The Hanging

by Wendy Hornsby

  Chapter 22

  When I got home, there was just enough daylight available, and optimism that the rain would hold off long enough for a quick, fast run. The day had been bloody endless, and the best way to put it behind me was to get out and get the heart pumping.

  Because of all the rain, I hadn’t run for a week and I suffered for it. I was stiff and slow when I started out, and the cold afternoon weather didn’t help. The rain held off, but there was a brisk wind that smelled of the ocean, so I knew there was more in store; this might be my only chance to get out for a while.

  I headed down the canyon to Crags and stayed on the remnants of the narrow paved road laid to service the set of the old “M*A*S*H” TV series when it was filming in Malibu Creek State Park. There had been many winter storms and mudslides since the series ended and much of the pavement had washed out, but some pavement to run on was better than all mud.

  Down in the canyon bottom along the creek, sheltered by ancient live-oak trees, I was out of the worst of the wind. By the time I reached the crossing with Bull Dog Trail, my stride had opened and each step came more easily. I turned up Bull Dog, headed for home.

  I arrived hot, sweaty, breathless, to find Jean-Paul feeding carrots to the horses.

  “Caught me again,” I said, grabbing a clean towel out of the feed shed to wipe my face.

  “Los Angeles freeway traffic—what can I say?” He smiled his upside-down French smile and shrugged. “There wasn’t enough of it tonight, and so here I am, too early. Do you natives ever figure out how to time an arrival?”

  “Never.” I wrapped the towel around my neck and reached for his hand.

  As he leaned forward to kiss my cheeks, his eyes elided to my chin.

  “Did you fall?”

  “No,” I said, touching the scratch. “I’ll tell you about it later. Right now, let’s find some wine and take it inside. I have something for you to look at while I make myself more presentable.”

  I punched numbers into the key pad next to the garage door, and the door rolled up.

  “Where is your car?” Jean-Paul asked as we walked in.

  “My mother borrowed it,” I said.

  “So you are driving the truck?”

  I sighed; how many men had asked me that question with the same hint of doubtfulness in the tone of their voices?

  “I am,” I said. “For a few days.”

  “For a few days, then, would you like to trade with me?”

  Hah! I thought, there was the heart of the question; he wanted a turn with the truck.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, opening the door of the wine cupboard.

  Upstairs, we passed through the kitchen to collect a corkscrew and a couple of glasses, and then I led him into my work room. I pulled up the dictator’s inventory sent by Max’s clerk that afternoon and asked him to look through it, to see if anything set his bell ringing again, while I showered and dressed.

  He was wearing cords and a lightweight collared sweater; casual, no tie. Thinking about what I should wear, on my way out I asked, “Where are we going for dinner?”

  “It has started to rain again,” he said. “Is there somewhere nearby?”

  I thought through some possibilities, but all of them came back to the same answer: It had been a long day for me; Jean-Paul had dark circles under his eyes.

  “How about my kitchen?” I asked.

  He smiled. “If you don’t mind, yes, a wonderful idea.”

  I left him in my work room poring over the inventory list. When I came back down, freshly scrubbed and brushed, Jean-Paul was on the telephone, speaking with someone in very rapid French. He had printed the inventory of the dictator’s collection. During the conversation he would make occasional notes on the printout or on the yellow legal pad next to it as he scrolled through images of paintings on the computer monitor in front of him. When he noticed me, he smiled and gave me a little wave, and continued with his conversation.

  I replenished his wineglass and went to see what I could find in the kitchen for dinner.

  A few weeks earlier I had made a big pot of potato leek soup, because you cannot make just a little pot of soup, had some for dinner twice, and froze the rest. I pulled out enough for two servings and put it in a pan on the stove to heat. Chicken breasts, green beans, and a salad would make up the rest of the meal. I’m not much of a cook, but no one has starved at my house yet.

  “Sorry to abandon you,” Jean-Paul said, bringing his glass with him into the kitchen; he was in his stocking feet. “But I was having a most interesting conversation with an old friend of mine.”

