Dirty Fire (19 page)

“During
perestrokia
, many strides were made to remedy this matter. And perhaps you will recall that several years ago the government allowed many of our national treasures from The Hermitáge to be exhibited here in the United States as a goodwill gesture. This trend toward a more open sharing of our artistic heritage continues today under the Russian Federation. Very recently, in this very city, we have placed on display a collection of our Impressionist paintings—among them, may I point out, pieces that were confiscated as reparations—that is unexcelled in its comprehensive nature and value to art scholars.”

The tempest broke: Herndon snorted, loudly and derisively. “Ms. Valova, could you kindly cut the snow job? You know as well as I do that the Soviets—that is, your government, under whatever name you want to call it today—are in possession of a helluva lot of artwork you people looted at the end of World War II.”

Herndon walked to an empty chair near Santori and carefully lowered his frame into it. He made a show of crossing his long legs, and only then did he return his attention to the rest of the group.

“The Nazis were great art lovers, too,” Herndon said, his tone scathing. “As Ms. Valova no doubt knows, they planned to construct a number of cultural centers after they won the war. Like the Linz Gallery—right, Ms Valova? Never got built, but Hitler had already designated more than five thousand paintings for it, had some beautiful architect’s plans drawn up. Would have been a world-class place filled with world-class artwork the Nazis ‘rescued,’ too. Only difference was who the Nazis ‘rescued’ the art from.”

He made his voice mockingly conversational.

“There’s this guy I talk with every so often—name’s Ori Soltes. He heads up the National Jewish Museum in Washington,” the FBI agent said. “His museum’s made kind of a crusade out of searching for lost artwork taken by the Nazis. Like the Linz artwork, for instance. Ori says that they’ve confirmed that about twelve hundred of the paintings earmarked for Linz were confiscated outright from Jews who were sent to the camps. Most of the rest, they bought at a reasonable price. Really reasonable—fire sale rates, you might say. It was an unprecedented collection: priceless, in every way. Funny thing, though. After 1945, most of them just…” Herndon flicked his fingertips and his eyes opened wide in sarcastic amazement. “…vanished. I guess it was pure coincidence your troops were occupying the country at the time, right?”

Herndon re-crossed his long legs and leaned back in the undersized chair. His posture left no doubt of what he was feeling.

Valova eyed the FBI agent from under brows that were arched in derision.

“Your…passion is admirable, Mr. Herndon,” she said. “But may I point out that the problem is not one encountered only in Russia. Do not your museums themselves possess so-called ‘stolen’ artwork? Are not many of the 16th-century religious drawings of Albrecht Durer, which the Nazis stole in 1941 from the Lybmomirski Museum in The Ukraine, still in your American museums? In your Cleveland Museum of Art, your Boston Museum of Fine Arts—even here, in your Art Institute of Chicago, no?

“Please correct if I am mistaken. At least some of these museums are contesting claims of the previous owners on the grounds of your ‘statute of limitations’ laws, I believe—that too much time has passed since the so-called ‘crime’ occurred. The same amount of time has passed for us; where is the difference, please?”

Herndon showed no signs of being impressed by the Russian curator’s arguments.

“One hell of a difference is in the sheer volume of what your people stole,” he retorted. “Then there’s the fact you continue to hide most of it and deny you know anything about it.”

“That is untrue,” Valova protested. “Our exhibition at The Hérmitage in 1995—”

“Only included a fraction of the ‘missing’ artwork,” Herndon interrupted rudely. “Most of it pieces your own dissidents had already leaked to the Western press. You people have never given us anything we didn’t already know. But we know enough not to swallow some fairy tale about your government’s good intentions.”

He addressed the room again. “Let me just add something Ms. Valova neglected to mention regarding that monastery in Zagorsk. It’s the largest single storage location in Russia for artwork they…uh, appropriated. It’s still considered a ‘secret’ location—am I right, Ms. Valova? And it doesn’t just hold paintings and statues they took from the Nazis, as she might like you to believe. They have items that came from French, Polish and Austrian museums and private collections.”

