Michelangelo_s Notebook fr-1

by Paul Christopher

  “You knew Crawley?” asked Valentine.

  “I knew him well enough to dislike him. He was what they refer to as a bean counter. Had no feel for the art he represented.”

  “How did you know him?” Finn asked. “Through the museum or through Greyfriars?” The old man gave her a long, almost predatory look that made her skin crawl.

  “Neither. Not that it’s any of your business. Look around you, Miss Ryan. Do I have your name right? I live for art. I purchase a great deal of it. When you buy art at the scale I do you often find yourself making purchases from deaccessioned works from places like the Parker-Hale.

  They had a number of Dutch works-Dutch is what I collect.”

  “Except for the Renoir,” Valentine commented, nodding toward the painting over the fireplace.

  “Yes, I purchased that just toward the end of the war.”

  “Oh.” Valentine let it hang. Gatty was a collector-a vulgar one, if the decor of his living room was anything to go by-and collectors loved to boast.

  “In Switzerland, as a matter of fact.”

  “Odd posting.”

  “Not really. I was army liaison to Allen Dulles in Berne.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Cloak-and-dagger stuff. Still can’t talk about most of it.”

  “Dulles ran an OSS listening post. How does Renoir come into it?”

  The colonel seemed surprised that Valentine knew as much as he did. He raised an eyebrow, then smiled. “There was a great deal of art for sale in Europe. Before, during and after the war. I merely took advantage of what one might call a downturn in the market. The provenance is perfectly legitimate.”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t,” Valentine answered mildly.

  “I still buy from them now and again.”

  “Who might that be?”

  “The Hoffman Gallery,” replied Gatty. Finn made a small startled movement. Valentine casually dropped his hand onto her knee and left it there. Finn wasn’t sure which was more shocking-the touch of Valentine’s hand or the name of the gallery. Hoffman was the same name as the one on the computer file for the provenance of the Michelangelo drawing. It was no answer to the mystery, but at least it was another piece of the puzzle put into play. The dagger, Greyfriars, Gatty’s connection to Crawley and now the Swiss art gallery linking everything together. Connections, but no real meaning.

  “Doesn’t it seem a little strange that a murderer would go to all the trouble to break into a school in Connecticut for a murder weapon he used in New York?”

  “As far as I know it was a coincidence. A robbery in one place, the dagger turning up in another. The killer could just as easily have purchased the knife from a pawnshop here; there’s nothing to say they were one and the same person.”

  “I suppose if you were defending yourself in court that would be true.”

  “But I’m not, am I?” Gatty answered. “And not likely to be.”

  “No, I suppose not,” answered Valentine. One finger tapped lightly on Finn’s knee. Valentine stood up and she followed suit. The old man remained in his seat. The white-haired bodyguard appeared as though Gatty had pressed some kind of hidden button.

  “Bert, show these two people out.” The old man gave them a cold smile and the bodyguard led them to the front door.

  “What was that all about?” asked Finn as they walked down the block to the rental car. “You never really asked him about anything except the Renoir. And how did you know there was a connection to the drawing?”

  “I didn’t,” said Valentine. “I knew I’d seen the Renoir before, though.”

  “Where?”

  “The same place as the Juan Gris back at the school-on an International Fine Arts Register Bulletin. The Renoir disappeared along with a Pissaro landscape in 1938. It was being shipped from Amsterdam to Switzerland. Supposedly it never arrived. That’s two pieces of stolen art in one day.” He paused. “And that’s two too many.”

  22

  The top floor loft of Ex Libris was as stark as the lower floors were overflowing. Returning from Gatty’s, Valentine keyed the big freight elevator and they rode up in silence. Finn stepped out into a five thousand square foot expanse that looked like something out of a Fellini film. One huge, high-ceilinged room led into the next. The first had faux brick walls in pressed tin painted Chinese red with a centerpiece table surfaced with a huge slab of black Georgia marble. From there they went into a wide hallway set out with John Kulik neon sculptures on deep green walls and round Chinese carpets on the gleaming black tile floor. The third area, obviously a living room, had more Chinese carpets on the floor and a huge Sidney Goldman surrealist canvas of nudes and nuns on the far wall. Finn sat down on one of three couches in the room and looked around. Valentine disappeared around the corner and came back a few minutes later with a tray holding two immense, stacked bagels and a couple of long-necked beers.

