Michelangelo's Notebook Part 10

"Like I said, some kind of secret thing, hot-footing it, you know. They're carrying something-loot, papers, something valuable." He paused and cleared his throat. "And then there's the broad."

"The woman you mentioned."

"Yes, sir."

"A phantom perhaps, wishful thinking?" Cornwall said with a faint smile.

"No, sir. She was real enough."

"You mentioned before that it might have been some relation to the occupant of the farm. What about the hypothesis?"

I don't know about any hypo thing, but I know she was real and if she was some farmer's wife or something she wouldn't have been walking around free like that in the middle of the night."

"Do you think it might be important? Tactically."

"Tactics aren't my business any more than hypo-watsits. I saw a broad. I thought you should know, that's all."

"All right," said Cornwall. "Now I know."

"So what do you want to do?" the sergeant asked. "The sniper saw us coming. They'll make a move before we do, try to break out, maybe."

"What would you do?"

The sergeant smiled. He knew that Cornwall was looking for more than just advice. He was asking for some kind of plan because he didn't have any f.u.c.king idea of what he was doing.

"Depends on whether or not you want to keep those trucks from getting blown to s.h.i.t or not."

"That would be preferable."

"Then we hit them first, before they can do anything. Hold them down with the fifty-caliber, blowing the f.u.c.king sniper out of his f.u.c.king tower with Terhune's M9 and go in hard."

"Day or night?"

The sergeant resisted the urge to tell Cornwall not to be an a.s.shole. "Night."

"All right," the lieutenant said again. "Let me think about it."

Just so long as you don't think about it for too f.u.c.king long, thought the sergeant, but he kept his mouth shut and thought about the broad and the bogus general instead.

He reached out and let his long, bony index finger play over the faded photograph pasted neatly into the Great Book beside the careful drawing of the farm: Stabsfuhrer Gerhard Utikal of Einsatzstab Rosenberg, last seen in the early spring of 1945 near Fussen and Schloss Neuschwanstein in the Bavarian Alps. In the picture he was in his early thirties, wearing, illegally as it turned out, the uniform of a Wehrmacht Hauptman, squinting into the sunlight in three-quarter profile, trees and a large ornamental pool behind him, the snapshot probably taken at Versailles or the Tuileries Gardens in Paris sometime between 1941 and 1943, his years of duty there.

The naked, gray-haired man smiled vaguely, remembering. Gerhard Utikal had been the first, so long ago now. According to all the files Utikal had vanished like smoke, but in time he'd found him, living in Uruguay, dividing his time between an apartment on the Playa Ramirez in Montevideo and a huge ranch in Argentina on the far side of the River Platte. By then Eichmann had been taken and the Butcher of Riga, Herberts Cukurs, had been liquidated by an Israeli death squad after boasting to journalist Jack Anderson that he was "invincible."

Utikal wasn't invincible, just smarter. Instead of keeping a set of neatly pressed n.a.z.i uniforms in his closet like the Latvian had, he had chosen instead to hide in plain sight, adopting the ident.i.ty of one of the interned sailors from the scuttled battleship Graf Spee. It worked for the better part of twenty-five years, but not quite long enough or well enough.

The naked man put the tip of his finger over the face in the photograph. The first of many, and more to come. Utikal had screamed as the first tenpenny nail was pushed slowly into his left eye, then died, twisting horribly in the chair as the second three-inch sliver was pushed into the right. The naked man closed the Great Book.

"Mirabile Dictu," he whispered softly. Miraculous to say. "Kyrie eleison." Lord, have mercy on our souls.

26.Valentine's kitchen on the top floor of Ex Libris was a paean of praise to a fifties that Finn had never known. The floors were covered in blue and white linoleum tile, the cupboards were yellow with chrome handles and white interiors, and the two small country-style windows that looked out onto the roof garden planted with staked tomatoes were trimmed in blue chintz.

The stove was a forty-inch Gaffers & Sattler factory-yellow four-burner gas range with a thermal eye, heat-timer griddle, and a fifth burner. The refrigerator was a 1956 turquoise Kelvinator. There was a Rival waffle maker on the yellow-flecked Formica countertop along with a bullet-shaped chrome toaster and a huge chrome breadbox that actually hid a very up-to-date microwave.

