The Cézanne Chase

by Thomas Swan

  “These are for your files. You’ll also find instructions for depositing the proceeds from the sale. Are there any questions?”

  Oliveira read the instruction then nodded. “I see no problem. We are frequently asked to deposit the net proceeds into one of our banks in Geneva.”

  Weisbord got to his feet and extended his hand to a beaming Oliveira. The meeting was over.

  Chapter 31

  Edwin Llewellyn regularly booked himself into the Stafford for the reasons that it was one of London’s exceptionally well-mannered hotels, was tucked away on a convenient cul-de-sac on St. James Place, and because its obscenely high rates had a purifying effect on the clientele. Llewellyn was given his usual corner-suite on the fourth floor and in accordance with propriety, put Astrid in her own nearby room. Astrid, for her part, would be busily engaged searching for English antique furniture for an anonymous couple she described as young, wealthy, and the new owners of a twelve-room condominium on Central Park South. They arrived mid-morning on Wednesday, lazed through the afternoon, then ended the day with an early dinner.

  “Sleep well, darling,” he said, unlocking the door to her room. “I’ll meet you at breakfast.” He kissed her on the lips. “Eight o’clock.”

  She stifled a yawn. “God natt,” she said softly.

  He was up early, ordered newspapers and coffee, and watched the morning television news. When he arrived in the dining room at ten before eight, Astrid was waiting, her coffee just then being served.

  “You look beautiful—as usual,” he said, and squeezed her hand affectionately. “Are you sure you won’t need any help?”

  “I have a list of shops. I’ll be fine.”

  An assistant concierge came to the table and said very confidentially, “Inspector Oxby has arrived, sir.”

  Llewellyn smiled. “Ask the inspector to join us.”

  Astrid frowned. “You didn’t tell me you were meeting him here.”

  “It’s a perfectly civilized place to meet someone, and I like the informality.”

  She gave a hesitant smile. “It’s just that I won’t be able to stay long.”

  “For a short while, to get acquainted.”

  Both turned to watch Oxby come toward them, and by the time he reached the table, Llewellyn was on his feet, hand extended, surprised by the deep voice that greeted him.

  “Mr. Llewellyn, delighted you’ve come.”

  “I’m happy to be here, Inspector Oxby. This is Miss Haraldsen, a friend who has come to buy some of your very best antiques.”

  Oxby gave Llewellyn a firm handshake, then turned to Astrid, “Antiques?” He sat between them. “What sort of antiques? Furniture, silver, paintings?”

  “Furniture, mostly. I’m doing a New York apartment, and my clients love everything English.”

  “Nothing in New York?” Oxby asked and ordered a pot of coffee from a waiter who stared at him with a look of familiarity. “You Americans have 50 percent of everything we ever made right there on Third Avenue.”

  “You know about Third Avenue?” Llewellyn asked.

  Oxby nodded. “Counterfeit antiques are all over, including your Third Avenue. I’ve been there and seen it, a year ago, in fact.” His coffee arrived, and he said to Astrid, “Tell me more about what you’re looking for. What period of English furniture, for example.”

  A blankness came over Astrid’s face, and she glanced toward Llewellyn. “Period?” she repeated with an uncertain awkwardness. “I don’t think that’s too important ... I’ll see what’s available.”

  “Choose late Victorian. A reliable dealer won’t put you off, and it will be authentic goods. But if you’re prepared to write a large check, find a couple of Sheraton chairs; they mix well with any period. In fact, I saw a pair advertised recently.” He slipped a half dozen cubes of sugar into his coffee and began stirring. He eyed her carefully. “What do you think of Sheraton?”

  She gave another weak smile. “Sheraton chairs. That would be nice, thank you.” She turned, as if to get up. “I must go, my first appointment is at Van Haeften.”

  “What takes you to Johnny Van Haeften’s?” Oxby asked.

  The answer came slowly. “A desk. I traced a desk to that shop. It’s in light colors.”

  Oxby tested his coffee and approved. “Did you attend design school?”

