue jeans, white knit shirt, and yellow summer sweater knotted casually around her waist loped in, I gave her no more than a stranger's distant half-smile and kept looking up the street, searching—so I thought—for Alexandra.
But she was better at this than I was, coming straight up to my table. "Hi, I'm Alex. Thanks for meeting me."
I'd missed her age too, by a decade; she was in her thirties, not her twenties, a robust, outdoorsy kind of woman, more milkmaid than executive, more handsome than pretty. Junoesque was the term that came to mind. Or maybe Amazon, if you were feeling unkind.
"Hiya, Alex, nice to meet you," I said, indicating by this attitude of insouciant nonchalance that of course I'd recognized her on the spot.
She caught the waiter's eye. "Can I get a white wine, please?" With a sigh she sat down opposite me. "Whew, hot." She didn't look hot, she looked as if she'd just stepped out of a cool shower.
"Sure is, but not too muggy, fortunately. August can be a killer when it's humid."
"Not just August. We've had heat waves in the middle of September. Remember last year?"
"Yes, but it's been a cool summer so far. Maybe it'll hold."
"Let's hope so."
So much for nimble, witty banter. She looked at her hands. I looked at my wine glass and—surreptitiously—at her. She had a wide mouth, an oddly appealing ski-jump nose that didn't go with her telephone personality and somehow kept making me want to smile, and wide-set gray-green eyes, all of which went surprisingly well together. If I hadn't known about her Russian background I'd have tabbed her as Swedish or Norwegian. Her straight, streaky-blonde hair was loosely pulled back and tied into a simple pony tail, your basic, clean-cut Thomas Jefferson look. Large, capable hands, with nails cut short and unpolished. And no wedding or engagement ring. That perked me up—I mean the fact that I'd noticed; it's always nice to realize you're still alive enough after all to show some interest.
"First of all," she said abruptly, "I'd like to thank you for what you did—what you tried to do—for my uncle last week. Sergeant Cox told me you'd been hurt, but I didn't realize . . . " She gestured in the direction of my face, which was in better shape than it had been a few days ago, but was still puffy and bruised, with two glossy, swollen black eyes.
"Me, hurt? Not at all; my head always looks like an eggplant."
Either she didn't hear me or she didn't find it worth laughing at. "How well did you know my uncle?"
"Not that well, really. I'd stop by to say hello once in a while, that's all. We met a couple of years ago, over a stolen painting that had shown up in his shop." I shrugged. "And we just seemed to hit it off."
Why, I had never been quite sure. I guess I liked his self-sufficiency and his funny good sense. And, I suppose, the fact that he sounded so much like my dimly remembered grandmother and grandfather—tiny bubbe with her dowdy, ink-black wig, and the kind but imperious zayde—who had fled Russia even longer ago than Simeon had, in the bad old days of the Romanoffs; bad for the Jews, anyway. As for what Simeon had liked about me, I couldn't say. I think part of it must have been that I represented a kind of walking American Dream to him. A penniless, barely literate young Jew escapes over the Turkish border from Russia in 1912, one step ahead of rampaging Cossacks—and two generations later his grandson has a Ph. D. after his name, knows his way around art museums and good society, and is even treated with respect and deference by a big-city police department.
Not that a little wasn't lost in the process. "Bubbe" and "zayde" were now pretty close to the sum total of my Yiddish, and my Russian was non-existent (zayde wouldn't allow it to be spoken in his presence). My religious education had ended at thirteen with my bar mitzvah—which my far-from-religious father put me through mainly to pacify zayde—after which I could hardly wait to get everything I'd learned in Hebrew school out of my mind as quickly as possible, at which effort I'd been successful.
"Did you know about his life?" she asked. "I mean, before he came to America."
I shook my head. "I know he came from Novgorod. That's about it."
"Yes, that's right, Novgorod. We still have family there, did you know that? My cousin is actually the deputy mayor there now." She smiled. "Simeon still can't believe a Jew could possibly be deputy mayor. He says . . ." Her eyelids lowered; the sentence died away. She'd forgotten he was dead, something I understood because I kept doing it myself.
"I know," I said gently, "it's hard to accept."
It didn't take her long to collect herself. A sip of wine, a little sigh, and she was her competent self again. "And after he left Novgorod?" she said. "He didn't tell you about that?"
"It's not the kind of thing he talked about to me."
"No, it's not the kind of thing he talked about to anybody. My Uncle Simeon had quite a life, though."
