by Sam Cabot
By unspoken agreement, they’d been conducting operations in the end of the holding room farthest from the bloodstains. They’d moved all the affected pieces to the long worktable, examining them minutely. Now, while Katherine packed up rug, map, and wooden figures, Livia excused herself to make a phone call.
“Livia, my dear,” Spencer said. “How are things progressing? How is your friend?”
“It’s dismal here, but Katherine and Estelle are both holding up and most of the art is undamaged. Including the Ohtahyohnee. Spencer, did you find Michael’s brother?”
“No. We met an interesting lady and some gentlemen, friends of Michael’s, and drank an unspeakable beer. Michael was eager to continue the search, proposing to visit a person named Donna who runs an informal boardinghouse, but he’s falling off his feet. I persuaded him that this Donna would be more disposed to welcome him at a decent hour, particularly so if he didn’t look as though he were likely to expire in her foyer. He was reluctant to pause in his efforts but he does think his brother will probably need to rest soon, also. Moreover, though Michael didn’t say it, I suspect that he wishes to regain as much strength as possible prior to another encounter with brother Edward. We’ve just reached home and I’ve sent him off to sleep.”
“That’s probably wise. He might be interested to know, by the way, that the New York police sent a Native American detective.”
“Did they really? Is that politically correct, or just the opposite?”
“It’s hard to know. The thinking is, it might have been a political killing. To stop the sale.”
“Interesting. It could be a useful red herring, though. I suppose it might even be true.”
“Do you really think so?”
“No. I’ll update Michael when he wakes. Livia, I’ve just had a worrisome thought. If brother Edward came for the mask and became enraged when he discovered it wasn’t real, might he attempt to find the consignor? Sending a forgery into the marketplace while retaining ownership of the authentic work isn’t unheard of. If Edward suspects that’s happened here—”
“I follow you. Estelle says the owner insisted on staying anonymous. Let me see what I can find out, though.”
“I think that would be wise.”
“Take care, Spencer. Talk to you later.”
Returning to the staging area, Livia found Katherine and Thomas drinking coffee together. “. . . way back in my childhood,” Katherine was saying. “I grew up in Florida, near the Seminole people. They’re great craftspeople, the Seminoles, beaders, quilters, basket weavers. I loved the colors and the patterns I saw everywhere. I used to sneak away and spy on them. You know how it is when you’re a child. Everyone else’s life is far more exciting than yours and anything you find out in secret is twice as thrilling as it would be if someone just told you.”
“I sometimes still feel that way. When I’m researching.”
Katherine smiled. “And my mother always said her mother was part Cree. I don’t even know if that was true, but I believed it. It meant I was part Indian and that made it tremendously unfair for me to have to live my boring subdivision life when my real people were just down the road having secret ceremonies and feasts that I could only hide behind trees and watch.” She laughed and turned to the door. “Oh, hi, Livia, there’s fresh coffee if you want some. I was just telling Thomas how I got into this field. He tells me he’s researching Kateri Tekakwitha, under your influence.”
“I take no credit for the eminent Father Kelly’s academic choices.” Livia sat. “Katherine, there’s something I need to ask you. The Ohtahyohnee. Did you tell Estelle how we felt about it?” Seeing Katherine glance doubtfully at Thomas, Livia said, “I already told Thomas what I thought.”
After a moment and a sip of coffee, Katherine answered, “No. What could I really say? That you and I had the same bad feeling? She’s nearly as much of an expert as I am—in this field, more than you, Livia—and she’s examined it minutely. The provenance is unbroken. If it’s a forgery it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen and I have no idea who could do that kind of work. Or really, why? And based on what?”
“What if the original were destroyed or damaged and the owner, knowing how much it was worth, had a fake made so he could sell it?”
“No one would own a piece like this without insuring it. That would’ve covered any loss and believe me, the insurance company would notice if an identical item came up for auction.” After a moment, Katherine added, “Livia, we may be wrong. In any case, my donors may still want me to bid.”
