The Big Score

by Kilian, Michael;

  “You’re despicable, Mr. Poe.”

  “And what are you? You fucked Diandra, a married woman. My wife. You cheated on your wife with Jill Langley.”

  “Will you stop this?”

  “Shut up. That’s not all. I’ll also see to it that you never work as an architect again. I’ll tell them all that you screwed up the design, that I had to get Cudahy, Brown to straighten it out, that you sold me a bill of goods about how it would work at Cabrini Green. That you were bilking me for money to pay off your family’s debts.”

  He paused to sip his brandy, as if this were idle dinner table conversation. “And that’s just for starters, Curland. I’ll think up lots more stuff. I’ll put my secretary, Mango, on it. She’s a real whiz at dreaming up ways to make people feel bad. You doubt that I’ll do it?”

  “Not for a moment.”

  “Your other choice is to play ball with me. If you do, I’ll make you a happy man. You’ll get full credit for the building. You’ll be the most famous architect in the world. And you can have Diandra. She’s damaged goods, as far as I’m concerned. But she’s expensive, Mr. Curland. You’ll need dough. I’m willing to settle a couple million on her—make it five million. When the building’s done, you can go wherever you want. South of France? I’ll get you a villa. I’ll get you a new sailboat. You’ll live happily ever after.”

  “You’re so generous.”

  “My middle name. But you gotta play ball. There’s something else.”

  “There’s always something else with you.”

  “Not that much. Look, the building’s a go. I’ve got everything lined up. The Meigs Field site will be a hard sell, but we can do it. The newspapers will be against it, but I can take some wind out of their sails—especially the Tribune, with the way they lobbied for McCormick Place back in the old days. The public will be for it—not the tree lovers, maybe, but the real people who live out in the neighborhoods. Especially the ethnic groups. I’m one of them, remember? I’ve got the votes in the City Council. I’ve already got what I need from the state legislature. I’ve got only two problems: I’ve got to sell the mayor on it, and I need a vote of approval from the Park District board.”

  Matthias was shaking his head.

  “Hear me out, I said. You can help with the mayor—that stuff about an Eiffel Tower for Chicago. He likes that. You can also help with the Park District. I think I’ve got the votes, but it’ll be close. A one-vote margin maybe. I think I can count on Cooperman. This is the only way he’s going to get his Holocaust museum, but there’s one other vote I absolutely have to count on.”

  “My father’s.”

  “You got it.”

  “Mr. Poe. I’m afraid you can’t even count on my father staying awake through a Park District board meeting.”

  “Yes I can, if you see to it.”

  “So that’s it.”

  “That’s it, Matt. A simple choice. You can have fame, riches, success, and the love of your life—if that’s what she is—as your wife. Or you can have ruin, misery, poverty, disgrace, and more legal trouble than you ever dreamed of. And all I’m asking you to do is help me put up one of the man-made wonders of the world.”

  Matthias stared, first at Poe, then at the model on the table.

  “Think about it hard,” Poe said. “I’m pretty sure I can get Cooperman to call a meeting of the park board in the next couple of weeks. It’s only authorization, but I need it to move ahead on the money end. I’ll give you until then. I’ll consider your father’s vote your answer.”

  “I gave you my answer.”

  “No, you didn’t. Two weeks, Matt. Whatever you’re thinking now, you’ve got two weeks to think again.”

  “I want to talk to Diandra.”

  “Oh, no. No Diandra. Not until that vote.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Indeed we will.”

  Poe let Curland go to the elevator by himself. He was sure he had the guy hooked. He might run out the line a little, but Poe would reel him in soon enough. He sipped his brandy. The big building looked almost as magnificent on the table as it would out there on the lakefront.

  Matthias walked home, but had dispelled little of the confusion in his mind by the time he got there. He turned his watercolor of the new building to the wall, paced his living room for several minutes, then turned the picture facing outward again.

  It looked so wrong now—the great sailboat rising out of the slums of the Near North Side. It didn’t belong there anymore. What was never intended to be couldn’t be. His notion that such a grand, monumental creation could be erected in such place was a foolish mistake; his rendering, a wasted effort—like so many of his notions and efforts throughout his wasted, mistaken life. He’d been swindled, exploited; left empty, deflated, and despoiled—and he had no one to blame but himself. As Poe had said, he’d lied to himself. That was how men like Poe succeeded, persuading other people to lie to themselves.

  Poe could go on with this without him. Cudahy, Brown would make changes, of course—add embellishments, corrupt the line, pervert the beauty to make it more commercial and profitable. They might dispense with the sail altogether and simply put up the tower—a tower of their own conception. That was all Poe was really interested in—the height. He wanted to own the top. He wanted his name on it.

  Matthias pondered the picture sadly, then began to reexamine it, putting the foreground and background out of his mind, imagining instead a pure field of blue.

  Why not on the lake? If it was true that Chicago’s long and devout belief in an open shoreline had kept the city from becoming another Cleveland or Milwaukee, there was no great danger of that happening now. No one would seize upon Poe’s building as a precedent for establishing factories and glue works in Lincoln Park. No one could duplicate Poe’s creation, his creation. There would never be another occasion for such a monstrous construction.