  “What did he have to say?”

  “He is familiar with your Dr. Chin and several of the collections he curated. Interesting man, Dr. Chin.”

  “Is he?” I asked. Instead of explaining, Jean-Paul looked at the chicken and asked what I intended to do with it. I turned it over to him.

  The telephone rang, another call from “caller unknown.” Tired of the calls, I picked up the receiver and listened. After a moment, a young female voice said, “Miss M?” Because only my students called me that, I said, “Yes?”

  She hung up. I touched the flash button and when I heard a dial tone hit Redial. The phone at the other end rang, but no one answered. I replaced the receiver and turned back to Jean-Paul, who was rifling my spice cupboard.

  “Have you plans tomorrow morning?” he asked.

  “Setting up interviews, unless you have a better offer.”

  We were invited to brunch at the home of Lisette Olivier, Hiram Chin’s Broad Beach neighbor, he told me. In another cupboard, he found a small roasting pan to his liking. As he put the seasoned chicken into the oven, he cocked his head and smiled at me enigmatically.

  “Dr. Chin is also invited. We shall grill him over croissants.”

  “What shall we grill Hiram Chin about, sir?”

  “The international art market, fakery, chicanery, and...” He took me by the shoulders and noisily kissed both cheeks. “And black market arms sales.”

  “Arms sales?” I said, hanging on to him. “Where does that come in?”

  “Through the back door. I will tell you over dinner.”

  “Mr. Bond, James Bond,” I said, looking up into his face. “You’re having fun, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I am,” he said, pulling me against him. I winced when, unaware it was there, he rested his hand on the pellet hole in my shoulder. “I am a quite boring businessman. This world of intrigue I seem to have fallen into on your behalf is far more interesting than tracking exchange rates and commodity fluctuations.”

  “But it may also be more dangerous,” I said, taking his hand from my shoulder and holding it.

  “I trust you to watch my back,” he said.

  “What if I told you someone took a shot at me yesterday?”

  He was thoughtful for a moment, unsure whether I was kidding. He ran a finger across his own chin, mimicking the scratch on mine.

  “Is that what happened?”

  “And this.” I pulled down the neck of my sweater enough to show him the edge of the bandage. He lifted the corner of the dressing and looked at the wound.

  “Fronde?” He hesitated, searching for the right word. “Slingshot?”

  “Pellet gun.”

  “Ah, a kid. One of your students is perhaps angry over his marks?”

  “If I had to venture a guess, I’d start by asking our sculptor friend Frankie Weidermeyer where he was Tuesday afternoon.”

  “Of course, young Weidermeyer,” he said. “My acquaintance mentioned someone named Francis Weidermeyer. But the man he mentioned is too old to be your very bad young sculptor. The father, perhaps?”

  “As far as I know, Weidermeyer has three daughters. No sons.”

  He laughed, shaking his head, teasing. “You Americans are so sweet in your outlook. Mr. Weidermeyer has three legitimate daughters. But does that also rule out a son?”

  “Mrs. Weidermeyer was described to me a
s a stiff-jawed example of an east coast snob,” I said. “Not at all like the lovely Ms Clarice Snow, who presents herself as the mother of Frankie.”

  “Of course, a successful businessman with a proper wife and a beautiful mistress; so ordinary,” he said. “What is unusual, I think, is for a mistress to name her son after his married father. A hostile gesture, is it not?”

  “I am not all that familiar with the etiquette of naming extramarital children, Jean-Paul, my own history not withstanding.”

  “I’ve meant to ask you,” he said, turning to stir the soup. “What shall I call you? Your grandmother in France calls you Marguerite, your American mother calls you Margot, your friends call you Maggie, except for Kate and Roger who call you Mags. Which do you prefer?”

  “Take your pick, just, please, not Maggot; that’s what my brother and sister called me,” I said, taking bowls out of a cupboard. “Or Miss M, as my students do.”

