Rembrandt's Ghost Part 4

Finn looked at the ornately framed object on the table in front of them, still bearing the ugly emblem of its violent past and the name of a man long dead. "I think it starts with the painting,"

she answered. "And that means a trip to the Courtauld."

7.

Somerset House is a gigantic neocla.s.sical building a quarter mile long. Its original function in 1775 was to be larger, more imposing, and more important than any other so-called national building in the world. Its secondary function was to provide office s.p.a.ce for every government bureaucracy in England anyone could think of, from the tax department and the Naval Office down to the office of the King's Bargekeeper, the Public Lottery, and the office of Peddlers and Hawkers. Over the years the bureaucracies have come and gone, but the huge building always remains. It occupies a single enormous block of London real estate bounded by the Strand, Lancaster Place, Surrey Street, and the Victoria Embankment.

When it moved from its old quarters in Portman Square to the Somerset House North Wing on the Strand in 1989, the Courtauld Inst.i.tute of Art, with all its galleries, laboratories, lecture theaters, and libraries, barely made a ripple at its new home. Few people outside the rarified world of art history would have known the Courtauld even existed if it hadn't been for the less than ill.u.s.trious tenure of its onetime director and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, the infamous and disgraced KGB spy, Sir Anthony Blunt. The Courtauld, however, managed to survive the revelations about its former director's seedy past, and over the years it became one of the world's great postgraduate inst.i.tutions concerned with art in all its aspects.

Dr. Alpheus Duff Shneegarten, professor emeritus in the Department of Conservation at the Courtauld, was a very short, very round man in his eighties who might well have been the model for Tolkien's Hobbit. He had a large head that was ten percent snow-white hair, forty percent hooked patrician nose, and the rest of it jutting chin with an ancient curved briar stuck between large, nicotine-stained teeth and a pair of smiling lips. His intelligent eyes were sparkling blue, and he looked as though he was always on the verge of delivering the punch line of a particularly dirty joke. Shneegarten was invariably dressed in a decades-out-of-date gray Harris tweed three-piece suit no matter what the weather. On his overlarge feet, he wore ancient Birkenstock sandals. He had been born in Germany or Argentina, no one knew for sure which. According to Shneegarten he still lived in England using a student's visa.

He was, as he'd once told Finn: "Entirely unique. Search for Shneegarten on your Giggle or whatever you call it and you will find nothing. Nothing, I tell you! I am unique among men! There is only one Shneegarten and he is me!" The old man had been at the inst.i.tute since before the war and had been friend and adviser to all three founders, industrialist Samuel Courtauld, diplomat and collector Lord Lee of Fareham, and the art historian Sir Robert Witt.

Shneegarten had been a pioneer in the field of X-ray fluorescence and infrared a.n.a.lysis of paintings. Using these methods he had conceived of and created a database of artists' fingerprints that had saved more than one museum's curator from being fooled by clever forgeries.

Retired from active teaching long ago, Shneegarten now occupied a rabbit warren of lofty attic rooms on the top floor of the inst.i.tute, which was only accessible by climbing several sets of dusty staircases and one extremely rickety spiral one made out of cast iron that shivered and clanged as Finn Ryan and Billy Pilgrim climbed it. In one of these attic rooms they found the professor bent over an immense canvas that looked like some kind of Turkish or Moroccan street scene. Shneegarten was examining a tiny square of the painting with a jeweler's loupe screwed into the socket of his right eye and he was rubbing a cotton swab delicately over the area. There was a faint odor of ordinary soap.

It was late afternoon now and it had started raining again; drops pattering lightly on the large, soot-grimy skylight overhead. The illumination on the room was an almost magical silver that seemed to fill the atmosphere with a foreshadowing intensity. He stood up as Finn and Billy stepped into the workroom and popped the jeweler's loupe out of his eye.

"Ah," he said with a smile. "My American girlfriend!" He winked at Billy. "Believe me, sir, if I was only seventy years younger, I would sweep her off her feet and have my way with her! Depend on it!"

