Michelangelo's Notebook Part 18

"That's right," said Finn, trying to go with it. "Only when Citywide is overbooked they give the slush to us."

"Slush?"

"Overflow. And like I said, I just pick up and deliver. You say there's nothing here, then there's nothing here. No problem." She pulled the Dodgers hat more firmly down on her head and turned to go. At the last second she paused and gave Hugo her brightest eager-beaver "I'm just a shy country girl in the big city" look. "Uh, can I ask you a favor?"

"What?"

"I've really got to pee." Which was true enough; Hugo and the gun he was wearing were scaring the h.e.l.l out of her.

"We don't have a public toilet."

"I'll only be a second, promise. You can check out that pickup for me again."

Hugo Boss paused and then frowned. Finn turned up the wattage on her pleading look, the same one she'd used in high school when she hadn't done her homework.

"All right," said Hugo. "Through there. First door on the right." He pointed. Finn trotted down to the far end of the room, watching from the corner of her eye as Hugo picked up the phone on his desk. She went through the door and shut it behind her. She was in a short hall between the front and rear of the house. To the left was a copy room, the source of the photocopier noise. To her right was a plain door with a sign that said WASHROOM. Straight ahead was an archway leading into an inner office. Two women and a man were sitting at computer work stations in a brightly lit windowless room. A flight of narrow stairs led up to the second floor. Yet another door led even farther back into the building, probably into what had once been the kitchen. No one was paying attention, so Finn ignored the toilet for the moment and ducked into the copy room. There was a big floor-standing Canon digital copier, an office fax machine and an industrial-sized scanner as well as a shelf full of coffee-making equipment and a row of coat hooks. Someone had left a bunch of keys beside the photocopier and without thinking Finn scooped them up and slipped them into her shoulder bag. She left the room, slipped into the bathroom and sat down, breathing hard. She gave herself a few seconds to calm down, flushed the toilet, ran the water and then hurried out to the front office again.

"Anything?" she said to Hugo, knowing what the answer would be.

The receptionist was on the phone. He shook his head briefly.

"Thanks for the bathroom," Finn whispered gratefully, giving the man a smile. She added a brief wave, then fled. A few minutes later she was on Hudson Street, looking for somewhere to get keys cut.

45.Michael Valentine moved through the stacks of Ex Libris, following his own arcane system of notation that was about as far from the Dewey Decimal System as you could get. He'd been working for most of the morning and part of the afternoon, consulting a dozen different encyclopedias of New York, old insurance plat books, ancient subway blueprints, the church records of half a dozen parishes and a complex sociological treatise on Greenwich Village from the 1930s that listed every single place of business and inst.i.tution, street by street throughout the entire neighborhood. As Valentine made his way through the gloomy tiers of books and records he began to put together a picture of what the area around 421 Hudson Street had once been.

Originally of course it had been on the very edges of New York in the small rural village of Greenwich on the sh.o.r.es of the Hudson River. By the early 1800s the fields belonging to the Voorhis family had been sold to Trinity Church, who in turn leased the property to the St. Mary Magdalene Benevolent Society. By that time the two-block square of property bounded by Hudson Street, Clarkson, Morton and Varick was already being used as a burial ground for the Episcopal Church of St. Luke's in the Field a little to the north. In the 1820s a Roman Catholic Church, Holy Redeemer, was built on the property and a stark, redbrick convent and home for "disadvantaged" girls built across Hudson Street. It was at this time that Edgar Allan Poe lived in the area, and his dour, stooped figure was regularly seen plodding through the tombstones of the burial ground. As time went on the burial ground property was subdivided and the first town houses on what was to become St. Luke's Place were erected, the road being an extension of Le Roy Street to the west and running through to Varick. Holy Redeemer Church burned in 1865 and burials in the area were taken over by St. Paul's to the south and St. Luke's to the north. By the 1870s the first elevated trains were appearing, infringing on the property owned by the convent at 421. A fire in 1877 forced the closure of the building and the ruins were demolished in 1881 to make way for the eight-story warehouse building that presently occupied the site. By 1900 there was no trace of the convent, the church or the cemetery. The graveyard was a park, St. Luke's Place was home to the Mayor of New York and streetcars and horse-drawn trolleys rumbled up and down Hudson Street.

