The Big Score

by Kilian, Michael;

  “I’m not sure we can unload all eight right away. We have only the one prospective customer, and he’s interested chiefly in Emil Nolde and Ernst Kirchner works. Half of what we have is Franz Marc.”

  “You’re talking on the public telephone, Larry.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Anyway, that means we can sell five, right? Four Noldes and another Kirchner.”

  “Well …”

  “You said ‘eight.’ There are supposed to be nine. Is something wrong, Larry? There hasn’t been another fuckup, has there?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I told you what I’d do if anything like that happened again.”

  “You’ve nothing to worry about, Peter. I must have misspoken. I’m just a bit flustered today. Everything’s in order. But really, I don’t think you’ll be able to sell more than four or five in anything like a hurry.”

  “Do your goddamn best.”

  “I always do.”

  “You had them all authenticated?”

  “Yes. I have the certificates right here.”

  “And we’re covered, right, as concerns the original, er, source?”

  “We’ll attend to that at the first propitious moment. There’s that other party to worry about. He works at the museum sometimes. Movement’s a little difficult just now.”

  “Don’t worry about the other party. I’m going to see to it he’s real preoccupied. There’ll be a lot of propitious moments.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m holding my press conference on the Cabrini Green project Sunday at two o’clock. Everyone concerned will be there, including that other party.”

  “It would seem, then, that I’ll be unable to attend.”

  “Get it done, Larry. If you can close a deal by the end of the month I’ll raise your cut to fifteen percent.”

  “You’re generous to a fault.”

  “But I’d like fifty thousand on account.”

  “Fifty thousand? Peter, you know what the art market’s been like. I’m afraid I can’t manage that amount.”

  “Why not? You’ll have the goddamn spaghetti painting, won’t you?”

  “Art isn’t money, Peter. Not until somebody’s ready to pay for it.”

  “What can you manage?”

  “Twenty?”

  “Make it twenty-eight. And get a certified check over here by messenger today.”

  “I didn’t think you worried about such paltry sums.”

  “Larry, I got where I am by worrying about all sums.”

  Poe hung up. He wondered if Train was screwing around with him. The fruitcake wouldn’t dare try anything funny, would he? Not with bombs going off and bodies turning up in sailboats.

  He looked at his calendar. He had thirty days to get everything ready for the Inland Empire Bank’s Japanese money men. When that was a done deal, he’d be rolling in millions again.

  Other people’s money. It was the name of the game.

  Zany knew there’d be hell to pay, but he’d stayed overnight in Chicago, in a cheap motel out by the Kennedy Expressway. He’d called Judy and told him he was going drinking with some cop friends and that if he got over his limit, he might sack out with one of them. She didn’t sound as if she believed him, but it couldn’t be helped. He certainly didn’t want to come home toting three expensive paintings. They’d be a hell of a lot harder to explain than an overnight out.

  He’d stop for a few beers on his way home. Maybe spill a little on his clothes.

  Having forgotten to leave a wake-up call—and not at all sure that the drunken night desk clerk would have remembered it, in any event—Zany slept late. The long hours he’d been putting in these last weeks had been creeping up on him. He didn’t bother showering—the better to convince Judy of a toot—but did stop for a greasy breakfast in the little café across the street from the motel. It reminded him of his Chicago cop days.

  His first stop was the Curland house on Schiller Street. Matthias Curland would have to take some interest in the Kirchner he’d found if Zany thrust it into his hands.

  When he opened the door, Curland looked as bad as Zany must. He appeared to have been up very late.

  He clenched his teeth when he spoke. “Why do you persist in bothering me? There’s nothing I can do for you now.”

  “May I come in?”

  “No. Damn it, no! I was up working most of the night.”

  “I told you I’d come across a painting. In Train’s gallery. A Kirchner.”

  “And I told you I didn’t care.”

  Zany opened his plastic bag. He’d rolled up the canvas for protection. “Here,” he said, “examine at your leisure. Just don’t tell anybody where you got it, or where I got it.”

  Curland unrolled the painting. He looked at it as he might a piece of junk mail. “This is supposed to be from my museum?”

  “That’s what I hope you’ll find out for me.”

  “And it came from Train’s gallery?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you come to have it?”

  “That I don’t want you to find out.”

  A spark of interest came into Curland’s bloodshot eyes, then vanished as the bleariness returned. “All right, I’ll look at it. But not now. Later.”

  “Take your time. You have my number. I’ll be waiting for your call. Just don’t talk to anyone else about it. Not your brother, not Mr. Train. If you pardon the expression, you’ll queer the deal.”

  “What?”

  “Just an expression. I’m trusting you, Mr. Curland.”

  “How utterly kind of you.”

  He stepped back and started to close the door.

  “I called your wife, your ex-wife.”

  Matthias hesitated. “You’re bothering her, too, Chief Rawlings?”

  “Official business. You told me you were with her in New York. The first time I talked to her, she said you weren’t. I called her again. This time her husband wasn’t on the line. He was out of town. She admitted she’d lied to me. She said she was with you that night, in a hotel in Manhattan.”

  Curland glanced down the street. He didn’t appreciate having such conversations on his doorstep.