  “Blatz?”

  “From Wisconsin.” Valentine smiled. “I went to school in Madison and got a taste for it.”

  “My dad taught at UW,” said Finn, taking a swallow of beer. She bit a chunk out of the bagel and chewed, staring across at Valentine as he sat down across from her.

  “That’s right.” Valentine nodded. He drank from his bottle and ignored the sandwich on the tray in front of him. “That’s where I met him.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “He was my anthropology prof.”

  “When was this?”

  “Late sixties, early seventies.”

  “He must have been young.”

  “He was. So was I-even younger.” He laughed.

  Finn took another bite of her sandwich and another swallow of beer. She looked around the room at the furniture and the art, thought about the piece of New York real estate she was sitting on top of, thought about Valentine. It was all so tiring. Her head began to whirl. Overkill.

  “You didn’t buy this place selling old books, Mr. Valentine.”

  “It’s Michael, and that sounds like a passive-aggressive statement, Ms. Ryan.”

  “I’m really not a fan of dime-store shrinkology. You do more than sell books and do research.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re some kind of spook, aren’t you?”

  “Spook?”

  “Spy.”

  “No, not really.”

  “And my dad, what was he?”

  “An anthropology professor.”

  “When he died they shipped his body back to Columbus for the funeral.”

  “Yes?”

  “It was a closed-coffin funeral. I didn’t really think about it much back then. I was just mad that I’d never get to see his face again.”

  Valentine said nothing.

  “But later, a lot later, I started thinking about all the places he’d been-always politically unstable, always dangerous-and then I wondered why he had a closed coffin when he supposedly had a perfectly innocent heart attack.”

  Valentine shrugged. “He died in the jungle. Maybe it took time to get his remains back to civilization.”

  “Or maybe he was missing his fingernails, or maybe he was tortured, or maybe it really wasn’t my father’s body in that coffin at all.”

  “You’re saying you think your father was a spy?”

  “I’m from Columbus, Ohio. I’m what my teachers used to call a linear thinker. Straight lines, you know-line up the facts like dominoes and see where they take you. In this case my mother gives me your phone number, you’re definitely no stodgy old bookseller and you used to be a student of my dad’s… probably more than a student. Is my analysis wrong? My boyfriend gets murdered, I get attacked, my ex-boss winds up with a dagger stuck into him and you don’t turn a hair… Michael.”

  “You sound just like him.”

  “Who?”

  “Your dad. He used to count facts off on his fingers like that too.” He smiled. Finn looked down and realized what she’d been doing with her hands. She flushed, remembering he
r father at the dinner table, explaining something, his hands playing over each other, one finger on another. When he ran out of fingers the lecture was usually over.

  Finn closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted. What she really wanted to do was find a bed and fall into it for the next month or so. How long had it been, twenty-four, thirty-six hours? Something like that. Like a bolt of lightning. Like driving in a car one second and finding yourself wrapped around a telephone pole the next. Life didn’t happen this way, or it wasn’t supposed to. She’d done all the right things, got good grades, brushed her teeth from side to side as well as up and down, played well with others, colored inside the lines, all of that, so this just should… not… be… happening.

  She opened her eyes.

  “I don’t want any more bullshit, Michael. I’m not playing games, and I’m not playing Holmes and Watson. This is my life-or maybe my death we’re talking about. Murder. I want the truth. And I want to know just who the hell you are.”

  “You may not like it.”

  “Try me.”

  “Do you know anything about your grandfather-your paternal grandfather?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “A great deal.”

  “He was some kind of businessman. My father never talked about him. He was Irish, obviously.” She sighed. “This is all ancient history.”

