by Mike Ashley
“Not just yet,” Jamieson said. “I assume they hid it somewhere. But the police did a thorough search and couldn’t find it. That’s why I called your office. You find it, then we don’t have to cut a cheque.”
“Let’s see what you’ve got,” I said.
CI&S does most of Fiduciary Mutual’s investigative work, so I was familiar with their procedures, even though I’d never worked with Jamieson before. They didn’t like hiring detectives, and they only did it when they were convinced that something was wrong. It was then our job to prove that something was wrong so they could justify the expense. If we actually found the painting, we’d be in line for a reasonable, but not excessive, bonus.
The folder held about a dozen pages of the sort of paperwork that corporations use to give everyone a feeling that no stone is being unturned. There was a copy of the original insurance application; an international form with all the questions asked in three languages above neat rectangular boxes just too small to write in the answers. The questions had been answered in English, I noticed, in a small, round hand written with a fine point fountain pen. We detectives notice details like that. There were copies of several documents which served to authenticate the picture: a letter from an art expert certifying, I suppose, that the painting was, indeed, art; a formal document on a kind of gridded paper of an odd size that detailed the tests that had been performed on the paint, establishing that it was at least five hundred years old; and a very formal letter from an art historian putting the painting in its proper place in the history of art. The first two documents were in French, the third in English.
The shipping documents showed that the painting had been packed and shipped by a firm picked by the insurance company, one that regularly did the same for entire shows for major art museums. There was a detailed diagram of the shipping crate. There was a document from the shippers certifying that they had turned the painting over to Graf Czeppski in the same condition as they received it. What I assumed was Czeppski’s signature was scrawled across the bottom.
I photocopied the three pages in the Czeppski folder that actually told anything about the Czeppskis, along with the four page police report, while Jamieson called the graf for me and made an appointment for three o’clock that afternoon. Then I headed to the Beechwood Cafe for lunch. It’s a piece of the old Hollywood that hasn’t been discovered by the tourists yet, so the locals tend to hang out there. There’s something soothing about eating surrounded by old writers and young actors. I studied the information on my photocopies over my natural sandwich with chunk white tuna. If there was anything there to tell me where the St Simon picture was hidden, I didn’t see it.
The Czeppskis had lived in Paris for over thirty years, since before daughter Paula was born. They had survived their years of poverty by doing an equestrian act in the Cirque Montmartre; horses cantering around the ring, graf and grafin cavorting on and off the horses’ backs. A few years ago, while the Soviet empire was busy crumbling, they had gone back to their ancestral estate outside of Szczecinek, a small town in northern Poland which was called Neustettin by the Germans when they thought they owned it. The estate had long since been carved up into pig farms, except for the chateau, which had housed a Soviet Army signals battalion. A little over a mile from the chateau the stable to the Czeppski horse farm, which had once held fifty horses, was still standing. Twenty-seven families lived in it now.
Graf Maximilian dug up what remained of the family fortune from behind the stable, where his father had buried it in 1939 as the Nazis closed in. It consisted of some very valuable jewellery, the tangible result of four centuries of oppressing the serfs; some silver plate used to entertain fellow nobles and royalty when they dropped by; some papers proving the family title to a sizable chunk of southern Poland that the Polish government was not about to give back; and the St Simon. He had immediately taken his family and his heirlooms back to Paris, where he had folded the act, sold the horses and a bit of the jewellery and had the St Simon authenticated.
The image of St Simon stoning the children was painted on a thin cedar board about 86 centimetres high and 62 centimetres wide. Which, for the metrically challenged, is about two feet by three feet. The art experts had decided that it had been painted in Germany in the fourteenth century, probably one panel of a polyptych that formed the altarpiece in a church of St Simon. A painting that might very well be another panel of the polyptych hung in the Valletta art museum on Malta.
