Rembrandt's Ghost Part 3

"I'm sorry," said Tulkinghorn. "I mean neither to offend nor to anger. Your blood relationship with Mr. Boegart is irrelevant with regard to his own will and your status as a beneficiary. Any claims to the rest of the Boegart holdings, most of which are in trust, will most likely require some form of confirmation. DNA a.n.a.lysis, that is. I felt that you should be forewarned. News of this will inevitably reach the press. There will be consequences."

"I'm not making any claims to anything," said Finn.

"Quite so," Tulkinghorn said with a nod. "Be that as it may, Mr. Boegart's instructions to you both are quite clear."

"Instructions to us both?" Billy prompted.

"The bequests are cojoint. They involve three items."

"Which are?" Finn asked.

"A painting, which is in the next room, a house, which is in Amsterdam, and the SS Batavia Queen, which at last report was somewhere off the western coast of Sarawak."

4.

Conrad "Briney" Hanson, captain of the breakbulk freighter Batavia Queen, dragged on his Djarum Filter, inhaling the clove-spiced smoke deeply before expelling it with an exasperated sigh, squinting in the harsh tropical sun. He stood on the flying bridge of the old rust bucket, leaning with his elbows on the salt-corroded rail, looking forward.

The bow had swung around on the anchor in the ebbing tide, and three-quarters of a mile away he could see the thick virgin jungle of Tandjung Api. In the distance he could see the white flush of the low waves breaking on the curving sandy beach. It looked deceptively calm but he knew it was an illusion. At low tide this was foul ground with barely six feet of clearance over a long shoal ridge.

If the old fool of an engineer didn't get the engines running soon they'd be trapped here for hours if not actually grounded. He could hear McSeveney something belowdecks hammering away with heavy and cursing in a mixture of Malay pidgin and foulmouthed Scots brogue that would confound even the most knowledgeable linguistic expert.

The dark-haired, deep-tanned captain took another drag on his kerak native cigarette, then snuffed it out in the sand-filled tin can duct-taped to the pipe rail for just that purpose. He glanced down to the fo'c'sle deck, baking hot in the sun. Eli, the powerful-looking, bare-chested able seaman from Mozambique, was painting things while his skinny friend Armand scaled rust. Eli was as black as the inside of a piece of coal, and Armand, who hailed from somewhere in the Balkans, was pale as a vampire and always wore a strange vinyl Cossack hat with ear flaps to keep the sun off his shaved head. They were a strange pair: black Eli with his tattoos and the long wormlike scars across his back that he never talked about; Armand with his pale skin and his hat.

Briney Hanson stared out toward the jungle. Who was he to call them strange? What was a good Danish boy from Thorsminde doing out here in the land of headhunters and China Sea pirates, hauling shipments of fluorescent lightbulbs and bicycles from Bangkok to Shanghai or cocoa powder, handbags, and car parts from Kaohsiung to Manila? A man who spent his days weaving through the reefs and islands and his nights occasionally fighting off stolen fishing boats full of Abu Sayyaf terrorists or MILF fanatics waving RPG rocket launchers and Chinese AK-47S. Not to mention driving the ancient converted World War Two corvette through the odd typhoon, monsoon, or tsunami?

The answer to that was relatively simple. He didn't like herring. He didn't like how they looked, tasted, or smelled, especially pickled, and he certainly didn't want to spend his lifetime catching them like his father. He'd always been in favor of a simple live-and-let-live philosophy; he'd stay away from the herring and the herring would stay away from him.

After that the rest of the unraveling was easy. Five years in the Royal Danish Navy right out of high school, three in icebreakers, two in supply ships, able seaman in the Danish Merchant Marine, mostly on cargo ships and livestock carriers, working his way up steadily through the ranks until he had his master's papers, then losing everything in a drunken knife fight in Kowloon. Waking up in a Manila flophouse having his pocket picked by a ten-year-old boy, a conversation in a waterfront bar with the leather-faced captain, Nick Lumbera, signing on with him as mate aboard the Batavia Queen, then replacing him when dear old Nicomedes died of a stroke in the midst of a force-nine gale in the Malacca Strait. The Queen was carrying a bellyful of mentholated cough drops to Bombay, the whole ship smelling like a bad cold.

