Painted Ladies s-39

by Robert B. Parker

  “He died young?” I asked, just to avoid passivity.

  “Not yet thirty,” Trachtman said. “Stabbed through the eye, apparently in a drunken brawl.”

  “Like Christopher Marlowe,” I said.

  “My, my,” Trachtman said. “You do know more than you let on.”

  “I live alone,” I said. “I read a lot.”

  “No wife?” Trachtman said.

  “No,” I said. “Though I have kept intimate company with the girl of my dreams for most of my adult life.”

  “But not married?”

  “No.”

  “Why?” Trachtman said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It is good to have someone,” Trachtman said. “I’m glad you do.”

  “How many paintings are there by Hermenszoon?” I said.

  “In his lifetime there were perhaps eight. To the best of our knowledge, only Lady with a Finch survives.”

  “How do you know there used to be eight?”

  “Transaction records, diaries, letters,” Trachtman said. “Usual sources.”

  “So being the one and only makes it even more valuable than it otherwise might be?”

  “The painting is a great work of art,” Trachtman said. “It’s priceless.”

  “And its pricelessness is enhanced by its singularity,” I said.

  Trachtman smiled.

  “Well put,” he said.

  “Is there a history?”

  “Certainly,” Trachtman said. “It remained in the Hermenszoon family something like two hundred years, then was acquired by a wealthy Jewish family in Amsterdam named Herzberg. It remained in the Herzberg family until 1940, when Judah Herzberg and his entire family were arrested by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz. The Nazis also confiscated the vast and priceless art collection that the family had maintained. After the war, some of the paintings were recovered and identified with the Herzberg family by a special unit of the U.S. military established to deal with stolen art. But the entire family had perished in Auschwitz, except a son, Isaac, who would have been about nine when he arrived in Auschwitz. No one could find the boy, who in 1945 would have been fourteen. He had disappeared into the tidal wave of refugees, many of them homeless, which inundated Europe at the time.”

  “What happened to the paintings,” I said, “when they couldn’t find anyone to return them to?”

  “They were kept in a sort of holding facility and distributed to museums or sold to private collectors. The army took surprisingly good care of them, being, you know, military men. But inevitably some just re-disappeared.”

  “Ever hear of the Herzberg Foundation?” I said.

  “No,” Trachtman said. “I haven’t. What is it?”

  “Just a name,” I said. “Came up in discussion. Probably a coincidence.”

  “If it had to do with seventeenth-century Dutch painting,” Trachtman said, “I would know of it.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Did the Hammond Museum get the painting from the army?”

  “In 1949,” Trachtman said.

  “They never found the Herzberg kid?”

  “There have been several claimants,” Trachtman said. “But none has been able to prove his lineage.”

  “Hard to do if your entire family is wiped out and you’re in a death camp for five years.”

  “Very hard,” Trachtman said.

  We were silent for a moment.

  “When was he last heard of?” I said.

  “He is on a list of surviving prisoners released from Auschwitz by the Russians,” Trachtman said. “That would date to 1945. We have no further record.”

  “So he could have died six months later,” I said.

  “Could,” Trachtman said.

  “Or he could be alive and living in Zanzibar,” I said.

  “Could,” Trachtman said.

  I nodded.

  “Tell me what you can about Ashton Prince,” I said.

  36

  A woman came into Trachtman’s office with some coffee and cookies on a small tray.

  Trachtman introduced her.

  “My assistant, Ibby Moser,” he said. “Say hello to Mr. Spenser, Ibby.”

  She said hello and put the tray down.

  “Ibby’s cookies are amazing,” Trachtman said. “Try one.” I took one and ate half of it. It was peanut butter.

  “Amazing,” I said.

  We all smiled, and Ibby left.

  “A mid-afternoon ritual,” Trachtman said. “Every day. I never know what kind of cookies it will be.”

  “Nice ritual,” I said. “Ashton Prince?”

  “Ashton is odd,” Trachtman said. “On the one hand, he is a first-rate scholar of low-country realism. An expert.”

  “As expert as you?” I said.

  “His expertise may not be as broad,” Trachtman said. “I am a bit of a generalist. But in his areas of specialization, it is deeper. He is . . . or was, I suppose I should say . . . the greatest authority I know of, far greater than I, on Franz Hermenszoon.”

  “Doesn’t matter what tense you use,” I said. “We both know he’s dead.”

  Trachtman smiled.

  “I like to be precise,” he said. “There was also an odd sort of collateral specialty. . . . He was unsurpassed in the identification of forgeries in the art of the period.”

  “Which is to say Dutch art in the time of Rembrandt,” I said.

  “More or less,” Trachtman said.

  “You said that on the one hand he was what you’ve just described,” I said. “How about the other hand?”

  Trachtman smiled and shook his head.

  “This will be, I suppose, a bit subjective,” he said.

  “Many things are,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “There was something deeply fraudulent about Ashton,” he said. “I didn’t know him well, but we had met at conferences and such, and I knew his work. But there was something . . . artificial about him. As if he were, oh, I don’t know, performing. Like someone in a drama whose acting shows through.”