  Or was that conceit? In the 1950s, who would have conceived of a Chicago spiked with all the monster towers it now possessed? Who would have envisioned the vast, hundred-mile sprawl of sterile suburbs? Ages hence, billions of people more, there might be a city full of monster buildings, reaching all around the lake. Whatever he and Poe might or might not do could ultimately be nothing more than an irrelevant footnote in the architecture books, like so many of Louis Sullivan’s once-dazzling creations in the Loop.

  Conceit, indeed. Goethe, his grandfather’s hero, had called architecture “frozen music.” It was something else, man’s pitiful attempt at frozen time, at immortality.

  What else had Goethe written? “The fate of the architect is the strangest of all. How often he expends his whole soul, his whole heart and passion, to produce buildings into which he himself may never enter.”

  Goethe. There was also Shelley: “‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: /Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ /Nothing beside remains. Round the decay, /of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, /The long and level sands stretch far away.”

  The wisdom of writers. Paltry stuff compared to the wisdom of the artist. Matthias had always thought that. Now he wondered.

  He went to his study, not simply for the brandy decanter that was there. With Sally no longer a concern in his life, he’d put his print of Egon Schiele’s whore back in its place.

  The whore looked down at him now, recumbent and weary, her nakedness worn like old, disheveled clothes. Why do you bother me? her pained and tired eyes said. You’re looking for wisdom, and surely I have none for you. All I know is that life is pain and then there is death. If love is as far as we ever get from death, I’ve had love, every kind of love, and it isn’t very far away at all. Don’t bother me. Don’t bother yourself. Have another drink, liebchen.

  Matthias poured himself a half glass of brandy. He took a swallow, and then another.

  Another pair of eyes were staring down on him, from another portrait. White hair. A large, gray mustache. Icy blue-gray eyes. People always remarked on the cold dignit
y of his grandfather in that picture. Now Matthias realized the true nature of the stern old gentleman’s expression. It was scorn.

  What could he do to please that long-dead man? What had he ever done that could?

  He drank again from the brandy, his eyes fixed on the patriarch’s. Then he set down his glass and went to the front closet, where he had left the rolled-up painting the Michigan policeman had brought him.

  It was still there—Kirchner’s ubiquitous woman in red with her garish, mocking smile; the stream of people rushing along the street toward a flaming horizon. It was almost the same painting as the one with which Jill had died, except that, in that one, Kirchner had them streaming toward a crimson tower.

  Rolling up the picture, Matthias put on his jacket and went out the front door. The old Rolls started. He steered it west.

  The museum office looked different from when he’d last seen it. Christian had been working there and had cleaned up thoroughly afterward, compulsively neatening everything. How had he left the vault?

  It took Matthias awhile to find the right bin, but there it was. The wooden case opened easily to reveal the same woman in red, the same people, the same street.

  He didn’t bother putting it back. He went directly to the phone and called Zane Rawlings.

  CHAPTER 23

  Lieutenant Frank Baldessari was having an easy morning. His section had caught only a couple of cases the night before. A homeless person, as they now called winos, had been found beaten to death in an alley near Old Town and the district coppers had reported an apparent suicide in a high-rise on Lincoln Park West—the victim a rich guy with a history of alcohol abuse and emotional problems, as they now described nut-case drunks. The mope had hanged himself from a hook in his closet with drapery cord. Divorced guy. No one home. Cleaning woman found the body. Close the book.

  As neither case was in any way pressing, and everything was quiet on all other fronts, Baldessari took himself a long break—coffee, Marlboro, and idle thoughts.

  But they were of a sunny day at the beach, which made him think of Zany Rawlings’s little town across the lake, which reminded him of Zany’s case, which brought him right back to his job. He’d shared his unit’s amazement and amusement at the news that Zany Rawlings had popped a couple of perps out there in the dunes—in his capacity as a deputy sheriff, no less. Mulroney said he must have whacked the bastards by accident, while pulling out his revolver.

  “Maybe old Zany mistook ’em for electric typewriters,” another detective had said, recalling the enormous hole Rawlings had inadvertently put into one of those machines downstairs in burglary getting his weapon out of a drawer one night.

  Baldessari had joined in the laughter, but his mind came back to the matter now with more seriousness. Zany had clocked the two in a burglary attempt on his house, which he said was related to stolen property involved in the Langley murder.

  Which Zany had insisted was inextricably linked to a certain burglary and two homicides in Chicago, including what had been the number-one homicide case in the department, now closed. O’Rourke, Robert.

  The lieutenant was not about to reopen that investigation and stir up downtown all over again. But a little look-see might be in order. The dead perps were a couple of out-of-town hired hands—last known addresses in Newark, New Jersey—but hired help had bosses, and Baldessari didn’t want somebody else coming at his old friend. The dead guys had been carrying heavy-duty weaponry.

  It occurred to Baldessari that maybe there was something he had passed over in his rush to get City Hall off his back, something that could help Zany work this out. If ever there was a cop who needed help at his job, it was old Zany.

  He called for the case file.

