Jade Venus

by George Harmon Coxe

  He said he was sorry to bother Damon so late and maybe he would ring him tomorrow. Damon said it was no bother and he was sorry he couldn’t be of some help.

  Murdock stepped into the hall and the door closed behind him. When he followed the butler down the stairs he went over the things that had been said and found he still liked the hunch that had brought him here. Even if it did not develop he had an idea his time had not been wasted.

  Chapter Four

  “MURDER’S MY BUSINESS.”

  REVEILLE FOR MURDOCK the next morning was a loud, shrill summons from the telephone that scared him awake. He rolled over and grabbed it before it could scare him again, and when he had juggled it to his face, spoke thickly into the mouthpiece.

  Lieutenant Bacon’s voice was crisp and laconic. “You in bed? Well, get up and get dressed.”

  “Did you get something for me?” Murdock asked, wide awake now.

  “I got something,” Bacon said. “I’m sending a car for you. It’ll be out in front in ten minutes.”

  Murdock protested. He said he hadn’t had breakfast.

  “Forget breakfast,” Bacon said. “Ten minutes,” he said, and hung up.

  By skipping a shower and taking a fast shave, Murdock was in the elevator in ten minutes and bucking his way through the revolving door in eleven. The police sedan was waiting out front as Bacon had promised and the driver opened the back door when he saw Murdock coming.

  “Where we going?” Murdock asked when the driver shifted and whipped the car round the corner.

  “Congress Street.”

  Murdock repeated the name silently and scowled. He had given Bacon a rough idea of the district where he thought he had been taken the night before and that was a long way from Congress Street. Congress Street was in the heart of the business section and there weren’t any brick walks or front vestibules anywhere near there.

  He stared out the windows at the morning traffic and thought about questioning the driver and by that time they were going down Franklin Street and Congress was just ahead. He hung on when the driver made the turn and then the sedan began to slow down.

  He saw then that a policeman was directing traffic in the middle of the block and there was a little crowd gathered on the sidewalk near by. The driver broke up the huddle by poking the bumper of the car across the sidewalk and then Murdock saw the alley and the second policeman. The driver reached across in front of him and opened the door.

  “Better walk from here.… Hey, Joe,” he called to the cop in the alley, “let this guy through.”

  Murdock started up the alley, a nerveless chill moving up the backs of his legs and a sickness growing in the pit of his stomach where only emptiness had been before. For somehow this scene—the blackened walls, the cobblestone floor, the open windows in the upper floors where the occupants of offices leaned across the sills and gawked—was sordidly familiar and he had the feeling that he had photographed it all before.

  Not this alley, but others like it. The others may have been wider or narrower, and some had been dirtier and smelled of garbage and decay, but the over-all impression and the growing sense of dread was much the same; the only difference being that in the old days on the Courier-Herald he had to bluff his way in with a camera and plate-case. Now he walked alone, past the ambulance with its open doors, past the lounging attendants to a sedan that was nosed in toward a wooden platform that stood propped up against the back door of some shop.

  The geography was a little different; everything important was the same. Lieutenant Bacon stood talking to one of his men while others prowled about the alley, looking for not even they knew what. The sedan’s two front doors stood open. At one a police photographer was adjusting a tripod and camera; at the other Doc Mason, the district medical examiner, was just straightening up. When Bacon made no move, Murdock tightened against the spreading sickness and walked to the car.

  He did not look long at the crumpled figure that lay half on the front seat and half on the floor. He saw the black hat, the thick graying hair, and the little mustache that no longer seemed to bristle. He saw the pince-nez dangling from its cord and that was all he needed. He backed away and sucked air into his lungs.

  “How long?” he asked.

  He had to wait for his answer. He looked very smart and fit in his captain’s uniform and he could not get used to the idea that old acquaintances were not accustomed to seeing him in such garb. He had been away. He had ribbons on his chest. Furthermore neither Doc Mason, nor Devries, the police photographer, were unduly impressed with what lay in the front of the sedan. This was just another victim and one unknown, personally, to them. Murdock on the other hand was something new and different and he had to shake hands and say hello and listen to their compliments on his appearance. Then when it was all over Doc Mason said:

  “How long? I’m not much good at preliminary guesses, but I’d say less than twelve hours.”

  “I can shorten that an hour and a half,” Murdock said. “I saw him at ten.”

  “Oh?” Mason blinked and his gaze sobered. “I didn’t know you knew him, Kent. I thought you were down here because—” He broke off and gave up the idea. “Well, I’m sorry.”

  Lieutenant Bacon stopped talking to the plain-clothes man and watched Murdock approach. Murdock eyed him coldly.

  “I guess you couldn’t tell me over the phone.”

  Bacon held a half-smoked stogie between his fingers and his rain-gray gaze was steady.

  “This was quicker,” he said. “You’d probably started asking silly questions or brought a camera or something.”

  Murdock nodded toward the car. “How?”

  “One slug over the heart. Close. The coat’s burned.”

  Murdock looked away. His glance moved up the wall of a building and stopped at an open window where two men and a woman leaned out and looked back at him. He did not see them because he was visualizing something else. He said, woodenly:

  “He didn’t get it in the car then.”

