Restitution

by Lee Vance

  “True.” He stares over my shoulder for a moment, one hand tapping restlessly on his knee as he frowns. “Anyway, that’s not all. A couple of weeks before you left—”

  “Before I got canned.”

  “Right. A couple of weeks before you got canned, you and Lemonde went back and forth on promoting Keisha, because Lemonde didn’t think she’d gone to a good-enough school.”

  “Like that should make any difference. Lemonde told me we weren’t going to start promoting community college graduates to professional positions just because they were cheerful. She said the word cheerful exactly like she meant because they have nice tits. Pissed me right off. I checked out Keisha’s school on the Web and found out they specialize in minority arts.”

  “Minority arts?” Tigger asks, an expectant grin lighting his face. “What are minority arts?”

  “Face painting maybe. Learning to dance the hora. What the fuck do I know?”

  “Good point,” he says, sounding disappointed. “What the fuck do you know? Anyway, you must have sent a note to legal.”

  “Right. I asked if we could get in trouble for discriminating against graduates of minority-oriented programs, and I copied Lemonde. I figured it would burn her ass a little and put some pressure on her.”

  “She went fuckin’ crazy,” Tigger says, shaking his head excitedly. “You’re not gonna believe it. You know the note she sent you back, sayin’ she was gonna review Keisha’s case again?”

  “This is going to be good, right?” I ask, helping him build the punch line. Much as I’m enjoying his story, Lemonde and Klein feel like ancient history. Seeing Tigger happy feels good, though.

  “Oh yeah,” he says. “According to the metadata, she wrote it at two a.m. Friday night on her home computer. There’s a whole paragraph she cut out, a rant against sneaky line managers—”

  “That would be me.”

  “Right. A rant against you for ‘subverting personnel policy by protecting geriatric staff with Neanderthal attitudes’—”

  “That would be you.”

  “Stop interrupting. A rant against sneaky line managers who subvert personnel policy by protectin’ guys like me and trying to promote—are you ready for it?”

  “Hit me.”

  “A high yellow slut in a low yellow dress.”

  “No,” I say, laughing disbelievingly. “Who would have guessed Lemonde could turn a phrase?”

  Tigger’s rocking so hard that the car’s shaking, a huge smile plastered across his face.

  “Rachel says Klein’s completely fuckin’ dead if any of this ever gets to a jury. A racial slur in a company document is the sound of a cash register ringing. The documents prove they’ve been underpaying, underhiring, and overfiring women, minorities, and people over forty, and their head of Human Resources wrote a memo denigrating seniors, blacks, and women. Rachel says they’re so fuckin’ dead, it’s unbelievable.”

  “I still can’t believe Eve wrote that,” I say, laughing again.

  Tigger shrugs.

  “Accordin’ to Rachel, it’s a well-known fact that people write all kinds of stuff they’d never say. There’s been shrinks doin’ studies about it.”

  “Is Rachel going to be able to get any of this into evidence?” I ask. “Klein’s bound to fight like crazy.”

  “Now I’m comin’ to the good part,” he says.

  “Now you’re coming to the good part?”

  “It just keeps gettin’ better,” Tigger says, giggling like a child. “Rachel filed a motion with the judge this mornin’ saying you’d joined the lawsuit and waived your privilege, and demandin’ the e-mail be admitted. Klein’s lawyers called half an hour later and asked her for a meeting. Rachel says they must have been expectin’ our motion. They rolled over on everything.”

  “What do you mean, ‘everything’?”

  “We got a choice. We can get rehired with back pay and seniority, or they’ll pay us off for our ‘emotional distress.’ The openin’ bid was two million bucks each. Rachel figures they’ll go five easy, maybe more.”

  “Wow,” I say, struggling to process the options. “And the quid pro quo?”

  “What you’d expect. Nondisclosure agreements, we both give up all rights to any information we’ve discovered, et cetera, et cetera. And one more thing,” he says, suddenly sounding sheepish. “If you want to come back and then you’re convicted of ah, you know, a felony, they can force you to quit and pay you off.”

  “Sounds fair,” I say, not wanting him to feel uncomfortable. “What about Eve?”

