Dirty Fire

by Earl Merkel

  I suddenly smiled, realizing just how tired I was. I had busily constructed a complex picture of Ms. Marita Travers. It was a picture that revealed more about myself than about a woman I had met only once. Of the mores or motivations of Marita Travers, I had no clue.

  That was, however, an easy lapse to remedy. Gil was still in his office, and that meant that Chaz was still outside Kay Cieloczki’s house. I had a choice: if I left now, I could take over the watchdog job for the hour or so until Gil called it a night.

  Or I had time to satisfy a certain curiosity before it became yet another obsession.

  I checked my watch: a few minutes past eight thirty. It was still early, and the Travers’s address was only slightly out of my way.

  Chapter 41

  Later, when it was all over and the paper-pushers had taken over, the bureaucrats wrote a postmortem. With twenty-twenty hindsight, one of the questions they raised involved the whereabouts of Nederlander on the final day of the Levinstein case.

  How, the authors wondered—with no effort to contain their sarcasm—could a police chief simply not show up for duty one morning without raising an alarm, or at least a few eyebrows?

  One answer was that he—or at least, his car—had been seen that very day, parked near the Lake Tower Municipal Center. Not just seen, but the image logged and recorded on the digital surveillance system that had installed throughout the Municipal Center the year before.

  One of the “Big Brother” cameras was mounted on an exterior corner of the building so as to command the street outside. There, at ten frames per minute, it dutifully recorded a vehicle that had parked for hours down the street.

  It was a shiny black Lincoln Navigator, and subsequent digital enhancement of the license plates showed the vehicle was registered to one Robert J. Nederlander.

  • • •

  He must have been watching all day, waiting for his quarry to make the move he now knew must come soon. It was not the most exciting way to spend a day, but at least his car was large and comfortable. The CD player must have been a particularly welcome distraction from what was otherwise a most boring experience.

  Once, in the early afternoon when he had spotted Talmadge Evans leaving the building on foot, he had left the Navigator where it was parked on the corner opposite the Municipal Center, and risked following on foot.

  According to the surveillance camera that captured his image, Evans had walked down the street to a small coffee shop; a burly man, who is seen only from the back, left the Navigator and followed. The city manager had spent fifteen minutes there, then returned to his office. He had not reappeared the rest of the day.

  Finally, shortly before eight thirty, the recording showed Evans crossing the parking lot to his own car and pulling away.

  If Evans noticed the big black vehicle following him at a discrete distance, he gave no sign.

  Chapter 42

  “Mr. Davey.” Marita Travers sounded as if she had expected me, though I had not called to make an appointment. “Would you care to assist us?”

  Her eyes sparkled with a slightly unfocused resolve, and in the hand not braced against the open door was a tall glass only partially filled with an amber liquid. With it, she motioned me into the house, spilling only a teaspoon’s worth in the effort.

  I stepped around a stack of boxes, badly packed suitcases and men’s clothing still on hangers that had been dropped haphazardly on top of the pile.

  “Please forgive the—” she searched for the word, then dismissed it with a fluttering of fingers. “It’s moving day, and Peter is helping.” She turned and cupped her hand at her lips.

  “Peter!” In a less elegant woman, it might have been called a bellow. “Help has arrived!”

  “You’re moving?”

  She looked at me brightly. “Me? Oh, no. I live here.”

  At that moment, Peter Comstock came around a corner, bent forward from the weight of the carton he held in his hands; his face was smudged with sweat and dust. He walked to the pile near the door and dropped the box with an expensive-sounding crash.

  Then he straightened with the exaggerated care of a person who has imbibed well but not wisely.

  “Peter, this is Mr. Davey,” Marita said. “Mr. Davey, Peter-Comstock-the-abstractionist.” She made it sound like one word. “Darling, he has offered to help you carry that big wooden…thing from the lower level.”

  The artist grinned. “Thank God. It’s a hell of a heavy crate for one man. Especially one who hasn’t slept for a week.”