He'd brought the ship through the gale and the strait with Lumbera safely stowed away in the hold's cold room and delivered the cough drops to Bombay on schedule. Pleased, the ship's owner, the Shanghai-Sumatra Shipping Corporation, a tiny subsidiary of the Boegart maritime empire, asked Briney if he'd like to stay on as the ship's master without too many questions being asked. After all it wasn't easy to find qualified people willing to endure the grueling backwater tramp through two dozen primitive shallow water ports. He'd taken the job with almost no hesitation since it was unlikely he'd ever be offered anything better.

That was a decade ago. In a few years from now, he'd be able to call himself middle-aged. He had nothing saved, no pension, no family. The Batavia Queen was almost seventy and reaching the end of her useful life. Without a prohibitively expensive refit, it was only a matter of time before Hanson was given the order to take the old girl to her grave at Alang, that bleak spot on the Indian coast known as the Beach of Doom. It would be the end of his useful life as well. His own wrecking beach would most likely be at the bottom of a bottle in a sweltering room above a Rangoon bar. He b.u.t.ted another cigarette in the sand can. It was amazing how easy it was to get from there to here, from then to now.

"Jakolin mo ako!" The watertight manhole on the portside of the main deck directly below the flying bridge crashed open and McSeveney appeared, the narrow, darkly freckled face streaked with grease, his hair bunched in a nylon net made out of one leg of a woman's panty hose. "Putang inang trabaho ito! Ya wee houghmagandie Jockbrit! Ya bluidy ming mowdiewark sasunnach sheeps.h.a.gging s.h.i.teskitter!" He hawked and spit a gob of something semisolid over the side of the ship. "Cack-a.r.s.e hamshanker! Gives me the diareaky,itdo, tam-t.i.t f.a.n.n.ybawz thing!" He kicked the mushroom vent at the base of the deckhouse. "Yah Hoor! Yah pok-pok Ang okie mo amoy ang p.u.s.s.it!" He paused. "Cao ni zu zong shi ba dai!" he added in Mandarin, just in case there was any doubt.

Hanson knew that w.i.l.l.y could curse for an hour without repeating himself. "Problem, Scottie?" he called.

McSeveney peered up at him, his beady black eyes squinting. He looked like an enraged gopher in an ancient pair of striped coveralls. "I hate being called that, as you well know!" w.i.l.l.y snarled, his Edinburgh accent sharp as vinegar and thick as mola.s.ses. "That man was no Scot, he was a bluidy Canadian, and this is no cludgie starship-that's fer dammit sure. So you can shut yer geggie!" He hawked over the side again and stared belligerently up at Hanson.

William Tung McSeveney was, according to him at any rate, the result of the unlikely mating of a red-haired Scottish clerk working for JardineMatheson tallying opium profits in the 1800s and a wh.o.r.e from Macau named Tung Lo May, a name that always reminded Hanson of something you might find on a Chinese take-out menu. The combining of the nationalities continued enthusiastically for several generations, the final result being w.i.l.l.y, raised in the slums of Fountainbridge in a Chinese laundry and enrolling in Sea Cadets at Bruntsfield School where Sean Connery had gone some years earlier. His only dream had been to get out of Auld Reekie, the Smoke, Edinburgh, as rapidly as possible. At fourteen he'd signed on the SS Lanarkshire as an unlicensed engineer, fourth grade, bound for Africa and Asia. He'd never set foot in Scotland again, working on fifty different Straits Trade ships from Hong Kong to Rangoon until he finally found a home and a set of old Scotch boilers on the Batavia Queen.

The Queen was older than anyone aboard her. Originally built as a Flower Cla.s.s Corvette K-49 at the Vancouver Shipyards on Canada's west coast, she was lent to the Royal Australian Navy and spent the war years dodging j.a.panese torpedoes and carrying troops through MacArthur's Philippines from Darwin to Rabaul. After being paid off at Subic Bay at the end of the war, she was bought by Burns Philips, given the name she still bore, and spent the next twenty years as an interisland trading ship, her belly torn apart to create a crude cargo hold.

