Michelangelo_s Notebook fr-1

by Paul Christopher

  “Is there anything else I can help you with?” asked the headmaster.

  “No,” said Valentine, shaking his head. “I think I’ve seen enough.”

  Wharton gave him a sharp look. “In that case, perhaps I’ll say good-bye then.”

  “Thank you for your help.” Valentine nodded.

  “No problem,” answered Wharton. He turned away and went back toward the cloakroom entrance. By the time Finn and Valentine followed he was nowhere to be seen, his footsteps echoing away as he headed back to his office through the school corridors. They exited through the smaller door out into the quadrangle and the hot sunlight.

  “Well, what did you make of all that?” said Valentine as they headed back across the quad.

  “Is this a quiz?” said Finn.

  “If you want it to be.”

  “Where do I start?”

  “The beginning, of course.”

  “His office smelled of pipe tobacco but I didn’t see any pipe.”

  “Yes, I caught that too.”

  “Uh, he wanted to make sure we didn’t go through the school on the way to the little museum place, so maybe there was somebody he didn’t want us to see… the pipe smoker maybe.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I think he was lying about Crawley. I bet if we checked we’d find out that Crawley went to Greyfriars.”

  “Go on.”

  “I think he was lying about this Colonel Gatty as well. I’ll bet he knows more than he’s telling.”

  “Why do you think he’d be doing something like that?”

  “I’m not sure. Protecting him for some reason, I suppose.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not really, except that you seemed awfully interested in that painting in the museum. Looked like a dingy Picasso knockoff.”

  “It’s by Juan Gris.”

  “The cubist?” Gris, a Spaniard like Picasso as well as his neighbor in Paris, had been one of the early exponents of the style along with George Braque. She’d studied him briefly in her second year. If Valentine was right, the painting was worth a lot of money.

  “If the painting is genuine it’s an untitled canvas from 1927. It shouldn’t be there.”

  “Why not?” said Finn. “Another generous ex-student?”

  “Doubtful,” answered Valentine. “It was looted by the Nazis in 1941 from the Wildenstein Gallery in Paris and hasn’t been seen or heard of since.”

  “How would it turn up here?”

  “Now that’s a mystery, isn’t it?”

  They reached the rental car. The Taurus was still there. The Jaguar was gone. “We can presume the Taurus is Miss Mimble’s.”

  “I thought the Jag belonged to Wharton.”

  “So did I until I saw the aerial photograph behind his desk. It shows quite a large house tucked in behind the main building. The headmaster’s residence.”

  “So who owns the Jag?”

  “The person who was smoking the pipe in Wharton’s office just before we came in.”

  “Shit,” muttered Finn. “We should have got the plate number.”

  “It was a New York World War Two veterans plate. 1LGS2699.”

  Somehow she wasn’t surprised that he remembered the number. “Colonel Gatty?”

  “Probably. Easy enough to find out.” He tossed Finn the keys. “You drive.” She unlocked the car and got behind the wheel. Valentine climbed in the other side. He reached down, picked his laptop case up from under the seat and plugged it into the empty lighter socket. He booted up the computer, turned on the GPRS wireless modem and tapped his way effortlessly into the New York Department of Motor Vehicles database. Finn ran the car up the long drive and then turned onto the road that led back to the highway. Within a few minutes Valentine had what he wanted.

  “It’s Gatty. He lives near the Museum of Natural History.”

  “That didn’t take long.”

  “Anything Afghani terrorists can do, I can do better.” He grinned. He punched a key on the laptop and closed it. They drove back to New York.

  20

  Night was falling and the nighthawks were making their swooping, booming mating calls in the purple sky overhead. Instead of being dark, the farmhouse and the outbuildings were bathed in light from half a dozen security lamps on tall poles, lit by the chugging of a small portable generator somewhere. Who had the gasoline to light up a stupid farmhouse these days, making it an easy target for Allied planes overhead, or passing patrols? But Allied flights never got this close to the Swiss border, and there weren’t any patrols wandering around in this area except for them. This was a dead zone, where whatever war that existed was a private one.

