Michelangelo_s Notebook fr-1

by Paul Christopher

  “Are you sure this is the right thing to do?” said Finn, sitting on the bench beside Valentine. Between his feet was a bag of equipment. They were both dressed casually in running gear. It was past seven and dusk was falling, the rush hour traffic on Hudson Street thinning.

  “You’re the one who went in there today and took the keys.” Valentine smiled. “Besides, if we want to bring this thing to some kind of conclusion that will satisfy the authorities we have to have evidence. Right now everything’s circumstantial, Internet paranoia and conspiracy theory.”

  “I just wanted to find out who killed Peter.”

  “We will,” Valentine offered. “I promise you.” He kept his eyes on the house on the far side of St. Luke’s Place. The last lights went out and a moment later Hugo Boss appeared, locking the door behind him. The tiny Panasonic D-snap camera Finn had carried in her shoulder bag earlier in the day had given Valentine all the information he needed about the inside of the interior of the building including the name on the security panel just inside the front door. It appeared to be a relatively simple ADT system with a telephone line connection to a central security center. The system was almost ten years old and a single call to Barrie Kornitzer had given him the bypass code for the system within five minutes. Finn’s theft of the key ring had simplified things even more; after copying them at a locksmith’s shop on Carmine Street, she used the beeper on the ring of originals to find the car the keys belonged to, eventually finding a Toyota Camry on Varick Street that answered the call. She simply tossed the keys on the floor underneath the front seat and then manually re-locked the car behind her. When the owner eventually discovered them he or she would assume the keys had been left behind when exiting the car earlier in the day.

  “I am the Baby Jesus.

  I see every single sin.

  I am the Baby Jesus

  And I always win.”

  Valentine checked his watch and then the darkened brownstone across the way. Nothing moved except the leaves in the trees. The traffic hummed a block away. Finn could faintly recall a few lines from an Edgar Allan Poe sonnet about some spooky dead love. She tried not to think about what lay beneath her, buried deep under the soil of the park. Old secrets. Older bones.

  “Time to go.”

  “All right.”

  “I told Barrie most of what we know. If I haven’t called him by midnight he’ll let a friend of his in the Bureau know what we found.”

  “That’s a comfort,” said Finn with a hollow laugh. They both stood up and headed across the street. Behind them, lost in the gloom, the children skipped.

  48

  They stepped into the dark house. Ahead of them and to the right was the ADT panel. A small, angry red light pulsed. Valentine punched in a set of numbers. The red light reverted to green.

  “That was easy enough,” Finn whispered.

  “This isn’t some high-tech heist movie,” Valentine answered. “After a while people get careless and they don’t bother with the basics.” He shrugged. “Besides, why would anyone break into a place like this? As far as anyone knows they’re just a bunch of paper pushers.”

  “Maybe that’s all they are,” said Finn. “Maybe we’re wrong.”

  “You said you thought your receptionist in the expensive suit was wearing a gun.”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “Then we’re not wrong. You don’t need a gun to guard papers.”

  Valentine paused for a moment to examine the painting behind the desk. “You do need a gun to guard something like that, however.”

  They moved quickly through the reception room and down the hallway into the open area at the center of the house. Finn dropped the equipment bag on one of the desks and slid open the zipper. Valentine took out a heavy flashlight and switched it on, panning the beam around the room. He saw nothing any different from what the camera had shown him: a large rectangular windowless room with a flight of stairs against the right-hand wall. There were three desks and a row of filing cabinets. A doorway at the end of the room led into a comfortable conference area with a long table and a half dozen chairs. There was a painting over the mantel of an old-fashioned fireplace to the left. It was too dark to see clearly; a muted landscape of some sort. Another door led to the rear of the house. It was locked. Finn stepped forward with her set of keys and tried them until she found one that fit. She turned it and the door popped open. They stepped through.

  “Now this is interesting,” Valentine murmured.