“Have you told them?”
“Not yet. But I’ll have to. It may be just a feeling but it’s their seven million dollars.”
“I don’t think we’re wrong.” Livia looked directly at her friend. Katherine met her eyes and after a moment nodded in agreement.
Livia asked, “Do you know who the owner is?”
At first Katherine didn’t reply. Then she shook her head.
“You don’t know,” Livia said quietly. “But you have an idea?”
A long pause. “There’s a gentleman in Riverdale. Do you know where that is?”
“In the Bronx, along the Hudson?”
“That’s right. There’s a man there who’s a major collector, but he’s kind of an old-fashioned recluse. Keeps his distance from the art world, thinks of his fellow collectors as Johnny-come-latelies, and fools. He’s studied Native cultures all his life. He often buys privately, not just through dealers or at auction. He’s good enough to know when he’s found gold in someone’s trash heap. And he sells exclusively through Sotheby’s. I got the idea from some things Estelle said that he might be the owner of the Ohtahyohnee.”
“Will you give me his name?”
“I— Why?”
“I want to talk to him.”
“Livia, why?”
“I want to trace the mask back. To see if I can find when the fake appeared. Art forgery’s a long-standing interest of mine.” Livia felt a pang of guilt; while that wasn’t untrue, it also wasn’t relevant. From the look on Katherine’s face, she wasn’t convinced, either, so Livia added, “And I can’t shake the feeling that these things aren’t coincidence—the appearance on the market of an Ohtahyohnee mask, the fact that it’s fake, and what happened here tonight.”
Katherine bit her lip, and said, “I can’t either.”
“Then tell me who the owner is.”
“But Livia, if you think the mask is involved in”—she spread her hands—“this, shouldn’t you tell the police?”
“They already have all the owners’ names and they’ll be following up. They’ve been told there’s talk the mask’s a fake, but Estelle insists it’s not and there’s no definitive way to settle the question. And it wasn’t stolen. As you said: What could I really say?”
“Then why do you want to know?”
“Because what the police won’t do is trace the mask back through its provenance. I want to do that. If the fact that it’s fake matters, then finding the real one may be important.”
Katherine looked at her, and then away, sipping her coffee. Was she buying it? Livia hoped so, because what could she say next? “A friend of mine, he’s a shapeshifter and so is his brother and we think the brother killed Brittany Williams and wants the real mask and we need to find the owner before he tears his throat out, too?”
Unexpectedly, Thomas spoke up. “Katherine, if I may?”
“Of course, Father.”
“If you’re worried you’d be breaking Estelle’s trust, you won’t be. She never told you who the owner was. You’re guessing.”
“No, that’s true.” Katherine gave Thomas an odd look. “Why are you interested?”
Thomas reddened. “This isn’t my area. But what happened here—it’s hard not to want to know.”
Could anyone be better than a priest at sounding sin
cere while saying nothing? Livia wondered. Another long pause. Then, “All right,” Katherine said suddenly. “I don’t know why I’m being so secretive. As you say, the police already know. I think the owner’s a gentleman named Bradford Lane. I can get you his address. It’s one of the big mansions by the river. Just please don’t let either Mr. Lane or Estelle know where you got the information. If it got out I was revealing the secrets of eccentric collectors”—a smile—“the Met would have a cow.”
26
Charlotte Hamilton pulled in and cut her engine. This was a no-parking zone, but though she lived forty blocks south, every traffic cop in this neighborhood knew her car and none of them wanted to piss her off. A couple of times, one or another of them had. Once, having pissed her off, one said something about her being on the warpath. None of them said that anymore, either.