  They had made a cold camp just inside the tree line using the remains of an old dry stone fence covered with bramble for cover. One of the spooks, Taggart, was whispering to Cornwall, who was making notes using a small pad and his pocket flash. Everyone else was having M-3 meat and vegetable stew or M-1 meat and beans, which tasted as bad as it looked cold and not much better heated. Not that the sergeant much cared; after eating that shit for three years all over Europe his taste buds were cardboard anyway. Shit filled you up just like good stuff and it all came out the same-C-3 accessory-pack toilet paper. Like everyone said, it was a shitty war.

  Wonder of wonders, Cornwall was actually talking to him.

  “Sergeant.”

  “Sir.”

  “We’re going to need to get a little closer to the farm.”

  “We, sir?”

  “You and a patrol. As many men as you think you need.” Stupid fucking question. I need the whole fucking U.S. Army if you’ve got it to spare. The light from the German lamps twinkled off the man’s glasses like he had no eyes at all. He had a voice like a history teacher, like he knew everything in the fucking world. A drone. “What do you want to know, sir?”

  “Reconnoiter the situation, Sergeant. How many men, weapons-that kind of thing.”

  “Fine.” They were going to do the hard part and Cornwall and McPhail and Taggart were going to sit back here and talk about art. Jesus!

  He chose Teitelbaum and Reid because they could keep their mouths shut. They slipped over the hedge and through the last of the trees just after the moon had set. It took them almost an hour to make their way down to the narrow dirt road that ran in front of the farm. It was just on the edge of the pools of light thrown by the pole lamps and offered enough shadow and cover in the roadside ditch to keep the sentries from seeing them.

  The sergeant got out his binoculars and swung them slowly from left to right. Everything was the same as it had been before, only closer. He could see the break in the bramble-covered stone wall and the post and a few splintered pieces of wood that had once been the gate into the place. There was a guard just visible on the left side, looking miserable in a canvas rain cape even though it had stopped raining hours ago. The sergeant could see the glow of a cigarette moving in an arc from the man’s hand to his mouth. It would have been an easy shot, payback for Hayes, but who the fuck cared about Hayes anyway? If the sniper was still in the tower of the abbey he’d pick up the muzzle flash and take him out easy as one two three. No, this was a look-see, no more.

  The sergeant could also see that getting over the stone wall was going to be a bitch. Too high and covered with brambles. They’d get hung up like birds in a fucking net. As far as he could see they’d have to go through the front gate if they were going to go in at all. On the other hand, if he told that to Cornwall or either of the other two phony officers, they’d probably do it and wind up getting them all killed. Like somebody told him back before France, to know more was to have more. He told Teitelbaum and Reid to park it, gave them the evening password and told them he’d be back in a while. If they smoked and got themselves picked off by the sniper in the abbey ruins, that was their lookout.

  He slipped back into the trees and moved north. He’d seen the big topo map that Cornwall carried and he knew there was the vague possibility of
one of those monster King Tigers coming down the road and blowing them all to hell with its 88mm, but he hadn’t seen one yet and he didn’t think he was likely to. The worst he’d seen was a burned-out old Panzer I that looked like it dated back to the Spanish civil war lying half in the ditch at the top of the hill. He’d been sidetracked with the OSS dudes and as long as they didn’t do anything stupid that was fine with him. He was no hero-that was for sure. At this point all he wanted was to do his time and then go back to Canarsie.

  He moved through the trees, his eyes automatically scanning the ground for deadfalls or trip wires, his ears cocked by long practice to the sounds around him, his mind in some kind of automatic autonomic state that was more animal than human, ready to react at any moment to any sight or sound that was out of the natural order of things. Eventually he reached another drainage ditch, this one leading to a culvert that ran under the road to the field on the other side. If there was going to be any kind of warning mechanism, mines or trips he knew it would be here, but there was nothing. The plates on the trucks said SS but this was no crack unit. Those pricks, hell, even the straight army types would know better than to leave their flank open like this. He checked the ground carefully; no cigarette butts, no matches or food waste, no stink of piss that would give away a perimeter guard. Nothing. He smiled to himself, glad he’d left the others behind. Something was going on here, something as squirrelly as Cornwall and his two so-called lieutenants.

