by Howard Fast
“Don’t grin at me,” she said.
“You don’t enjoy having a brilliant husband, do you?”
“You’re smart enough for me, but we’ve lived together a long time. How did you know the painting was under the bench?”
“Brilliance. Intuitive comprehension.”
“Harry!”
“All right, but I wasn’t going to let those three snobs know that I wasn’t some kind of police genius. Do you know who Edgar Wallace was?”
“Should I?”
“No, you don’t read detective stories. I do. Always have, ever since I was a kid. But Edgar Wallace was before our time. Most of his stuff appeared during the twenties and the thirties, and I used to pick them up as used paperbacks for a dime mostly when I was a kid. He wasn’t much of a writer, but damned ingenious, and in one of his stories he had a gal steal a picture from a London museum and hold the picture for ransom. She cut it out of its frame, pinned it to a window shade, and then rolled up the shade. A pretty unlikely job, but in the story it worked. Well, that stuck in my mind. They don’t have window shades in the museum, but first thing I walked into that gallery the day the Vermeer was stolen, I remembered the Wallace story. I looked around, and there was the bench. It had to be the bench. So I sat down there to tie a shoelace, reached under and felt the picture.”
“Incredible,” Fran whispered.
“I’m incredible. The kettle’s boiling.”
“But how could you be sure it was the Vermeer?”
“What else could it be?”
“You said the thief was stupid. That’s not stupid, taping it under the bench.”
“If it was a guard who’d stood in that room five years, figuring out how to steal that picture, then it was stupid, believe me.”
“Harry,” Fran said to me, “do me a favor, please. Don’t tell anyone about the Wallace story.”
“You want to keep me in the genius class?”
“Don’t ever apologize to me about that,” Fran said. “We both know how smart you are, damn smart. But if the boys over at the precinct feel that it all came out of your bright little head, it will do you no end of good.”
She was right. I walked into the precinct house like a conquering hero. Sergeant McGruder at the desk bowed and saluted. Evidently, Lawrence—who, I learned, had reported to the precinct—spared nothing in praise of my acumen. When I walked into the detective room, I was met with cheers and the clapping of hands and three reporters waiting to get my personal story. A few minutes later, Captain Courtny beckoned me into his inner sanctum.
Courtny was an overweight, cigar-smoking cop who made up with a lifetime of experience what he might have lacked in intelligence. He had a deep, hoarse voice and a constantly troubled frown, but today he greeted me with a bone-crushing handshake.
“Harry, you pulled off something good. It’s the kind of thing that’s worth more to the department than even solving a tough homicide. You got to believe me. It shows brains. People say to themselves, could it happen in L.A.? No way. They got stiffs in L.A. Could it happen in Detroit? Never. They got bums in Detroit who only know brass knuckles. Chicago, Atlanta, Philly—never. It’s a New York thing. It gives the department class, and nobody ever died from too much class. Only one thing, Harry, keeps it from being perfect.”
“Oh?”
“You should have told me at the beginning.”
I nodded and sighed.
“Pride, Harry. You wanted it for yourself. Well, I got to admit it was the most peculiar collar ever came our way, if you could call it a collar. What the hell! You deserve it. Let’s talk about the drop this afternoon.”
“The drop’s off, Captain. There are three reporters in the squad room. I should have sworn those dumb bastards at the museum to silence, but it wouldn’t have helped. They were all bound for dinner parties, and not one of those important characters could have resisted telling the story of the Vermeer. How did those reporters get here?”
“Come on, Harry. It won’t be in the papers until tomorrow. Lawrence called me an hour ago and told me. The reporters were here for the Snelling case and they latched on to something they still don’t know what it is. The TV crowd isn’t on to it.”
“I’ll bet it’s all over the museum.”
“Harry, we got to go through the motions, whether you’re right or wrong. These are big taxpayers we’re dealing with.”