  “Peter has completed three-and-a-half paintings while he’s visited here,” Marita said. “They are manifestations of his evolution as an artist, Mr. Davey. But he is too proud to keep them, you see.”

  I didn’t, but that did not slow the conversation.

  “Peter, are you sure?” she asked. “They’re yours, if you want them.”

  Peter nodded with grim determination, and the slight swaying of his body diluted the effect only minimally.

  “I don’t,” he said. “It’s his canvas—I just spread a little fresh paint on the back. Your husband can decide which side he wants to face out. Far as I’m concerned, they leave with the rest of his stuff. I put ‘em back in that damn crate and screwed it shut. Except for the one you want me to finish.”

  “Pardon me,” I asked, “but what’s going on?”

  “She’s throwing him over for me,” Comstock said, patient as if explaining to a child. “He doesn’t even live here, you know. Hasn’t for months. So all the stuff he’s stored in Marita’s house goes to the trash.”

  “To storage, darling,” Marita corrected him. “I don’t want to be uncivil, or to…to anger him.”

  “Screw him. I don’t care if he’s angry or not.”

  Marita turned to the artist.

  “Peter, you should know that my husband is…a dangerous man. He is involved in activities that may be—that are—illegal.”

  Comstock frowned. “What kind of activities?”

  “The kind that get your telephone tapped, or your car followed,” she said. “The kind that cause people from the government to examine your bank account. The kind that makes those people question some of your friends, who then can’t wait to ask you about it. Those kinds of activities, Peter.”

  She finished her drink and carefully centered the empty glass on a lamp table. “I guess you think I should tell the police,” she said to me, a chastising voice.

  “I am the police,” I said. “Sort of.”

  “The police?” she said, and her eyes opened wide. “If you’re with the police, you know about—” She stopped as if she had said too much.

  “Ms. Travers, right now I don’t know about anything. Except that I want to see these paintings.”

  “Most of them are in a shipping crate downstairs. But the one Peter is using is still on the dining room table.”

  We walked through the kitchen and into the dining room, with its dark cherry formal chairs and oval table aligned beneath an impressive brass and crystal chandelier.

  Heedless of the finish, on the table rested a large canvas mounted on a modern metal-rod stretcher—remounted, rather; a row of small rust-marked holes around the edge of the fabric indicated where mounting pins had been removed from a traditional wooden stretching frame. I picked it up and examined the whorls of paint brilliant against age-darkened canvas; it was the piece on which Comstock had been working when I visited earlier.

  And then I turned the frame in my hands, and the mystery that had cost Stanley and Kathleen Levinson their lives suddenly became clear.

  • • •

  The three of us walked back toward the front of the house in single file; I walked with caution, mindful of the value I held between my two hands. Whatever the thoughts of my companions, they held them quiet inside.

  Marita was still in front when we reached the large foyer. She stopped short, so abruptly that Peter almost crashed into her, and I into him.

  In the still-open
doorway, surrounded by the stacks of what he obviously recognized as his belongings, Talmadge Evans stood staring at the three of us.

  “Hello, Talmadge,” Marita said cordially. Ignoring me, she addressed the artist.

  “Peter,” she said, as if the situation was the most natural thing in the world, “this is my husband.”

  Before anyone else could speak, Talmadge Evans lurched forward, his hands outspread. For an instant, I thought he intended to attack Marita, to seize her by the throat in fury.

  But he was only stumbling forward, his arms flailing to keep his balance.

  A large man had replaced Evans in the doorway. The heavy revolver he held in his hand was steady as he closed the door behind him. I saw his face brighten as his eyes fastened on the painting I held.

  “I think we have much to discuss,” he said. “I am told, by an unimpeachable source, that you have several items here I have been employed to recover. It seems he spoke truly.”

  His left index finger pointed to Evans. “You. If you continue to move your hand, I will shoot you in the stomach.”