  “Dead woman walking. Good riddance.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “What do I think about makin’ Eve Lemonde and Josh Kramer eat a shit sandwich? Are you kiddin’ me? I got a woody like I just ate a whole bottle of Viagra,” he says, grabbing his crotch.

  “So you want your old job back?”

  “Only if you do.”

  I look away. I was distraught when Eve fired me, not knowing what I was going to do with myself. I still don’t know, but somehow I can’t imagine going back to Klein. That incarnation of myself seems as remote now as a character in a novel.

  “I’ve got to figure out what happened to Jenna first,” I say quietly.

  “So fuck ’em,” he says quickly. “We’ll take the cash.”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  “I’d ask you the same question,” he says, “but then we’d sound like a couple of teenage girls tryin’ to decide whether or not to get our muffs waxed.”

  “Sitting here right now, Tigger, all I can say is that I just don’t give a fuck. About the job or the money.”

  “You feelin’ a kung fu Master Kan ‘snatch the pebble from my hand’ type of enlightenment, or a George Bailey pre-Clarence kind of disillusionment?”

  “I’m feeling like I’d pop you in the head if I could throw a punch,” I say, smiling weakly at him.

  “You really don’t care?”

  “I don’t think so. Not now. Not while Jenna’s killers are still out there.”

  “We could stick it to them,” he says tentatively. “Tell Klein we’re not gonna settle and give Rachel the go-ahead to start signin’ up anyone she can for a couple of monster class-action lawsuits. It might be the right thing to do.”

  “Klein gets the e-mail excluded and it could turn into the wrong thing real quick.”

  “They get the mail excluded, they get the mail excluded,” he says with a shrug. “That’s the breaks. I meant the right thing to do like the right thing to do. The ethical thing.”

  “Ethics on Wall Street is only eating half the other guy’s lunch when he goes to the can. You taught me that.”

  “And not bangin’ your secretary on your wife’s birthday,” Tigger responds automatically. “Right. But what we got on Klein affects a lot of people. Maybe we should be thinkin’ like fiduciaries.”

  “Fiduciaries?” I say, laughing. “A fiduciary is a guy—”

  “Who gets paid a fee for fuckin’ people,” Tigger finishes. “Stop quotin’ me to me. All I’m sayin’ is, maybe we should give it a few days. Let Klein sweat while we figure things out. Stallin’ them can’t hurt.”

  “Agreed,” I say, offering him my good hand. “Listen. I’m feeling like I’ve got a chance of figuring things out. I’m looking for a guy and the cops are looking for a guy. Either one turns up and I might learn what really happened to Jenna. Then maybe I’ll be able to think more seriously about what happens next.”

  “No problem,” Tigger says. “Do what you gotta do. Where you sleepin’ tonight?”

  “Harvard Club, I guess.”

  “Shit,” Tigger says, glancing at his watch. “I forgot. I asked Rachel to meet with us. She must be hangin’ around the lobby there, steamin’. Tell you what. I’ll go meet her and tell her what we’ve been talkin’ about. You call me when you’re done here and I’ll come back and get you. You can sleep at my place tonight. I got some homemade chicken soup that’ll fix
you right up.”

  “Done.” I open the door and try to climb out.

  “Hang on a second.” Tigger climbs out the driver’s door and comes around the car to give me a hand. “You’re a real mess. You’re not gonna be able to get out of bed tomorrow.”

  “Which is okay,” I say, leaning against the car as he closes the door, “because getting me out of bed will give you something to do with yourself.”

  “Right,” he says, taking my arm. “You’ll be doin’ me a favor.”

  31

  I’M SITTING IN THE SHABBY ARMCHAIR next to Mr. Rozier’s desk, my feet propped on an open drawer and a couple of ice bags from the Korean grocer tucked around my body. Mr. Rozier enters the room carrying two steaming mugs and hands me one. Hot chocolate. I take a long, grateful sip, careful not to move any part of my body save my good arm.

  “Your friend Mr. Meyer is right,” he says, sitting down facing me. “It’s foolish not to go to the hospital.” He picks up a pencil and points the sharp end at my shoulder. “A joint injury can lead to arthritis. You get a built-in barometer like us old folks, learn what it’s like to be living on thirty-two hundred milligrams of ibuprofen every day and slugging Maalox from the bottle so you don’t burn a hole in your stomach.”