  “Yes, in Oslo,” she answered somewhat cautiously, “at the Kunst Og Handverks Heyskole.”

  “Will you be going directly back to New York?”

  Astrid shifted her eyes to Llewellyn. “My plans are not firm. It depends on how soon I find the furniture.” She got to her feet. “I really must go. Excuse me, please.”

  Oxby stood. “Good luck with your shopping, Miss Haraldsen. If you need help, please let me know. Antiques are our business, and we know the troublemakers.”

  Llewellyn accompanied Astrid to the lobby. “You seemed a bit nervous. Is everything all right?”

  “I didn’t think the inspector would be so interested in my shopping trip, and I couldn’t answer all his questions.”

  “He’s probably very knowledgeable and merely wanted to help.” He took her hand and patted it. “Plan to meet me at Brown’s Hotel at four, and we’ll have tea.”

  “Will he be with you?”

  “Inspector Oxby? I hope so. I plan to invite him.”

  She sighed, turned, and walked out to St. James Place. Llewellyn watched her disappear before returning to the dining room.

  “A beautiful friend,” Oxby said. “I hope that she doesn’t buy a counterfeit the first time around. It’s like entering enemy territory going into some of the shops.”

  “Yes, I’ve been there,” Llewellyn said, agreeing.

  “On the whole, London dealers are an honest lot, but we’ve got our quota of bad apples who deal in every deceit imaginable. They’re nearly as venal as those in the art world.”

  The two men asked and answered questions in an easy conversation, getting a grasp of each other. “What’s your schedule today?” Oxby asked.

  “I’ve set the day aside,” Llewellyn answered. “Alex Tobias said you wanted to talk, and I have nothing more important to do than help find the son of a bitch who’s burning up Cézannes and who killed Alan Pinkster’s curator.”

  “Good. Do you like to walk?”

  “Not especially,” Llewellyn replied. “Why?”

  “It might do you some good,” Oxby said, daring to sound like an old friend. “We can say what we want, no one to eavesdrop. Besides, the English are great walkers, and that’s a good reason, right?”

  “By all means, let’s go for a walk.” As they went out to the lobby, Llewellyn said, “I’ve asked Astrid to meet me at Brown’s for tea. Will you join us?”

  Oxby smiled. “I have an un-English aversion to tea, but a huge fondness for Brown’s. I’d like that.”

  They crossed St. James Place to a walkway that twisted through a garden of roses and boxwoods to a network of paths that spread throughout Green Park.

  “When this thing started, I wasn’t keen on Cézanne,” Oxby said. “Frankly, I hadn’t studied the man and didn’t know all that much about what he had painted, and what I did know was restricted to his nude bathers and a few landscapes. But I became interested in a hurry when four of the portraits were burned up in twenty-four days.”

  “Have you got any idea who’s behind it?”

  “Not an inkling at this point, but the fact there’s been so much destruction without any threats, or warning, or messages, seems, strange to say, quite important.”

  Llewellyn stopped and turned to Oxby. “Explain.”

  “If one painting had been burned without any communication, I would say it was a crank or a crazy person, and that would have been the end of it. If two paintings had been ruined and again there were no messages, I might argue that it was a wooly-headed crank who sprayed the first painting and that another person, totally unrelated, sprayed the second one. We’ve seen this sort of thing. It happened a yea
r ago. A painting in a church in Paddington was badly carved up with a knife. A week later the same thing happened in Swindon, without an explanation. In my view, those were separate but related incidents and were not carried out by the same person.”

  They began walking again. Oxby said, “But four paintings in three countries, one murder, and still no message?” He looked solemnly at Llewellyn. “That’s an authentic mystery.”

  They reached the Mall, crossed the wide avenue, and continued into St. James Park. Oxby quickened the pace, recounting the few significant details that were known about each incident, then enumerating the unanswered questions that surrounded the Pinkster painting and the peculiar way in which Clarence Boggs had been murdered. “Then Boston,” Oxby said, catching on to Llewellyn’s arm. “That sent a different message.”