  “She said you were in bad shape, that you’d been drinking. She said she’d stayed long enough to get you out of it, but her husband wouldn’t understand.”

  “I was upset, about my mother’s death, about having to come back.”

  “Doesn’t bother me. I’ve gotten pretty shit-faced myself on occasion.”

  The architect seemed repelled by the remark.

  “Look, Mr. Curland, do you want to get the people who killed Jill Langley? The people who are probably responsible for all the trouble that’s been going on here?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Well, as things stand, that makes just two of us. Everybody else seems to be against me or just doesn’t give a damn. So help me out. Check out this painting. Please.”

  Curland stared at the ground. “I’ll see what I can do. When I have the time. Good day, Chief Rawlings.”

  “One more thing, Mr. Curland. Your boat. The Grand Pier police department is through with it. It’s no longer impounded. You can come out and pick it up whenever you want. When you do, stop by my house. We can have a couple of cold ones—and talk. I trust that by then you’ll have checked out this painting.”

  “I’ll be out for the boat as soon as I can. Thank you, Chief Rawlings.”

  He closed the door politely.

  Zany walked away feeling more confident. If nothing else, he had more proof that Matthias Curland was an honest man. He’d called him “Chief Rawlings.” If he was one of the bad guys, he would have known Zany had been fired from the job.

  Matthias stood there in the foyer, trying to think. He unrolled the canvas again, focusing his weary eyes as best he could. It was a Kirchner, that was clear. But, if Rawlings had found it in Train’s gallery, it might only be because Jill had hidden it there.

 
; He didn’t want to think about any bad things Jill might have done. He didn’t want to think about Jill at all now.

  How did Rawlings get it out of the gallery? If it was official evidence, why had he given it to him? If he went to Larry Train about it, whether Rawlings was right or wrong, it would only stir up godawful trouble.

  This was not the time for that. Matthias went to his front closet and put the painting up on the top shelf, among some hats and clutter.

  Returning to the living room, he sat down on the couch and stared bleakly at the coffee table, where he’d spread out some sheets of paper from a sketch pad. They were covered with hasty drawings and floor plans.

  He’d done something dumb. He’d left something out of his grand design, something simple, obvious, and altogether obligatory: a garage. There would be an extraordinary number of occupants in that building, and the garage would have to be huge. But he could think of no place to put it.

  Zany really wanted to go home now, but he had one more visit to make—to the Art Institute.

  As he expected, it being the height of the summer tourist season, the great museum was crowded. He queued up at the check room behind a couple of college kids carrying backpacks. When he handed the plastic shopping bag with the two purloined paintings in it to the attendant, she didn’t even look at him—just slapped down a numbered tag on the counter. He pocketed it and drifted away into the throng, passing only about a half hour among the paintings, then wandering idly outside.

  He’d been no more noticed than one of the pigeons on the steps. His shopping bag, he knew, would sit there a few days, then be turned over to the lost and found, where it might remain weeks or months before anyone seriously bothered with it.

  And then? Well, he’d consider himself one of the Art Institute’s benefactors.

  He tossed the numbered tag into a trash can.

  Nearing the Michigan line, Zany turned off at the next exit and then kept driving until he came to a bar—a country and western joint with a lot of old cars in front. The customers were staring transfixed at the television set, which was showing a soap opera. He had four beers in fairly quick succession, went to the bathroom, and then drove on home.

  Judy took one look at him and bought his story entire. “God, Zany, you smell.”

  “Sorry. I’ll take a shower. After I get some sleep.”

  “Was this really necessary?”

  He paused in thought, as if this were a truly profound question.

  “Yeah,” he said. “After what I’ve been through? It was.”

  “All right. I won’t give you a hard time about it. This once. I’m going down to the store. I think I’ll reopen tomorrow. I’m tired of sitting around. How’d it go with the outboard engines?”

  He’d brought the stack of brochures in with him from the car. He showed them to her. “I’m not sure I want to be in marine supplies. Looks kinda dull. I think I’d like to open a bar.”

  “I’ll bet you would.”

  When he heard her car drive away, he went to his phone. What did an art thief do after pulling off a successful job? He called the cops.

  Detective Myron Plotnik, as he preferred to be, was at his desk. “Hiya, Zany. What’s the word?”

  “I was wondering if anything turned up on that missing painting of mine.”

  “Sorry. Not a fucking thing. I think it’s long gone. You sure are hung up on that. I heard you lost your job out there. Are you still working the case?”

  “Not really. Just wondering.”

  “Well, we got nothin’.”

  “You catch any other art theft cases? Anything that might be similar.”

  “Not a one.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Blank sheet, Zany. No, wait a minute. Here’s one came in last night.”

  Zany held his breath.

  “Yeah,” said Plotnik. “Woman on the Gold Coast. Said someone made off with a statue from her garden. Aphrodite, it says here. Seven-foot-high statue of a naked woman. What do you suppose anybody would want with that, when they could get one of those life-size inflatable dolls?”

