Michelangelo's Notebook Part 11

A woman in a blue dress and brown shoes with fat Cuban heels walked casually about, chatting and smoking. A second woman, dressed in the flat brown uniform of the Wehrmacht women's auxiliary was sitting on the edge of the well casing, her head tilted back into the sun. The only man in full uniform was a youngish-looking officer in a black SS uniform.

The shirtsleeved soldiers cleaning the windshields carried no weapons. n.o.body except the SS officer had a sidearm. The sergeant turned his attention to the abbey tower. The small opening at the top of the tower looked dark and empty, but that didn't mean anything. Snipers were good at keeping in the shadows.

The sergeant turned and spoke quietly out through one of the rear observation ports. "You catching any of this, Reid?"

"Yeah" came the faint response from outside the tank.

"Whadya think?"

"Not army, not military. I dunno who they are," said the disembodied voice.

"Take a guess."

"Civvies."

"What do you think of the women?"

"They're women. What am I supposed to think?"

"Why would they have women along?"

"Why does anyone have women along."

"Gotta be more than that."

"Why?"

"Something pretty strange going on, you ask me."

"Is anyone asking you?"

"Don't be an a.s.shole." The sergeant was silent again. He looked back through the front port. "What's east of here?"

"Mountains, bunch of castles."

"West?"

"Lake Constance. The Krauts call it something else. Switzerland's on the other end."

"South?"

"Austria."

"Who's there now, any idea?"

"Forty-fourth. The Russkies, I think."

"Germans don't like Russkies-am I right?"

"How the f.u.c.k do I know, Sarge? Why are you asking me all these questions? I'm just a redskin off the reservation, remember? 'Ugh, How, Kemosabe, ' like that."

"Hey, Reid, how come your name isn't Running Bear, or Moon Blanket or something?"

"My father was a garage mechanic in Kansas who like f.u.c.king squaws when he got drunk, okay?" He almost laughed. "Where you come from it was 'n.i.g.g.e.r in the woodpile.' Where I'm from it was 'Choctaw in the cornfield.' "

"You know what? You're okay, Reid." The sergeant shifted gears. "They had to come from the east, or else they would have had to get those trucks around the tank and there's no sign of that. They're not going north, 'cause that's where the war is, and the Russkies and us are in Austria, so they're not going there."

"So they're going to Lake Constance."

"Yeah. The Bodensee or something, that's what the Krauts call it. I wonder if they got some kind of ferry service or something that would handle six trucks like that."

"Probably." There was silence from Reid for a moment. The sergeant turned his gla.s.ses on the courtyard again. If the sniper was up in the tower he was their only line of defense. If the machine guns in the tank still had ammo he could probably do pretty much of a clean sweep. He reached down and opened the big ammo bin and saw enough belts to keep the guns going steady for ten or fifteen minutes. The only problem was you'd have to have the engine going to power the turret; with the sight gone it would be dead reckoning. Still . . .

"You cooking up some kind of plan, Sarge? It feels like you're cooking up some kind of plan."

"I'm working on it."

"What is it?"

"I'm not sure. Hey, Reid, how many real Krauts you see down there? Soldiers."

"Maybe a dozen or so, the guys cleaning the windows."

"They're not even armed. The tags say they're Feldgendarmarie but army cops wear gray and those guys have brown pants on. It's like they picked up uniforms where they found them. I wonder how many truck drivers they conscripted who wear gla.s.ses."

"Maybe they had no choice."

"And maybe they're in a big hurry to get what's in those trucks out of here."

"What do you think's in those trucks, Sarge?"

"Somethin' good, Reid. Somethin' to get you doing your best war dance and sharpening your tommy-hawk." He focused on the trucks again, trying vainly to catch a glimpse of what was inside them. They were closed up tight, even the back flaps. As he watched, some of the men pushed a big open staff car out of one of the smaller outbuildings and began to gas it up using jerry cans pulled down from the sides of the trucks.

"They're getting ready to move," said Reid.

"Yeah. We gotta get Cornwall and his friends off their duffs or it's going to be too late."

"We going to get a piece of what's in the trucks, Sarge?"

"I think that's fair, don't you. To the victor go the spoils, right? And my middle name's Victor."

"Funny," said Reid. "So's mine."

"Maybe we're related."

"Anything you say, paleface."

"How many people you count down there?"

"Dozen at the trucks, four, no, five more outside, walking around."

"Plus the sniper."

"Yeah, there's him. But most of the others don't look like regular army."

"There's gotta be a few somewhere. I saw a guard with a 98k on his back and an MP40 in front last night by the gate."

"Could have been one of the motor pool guys."

"Maybe. Point is, he was armed."

"They aren't armed now."

"The way they're cleaning up that staff car or whatever it is, looks like they're maybe getting ready to bug."

"Maybe we should go back and report."

"Yeah. I'm coming down." He climbed up out of the tank and back down the side. On his way down he tapped a couple of the jerry cans strapped to the hull. At least half full. A machine like this was usually stripped pretty quickly, and he began to revise his thinking about how long it had been here. He also began revising his tactics about taking the farm. He and Reid slipped back into the woods.

"You know anything about tanks, Reid?"

"Not much."