"And I'd probably let you," said Finn, smiling as she poked the man lightly in his round, protruding belly. He laughed uproariously and poked her back. She introduced Billy.

"Ah yes, the impoverished lord you mentioned.

I'm honored, Your Grace."

"William, or Billy if you'd like. Your Grace makes me sound like the Archbishop of Canterbury." Shneegarten smiled.

"What are you working on?" Finn asked. "A dirty Delacroix," the old man grunted wearily. "Another one of those dreadful things he painted in Tangier, people rioting, women with improbable b.r.e.a.s.t.s being raped in improbable positions, horses underfoot dying awful deaths. A terrible lot of meaningless activity and violence. The Quentin Tarantino of his day!" He nodded toward the package under Billy's arm. They'd wrapped it in Tulkinghorn's salmon-pink copy of the Financial Times and tied it up with twine.

"That is for me?" said Shneegarten.

"Yes," said Finn. Billy handed the package to the professor. He sliced the string with a scalpel, neatly took off the newspaper, laying it aside on the worktable, and looked at the painting. He nodded. "The frame is almost certainly Foggini as you said on the telephone." He screwed the loupe into his eye socket again and bent down.

"Brushstrokes are appropriate for Rembrandt's studio, although I would say the subject matter looks more like Jan van Leiden or Willem van der Velde. Just look at that sky! Those Dutch, they always painted the sky as though the world was about to end." He flipped the painting over and, using a small, stainless steel tool like a stiff putty knife, he popped the painting easily out of the frame. "Very odd," he muttered, his white eyebrows rising. "Canvas over a wood panel. I would say that the canvas is from the correct period, perhaps 1660 or so, but the tacks are much newer, definitely twentieth century."

"Contemporary with the Goudstikker Gallery label?" Finn asked.

"Undoubtedly. And also the n.a.z.i one. That label is from the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the ERR."

"What are you saying?" Billy asked.

"Look," Shneegarten said, pointing with one bony finger. "The tacks are bra.s.s, but in between you can see the small holes and stains from the original nails. You can also still see the marks where the original stretchers were placed. What it means is that this painting of the ship was probably painted sometime in the mid-seventeenth century, contemporary with Rembrandt certainly, but was taken out of its own frame in modern times and used to cover the wood panel beneath, which bears the ERR label and the Goudstikker label.

You can even see that the original painting was larger. This section has been cut to fit and the Rembrandt signature applied."

"Who would do a thing like that?" asked Billy. "Presumably it is as Finn suggested-to cover that which lies beneath from prying eyes." "Can you remove the canvas?" Finn asked. "Certainly," said Shneegarten. "The canvas wasn't glued. It was simply tacked onto the panel. Give me a moment." He picked up another tool, shaped like a flat-nosed pair of small pliers, and began easing out the tacks. When he was done he gently pulled back the canvas.

As Finn had expected there was another image on the board beneath the canvas. It showed a man in his middle years dressed as a Dutch burgher wearing a red velvet blouse and a plumed hat. He was standing beside a draped area that had a table set out in front of it covered with various exoticlooking seash.e.l.ls and several equally exotic bra.s.s nautical instruments including something that looked like an early version of a s.e.xtant. In one gloved hand he held a pale, calfskin-covered book and in the other an ornate, basket-hilt rapier. Light came in strongly through a very narrow stainedgla.s.s window on the far left. The image on the stained gla.s.s was a heraldic shield. The coat of arms showed a complex plumed helmet seated on a shield divided into a checked field of opposing black and yellow stripes on one set of opposed squares with Turkish crescents and French fleurs de-lis on the other set.

"That's the Boegart crest," said Billy, excited. There was a signature in the lower right-hand corner, done lightly in black. It was entirely different from the one on the canvas.

"The real signature of Rembrandt Van Rjin,"

announced the old man with a theatrical flourish of his hand.

"Is the painting genuine?" asked Finn. "Let me check," said Shneegarten. He shuffled across the room to a computer terminal on a very cluttered desk and began hitting keys. He talked while he tapped.