  “No. It’s his car but he wasn’t driving it when it came here. No gun either. At least we haven’t found one yet.”

  Murdock took another deep breath. It did not help much. He took out cigarettes and then put them away because he knew he couldn’t take one, because he kept thinking of the gallant, fiery little man who had gone out alone last night to his death; because no matter how he figured he could not escape the thought that he was in some measure responsible.

  “Have you told them at his home?” he said finally.

  “Keogh’s out there now.”

  “Sergeant Keogh?” Murdock’s voice was cold. “They’ll love Keogh. He’s such a nice tactful guy.”

  Bacon colored. “The blunt way can be the easiest way.” He found a match and lit his stogie. When he spoke again there was a lot of irritation in his tone. “I should have known. God knows I’ve seen it happen often enough. Any time you come around wanting help from me I ought to know by now that if there isn’t a corpse around there will be before you get through. Damn it all, Murdock, if I thought you had any idea—”

  Bacon stopped suddenly. He was looking right at Murdock and he was sore but he was not too sore to note the hard line of the jaw and the stormy darkness of the eyes that challenged his. He glanced away and rubbed his nose. “Well, let’s go,” he said. “Come on, Orsatti.”

  A plain-clothes man joined them and they walked down the alley and climbed into a police sedan. As the car got under way Bacon began to talk. He said Murdock had come to him last night with a story of two men who had kidnaped him and borrowed his identification so that one of them could go to the Andrada house and steal a painting Murdock called the Jade Venus, a picture that, according to Murdock, had no great value.

  “All right,” he said. “Last night that yarn might’ve sounded okay—it didn’t, mind you, but it might have. Anybody else I’d yelled for a psychiatrist but you, damned if things like that don’t really happen to you. But that was last night. Now i
t’s murder, and that’s my business, and don’t get the idea that uniform is going to get you any favors. I want to know about that picture. It must have been worth plenty and you know it. Why?”

  Murdock had worked with Bacon before and while they had had their differences and did not always agree, this association had lasted a long time because it was founded on mutual respect. Bacon had a job to do, he was competent to handle that job, and if his manner of working was often obvious, it was always thorough and generally productive. He tried hard to play no favorites where the press was concerned and if in the past he had perhaps told Murdock more than he had told others it was simply because he knew Murdock would not deliberately double-cross him to get a picture or a story. In other days Murdock worked with a camera and he and the men under him had to take pictures and he took them in any way he could. Yet in a matter of confidence he could be depended upon and it was a reputation that paid high dividends. Now, thinking back, Murdock knew it would be best to tell what he could.

  “I can tell you this much,” he said.

  “You’ll tell me everything.”

  Murdock eyed him steadily. He said, “I’ll tell you this much. If you read the papers you know what the Germans have been doing to museums, art galleries, churches.”

  “Looting ’em.”

  “Of everything they could get their hands on. From the National Museum in Naples alone they took eighty truck-loads. They confiscated the entire royal treasure of the Italian House of Savoy—three hundred and seventy cases.”

  “If that’s the King’s stuff I can’t get sorry about it,” Bacon said.

  “That’s not the point. In his case a lot of the loot was jewels and old coins dating back to the first days of the Roman Empire. It makes no difference if you feel sorry for the King. Some of those things are priceless and they should be preserved as historical pieces and anyway that’s just one example. The Germans have taken probably over two billion dollars’ worth of paintings, manuscripts, statues, art treasures of all sorts. Some of it has already been destroyed. Some of it will be lost for years but a lot of it will be recovered after the war. That’s our job—the job of the fine arts and monuments section attached to the Fifth Army: to recover and preserve what we can so it eventually can be restored to the rightful owners.”

  “So?” Bacon said.

  “We have lists of important art objects. In Italy, for instance, all places that house anything in that line are marked on our maps so we can avoid shelling and bombing them. Like at the Abbey of Mount Cassino. We knew there were some good paintings by Giordana and Soliemena; we knew that the Germans grabbed two hundred and thirteen cases the Italians had stored there—work by Titian, El Greco, Correggio, Mantegna, Goya. Of course it was all gone long before we had to bomb the place.

  “Professor Andrada has been working with Washington on the whole thing. He was an authority on Renaissance painting, particularly the Italian, and though he was an American citizen and hadn’t been home in twenty years he knew where nearly everything of importance was located and he helped us check our lists and helped also to train some of the men in my branch.

  “The point is this. A lot of this stuff is not going to be located, a lot of it will be hidden, and I think that after the war is over there’s going to be an international black market in art treasures, particularly those that can be easily smuggled out of a country—paintings, manuscripts, small statues and carvings. We’re doing what we can to prevent it, naturally, but just the same—”

  “Wait a minute.” Bacon tossed his cigar butt from the window and spat after it. “I don’t know anything about Art, but I thought those famous old paintings—Michelangelo and Raphael and Rembrandt and those guys—I mean, I thought they had their paintings pegged. There was a copy of this and a copy of that and everyone knew where it was, so even if you stole it, who’d want to buy it?”