  We hadn’t yet switched on lights in the house when we went into the kitchen to start dinner; it had been twilight then, that brief lower-latitudes moment between day and full night. Without our taking notice, the inky blackness of a moonless mountain night made our warm and fragrant room feel like a bright island in a vast dark sea; there were no street lights in our neighborhood.

  White light suddenly filled the dark living room beyond the kitchen door, flashed up the side of the house and hit the stone canyon wall on the far side of the patio outside our French doors.

  Jean-Paul looked up sharply, a question in his expression.

  “Something tripped the motion-activated lights out front,” I said. “Probably coyotes.”

  I excused myself and walked through to the front windows to check, as I always do.

  Duke, Mike’s big horse, had run across his enclosure to look down the driveway, as he always did when the front lights were tripped; he was as vigilant as any watchdog. Peering through the front windows, I saw nothing in the yard that shouldn’t be there. I rapped on the window and Duke looked up toward the house, gave the enclosure rail a token thump with his forehead and a snort to express his displeasure at being bothered by the lights, or maybe as warning to local wildlife that he was on the alert, then sauntered back to rejoin his buddies.

  “Maybe raccoons,” I said as I reentered the kitchen. “If Duke isn’t worried, I’m not.”

  Jean-Paul had put green beans in the pan with the chicken and was basting them with pan drippings.

  “Perhaps fifteen minutes more,” he said.

  I ladled soup into bowls and, carrying them, led Jean-Paul to the table in the many-windowed alcove at the end of the kitchen.

  He held out a chair for me. When he had settled into the chair beside me, I took his hand and leveled my gaze at him.

  “It’s time, Jean-Paul, for you to spill it, and I do not mean the soup.”

  “Ah, yes, my mysterious friend on the telephone.” As if he had forgotten.

  “Yes. Whom were you speaking with?”

  “If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” he said. “And this is lovely soup.”

  “It’s my grandmother Élodie’s recipe. And I’ll take the risk; who is this guy?”

  “His name is Gilbert. I wish I could say he is something glamorous like CIA or MI6, but he is only a bureaucrat who works at the French Ministry of Culture and Communication in the area of the security of national treasures. So, of course, he is hard-wired into Interpol.”

  “What did he have to say about Weidermeyer, Senior?”

  “Mr. Weidermeyer was an international arms broker, a very successful one.”

  “Was?”

  “Yes. He filed for bankruptcy and lost his export certification. I don’t know what he does now.”

  “He and Park Holloway were good enough friends at some point for their families to vacation together. In Asia.”

  He thought about that for a moment. “Certainly it would be convenient for an arms broker to have a friend in the American Congress; it is not easy to get proper export licenses for American-made weapons and weapons systems.”

  “Where does fine art enter the picture?”

  “One of Mr. Weidermeyer’s better clients was the dictator that your friend Dr. Chin worked with,” he said.

  “Was Hiram Chin involved in arms sales?” I asked, dubious.

  “Not that I am aware, no. But there is a connection,” he said. “The old demagogue was quite a clever character. With Dr. Chin as his advisor, he acquired what became a very famous personal art collection. He then used that collection as collateral to purchase arms.”

  “But the collection turned out to be full of fakes,” I said.

  “Yes, but not entirely,” he said. “There were some very fine examples of Asian antiquities, many of them gifts to his nation from other heads of state. And there were several very valuable pieces that, it turned out, were looted from museums in Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia during the upheavals of the 1970s and acquired on the black market, probably fairly cheaply.”

  “I would imagine that those nations would want their treasures back at some point,” I said.

  “Yes, of course. And in a few instances they successfully regained them through American courts.”

  “American courts?”

  “Yes.” He certainly was enjoying himself. “Before he was deposed, this fine example of post-colonial corruption, perhaps seeing the handwriting on the wall, shipped the entire collection to Hawaii in a steel cargo container under cover of diplomatic courier, immune from U.S. Customs inspection. However, before the ship carrying his container arrived, he was—shall we say?—past-tense as his nation’s leader and his diplomats had all been recalled. When there was no one to claim the shipment, it was impounded by U.S. Customs until ownership issues were resolved.”

