Cold Hit

by Linda Fairstein

  “Like my pal Scanlon says, ‘The camel shits. The caravan moves on.’ I agree with little old Mrs. B. You need to get a life before this job sucks everything out of you, kid.”

  “Don’t start with me, Mike. It’s everyone else I know outside these doors who can’t understand why I love what I do and who just doesn’t get it. From my pals, I at least expect that you agree that this is the most fascinating job in the world. How many people get up in the morning and look forward to going to work? You and I have never had two days that have been at all predictable in our entire careers, and no two that have been even remotely alike. And on top of it, you do a little bit of good for somebody else in the mix.” I knew I was preaching to the choir, but Mike was just in one of those moods that swept over each of us from time to time.

  “Jacob Tyler. Isn’t he the guy who’s like a baby Brian Williams?”

  “I don’t think that’s quite the description he’d favor.”

  “But he’s the one who sits in for Brian Williams when Williams sits in for Tom Brokaw, right? Anchorman-to-be. Deep voice, lots of hair, best-looking striped shirts on the airwaves.”

  “When you’re ready to tell all about your love life, I’ll buy the drinks and we’ll compare notes for an entire night, if you’d like.”

  “All I need is half a minute. The story of my love life’d fit on a matchbook cover. C’mon, let’s get this thing signed so I can rattle Bryan’s cage tomorrow morning.”

  As we returned to the office from the courtroom, Catherine Dashfer and Marisa Bourges, the two senior members of the Sex Crime Unit, were waiting for me. “Did you forget that Rich was on trial?” Marisa asked, referring to one of our colleagues, who was in court with his first date-rape prosecution.

  “Damn it, I forgot completely. I’m so wound up in this that I’m not paying attention to the daily routine.”

  “That’s okay. When he heard you weren’t in, he called and we went over to help him. The medical testimony was on today, and his witness handled it extremely well.”

  In more than 70 percent of reported sexual assaults, the victim suffers no gross physical injury. And even though physical injury is not an element of the crime of rape, most jurors expect that they’ll hear evidence of bruises and lacerations. Frequently we need an expert physician to explain the absence of visible trauma, as well as the elasticity of the vaginal vault.

  “Thanks for covering for me. Michael Warner is such a prick, I thought he’d make mincemeat of Rich’s doctor.” The defendant’s attorney was a mean-spirited character as well as a screamer, and though the physician who had examined the victim was an experienced practitioner in an emergency room setting, he had never testified in a courtroom before.

  “I think Rich has a lock. Dr. Hayakawa held up beautifully. Every time Warner went back at him, he held his ground, described his findings, and concluded that they were consistent with the victim’s version of the events. Finally, Warner was halfway across the room and yelled out at the doctor at the top of his lungs, mocking him for dramatic effect. ‘I want you to tell the jury why it is, Doctor, that you did not expect to find any lesions or tears, even though this woman had described to you an absolutely brutal and life-threatening encounter.’

  “Dr. Hayakawa never lost his cool. He just looked straight at the jury and said, ‘Because actually, penis not so awesome weapon, ladies and gentlemen.’ ”

  Catherine broke in. “The foreman cracked up and the rest of the jurors followed. I never saw anyone run for his seat as fast as Warner. Rich is going to sum up tomorrow. We took him through it when we got out of court tonight and he’s going to do fine. You still have time to go to the hospital to visit Sarah and the baby?”

  It was after six. “Sure. I told Nan Toth to be downstairs at my Jeep at six fifteen.”

  “You two ride with me,” Chapman said to Catherine and Marisa. “They can meet us up there.”

  I finished returning phone calls before going out to meet Nan. We headed up First Avenue to New York University Medical Center and parked the car on Thirty-fourth Street, stopping to buy flowers before going in. Keith Raskin was getting off the elevator as we waited for it on the ground floor. A brilliant orthopedic surgeon, he had painstakingly reconstructed the bones in my right hand after they were shattered in a horseback riding accident several years earlier. I flexed my fingers and made a fist to demonstrate how successful the operation had been.