  Baldessari had finally done the professional thing about the prints taken from O’Rourke’s station wagon. Run every one of them through the FBI computer out in Washington, just as Zany had asked, and those from the murdered hooker’s apartment as well.

  Those from the murdered blonde’s apartment and the black chippie who got wasted with O’Rourke naturally enough produced arrest records—multiple busts for prostitution and soliciting. The set taken from beneath O’Rourke’s car seat turned up a rap sheet, too. As they didn’t match those of the dead blonde, Margaret Kozak, who everyone now agreed was O’Rourke’s killer, Baldessari hadn’t paid too much attention to them. The record attached to these mystery car seat prints had a name—Rose Scalzetti—and listed three busts, also for prostitution—two in Miami and one in Atlantic City. The lieutenant had attached no significance to the far remove. Hookers moved around. Miami, Atlantic City, Chicago, Vegas, Los Angeles. Some hookers stuck with their turf and pimps; others drifted around, always looking for a better score.

  The only thing that really grabbed Baldessari about this was how the hell anyone could be arrested for turning tricks in Atlantic City. It was like getting pinched for double parking in New York.

  Still, he thought he’d better check her out now. You never knew.

  Rose Scalzetti. A nice Italian girl shouldn’t have to be doing that kind of work.

  He called in Mulroney.

  “Get on the horn with the coppers in Atlantic City,” he said. “I want to find out more about this lady.”

  Rawlings and Matthias Curland had phoned five art collectors who, according to the calculations of Zany’s computer, were the most avid buyers of Ernst Kirchner works and German Expressionist art in the city. And they’d abruptly stopped buying art the previous year.

  They got nowhere with four of them. Two had very good reasons indeed for so mysteriously halting their collecting. They’d gone Chapter 11. Two others were worried they might soon share such a fate.

  The other collector on the “hot” list was in Philadelphia, and they were unable to get him on the phone. Matthias recognized the name, Herman Franck, noting that the man had once been associated with his grandfather. Franck was nowhere near Chapter 11. He was one of the richest men on the East Coast.

  They decided to visit him in person. Matthias made the arrangements over the phone with Franck’s butler, identifying himself as Karl Albrecht’s grandson, and saying he had a painting to sell—discreetly. He said he’d bring it with him. The butler called back, saying Franck had agreed to see him.

  Discreetly.

  Franck was an older man, well into his seventies. He had been both a friend and a rival of Matthias’s grandfather, having amassed one of the country’s great collections of German and pre-World War I Russian Expressionists paintings. Unlike Karl Albrecht, he had freely loaned them to museums, and had talked to the Museum of Modern Art about making a gift to the institution of the larger part of them, provided they’d be installed permanently in a display chamber bearing his name. When the museum had balked at keeping them all on permanent view, he’d withdrawn his offer. He’d allowed the Philadelphia Museum of Art to stage a huge exhibition of all his holdings, declared it his last show, and then returned all the works to the galleries in his huge house out on the Philadelphia Main Line.

  Franck had kept collecting, however. The previous summer, he’d paid a world record price for an Emil Nolde.

  Then, the previous October, he’d ceased his acquisitions and even dismissed his New York agent. This had taken people quite by surprise. Franck had vowed to go to his grave with a greater collection than Albrecht’s.

  Though his computer had put Franck on the “hot” list, Zany had known nothing about the rivalry with Matthias’s grandfather. If he had been aware of that, he would have gone to the old man first before bothering with all the other collectors.

  They took a cab from the suburban railroad station. After being admitted to the house by the elderly butler, they were ushered into a library, and asked to wait.

  “Makes your place in Chicago look like a shack,” Zany said, eyeing the endless shelves of leather-bound books.

  “No one should live like this anymore,” Matthias said. “This house ought to be a museum. It probab
ly will be someday.”

  Franck entered, moving haltingly, and made his way to a large mahogany desk without stopping to introduce himself or shake hands. With a gesture, he invited them to take chairs. Glancing at Zany with some disapproval, he turned to Matthias.

  “I knew your grandfather well,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “I worked with him on the ‘Save German Art’ committee in the thirties, when I was in college. He was an opponent of the Nazis when many German Americans were cheering Hitler on. He contributed a great deal of money to get Jews out of Germany. Did you know that? A fine and considerable man, Karl Albrecht. Too bad he was so stupid and narrow-minded about art.”

  “He had his eccentricities,” Matthias said.

  “Locking all those wonderful paintings away like that. I no longer exhibit mine, as you may know, but I allow students and scholars to come and see them by appointment. Would you like to look at my collection?”

  “Perhaps later,” Matthias said.

  The old man coughed. He had fewer years than Matthias’s father, but seemed older. Too much time spent indoors.

  “You said you had a painting for sale,” Franck said. “A German Expressionist.”

  Matthias snapped open the big briefcase they had brought, but moved no further, letting Franck’s eyes linger on the lid.

  “You’re not allowed to sell paintings from your museum,” Franck said.

  “That’s correct. This one isn’t part of my grandfather’s collection. I came by it oddly.”

  “Well, let’s see it.”

  “I’m told you have one of the most extensive collections of Ernst Kirchner paintings in the country.”