  “I think actors call that ‘indicating.’”

  “Really,” Trachtman said. “Are you a theater buff?”

  “No, but I have a friend who is a performer.”

  “You appear to be one on whom nothing is lost,” Trachtman said.

  “Though often wasted,” I said. “Do you know anything about his personal life?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing. That’s part of it. Look at you. I’ve never met you before. We’ve talked for perhaps half an hour. And I know that you are unmarried and live alone, but you are in a committed relationship with a woman of whom you are quite fond, and you have a dog.”

  “We share a dog,” I said.

  “I knew nothing of Ashton,” Trachtman said. “He dressed like some sort of caricature of an art professor. He had a fluty accent, as if he had gone to an upper-class English boarding school.”

  “I know,” I said. “I spent time with him. Do you know if Ashton Prince is his real name?”

  “As far as I know,” Trachtman said. “But if it weren’t, I wouldn’t be startled. He seems just like the kind of man that would change his name . . . and Ashton Prince is the kind of name he’d change it to.”

  “Anything else about him bothers you?” I said.

  “Walford,” Trachtman said. “He stayed, for God’s sake, at Walford.”

  “Not a good thing?” I said.

  “Walford is all right,” he said. “But it is not a first-rate art department, neither in composition nor history. It does not value artistic scholarship in the way that, say, Yale would. Or Brown. Prince was not as free as he might have been someplace else to do scholarship. He had no research support. He always had classes to teach.”

  “Salary?” I said.

  “He would have been paid more had he taught at a major university.”

  “And he was good enough to upgrade?” I said.

  “Absolutely,” Trachtman sai
d.

  “Any idea why he stayed?”

  “In many people I would speculate inertia,” Trachtman said. “But Ashton Prince was one of the great forensic art scholars in the world in his period. People who achieve that kind of expertise are rarely inert.”

  “Hard to generalize,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “But he had the credentials to work at better schools for more money and fewer teaching hours and more research support.”

  “He did indeed.”

  “And he apparently chose not to,” I said.

  “Yes,” Trachtman said. “That is a puzzle.”

  “Maybe he liked teaching,” I said. “Maybe he wanted to be in the classroom.”

  “I am, myself,” Trachtman said, “a reformed academic. In my years at the trade I never met anyone who didn’t want his or her teaching load to be smaller.”

  “So they can do more research?” I said.

  “No,” Trachtman said. “Because they don’t like to teach. It’s hard work if you really do it.”

  “Most things are,” I said. “What would they prefer to do?”

  “Sit about in the faculty lounge, drinking bad coffee and discussing intensely matters of great import with which they have no active engagement.”

  “Frees their mind,” I said, “to romp with the mind of God.”

  “Who said that?” Trachtman said.

  “Nick Carraway, in The Great Gatsby,” I said. “Did Prince seem like that to you?”

  “No,” Trachtman said. “He seemed a man who might actually want to be engaged.”

  “Be my guess, too,” I said.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon at it, but nothing much else surfaced. So I went back to the Carlyle, which was always one of my New York indulgences, along with the Four Seasons restaurant and the Bronx Zoo. I had a couple of drinks from the minibar, ordered room service, called Susan, and had a pretty good time.

  In the morning I had breakfast in the dining room and got my car from the garage and drove home straight to Susan’s house. Where I spent the night.

  37

  Susan had early appointments, and I left her to them and went home at about seven-thirty. In the Back Bay all the streets have a public alley behind them, and the alleys are numbered. The one behind my building was number 21. I pulled into it off Arlington Street and parked in my spot behind my building. There was a back entrance, but I always liked to walk around and go in the front door. It was a good-looking street, and I liked that I lived there. I’d gotten the place when it was far cheaper than it would be now, and I’d worked on it during slow moments in the sleuthing business, so it was pretty much just the way I liked it. Actually, it was probably more the way Susan liked it, and I didn’t mind.

  One of the collateral benefits of having someone try to kill you is that it makes you alert . . . unless they succeed. And as I walked to my door, I noticed a maroon Lexus sedan parked across the street from my building. The passenger-side window went down as I walked up Marlborough Street, and a cigarette flipped into the street. It was cold, but the motor wasn’t running. So somebody in there was sitting in a cold car. It could be that he didn’t want to attract my attention to the white exhaust that would tail up from the car if the motor was running. Might be that he was waiting for someone and didn’t want to waste gas, or pollute the atmosphere by letting his car idle.

  If he was waiting for me, he probably expected me to come out of my building in front of him, and not walk up the street behind him. Or he might be killing time until a meeting that he didn’t want to be early for. The car had tinted windows, and I couldn’t see in. So I paid it no apparent attention and turned into my front walk and up the low stairs. The entry to my building had a glass door, and I could see the Lexus reflected in it. There was no movement. I opened the door and went in and looked back out covertly. Nothing.

  I shrugged and went to my apartment. The door seemed as always. Still, no sense being careless. I put my overnight bag on the floor and took out my gun while I unlocked the door. I felt a little paranoid, but that was quite a bit better than feeling a little dead.