  “After that Dogen murder case you worked on this spring, I never thought I’d see you inside a hospital again,” Keith remarked, referring to the tragic slaughter of a neurosurgeon inside one of the city’s largest medical centers.

  “Just a visit to the obstetrical floor, Doctor. In and out as fast as I can make it.” We caught up with each other briefly, and Nan and I continued on our way to Sarah’s room.

  We arrived in time to join Catherine, Marisa, and Mike in admiring the baby as she squinted up at us through teeny brown eyes. The room was well stocked with bouquets, Beanie Babies, and oversized stuffed animals, and the phone rang constantly while we each took turns holding Janine in our arms.

  When the aide came to take her back to the nursery, Sarah put on her slippers and padded down the hall for a few laps of exercise around the maternity floor. Mike grabbed the clicker and turned the television on to Jeopardy!, having timed his visit to be sure to get in for the final question. The screen lit up just as Trebek displayed the category for the night, which was Famous Quotations.

  We looked at each other and I shrugged my shoulders, knowing this could go any which way, depending on the subject of the quotation. “You guys in for ten?” Chapman asked all four of us.

  Marisa, Catherine, Nan, and I each dug in our pocketbooks to match the ten-dollar bill that Mike had thrown on Sarah’s bed.

  “And tonight’s answer is: John Hay referred to it as ‘a splendid little war.’ ”

  “So much for all your fancy degrees and the twelve years of law school among you. This is the quickest fifty bucks I ever made,” Chapman said, scooping up the money and fanning it in our faces.

  There was not much about American history-and nothing about military history-that Mike Chapman didn’t know. I looked at the other women and told them I conceded defeat. Not one of us had a serious guess.

  Before any of the contestants revealed their answers, Mike announced, “The Final Jeopardy question is: What was the Spanish-American War?”

  “That’s exactly right,” Alex Trebek said, remarking on the answer given by the poultry inspector from Lumberton, North Carolina, which earned him $ 8,700 and the evening’s championship.

  “Eighteen ninety-eight was the year. And John Hay, ladies,” Chapman continued, “was our ambassador to Great Britain during that conflict. Later he was secretary of state. His comment may have seemed appropriate at the time, since it was a very short and one-sided war. Now, more than a hundred years later, we’re still dealing with the fallout-Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.

  “A little less time shopping at the Escada sample sales and a bit more with your noses in the books-and I don’t mean Dorothy L. Sayers or Anthony Trollope, Mrs. Toth-and you’ll be able to hold on to your husbands’ well-earned money. C’mon, blondie, we got work to do.”

  “We’re meeting my friend Joan Stafford for dinner. She claims to have some inside poop about the deceased. See you in the morning.”

  We said good night to Sarah and the others near the nursery. It was a quick ride up to Forty-sixth Street and the quiet elegance of the best steak house in Manhattan, Patroon.

  Mercer and Joan were already seated at the front corner table when we entered. I kissed the top of her head before sliding into the banquette and told her how much I missed having her in town, now that she was spending all her time in Washington with her fiancé. Ken Aretsky, the owner, sent a round of drinks over to the table.

  Mike was already buried in the menu and banking on Joan’s inimitable generosity. “I’m starting with a dozen oysters.
Then the veal chop with the garlic mashed potatoes. Let’s order so we can talk business.” He raised his glass in Joan’s direction. “Cheers. So whaddaya know that we don’t?”

  “Here’s the thing. I never knew Deni personally, but a lot of my friends did. And I’ve met Lowell more times than I can remember-at his gallery, at auctions, and even dinner parties. But there have been stories floating around town for years, for whatever they’re worth.”

  “You gave Mike the names of two of her lovers when you called. Any significance to that?” I asked.

  “I ran rap sheets on both of ’em,” Mike broke in. “Came up clean. Look like legit businessmen.”

