“I appreciate all your work on this, Angus,” Miriam said, as she walked out of the interview room. “I’ll have to liaise with Agent Mastroianni because the immigrant smuggling case is his. You should check in with him tomorrow and see what he wants to assign you to now that I won’t need your help anymore.”
And just like that, I was out of the picture.
It wasn’t the first time it had happened to me on an investigation, and I was sure it wouldn’t be the last. “One thing, though,” I said. “I really want to hand over the painting to Frank Sena. It belongs to him, and I promised him I would retrieve it.” I took a deep breath. “But I understand if it’s evidence in the case and you need to hold onto it.”
She considered for a moment. “The brothel tokens are what matters. Just ask him not to leave town with the painting in case we need to examine it again.”
I walked back to my office, called Frank, and agreed to bring it by his condo on my way home. He thanked me effusively. I wrapped up the painting again and left the office a few minutes later. At least this part of the operation would be a positive one.
Then my cell phone rang with a Skype call from my brother.
I figured something was wrong because calls to a phone number cost more than calling another Skype customer, as we’d been doing. Had the Italian police come after him? Was Affogato still trying to get at me, going through my brother?
“Hey, Danny, what’s up?”
“Awesome news, bro. Remember I told you I applied for that museum internship in Miami?”
So much had happened that it took me a minute to remember. “Yeah, you said you didn’t get it.”
“They called me today. The girl who was supposed to do it got sick at the last minute, so I’m next in line. I can have it if I want, but I have to be there Monday morning.”
“Wow. That’s fast.”
“Yeah, I know. Fortunately I can wrap up the rest of my course work on line. Can I stay with you?”
“Of course you can. When do you think you’ll come in?”
“I checked the flights, and for a change fee I can get a flight out of Rome Thursday morning, and get into Miami at 3:45 in the afternoon. I know you’re probably busy so I can just hang at the airport until you can get there, or maybe if there’s a bus or something...”
I interrupted him. “That’s great, Danny. I can pick you up. Email me your flight number so I can check the status, and then I’ll wait for you in the cell phone lot.”
My emotions were all over the place as I left the FBI building, through all the elaborate security that made me feel like a knight leaving a moated castle. I was happy to get Frank the painting, but sad for Jesse Venable, whose life as he knew it was over. Excited to be able to see Danny, bummed that I was being shut out of the rest of the case.
Rush hour had already come and gone, so I made good time on the highway. The setting sun glared off the rear window of the car ahead of me on Oakland Park Boulevard, and I felt a headache coming on. But once I handed the painting over to Frank, my personal involvement would be over. My trip to Italy would turn into a pleasant memory – especially if I could forget about the deaths of Larry Kane and Gianluca Bianchi.
I parked at Frank’s condo and rode the elevator to his apartment. After an awkward greeting I handed the paper-wrapped parcel to him. He stood there with it in his hands for a moment.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” I asked.
When he spoke there was a hitch in his voice. “It’s just...” he began, then he stopped.
He put the package down on his dining room table. “It’s hard to explain,” he said. “I always felt a sort of connection to Zio Ugo, even though I never met him. If homosexuality has a genetic component, as some say, then we shared that, right?”
I nodded.
“And look at the advantages I’ve had, growing up in the United States. When my uncle was forty-one, he died in a concentration camp. When I was that age, I was a success on Wall Street, making more money in one year than my father had in his whole life.”
“Were you happy?”
He cocked his head, as if that question hadn’t occurred to him. “What do you mean?”
“From what you’ve said, your uncle had a great life in Venice before the Nazis came. He made money, he had friends, and he bought art that brought him pleasure. Yes, it’s terrible that he was killed, and his collection stolen. But it sounds like he had a good life, the years he had.”
“You’re right. I didn’t really start living until a few years ago. Maybe I’m picking up where Zio Ugo left off.” He smiled. “Let’s see what this painting looks like.”
He got a pair of scissors from the kitchen and carefully cut away all the brown paper and the packing material. When Frank removed the last layer of paper, the painting glowed beneath us.
“Oh, my,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”
Though I’d already looked at the painting several times by then, I had to agree. “It is, isn’t it?”
Frank turned and embraced me, and there were tears in his eyes. “Thank you so much, Angus,” he said. “From me, and from my uncle.”
I was embarrassed at the show of emotion. “I’m glad I was able to help,” I said, when he released me. I explained about the brothel tokens that had been smuggled in the frame, and pointed to the place where they’d come from.
He looked shocked, but then he pursed his lips and thought for a moment. “I don’t care,” he said. “Whatever happened is over. I have this memory of my uncle to hold onto.”
I told him about Miriam’s request, and he said, “Don’t worry. These boys aren’t going anywhere except up on my wall.”
“And you may have more of your uncle’s art soon, too,” I said. We sat in the living room and I told him about the other artwork we’d found in the shed on Grassini’s roof, and that I’d been able to identify another half-dozen pieces from the video.
His eyes opened wide. “That’s amazing,” he said. “I never considered I’d be able to get anything else back. You think the video will be evidence enough?”
“I think so, especially since they all have the same marks, indicating that they were confiscated from Jews in Venice.”
