Loot

by Aaron Elkins

  In a mere two minutes.

  There was no way the telephone messages could be anything I was eager to deal with, so I slowly got out of my clothes (believe me, space doesn’t permit the procedural details), took a hot shower followed by a hot bath, shaved, put on a bathrobe, and toasted up my last two chocolate fudge Pop-Tarts for breakfast. By the time I slithered through the living room to the answering machine with a cup of coffee, it was eleven a.m.

  There were two messages. The first was Christie Valle de Leon’s return of my call of the previous day, letting me know that CIAT had drawn a blank. They had run a search in the files of London's Art Loss Register and of Interpol as well, and the only currently missing Velazquez that anyone knew about was a study for The Forge of Vulcan, stolen many years before from a private collection in Leeds, England, and of doubtful attribution. No Count of Torrijos or anything remotely resembling one.

  The other message was from Sergeant Detective Ron Cox of the Boston Police Homicide Unit, asking me to call him.

  I lowered myself as comfortably as I could into the old swivel chair at my desk, made sure the coffee was within arm’s reach, and dialed. He picked it up on the first ring.

  "Thanks for calling back, Mr. Revere. How you doing this morning?"

  "You don’t want to know."

  "You’re probably right," he said with a laugh. "Listen, I’m gonna be looking into the Pawlovsky case, and I could use your help."

  There was no expression in his voice, nothing beyond a professional civility, and why would there be? He was a homicide cop; this was all in a day’s work. Pawnshop proprietors were in a class with convenience-store operators and all-night gas-station managers: easy marks.

  "I’d like to if I can," I said.

  "Well, that’s just fine." I got the impression that he was toying with a pen, or a paperclip, or shuffling papers on his desk. "Now, I’ve looked over the statement you made to Officer Bando last night, and as far as that goes, it’s quite clear, very helpful—"

  "I'm surprised to hear it. I don't remember being too coherent."

  "—but there are a few things I wanted to ask you about. You were an acquaintance of the deceased, right?"

  "That's right," I said, after the moment it took to digest the unsettling phrase

  "And Lieutenant Harrigan thinks you might be the Revere who's worked with our Major Case Unit before, is that right too?"

  "Yes, it is. On some art theft cases."

  "Well, that's good, I'm hoping you can give us some assistance here. Now, there’s a safe in the back of the Pawlovsky establishment, are you familiar with that?"

  "Yes."

  "When was the last time you saw it? I mean, before the events of last night."

  "About an hour and a half earlier. Four o’clock. We opened—"

  "Do you remember if it showed signs of tampering?"

  "—You mean like scrape marks, or—"

  "That’s right."

  "No, I don’t think so," I said. "It was pretty beat-up, but just generally from age. Why, are you saying—"

  "I'm saying that if what you're saying is accurate, someone worked real hard on jimmying it open after you saw it yesterday, and it's a pretty good guess that it was the guy you ran into. We can't tell for sure whether he ever got it open or not, and I was hoping you might know what Pawlovsky had in it. A lot of times, if we can get a good description of what somebody steals, it gives us a lead—"

  "Of course I know what was in it, and obviously he didn't get it, or I would have seen it on him."

  "Get what?"

  "The painting."

  "What painting is that, Mr. Revere?"

  "What painting—you mean I didn’t explain about the painting in my statement?"

  "No, I can’t say that you did."

  I realized that I must have been even more out of it than I’d thought. "Sergeant, this is important. If you open up that safe—"

  "It’s open. We got into it this morning."

  "And there was a painting in there, right ? A man in black."

  "Yeah, there was. I got it in front of me right now. Look, I'm starting to think we'd be better off talking here at Schroeder Plaza. Are you in good enough shape to come down?"

  "I can make it. When?"

  "Sooner the better. I can have a cruiser pick you up in five minutes. Or do you need any time to get ready?"

  I laughed in spite of myself. "No more than six hours or so."

  "Come again?"

  "Give me forty-five minutes," I said.