  “There’s Preston Mattox, who’s an architect,” said Joan. “Not much talk about him. The other one nobody really gets. He’s Frank Wrenley, an antiques expert and dealer. Scratch a bit below the surface on him and I’m not quite sure the kind of guy you’ll find. Maybe it’s just that he’s such new money. Sprang up on the art scene out of nowhere, and suddenly he’s in the big leagues, running side by side with Deni Caxton.”

  “I’m telling you, Coop. This case has everything for an art caper except Nazis,” Mike said, eschewing the dainty shellfish fork in favor of slurping up an oyster.

  Joan Stafford picked at her warm foie gras. “So it’s Nazis you vant, Herr Chapman? Then it’s Nazis I shall give you.”

  13

  “Have you ever heard of the Amber Room?”

  The three of us shook our heads in the negative.

  “I’m sure I don’t have to remind you about all of the art that was seized and stolen by the Nazis during the Second World War,” Joan said.

  My father had insisted that my brothers and I learn about the Holocaust from our childhood on, both to understand the magnitude of its atrocities and to know its historical and cultural importance. As a Jew, and also as an art collector, he had followed the stories of families fleeing Europe before the war, and those sent to the death camps, whose personal treasures became the property of their conquerors. Recent years had seen a series of legal wrangles to reclaim such confiscated artworks and restore them to the survivors or the rightful heirs of their owners. I knew of many of the cases that had been brought in the courts as paintings surfaced at auctions or institutions after half a century of being secretly held, but I had never heard of something described as a room.

  “In seventeen seventeen, King Wilhelm I of Prussia gave the tsar-Peter the Great-a unique gift. It was a set of gilded oak panels that were decorated with more than six tons of amber, elaborately carved and inset with Florentine mosaics and Venetian glass mirrors. The walls were installed in the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, and had actually been dubbed the ‘eighth wonder of the world’ by the British ambassador. So far as I’m aware, only a single photograph of this breathtaking creation was ever known to have been taken in its two-hundred-year history.

  “When Nazi troops invaded Russia in nineteen forty-one, they brought their own art experts along to aid in the plundering of the Soviet bounty. The priceless Amber Room was taken apart and shipped off to a town called Königsberg, which is on the Baltic coast. But by the end of the war, as some of the treasures began to appear, there was not a sign of this enormous chamber.”

  “Any theories about it?” I asked.

  “Dozens. I researched it carefully because I intended to write a play about it.” She glanced across at me, knowing that I always chided her about her abandoned efforts. “Had to stick it in a drawer once your DNA buddies matched the Romanovs’ bodies. I had it all set to be reconstructed for Anastasia, who was found alive and well in-never mind.

  “I take it you want the leading theories and not the obscure ones. Some professional treasure hunter showed up a few years ago with Xeroxes of documents signed by Himmler, claiming he could prove that the room had been redirected to burg but that the general transporting it had made an independent decision to change the route in the face of the Allied advance.”

  “Quedlinburg,” Mike said. “That was a major Nazi stash, wasn’t it?”

  He reminded us that in 1996 the Feds tried to prosecute two Texans for the return of several hundred million dollars’ worth of medieval reliquaries, stolen by their brother-an American soldier-at the end of World War II. German troops had looted the religious treasure-everything from ninth-century prayer books and lavishly painted manuscripts to gem-encrusted vases and figures. And in the process of the American liberation of Europe, lowlifes in our own army had made off with the already stolen cache of goods.

  “So, one school has the amber buried in the quarry beside a seventh-century castle, while the latest claim is that the son of a German military intelligence officer who helped with the actual logistics of the move has used his father’s papers to establish that the stuff never even got to Germany, but is still buried in the Russian system of underground tunnels and mine shafts.”

  Mercer had been unusually quiet throughout the meal. “Connect this to Denise Caxton for me, will you?”

  “This all goes back to the Second World War. Lowell Caxton’s father lived in France, as you may already know by now.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He made some reference about how his parents met, and his being raised in an apartment in Paris.”