  The room was completely empty. A window on the far wall had been bricked up and the original rear door had been replaced by something that looked vaguely like the sliding mechanism usually seen on garages. Instead of the cherry in the other rooms here it was wide oak planks, dark with age. It was the original floor.

  “A loading bay,” said Valentine. “The insurance plat books show an old court-style alley in the back with an entrance on the Varick Street end. That’s where this must go.”

  “That doesn’t make sense unless they’ve got something to load,” said Finn.

  “Look.” Valentine pointed. In the center of the floor there was a square seam in the planks. He swung the light around the walls. Beside the operating mechanism for the heavy rear door there was a single large button, much like the elevator call at Ex Libris. “Hit it.”

  Finn crossed the room and slapped her palm down on it. There was a humming sound and a section of the floor six feet on a side pushed upward slowly. A large open cage appeared, finally thumping to a stop.

  “What the hell is that?” said Finn.

  Valentine played the beam of his light over the open cage. A stamped metal plate across the top beam read: OTIS BROTHERS YONKERS NY 1867.

  “I couldn’t find anything out about the original owners of the building but it could easily have been some kind of tavern or small hotel. This would be the freight elevator they used to bring up beer barrels and food from storage down below.” Valentine stepped into the cage and swung the flashlight around. He spotted a switch on one of the cage uprights. “Looks safe enough.”

  Finn stared, horrified. “We’re going down in that thing?”

  “I don’t see any other way.” He waved her forward. Tentatively she stepped onto the old steel floor of the cage and Valentine tapped the button. The cage descended ponderously. By the time they reached the bottom they were smothered in darkness. They stepped off the elevator and Valentine swept the beam around. They appeared to be in a modern, concrete-walled basement filled with boxes and crates. Valentine found a light switch and flipped it on. Overhead fluorescents crackled into life.

  The basement was as large as the entire house, a long narrow room with a well-outfitted packing facility complete with storage bins for lumber, saws, worktables and a large overhead setup for blowing in foam popcorn, and an area devoted to metal strapping. All very efficient. A dehumidifier hummed against one wall and the room was cool and dry. A half dozen medium-sized crates had been arranged close to the freight elevator, neatly labeled and bar-coded. They were all designated for various outlets of the Hoffman Gallery around the world and they each had a plastic pouch stapled to one side already packed with customs clearance papers. Off in one corner of the room was a metal desk with a computer and heavy-duty label printer. Valentine took a box cutter out of his bag and slashed one of the pouches open.

  “Form 4457, Declaration of Goods only. One of the great assets of dealing in fine art and antiquities: no duty. It’s like transporting millions of dollars across international borders without raising an eyebrow.”

  Valentine found a pry bar on one of the worktables and began pulling open one of the small crates. The top finally pulled free and he carefully lifted out the contents.

  “Rembrandt. The Raising of Lazarus. It’s been missing since 1942. It was stolen from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam.”

  “Is that enough evidence?”

  “No. We have to find the rest.”

  “It’s not here.” />
  Valentine looked around the room. “First we have to establish exactly what the extent of ‘here’ is.” He walked to the far end of the basement and stared at the wall. Like the rest of the long, narrow room it appeared to be made out of solid brick. There was nothing against the wall that might have disguised some sort of hidden entrance.

  “It’s got to be here. We’re facing the park.” He looked left and right. “These are adjoining walls to the buildings next door and the back wall is facing in the wrong direction.” He checked the floor carefully, looking for signs that something had recently been brought out from behind the wall but there was nothing.

  Valentine dropped down on his knees, carefully checking the join between the front wall and the floor. Finn turned and looked back the way they had come, remembering the office at Ex Libris and Sherlock Holmes. When the possible has been eliminated…

  The whole back wall was taken up by a series of metal shelving units full of packing supplies. Leaving Valentine to his study of the floor she walked back to the north facing wall and stared. Six shelving units filling up the whole wall and rising to within an inch of the ceiling. They were lifted half an inch off the floor by stumpy little angle iron feet. The units were painted an institutional green and looked old. Finn turned again. The old-fashioned freight elevator was twelve or fifteen feet away. There were more shelving units against the left adjoining wall but none against the right, which was hung with a large piece of pegboard for holding tools instead. She continued to stare, frowning, knowing that something was wrong. Then she saw.