And over our wine and a plate of fried calamari that we ordered to go with it, she told me about it. It took half-an-hour. The barely-touched calamari grew cold.
Simeon had been a young soldier, hardly more than a child, in the Russian army during World War II. Captured by the Germans during the terrible fighting at Smolensk, he had spent most of the war in Mauthausen, a German concentration camp specifically reserved for Soviet prisoners and other persons officially classified as ruckkehr unerwunscht—"return not desired"—where conditions were unspeakable even by Nazi standards. Still, he had managed to survive—only to return, sick, starving, and in rags, to a victorious Russia that didn't even acknowledge his return, let alone desire it. There were no parades, no commendations, no stipends for Simeon and his hundreds of thousands of fellow-prisoners-of-war; the Moscow government formally refused to admit that any Russian soldier would have been cowardly enough to give up rather than dying for the motherland.
It had taken him two years to get his health back. He had married a nurse and gone to work in Novgorod, first in a shoe factory and then in a glove factory, where he eventually rose to assistant manager of production. Somewhere along the line, however, he was accused of "deviating." He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to two years in a so-called mental institution followed by six years' hard labor in a penal factory in Siberia, where his leg was accidentally broken in five places by a stamping machine and he later lost half of his right foot to frostbite.
In 1963, soon after being freed, he had fled Russia with his family, escaping through Poland and East Germany to Israel. But he had arrived alone and broken. His wife and fifteen-year-old son had been killed by border guards in the final desperate dash from East to West. It was a loss from which he never fully recovered, physically or emotionally.Five years later, with the help of his nephew, Alex's father, he had come to the United States and had worked as a bathroom attendant and janitor, living with Alex's family when she was a little girl and saving almost everything he earned beyond paying for his room and board. Two years after that he had moved out, opening the pawnshop and settling into a solitary residence in the seedy rooms behind the store. He had never found the heart to remake his life in any significant way, but ten years later, his gift to Alex when she started college had been a check for $10,000.
Tears trembled on her eyelashes a couple of times as she spoke, but she brushed them away with a fingertip before they welled over. When she wound down we had the waiter take the soggy calamari away and ordered some more wine. She smiled at me for the first time, a sweet smile, almost shy. Her mouth was wide, her teeth large and square, with one front incisor very slightly overlapping the other, but it was an attractively feminine smile all the same; fresh and healthy-looking, like everything else about her.
"Thanks for letting me run on like that. You're a good listener."
"Why did you tell me all that?" I asked.
It came out more disagreeably than I'd intended, but as I said it I realized that I was in fact feeling disagreeable. Disagreeable, chagrined, sullen . . . I didn't know what else. I was genuinely upset over having thought that I'd known the man and yet known nothing of the awful afflictions he'd lived through. I hadn't known and I hadn't been interested enough to ask or even to wonder; for me he'd been a sweet old guy running a pawnshop, period. And more than that, I was embarrassed that my own pampered, self-indulgent life had been so free of tragedy and despair and his so filled with them.
And then, naturally, I was annoyed at Alex for being the cause of my feeling like such a complete crud about it all.
At my tone, her smile disappeared. "I thought you might be interested," she said coldly. "I was under the impression that he meant something to you." It was as if an iron shutter had come clunking down over those clear, gray-green eyes.
Terrific, I thought, good going. Benny Revere, charmer. "I only meant that you must have something in mind," I said, smoothing the waters, but not much. "Is there something I can do?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact. I've been talking to Ron Cox at the police department. He puts a good face on things, but I can see they're not getting anywhere."
"Well, there's not much to go on . . ."
"He told me you've been helping with the investigation. I thought perhaps—"
"Helping with the investigation is overstating it," I said modestly. I told her what I'd found out about the Velazquez and about my call to Yuri.
She looked at me expectantly, waiting for more, but of course there wasn't anything else. "And that's it?" she said. "You're not doing anything else? You haven't done anything since?" Alex wasn't exactly silver-tongued herself.
"Such as what?" I asked testily. (Now I was mad in addition to everything else.) "I spent three days in the damn library, aching every minute. I told the police everything I found out. I'm going to St. Petersburg just as soon as I can get a visa. What else would you suggest?"
"Simeon was murdered here," she said coldly, "not in St. Petersburg."
"So?"
"So I'd think the place to look would be here."
"Look? For what?"
"I don't know . . . clues, leads . . . I'm no cop, you're supposed to be the cop."
I blinked. "I'm a cop?"