  He stepped forward and removed a small revolver from Talmadge Evans’s belt. His lip twisted in derision as his thumb snapped open the cylinder.

  “Such a useless toy!” he said. “Fit only for children to shoot at empty soup tins.”

  The Russian shook the weapon, and six .22 caliber cartridges clattered on the hardwood floor. He threw the empty pistol through the arched entry into the dining room.

  “Who are you?” Evans said.

  “Ah, forgive my poor manners,” he said, but his face betrayed no geniality. “You may call me Mikhail.”

  “I have a message from a mutual acquaintance,” I said, looking hard at the Russian. “A police officer named Posson. You told her she was lucky.”

  “I remember.”

  “She says you can take your luck and shove it.”

  “How refreshingly blunt,” Mikhail said. “I too have a message you may deliver to her. One way or another.”

  • • •

  With characteristic thoroughness, Mikhail had brought along a roll of packing tape. The polyester filaments bonded inside the cellophane could immobilize an angry orangutan, if one used it as he had ordered me to do.

  It was a small roll, barely enough to wrap each wrist with what a less self-confident man might have felt was a sufficient number of turns. Judiciously, he had told me to secure the artist first and the woman last. He kept his pistol leveled at me as he checked my handiwork.

  “Like the Three Bears,” Ilya laughed. “If you used perhaps too much on the larger man and perhaps too little on the woman, at least the length used on the older man was just right.”

  He patted me down, smiling when he found my Smith & Wesson automatic. “A real weapon, yes? Join them, please, keeping your hands on the top of your head.”

  Now we sat, side by side, on the ivory-colored silk sofa, against which Mikhail had also propped the painting—or rather, the two paintings, modern and antique, one on either side.

  At the moment, in a decision based on more than a century of critical acclaim, the Comstock painting was turned from view. Instead, the Russian contemplated the painstakingly unique style of Cézanne’s Ville du Temps.

  “You know,” Mikhail remarked casually, “I am told that this single piece would be valued at more than thirty million U.S. dollars. That is, if one could place any figure on such a work.” He shrugged. “Myself, I do not see it. It is just one more old painting—and there are so many old paintings in the world, no?”

  He turned his stare to his captives.

  “For example, there are eight others quite near to us at this moment, are there not? Somewhere in this very house, I have been told.”

  He stepped close to Talmadge Evans, who looked up at him silently through expressionless eyes.

  “You, my aged gunslinger,” he said not unkindly. “Would you like to tell me? Come, grandfather—speak to me, eh? No?”

  He turned to Peter.

  “Perhaps you are more informative, yes?” Mikhail said, for all the world as if he were asking directions from some perversely reluctant passerby. Without waiting for an answer, he turned to Marita: “Or you, lovely lady. Do you not wish to aid me?”

  “Say nothing,” Talmadge Evans said calmly.

  Mikhail raised his eyebrows.

  “That is one option, I am sure,” he said, appearing as if he were weighing the choices available to us. “Another is for me to employ my considerable powers of persuasion on each of you, in turn. I will then compare the answers which all of you will, I assure you, provide to me.”

  He smiled and gave a dismissive shrug.

  “The final option is for me to burn this house to the ground—with all of you in it, of course. You see, I am no sentimentalist. These paintings you have hidden here—it is the simple knowledge that they exist that presents a danger to my employers.”

  He addressed Evans.

  “You must appreciate the irony of solving this matter by fire,” Mikhail said. “It is a solution you—please do not quibble: the policeman was your underling, this I know as truth—that you also employed in the home of the Jew Levinstein. Better if they had been destroyed in that fire; I would already be on a warm beach somewhere, spending my fee for this assignment.”

  His voice took on a scolding tone.

  “But you see, you cleverly convinced the Jew to turn these paintings over to you”—he winked at Marita, a broad vaudevillian gesture—“for ‘safekeeping,’ is that not hilarious?”