  “What was that?” Llewellyn asked.

  “All along I’d been trying to put together a picture of who this person is and what motivations are in play. Why Boston?” He gave a wry smile and turned onto a path that wound around the lake in the middle of the park.

  “He must have known there were four self-portraits in America, three of which are in museums. He chose the one in Boston, probably because it was less risky than the Modern in New York or the Phillips in Washington. But it’s not why Boston so much as why burn one up in America at all? The press pounced on it. Particularly the New York Times.”

  “The media is feasting on it,” Llewellyn said.

  “But come back to the other question, why Cézanne, and why his self-portraits? Was it because Cézanne wore a beard, or was bald, or was financially well off?” Oxby paused. “Or was it some kind of a sexual abberation: Each time he sprayed a painting he experienced the sensation of killing.

  “Killing Alan Pinkster’s curator wasn’t a sexual abberation, ” Llewellyn said. “And I’m sure it was pretty tough on Alan.”

  “You know Pinkster?”

  “Not well, but Alan’s been on the social scene in New York, and I’ve been with him on several occasions.”

  “Boggs was killed approximately twelve hours after Pinkster’s painting was destroyed, and I don’t consider that a coincidence. He was killed with a rare poison, which suggests that someone with a knowledge of chemistry was involved. In fact the spray used on the paintings is a unique formulation, not available through the usual sources. Further, on the day the portrait was sprayed, a professional photographer was in the Pinkster Gallery and took pictures of a group of employees from the Danish embassy, including two shots that show a man and a woman we haven’t been able to identify. Because the man’s back is to the camera, all we know about him is that he’s tall—over six feet.”

  “The woman?”

  “The camera got her head on, but her face is a blur. We believe there were other photographs, and we’re attempting to get hold of them.”

  They left St. James Park, crossed Birdcage Walk to Queen Anne’s Gate. “I’m not a psychiatrist, but we’ve got a couple of men who are, and they’re first rate at it. They’ve confirmed that we’re dealing with a psychopath, not surprising, perhaps.” Oxby stopped and looked at Llewellyn, his eyes bright. “I don’t like using the word perpetrator because it reminds me of a purse snatcher, so I’ve given our suspect a name. It gives all of us on the case a point of reference, as if each of us knows a bit more about who it is we’re trying to find,”

  “Sounds like espionage. What name did you give him?”

  “Vulcan. The world’s aware that every painting was sprayed with a chemical and that each one looks as if it were pulled from a fire, and I know because I’ve seen two of them. Vulcan seemed to fit.”

  “Vulcan,” Llewellyn repeated the name. “God of fire.”

  They had angled through the park and taken Dartmouth Street to Broadway. Before reaching the intersection with Victoria Street, Llewellyn looked up at a quite ordinary building, one that was cold and impersonal, and one that might have been another undistinguished government building except for a large sign in a triangle of grass: New Scotland Yard.

  “Are you taking me in for questioning?” Llewlleyn asked with mock seriousness.

  Oxby shook his head amiably. “It will be you asking the questions, and as I have a serious proposition to put before you, we’ll want privacy. And good coffee.”

  Llewellyn checked through security, pinned a visitor’s badge to his lapel, and followed Oxby into an elevator. They got off on the fifteenth floor and walked through an open area crammed with desks and files and clicking fax machines and operators at consoles in front of display monitors—all enveloped by a modern cacophony consisting of the bleeping of electronic signals from telephones and shortwave or cellular radio hookups. Oxby continued into a windowless room and closed the door, shutting out the nervous noises they had just walked through. The room was square. Along one wall was a battery of television monitors and on a table set apart from the large center table were several dozen telephones, their wires strewn over the floor like black-and-red ribbons unraveled from their spools. A large blackboard on coasters was pushed against another wall. “This is primarily a conference room and when we’re concentrating on a difficult case, it becomes what we call an Incident Room.”