"He used to talk about you a lot," she said, her expression softening a little. "You meant a lot to him. He was really proud of you. I remember an article he cut out of the paper to show me. 'Museum's Paintings Back Home, Thanks to Boston's Art Cop.' That was you."
"Take my word for it," I said wryly, "it's not the same kind of cop."
She frowned at her wine glass, slowly rotating it on the table. "Do you know why Sergeant Cox thinks Simeon was killed? Did he tell you his theory?"
I nodded. Shithead robs pawnshop. "A simple, everyday burglary that went wrong," I said. "Nothing to do with the painting."
"Yes, but you know that's not true."
"Alex, I don't know anything, and neither do you. For all we do know—"
She stared incredulously at me. "Are you seriously suggesting that my uncle wasn't murdered because of your precious Velazquez?"
I glared back at her. My precious Velazquez? "Wait a minute, don't you think this is getting a little—"
"Look, I'm not interested in getting into an argument with you. My only point is that that Sergeant Cox may know all about murder, but he doesn't know beans about art and he doesn't care. He's going to be looking in all the wrong places, don't you see that?"
"No, I don't see that." I did, of course, but she'd riled up my contrary impulses. "And anyway, I don't know beans about homicide investigations, so I'm following up the only way I know how."
"By going to St. Petersburg to ask somebody some questions about a Turnbull—"
"Turner."
"—that was stolen fifty years ago, for God's sake, and has probably been in Russia ever since? Pardon me, but the connection seems a little tenuous."
"Sure it's tenuous," I said hotly, "you think I don't know that? It'll probably be a complete waste of effort, but I'm willing to spend my time and my money trying it precisely because Simeon did mean something to me. And, forgive my saying so, but I don't hear you coming up with any better ideas." The damn woman had really gotten my goat.
I expected her to respond in kind, but instead she merely looked at me with a pitying sort of smile, just to let me know I'd let her down, then stood up, put fifteen dollars on the table to cover her share, and held out her hand. "Well, thanks for talking to me, anyway."
Ordinarily, being old-school, I would have insisted on picking up the tab, but this time I didn't. I had a hunch it just would have set her off again. "Alex," I said, taking her cool, dry fingers, "you couldn't want Simeon's murderer caught any more than I do. Believe me, I'll be doing everything I can. And I wouldn't sell Cox short."
She smiled at me, not really unfriendly now, only distant and ready to be gone. "Goodbye, then. And good luck."
Feeling thoroughly ill-used and out-of-sorts, I finished my wine, lever
ed myself painfully up from the chair, and started on the long, slow, one-block trek to my apartment.
Chapter 9
Two more weeks passed. My Russian visa came through; I was cleared to arrive in St. Petersburg as of September 19, another five days. Meanwhile, time dragged. A couple of articles about the painting appeared in the paper and then the story, in the nature of such things, disappeared. The police made no apparent progress. Sergeant Cox never got in touch with me again. While my ribs slowly knitted I frittered my time away, eating junk food, getting no exercise, watching too much baseball (but no ice-dancing yet, knock on wood), drinking too much wine every evening, going to bed every night angry at myself for wasting another day of my life, and swearing that I was going to get organized for sure when I got back from Russia. Or to put it another way, life returned to normal.
However, I did manage, by dint of intermittent episodes of self-discipline, to keep rolling on the nearest thing I had to steady work, namely Samuel van Hoogstraten: The Illusionist of Dordrecht, my book on the capable but obscure Dutch painter whose chief claim to fame was having been a student of Rembrandt's.
Actually, "keep rolling" is a slight exaggeration. Hoogstraten had been one of the subjects in a Dutch painting exhibition that I had curated when I was at the museum, and in a momentary fit of egotism I had afterward signed a contract to turn my catalogue notes and a subsequent article into a book for Sfumato Press, an art publishing house almost as obscure as Hoogstraten himself. The advance was $850 (to be paid on acceptance of the manuscript), and as the months wore on, my interest, never exactly passionate to begin with, had waned, until now I worked on the thing perhaps six or eight hours a week, usually in the afternoons. It wasn't as if I needed the money, after all—I could easily live, in the not-overly-lavish manner to which I was accustomed, on the income from my art-poster investments and an occasional windfall from a consulting job. And it sure wasn't as if the art world was champing at the bit for a new Hoogstraten monograph. When it came down to it, as I knew all too well, the reason that I was still working on it at all was that it would have been more trouble to look into breaking the contract than it was to keep plodding away.