“This certainly calls for a celebration,” he said. “A glass of my homemade limoncello?”
“Sure. You make it yourself? An old family recipe?”
He laughed. “No, one from the New York Times. You just mix lemons, sugar and vodka together and let it marinate. It reminds me of what my father made. Yet another tie to my childhood and my family.”
He poured a couple of ounces into a pair of crystal shot glasses, and we toasted, to art and Zio Ugo. The gold liquid glittered in the light.
29 – The Sun Metal
As I rode the elevator down from Frank’s apartment, I got a text from Lester. The bar where he was doing a demo that night had cancelled, and he was unexpectedly free. Did I want to get together?
You bet I did. He said he’d pick up dinner for us and come over to my place, then stay over. He included a couple of Italian eggplant emoticons with his text, the ones that are supposed to represent the penis. I replied with a pair of lips.
Jonas was home when I got there, though he was on his way out to see his new boyfriend. “Hey, before you go, I need a little favor,” I said. “My brother got a last-minute internship at the Perez Art Museum in Miami. It’s okay if he sleeps on the couch for a month, right?”
“Sure. I don’t expect to be here that much anyway. When does he get in?”
“I’m picking him up Wednesday at the airport.”
Jonas shrugged and said it was all the same to him, and he left a few minutes later. I tidied up the house, then greeted Lester at my front door with a big kiss. It felt so good to be swept up in those powerful arms of his. After all I’d been through it was a relief to just be a guy with his boyfriend. I loved the sense of connection to him that the kiss provided.
We finally pulled apart. “I missed
you,” I said. “I loved being in Venice with Danny, but I kept thinking about how awesome it would be if you were there with us. So you could see all the architecture and the art work in person.” I smiled.
“We’ll put it on our bucket list, then,” Lester said, with a big grin. “Gondola cuddling.”
I laughed, and the idea that Lester and I would have a shared bucket list made me feel warm inside.
We sat at the kitchen table with a pair of healthy salads studded with chickpeas, tiny sweet tomatoes, and strips of grilled chicken. As we ate, I told him about the art work I’d seen, how impressed I was with all my brother had learned. “Your brother sounds like a cool guy. Am I ever going to meet him?”
“You are indeed.” I told him about Danny’s internship at the museum. “He’s coming in Wednesday. You want to have dinner with us?”
“Love to.” He leaned back in his chair. “So is your brother as cute as you are?”
“He is. And straight, so don’t get any ideas.”
“You’re all the man I need, G-Man,” Lester said.
He told me a couple of stories about bars where he’d done demonstrations, and then I showed him the images on the brothel tokens, and we decided to see how many of the poses we could imitate.
LATER THAT NIGHT, WE were sitting up in bed, both of us on our digital devices, reading emails and following links and showing each other cute videos. “You going to be busy this weekend?” he asked.
“Not sure. Why?”
“There’s an exhibit in the Boca Raton Museum of Art,” he said. “Secular Art from the Islamic World. I figure since you’re developing an interest in art we might go up and take a look at it. Take your brother, too.”
He sent me a link to the exhibit and I opened it up. When I scanned to the list of patrons at the bottom of the page, I was surprised to see Ms. Evren Kuroglu there. “This is the woman we’re investigating,” I said. “Lester, you’re a genius.”
“Hardly. I just wanted to go look at some paintings.”
I agreed to go with him, and made a note to myself to research Kuroglu’s connection with the museum.
Lester stayed the night, and a short time after dawn we went for a long, sweaty run together. We kept to the residential streets where there were no sidewalks, dodging guys walking dogs, early morning delivery trucks and big plastic recycling bins. Could I see myself running like this with Lester by my side for the rest of my life? Maybe. I’d known him for less than a year, and there was still so much we didn’t know about each other.
He was strong, kind, and smart. His body rocked my world and he’d wormed his way into my heart as well. I had never fallen for someone as hard as I had for Lester. But I was savvy enough to realize that we were both still young, and on the brink of our careers. What if the Bureau transferred me somewhere else? What if it was Lester who wanted to move?
I was getting way ahead of myself. And all that wool-gathering meant Lester had gained a big lead on me. I put on the gas and sped up to catch him, then pass him. “You want to make this a race?” he called to my back. “You’re on, buster.”
We raced each other all the way back to my house, where we collapsed on the front lawn next to each other, a mass of overgrown grass and sweaty flesh, and it was only the fear of giving the neighbors a show that finally motivated us to get up and go inside.
Jonas was in the kitchen having breakfast as we walked past on our way to the shower, and from the smile on his face I could tell that he’d had a good time with his boyfriend the night before. Lester and I showered together, and by the time we were finished Jonas was gone, which meant neither of us had to get dressed right away.
Eventually, though, we both headed out. When I got to work I reported to Vito’s office. “Good work on that painting detail,” he said. “Miriam Washington brought me up to speed on what you did. Nothing more than I expected of you, though.”
I basked in his praise. “But now you’ve got to shift gears. I want you to gather as much background as you can on Evren Kuroglu and Turkish Time LLC. This woman is slick, so we’re going to need as much data as we can collect on her if we’re going to figure out her role in the immigrant smuggling and shut that operation down.”