  * * *

  Sergeant Detective Ron Cox was a leathery, rawboned, rangy man of fifty who looked like a hardscrabble Dustbowl farmer from the ‘30’s; so much so that he seemed out of place in his contemporary, color-coordinated office in the spanking-new police building. A man who had seen everything, he was politely sympathetic about my swollen, banged-up face, but it wasn't long before he got bored and started sneaking looks at whatever he had on his computer monitor. But he gave me his full attention when I got to the part about what the painting was worth. First he stared at me, and then at the painting, which was propped against an avocado file cabinet that some interior decorator had decided went with the russet-brown paneled walls. "You're kidding me, five million bucks?"

  "That’s a conservative estimate," I said. "It could bring a whole lot more, given the right buyer."

  "Oh, shit," he said, reaching for his telephone. "I better see if it’s been reported stolen from anywhere."

  "It hasn’t," I said. "I checked with CIAT in New York. They don’t have any record of it. Neither does Interpol."

  "Oh, yes?" He put the phone down. I could see that he didn’t know what CIAT was but wasn’t about to admit it. I could also see that he didn’t approve of my doing things like checking with Interpol.

  "My theory," I said, "is that it’s been salted away overseas for years, maybe decades, maybe even since the war, and that it came over here fairly recently. From Russia, probably."

  "Mm." He wasn't too crazy about my having theories either.

  "That’d be my guess, anyway," I said, trying to make amends.

  "The fact that a Russian pawned it doesn’t mean it just arrived from Russia, Mr. Revere."

  "No, but I was thinking about the bag he had it in."

  According to Simeon, I explained, Brodsky, if that was really his name, had brought the picture into the shop in a large canvas valise decorated with a floral design—a favored container for smuggling paintings into and out of countries without being spotted. The painting, minus its frame and stretcher, would be placed against an inside wall of the valise and a layer of cloth, also decorated with some complex, busy design, would be sewn over it, forming a sealed, invisible pocket. Then the suitcase would be stuffed with clothes, toiletries, whatever. The designs on the inside and outside would make it difficult for X-ray machines to pick out the painting, and the canvas material of the valise would bend and give under pressure without revealing that there was one more layer of canvas—a five-million-dollar layer—hidden between the inner and outer walls.

  "Is that so," Cox murmured, looking at me from under tobacco-colored eyebrows. I got the impression that if this kept up he might yet consider taking me seriously. "So where do the Russians come in?"

  "There were some markings on the back that showed it’d been looted by the Nazis in 1942. One possibility is that it was grabbed in turn by Russian troops at the end of the war and that it’s been hidden away over there all the time."

  "And it shows up now because the Russian mafia’s gotten into the act now?"

  "Exactly."

  "And the guy who pawned it, who was he? Some kind of mafia underling? A courier, maybe?"

  "Yes, maybe, why not?"

  He shrugged his shoulders, unconvinced. "It doesn't—"

  "And don't forget that . . . that ape that came back to get it. He was Russian too. I noticed his accent before, when he came in about the violin. He could have been mafia too."

&nb
sp; "A Russian accent, huh? You're positive? Couldn't have been Polish? Latvian? Bulgarian, maybe?"

  He had a point and I smiled. "Well, if you're going to put it like that, I suppose it could have been Serbo-Croatian for all I know, but doesn't it make sense that—"

  "And even if it was Russian, so what? Didn't you tell me most of Pawlovsky's customers were Russian? So why should these guys be any different?"

  "No reason, except for a five-million-dollar painting that happened to be sitting in the safe at the time."

  "All right, tell me this: why would this mafia courier you're talking about take a hundred bucks for something worth five million? And according to what you told us, he only wanted a thousand in the first place. How do you explain that?"

  That was the question, all right. The going price among black market art fences was five percent of estimated market value. That was a quarter of a million dollars; probably a lot more. And stolen-art receivers in Boston and New York weren’t exactly hard to find if you had a few connections. Did the Russian who carried it into the shop not know what he had? Possible, but prodigiously unlikely.