“My point,” Valova said, “is that ownership is a very complicated issue to—”

“Not always,” Herndon interrupted. “For instance, some of those pieces you’ve stashed in Zagorsk came via guys like Eichman, who made a little habit of expropriating anything of value from the Jews he rounded up for the death camps. I have in mind pieces like
Fisherman At Rest
—that’s the famous ‘lost’ Donatello, right, Ms. Valova? It came from the collection of Ibrihim Fehyman, appropriated about the time he and the other Warsaw Jews were taken away to be gassed. How about
David Espies Bathsheeba
by Artemisia Gentileschi? I’ve heard scholars say it would be an icon of today’s feminist movement—if it hadn’t been ‘lost’ after Emil Tassilmann fled France to avoid a Nazi arrest warrant. His collection was shipped to Germany and then reported captured by your troops. And there’s
The Fire Of The Soul
, painted for Pope Julius by Michelangelo. Last known owner was Jakub Weissman, beaten to death at Theresienstadt. Nobody’s seen any of those pieces since the end of World War II.”

He turned back to the Russian art expert. “Or have they? That’s really the point you’re leading up to, isn’t it?”

For a moment, Petra Valova tried to match his hard-eyed glare. Then she blinked rapidly several times, and her eyes refocused on a point on the wall above and behind Herndon’s head.

“In part,” she said, and hesitated. I watched her compose herself with an effort that was almost physical. “In point of fact, I am authorized to tell you that the three pieces you describe are listed among those kept in Zagorsk.”

Herndon straightened, and his eyes flared with a triumphant flash that was extinguished by Valova’s next words.

“They, and six other pieces with a similar history, are no longer there,” she said. “As best we can determine, they have been missing for at least six months.”

It is a fact of the human condition that as mortals we are subject to what the Greeks call
hubris
. Roughly translated, it means an overweening pride—a frequently fatal flaw that blinds us to our own peril. The hunter is stalked, the biter bitten. Few of us ever consider the reality that we are not in control—that someone else, a little more paranoid or maybe a little less sane, has turned the tables on us.

Case in point: Ron Santori, who took great pride in his ability to monitor events, even to the point of having microphones hidden in a barroom frequented by those he stalked. In his own hubris, Santori never considered the possibility that someone else—a former policeman, perhaps, his nerves ragged and possessed of his own sense of impending doom—might secret a voice activated tape recorder under the seat of Santori’s vehicle to be recovered later.

As I had, after Santori had picked me up at my apartment.

• • •

Ron Santori was at the wheel of his car, expertly matching the southbound flow of the sparse traffic around him. Dawn was only an hour or so away, and its faint preliminaries were already giving Lake Michigan a hint of false shoreline at its far horizon. The traffic lights were in their early morning cycle, blinking red for traffic from the cross streets and yellow for those, like Santori, on Michigan Avenue.

In his rearview mirror, Santori saw the cab carrying me north through the city and Near North suburbs toward Lake Tower. The delegation of Russians had remained in the suite, and Santori sincerely hoped they would stay up there indefinitely. Despite the intensity of Charlie Herndon’s all-too-obvious excitement, international intrigue—especially as it related to missing masterpieces, Nazis and Russian duplicity—was a complication his Operation Centurion could do without.

“Well,” Santori said to Herndon, “you seem to have lit a fire under some major-league players. Hope you’re ready for the consequences.”

Even with the car seat set in its furthest-back position, Santori’s government-issued car was tight quarters for the oversized art expert. He grunted, studying the pages of a legal pad covered with his untidy handwriting. His knees—uncomfortably close to his chin—served as a makeshift desk.

“You saw the files,” he told Santori. “You knew Levinstein had involved his pet Russians here to bring in something from the Soviet Union”—Santori decided not to correct Herndon’s out-of-date geopolitics—“and it was only logical to figure he’d use his old contacts there, too. Throw in the missing artwork, and it all starts to fit together.”

“You think Levinstein has—had—paintings from the Nazi loot,” Santori said, eyeing the traffic. “And these Russians—they’re looking for our help?”

“If you believe they told us everything,” Herndon said. “I don’t. Valova comes halfway around the world because I’m sending e-mails about missing paintings? Then neither she nor that slick bastard Tarinkoff asks us if
we
have them?” He shook his head skeptically. “Uh-uh. I don’t trust them—any of them. I think she knows where they are, or at least thinks she knows.”

“Now you’re starting to sound like a fruitcake,” Santori retorted. “Just like our poor paranoid pal Davey.”

Herndon looked at his companion.

“And, speaking of your friend, I suppose you noticed?”

“Yeah,” Santori said. “Right hip. Haven’t seen him carrying before tonight.” The FBI agent was silent for a moment. “He’s starting to lose a little stuffing at the seams, Charlie. We’re going to have to keep that in mind from now on. He called me earlier—wanted to know if we’re having him tailed.”

