Treasure of Saint-Lazare

by John Pearce

  “Wait. He said Jen introduced them? Personally?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  “Most likely he was looking to buy some of the loot. Sonny would have been a better seller,” Eddie said.

  “Yes,” Thom said, “But remember Kraft was already chasing Mr. Castor for the Raphael and whatever’s with it. Sommers’s and Sonny’s own loot would have been peanuts next to that. No, I think he wanted Sommers to help him find the big trove. He was just doing the same sort of detective work I do every day.

  “And if that’s not enough, I went through the recent calls on Sommers’s cellphone. It seems that just a few minutes before Mr. Castor was killed he placed a call to a French cell phone registered to Erich Kraft — but the phone was roaming in Sarasota. He must have been tipping off Kraft that Roy was on the way. That call by itself will earn him a life sentence.”

  “Wow,” Eddie said. “Good thinking on your part. Did you hear anything about Woody? He was pretty beat up. Will he be OK?”

  “He was tougher than you’d think. The hospital released him a couple of hours ago. He’s to come in tomorrow and give us a statement.”

  “How did they know I’d talked to him?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet. He said he didn’t tell anyone, and Sonny said no one was following you that day. I don’t know if I believe either of them.”

  “Did they threaten Lindy as well?”

  “I don’t think so,” Thom replied. “I called her and she said not. At least they didn’t kidnap her, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d talked to them. Does it matter?”

  “I don’t think so, no. You haven’t asked me if I told Jen.”

  “No, I haven’t, and I don’t plan to.”

  “I didn’t. I can’t say why, but something kept me from it.”

  “That may be the best thing you’ve done for her.”

  When the call ended, Eddie looked at the iPhone clock — one o’clock. “Merde,” he muttered. “If I hurry maybe I can find Woody.”

  In 20 minutes he had showered and shaved and 10 minutes after that he parked across the street from Hemingway’s, just as Woody walked out next to a short man who looked like an F. Scott Fitzgerald impersonator, down to the center part in his blond hair. The man waved his arms around in agitation, and it appeared to Eddie that he was trying to convince Woody of something.

  Woody’s left eye was black, with a thick bandage above it. Another bandage on his right cheek came precariously close to his mouth. His right arm was in a sling but there was no cast on it. Eddie remembered he’d landed on that shoulder when he was thrown down the stairs. He looked profoundly unhappy, and he was having none of what the slim man was trying to sell him. Twice he shook his head defiantly and when the blond left him at the next corner, after he’d tried one last time to make his case, Woody refused to shake his hand.

  Eddie followed on foot as Woody turned south. Lindy had said he lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment he’d bought after his divorce 20 years before, but hadn’t said it was on Lido Key, the barrier island adjacent to St. Armand’s, although that explained his fondness for Hemingway’s — he could drink all day and then walk home. The property must have appreciated enormously, Eddie thought. Maybe he won’t be so bad off when this all blows up, as it seems to be doing.

  As Woody turned onto the sidewalk of a three-story green apartment building Eddie caught up with him. “I’m glad to see you’re not in the hospital, Woody. I was afraid you were hurt bad when they took you off in that ambulance last night.”

  Woody turned his head to look at Eddie and took his hand out of his pocket to wave Eddie away. “Stay the fuck away from me, man,” he said, obviously frightened. “I’m already in enough trouble for talking to you.”

  “Woody, like I told you last night, I didn’t tell anybody I’d seen you. Why would I do that? I’m not here to cause problems like that.”

  He paused. Then he asked, “Who was that you came out of Hemingway’s with? He looked like he was trying to sell you a used car from the 20s.”

  “You may as well know. That was Perry Andrews. He’s the money partner in Lindy’s newspaper. He’s the son of a bitch who told Sommers I talked to you. He tried to tell me Al didn’t have me roughed up, that it was all Dmitri and that snake Sonny, but I know better and I told him so. He also said I shouldn’t testify against any of them, if I knew what was good for me. I told him what he could do with that.”

  “He’s the one who’s Sommers’s friend? Lindy told me about him.”

  “Yeah. She told him. The bitch.”

  “Really? That must be how they knew I’d be at the airport. But she struck me as pretty nice when I met her.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. She’s made more people unhappy here than hurricanes. And the one she hates most of all is your girl Jen, who she’s convinced stole her husband. I think she’s right about that. Jen was flittin’ about in public with that hifalutin’ doctor while Lindy was still married to him and living with him, and everybody in their circuit knew it. And I guarantee you that the minute you left she called that partner to tell him all about your meeting. She probably told him about your trip to Washington, too.”

  Eddie knew Jen was self-centered and not discriminating about her sexual partners but was surprised to hear Woody’s take on Lindy because it was so different from the image she’d displayed during his long conversation with her.

  “That’s sure not the woman I saw,” he said.

  “Don’t kid yourself. Right after Lindy’s fancy doctor left her there was a big poison-pen campaign against Jen around town. I was never completely sure Lindy started it, but Jen was, and she fought back. She told the story to all the society advertisers and Lindy’s advertising dried up. She was about to lose the paper when she found that investor asshole you just saw, and he bailed her out. That’s also when she started getting fat.”