  "Here's this painting," Cox went on. "It disappears for fifty years—I mean, fifty years?—and then it gets unloaded in some junky pawnshop? For a hundred bucks? Why?"

  I stiffened. Simeon Pawlovsky’s shop wasn’t "some junky pawnshop," I wanted to tell him. Only of course it was.

  "Sergeant, I don't have any idea," I said. "But the guy who came back for it obviously knew it was worth something. Enough to kill Simeon over it. And come damn near killing me."

  Cox sighed, dropped the ballpoint he'd been fiddling with, and leaned back in his chair. "And then there's another thing: okay, assume both these guys worked for the mafia, and the mafia decided it made some kind of mistake and wanted the painting back. Wouldn't you think the guy who pawned it in the first place would just come on back with his ticket and get it out of hock? Wouldn't that have been a whole hell of a lot easier?"

  All I could do was shrug and shake my head. I didn't have any answer for him.

  "No theory, huh?"

  I laughed. "No theory. I’m afraid you’re on your own there."

  "Well, I'll tell you the truth, Mr. Revere. What you've been telling me is damn interesting, and I'll see that we look into it. But—look, Pawlovsky was a friend of yours, and it's only natural for you to want his death to mean something, to be significant, if you understand what I'm saying. But I see a lot of these things, a lot, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred they turn out to be just what they look like. Some shithead druggie needs a few hundred bucks, and he sees all these rings and jewelry in the store, and nobody but this old crippled guy in the place—"

  "Are you serious? You don't think it had anything to do with the painting? You think that was just a coincidence?"

  "Look at it this way. Shithead walks into store to rob it. Sees young, healthy guy there—you—and takes off. Comes back later to do the job when the old man's alone. And of course he'd try to get into the safe, wouldn't he? Where else would the most valuable things be? So—"

  "Sergeant, this guy was wearing a suit and tie. How many people breaking into a pawnshop for drug money wear suits and ties?"

  "All right, maybe it wasn't drug money; that was just an example. All I'm trying to say is that the last thing we need to do right now is bring in World War II, and Hitler, and the Russian mafia. Believe me, I've got more than enough on my plate as it is. Let's try and keep things simple, okay? At least for a start."

  He straightened up with a tired smile and held out his hand, ready to move on to someone or something else. "Don't worry, you can be sure we'll do everything we can to nail this guy. I want to thank you—"

  "Sergeant, can you tell me some more about . . . I don't really know how Simeon died. Was he . . . was he beaten to death?"

  He settled back again and sighed. "That's about it. We don't have the M.E.'s final report yet, but it's pretty clear what happened. There's some pretty bad abdominal bruising, a detached collarbone, and probably some busted internal organs. Fists, probably. I'd guess the creep tried to beat the combination out of him."

  "God," I said miserably. "Oh, dear God." I leaned my forehead on my hand, feeling sick.

  Because it was my fault. Cox might not think so, but I knew in my heart that it was.

  "He was an old man," he said in an effort to be kind. "It wouldn’t have taken much."

  "Sergeant," I said unevenly, "There's got to be something I can do to help with this. Broken ribs are no big deal." (I can lie when I need to.) "If there’s any way that I can assist, anything at all I can do . . ."

  He looked at me inquiringly, lips pursed, but I didn’t know what I had in mind any more than he did. All I knew was that I was shaking with remorse and guilt and that I longed with all my heart to be Simeon’s avenging angel.

  "Well, I suppose it might help if you could tell me, you know, a little more about the painting," he said vaguely. "It couldn't hurt. Who knows, maybe this is the one case in a hundred."

  I knew this was little more than a benevolent sort of make-work, but I jumped at the idea. "You mean the provenance—where it came from, who owned it before, that kind of thing?"

  "Sure, yes, that kind of thing. You said the Nazis took it in 1942. Well, who'd they take it from? For that matter, who's had it since? You said it could be the Russians, but do we know that for a fact?"

  Far from it. The information in the Lopez-Rey catalogue had been no help. Sure, it had translated a few of the markings on the back of the canvas, but the most recent entry in the catalogue was a 1902 sale, and even that didn't tell us who'd bought it. It was a century-old dead end.