"Back in 1968 I was part of the Rembrandt Research Project, which was established through the Dutch government to a.s.sess the number of actual Rembrandts in existence. We were a team of experts from all over the world. As well as establishing the authenticity of the pictures we also, by definition, a.s.sembled a database of the paintings themselves." He hit a few more keys. "When you cross-index that data with the information in the Courtauld's own Provenance Research department of Holocaust-related works, you wind up with an exceptional fund of information." He paused, squinted, and tapped a final key. "Ah,"

he said finally, pleased with himself.

"Ah what?" Finn asked.

"The painting, very mysterious I think," murmured the old man, staring at his computer screen. "According to this, it is a portrait of Willem Van Boegart painted by Rembrandt in 1659, roughly in midcareer. The commission appears both in Rembrandt's records and those of Van Boegart, held in the family archive. Willem Van Boegart would have been thirty-seven at the time it was painted. It was never sold and remained with the original Van Boegart collection in Amsterdam until 1938 when it was stolen along with half a dozen other paintings. None of those paintings was ever recovered. The only reason we know of its existence at all is through a photograph for archival purposes taken by Jacques Goudstikker in 1937 at the request of the Boe gart family."

"Where is the photograph now?"

"There are two copies, one in the U.S. National Archives Holocaust Provenance and Doc.u.mentation Office in Washington, D.C. The other is in the Rijksmuseum Archives in Amsterdam."

"Jacques Goudstikker takes a photograph in 1937, the painting is stolen in 1938, and the picture, with another painting overtop, appears in Goudstikker's inventory in 1940?" Billy Pilgrim shook his head. "It's obviously no coincidence, but it doesn't make any sense, either."

"It does if they were all in on it-Goudstikker, the thieves, the Boegart family," said Finn. Shneegarten nodded. "A plausible theory. Both men were Jews. Both knew Hitler was coming and that his path would inevitably take him through the Netherlands. They all conspired to make the painting disappear before he got there." Billy scowled. "I still don't see it. Why that particular painting? And if it was meant to disappear, why does it have the n.a.z.i label?"

"That bears some investigation, I should think,"

said the old man, stroking his large chin with the stem of his old pipe. "You can leave the painting with me for a few days, yes?"

Finn looked across at her new friend. "Billy?" "I suppose so."

"Good!" Shneegarten said and jammed the pipe back in his mouth. He clapped Billy on the back.

"I'll get you some answers, my lord. Rest a.s.sured!

I am like the Canadian Mountie in his bright red jacket-the man I always get!"

8.

Finn and Billy left the old professor muttering over the painting and found their way down to the Strand entrance to Somerset House. It was raining even harder now and it was already dark. They stood under the great stone portico and stared bleakly out at the street. Like every other thoroughfare in London at that time of day, the Strand was jammed with traffic, the lights on the rooftops of lumbering, beetlelike black cabs winking like fireflies in the rain. Almost n.o.body was honking. This was England after all. A line of people, most of them with umbrellas, stood drearily by the taxi stand at the curb.

"It'll take us an hour at this time of day," groaned Billy.

"What about the Tube?"

"The closest station is Temple, on the Embankment," said Billy. "We'll be soaked by the time we get there. On a night like this, it'll smell of old socks."

"I don't think we've got much choice," answered Finn.

"You have no choice at all, Miss Ryan," a strange voice said behind her. Something hard prodded her in the small of the back. Startled she glanced back over her shoulder. She caught a brief glimpse of a well-dressed man, Asian, not Chinese, maybe one of the small East Asian countries. He held an umbrella in one hand and had a folded newspaper over his other arm. There might have been a roll of quarters in his hidden hand, but she didn't think so. With the brief look she saw there were two of them, one behind her, one behind Billy. The hands holding the umbrellas were encased in surgical gloves. Professionals.