  CHAPTER 18

  Poe’s news conference, held in a ballroom of his grandest hotel, was as well attended as he possibly could have hoped. In addition to a small mob of local news media, there were correspondents there from two of the networks as well as from the Chicago bureaus of the news weeklies. There was even someone from People magazine. No foreign reporters had come—most noticeable to Poe, no reporters from Japan—but they’d be on hand soon enough.

  Standing behind Poe when he took to the podium was as large an array of city fathers and other notables as he could pull together on short notice in the middle of summer. Aldermen Larry, Curly, and Moe were there, among a number of politicians. Poe had both Yeats and his establishment stuffed shirt of an attorney present, along with Matthias and Diandra, and a battery of architects from Cudahy, Brown. Most important of all, a beaming Aaron Cooperman was front and center, with Matthias’s father standing uncomfortably behind him, looking a little dazed.

  There was no one there from the Inland Empire Bank, but that was the last thing Poe would have wanted. They were to be involved later, after the project had become quite something else.

  Poe began with a long paen to Chicago and its extraordinary architecture, and the leadership role it was taking in reviving America’s old big cities from decades of decay. He painted a vivid verbal picture of what an urban paradise that end of the Near North Side would be ten years hence, and heaped embarrassingly gushing praise on Matthias for the genius he had shown in coming up with his unique design, calling him Chicago’s greatest architect since Frank Lloyd Wright. Then Poe launched into a long personal testament to the deep and abiding love he had for the city of his birth, going on about how unhappy and frustrated he’d been trying to realize his dreams in such lesser, unvisionary cities as Philadelphia and New York.

  When he could see the newsies begin to get itchy, he threw the floor open for questions. Park District President Cooperman had been promised an opportunity for a big spiel about the Holocaust Museum and the other ethnic installations, and was nearly beside himself with impatience. But Poe was going to hold him in reserve, for the strategic moment when he’d most be needed.

  “Mr. Poe, you haven’t said how tall this thing is going to be,” a reporter had begun. “Isn’t it true you plan to give Chicago the world’s tallest building again? And beat out that guy in New York?”

  “Chicago should always have the world’s tallest building,” Poe said. “But the dimensions of the project haven’t been determined yet. This is just the concept, the design. I wanted to show it to you before we went another step further.”

  “You also haven’t said how much it’s going to cost.”

  “When we figure that out we’ll know how high it’s going to be.”

  There was a lot of laughter. Poe smiled. He was completely in control.

  “Are you going to pay for it out of your own pocket?”

  “I was going to, but then I looked at my wife’s department store bills.” He paused to wait for the next wave of laughter to subside. “Don’t worry. This will be solidly financed. Like all my projects.”

  Then another reporter changed the subject. “Mr. Poe, can you tell us now why someone put a bomb on your yacht, and who you think did it?”

  Poe frowned. “The Coast Guard and I think the Transportation Department are conducting an investigation into possible arson—local police, too—but no evidence of anything like that has been recovered. They sent divers down. Didn’t find anything.”

  “What about reports that the crime syndicate is out to get you?”

  “I’ve heard those reports, all that gossip. I’ve no idea if there’s anything to them. I personally think the fire was just an unfortunate accident. I mean, I wasn’t even on the boat. But I can tell you that I don’t and won’t do business with those scum. I think any businessman who does is no better than they are. And let me s
ay something about my, er, first mate here, Matt Curland. Thanks to his seamanship and courage, everybody got off that boat alive. That fine young woman, Cindy Ellison—all the crew members, the best crew I’ve ever had—could have been killed. My wife could have been killed. Matt ought to get a medal.”

  “Do you think maybe someone was trying to send you a message?”

  “What? To stay away from sailboats?”

  “Mr. Poe, charges have been made that you might have cheated to win that sailboat race.”

  Now Poe let himself get angry. “You know, young man, that’s absolutely disgusting. Yes, a protest was filed with the race committee and it was unanimously rejected. We were fair and square from start to finish. We won that race because we had the guts to take a few chances. Because we had real sailors like Matt here and Cindy Ellison aboard, not a bunch of high-society wimps who think sailing’s just for aristocrats.”

  Matthias winced. Someone would duly note that both he and Cindy were in the Social Register.

  “Anyway,” Poe continued, relaxing again, “I think it was just sour grapes. I put up a hundred-thousand-dollar prize on that race, to be given to charity. I think the other guy is just pissed—excuse me, just miffed—because he’s out the money. I think he was going to give it to the Republican Party.”

  The laughter this time was explosive. Moe almost doubled up.

  “And while we’re on the subject,” Poe said, “I’d like to announce today that I’m contributing that hundred thousand—every cent—to the fund for the Holocaust Museum. And now I think I’d better turn the microphone over to President Cooperman so he can say a few words about that.”

  He stepped back, like an artist from a freshly completed masterpiece.

  Cooperman spoke for a good fifteen minutes, giving what amounted to a history lesson wrapped in a sermon. When he was done, on cue, one of Poe’s aides went to the mike to invite the press to refreshments in an adjoining reception room, cutting off any further questions.

  As the newsies headed for the door, Poe drew Matthias and Diandra aside.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “A tour de force, Peter,” said Diandra coolly. “I didn’t expect anything less.”