Nothing about the building containing American Mercantile seemed to be special in any way but there had to be a reason Cornwall and his cohorts from the Grange Foundation had chosen it as the storage facility for their shipment. Clearly it had something to do with the foundation's choice of an office but according to the plat books and Valentine's ancient, dusty collection of Manhattan reverse directories the foundation hadn't moved into the old brownstone on St. Luke's Place until long after the shipment had disappeared.

After carrying a half dozen reference books back to his office, he dropped down into his chair and closed his eyes, trying to see the problem in some kind of rational order. What did Cornwall know about the location that wasn't immediately obvious to someone browsing through the history books, or more directly through the thousands of volumes and books of records surrounding him now? Irritated by his inability to figure it out for himself, he turned to his computer, booted up the ISPY program Barrie had custom-built for him and punched in Cornwall's name. A brief biography appeared almost immediately.

Name: Cornwall, James Cosburn Date of Birth: 1904 Place of Birth: Baltimore, Maryland Date of Death: 2001 Place of Death: New York, NY HDescrip: Cornwall was born to Martin and Lois Cornwall, the latter a prominent interior designer and teacher at the Baltimore School of Art. The young Cornwall attended private schools, where he was especially interested in monastic and church architecture. He studied in Europe before college for two years at the ecole Sebastien in Paris. In 1922 he returned to the United States, attending Yale University the following year. He graduated c.u.m laude from Yale in 1927 and joined the Parker-Hale Museum the same year as an a.s.sistant in the department of decorative arts. He was a.s.sistant curator 1929-32 before being advanced to a.s.sociate curator. Beginning in 1930, he worked with Parker-Hale director Joseph Teague (1885-1933) in planning the new medieval extension to the museum. Cornwall was named a.s.sistant curator of medieval art in 1934 after Teague's death. He was named curator of the medieval department the same year. He married Katherine Metcalfe in 1942. In 1943 he joined the army and quickly rose to an appointment as lieutenant in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the Seventh United States Army, Western Military District. His chief responsibilities were the discovery and preservation of art treasures hidden by the n.a.z.is. Cornwall was responsible for seizing the looted collections of Goering, Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg, among others. Returning to the Parker-Hale, he was made director in 1955. In June of 2001 he suffered a fatal heart attack after a particularly contentious board meeting and was succeeded by his protege, Alexander Crawley (q.v.).

The biography didn't tell him very much he didn't already know but a notation in the bibliography of Cornwall's published works leapt out at him. A reference to his PhD thesis at Yale: "Giovanni Battista de Rossi and the Catacombs of San Callisto: A Biographical and Architectural Evaluation."

Using that as a starting point Valentine skittered around through the Internet putting the pieces together. Cornwall's interest in the subterranean world hadn't ended with his doctorate. Over the years he'd published a dozen articles on the subject, edited and compiled several scholarly works and had even been an advisor on a series of History Channel programs about crypts, mausoleums, cemeteries and catacombs all over the world. The last program in the series was called "New York Dead."

Within an hour the pieces had all fallen into place and he had the answer. He searched through the sociological history of Greenwich Village to confirm his theory.

"My G.o.d," he whispered, as the reason for Cornwall's choice of the Hudson Street warehouse became blindingly clear.

What was now a park where young children played had once hidden the underground crypt of Holy Redeemer Church, connected to the convent on the other side of the road by a "priest's hole" tunnel so the nuns and "disadvantaged" girls would not be seen in daylight as they made their way to prayer. Cornwall and his fellow conspirators, along with two hundred twenty-seven tons of crates and boxes-six truckloads of looted booty-had vanished under the streets of New York.