"There is an automobile parked around the corner. A blue Audi. You will get into the car without any muss or fuss. If you give us any muss or fuss we will kill both of you. Jolly good?" The hard thing, presumably the barrel of a gun, prodded her in the back. She gave Billy a quick glance. He looked appropriately nervous but still in control. Together they went down the steps and turned right. The two men behind them made no polite allowance for the pedestrian traffic-they simply moved straight ahead using Finn and Billy like the prow of a ship. The people on the sidewalk moved obediently aside, heads bent, blinded by their umbrellas, concentrating on their own feet. Kidnapped in the middle of a crowd. If Billy and she got into the car, it was all over. This wasn't a simple mugging-this was something much worse. If the kidnappers had been waiting for Billy and Finn, it meant that they'd been followed, from Tulkinghorn's or maybe even before that.

Tumble. The word came to her out of nowhere. Miss Turner, her phys ed teacher at Northland, had called it that. Miss Turner, inventor of Turner's Torture Exercises. Miss Turner, who had fought a faint mustache and too much testosterone. Miss Turner, with more than a hint of Marine drill sergeant in her background. Never something s.e.xy like "gymnastics." Tumbling. Jackie Chan and how to take a fall.

There was another prod. Finn kept on walking. It was now or never because Finn knew without a doubt that if they climbed into the blue Audi, they were dead. Something grabbed at her-a coldness and anger. It was more than the fact that she'd been in this position once or twice before in her life: under the streets of New York, a hundred feet down in the Caribbean, in the jungles of the Yucata'n with her mother when she was a kid. This was different. This was something innate, something Miss Turner could never teach, only perhaps encourage. Something you were born with. Something diamond hard in her mind-a deadly preternatural calm.

"Jolly good," she said quietly, hoping Billy would understand. They were past the island in the middle of the road on their left that held the church of St. Mary Le Strand. A number 52 Waterloo bus went by, tires hissing on the slick gleaming asphalt of the roadway. There was a steel barrier between them and the street now, a line of newspaper boxes chained to it along with several bicycles. To their right was the closed and abandoned entrance to the Strand Underground Station, out of use for more than a decade.

They turned the corner on to Surrey Street. The traffic sounds abruptly faded. A few yards away, she saw the dark blue Audi pulled up onto the wide sidewalk beside the old Strand Station exit, a shadowy figure behind the wheel. The lights were off but the engine was running, exhaust wisping in the rain. Three against two. Twenty, perhaps thirty seconds and it would be too late. Her roving eyes found a low wrought-iron gate beside a door, a pair of neglected rubbish bins, and a little pile of builder's junk. G.o.d bless you, Miss Turner from Northland High School, wherever you are. Tumble.

"Jolly good!" yelled Finn at the top of her lungs. She went into a simple tuck and roll, her hand reaching out blindly, fumbling, grabbing the length of old narrow plumbing pipe. She came out of the somersault, facing back the way she'd come, and swept the pipe around as hard as she could, aiming for the knees. The pipe connected and she felt the shivering, wet crunch of impact run up her arm. The man screamed and dropped his newspaper and his umbrella. She saw that there really was a gun in the man's hand, a flat, chunkylooking automatic. Then chaos.

"Is do nach bhfuil seans ar bith ann!" screamed Billy, turning on his heel and bringing his booted foot up into the crotch of the man behind him. "Perite! Irrumator Mentula! s.p.a.culatum Tauri!" Finn was vaguely aware of the man in the Audi getting out of the car.

"This way!" she yelled, grabbing Billy by the arm. She took a few short steps, jammed the lead pipe into the chain around the steel grate covering the old station exit, and pulled hard. The corroded, rust-caked links snapped. She pulled the grate aside and raced into the station, Billy on her heels.

Amazingly there was light to see by; every second fluorescent bar in the ceiling of the old ticket hall was lit. There was a white-tiled entrance archway on the right and a sign: THIS WAY TO TRAINS. Once upon a time, there had been two large pa.s.senger elevators, but all that was left now was the emergency exit, a pirouette of iron steps fitted in a descending spiral, filling one of the paired elevator shafts. Oddly the lights were on here as well. They clattered downward, footsteps clanging loudly, echoing off the old brick. The air was thick and musty.

"Where the h.e.l.l are we going?" yelled Billy, a few steps above Finn.

"How should I know?" she yelled back.

There was another sound. High above them; steps on the staircase and then a whining roar. The stairwellaelevator shaft was suddenly filled with an earsplitting, roaring echo.