In the sixties she was transformed again-this time into a salvage and survey tug traveling the same routes in search of wrecks and sunken ships from the war that could be raised and floated for sc.r.a.p. The sc.r.a.p business eventually self-destructed and the Queen went back to being an interisland trader once more, being pa.s.sed from owner to owner over the years like an old streetwalker in decline, eventually finding herself carried on the Boegart List almost as an oversight.

Barely two hundred feet long and thirty-three feet wide, she had a draft of eleven feet when the pumps were operating. Originally equipped with depth charges, a four-inch gun forward, antiaircraft pom-poms, and a pair of twenty-millimeter cannons, she'd long ago been stripped down to a rusty hulk with only an old twelve-gauge in the captain's cabin for protection and a few other bits of weaponry hidden here and there just in case. Originally designed for a crew of seventy, she now got along with eleven, from Hanson on the bridge to McSeveney in the engine room and his hulking, mute Samoan wiper, Kuan Kong. There was a single lifeboat in case of emergency: a twenty-seven foot vessel dogged down on makeshift davits in the stern, where the depth charge rails had once been fitted. At best she could barely make twelve knots' headway but usually cruised at closer to seven.

Originally painted in blues and grays, the Queen had suffered through a number of color changes over the years from black to green to dull red and back to black again, the superstructure white, the funnel scarlet with a large black B, and everything streaked with rust. The bow and stern quarters and the bridge were wooden-decked and desperately worn while the rest was riveted plate steel. It was a credit to her builders that she was still afloat after almost seventy years of battling through wars, storms, and pounding seas, even though she obviously and sometimes noisily showed her age.

Almost as though in defiance of Hanson's bleak line of thought, there was suddenly a racketing roar from the bowels of the ship as the ancient copper-pot cast-iron steam engine rumbled into shuddering life. A few seconds later, McSeveney's voice came echoing up through the wheelhouse speaking tube.

"Captain! D'ye ken that lovely sound?" he called.

Hanson stepped off the flying bridge and into the small shelter of the wheelhouse. "Thank you, w.i.l.l.y!" he said, bellowing into the old-fashioned funnel-necked instrument. He rang the engine room telegraph himself, repeating the request into the speaking tube. "Ahead slow. Let's get off this reef."

A few seconds later the churning propeller dug in and the Batavia Queen, like the reluctant dowager she was, began to move out to sea again.

5.

One hundred thirty miles farther up the coast, the notorious pirate known simply as Khan, or sometimes as Tim-Timan, the Faithful One, rested in his temporary home-a native rumah,a house built on sticks in the estuary of the Rejang River's northwest channel. His fingers, heavy with gold rings, played with the necklace he wore like worry beads. The necklace was strung with dozens of human teeth, some yellow and dark with age, others whiter and much more recent. One or two still even had gnarled dangling bits of nerve and pulp attached. The necklace had been a gift from his grandfather on his mother's side, the infamous penghulu, Temonggong Koh.

From his swinging hammock on the wide ve randah Khan could see the other houses of the riverbank village, rumahs like his. A few were open-sided bungalow-style barracks built by the j.a.panese during the war, and there was even an old longhouse or two like the one his grandfather had been raised in, filled with smoke and laughter and the ghosts of the men, women, and children whose shrunken, withered heads were lined up on the rafters, row after row of trophies from a savage past.

Like many modern members of his tribe, Khan was part Malay, part Chinese, and part indigenous Melenau native, but unlike any other Khan could claim direct descent from the original White Rajah himself, Charles Brooke, the adventurer who came to Sarawak in the mid-1800s and whose family had ruled like Oriental potentates for a hundred years. Not only could he claim it, but he could prove it, for although his brutal features were those of a Chinese-Malay half-caste, Khan had bright blue eyes-blue eyes capable of casting spells, seeing through lies, and envisioning the future, or so some superst.i.tious subjects of his pirate kingdom believed. It was an idea that he encouraged and sometimes even half believed himself.

A brief squall pushed in from the ocean and suddenly the air was full of hissing rain that rattled on the old tin roof of the rumah like handfuls of thrown pebbles. Khan slipped out of the hammock and walked to the edge of the covered porch, looking out over the rain-tattered river. His feet were bare on the woven mats that covered the floor and he wore only a simple black-checked sarong. He was thick-bodied and tall, hard muscles rippling, his gold-brown skin gleaming with a faint sheen of perspiration. His hair was jetblack, cut in the severe bowl-and-bang style of his ancestors. He was iban, a sea dyak, and every inch a warrior penghulu of his clan.