  “Ancient history is what we are and where we came from. You know the old saying ‘Those who forget history-’ ”

  “ ‘Are doomed to repeat it.’ ”

  “Lots of people know the quote, but do you know who said it?”

  “No.”

  “A Spanish philosopher named George Santayana. He was born in the middle of the nineteenth century and died in 1952. Your grandfather actually met him once.”

  “You always go the long way to get home?”

  “Your grandfather was born in Ireland but his name wasn’t Ryan. It was Flynn, Padraic Flynn- which figures, because Flynn in Gaelic is O’Flionn, which means red-haired.”

  “Jesus wept,” Finn groaned. “You mean my name is really Finn Flynn?”

  “He changed it legally when he left Cork in a bit of a rush. He was part of the Easter Uprising in 1916 and had to get out of town. He came to Canada and he wasn’t in business. He was a bootlegger. He got rich by taking rowboats full of booze across the Detroit River from Windsor.”

  “This is all very interesting, but where’s it leading?”

  “When he got to the American side of the river he met up with my grandfather, Michelangelo Valentini. He changed his name too. He called himself Mickey Valentine but everyone called him Mickey Hearts. He was famous for a while, like your grandfather. Patrick Ryan retired after Prohibition and moved to Ohio. Mickey Hearts was gunned down in the seventies gang wars in New York. After that, Gotti and his freaks took over.”

  “Okay, so we both come from criminal backgrounds-if it’s true, which I’m beginning to wonder about any of this. Just what is your point?”

  “The point is neither my grandfather nor yours wanted their children growing up criminals. For them it was rooted in the necessities of poverty. For their children there was the freedom of education. They both went to Yale, you know. During the war my father worked for the judge advocate general and your father worked for the OSS.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Finn, “but I still don’t see what it has to do with Crawley’s murder or my boyfriend, Pete’s.”

  “I’m beginning to think it has a lot to do with it, at least peripherally.”

  “So finish your story.”

  “After the war my father went to work for the CIA and your old man taught anthropology-which meant, in the early days, the fifties and early sixties, he did a lot of traveling, mostly to Southeast Asia and Central America. He even looked the part-horn-rimmed glasses, bald, red beard, big smile, tweed jacket with elbow patches… he even smoked a pipe. Nobody paid any attention to him. He wrote papers on the Hmong and the Montagnards in Vietnam and Cambodia before most people could find the places on the map. He also correctly predicted the revolution in Cuba and pointed out Fidel Castro as a potential problem several years before he came to power.”

  “You’re saying he was a spy.”

  “No. Not officially, but my father enlisted him as a freelancer-one of the best in the business-and your dad, in turn, recruited me. He was an information specialist on a human scale. I broadened out into history and… other specialties.”

  “Like crime?”

  “I was connected. My grandfather was still alive then. My father had broken off any relationship years ago, just the way your father was estranged from his father, but I was always curious about my roots, and like it or not, Mickey Hearts was blood.”

  “Which equals murder and stolen art.”

  “Art theft has been a major source of income for me for the past twenty years: finding it, recovering it, authenticating it. I work for private individuals, insurance companies, museums. Anyone who needs me.”

  “Including brokering it for the thieves.”

  “Sometimes it has to be that way, or the art suffers.”

  “Ars Gratia Artis,” Finn scoffed. “Art for art’s sake. And a big fee.” She shook her head again. “We’re a long way from my dad.”

  “Not very far-or your mom either.”

  “Mom? She’s a little old lady.”

  “She might surprise you. She was as deep into it as your father.”

  “Into what, exactly?”

  “Your father wasn’t killed because he was trying to destabilize some rickety tin-pot dictator in some banana republic. He was killed because he discovered that the tin-pot dictator-a man named Jose Montt-was murdering villagers by the truck-load and raping archaeological sites all over central Guatemala. The man who actually did the killing was the head of one of Montt’s death squads, Le Mano Blanco, the White Hand. His name was Julio Roberto Alpirez. They were doing a hundred million dollars’ worth of business a year in looted artifacts. Your father got in their way. He also made a stink about it, which was even worse.”