We went through the motions. I had a detective cutting up newspapers and putting them into cashlike packs. I sent another detective out to buy two knapsacks and I put every uniform I could detach into civilian clothes. It still wasn’t enough, and I had to borrow a dozen more from Manhattan South over the sour comments of their captain, who stated that with all our smarts, we didn’t need bodies. Since the kidnapper had not been thoughtful enough to tell us whether he would be on a downtown train or an uptown train, we had to cover both. Since about four trains an hour came by on each side of the tracks, I had the devil’s own time putting a man in every car, even though the uptown crowd got out at 86th Street and the downtown crowd at 59th Street, where they continued their circular motion. It was an exercise in futility, as I’d known it would be. No kidnapper appeared to grab a knapsack of cut newspapers. When I returned to the station later that afternoon, the media were present, ABC, CBS, NBC, not to mention channels 5, 9, and 11, and a fancier group of reporters than usually hang around a precinct house. Toby Horowitz, the art critic of the Times, was there jumping with excitement. He wanted to find out how much I knew of Vermeer and whether I was aware that my brilliant piece of deduction was a boon to mankind. If some poor kid had been kidnapped, there might have been one or two reporters waiting to get the facts, but kids are more easily produced than Vermeers. If not, we wouldn’t have wars.
They threw questions at me as if I were important. I wasn’t important. I was a police lieutenant in a midtown precinct, a cop in a city that had more than thirty thousand cops, and if I had learned anything about a situation like this, it was not to talk to the media in words of more than one syllable. But it was very plain by now, if it had not been this morning, why the kidnapper had not appeared to collect his boodle. I am sure that even as far away as Tokyo, they knew that the Vermeer had been recovered.
When I got home that evening, Fran was watching the crowd scene at the precinct on our television. “You’re good-looking enough,” she observed, “but not very amiable. In fact, you’re downright surly. But it’s interesting. The tough-cop image.”
“Save your sarcasm, lady. I am damned disgusted by the whole thing.”
“Why? Why?” Fran wanted to know. Then she held up her hand for silence. I was delivering my one-syllable answers, and she was hanging on to every word I said. She flicked off the television and demanded, “Why on earth should you be disgusted? My goodness, Harry, you come off like a wizard in shining armor. For the next twenty-four hours, you’re the hottest name in town, and since I’m your wife, I also sizzle a bit.”
“I’ll tell you why I’m disgusted. I know I’m a benighted Philistine, but as far as I’m concerned, a painting is a piece of canvas with some paint on it. I don’t give a damn whether it’s the Mona Lisa or a Vermeer, it’s cloth with paint. Since I’ve been a cop in this city, I’ve seen children kidnapped, babies raped, people hacked to pieces, and men who kill for hire walking free on these streets—and no one ever made much of a fuss about it. But here’s a painting stolen, and the whole city goes crazy.”
“Because it’s unusual, Harry. You know that. We have murder and violence every day, but how often is a great painting stolen? It takes our minds off the horror of everyday crime. It’s a sort of deluxe crime. And by the way,” she added, “you’ll be interested to know that the kid at your lecture called about an hour ago.”
“What kid?”
“The tall, skinny kid—don’t you remember? The one who was convinced that Stanley Curtis was murdered? I think his name was Oshun. I wrote it down somewhere.”
“Ho
w did he get our number here? If he wanted to speak to me, why didn’t he call the precinct?”
“I asked him that. He’s a bright kid, Harry. He figured that with all the fuss and bother over the Vermeer, he’d never get to you.”
“How did he get our number?”
“I asked him that too. He knew your name, and he called every Harry Golding in the book until he got to us. He left a telephone number,” Fran added tentatively. “Are you going to call him?”
“No. He’s a nut. This city is full of nuts, and I’ve had enough of them today.”