There was a four-seat yellow vinyl and chrome dinette set in the middle of the room, and off in one corner there was a sky blue vinyl breakfast nook under one of the windows. Finn, wearing her panties and one of Valentine's crisp Sea Island cotton white shirts, was lounging in the breakfast nook, drinking coffee brewed in the big silver GE percolator. Valentine, nude except for an idiotic barbecue ap.r.o.n that said "A little sugar for the chef makes sure the cookin' is sweet," was making scrambled eggs at the stove. Finn reached out onto the breakfast nook table and toyed with the green-skirted, hula-dancing, ukulele-playing ceramic boy and girl salt-and-pepper shakers. According to the tail-swinging, eye-rolling cat clock over the sink it was just after eight in the morning. Apparently everything in the fifties had been in pastel shades of "cute." Tellingly, there was no visible dishwasher-or at least one that she could see at first glance.

The whole thing was ridiculous to the point of fetish, but she knew it was almost certainly accurate down to the plastic laminated cowgirl placemats and the bright yellow "Mornin' Ma'am" cowboy coffee mugs. She felt herself remembering their time in his bed the night before. She stretched in her seat, a shiver running through her from the back of her neck to the pit of her stomach. There was no doubt that Valentine was a perfectionist in everything he did.

"You always show your women a good time like this?" She grinned.

He turned and smiled, looking at her, the expression on his face taking ten hard years off his face.

"There aren't that many to show a good time to," he answered. Finn almost said something but stopped herself. She had a pretty good idea that Valentine was a lot like the guys she'd yearned after in high school. They didn't have the slightest idea they were attractive, which in itself made them even more so. On the other hand, his love-making had been smooth, practiced and knowledgeable. Could you know a lot about women without knowing a lot of women? She stopped herself from thinking about it at all. They'd made love for hours and it had been wonderful. That was all she needed-or wanted-to know right now, certainly not his reasons for doing it, or hers. Maybe she'd been in school for too long; this was the real world. And she didn't want to think about that too much either.

Valentine took two plates out of the warming oven, slid a mound of scrambled eggs onto each then went back for the toast and bacon. He picked up both plates and fitted them into his right hand, then snagged the ketchup off the counter with his left. He brought the meal expertly across the room, put everything down on the breakfast nook table and slid onto the blue vinyl seat. He slid the plates onto the placemats, and they began to eat, talking easily between bites with no obvious discomfort at their situation. To Finn it felt as though they'd been lovers forever, which was a little scary.

"What's with the retro stuff?" she asked.

"It's the easiest way to decorate a room," he said. "Pick an era and then pick up things from the period. It's fun. You get to look for things without it being serious. I can get as excited about a 1954 first edition of the Betty Crocker's Good and Easy Cook Book as I can about finding a Vermeer stolen from an Irish country house."

"I heard about that when we were doing a Dutch masters cla.s.s," said Finn, her eyes widening a little. "Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid. They even wrote a book about it. That was you?"

"It was the second time the painting had been stolen. There was a drug connection. I helped track it down from this end." He shook his head and took a sip of coffee from his cowboy mug. "Once upon a time art theft was something you saw in the movies starring David Niven or Cary Grant. Now it's usually got some kind of other link-usually with drugs, sometimes with guns."

"I don't get it," said Finn. "They don't have anything to do with each other."

"Sure they do," responded Valentine.

"Explain."

"Most criminal activity deals in large volumes of cash. Cash is hard to keep and hard to spend. Stealing art helps both problems."

"How?"

"It's currency. Most works of art, valuable ones, have a well-established value. A painting or drawing can be sold for X amount. Instead of doing deals for money, big drug dealers and weapons dealers-especially the ones in the terrorist market-trade in art. It's portable, it's easy to move across borders and it's usually insured in one way or another. I can name you half a dozen galleries in Europe that knowingly traffic in stolen art and twice that many just in New York. It's a very big business."

Finn shifted on the seat across from Valentine, tucking one leg up underneath herself, thinking. "Is that what we're dealing with here?"

"I'm not sure. If it's drugs it's very sophisticated, beyond anything I've ever seen. On first glance I'd say no. It's something else, and it's been going on for some time."

"Why do you say that?"