  "In a word," I said, "no."

  "Well, is it something you could find out about?"

  "I could sure try," I said.

  "That’s fine, Mr. Revere," Cox said, happy to be getting me out of his hair at last. "That could help a lot, you never know."

  I didn't think for a minute that he believed it, but that didn't matter to me. I desperately needed a sense of doing something, and this was it. A long shot, but I owed it to Simeon. And as Cox had said, you never knew.

  With all the careful preparation that was already becoming second nature, I slowly stood up, or rather levered myself with the help of the desk to a reasonably vertical position. "If we’re done, I’ll go on back to the research library at the museum right now and get started."

  I almost laughed, imagining how dumb that sounded to him. What’s the first thing you do when you need a murder solved? Head for the research library at the art museum. Obviously.

  But Cox, a nice guy at heart, nodded benignly. "That’s good, you do that, Mr. Revere."

  Chapter 6

  First, though, I had the squad car drop me back at my apartment, where I lunched on half a jar of applesauce and one suspect banana, the only food I had that didn't require the opening of a can or a sealed jar, which I didn't dare tackle. Then I used the telephone to arrange to have my car, left in front of the pawnshop the previous evening, driven to the garage I rented on Exeter. I knew by now that I wasn't going to be doing any driving of my own for a while. Another telephone call to arrange a taxi to the museum, and two more codeine tablets to head off the pain, which I could feel hunkering down inside me, waiting for the four-hour relief period to pass and just hoping that I'd forget to take my pills. An hour later, I was back at the Hunt Memorial Library, at the same table I'd used the day before, where I managed to put in three hours of research (unproductive) before I had to quit because I couldn't sit upright any more without wincing.

  Much of the next day was spent at the library too, and the next, so that Friday afternoon, three days after Simeon's death, I was still there, spent and aching, with a depressingly large jumble of thoroughly-perused reports and monographs heaped in front of me, no wiser than I'd been when I started. I'd been poring over some 50-year-old books and articles dealing with the activities of the famed MFA&A—the Monuments,
Fine Arts, and Archives Unit—an Anglo-American organization of hastily commissioned art experts created by the United States Army at the end of World War II. Their job had been to fan out over the smoldering, still-dangerous European continent, ferreting out and then restoring to the rightful owners, whether individuals or institutions, the huge hoard of Nazi art plunder. It had been tremendously successful, a prodigious and unprecedented task of investigation, logistics, and Elliott-Ness-like integrity that remains one of the justifiably proud achievements of American and English military history.

  This is not to say, however, that their prose style was anything to write home about, and three hours of immersion in the stuff had left me with eyeballs glassy and mind benumbed. All without finding a single reference, even an indirect reference, to the Count of Torrijos.

  And why, you may well ask, would I have expected to find one in the MFA&A material anyway? If it was the Russians and not the British or Americans who recovered the painting in 1945, as I was guessing, why wasn't I looking through the Soviet records? But the sorry fact is that whatever loot the Russians got their hands on had been summarily re-looted by them, gone straight back to the Soviet Union as war booty and stayed there, most likely in a museum, or a KGB warehouse, or the home of some high-level Party apparatchik.

  Naturally enough, the Soviet authorities had not been anxious to publish reports on the operations of their aptly named "trophy brigades," so my only hope—growing slimmer by the hour—for coming up with any kind of lead was to go through the American material on the off-chance that they had come across the painting at some point before the Russians had gotten hold of it, or else that my guess was wrong and the Russians didn't get hold of it. Anyway, what choice did I have?

  But I felt like the drunk in the old joke, down on his knees under a street lamp, feverishly searching for his keys. A passerby, stopping to help, asks him where exactly he thinks he might have dropped them. "Over there," the drunk says, pointing to a dimly lit stretch of sidewalk halfway up the darkened block. "Well, then why are you looking for them over here?" the passerby asks. The drunk pauses to direct a pitying look up at him. "And jusht how," he asks, "am I shupposed to find ‘em inna dark?"