The police report told as implausible a story of grand theft as ever I have read. The Czeppskis’ apartment was on the eighth floor of a brand new high-rise building at the intersection of Wilshire and Brass, just west of Beverly Hills. All expensive, all elegant, and not at all where I would choose to live in the midst of a major earthquake fault zone. They had left their apartment early evening last night, except for daughter Paula, who didn’t leave until a little after eleven. None of them was wearing or carrying anything that could have concealed a two-by-three foot inflexible cedar board. According to the concierge on duty, and I could just picture his grin when he said it, the way Paula was dressed she would have had trouble concealing a toothbrush.
The painting had been there shortly before they left – several reputable citizens had been over for cocktails and could testify to that. It had not been there when Graf and Grafin Czeppski returned from what the reporting officer had written down as “a benefit for indignant actors” at about two in the morning. The only ways downstairs from the Czeppskis’ apartment were by the elevator, which wouldn’t stop at any floor between the resident’s and the lobby, and a staircase which you could enter at any floor but only leave at the lobby floor. There were security cameras in the elevator and at every landing in the staircase. The staff claimed to have seen nothing unusual between when the Czeppskis left and when they returned, and a check of the security camera tapes backed them up on that.
I could see why Fid Mut was suspicious. I had no opinion yet. I hoped to form one within the next few hours.
The doorman admitted me to the lobby, the concierge called upstairs to make sure I was a welcome guest, and then a lobby man walked me to the elevator and punched 8 for me, in case I had forgotten how. He used a key to activate the panel, and then removed it; so even if I had wanted to get off at another floor, the elevator wouldn’t have stopped.
Graf Czeppski met me at the door. A tall man with rounded corners wearing a brown suit, a white, button-down shirt with vertical green stripes, and a forest-green tie as wide as his smile, he shook my hand with a hardy, vice-like grip. I managed to pull the hand free before any of the larger bones were broken, and returned his smile.
“You are agent Stanley Baum,” he said, “of the insurance company?”
“Yes, sir,” I agreed. Not exactly right, but close enough for jazz, as we used to say. I wondered whether I was supposed to call him “your excellency,” or “your highness,” or something, but then decided not to worry about it. We are all equal here in the Land of the Free, although some are more equal than others. But such inequalities as exist are seldom based on previous patents of nobility.
“Come quite in,” he invited. “Look over the house. Question the servitors. This thing is surely a mystery. We are anxious for it to have a solution.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I told him.
He showed me into the living room. It was a study in chiaroscuro. The walls and drapes were white, the wall-to-wall carpet was black. The drapes which covered the wide picture window hung from a thick black rod and were accented with black cords. There was a long black couch in the shape of an L framing the centre of the room, a large, low black table in front of it, and an easy chair of the same pattern as the couch across from it. They looked modern, but the other pieces in the room – several severe-looking straight-back white chairs, an armoire, and a small desk that had been done in a black stain so that the wood grain showed through – all looked to be of an older European pattern. They might well have been anti
ques.
His wife and daughter were there, but there wasn’t a servitor in evidence. The wife, sitting on one of the straight-back chairs, was thin of body and lip, with a sharp nose. She blended in with the chiaroscuro motif; wearing a straight-line black dress with a touch of white lace around the narrow collar, and had a single strand of pearls the size of walnuts around her neck and a ring with a diamond the size of a major metropolitan area on the ring finger of her right hand. She seemed distinctly annoyed at having to speak to me. I couldn’t tell whether it was because I was a detective or because the lapels on my jacket were too narrow.
The daughter, sitting on the couch at the short end of the L, was the woman I had been dreaming about at least once a week since I was seventeen. I won’t tell you what sort of dreams they were, but I imagine you can guess. A blue-eyed blonde with sharply chiselled features, she was wearing charcoal grey slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and had that air of quiet elegance that looks so natural and is so difficult and expensive to acquire. She had a lithe, slender, athletic-looking body, and looked to be somewhere around thirty, but I could have been off by a decade in either direction; I’m very bad at guessing women’s ages. I’m not much better with men, but I seldom find myself wondering about a man’s age.