  “Michael,” she called. He stood and turned in her direction.

  “What?”

  “I think I’ve found something.”

  “Where?” He headed down the low-ceilinged basement room toward her.

  “Look,” she said, pointing as he joined her. “The pegboard.”

  “What about it? That’s an adjoining wall.”

  “There’s nothing on it.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “All the tools are on shelves over there, none of them are hanging up so what do you need the pegboard for?”

  Valentine was silent for a moment. He stepped forward and checked the pegboard, tapping at it with his knuckles, then checked the place where the adjoining wall and the rear wall formed a junction. After a moment he grabbed the center shelf of the nearest wall unit and tugged hard. At first nothing happened and then, smoothly and almost silently two of the units closest to the adjoining wall rumbled forward until the double-wide shelves stood two feet out from the back wall. They clicked decisively to a stop like a cork in a bottle. Changing his grip slightly Valentine pulled the shelf unit to the left, away from the adjoining wall finally revealing the dark, hidden entrance.

  He grabbed his flashlight and headed down a wide concrete ramp that led down to a circular antechamber. The walls of the chamber were quarried, Pound Ridge granite, the ancient bedrock on which the skyscrapers of New York had been built. Valentine put his hand out and let it rest on the rough-hewn rock. Cool and dry, a perfect place to bury the city’s favorite sons of history and keep her later secrets from prying eyes. Edgar Allan Poe.

  “Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

  In a strange city lying alone

  Far down within the dim West

  Where the good and the bad and the worst

  and the best

  Have gone to their eternal rest.”

  “Sometimes you can be downright spooky, Michael,” Finn muttered. She followed the beam of the flashlight. Two metal rails like a miniature railway line led through a narrow, pitch-black cavern to the left. There was a switch box bolted onto the near wall and a line of heavy insulated conduit led into the hole. Valentine flicked the switch and a line of industrial bulbs came on, dimly illuminating the tunnel ahead. He switched off the flashlight. The opening was seven or eight feet high and little more than that across. The walls had been constructed on the same stone as the round antechamber and the floor was overlaid with a thick absorbent pea gravel.

  “I wonder where this goes?” Valentine said quietly. He headed into the tunnel.

  “I’m not so sure I want to find out,” said Finn, but she followed him anyway.

  The tunnel turned and twisted half a dozen times as they moved forward. Here and there narrow niches had been cut into the walls, bodies interred and then bricked over, but the crumbling brick had long since vanished and the old interment sites were empty. The rails at their feet seemed strangely out of place in this dead place, the low lightbulbs overhead in their metal screen safety baskets even more so. Finn tried not to think of the weight of the earth directly above her head; tried to breathe evenly in the oppressive, gloomy passage. She’d never been particularly claustrophobic but this was something on a completely different order of magnitude. Hell wasn’t hot, it was just like this-empty and buried underground. Buried alive.

  They moved through the passage for a lifetime and then finally came to another widened antechamber. The rails ran across it to a heavy iron door set on massive hinges bolted into the wall. The door was some kind of dark heavy wood, the strap hinges as old as the stone walls they were attached to. A pair of obelisks had been neatly carved in half relief into the stone on either side of the door, then picked out in whitewash and some dark, ancient stain. Words had been neatly hammered into the rock over the entrance, picked out in black and white the same way as the obelisks.

  “Silence, Mortals, you are entering the Empire of the Dead,” Finn read out aloud. “Nice.” She looked at the door and then at Valentine. “Are we going in?”