God, what a night. Out of her shift rotation, a gruesome crime scene, no forensics—what the hell did this guy do, wear gloves and lick his shoes clean?—hours of overtime, a string of dead ends, and no damn progress worth the name. Framingham was still in the squad room pushing papers, nursing God knew what whackjob theory, but Charlotte recognized the moment when her brain stopped doing useful work. She needed sleep, but before that, she seriously needed a drink. Any number of places on her own block could have helped her out with that, but New York only had a handful of Indian bars and this was the one she liked best. On nights like this, when Charlotte didn’t have the energy for barstool cowboys, stockbrokers smitten with her cheekbones, or, so help her, some moron who’d lift his hand and solemnly say, “How,” she did what a lot of city Indians did: she came up here, and thanked God the Stonehenge never closed.
Though it did pretend to, between 4:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m., as the law required. They clicked off the neon, pulled the curtain, and you actually had to knock in code on the steel door.
Charlotte’s knock was answered by Leonard Moore, who owned this place with his brother Frankie, trading shifts irregularly as the spirit moved them. “Hey, Len. Frankie go home?”
“He got tired of looking at a bunch of drunken Indians. What can I get you?”
“A beer, thanks. What, he took the drunks with him? Jesus, there’s no one here.” Even the back table was empty. Two guys she knew and wasn’t crazy about sat in a booth; one she didn’t know surrounded a beer at the bar. She dropped herself onto a stool and took a long pull on the Labatt’s that Len slid in front of her.
“Hard night?” he asked.
“You better believe it. I need another line of work.”
“I need another beer.” The guy down the bar spoke to Len. Len opened a bottle and put it down on a coaster. The guy looked over at Charlotte with a sharp grin. “If it’ll help, I’ll buy you one, too.”
Well. This was something she hadn’t considered. Maybe a drink and some sleep weren’t the only things she could use right now, not the only ways to drain the adrenaline raging through her blood and calm her nerves, jangled by frustration, weariness, and too many hours spent with Framingham.
She lifted her bottle. “I’m not ready.”
“I can wait.”
His black hair hung down his back in a braid bound in leather. That was good; Charlotte liked leather. Her own hair, until recently in a similar braid for work, fell loose about her shoulders. Curious gold circles surrounded the pupils of his dark eyes and under his sweater she could see the bulge of a medicine bag. With the older Indians that was one thing, but with a young guy it was usually a tip-off that he was a pretentious jackass. When that was true, though, the jackass was making a statement so he wore the bag where the world could see it. Maybe this fellow really was newly down from the rez; maybe wearing a medicine bag was just his way. He was big and good-looking and radiated an energy as charged as her own—with, she thought, a weariness as great underlying it.
“Okay.” She put out her hand. “Charlotte,” she said, and then, in case he really was a traditional kind of guy, “Lenape.”
He leaned over from his barstool but made no move to come sit closer. That was classy, she thought. His hand was big, rough, and warm as they shook. “Good to meet you, Charlotte. Tahkwehso. Abenaki.”
27
Bone-tired, Katherine Cochran hailed a cab to head for home. It almost wasn’t worth it. It was past four, and she had an 8:00 a.m. breakfast with a curator from Chicago. After which she’d have to face the decision she’d been putting off since late in the afternoon: whether to let the donors know the mask wasn’t real.
When Livia brought up her doubts, Katherine had been surprised. For even the most erudite scholar to feel so definite about a piece outside her own area was unusual. But one of the qualities that had always impressed Katherine was Livia’s sensitivity to the tiniest nuances of a work. Katherine would have taken Livia’s misgivings seriously under any circumstances, but this afternoon she hadn’t needed them, except to confirm her own. From the moment Katherine held the mask, she knew.
No, the honorable thing would be to tell the three donors their money would be wasted on the Ohtahyohnee. Those would not be easy conversations. Talking to Livia she’d used the phrase “eccentric collectors” but what collectors weren’t? These three had been chasing stories of the lost masks for years. When this Ohtahyohnee had surfaced she’d done some delicate dancing to persuade them to pool their resources to buy it for the Met. They only agreed once they realized the price would go too high for any one of them alone. That they were willing to share it with each other and the public so it wouldn’t disappear again marked the keenness of their desire. To learn it wasn’t real would break their hearts. They’d want to know how she knew, how she absolutely knew. They’d want her to be wrong, and what could she say? I don’t feel a current. I don’t hear it sing. It’s a piece of wood, gentlemen. Beautifully wrought. As a work of art it deserves a place in any museum. But art is all it is.