  On the table was a thermos and cups. “I promised coffee,” Oxby said, motioning with his hand in a help-yourself gesture. Four chairs had been pulled up to the table, two on each side. Oxby took one and asked Llewellyn to sit across from him, then he said, “The madness outside that door is a small part of the Specialist Operations Department, to which we are attached. We used to be called the Arts and Antiques, but we’re carrying on under different colors. Squad SO1 deals with international and organized crime and is commanded by Elliott Heston, who, unless he’s spirited off by the commissioner, will join us at 11:30. I’ve also asked Detective Sergeant Browley to meet with us, but first I want to introduce you to Nigel Jones. Jonesy is one of our top forensic investigators and has something quite exciting to show us.”

  Llewellyn poured himself a mug of coffee. He looked curiously at Oxby, and an embarrassed smile broke clear. “I never imagined I’d be inside Scotland Yard.”

  “It’s really just a big-city police department that every now and then stretches its wings out over the whole country. I suppose you Americans think of Scotland Yard in the same way the English regard your FBI: in the way of a romanticized motion picture.”

  “How long have you known Alex Tobias?” Llewellyn asked.

  “We go back ten years or more. And we’ve become especially well acquainted during the past two years, since Alex became involved in the same sort of thing we do in my department. He said you and I would hit it off.”

  “Do you think we have?”

  Oxby nodded. “I think so.”

  “Tell me more about Vulcan.”

  “If we’re right and if Vulcan shows consistent psychopathic behavior, then I believe we can entice him to reveal himself.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “Vulcan’s taste for fine art is very narrow; nothing else of Cézanne’s seems to interest him, except the self-portraits. It makes me wonder if someone else is actually calling the shots or, put another way, does Vulcan have a boss? I was determined to learn if there was something in that, and so I asked our brain crackers to work up a psychiatric profile on Vulcan based on every shred of information we’ve got. That included the chemical formulation of the solvent he has used in his attacks, the cities and museums he selected, the burned-up briefcase from London’s National Gallery, the photograph taken of the Danish tour group in the Pinkster Gallery, the description of a man seen with an oxygen tank in the Hermitage museum, the man with a European accent who attended a woman who fainted in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the poison used in the murder of Clarence Boggs and the way it was administered, and, finally the dates and times of every burning.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a great deal of information,” Llewellyn said.

  “You put it precisely. It ‘
sounds’ like a geat deal, but it’s actually a short list, and it doesn’t tell us if Vulcan is on his own or taking orders.” Oxby pushed his chair back from the table and got to his feet. “When the list of things we know is short, we’re forced to make a long list of the things we don’t know.”

  “Want to explain that?”

  “It ’s easy enough to put too much on the list of things we don’t know, and so the secret is to be selective. In the end, we put down twelve unanswered questions.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “His nationality ... are others involved? . . . if so, how many? . . . what is the motivation? That sort of thing.”

  “From that you build a profile of Vulcan, then go out and find him?”

  “It’s not that easy. On the one hand we have a few unrelated facts, and on the other are a dozen unanswered, but highly focused questions. And so we put together what we know with what we are striving to learn. The psychiatrists have made their contribution, and as we find the answers to those twelve questions and new facts are uncovered, the profile becomes more accurate. Eventually we’ll know exactly who Vulcan is. But there are limits to how long we can wait before more paintings are destroyed or another person dies.”

  “What can you do?”

  “Try to make things happen on our terms. That’s where you can help us.”

  Llewellyn laughed good-naturedly. “What in God’s name can I do?”

  “You can be a lightning rod.”

  Llewellyn frowned. “Explain what you mean.”

  Oxby smiled. “Vulcan may be a psychopath and murderer along with a few other heinous personality quirks, but the destruction of the portraits was designed to draw attention to Paul Cézanne the artist and drive up the value of all of his paintings. Especially the self-portraits.”

  “Vulcan doesn’t have a portrait; they’re all accounted for. If he should steal one, who would buy it?”

  “You’re aware that one of Cézanne’s self-portraits has never been seen by the public, has never been displayed in a gallery, has never been photographed, and has been owned by the same family for nearly a hundred years. Sound familiar?”