  “I think we’ve come too far to back out now,” he answered. He tapped the rail with the toe of his boot. “They’re not using these to transport old bodies. This is a warehouse, not a crypt.” He stepped forward and grabbed the wrought iron handle. He pulled open the door and stepped through.

  There was a deep, guttural moan like the sound of some wounded animal, and then the lights went out. Finn screamed, the terrible scent of fresh-spilled blood suddenly in the air around her. She screamed again, feeling the air rush from her lungs as the stony floor of the tunnel rushed up to greet her. In the distance, echoing, came the flat hard sound of a shot being fired.

  49

  For a single terrible instant Finn felt consciousness failing her and a sudden vision of the last instant she had seen Peter’s face appeared before her. Heart pounding, she got to her hands and knees then pushed herself to her feet. Screaming Valentine’s name she stumbled forward, arms outstretched, fingers clawing at the empty air. She lurched to one side as something struck her hip with a grunt and she felt her cheek smack hard into the rough wooden surface of the door. She lost her balance and twisted away, smelling blood and the thick reek of some kind of cheap men’s cologne or aftershave. It touched some kind of vague sense memory on the edge of conscious thought and then vanished. Close beside her she could hear the sound of ragged breathing and the dull hard sound of a bunched fist smashing into softer flesh. She fell to her knees again, realizing that the floor beneath her was smooth concrete now, not gravel. Bizarrely, filtered down from above her head she could hear the children playing in the park.

  “I am the Baby Jesus.

  I never, ever lie.

  I am the Baby Jesus,

  And if you don’t believe me,

  You will surely fry.”

  The children’s voices were coming through the old ventilation system that brought fresh air down to the crypt, still somehow connected to the surface. Pushing to her feet a second time, arms outstretched again, Finn reached a smooth wall in the darkness and edged along it, feeling desperately for a light switch. The smell of blood had been replaced by something else: the heavy pungent odor of spilled gasoline. There was a horrible sighing sound and then the sound of something heavy crashing to the ground. She felt a plastic switch plate underneath her hand and flipped it upward. The lights came on again and she saw where she was.

  The bun
ker was arch-roofed and enormous, at least a hundred feet on a side, stacked with aisles and rows of crates and wooden boxes, old suitcases, trunks and huge strapped sheet metal steamer chests that reached up to the ceiling, twenty feet overhead, interspersed with steel support beams installed to keep the old stonework from collapsing. A tall crate nearby was open and a Dutch master portrait by Franz Hals leaned against it. The label on the crate was clear, if faded, and had the distinct lightning bolt runes of the Nazi SS. A steamer trunk was open beside it, filled almost to overflowing with thousands of old-fashioned spectacle rims, solid gold, lenses gone. Over everything was the reek of gasoline and out of the corner of her eye Finn saw the familiar red shape of a plastic five-gallon container. The twin narrow-gauge rails that ran into the room ended at a buffer made from a heavy slab of oak beam. A flat pallet dolly rested against the wood: a simple way of transporting plunder from the vault to the loading bay beneath the house on St. Luke’s Place.

  “Michael!”

  “Here!”

  The sound came from behind the large crate. Leading to it she saw a bright trail of fresh blood. She ran forward, pushing the crate out of the way. Valentine was pushing himself upright, grabbing at a pile of flat crates for support. At his feet lay the body of a man, still alive, clutching his belly, groaning, hands clasped around the haft of a long, bone-handled hunting knife. He was gray-haired, in his sixties and wearing some kind of olive drab-colored uniform-the uniform of a World War Two infantry sergeant, much too large on the small man’s frame. Finn recognized him instantly.

  “It’s Fred!”

  Valentine grunted painfully, finally standing erect. There was a large bloody slash across the shoulder of his heavy sweatshirt. “Who?”

  “From the museum. He was a security guard,” she answered faintly. “I used to say hello to him. Just a shy old man.” She stared at Valentine’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “Just a graze. I’ll live.” He bent over the man on the floor. “I’m not so sure about him.”