  “I’m going to be fine,” I say. “They’re just bruises.”

  “You must have got the common sense knocked right out of you.”

  “Thanks for assuming I had some. You said you learned something interesting about that deposit.”

  He touches the eraser to his chin, frowning as though he’d been sassed.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” I say hastily. “I’m grateful for everything you’ve done, and I know you and Tigger are right that I should see a doctor, but I’m really anxious to find this friend of mine.”

  “Tigger?” he asks, lifting his eyebrows.

  “Mr. Meyer. Tigger’s his nickname. Because he bounces up and down a lot.”

  “I see,” he says in a tone that suggests I’m concussed. “Well, about that deposit. You were right that there’s no bank matching up to GPICCARDAG, so I ran the name through a search engine a couple of different ways and found an outfit called Galerie Piccard AG.”

  “Which is what?”

  “An old-line Swiss auction house. Like Sotheby’s. Furniture, paintings, antiques.”

  “You think my friend sold something at auction?” I ask doubtfully.

  “A painting,” he says, lifting a catalog from a stack of periodicals on his desk. The cover’s a glossy reproduction of a Madonna and Child, Galerie Piccard printed in gold at the top. “I’ll show you.”

  “Where on earth did you get that?” I say, amazed.

  He flips through the pages, smiling.

  “A friend of mine works over in Room 300 at the main library. They collect auction catalogs and results, among other things. I gave him the date and the amount of the deposit and he was able to identify the painting right away. Said it was the only thing that matched. He dropped the catalog off for me on his way home. Here.”

  Mr. Rozier holds up the open catalog. There’s text in four languages on the left-hand page and a color photograph of a painting on the right. I suck my breath in abruptly, startled.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  “I saw that painting,” I reply wonderingly. “Just a couple of hours ago. Something in winter, by a Dutch guy, right?”

  “The Village in Winter,” he says, turning the catalog around again so he can read the text. “By Pieter Brueghel the Younger. He was Flemish, which mainly means Belgian. Where’d you see it?”

  “At the office of Turndale and Company. That’s where I was before I came here.”

  “Huh.” He flips to the back of the catalog and examines some pages paper-clipped to the rear cover. “The buyer isn’t listed, only the sale amount. Four point one six million Swiss francs before premium. The exact amount deposited in your friend’s account.”

  “William Turndale told me a strange story,” I say, feeling bewildered. “He said the painting had been part of a collection put together by the Nazis for some museum Hitler was planning in Linz.”

  “Right,” Mr. Rozier says, lifting another periodical from his desk and handing it to me. It’s a eight-year-old copy of Time, the cover a painted portrait of a woman in a white cloth cap, the light from an unseen window catching her face. The headline reads THE LINZ COLLECTION.

  “The Brueghel auction was big news in the art world,” he continues, “because the rest of the collection’s never been seen again. People suspected the seller might know where the other paintings were.” He taps the cover of the magazine I’m holding. “This is one of the Vermeers. There were two in the collection.”

  “So William Turndale told me. Who sold the Brueghel?”

  “No one knows. The seller was listed as the estate of Frederic von Stern—”

  My phone rings, interrupting him.

  “Sorry,” I say, apprehensive of missing a call from any of the people I’ve left messages with. I put the handset to my mouth. “Peter Tyler.”

  “I’m at the Harvard Club,” Tilling says. “Where the hell are you? I told you to stay put so I could find you.”

  “I’ve been calling you all day,” I reply heatedly. “Have you learned anything about Lyman?”

  “Not on a cell phone. Tell me where you are.”

  “Nearby,” I say, unwilling to have Tilling meet Mr. Rozier. She might well ask him what I’ve been up to, and I haven’t figured out how much I want to tell her about Andrei yet. “I’ll meet you there. Fifteen minutes.”

  “Don’t be late,” she says, hanging up.

  “Something’s come up,” I say to Mr. Rozier, gingerly working my way to my feet. Learning what happened to Lyman is more important right now than figuring out how Andrei got hold of a missing painting. “I’ve got to go. Will you be here tomorrow?”

  “I’m here twelve to eight, Monday to Friday. But hold your horses a second.”