  “That’s true about some things,” Murdock said. “We do know where many of those paintings are, but even if there was only one Toilet of Venus by Boucher, and there are seven that we know of—not the same subject but the same title—even if there was one there’d be some collector somewhere who’d buy it for a price. He wouldn’t dare show it in this country maybe. He might be the only one who knew he had it, but he’d know and he could see it every day and gloat over it and enjoy it. I tell you there are guys like that. Plenty of them.”

  He tapped Bacon’s knee. “But those are only a small part of what might be sold. A lot of genuine paintings could be sold more or less openly. Some artists made copies of their own work. Others used the same general scene over and over. What I mean is, every artist who ever made a painting called, say, The Bathers, made more than one. I don’t mean a copy necessarily but I mean he made other pictures of the same title. Renoir made many. Except for those that have been definitely tagged, who’s going to say that you didn’t come by some painting by Joe Doakes legitimately—if anyone ever finds it.

  “I say there will be hundreds of valuable canvases—not to mention other things—offered for sale by unscrupulous dealers after the war unless we can stop it. You get a Titian like Sacred and Profane Love. I don’t know what it would be worth but I guess if you could buy it for $100,000 you’d be sure of a nice profit—”

  Bacon whistled. “Are you kidding?”

  “You get a painting like that,” Murdock said, “and maybe you could only sell it to some millionaire crackpot whose only interest is in owning it. I mean, you’d have to sell it under cover because we know about that painting and after the war—and for many years after—we’re going to be watching for just such things.

  “But that’s only this country. We can’t do much about the things that are smuggled out to other countries. And even here there are some of the lesser-known artists, particularly the prolific ones, who are going to be easy to dispose of, once you get the stuff here. A painting may be worth forty thousand. You buy it from some crooked dealer for fifteen, say. You hang it in your home and keep it fairly quiet. You have it to enjoy. You know it’s worth two or three times what you paid for it. Five years later you want to sell it. I say you probably can sell it then if you buy wisely. Because there are so many paintings it’s impossible to trace them all.

  “And this won’t be just happening in this country where we’re going to try and stop it. People with money are going to be buying stolen art all over the world. A lot of it will never get back to the legal owners. Many things the Nazis have taken are likely to wind up in Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, Turkey, Spain, South America. Once a work of art gets to one of these countries, there’s nothing we can do about it. And only when we’ve got proof of original ownership and can trace the picture can we do anything at all. That’s why we’re keeping records and why we hope to get some of that Nazi loot before they can dispose of it.”

  He started to continue because the subject was so real and important to him now, but Bacon cut him off.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m getting an earache. I’m sorry I asked. The thing I’m interested in is this.” He paused as though to emphasize his words. “This picture—this Jade Venus thing—that got stolen last night could be a key to some of the loot you can’t find in Italy?”

  “I don’t know,” Murdock said. “I told you I’d never seen it.”

  “You described it.”

  “It was described to me.”

  “You mean you’ll tell me the rest of the story when you get damn good and ready,” Bacon said and snorted disgustedly. “Okay. For now let’s just say it was one of your hunches.”

  “If you want another, I’ll give you one,” Murdock said. “Scare Arlene, the Andrada maid, but don’t hold her. Someone in that house saw the telegram I sent Andrada. It could have been her. She’s only been there a month or so and she might have been planted. If she was, maybe she’ll lead you somewhere.”

  “I hope,” Bacon said dryly, “I hope that hunch is better than the one you had last night.”

  Murdock wa
s staring out the window, his eyes half closed. It was a question he had intended to ask long ago and it had slipped his mind. Now it had been answered and his disappointment made his stomach seem a little emptier.

  “Oh,” he said. “So Damon didn’t try to phone Erloff?”

  “He didn’t phone anybody. Nobody in that house phoned between twelve and two. After that I told my guy he could quit watching the board. You said an hour.”

  Murdock thanked Bacon for his trouble. He said he had been wrong so many times one more mistake wouldn’t matter.

  Chapter Five

  PICTURE PUZZLE

  THE ANDRADA HOME was a semi-Georgian affair of red brick and white-painted frame. It stood well back on a half-acre plot and was separated from its neighbors by a high hedge except in the rear where the garage and the professor’s studio made the boundary line. Out in front, where the hedge broke to admit a sidewalk, a uniformed policeman was talking to a half-dozen reporters and apparently keeping them off the property, for when Murdock and Bacon left the police car they immediately chorused a good-natured protest at such discrimination.

  Barry Gould was among them, and with the others Murdock had to go through much of the same routine he had gone through with the medical examiner. He knew most of them. He had to shake hands and say hello.

  “How do you rate here?” they asked. “You working for the Courier again, or what? Where’s your camera?”

  And then they were after Bacon. When was he going to give them the lowdown? Bacon said, “Later.” For the present he had nothing to say and he would have gone in if Barry Gould hadn’t stopped him.

  “No,” Bacon said. “You’ll stay out here with the rest of them.”

  “I think you should.” Gould glanced at Murdock and winked. “I’m really sort of a witness.”

  “How?”

  “Well, I was here last night for a little while. Ask Murdock.”