  “That’s something to keep in mind,” Eddie replied. “Here’s another question. You mentioned last time that Dmitri told you Sommers knew someone like Roy who knew about the missing painting. Did he tell you more about who that was?”

  “Nah. He said it was an old geezer, older than Roy even. He lived in France.”

  “Paris?”

  “Maybe. But I think it was somewhere else. I got the feeling Dmitri wasn’t too strong on the geography of France. He wasn’t an intellectual, you know.”

  “Could it have been Rennes?”

  “Cudda been. It sounded something like that, but most of those French words sound the same to me anyway. Anyway, I’m going in. My head hurts and I need to take a pill and get rested up for when that young detective gives me the third degree tomorrow.”

  14

  Sarasota

  Eddie walked the two blocks to Lido Beach, took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his trousers, and began pacing the sand, trying to sort out what he knew and what it meant. Sommers was clearly a key player in the conspiracy that resulted in the death of Roy Castor, and it looked like he was behind the death of Artie, too. Was this Sommers’s plot or Erich Kraft’s? Or was there a dark presence in the background? He had a disturbing feeling that there was a kingpin lurking in the wings.

  “I’m surrounded by evil,” he heard himself say aloud. “I’ve been in bed with it. Where do I go from here?”

  He realized he couldn’t abandon the chase until he’d found the painting, that this was the time to re-engage. True, there were hundreds of stolen artworks still missing, but this was one that had captured the imagination of a small group of determined and amoral men with no qualms about killing to find it. And it just might lead to his family’s killers.

  He looked out over the Gulf of Mexico and gave himself a pep talk. You’re in this now, Grant. Nothing to do but follow it to the end, wherever it leads.

  Feeling better, he walked back to his car and drove slowly to the hotel, dreading the confrontation he knew was coming. On the way, he called Thom’s phone and got his voice mail. He
left a message saying he had information that would help him question Woody and Sonny. And he asked Paul to meet him.

  He called Philippe as he waited in the hotel room for Jen to arrive. It was ten p.m. in Paris and Eddie found him at dinner at a restaurant on Rue de Sèvres, just a few blocks from Aurélie’s apartment. Philippe took his portable into the street.

  “We’re just finishing, and I don’t mind a bit skipping the coffee. It’s lousy here. It’s just an informal dinner with Aurélie and the Sorbonne friend she’s been seeing.” Eddie felt a momentary twinge. “Also, I had dinner with Margaux last night and she’d like to hear from you.”

  “Philippe, I know I should call her but I don’t know what to tell her at this point. I’ll try to think of something.

  “Also, the local prosecutor has delegated me to give you some information that may help on your end. And, he’d like help finding the man who was driving that night outside the Chopin. It already seems like a hundred years ago, but it was just last week. We — they — think he was the man who grabbed Roy Castor.”

  He went on to explain his own suspicion that Erich Kraft was responsible for Artie’s death, aided by Dmitri. He went through Erich’s immigration story and Jen’s help in getting him American citizenship.

  “And I don’t know if she was directly involved in setting up Roy’s kidnapping, but she certainly introduced Kraft and Sommers shortly before Artie was killed. If I had to guess I’d say she did stupid things with consequences she never imagined, but the police may find it’s more than that. Bottom line, I don’t think we can count on her for help because it’s going to be a full-time job for her just to stay out of jail. And I have serious doubts about her loyalties.”

  Philippe heard Eddie out then asked, “What are you going to do? You’d certainly be justified in coming home and dropping the matter.”

  “Until I re-interviewed Woody Matthews this afternoon that’s exactly what I intended. No, I’ll be back in a couple of days to work on it there. I’ll call you so we can talk about the next step. I’m beginning to take this personally. And it’s time I re-engaged with my own life.

  “Do you think Aurélie would like to be involved? I haven’t responded very well to the stuff she’s sent me. I hoped I wouldn’t have to pursue it.”

  “You should ask her yourself.”

  “I will. Please tell her I’m reading her information right now.”

  He placed the phone carefully back on the table and plugged in its charger. Then he opened the MacBook Air and waited for his inbox to synchronize with French Gmail. There, among messages from his accountant and the manager of his language school, he found two long messages from Aurélie — one he’d already read, and a new one dated today, which he opened.

  From: Aurélie Cabillaud

  Subject: History of the lost painting

  Cher Édouard,

  This is what we know so far, including the material I sent you earlier. I’ve put it into English in case you need to give it to someone else there.

  The missing painting is almost certainly “Portrait of a Young Man,” a self-portrait by one of the great masters of the High Renaissance, Raphael (or more completely Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino), who did his best-known work in Rome 1509-1520, mainly working for two popes, Julius II and Leo X (one of the Medicis).

  I’ve talked to several art historians and a couple of gallery people and they tell me it’s the most valuable painting still missing from the war. When “The Rape of Europa” came out in 1995 the general estimate was it would be worth $100 million. I don’t know who would buy it, unless they wanted to hang it in a cave somewhere and admire it privately, but there are people like that. Maybe a rich investor in Russia, China or one of the Gulf countries.