At least Peter van Vliet wasn’t one of them. In him you had a genuine eccentric, though a serious scholar, as serious as Bradford Lane. Van Vliet had traveled most of the native lands, spent time with elders of various nations, and, he said, been taught some of the vanishing ceremonies. She believed him; he was odd but he wasn’t a blowhard. He had a bit of P. T. Barnum in him, true, but in a way that corroborated his stories: all the medicine people Katherine had met were charismatic charmers. That van Vliet shared that temperament made it more likely that he’d be allowed into the inner tribal circles he claimed to have penetrated. She and he had been trading pieces for years, van Vliet donating works he’d bought in return for ones she deemed less valuable for the Met’s collection but which he, for whatever reason, wanted. To her knowledge he hadn’t seen this Ohtahyohnee, but he’d declined to join the bidding consortium. Nor was he planning to bid against her. She wondered, belatedly, if van Vliet’s lack of interest should have raised a red flag.
She sighed. Letting her mind drift to a collector she wouldn’t have to call in the morning was one giant avoidance technique and she knew it.
When she did call, would they believe her? Would they insist she ignore her “feelings” and bid because other authorities disagreed, other experts had authenticated the mask? If they did, would that be so bad? The Met stood to acquire what was widely accepted as one of the greatest Native treasures to come on the market in decades. No one else except Livia, who had no credentials in the area, believed it was a fake. The real one might never come to light.
Even if it was found.
She leaned back against the seat, her mind racing, as on edge as her body was exhausted. She thought about Brittany Williams, whose blood they’d spent the night carefully, clinically cleaning from precious objects. What had the girl’s final moments been like? What terror, what confusion? Katherine hoped she hadn’t suffered but from what she’d learned about the crime she thought she must have. For someone to be so full of desire and rage that they were willing to kill, how horrible; to do it
with such savagery, was beyond words.
That was most of what Katherine was feeling now, as the cab rolled through near-empty streets: sorrow, helplessness, a kind of resigned horror. But another, brighter note had crept into her thinking, one she felt ashamed for caring about in the face of this tragedy but one she could not, if she were being honest, deny. For reasons of their own—and the ones they’d given sounded thin, but what would have been the point of questioning them closely?—Livia and Father Kelly seemed determined to trace the Ohtahyohnee. Katherine herself could not be part of that hunt; her position at the Met required a high level of discretion. Particularly from the curator of a secondary department. Oh, no one would call it that aloud, especially in this era of political correctness. No one could say the work Arts of the Americas handled wasn’t in every way—design, workmanship, materials—the equal of pieces from Renaissance Italy or Expressionist New York. But Katherine had learned in her student years that in the art world “artist” trumped “artisan,” “attributable” trumped “anonymous,” and European trumped everybody.
To have suggested Bradford Lane’s name to Livia was a serious breach of protocol. But though Katherine had to keep her distance from the hunt for the true Ohtahyohnee, it brought her an electric thrill of excitement to think that Livia and Father Kelly might find it.
Still, she hadn’t been entirely truthful with Livia. As the cab neared her block she took out her cell phone. On the second ring her call was answered. “Morse, of course.”
“Hi, Ted. It’s Katherine.”
“The kachinas are here.” In his usual breathless flurry, the wood restorer went on, “I just started. I just got off the phone with Estelle. Unless one of you gorgeous women is going to bring me coffee, leave me alone and let me work.”
“I would if you weren’t in Brooklyn.”
“You would not. Katherine? That young woman—it’s terrible what happened to her. I’m so sorry.”