And it was still there.

46.The false priest moved through the cluttered rooms of the dank, verminous-looking apartment on Ludlow Street, far below the trendy stores and salons that lined the narrow one-lane thorough-fare above Delancey. As he examined the pitiful rooms, he carried the Beretta at his side. Rooting through the old woman's apartment in Queens had led him here, but the place was empty. There were only terrible ghosts and memories left behind. The floor was covered with stained and cracked linoleum that might have been blue once. The ceiling sagged in seams and lumps, threatening to split open like overripe fruit. With each step, shining roaches scuttled greasily toward the open baseboards and silverfish fled under the sc.r.a.ps of old carpeting that lay here and there.

It was, without a doubt, the horrible den of a madman. The crumbling plaster and ancient floral wallpaper were covered with newspaper clippings, drawings, pictures from magazines, annotated maps, scrawled letters in script so small it could barely be read, reproductions of paintings and here and there the broken pieces of plaster or plastic saints and angels, glued, tacked, nailed or simply placed in niches dug with spoons into the soft spongy walls themselves. It was a museum dedicated to the insane meanderings of an obsessed heart, the obsession impossible to penetrate or a.n.a.lyze except that it concerned the old war and people who had taken part in it, artists, art and the deaths of a hundred n.o.bodies in a score of countries and most of all the life and times of a single hawk-nosed man in steel spectacles wearing the robes and mitred headpiece of a pope. The man from Rome had lost his faith long ago and sometimes found himself agreeing with the cynics that man had been placed on the earth to do no more than eat, fornicate and excrete but being here he knew there was something else: this man had been created to prove that h.e.l.l existed. This place was a petri dish meant to provide a culture of the d.a.m.ned.

There were more rooms than he would have expected, as though perhaps two or maybe even three of the decrepit tenement apartments had been joined together. The only thing new in the place was the metal-clad front door and the locks that guarded it, easily picked. The kitchen lay in the middle of the apartment in the old-fashioned style with a pa.s.s-through into the small, dark parlor beyond. It was a horror, the chipped enamel sink resting on its own plumbing, open without cabinetry, stacked with crusted plastic plates and bowls and cups, a jar of grape jelly open and moldy on the counter along with a box of cornflakes, a soured pint carton of milk and a half-empty mug of coffee. A choked twist of old-fashioned flypaper hung from the overhead light fixture. Reaching up with thumb and forefinger the false priest tried the dangling pull cord but nothing happened.

He went into the parlor. An old rag rug, brown and curling at one side. A drawing in ink directly on the left wall: Christ on a cloud above a grotesque Calvary below and words beneath the triple crucifixion: THOU WILT SHEW ME THE PATH OF LIFE.

IN THY PRESENCE IS FULLNESS OF JOY.

AT THY RIGHT HAND THERE ARE PLEASURES.

FOR EVERMORE.

A closer look and the man saw that the figures on the crosses were women, bleeding from b.r.e.a.s.t.s and eyes and that there were strange inscriptions in faint winding circles above Christ's head, vague and indecipherable.

There was a short hall and then another door, old and scarred but painted bright, fresh, robin's egg blue. Inscribed on the door was a single word: TSIDKEFNU.

The Old Testament word for "Righteousness," one of the thousand names of G.o.d.

The man from Rome eased back the slide of the Beretta with his free hand, took a breath and held it. He pushed open the door and went into the room beyond, the end of his journey. He reached up to shade his eyes with one hand, almost blinded by the light.

47.Behind them in James J. Walker Park Finn and Valentine could faintly hear the sound of children jumping rope, singing a counting song that became faster as they skipped.

"I am the Baby Jesus, Marching to the cross.

I am the Baby Jesus.

My daddy is the Boss."