The graf introduced me and I settled on the corner of the couch away from the daughter, as the chairs looked too fragile to hold me, and pulled out my pocket notebook. Not that I needed it, my memory is trained and practiced, but it gave me that air of authority that I otherwise lack. “If you could tell me what happened,” I said to the room at large.
“We’ve told all that already,” Grafin Sylvia said, staring down the edge of her nose at me. “To the police and to that other insurance person. I don’t see any need to repeat it for a third time.” She was perched on a delicate-looking chair of blackened wood with a white cushioned seat.
Paula shifted in her seat. “In my opinion –” she began.
Grafin Sylvia swivelled to look at her and snapped, “We don’t need your opinion!”
Paula’s face flushed a deep red, and she took several deep breaths, but then she calmed down and nothing more came of it. A pity. Perhaps later I could take her aside and ask her what she had been going to say.
I stood up, stuck the notebook in my jacket pocket, and buttoned the jacket. “I’m terribly sorry to have bothered you,” I said. “I was told that you were anxious to get your cheque for the painting. I’ll find my own way out.”
“Now, now,” the graf said, with a broad smile on his face, intercepting me on the way to the door. “You’ll have to excuse my wife. She is extremely troubled about all this. It has upset her terribly.” He glared at his wife and snapped a few words to her in what I assume was Polish.
The grafin allowed a sneer of anxiety to cross her face. “I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression, Mr, ah, Baum. This has all been so fatiguing.”
“I’m sure losing a two-million dollar painting must be quite tiring,” I said, returning to the couch. I took my time settling back onto the cushion and opening my notebook again, and then looked back up at my audience. “Tell me about your household staff.”
There was a short pause while they thought this over. “Well, there’s Feodore,” Paula said, leaning forward. Her teeth, I noticed, gleamed with a whiteness that her toothpaste manufacturer would have approved of, but they looked somehow sharp.
“Feodore?”
“The butler,” Paula explained.
“We keep quite a small establishment here,” the grafin said. “Only a butler and two maids. But of course the building has a concierge service which supplies many of our needs.”
Of course. “Has Feodore been with you long?” I asked.
“About five years,” the grafin said. “We brought him with us from Paris. The two maids we acquired here.”
“Where are they from?”
“One is from Guatemala. Maria. The other, Estafia, is from Honduras. They are quite bright and capable, and seem completely trustworthy.”
“And besides,” Graf Czeppski broke in, “they were off yesterday, when the theft happened.”
“Could they have snuck in without your knowing it?” I asked.
“They don’t have keys,” the graf said. “The concierge staff has to let them in.”
“Ah,” I said, making a random squiggle in my notebook. “Then I guess that lets Maria and Estafia out. What about Feodore?”
“He, also, was away at the time of the theft. He is away for this whole week. Some family matter he had to take care of.”
“It was an outside job,” Paula said. “Did you not read the police report?”
The police report said no such thing, but I decided not to point that out. “I try to form my own opinion,” I told her. “The police and I have different goals.”
“Yes,” Grafin Sylvia said. “The police are trying to catch the miscreant who took our picture. You are trying to find a way to avoid paying us one million and two hundred thousand dollars.”
“I am trying to recover the picture,” I said, standing up and putting the notebook in my pocket. “Which will save the insurance company one point two million dollars. But it will also get you back your St Simon; which, I understand, is worth considerably more than that.”
The graf shrugged a broad shrug. “I am told it will bring over two million dollars at auction,” he said, “but who knows? There is no guarantee. And after the auction house takes its twenty per cent commission – there is little to choose.”
“I see,” I said.
He took a step toward me, put a finger on the middle button of my shirt, and pushed slightly. “But that is not to say that I would have any reason to arrange for the theft of my own picture,” he said in a flat, controlled voice, which was trying to suggest suppressed anger, but seemed overly theatrical. “I know what you people at Fiduciary Mutual are suggesting, but I don’t know why you’re suggesting it, except in some obscene attempt to refuse to pay the claim. You didn’t hesitate to collect the rather substantial premium – and to make me pay for the authentication of the picture and the too-expensive shipping costs.”