It was two days later when Oscar telephoned and invited us to the dinner party. When I speculate on where it began, I am unable to choose among three events: the stolen Vermeer, the lecture at New York University, or the dinner party. The dinner party was in honor of Asher Alan, who, according to those who knew, would be the next prime minister of Israel. From everything I had heard, Alan was upright, honest, and highly intelligent, the one man in the Israeli leadership who had the respect of even his Arab enemies. Since Oscar was in large part responsible for the creation in Tel Aviv of the Sociological Institute, raising several million dollars toward its construction, and since he had lectured there on several occasions, it was understandable that Asher Alan should be his guest. It was less understandable, to me at least, why he asked Fran and me to be there. Oscar and I were close, but we functioned in different worlds.
“He asked that you be there,” Oscar explained. “I don’t want you to be hurt, Harry. I would have invited you in any case”—hardly likely—“but when Alan heard that you were my brother, he was absolutely delighted. You know, this Vermeer gambit that you pulled off was in the press all over the world, and Alan loves the thought of a Jewish detective doing it. So will you come?”
“Of course I’ll come. I don’t get an invitation like that every day, Oscar. Fran and I will be there.”
When I told Fran about it, her face lit up. “I know you don’t give a tinker’s damn about politics, Harry, but this man Asher Alan is absolutely unique. I think he’s going to change history a bit. But good God, what can I wear to one of Oscar’s fancy affairs?”
She called Oscar back to find out whether it was formal, and then she and Shelly had a long discussion, the upshot of which was that Fran put out two hundred and fifty dollars at Bonwit’s for a new dress. We had a few words about it, but she convinced me that considering inflation, two hundred and fifty dollars was not an exorbitant price.
I must admit she looked good in it. She was the prettiest woman in the room that evening at Oscar’s apartment. She was forty-three years old but she could have passed for thirty, and that’s not the stacked statement of a man who loves her. Every head in the place turned toward her as she walked in.
There were two other couples there that evening, aside from Oscar and Shelly, myself and Fran, and Asher Alan and his wife, a lean, deeply tanned woman with sun-streaked hair and flashing blue eyes. Alan was a tall, barrel-chested man in his mid-fifties, almost bald, with a warm, open smile. The rest of the party consisted of Frank Bessington, under secretary of state in the Reagan government, his wife, Sally, Delver Glenn, head of the department of sociology at New York University, and his wife. Bessington was a sharp, narrow-nosed product of Stanford and the California Establishment, one of those whom Oscar had gathered into his eclectic circle of friends. Delver Glenn was a stout, amiable academic, technically Oscar’s boss. Both their wives were thin, self-effacing women, made to be seen and not heard, except that they appeared more pleased to meet me than our guest of honor. But then, they had been meeting guests of honor all of their married lives, while a real, live city police detective was something they had never encountered before—certainly not at a dinner party. I was embarrassed that here, at a dinner party which boasted the next likely prime minister of Israel and a real working member of Reagan’s government, attention should focus on a cop.
“But you are not just a policeman,” Delver Glenn said. “You have plunged head over heels into an Agatha Christie mystery, and with more aplomb than her Hercule Poirot.”
“Just luck.”
Watching me, Fran’s face said, “Don’t you dare mention Edgar Wallace or I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Of course,” Asher Alan said, “as an Israeli, I’m taken by the notion of a Jewish policeman. In Israel, our whole police force is Jewish—”
“We must have several thousand Jewish policemen,” Fran said. “We’ve even had a Jewish chief of detectives, and right now we have a black police commissioner. Don’t ever sell New York short.”
“Heaven forbid!” His English was excellent, tinged with a slight British accent.
“Where did you learn your English, if I may ask?” Oscar said. “It’s extraordinary.”
“You know, it’s the second language in all our schools. And in the Foreign Service, I did a three-year hitch in London. My wife, Deborah, is better than I am at languages. She speaks nine of them fluently. I wish I had the gift. When you live in a very small country, you must have language. But is it true that you have thousands of Jewish policemen?”
“I haven’t seen the statistics,” I said, “but we have a very large police department. I’m sure it comes to several thousand.”