  “You have something else?” I ask, trying a little cautious stretching. My left elbow and shoulder are still too painful to move, but my hip seems to have recovered some. I’m mobile enough to catch a cab.

  “I do.” He reaches to his desk and picks up a single piece of paper printed with smudged text. “This is from microfiche,” he says apologetically, adjusting his glasses. “The von Stern who owned the painting was a professor of art history at Humboldt University in Berlin before and after the war. Quite the grand old man, evidently. The Museum Conservation Institute at the Smithsonian published a testimonial to him on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, written by the senior conservator at the Uffizi, in Florence. Apparently, von Stern taught an entire generation of Europeans modern techniques of conservation. He mentions that von Stern was like a father to his students, and that he was known to them by a nickname.” Mr. Rozier looks up at me and grins. “You care to guess what it was?”

  “Bon papa?” I say, scarcely believing it’s possible.

  “Bingo.”

  “You’re amazing.”

  “I’m a librarian,” he says modestly. “You want to try that Luxembourg bank account again?”

  “Please.”

  Mr. Rozier navigates the antique Apple laptop on his desk to the correct Web page while I struggle to assimilate the new information he’s given me. One thought clicks immediately. Mrs. Zhilina is a conservator at the Met. I’d be willing to bet that she was once a student of von Stern’s at Humboldt University. I knew she was holding something back.

  “You have that account number and password?” Mr. Rozier asks.

  I read them to him while he types. The Web site demands the answer to the secondary security question and he enters the name von Stern. A screen we haven’t seen before pops up, a hypertext menu in French, with the bank’s logo in the top right corner.

  “We’re in,” he says.

  My phone rings again and Mr. Rozier flaps a hand toward me amiably.

  “Answer
that if you want,” he says. “I’m not in any hurry.”

  “Peter Tyler,” I say distractedly, putting the phone to my ear again.

  “It’s Tigger,” he whispers.

  “I can barely hear you.”

  “Listen,” he replies. “I’m at the Harvard Club. You expectin’ to meet some cops here?”

  “Yeah. Detective Tilling, the woman who was with Rommy at the funeral, and her partner, a short black woman. Why?”

  “They’re here,” Tigger says urgently. “And they brought along about six friends. There’s a couple of cops hangin’ around the lobby pretendin’ to read the paper, and a bunch standin’ out front actin’ like tourists. The manager threw a hissy fit a minute ago, said they couldn’t be using their radios in the lobby because the club has a no cell phone policy. Hang on.”

  I feel a cold hand clamping my guts as I wait.

  “Sorry,” Tigger says a minute later. “I’m sittin’ in one of the phone booths over by the coat check and there was a cop standin’ right outside. You better find out what’s goin’ on before you come over here.”

  “I’ll check it out,” I say numbly.

  “Call me back. I’ll be waitin’ to hear from you.”

  I hang up and stare at the phone in my hand, wondering why Grace would be lying in wait for me with half a dozen plainclothes police.

  “Can I ask you for another favor?” I say to Mr. Rozier.

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve got to make an urgent call. You read French. Do you mind having a quick look through that account for me? I’m interested in any recent activity that might help me figure out where my friend is.”

  “No problem. You need some privacy?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “I’ll take my computer downstairs and work there,” he says, getting to his feet and giving me a wink. “I’m kind of enjoying myself.”

  32

  I SIT DOWN IN MR. ROZIER’S DESK CHAIR and dial Tilling’s number on my phone, staring blankly at the crowded bulletin board over his desk while I wait for her to answer. I wonder what it means that Mrs. Zhilina might have been trained by von Stern, and that Andrei ended up with a painting that belonged to him. I’m feeling tired, confused, and beat-up. The guys in the London office used to send us Magic Eye puzzles, pointillist illusions that looked like NASA photographs of colorful star clusters until you’d focused your eyes the correct distance in front of or behind the image, at which point the mysterious patterns fused fleetingly into a brilliant three-dimensional representation of a tree, or a waterfall, or a horse at full gallop. Every fact I’ve learned recently is like a spray of colored dots in one of those puzzles, the sum an image I can’t seem to resolve. I’d like some simple answers for a change. Tilling picks up on the fifth ring.