He picked up the cup resting on the verandah railing and took a swallow of the fiery tuak rice wine it contained, swishing the harsh liquor around in his mouth, then spitting it out over the railing and into the river below. The rain began to slow, the sound of it on the roof above him tempered to the slow drumming of angry fingers.

Once upon a time, it had seemed that Khan might have traveled on a different path. He was James How Ling Singbat Alaidin Sulaiman Khan back then, the younger son of Sarawak's minister of health under Stephen Kalong Ningkan, a privileged young man who had attended the prestigious Lodge School, won entry into Phillips Academy Andover in America and then went on to Harvard and a combined degree in business administration and international law.

During his long time abroad-more than a decade-letters from his family told of change in his homeland, none of it for the better. Corruption set in like a disease, infecting everything it touched. His father had been ousted from his post, his lands and money taken, and finally his dissenting voice silenced by the swinging blade of an a.s.sa.s.sin's parang in a Kuching alley.

Returning to his native land, he found his mother dying of despair, his older brother now a high-ranking and corrupt civil servant in the Judiciary, and the country committing slow suicide under the self-serving regime of Haji Abdul Taib Mahmud as her natural resources were auctioned off to the highest bidder, her forests and rivers destroyed, and her people abused and slaughtered. Then his mother died and he was alone.

Taking the few remaining a.s.sets that were left to him, James How Ling Khan fled to the upriver jungles of the Rejang, renewing friendships and native family ties, forging a pirate empire that had no allies only enemies, preying on the ships of any nation foolish enough to pa.s.s within range of his wrath and his fleet of marauding gunships spread out from Sumatra to Zamboanga in the Sulu Sea, lurking like sea snakes in hidden river bases just like this one.

There was other business as well; there were endless shipments of North Korean methamphetamines and counterfeit American currency to move, raw opium from Vietnam, slipper orchids from Sabah, sometimes special human cargo quietly left on the lonely beaches along Northern Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria, and always, and very profitably, guns and other weapons ferried to the k.u.mpulan Mujahidin Malaysia terrorists, Darul Islam, Abu Sayyaf, Moro National Liberation Front, Jemaah Islamiya, and anyone else prepared to pay Khan's exorbitant freight rates.

Through the beating pulse of the rain Khan heard another, deeper sound that resolved itself into the familiar, lumbering thunder of his personal boat, Black Dragon, one of a half dozen World War Two "Karo-Tei" subchasers he'd discovered, forgotten and derelict in an old camouflaged pen on an uninhabited island in the Sulu Sea. Based on stolen plans for the prewar American "Six-Bitter" Coast Guard ships, the Karo-Tei were sixty-foot-long shallow-draft cutters powered by twin eight-hundred horsepower aircraft engines and capable of speeds up to thirty-eight knots.

The small ships were heavily armed with twin twenty-millimeter cannons and an aft machinegun tub. They were completely constructed from wood, which made their radar shadows almost invisible, and they carried a crew of fifteen, more than enough men to capture any unarmed vessel afloat in any weather. They were the deadliest weapons in Khan's a.r.s.enal, and over the years, he had made them even more fearsome with Russian-made RPG rocket launchers, sophisticated navigation electronics as good as or better than those of any ships sent against him, and refurbished engines that made him fleet as the wind and just as hard to see or catch.

The narrow, V-hulled boat appeared out of the misty rain, nosing gently through the shallow waters of the estuary, her flat gray and stealthy paint job making her as elusive as smoke. Khan smiled coldly as she approached, powerful engines backing. Black Dragon, more a home to him than anything had been since he'd returned to the South China Sea.

The engines of the sleek gunboat died and Black Dragon slid the last few dozen yards silently. A seaman appeared on deck, barefoot, picking up the forward line. The boat b.u.mped gently against the floating dock directly below the rumah, and the seaman jumped down and secured the line to a wooden cleat. A short, squat figure stepped out of the wheelhouse, crossed the deck, and stepped down onto the dock. He reached the heavy bamboo ladder at the end of the dock and climbed easily up to the verandah. He was dressed in camouflage greens and combat boots, and there were three official-looking stars on each one of his epaulettes. His skin was dark, burned to the color of old leather by the sun after years of exposure. The man's hard features were Chinese. His name was Fu Sheng and he was Khan's second in command. The two men had known each other for almost twenty years.