  The sergeant squatted by the culvert, staring at the ground. He’d been with the little band for more than six months now, him and the others taken out of Antwerp just after Holland was liberated and attached to G2 by orders of God knows who. Since then they’d been working their way across Europe, mostly talking to people without the slightest sign of combat. Two weeks ago they’d been sitting around fifty miles from Koblenz waiting for the Brits to make up their minds and Cornwall had found out something that had them pushing south and east like a coon dog with a bitch’s scent up his schnoz. Maybe what he was sniffing was this: a phony SS unit out in the middle of the fucking Bavarian nowhere and six Opel Blitzes.

  At this stage of the war a gas guzzler like the Blitz-capable of at least thirty miles an hour, or even more with a good enough road-was worth its weight in gold, and that had the sergeant thinking quick. The trucks had to have some kind of special designation and documents to get this far south, and from here they could head for Switzerland, Italy or Austria. The Russkies were to the east, the Allies were to the west and they were being squeezed like a pimple. Odds were they were heading for Switzerland, since Italy had already surrendered and Austria wasn’t far behind. That meant Lake Constance, no more than sixty miles away.

  The sergeant looked through the culvert, wondering how much trouble his curiosity could get him into. Say the shipment in those six Opels really was valuable, and say that Cornwall meant to take it. But the real question was, what did he intend doing with it after that. His job was to recover the stuff then get it through proper channels back to its owners, but he was beginning to wonder. Maybe now they were past war, and playing finders keepers. Maybe it was every man for himself. Maybe it was time for the boy from Canarsie to cut himself a big slab of that pie. Maybe.

  The sergeant let his hand drop to the butt of the firearm holstered on his hip. Three phony officers who weren’t really army at all, who all had soft jobs stateside, who were probably true-blue as all get-out. It would be easy enough, but then what would he do with the six trucks? It was all in the paperwork.

  He stood up. The dawn was coming on pretty quick and the ground fog was running through the trees like so many torn rags. Six trucks and close enough to the Swiss border to make it in a day, maybe two. It was worth thinking about. He peered through the patchy fog at the distant entrance to the farm. For a moment he was almost sure he saw a figure moving across the gated opening. He lifted his binoculars. Not a guard. A man in uniform. A general, right down to the red stripe on his fucking jodhpurs. But he was way too young-hawk-faced, pointy chin, young side of forty. Some kind of disguise, maybe. He stopped at the edge of the gate and a second figure appeared. A woman in a sweater and a head-scarf. The guy in uniform lit her cigarette. They were laughing about something. A young woman; now that was interesting. The farmer’s wife or daughter, someone along for the ride? Six Opel trucks, a phony general and a woman. What was that all about?

  21

  Gatty’s residence was a six-story house on West Seventy-second that looked as though it had been transported away from beside a canal in Amsterdam a few hundred years ago. To the left was a brownstone, to the right there was a fair-sized apartment building. The front door was in the basement and they had to walk down into a little well surrounded by a wrought iron fence. The door knocker was huge: a black hand on a hinge holding something that looked like a small cannonball. In the middle of the cannonball was an unblinking eye. Valentine tapped the knocker twice against the heavy oak door. They could hear it echoing inside and then they heard the sound of footsteps on stone.

  “Spooky,” said Finn.

  Valentine smiled. “The kind of money that can afford a house like this on the West Side usually is,” he answered. A light went on over their heads. There was a short pause and then a man in a plain black suit answered the door. He was in his seventies and the little hair he had on his head was silver-white. He had dark eyes that had seen too much and a thin mouth. A scar pulled his upper lip upward, revealing a piece of yellow tooth. He’d been born before operations for split lips and cleft pallets were commonplace.