  “What happened to Alpirez?” Finn asked, her voice taut, her face even paler than usual.

  “He died,” said Valentine.

  “How?”

  “I killed him,” said Valentine, his voice flat. “He had an apartment in Guatemala City, Zone Four behind the old Church of St. Agustin on Avenida Quattro Sur.” Valentine took a sip from the bottle on the table in front of him. He stared at Finn but she could tell that he wasn’t looking at her at all. “I went to his apartment and I found him asleep, alone, stoned out of his mind on cocaine and drunk on twelve-year-old single malt. I taped his hands and feet and then I woke him up with a lit cigarette and I talked to him for a few minutes and then I wrapped a very thin piece of piano wire around his throat and pulled it tight and cut his head off. The artifact thefts stopped after that.

  “Your father was my teacher, my mentor and my friend and I come from a long line of people who are great believers in the power of revenge.” Valentine finished off his beer and stood up. “It’s late. I’m going to bed. You should try to get some sleep too. Your room’s at the end of the hall.” He gave her a brief smile, turned and left the room.

  23

  The residence of the cardinal archbishop of New York is a handsome one-hundred-year-old mansion at 452 Madison Avenue, directly behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral and connected to it by an underground passageway. The first floor of the mansion, generally referred to as the museum, is filled with formal antique furniture and is usually used for photo opportunities, cocktail parties and various high-level fund-raising events. The second floor contains offices and the private rooms for the archbishop’s staff, which includes a cook, three housekeepers, the two priests who serve as the archbishop’s secretaries and a monsignor who acts as chancellor of the archdiocese. The two “secretaries” are both trained marksmen, have completed a number of special weapons and tactics courses at the FBI
Academy in Quantico and are usually armed when accompanying the cardinal archbishop off the premises of the mansion or the cathedral itself.

  The archbishop’s private apartment on the third floor of the mansion includes a bedroom, bathroom, small kitchen, sitting room and a study. The sitting room is sparsely furnished with a couch, a few chairs, a small but well-stocked bar and a very large color television set. The study has several large stained-glass windows, a cathedral ceiling and a long, old, refectory table the archbishop uses as a desk. The apartment’s bedroom lies between the study and the sitting room and is small, a mere twelve by fourteen feet. There is a king-sized bed, and a single window, covered with brown-and-white draperies that match the bedspread. The glass in the drapery-covered window is bullet-proof and plastic laminated to prevent splintering in case of a bomb attack. Over the head of the bed there is a rather tasteless painting of Christ entering Jerusalem on a donkey, and on the wall opposite there is a large fourteenth-century gold crucifix that once was part of the altar of the Cathedral of Wroclaw. At the far end of the room is a tall ironwood vestry containing the archbishop’s ecclesiastical garb including copes, chasubles, surplices, several scarlet-and-black mantelettas, or cloaks, edged in gold thread and ermine and an emerald-studded gold pectoral cross he favored for the evening masses on Friday, the only day he personally offered the sacrament.

  The man known variously as Father Ricardo Gentile, a priest of Rome, Peter Ruffino of the Art Recovery Tactical Squad and Laurence G. MacLean of Homeland Security moved silently through the rooms of the archbishop’s third-floor apartment, his footsteps hushed by a pair of cheap black Nike knockoffs. He had hidden in a small storeroom behind the sacristy until the cathedral closed at eleven, then followed the directions he’d been given to the basement crypt and the passageway leading to the mansion.

  For a city and a country so recently and violently attacked, the ease with which he’d reached the private apartment of His Eminence David Cardinal Bannerman had been truly alarming. The Americans were still amateurs at this sort of thing, and remarkably innocent, still refusing to accept that they could be so deeply hated by people seriously intent on doing them harm for no other reason than their being American. The Vatican had been dispatching assassins to do the Devil’s work in the name of God for the better part of a millennium or more and other nations had been doing it for much longer.