Khan's old friend clambered onto the porch. "Apa kabar, Dapu Sheng?" Khan asked in Tanjong, an ancient dialect spoken by fewer than a hundred people, most of them members of his own Rejang River clan. "What news?" Dapu was Fu Sheng's nickname: Big Gun.

"Kaba baik, tuan," replied Fu Sheng, bowing slightly. "The news is good, master." He continued. "I have spoken with our people at the shipping company. They have confirmed the situation. The ship is some way south of us still."

"And the business in London?"

"It proceeds," said Fu Sheng. He shrugged. London was only a place he'd heard of, never seen, and matters there did not really concern him.

"Follow the ship but do nothing yet. As to London, keep me informed."

"Yes, tuan. Will you remain here?"

"Three days, only, then come for me. Those clowns from the Maritime Enforcement Agency are due for one of their patrols. Let them find nothing."

"I don't know why you go to such lengths to hide, tuan," said Fu Sheng. "Their pencil has no point," he scoffed. "We have more ships than they do, and more guns."

"I don't want to make war, Dapu Sheng. I want to make money. We pay bribes for that reason- to keep their pencil dull."

"It isn't the honorable thing, tuan," growled Fu Sheng, refusing to give in, his voice tinged with anger and regret.

"Perhaps not, old friend, but it is the prudent thing. We live in a world that holds honor in no esteem. It is extinct, just like the words we speak." He reached out and laid his hand on Fu Sheng's broad shoulder. "It is not the time."

"Will the time ever come?"

"Perhaps sooner than you think, Fu Sheng. Our ancestors are calling. If we heed them we shall have our day."

"You speak in riddles, tuan."

"Perhaps." Khan smiled. "But then again, what are riddles except mysteries waiting to be solved?"

6.

"Very mysterious," said Billy Pilgrim, staring at the painting on its tabletop easel. He and Finn Ryan were standing with James Tulkinghorn in his small, book-lined conference room. The table the easel sat on was oak, dark and very old.

It looked as though it belonged in a monastery, and Finn could just imagine silent hooded monks eating their simple meals around it.

The painting itself was small, no more than a foot square. It showed an almost comical little ship, full sailed and high decked, running through stormy seas. In the background was a clearly defined reef with crashing surf and behind that a jungle landscape. The sky was painted in vivid sunset colors. The famous signature appeared in thick, almost italic letters in the lower right-hand corner: Rembrandt.

"According to information given to me by the Boegart archives, the painting is a commissioned portrait of the Vleigende Draeack,or Flying Dragon- the ship with which Willem Van Boegart made his original fortune in the East Indies. It was painted in 1671. The painting disappeared just after the beginning of World War Two and was recently discovered in a Swiss bank vault."

"It's a 'jacht,' the first of the types of ship used by the Dutch East India Company. It's where we get the term 'yacht,' " Billy supplied.

Tulkinghorn nodded. "Quite so."

"It might be a yacht," said Finn, "but it isn't a Rembrandt."

"I beg your pardon?" Tulkinghorn said, sounding a little offended. "It's signed."

"That doesn't mean very much," responded Finn. "Rembrandt had a workshop and employed dozens of apprentices, all of whom were authorized to sign his name. It's almost like a rubber stamp. On top of that Rembrandt was well known for signing his own name to paintings that he never put a brush to."

"But you can't be sure of that."

"Sure I can," said Finn with a smile. "If it was painted in 1671."

"Why is the date so important?" Billy asked. "Because Rembrandt died in 1669," she answered. "I'm no expert in the subject, but I remember that much from my art history cla.s.ses." She reached out and tentatively ran her fingers along the ornate gilded frame. "Interesting, though," she said quietly.

"What is?" Billy asked.

"The frame. I'm almost sure it's by Foggini." "Who?" Tulkinghorn asked.

"He was a Florentine during the seventeenth century," said Finn. "I spent a year in Florence before going for my master's. I got interested in him then. He was an artist in his own right, a sculptor, but he's most famous now for his picture frames. Frames like this one. Gold, ornate, a lot of decoration."