  “Although the senior Caxton spent the war years in the States, he never severed his ties with a guy called Roger Dequoy, who was later identified as one of the worst collaborators in the art world. Dequoy was selling paintings to all the Nazi leaders, and they in turn were trying to dump the Impressionist works they had stolen. Thought it was all too degenerate, if you can imagine that.

  “The French government considered bringing charges against Caxton’s father for selling to the Nazis, but they were never able to build a case. What is quite clear is that the Caxtons were positioned-both financially and politically-to have had access to an unbelievable number of the pillaged works. What they also had was the ability to move them around Europe pretty well, too.”

  “It seems to me,” Mike said, “that with all the wealth they had already accumulated, the old man could afford to sit on the stuff until the millennium. No need to try to sell it and show his hand, like most of the others who got caught.”

  “The Caxton thing has never been about selling or making any more of a profit. That’s just sport for them, father and son. It’s all in the possession-sheer, unadulterated greed. You’ve been to the apartment, right?”

  “Yeah. We were there over the weekend.”

  “Lowell has suites, as you may know, each done in a favorite painter or period. Of course, I’ve never seen it myself, but rumor has it that somewhere, in one of his properties, he has rebuilt the Amber Room. It’s not complete-some of the wood was warped when the mine shaft was flooded. But he got most of the jeweled pieces out of Europe somehow, and found craftsmen to regild the mirrors and panels in separate units, so none of them had reason to suppose that he had actually found a whole room. It must be as close as anyone in the world is going to come to feeling like a tsar.”

  “And Deni?” I asked.

  “She certainly knew about it. Each of his wives did. That’s what Liz Smith was alluding to in her column this morning.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I tell you I didn’t have a moment, between autopsies, to read the friggin’ society pages, won’t you?” asked Chapman.

  “Sorry. Liz wrote something about how getting to Caxton’s inner sanctum was certainly the kiss of death for each of his three lovely wives. You know, like Bluebeard’s castle. Once he got them in his secret lair and made love to them there, he had to kill them.”

  “Don’t lose me here, Joanie. Are you suggesting that Lowell-was trying to shut her up about the Amber Room, or that someone else was trying to use Deni to get to it? And please don’t tell me that your personal trainer is the source for this.” I knew that half of Joan’s best gossip came from the guy who worked her out at home every morning when she was in Manhattan, where she still kept an apartment. He ha
d a fantastic client list, and something about lifting weights and doing inversions seemed to cause these well-toned, tight-lipped women to reveal their deepest secrets to him.

  “The way I heard it, the Russian mob was pushing its way into the Chelsea art scene, hoping to put pressure on Deni to lead them to the amber so they could return it to the palace, which has been under restoration for twenty years. They’ve got a patron, a Soviet businessman who hit it big in the telecommunications industry, willing to pay the tab for what they assumed she could lead them to.”

  “Ever been to Brighton?” Chapman asked Joan.

  “Sure, my play had tryouts there and in Bath before it opened in London.”

  “Not Brighton, England. Brighton Beach. Home of the Russian mafia.”

  “You think I don’t do the West Side, Mikey? Well, Joan doesn’t do the outer boroughs. Forget Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx. They’re just places she has to drive through to get where she wants to go.”

  “So she’s not coming with us when we go poking around for double agents looking for Nazis looking for stolen art, huh?” Mike asked me.

  Mercer picked up the thread. “What do you know about Bryan Daughtry?”

  Joan laughed. “More than anyone needs to know, that’s for certain. Denise Caxton didn’t create that monster, but she was certainly feeding him.”

  “Why was she so attached to him, do you think?”

  “She was the classic underdog, Alex, and there was something in her that must have made her reach out to characters with the same background. I’m sure you remember that I used to buy from Daughtry, in the old days, before any of us knew about the dark side with the leather and young girls. Like Deni, he’s basically a dreamer, trying to create a fantastic life out of whole cloth. His business was riskier than anything that Lowell did, and she apparently liked that. I mean, it doesn’t take much skill to sell a Picasso, right?”