"Crawley was pretty high up the ladder. You said the provenance for the Michelangelo had his initials on it?"

"No, the inventory line."

"What about the Hoffman Gallery receipt. Who was it sent to? Crawley or somebody else?"

"It's all on computer. One of the founders of the Parker-Hale bought it from the Hoffman Gallery in 1939, I think. Before Crawley's time."

"But he inventoried it?"

"Yes. As an Urbino, a few years back."

"Too many coincidences and not enough answers," murmured Valentine. He finished his eggs and chewed on a piece of bacon. Finn refilled his coffee cup and her own. A silence fell across the pleasantly anachronistic kitchen. Somewhere far away she could hear the morning traffic sounds on Broadway, and closer, the whine and thunder of the garbage trucks behind Lispenard.

"Okay, let's put together what we have," said Valentine. "This all starts when you accidentally trip over a Michelangelo drawing and Alex Crawley catches you."

"You make it sound as though I was stealing something."

"That's the point," said Valentine. "You weren't doing anything wrong, so why was Crawley so upset? All he really had to do was say that you were mistaken, and it was only after you insisted it was a Michelangelo that he fired you."

"What are you saying?"

"Either he didn't want you or anyone else knowing the gallery was in possession of that particular drawing, or it's a fake. More likely the former rather than the latter because it's obvious there was already a cover-up in motion since it was identified in the inventory as the work of another artist. The question, of course, is Why?" He tapped his fingers rapidly on the Formica surface of the table. "I'd love to see the original paperwork. It's got to be somewhere and it would be easier to trace than computer files, harder to fake."

"It's a company called U.S. Docugraphics Service. I've seen their trucks in the parking area behind the museum."

"All right. That makes things easier," he said. He thought for a moment, picking up a toast crust and dabbing it with a knifeful of E. Waldo Ward Rhubarb Conserve. Even that simple act made the muscles in his arms and shoulders stand out and she remembered being in his arms last night; he'd been enormously strong and had a tough, hard body that came from more than three times a week at the gym. Definitely not the abs of a librarian. They were lovers now but he still hadn't told her everything.

"Penny for your thoughts." He grinned in that slightly savage, predatory way, his perfect teeth gleaming, the intelligent eyes focused on hers.

"Not a chance," she said, laughing. "So what do we do now? Run away to a desert island and wait until things die down?"

"I know just the place." He smiled. "But I don't think it's a possibility yet."

"Then where do we go from here? Crawley's murder is being investigated by the cops and so is Peter's. We've established some kind of relationship between Gatty, Crawley and Greyfriars Academy through the missing knife and the Juan Gris, and that creep-the headmaster, Wharton-is probably involved. We know Gatty's involved in stolen art, at least as a buyer, because he's got that Renoir. None of it fits together."

"Sure it does. We just don't know how yet."

"So how do we find out?"

"I want to talk to a dealer I know. Then maybe go to the Parker-Hale and ask a few questions."

"Under what pretext?"

"I'll tell them I'm your G.o.dfather and that you're missing. Your boyfriend was murdered and obviously I'm concerned."

"I don't know if I like you referring to yourself as my G.o.dfather. It makes me feel as though I was in a cradle that was just robbed." She grinned.

"Think of it in the Marlon Brando sense, then." He grinned back. He stuck out his foot under the table and let his big toe slide down her calf. She shivered. He gave her a strange look.

"What's that?"

"My best Christopher Walken leer."

"Can you back it up?"

"That remains to be seen."

"What am I supposed to do . . . afterward?"

"Get on the computer and find out how all the pieces are connected."

"Okay."

"You finished?" He glanced down at her plate.

"Yup." She slid out of the breakfast nook and started undoing the b.u.t.tons of her shirt. "Gentlemen, prepare to defend your ap.r.o.ns."

27.Without being asked or ordered, the sergeant went out an hour or so after dawn broke, leaving everybody else behind this time except Reid. He was part f.u.c.king Cherokee or something and he looked like the front of an old nickel. Quiet enough to stand in front of a cigar store and yet he could pick off most anything with his M1 from a couple hundred yards.

"Where we going, Sarge?" Reid asked.

"Same as before. Maybe somebody's up and around. Maybe do a head count or something."

"Sure, Sarge," and that was it. Reid unslung the M1 and followed him into the woods.