"Are you sure this is the right thing to do?" said Finn, sitting on the bench beside Valentine. Between his feet was a bag of equipment. They were both dressed casually in running gear. It was past seven and dusk was falling, the rush hour traffic on Hudson Street thinning.

"You're the one who went in there today and took the keys." Valentine smiled. "Besides, if we want to bring this thing to some kind of conclusion that will satisfy the authorities we have to have evidence. Right now everything's circ.u.mstantial, Internet paranoia and conspiracy theory."

"I just wanted to find out who killed Peter."

"We will," Valentine offered. "I promise you." He kept his eyes on the house on the far side of St. Luke's Place. The last lights went out and a moment later Hugo Boss appeared, locking the door behind him. The tiny Panasonic D-snap camera Finn had carried in her shoulder bag earlier in the day had given Valentine all the information he needed about the inside of the interior of the building including the name on the security panel just inside the front door. It appeared to be a relatively simple ADT system with a telephone line connection to a central security center. The system was almost ten years old and a single call to Barrie Kornitzer had given him the bypa.s.s code for the system within five minutes. Finn's theft of the key ring had simplified things even more; after copying them at a locksmith's shop on Carmine Street, she used the beeper on the ring of originals to find the car the keys belonged to, eventually finding a Toyota Camry on Varick Street that answered the call. She simply tossed the keys on the floor underneath the front seat and then manually re-locked the car behind her. When the owner eventually discovered them he or she would a.s.sume the keys had been left behind when exiting the car earlier in the day.

"I am the Baby Jesus.

I see every single sin.

I am the Baby Jesus And I always win."

Valentine checked his watch and then the darkened brownstone across the way. Nothing moved except the leaves in the trees. The traffic hummed a block away. Finn could faintly recall a few lines from an Edgar Allan Poe sonnet about some spooky dead love. She tried not to think about what lay beneath her, buried deep under the soil of the park. Old secrets. Older bones.

"Time to go."

"All right."

"I told Barrie most of what we know. If I haven't called him by midnight he'll let a friend of his in the Bureau know what we found."

"That's a comfort," said Finn with a hollow laugh. They both stood up and headed across the street. Behind them, lost in the gloom, the children skipped.

48.They stepped into the dark house. Ahead of them and to the right was the ADT panel. A small, angry red light pulsed. Valentine punched in a set of numbers. The red light reverted to green.

"That was easy enough," Finn whispered.

"This isn't some high-tech heist movie," Valentine answered. "After a while people get careless and they don't bother with the basics." He shrugged. "Besides, why would anyone break into a place like this? As far as anyone knows they're just a bunch of paper pushers."

"Maybe that's all they are," said Finn. "Maybe we're wrong."

"You said you thought your receptionist in the expensive suit was wearing a gun."

"I'm sure of it."

"Then we're not wrong. You don't need a gun to guard papers."

Valentine paused for a moment to examine the painting behind the desk. "You do need a gun to guard something like that, however."

They moved quickly through the reception room and down the hallway into the open area at the center of the house. Finn dropped the equipment bag on one of the desks and slid open the zipper. Valentine took out a heavy flashlight and switched it on, panning the beam around the room. He saw nothing any different from what the camera had shown him: a large rectangular windowless room with a flight of stairs against the right-hand wall. There were three desks and a row of filing cabinets. A doorway at the end of the room led into a comfortable conference area with a long table and a half dozen chairs. There was a painting over the mantel of an old-fashioned fireplace to the left. It was too dark to see clearly; a muted landscape of some sort. Another door led to the rear of the house. It was locked. Finn stepped forward with her set of keys and tried them until she found one that fit. She turned it and the door popped open. They stepped through.

"Now this is interesting," Valentine murmured.

The room was completely empty. A window on the far wall had been bricked up and the original rear door had been replaced by something that looked vaguely like the sliding mechanism usually seen on garages. Instead of the cherry in the other rooms here it was wide oak planks, dark with age. It was the original floor.