"I'm not sure I see the point. Why is the frame important?"

"If the painting is a forgery, or a copy, why would you put such a valuable frame around it?" "Maybe to make people believe in the authenticity of the painting," said Billy.

"But if you're going to all that trouble," mused Tulkinghorn thoughtfully, "why would you ascribe a date to the painting that was incorrect, nay, impossible, and, I would think, extremely easy to prove that it was so?"

It really was amazing, thought Finn; the man spoke like Sherlock Holmes come to life. But the old lawyer was right.

"Can I take a closer look?" Finn asked. Sir James nodded. "Of course. The painting after all now belongs to you and His Grace." Finn picked up the little painting. Given the weight of the ornate frame, the picture itself was quite heavy for its size, which meant that it had been painted on a wood panel, almost certainly oak. One of her night cla.s.ses at the Courtauld Inst.i.tute had been about dating wood panels used in painting by dendochronological a.n.a.lysis-counting tree rings. She looked closely at the surface of the painting and immediately saw the weave of canvas in several worn spots near the edges. Canvas over wood? She'd never heard of a painting done that way, and certainly not in the seventeenth century. Frowning, she flipped the painting over. The back of the painting was covered in old, very brittle-looking kraft paper.

"Anyone have a penknife?"

Sir James nodded and reached into the watch pocket of his waistcoat. He took out an old pearlhandled jackknife and snapped it open. The old man gave it to her. She took the little knife and carefully cut along the kraft paper, keeping well away from the edges of the inner frame, or stretcher. She lifted the paper away, revealing the back of the panel. Dark wood. There were several scratched initials, what appeared to be the chalked number 27a 3 , the 7 struck through in the European fashion, and two labels, one, clearly from the n.a.z.i era, the other a simple paper rectangle reading Kunsthandel J. Goudstikker NV.

"Goudstikker was the preeminent gallery in Amsterdam," said Finn. "The n.a.z.is cheated him out of everything in 1940. The Dutch government only resolved the whole thing a little while ago. It was big news in the art world."

"This Goudstikker was a person?" Billy asked. Finn nodded. "Jacques Goudstikker. If I remember the story right, he inherited the gallery from his father."

"What happened to him?"

"He fled Holland on a refugee ship for England, but they wouldn't let him into the country because he was a Jew. He would have been interned. The ship went on to South America with him still aboard. Apparently he had an accident on the ship and died." She stared at the upper edge of the painting. Frayed edges of canvas could be seen, almost glued to the wood with age. "But Goudstikker's not the point."

"What do you mean?" Billy asked.

She pointed to the canvas edging barely visible at the inner edge of the frame. "Most paintings this old get relined every fifty years or so-the original canvas is bonded to a newer blank canvas to give it strength. It's usually done with wax or resin. This is different. The canvas with the ship painting is a mask, a ghost image put over the original wood panel."

"You think there's something underneath?" Sir James said.

"The n.a.z.i label probably dates from 1940. The Goudstikker label is much older. I think somebody took an old Rembrandt copy and stuck it on the wood panel to hide the ident.i.ty of the original painting from Goering's people."

"How can you be sure?" Billy asked.

"I know a man at the Courtauld who can help us."

"Today?" queried Tulkinghorn.

"Why the sudden urgency?"

"The Amsterdam house," explained Tulkinghorn. "What about it?" asked Billy.

"Mr. Boegart's instructions are quite clear, I'm afraid," the old man replied. "The house, like the other bequests, must be taken into possession personally and by both of you within fifteen days or the items will revert to the estate."

"The boat as well?" said Finn. "That means we have to go to Amsterdam and then Malaysia? All within two weeks?"

"Precisely, Miss Ryan." Sir James cleared his throat. "And the Batavia Queen is a ship, not a boat." "What's the difference?" Finn asked, suddenly Tulkinghorn's old-fashioned nitirritated with picking.

"The usual enough to carry its own boat," said Billy. "But this is all madness. Why on earth is Boegart doing it?" "At a guess, I should venture to say that he is trying to tell you something," offered Tulkinghorn. "He's trying to get us to follow in his footsteps," Finn said.

definition is that a ship is big "But why?" Billy asked.