“And do you think your very large police department will ever catch the man who stole the Vermeer?”
“I doubt it. As you should know, Mr. Alan, size alone does not solve problems.”
“Touché. If that were not true, we would not exist.”
I was relieved, when we finally sat down to dinner, that the talk turned away from me and the ridiculous business of the Vermeer. Fran loved dinner at Oscar’s house because, as she put it, Shelly was totally dedicated to Architectural Digest. Her table always looked like an advertisement for British china or Tiffany glass, and though Fran would never admit it, she would have loved to set up similar situations. She was seated across the table from me now, settled between the State Department and the department of sociology, while I was flanked on either side by the silent wives of Fran’s table partners. Just as well. I wanted to listen, not to contribute.
There was some polite exchange of light conversation that took us through the crabmeat and the main course, and then Bessington said, “I do suppose that anything said here could be privileged, so to speak. I mean, there’s so much we all want to ask you, Mr. Alan, but I’m sure you would only talk off the record. Oscar is an old friend, and he can tell you that I can be trusted. If it’s off the record, none of it goes back to Washington.”
“Why should it be off the record?” Asher Alan asked. “I’ve come here to make my views known.”
“Hear! Hear!” Glenn said.
“In any case,” Oscar told us, never one not to drop a name when the right moment came, “Asher meets with President Reagan in a few days.” And to Bessington, “Do you think it’s proper, you being with the State Department, for Asher to talk here about things he might be saving for the Oval Office?”
“Why not?” Asher demanded. “I have no secrets. I’m sure the President has on his desk a memorandum of absolutely everything I stand for—from the return of most of the West Bank to the Palestinians to the complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from any foot of foreign soil. I have screamed loud enough my anguish over what has happened to Israel. I was born on a kibbutz. I’ve fought in every war since forty-eight, and I will not keep silent and see my homeland turned into a mindless garrison state by those who have taken over from Mr. Begin.”
“Then you believe Israel can live in peace in an Arab world?”
“Yes—because the Arabs need Israel as much as the Jews do. We will talk to them, persuade them, and learn to live with them. And they need us. We have the best hospitals outside of this country. We have medical schools, doctors. We manufacture the most advanced medical products in the world. We have factories for electronics, for computers, for agricultural equipment. We have the finest agronomists in the world. Together with us
, the Arabs can take a giant step. But enough of that. I want to hear about the Vermeer. There’s real storybook drama.”
“Just one last question,” Fran begged him. “I’m not Jewish, but my husband is and we’ve been married a long time. So I feel it as a Jew would, and one thing that makes me utterly heartsick is the sale of munitions made in Israel. The utterly corrupt Santa Marina government has equipped a whole army with your Uzi guns.”
“I know that,” Asher Alan replied bitterly. “Bought with money your government gives them. It will stop. We will sell no munitions. There are other ways to survive.”
After that, the table conversation turned to the Vermeer and to the life led by a cop in New York, as opposed to a policeman’s life in Israel. “Of course,” I said to Alan, “even with your growing problems of crime and enforcement in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, it just cannot be compared to our situation. When Fran and I were in Israel three years ago—we were in Jerusalem—we found our way to the police station. I think there are two of them there.”
“Yes, two.”
“Well, we walked in and I told them I was a New York cop, and they invited us to have tea with them and look around. Can you imagine—tea at three in the afternoon. The cells were open and empty. The male cops were sitting around and flirting with the lady cops, and during the hour or so we remained there, not one arrest was made.”
“I suppose everything’s a matter of contrast.”
“Thank heavens,” Oscar said. “Can you imagine how dull it might be otherwise?”
Shelly moved us into the living room for coffee. It had turned out to be a very pleasant evening indeed. But the party broke up early. Deborah Alan explained to Shelly that her husband was very tired. They had been across the country and had spent a week in Los Angeles before returning to the East. It was too much. His blood pressure was high, and the physician who had seen him in Los Angeles had advised a slower pace and more rest.