"They're firing at us!" Billy yelled. Another shot rang out, whirring and banging off the metal steps as it ricocheted past.

"Come on!" Finn hurtled down the seemingly endless steps, finally reaching the bottom. There was a narrow sloping tunnel, brightly lit, and then she erupted onto the old platform. She stopped dead in her tracks and felt Billy stumble to a stop, barging into her, pushing her farther out onto the platform and into a waiting crowd. Directly in front of them was a waiting train, doors open.

"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l," Billy whispered. There was a poster on the curving wall beside them. Three soldiers with rifles marching left to right and the message below: TAG DER WEHRMACHT 17 MARZ 1942.

KREIGSWINTERHILFSWERK.

There was also a large metal sign on the wall giving the station's name: PICCADILLY CIRCUS.

The crowd on the platform was made up of an a.s.sortment of men and women, all dressed in vintage clothing, some carrying rolled umbrellas, others with newspapers or parcels. There was also a sprinkling of men in uniform. German uniforms. A whistle blew loudly, answered by a second whistle from the head of the train. The crowd surged forward and a distinctly British voice called out: "Mind the gap, ladies and gents. Please, mind the gap! Mind the gap, mein herren! Auflachen der kluft bitte!"

"Definitely not Kansas," muttered Finn. She could hear echoing footsteps coming from the pa.s.sage behind them.

"What do we do?" said Billy.

"Get on the train."

They joined the crowd surging onto the train and found themselves pushed through the open doorway. There was a pause and then the doors slid closed and they began to move.

"This is insane," whispered Billy. Directly in front of them, hanging on to a strap, was a man wearing the soft cap and gray uniform of a sergeant in the n.a.z.i Landspoliezei, the regular police. He had a copy of Signal, the German version of Life magazine, under his arm. Above him was an advertis.e.m.e.nt for Dr. Carrot, guaranteed to bring you good health if you ate a lot of him. The Landspoliezei sergeant had a holstered Luger pistol on his hip. He looked bored.

"Did they get on?" asked Finn.

"I didn't see."

"Do you know where this train goes?"

"No, except that wasn't b.l.o.o.d.y Piccadilly back there." The German cop was definitely staring at them now, a worried expression on his face. He started to say something, then turned away. "This is giving me the collywobbles," Billy muttered. He looked away from the cop. There was another poster beside the Dr. Carrot advertisment. It was a stern black-and-white ill.u.s.tration of a strong man with shirtsleeves rolled up, a cap on his head, and a serious expression on his face. There was a ma.s.sive sledgehammer over his shoulder. He had muscles like a stevedore's. The message said something about helping the soldier on the front lines, which didn't make much sense because a man with muscles like that would have been on the front lines himself, unless he had some kind of heart condition, in which case he wouldn't have the sledgehammer over his shoulder. . . . He stopped himself; he was on the edge of losing it. Finn squeezed his hand. The train began to slow.

"We're not going far," said Finn.

"We're in trouble," Billy answered, nudging her. There was a crash as the door opened at the far end of the coach. The two Asians, minus their umbrellas, had turned into three. One of them was limping, pushing his way through the crowd of people. He looked extremely angry.

"c.r.a.p," said Finn. She threw herself forward into the arms of the n.a.z.i sergeant, reaching for his holstered Luger and pushing him out of the way in a single motion. The gun was far too light. It wasn't the real thing. She waved it in the general direction of their pursuers anyway and instinctively half the people in the car screamed and everyone ducked, including the three Asians. The train pulled into a brightly lit station. The sign said: LEICESTER SQUARE.

"No, it's not!" said Billy.

Finn threw the Luger down the length of the car as the doors slid open. She turned, put both hands on Billy's back, and pushed him out onto the platform.

"What the h.e.l.l!" A man wearing headphones jumped back, barely avoiding being run down. "Who let you on! Wardrobe! s.h.i.t! They've ruined the shot! Sean! Who the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l...?"