"Think you could handle her machine guns?" He thumbed over his shoulder.

"I could figure it out. Is there ammo?"

"Yeah."

"Need gas to run the turret, wouldn't you?"

"They've got it but you might not need it. The guns are already facing down into the courtyard. There's a crank wheel to lower the elevation."

"So what do you figure?"

"Knock out the tower with Terhune's bazooka. Then go in through the front gate. You keep a cross fire going from up here as soon as we put up a flare."

"Sounds like it would work."

"So let's tell Cornwall and get on with it." They moved into the deeper shadows of the woods. "We're running out of time."

28.The Newman Gallery was located in Chelsea, on West Twenty-second Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. The gallery had moved with the times, from Greenwich Village in the thirties to Soho in the seventies to Tribeca in the eighties and finally to its present Chelsea location in the early nineties. During all that time a series of Newmans had stuck to the credo laid down by the gallery's founder in 1889: "Don't buy what you can't sell." To the founder, Josef Neumann of Cologne, that meant buying quality, which meant sticking to the proven. In more than a hundred years the Newman Gallery had never succ.u.mbed to the vagaries of taste. Because of that, they had prospered, riding out waves of flash-in-the-pan art, quietly expanding over the years, stocking up on Dutch masters and French Impressionists when they were out of favor, trickling them back on the market when the tide turned, which it inevitably did.

The gallery occupied a narrow s.p.a.ce on the ground floor of a renovated warehouse building and was bracketed by a nouveau j.a.panese restaurant and an upscale kitchen store. The walls of the gallery were painted flat white, the floors were heavily polyurethaned oak planks and the ceiling was a black steel grid capable of virtually any lighting arrangement.

There were only three paintings on display: a Franz Hals portrait a yard square, a Jacob van Ruisdael about the same size on the opposite wall and, at the rear of the gallery, a ma.s.sive Petrus Christus religious scene as large as the other two put together. By Valentine's quick estimate there was at least twenty or thirty million dollars' worth of art in the long narrow room. Valentine also knew that the three pieces were only the very tip of the iceberg; the gallery's real inventory was in a climate-controlled storage vault in New Jersey.

As Valentine stepped through the door, Peter Newman came out of the office in the back. Newman, as usual, was dressed in funereal black. He was in his early seventies, bald and stooped. He looked more like a mortician than an art dealer, although it occurred to Valentine that both professions were similar: a mortician cared for dead bodies, an art dealer of Peter Newman's stature cared for dead art. Both jobs were remarkably profitable.

"Michael," said Newman, smiling as Valentine came down the room. "It's been ages. How have you been?"

"Well enough," said Valentine. "Taking care of business."

"Business," huffed the old man irritably "Feh! Art is supposed to be art, not business. 'I got fifty million worth of Van Gogh,' says one of the little j.a.panese businessmen. 'That's nothing,' says the man beside him at the sushi bar. 'I got a hundred million in Pica.s.sos in the trunk of my car.' " Newman made a snorting sound. "And by sushi bar I don't mean the restaurant next door." He slipped his arm through Valentine's and led him into the rear office. The little room was cramped. An old and probably valuable escritoire stood against one wall, and the other wall was taken up by floor-to-ceiling bookcases crammed with ledgers that probably dated back to the gallery's origins. In them Valentine knew were the sales records and provenances for every painting the Newmans had ever sold, and in a sense it was those records that were the real value of the gallery-the family trees of ten thousand individual pieces of art and the record of a hundred thousand transactions that covered Europe and North America like an invisible network. What wasn't in the records was probably crammed into Peter Newman's head, information handed down from father to son for more than a hundred years.

Valentine sat down in an old wooden office chair and watched while Peter Newman shuffled around in front of the coffeemaker at the very rear of the cell-like office. He brought back two ancient Delftware cups and saucers and handed one to Valentine. Then he sat down at the escritoire and sighed as he settled into his seat.

"So?" he said, sipping his coffee, peering at Valentine over the milky edge of the cup.

"Juan Gris."

"He's dead," Newman cackled.

"The n.a.z.i connection."

"He was Spanish. He stayed in Paris during the war. He was one of the so-called 'degenerates.' The n.a.z.is looted some of his early work. He's part of the whole mudslinging match between European galleries about who did what during Hitler's reign. I never had much feeling for the man myself."

"Renoir, Head of a Young Girl."

"More n.a.z.i loot."

"If I told you I'd seen a looted Juan Gris and the Renoir portrait in one day what would you say?"

"I'd say you'd paid a visit to Colonel George Gatty."

"Why haven't I heard of him before?"

"He lives in a very rarified strata. He never buys at a public auction. Very discreet."

"Both the Gris and the Renoir are reasonably well known. Why doesn't somebody tell the police?"

"The colonel has some very important connections."

"Anyone in particular?"

"Is the president of the United States particular enough?"

"Impressive."

"Not in the art world. The man is a pig. No one reputable would buy or sell for him."

"Somebody is."

"Who said the art world was entirely reputable?" Newman cackled again, finishing his coffee.

"Come on, Peter, it's me you're talking to."

Newman sighed and put down his cup and saucer. "I would not like to be accused of being a bigot," he said. "Such things are not good when you are an old Jew like me. Bad for my reputation."