"A loading bay," said Valentine. "The insurance plat books show an old court-style alley in the back with an entrance on the Varick Street end. That's where this must go."

"That doesn't make sense unless they've got something to load," said Finn.

"Look." Valentine pointed. In the center of the floor there was a square seam in the planks. He swung the light around the walls. Beside the operating mechanism for the heavy rear door there was a single large b.u.t.ton, much like the elevator call at Ex Libris. "Hit it."

Finn crossed the room and slapped her palm down on it. There was a humming sound and a section of the floor six feet on a side pushed upward slowly. A large open cage appeared, finally thumping to a stop.

"What the h.e.l.l is that?" said Finn.

Valentine played the beam of his light over the open cage. A stamped metal plate across the top beam read: OTIS BROTHERS YONKERS NY 1867.

"I couldn't find anything out about the original owners of the building but it could easily have been some kind of tavern or small hotel. This would be the freight elevator they used to bring up beer barrels and food from storage down below." Valentine stepped into the cage and swung the flashlight around. He spotted a switch on one of the cage uprights. "Looks safe enough."

Finn stared, horrified. "We're going down in that thing?"

"I don't see any other way." He waved her forward. Tentatively she stepped onto the old steel floor of the cage and Valentine tapped the b.u.t.ton. The cage descended ponderously. By the time they reached the bottom they were smothered in darkness. They stepped off the elevator and Valentine swept the beam around. They appeared to be in a modern, concrete-walled bas.e.m.e.nt filled with boxes and crates. Valentine found a light switch and flipped it on. Overhead fluorescents crackled into life.

The bas.e.m.e.nt was as large as the entire house, a long narrow room with a well-outfitted packing facility complete with storage bins for lumber, saws, worktables and a large overhead setup for blowing in foam popcorn, and an area devoted to metal strapping. All very efficient. A dehumidifier hummed against one wall and the room was cool and dry. A half dozen medium-sized crates had been arranged close to the freight elevator, neatly labeled and bar-coded. They were all designated for various outlets of the Hoffman Gallery around the world and they each had a plastic pouch stapled to one side already packed with customs clearance papers. Off in one corner of the room was a metal desk with a computer and heavy-duty label printer. Valentine took a box cutter out of his bag and slashed one of the pouches open.

"Form 4457, Declaration of Goods only. One of the great a.s.sets of dealing in fine art and antiquities: no duty. It's like transporting millions of dollars across international borders without raising an eyebrow."

Valentine found a pry bar on one of the worktables and began pulling open one of the small crates. The top finally pulled free and he carefully lifted out the contents.

"Rembrandt. The Raising of Lazarus. It's been missing since 1942. It was stolen from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam."

"Is that enough evidence?"

"No. We have to find the rest."

"It's not here."

Valentine looked around the room. "First we have to establish exactly what the extent of 'here' is." He walked to the far end of the bas.e.m.e.nt and stared at the wall. Like the rest of the long, narrow room it appeared to be made out of solid brick. There was nothing against the wall that might have disguised some sort of hidden entrance.

"It's got to be here. We're facing the park." He looked left and right. "These are adjoining walls to the buildings next door and the back wall is facing in the wrong direction." He checked the floor carefully, looking for signs that something had recently been brought out from behind the wall but there was nothing.

Valentine dropped down on his knees, carefully checking the join between the front wall and the floor. Finn turned and looked back the way they had come, remembering the office at Ex Libris and Sherlock Holmes. When the possible has been eliminated . . .

The whole back wall was taken up by a series of metal shelving units full of packing supplies. Leaving Valentine to his study of the floor she walked back to the north facing wall and stared. Six shelving units filling up the whole wall and rising to within an inch of the ceiling. They were lifted half an inch off the floor by stumpy little angle iron feet. The units were painted an inst.i.tutional green and looked old. Finn turned again. The old-fashioned freight elevator was twelve or fifteen feet away. There were more shelving units against the left adjoining wall but none against the right, which was hung with a large piece of pegboard for holding tools instead. She continued to stare, frowning, knowing that something was wrong. Then she saw.