  “We’d like to speak to the colonel, if you don’t mind,” said Valentine. “It’s to do with Greyfriars Academy. He was just visiting there, I believe.”

  “Wait,” said the man. There was a slight snuffle to his voice but it was clear enough. He closed the door on them and the light went off, leaving the two standing in the darkness.

  “The butler did it,” said Finn. “He’s really spooky.”

  “Not just a butler,” Valentine commented.

  “Bodyguard. He’s wearing a shoulder rig. I saw it when he turned away.”

  The butler-bodyguard returned a few moments later and let them in. They followed him into a gloomy, slate-floored foyer set with old-fashioned wall sconces, then up a wide flight of worn oak steps to an enormous room on the main floor. It was two stories high, a blend of church nave and baronial hall. The ceiling was plaster, worked in ornate clusters of ivy and grapes, the walls paneled three quarters of the way up in dark oak, the floor done in wide planks. At one end of the room three arched windows, heavily leaded, looked out onto Seventy-second Street while at the other end more than a dozen smaller windows rising from floor to ceiling looked out onto a small walled garden, dark except for two or three small lights set into the corners of the wall.

  There were dozens of paintings on the walls, almost all of them Dutch: meticulous DeWitte architectural renderings, DeHooch domestic interiors, seascapes by Cuyp and Hobbema’s gloomy castles. The only exception was a large Renoir, the head of a young girl, placed in a position of honor above the large tiled fireplace.

  Heraldic banners hung around the room from a second-floor gallery running around three sides of the room, and there were four blue-black suits of armor, one in each corner. A bright red rug covered most of the floor and on it, facing each other were two large, tufted leather sofas in caramel brown. Between the sofas, resting on a large, splayed zebra skin was a square coffee table framed in teak and surfaced in squares of heavy beaten brass. There were end tables and side tables here and there loaded with photographs in silver frames and assorted small treasures from ornate gold cigarette boxes to at least three silver koummyas that Finn could see.

  “I see you are enjoying my things,” said a voice from somewhere above them. “Please, enjoy yourself.” Finn looked up and saw the face of a heavily jowled man looking down at them from the gallery. The man disappeared and there was a low humming sound. A moment later the man appeare
d at the far end of the room. He was dressed in a very formal-looking Saville Row suit at least thirty years out of date. He had a full head of flat black hair that might have come out of a tin of shoe polish, Ronald Reagan-style, and his large blue eyes were washed out and pale. He had large liver spots on his gnarled hands and when he walked, he leaned heavily on a three-point cane. His right leg appeared to hitch a little as he moved and his left shoulder was fractionally higher than his right. Despite the black hair he appeared to be well into his eighties. Using his left hand, he gestured with the cane.

  “Sit,” he said pleasantly, pointing at the brown leather couches. Finn and Valentine did as he asked. The old man chose a heavy-looking straight-backed wooden chair at right angles to them. The butler-bodyguard appeared carrying an antique silver coffee service. The man put it down and disappeared. “Edward Winslow,” said the old man. “People often mistake it for Paul Revere.” He took a gnarled briar pipe out of his jacket pocket and lit it with a World War Two-vintage, black, crackle-finish lighter. He snapped it shut with a practiced motion and blew out a cloud of apple-scented smoke. One mystery solved, Finn thought.

  “Winslow was much earlier than Revere, though,” commented Valentine. “And better, in my opinion, especially his smaller pieces. Revere was like his politics, a little bit melodramatic.”

  “You know something of silver?”

  “And politics.” Valentine smiled. “Especially the melodramatic kind.”

  “Who is your young and singularly pretty companion?”

  “My name is Finn Ryan, Colonel. We’re here about the koummya you donated to Greyfriars.”

  “The one that wound up being shoved down poor Alex Crawley’s throat, you mean?” The old man laughed. “Much as I would have enjoyed doing it, I seriously doubt that my arthritis would have allowed it, not to mention the stroke I had a year or so ago. I don’t get around the way I used to.”