This time the sergeant kept his eyes on the forest floor. There seemed to be three well-worn paths, one going straight through, one moving to the left and one to the right. They all came together in roughly the center of the woodlot at a small clearing. Rabbits maybe, more likely deer.

There were chewed-off branches about five feet up, which would be right for a deer, or maybe a young moose. He wondered if there were moose in Europe. He put the thought out of his mind; waste of time to think about anything except the here and now. The sergeant gestured to the left and Reid nodded. The sergeant headed along the left-hand path with the other man a few yards behind him. Reid didn't make a sound, which was more than you could say for most of the others.

When they reached the edge of the woods, the sergeant made a "get low" gesture. Sitting on his haunches, he had a brief conference with Reid.

"There's a ditch and then the road. There's an old Panzer, burned out, catercorner. The hatch is open. We should be able to get a pretty good look down into the farm. The tank's at the top of the hill."

"The sniper?" Reid asked.

"If we come up low the tank will be between us and that tower. Unless he's looking for us it should be okay."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Watch my back."

"Okay."

They waited just inside the screening woods, trading puffs from one of the sergeant's Luckies. The sniper might not be looking for them, but a sharp eye might see cigarette smoke wafting up in the still, early-morning air. The overcast sky wouldn't help either. No smoking, drinking or s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g while you were fighting a war. He field-stripped the smoke, grinding the hot ash under his combat boot. Didn't quite seem right; you should be able to have one last bit of pleasure before you were snuffed with a bullet from some invisible Kraut's Steyr 95.

The sergeant slid out through an opening between the trees and dropped down into the ditch that ran beside the road. He crawled forward until he was in the shadow of the old tank. Coming at it low, from the rear, he saw that it wasn't as badly damaged as he'd first thought. He could see the exposed rear differential blown to s.h.i.t and one of the treads had been blown off the right rear a.s.sembly but that was about it. From the way the road was chewed up behind it the tank looked as though it might have been strafed by a fighter. American, Brit, Russkie, who knew? The Panzer 1 had been designed originally as a practice tank. It had thin 8mm armor and only a couple of machine guns with no cannon. Good against infantry but no better than a tin can if it ran into another tank, even a c.r.a.ppy old M1 or a guy with a bazooka. On the pro side-if you were a Kraut-was the fact that there were thousands of them and they used only a two-man crew: The driver and a combination commander, observer and machine gunner.

The sergeant left Reid down on the ground behind the left-hand tread. He climbed up the side of the tank, avoiding the sharp, sheet-metal mud flaps and the cheese grater-pierced metal of the m.u.f.fler cover. He pulled himself up to the turret, using the big eyebolts used to hold a spare length of winch cable, then slithered through the hatchway and into the gunner's chair. There were foot pedals to swing the turret and each of the twin guns was on a swivel, able to move up and down independently. Between the guns was a long metal telescopic sight. The sergeant peered through the eyepiece but the far magnifying lens had shattered during whatever firefight had stopped the tank.

The inside of the tank was the usual sandy beige color and there didn't seem to be any blood, so maybe the crew had gotten away clean. The fact that the tank was still here meant the road wasn't used very often, which almost certainly meant that the trucks down on the farm had come from the east. That was something to chew on, since that's where Hitler's place was supposed to be-Berchtesgaden or whatever it was called.

He tried to imagine coming face-to-face with King Kraut and couldn't imagine it. For the past four years when he thought about Hitler it always came out like Charlie Chaplin. You couldn't really take the guy seriously with that mustache, could you? On the other hand, you could take a bunch of guys with those big f.u.c.king helmets seriously, that was for sure.

The sergeant eased himself out of the gunner's seat and slid down into the bottom of the tank. All the ports were open so he squeezed into the driver's seat. He eased the binoculars out of their case and looked down at the farm. He could immediately see a great deal of activity.

Several men in shirtsleeves were sponging off the trucks' windshields and more men were hanging out laundry on a makeshift line that ran from the side mirror of one of the trucks to a post beside a well opening on the other side of the cobbled courtyard. Two men in civilian clothes-lightweight crumpled suits, one brown, one blue-were smoking cigarettes beside one of the small outbuildings. Both men had eyegla.s.ses on.