  Raphael lived in a time when patronage of the nobles was the source of all money, and he went right to the top. He trained in Urbino and then in Florence, but moved to Rome where he was introduced to Pope Julius, who put him to work immediately. Michelangelo, on the other hand, had to wait around for months before he could start his work.

  The highlight of Raphael’s relatively brief career is the first room he did for Julius, known as the Stanza della Segnatura. It contains a sequence of paintings, one of which is called “The School of Athens.” I mention this much detail only because “Athens” contains his only undisputed self-portrait, and it is the similarity of the missing painting that convinces most experts it is Raphael’s own portrait of himself. This is the art world, of course, so there are other opinions, but the majority vote seems to be that it’s the real thing.

  Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling at the same time. One story holds that Raphael had the Vatican guards let him go into the chapel after hours so he could admire the painting. It seems to have had some impact on his work. Michelangelo called him a plagiarist.

  He was also an architect, and at one time had a contract for the design of St. Peters, but after his death Michelangelo’s work was kept instead.

  Raphael was born in Urbino, a town with a long artistic tradition, where his father was court painter to the local duke. He died young in Rome, at age 37. One popular rumor is that he died of a fever brought on by too much sex with his long-time mistress, but the truth is probably something absolutely pedestrian and in any case it doesn’t matter now and that story isn’t very likely, as we know.

  The Portrait was painted in 1513-14, when he was 30 years old. It’s not very large, about 22 inches wide and 28 inches high, and it’s painted in oil (which was a relatively new medium at the time) on a wood panel, which means it couldn’t just be rolled up and stuffed in the corner of a suitcase. It would require some protection and would take up some space.

  There doesn’t seem to be much if any record of who his client was or what happened to the painting after his death. But almost three hundred years later a young Polish prince, Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, traveled to Italy and bought it, along with Leonardo’s “Lady with an Ermine” and some Roman antiquities.

  He took his purchases back to Cracow, where they became the center of the Czartoryski family museum, except for a period during some political unpleasantness when they were in Paris. Just before the Germans attacked in 1939 the paintings were sealed up in the basement of a country house in the vicinity, but the Germans found out about them anyway. Hans Frank, the governor general of Poland, confiscated the Raphael, the Leonardo, and a Rembrandt. There was an internal squabble with Göring over all three, but they wound up hanging on the wall of Frank’s home in Wawel Castle in Krakow.

  Here’s where it gets interesting. As the Russians were closing in on Krakow early in 1945, Frank wrapped up his looted treasures and sent them off to his home in southern Germany, not too far from Munich. All three of the famous paintings were on the travel manifests — you know how the Germans had to document everything — but when the shipment arrived there was no Raphael. For a long time the prevailing theory was that Frank’s personal curator had stolen it, but he denied it. Frank’s own son wrote a bitter book well after the end of the war and speculated that his mother traded it for butter, and that it still hangs on some farmer’s wall. We can’t ask Frank, of course, because he was hanged by the Nuremberg tribunal in 1946.

  One of my colleagues has made a special study of the Nazis’ thefts and says he’s never seen evidence that the painting was in Frank’s house in the year or so before he moved — or that it wasn’t. That doesn’t prove anything, but it holds out the possibility that the painting could have been moved long before Frank took the others to Munich, in which case it could be just about anywhere.

  Always,

  Aurélie

  The door hummed, then opened slowly. Jen entered with a bright smile that looked forced.

  “I just came from the house,” she said. “Jim was able to start this afternoon so we went over details for a couple of hours.”

  “You’ll be glad when the work is done and you can move back in.”

  “I suppose we could go ther
e now if it weren’t for the fire. I heard on the radio that the police have arrested Al Sommers and poor Sonny Perry, and that Dmitri is dead. Is that why I didn’t hear from you last night?”

  “More or less. I was pulling into the hotel lot last night when Sonny and Dmitri kidnapped me at gunpoint. It was a close call. Let’s go down to dinner and I’ll tell you more.” She did not look surprised.

  Paul waited for them at a table for four in a remote corner of the dining room, Eddie pointed the way there.

  “Jen, this is Paul Fitzhugh, who works with me in Paris. We served in the Army together and he’s been part of our group since. And he’s the main reason I’m still alive to talk to you tonight.”

  She sat without a word, her face rigid. “What’s going on here?”

  Eddie spoke plainly. He didn’t want to leave room for misunderstanding. “Paul and I are returning to Paris to do some serious rat hunting. I thought this whole affair started when your father was killed, but the things I’ve learned in the last couple of days make me think it may have started with the death of my own father in 2001, or before.”

  “How could that be?”

  Paul put his hand on Eddie’s arm and picked up the story. “Ma’am, the dead Russian — Dmitri — was a known member of the Russian Mafia, an enforcer who worked mainly in Miami. We know he went to Rennes in June 2001 and was there the day Eddie’s father died. We now know — and Eddie, you haven’t heard this before — that Sonny was there, too. Artie Grant was kidnapped, interrogated and murdered, just as it’s clear your father was murdered. The difference is that he died before they could question him. They would have done the same thing to Eddie if he hadn’t outsmarted Dmitri and killed him.”