I stepped forward and he hastily jerked his finger out of the way. “I don’t work for Fiduciary Mutual,” I told him. “I am a private investigator specializing in cases of fraud and embezzlement. My employer is Continental Investigations & Security.” We were nose-to-nose. I hoped my breath was okay; I didn’t want to offend. His breath smelled faintly of licorice. “Fiduciary Mutual calls us in when they want to be absolutely sure that there has been no hanky-panky. If I tell them you’re clean, then they’ll cut you a cheque tomorrow.”
“Hanky-panky,” the graf said.
“And it is us that they suspect of this hanky-panky?” the grafin asked.
“I don’t know that they suspect anyone,” I told them, prevaricating perhaps just the smallest bit. “They suspect the situation. It appears to be an impossible crime, but there are no impossible crimes, only misunderstood crimes. They have sent me to see if I can understand it.”
There was a prolonged silence as everyone thought this over. Graf Czeppski’s belligerent attitude disappeared in a wave of good fellowship, and he smiled a broad smile at me. “Then it is to our interest to help you ascertain what happened, is it not?” he asked.
“It is,” I assured him.
“Then ask your questions.”
I nodded. “The painting was delivered the day before yesterday. It actually arrived in Los Angeles the day before that, but it was held up in customs. Late last night it was gone. Who, aside from your guests of yesterday evening, knew that the painting was here?”
“The persons from the shipping company,” the grafin suggested.
“And?”
“Lasser & Sons, the auction gallery,” Graf Czeppski said. “They were to pick it up here today.”
That I knew. It was delivered to the Czeppskis instead of directly to the gallery because Lasser & S
ons’ insurance for this particular auction wouldn’t start until today. “Did any of you tell anyone?” I asked. “Among your friends, not connected to the gallery.”
Grafin Sylvia lifted her nose higher to stare at me down it. “Are you suggesting that one of our friends might have done this?” she asked in a voice that would chip stone.
“Of course I am,” I said. “Tell me which of your friends you could swear wouldn’t steal a quarter of a million dollars, and I’ll cross him or her off the list.”
“A quarter of a million?” Paula asked. “I thought –”
“Thief’s wages,” I told her. “These days valuable and unique artwork is hard to fence. Whoever took it will be lucky to get that much for it.”
After a few more questions I excused myself to prowl around the apartment. The Czeppskis stayed in the living room, trying to ignore the fact that a private detective was poking through their drawers and closets. I tried to think of places that the police might have missed on their search, and I poked and prodded a few possibilities, but nothing came of it. There was a bit of white powder at the bottom of one of the drawers in Paula’s bedroom which interested me for a moment, but it proved to be some sort of chalk. The windows in the two bedrooms looked out over a locked courtyard to which the tenants did not have a key, so the painting had probably not been lowered out a window. Unless a confederate was stationed in one of the apartments below. I made a note to check on the tenants in the suspect apartments.
I pulled aside the curtains in the living room. One of the rungs holding the curtains to the oversized curtain rod was not looped over the rod. Paula, who was watching me, did not restrain herself from making comments as I felt along the curtain to make sure a two-by-three foot slab of wood had not been inserted into it somewhere. “Ah!,” she exclaimed, “The great detective has found a clue! Not there? Perhaps it has been sewn into the carpet!”
Like Gaul, the large picture window behind the drapes was divided into three parts: an unopenable centre section framed by two smaller casement windows. I cranked open the one on the left and peered out. The window faced West, with a splendid view of the facade of the 1930s apartment building across brass Street. That building only went up ten stories, so the tenants above the tenth floor in this building might have a wonderful view of the tops of buildings in Santa Monica, and maybe even a glimpse of the ocean. Directly below was the black tarred roof of the two-storey parking garage, access to which was available only to workmen, who had to sign out the key. According to building security, the key had not been signed out for three weeks until the police used it this morning. There were a couple of old white fivegallon cans and a coil of black rope visible on the roof, but no painting.