  He returned his smile to Evans. “I will tell you a secret, old one. Had not an idiot been with me, I would have known your name from the start. Poor Mr. Levinstein would have told me, assuredly. But I was cursed with an inept assistant, and your Jew died too soon—not as you had planned, perhaps, but dead is dead, no? And then you had your pet policeman, this Nederlander, burn that beautiful home to the ground. Such a pity, no?”

  Mikhail’s smile disappeared abruptly and chillingly.

  “So you have the paintings, and I have you.”

  He stared at Evans with eyes that spoke of death.

  When Evans replied, his voice carried no more apparent emotion than if he was rebuking some errant subordinate for a minor lapse of judgment.

  “In a few minutes—fifteen at most—two officials from the Russian Consulate will arrive,” Evans said. “Do not act in a way which you will certainly regret.”

  “So? Enlighten me, please.”

  “I have been in discussions with one of them for some weeks, and we have reached agreement. The artwork will be returned to your government. Its existence will remain confidential, or at least unconfirmable. But if you violate this arrangement—in any way!— you will answer to your government for it.”

  Mikhail listened, thoughtfully nodding.

  “Perhaps that is another option,” he said reasonably. “My way is much more simple, and I am a simple man. We will see—if your ‘Russian officials’ arrive soon.”

  The doorbell rang, a refined double chime. Mikhail grinned at Evans broadly.

  “Rather, I should say ‘when’ they arrive. Such excellent timing, yes?”

  Mikhail stepped sideways to the door and squinted through the small doorlight. He nodded, as if in recognition.

  Mikhail opened the door like a host welcoming dinner guests.

  “How are you tonight, Anatoli Tarinkoff?” he said in English. “And who is this lovely woman?”

  Anatoli Tarinkoff grunted a response. His eyes swept the room, noting without reaction Mikhail’s captives on the sofa, accepting as normal the fact that our hands were taped in front of us. He appeared outwardly calm at finding Mikhail here, but his companion did not. She stared at him and then around the room, eyes wide as if her worst fears had been confirmed.

  Petra Natalia Valova looked like a woman nearing the end of her rope. Her distress at our tape-wrapped tableau was apparent, and the very effort to conceal it only adde
d to her agitation.

  I was certain I knew what she was thinking. Valova clearly understood the potential consequences if it became widely known that the paintings existed; as the Pushkin’s senior curator, she had responsible for maintaining the secret. But she also considered herself responsible for their preservation—indeed, their survival. At first, perhaps, she had not grasped that the secret was as inviolate as the paintings were expendable. Now she did, and the knowledge was ravaging her.

  Tarinkoff must have known, have understood all along. He had to be an agent of State Security, under deep cover; it was the only explanation for his presence here. Perhaps he too was pained by the thought of destroying the artwork; still, his training would make him philosophical about certain unpleasantness. But he would be worried about Valova’s instability. He could well predict her reaction if the need to destroy the paintings became a reality.

  But I was also certain that neither the fate of the paintings, nor that of the others in the room with him, was his most immediate concern. I watched his sidelong glances at Mikhail and observed how he studied the door and windows around the room.

  To my mind, he had the look of a man faced with a worrisome dilemma, one unsure whether the greater danger existed outside or within.

  I had recently felt the same anxiety, one that had increased with each mile as I had neared Lake Tower. It was the belief that one set of headlights behind me had become a too familiar, troubling feature of the landscape.

  At that instant, from outside came the crunching sound of tires on the gravel drive.

  Chapter 43

  “We are expecting more company, perhaps?” Mikhail’s eyes had narrowed, and his voice—though still level and reasonable—had lost its bantering tone. At the sound of an auto crunching to a stop on the graveled drive outside, he had become unnaturally, ominously alert.

  Then the door shook under three hammer strokes.

  “Answer it,” he said to Tarinkoff, and it was not a request. He smiled, dangerously without mirth. “If it is the police—well, you have diplomatic immunity, and I do not.”