“Along those lines,” I said. I told him about discovering her connection to the art museum, though I left out the part about Lester leading me to it. Let Vito think I was already on top of my research.
“I doubt any of the art she’s loaned to the museum was stolen, but you ought to go up there and check it out anyway. See if you can talk to anyone there about her.”
I agreed, and when I got back to my office I texted Lester and discovered that he was free that afternoon for a jaunt up to Boca instead of waiting for the weekend to go with Danny.
There was something else niggling at the back of my brain when it came to Kuroglu. How had I found out about her in the first place? I went back to the article that mentioned her, and journalist Luca Albrecht, who had died in a motorcycle accident like Larry Kane.
I placed a phone call to the police department in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the town in Switzerland where Albrecht had died. Fortunately, the receptionist spoke enough English that I could leave my cell number with a message for the detective who had investigated the case.
While I waited for a call back, I did some research on the museum in Boca. I found the name of the curator who had assembled the exhibit and made arrangements to talk to him that afternoon, though I didn’t tell him I was investigating Evren Kuroglu. In case he had a close relationship with her, I didn’t want to tip my hand.
And I didn’t want him to end up like Larry Kane or Luca Albrecht.
I left the office early in the afternoon and picked up Lester, and we drove up to Boca Raton. It was another gorgeous South Florida day, with a scattering of puffy cumulous clouds against a blue sky, palm trees swaying in a light breeze, and of course, clusters of traffic all the way up the highway.
The museum was located in the faux-Spanish shopping complex of Mizner Park, a couple of miles east of I-95. I paid the admission for the two of us, and then asked at the admission desk for Dashiell Beckett, the curator I’d spoken with. Lester and I milled around for a couple of minutes until a thirty-something guy with a brown man-bun came out from behind a door marked Private. “I’m Dash Beckett,” he said.
I was reminded of a cartoon I’d seen, about how hipsters could die—things like being run over by a self-driving car, falling off a cliff while Instagramming, or being strangled by a smart phone charging cable. If I was ever tempted to grow my hair long and pull it up into a man-bun like Beckett, I hoped someone would put me out of my misery.
I smiled, though, and shook his hand, introducing myself and Lester. “What brings you up here today?” Beckett asked. “Not just an interest in contemporary Turkish art, I presume?”
“More an interest in one of your patrons,” I said. “Evren Kuroglu.”
He nodded. “The kind of woman who generates interest,” he said. “Wealthy, beautiful, with an air of mystery. And an excellent eye for art. Would you like to see the painting she lent us?”
I agreed, and he led us to a watercolor about three feet wide and two feet tall. It was by an artist named Seref Akdik, a seaside view, looking across the Bosporus at Istanbul. “Akdik was one of a group called the Müstakiller—Turkish for Independents,” he said. “They were a group of young Turkish artists who studied in Europe during the 1920s, then returned to Istanbul inspired by European styles from the period between the wars.”
“You can see the same technique used in Ragazzi al Mare,” Lester said to me. He turned to Beckett and I could hear the pride in his voice. “Angus just retrieved a painting stolen by the Nazis.”
“Painted by one of the Macchiaioli,” I said. “Kind of like Italian impressionists.”
“I’ve heard of them,” Beckett said. “How similar?”
I let Lester take the lead, talking about the brush strokes and the idea of capturing nature. B
eckett nodded, then asked, “You think Ms. Kuroglu had an interest in that painting, too?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to get into the stolen brothel tokens. “No, her name came up as an acquaintance of the man who brought the painting to the United States.”
“And that led you to investigate her?”
“I’m really just curious about her connections to the art world,” I said. “Do you know if she has a big collection?”
“She owns several other paintings by Akdik,” he said. “Though in my opinion this is the best of them. It was kind of her to allow us to borrow it.”
“Can you tell me anything more about her?” I asked.
“She drives a Bentley and always has a bodyguard with her,” Beckett said. “And she wears a lot of gold jewelry. She told me once she has a mystical connection with gold. That it’s the sun metal, connected to health, wealth, and growth.” He smiled. “Seems to be working for her.”
He left us then, and Lester and I walked through the rest of the exhibit. Lester didn’t know much about the paintings we saw, but he did point out some similarities between the French impressionists, the Italian Macchiaioli, and the work of the artists like Akdik who had studied in Europe. It was interesting to see how those same ideas had moved across borders and been interpreted by different artists.
When we finished with the exhibit, we strolled through the arcades of Mizner Park and looked at expensive stuff in store windows, and I picked up a bunch of free glossy magazines that showed rich people cavorting in Boca.
We ate dinner at a New York style deli, and then I drove Lester home so he could get ready for a night of trawling bars to push his whiskeys. Then I settled down in my bed with the magazines I’d brought home. In one of them I found a series of photographs taken at the opening of the museum’s exhibit. Evren Kuroglu was tall, probably close to six feet, with glossy dark hair curled into an elaborate knot. She wore a low-cut dress in what looked like peach silk, with a necklace of hammered gold and several gold bangle bracelets. The sun metal indeed.
Survival Is a Dying Art Page 19