  “Poor bastard,” I joked. “Ferdinand Marcos and Nguyen Van Thieu left their countries with briefcases full of diamonds and gold, much more portable. He should have given them a call.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t have the resources to acquire diamonds.”

  “Ergo, he acquired fake masterworks.”

  “Donc,” he said—“Therefore”—grinning, “the American courts were able to return certain pieces to their countries of origin.”

  “And the rest to Weidermeyer and others to settle their claims.”

  “Yes. And some of the Asian pieces were very fine, indeed.”

  “But the remainder of the collection was fakes?”

  “So it seems, yes, primarily the works attributed to European artists, a sad truth Mr. Weidermeyer discovered only when he tried to sell them.”

  “When was that?”

  “Initially, about ten years ago. Of course, final resolution was tied up in the courts for many years. My friend Gilbert says that Weidermeyer’s latest attempt to get an amended judgment, asking for further assets in repayment of the debt, failed only recently.”

  “I found an abstract of the case,” I said. “I don’t know the details, except that Hiram Chin was called to testify and that the judge ruled, essentially, ‘Let the buyer beware.’ It was Weidermeyer’s obligation to verify the value of the works before he accepted them as collateral. If he accepted the collection as surety against the loan, so should the court.”

  “And there you have it.”

  “Can’t blame Weidermeyer for being a bit peeved.”

  He raised his eyebrows as he does when a word isn’t familiar.

  “Upset,” I said.

  “Of course. More than peeved, perhaps.” Jean-Paul rose and picked up empty soup bowls.

  “According to Gilbert, what your Dr. Chin told the court was most remarkable,” he said as we walked back toward the kitchen counter. “Your interim academic vice president claimed that the dictator was fully aware from the beginning that the paintings in question were imitations done in the style of various great European artists, but were not themselves masterworks.”

  “Was Hiram?” I followed him.

  “Aware? Yes.
” When he turned toward me, Jean-Paul had a wicked gleam in his eyes. “Maggie, it was Hiram, as you call him, who commissioned a workshop in China to produce the paintings. If his client wanted a Picasso, Hiram got him a Picasso.”

  I remembered Karen Holloway telling me about Chinese workshops replicating fine Venetian glassware.

  I said, “But surely Weidermeyer checked the provenance of the paintings before he accepted them as collateral.”

  “Surely, if one can produce a credible Picasso, one can produce credible bills of sale and other evidence of provenance. Weidermeyer told the court that he depended on Chin’s expertise. But Chin testified that he never counseled Weidermeyer about either value or authenticity. If there was fraud, it was committed by a national leader who is now dead, and not he.”

  “How much money are we talking about?”

  A little shrug as he picked up hot pads and opened the oven door.

  “The arms purchases in total? Billions. The collection, if it were genuine, would represent only an earnest money deposit in the neighborhood of, at most, half a billion dollars.”

  “Dear God.”

  While Jean-Paul busied himself arranging chicken and green beans on plates, I leaned against the counter, lost in thought.

  At about the same time that Weidermeyer’s financial ordeal began to unfold in the courts, Park Holloway and his old friend Hiram Chin had a falling out, Holloway resigned from Congress, went home and drove himself and his problematic son off a mountain road and into a ravine.

  Some details were still missing, such as Holloway’s possible role in negotiating the arms deal using Chin’s fakes as collateral, or in bringing his two friends together, or his knowledge of the nature of the fraud the collection represented. But it didn’t take a lot of imagination to find grounds for murder lurking in the corners. They had played a dangerous high-stakes game, and lost.

  The Holloway-Chin-Weidermeyer triad became very messy, certainly, and was fraught with betrayals and manipulations that were both personal and public. Though I had some qualms about collateral damage to innocent family members, exposing the international skulduggery Jean-Paul was telling me about would broaden the scope and content of my film project enormously, which was good, and could potentially shift the focus away from Holloway’s former wife and children, also good. Like Sly, hadn’t they been through enough already?