  My apartment was undisturbed. No one was in it. I retrieved my overnight bag and locked my front door and headed to the front windows to see if anything was shaking down below. As I passed the open door to my bedroom I tossed my suitcase on the bed and was a step past the doorway when it landed and the bed exploded.

  Scraps of mattress and bed frame surged through my door and scattered on my living-room floor. I stepped back a little and peeked around the doorjamb. The bed was gone. Beyond that, there was surprisingly little damage. The bomb had been intended to kill only me. It must have been under the mattress, which had muffled its force and sound. I went to my living-room window and looked down.

  The Lexus had pulled out of its parking spot and was approaching Berkeley Street. I got the license-plate number. Then I called the cops and walked back into my bedroom and looked at the wreckage.

  38

  Belson and I sat at my kitchen counter and watched the technicians do whatever it was they did.

  “These guys are pretty good,” Belson said.

  “I know.”

  “They keep at it, they might get you.”

  “I think the best bet is to catch them before they do,” I said.

  Belson nodded.

  “Good idea,” he said. “The license-plate number you got from the Lexus is assigned to a Volkswagen Passat. Owner is Laurie Hanlon. We’ll check her out, but sounds a lot like a stolen plate to me.”

  “If it had anything to do with the bomb blast in the first place,” I said.

  “If it’s a stolen plate,” Belson said, “it would make me think that they did.”

  “Yeah, sat out there for however long,” I said, “waiting to make sure the bomb went off.”

  “One of your neighbors takes her kid out in his carriage couple times a day, says the car’s been there for several days. Sometimes, she says, another car would pull up and a guy would get out and swap places with the guy in the Lexus.”

  “Working in shifts,” I said.

  “Rivera, the bomb-squad guy, says the kind of charge they rigged, to just destroy the bed and its occupant, is pretty sophisticated.”

  “Can they tell anything else about it?”

  “Nothing much to look at,” Belson said. “Maybe when they get the scraps into the lab.”

  “We knew they had a bomber on staff,” I said. “The thing that blew Prince up wasn’t a bunch of nails in a pipe.”

  “True,” Belson said. “You know how they got in here?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve looked?” Belson said.

  “What do I do for a living,” I said. “Sell watches out of the trunk of my car?”

  “You’ve looked.”

  “I see no sign of forced entry,” I said.

  “We haven’t, either,” Belson said. “Anybody got a key to the place besides Susan?”

  “Hawk,” I said.

  “Where is he?”

  “Central Asia,” I said.

  “Central Asia? Doing what?”

  “What he does,” I said. “It’s got something to do with Ives, the government guy. You know Ives?”

  “The spook,” Belson said.

  “Yes.”

  Belson shook his head slowly.

  “Anybody else?”

  “Nope. Just Hawk and Susan.”

  “She’s okay?”

  “Left her at seven-thirty this morning,” I said. “She was fine.”

  “Why don’t I ask Cambridge to send a car up there, just to check,” Belson said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He stood and went to the other end of the living room, where he took out a cell phone and talked for maybe five minutes. Then he came back.

  “Cambridge will send a car up. I explained a little of the deal. They’ll actually talk to her, make sure she’s okay.”

  I nodded.

  On
e of the uniformed cops, a young one, came into my apartment.

  “Sergeant,” he said.

  “You got something, Stevie?” Belson said.

  The young cop looked at me.

  “He’s on our side,” Belson said. “For the moment, at least.”

  Stevie nodded.

  “Got a stiff in the cellar,” he said. “Hispanic male, maybe forty, forty-five, shot once in the back of the head. Got a tattoo on his right biceps says Rosa.”

  “Francisco,” I said. “The super.”

  Belson nodded.

  “He have a passkey?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “That’s probably how they got in,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Take some scientists down there, Stevie,” Belson said. “I’ll be right there.”

  He looked at me

  “You wanna take a look?”

  “I would,” I said.

  And we headed to the cellar.

  39

  Francisco had been a good guy, and clever with his hands. He could fix a lot of stuff. Now he was facedown on the floor of his basement workroom with a small, dark hole at the base of his skull, in a pool of his blood dried and blackened on the floor.

  “Keys?” Belson said.

  Stevie shook his head. “Haven’t seen any.”

  “Normally carried them in front, hooked to a belt loop,” I said. “Large bunch. You could hear him coming. They may be under him.”

  “Turn him,” Belson said.

  And a couple of technicians turned him up on his side. The bullet had apparently exited his forehead and made a much larger hole, from which the blood had come. The keys were on his belt loop. The technicians let him back down as he had been. Belson squatted on his haunches and looked at the bullet hole.

  “Big caliber,” he said.

  “Big enough,” I said.

  Belson stood up.

  “Bell marked Super out front?” Belson said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So they ring the bell,” Belson said to whatever he was looking at in the middle distance. “He lets them in. They point a gun at him, and since they don’t know the layout here, he takes them to your place and opens the door.”