"Michael," she called. He stood and turned in her direction.

"What?"

"I think I've found something."

"Where?" He headed down the low-ceilinged bas.e.m.e.nt room toward her.

"Look," she said, pointing as he joined her. "The pegboard."

"What about it? That's an adjoining wall."

"There's nothing on it."

"I don't get it."

"All the tools are on shelves over there, none of them are hanging up so what do you need the pegboard for?"

Valentine was silent for a moment. He stepped forward and checked the pegboard, tapping at it with his knuckles, then checked the place where the adjoining wall and the rear wall formed a junction. After a moment he grabbed the center shelf of the nearest wall unit and tugged hard. At first nothing happened and then, smoothly and almost silently two of the units closest to the adjoining wall rumbled forward until the double-wide shelves stood two feet out from the back wall. They clicked decisively to a stop like a cork in a bottle. Changing his grip slightly Valentine pulled the shelf unit to the left, away from the adjoining wall finally revealing the dark, hidden entrance.

He grabbed his flashlight and headed down a wide concrete ramp that led down to a circular antechamber. The walls of the chamber were quarried, Pound Ridge granite, the ancient bedrock on which the skysc.r.a.pers of New York had been built. Valentine put his hand out and let it rest on the rough-hewn rock. Cool and dry, a perfect place to bury the city's favorite sons of history and keep her later secrets from prying eyes. Edgar Allan Poe.

"Lo! Death has reared himself a throne In a strange city lying alone Far down within the dim West Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best Have gone to their eternal rest."

"Sometimes you can be downright spooky, Michael," Finn muttered. She followed the beam of the flashlight. Two metal rails like a miniature railway line led through a narrow, pitch-black cavern to the left. There was a switch box bolted onto the near wall and a line of heavy insulated conduit led into the hole. Valentine flicked the switch and a line of industrial bulbs came on, dimly illuminating the tunnel ahead. He switched off the flashlight. The opening was seven or eight feet high and little more than that across. The walls had been constructed on the same stone as the round antechamber and the floor was overlaid with a thick absorbent pea gravel.

"I wonder where this goes?" Valentine said quietly. He headed into the tunnel.

"I'm not so sure I want to find out," said Finn, but she followed him anyway.

The tunnel turned and twisted half a dozen times as they moved forward. Here and there narrow niches had been cut into the walls, bodies interred and then bricked over, but the crumbling brick had long since vanished and the old interment sites were empty. The rails at their feet seemed strangely out of place in this dead place, the low lightbulbs overhead in their metal screen safety baskets even more so. Finn tried not to think of the weight of the earth directly above her head; tried to breathe evenly in the oppressive, gloomy pa.s.sage. She'd never been particularly claustrophobic but this was something on a completely different order of magnitude. h.e.l.l wasn't hot, it was just like this-empty and buried underground. Buried alive.

They moved through the pa.s.sage for a lifetime and then finally came to another widened antechamber. The rails ran across it to a heavy iron door set on ma.s.sive hinges bolted into the wall. The door was some kind of dark heavy wood, the strap hinges as old as the stone walls they were attached to. A pair of obelisks had been neatly carved in half relief into the stone on either side of the door, then picked out in whitewash and some dark, ancient stain. Words had been neatly hammered into the rock over the entrance, picked out in black and white the same way as the obelisks.

"Silence, Mortals, you are entering the Empire of the Dead," Finn read out aloud. "Nice." She looked at the door and then at Valentine. "Are we going in?"

"I think we've come too far to back out now," he answered. He tapped the rail with the toe of his boot. "They're not using these to transport old bodies. This is a warehouse, not a crypt." He stepped forward and grabbed the wrought iron handle. He pulled open the door and stepped through.