Finn still pushing Billy from behind, they skirted the camera setup, jumped over a set of narrow rails waiting for a dolly shot, and battered their way through a regulation swarm of camera people, lighting crew, grips, first, second, and third ADs, sound men, set dec, props, and a.s.sorted need-to-bes, want-to-bes, and think-theyalready-ares that make up a location shoot for a major motion picture. Predictably someone shouted out the cla.s.sic angry comment heard by anyone who has ever interfered with the making of a film, even if only for a moment, destroying their expensive and very fragile illusion.

"Hey! Can't you see we're making a movie here?" As though creating cinematic fantasy was more important than any possible reality that might stand in its silly way.

Billy knocked over a light stand and there was a sharp bang as a hot bulb exploded. Finn caught a glimpse of a placard announcing that they were on the set of the DreamWorks production of Len Deighton's novel SSGB, and then they were gone, sidestepping through a wide-open set of doors leading onto the actual Holborn Station platform and reaching the escalator. They took the moving steps two at a time, pushing past people riding to the surface, and finally found their way up to High Holborn. They were almost back to Tulkinghorn's and the British Museum. The rain had stopped. There was no sign of the men behind them. Without a pause Billy stepped off the curb and waved. A black cab came to a jarring halt. They climbed in and Finn slammed the door. As the cab moved off into traffic she looked back and saw their limping enemy and his friends come out of the station entrance. A moment longer and it would have been too late.

"Where we going, if you don't mind me askin'?" said the cabbie without turning around.

"Canvey Island," said Billy, settling back in the wide, comfortable seat.

"That's in bleeding Ess.e.x, mate!" the driver said, startled.

"I'll pay."

"Too right you'll pay," said the taxi driver. "Quite the distance. At least twenty miles."

"More like thirty," said Billy, sighing. The cabbie shrugged and slid the big car back into the stream of traffic. Ten minutes later they were on their way out of London, heading East along the Thames, making for the Channel.

"What was that before you started saying dirty things in Latin?"

"Something rude in Cornish as I recall," Billy said. "Something to do with goats and his mother's s.e.xual habits."

"What's on Canvey Island?" Finn asked.

"Home," answered Billy. "The Busted Flush."

9.

Ask the average person in Wichita Falls where Mariveles is, and you'll most likely get nothing but a blank stare, and for good reason: Mariveles has always been either in the middle of nowhere or at the gates of h.e.l.l, depending on your point of view. The small coastal town lies at the entrance to Manila Bay on the northwestern arm of a jungle peninsula. The harbor is a deep-water anchorage clinging to the base of an immense, forest-covered volcanic cone. This mountain is usually wreathed in flirtatious mists, occasionally giving a glimpse of the summit as it waits patiently for better times to come again, as they had a few years previously for the mountain's fiery brother, Mount Pinatubo, less than fifty miles away.

Historically Mariveles was once a resting point for ships entering the bay and the famous Chinese pirate Li Ma Hong reportedly stopped there for food and water before attacking Manila in 1575. Under Ferdinand Marcos the town became the center of something called an "economic zone," and the original fishing town was swept aside to make way for factories, docks, and official-looking government offices, most of which were now empty, and even a nuclear reactor, which they could never get to run. The grain terminal didn't quite work out and neither did the "plastic city" manufacturing polyethylene sheets. Given Imelda Marcos's infamous fetish, there was a certain irony in the fact that one of the few surviving factories manufactured Nike knockoffs. At the end of the day, if Mariveles was known for anything, it was as the place where the Bataan Death March began in 1942 and also as the place where the tennis b.a.l.l.s for Wimbledon are manufactured. Though it's supposedly a "first-cla.s.s" city of seventy-five thousand or so, the real population is almost twice that, mostly unemployed and mostly living in slums on the far western side of the harbor and well outside the boundaries of the "economic zone." It is a mixed-culture port town of immigrants fleeing even poorer places in the world and a place where hope is a commodity in shorter supply than jobs. The favorite recreation in Mariveles is the consumption of shabu, the Philippine version of methamphetamine, cooked up in enormous quant.i.ties in illegal, and violently explosive, drug microbreweries all over the hillside squatters' ghettoes.