“He called you to ask
that
? Does he keep his brains in his ass?”

“Oh, he’s
smart
,” Santori said. “He’s got some kind of guilt complex because his dad was a crook, but he’s no dummy. The trouble is he’s just not as smart as he thinks. He likes to freelance, to force the play. He’s an impetuous sort of guy, Charlie. That’s why I brought him into this. When the temperature goes up, Davey forgets about being smart and pushes too hard. That’s what got him in trouble before, and it’s what he’ll do this time, too.”

Santori’s voice was philosophical. “He’s so focused on Nederlander that he can’t see the bigger picture. But he’ll push in ways we can’t. Davey will create the kind of pressure that stampedes our guy into a mistake.” Santori’s lip twisted wryly. “That is, if Davey doesn’t do something to self-destruct first. His character fault makes him his own worst enemy.”

“Bullshit, Ron,” Herndon said, and the tape clearly captured the distaste in his tone. “Hell—given everything he’s had piled on his head, he’s reacting exactly the way I would. Or you.”

Santori might have smiled; it was there and gone so quickly that Herndon could not be certain.

“Well,” Santori said, without taking his eyes from the traffic, “we’re probably not as smart as we think, either.”

Virgil Erlich chewed ferociously at the gum he had just popped into his mouth and remembered how good a cigarette tasted before an action began. The memory did not improve his temper.

“Do I need to remind you two whose party this is?”

“Yeah, Lieutenant, we remember,” Mel said sourly. He looked at Terry, sitting beside him in the back seat of Erlich’s Sheriff’s Police vehicle, and rolled his eyes. “We’re just along for the ride.”

“You’re along out of professional courtesy,” Erlich said, and his tone brooked no discussion. “You’re out of your jurisdiction. If there’s a collar here, it’s a
county
collar. Are we clear about this?”

He made a point of waiting until both Lake Tower officers had nodded, albeit grudgingly in Bird’s case. Then the Cook County detective pulled a handheld transceiver from inside the leather jacket he wore.

He keyed the transmit button.

“Central, this is Erlich. I’m gonna be out of service for a few minutes.”

• • •

The way the reports read later made no reference to the noises of the night, the nocturnal background ambiance that is noticed mainly when its absence signals danger. Neither was there a description of what, if anything, was said as the three officers entered the building. If a suspicious vehicle had been parked along the curb, they did not notice it; if a figure watched their approach from behind a darkened window, it did not register.

From the official incident report, there was nothing unusual noted about the building: nothing to raise suspicion, no reason to hold back or call for additional support in the post-midnight darkness.

Later, I would pore over the official record again and again, trying to determine if there was any intimation of the peril that awaited them inside, or if one of them had any premonition that it all was about to go wrong.

Erlich, with Bird and Posson in tow, slipped into the foyer of the three-flat. There, Erlich studied the lock on the inside door before producing a thin piece of flexible flatmetal. This he inserted into the jamb where the lockset met the frame, working by feel alone to finesse the slim-jim between striker and bolt.

The spring-loaded bolt snapped back with a satisfying metallic snick, and Erlich turned to wink at Posson and Bird.

“Benefits of a misspent youth,” he murmured, and held the door wide.

The trio eased through to the stairway passage and crept upward, stepping close where each riser met the wall to minimize unwanted noise. On the landing immediately below Sonnenberg’s apartment, they eased their weapons from concealed holsters before tiptoeing up the final stairs.

It was anticlimatic. The door to Sonnenberg’s place hung open, the room behind it empty and dark.

Still they entered cautiously, moving in practiced drill through each of the three small rooms inside. In the beam of Erlich’s pocket flashlight, they saw a thin patina of undisturbed dust on the lamps and tables. Despite the open door, there was no sign that the apartment had been visited in weeks.

Finally, the three of them stood again in the darkness of the front room, framed by the still-ajar door.

“Well, this is a waste of time,” Erlich said, lowering his pistol. “A damn wild-goose—”

There was movement from across the hallway as the door to the other apartment abruptly opened. Then the darkness flared blindingly white, as if a photographer’s strobe had been triggered.

Erlich spun and fell back against Terry, clutching at her arm and shoulder with an iron grip. It hurt, and she tried to push him away with the hand not holding her own pistol. But he clung to her with a desperate strength, and the sudden deadweight of his body dragged them both down, hard.

Terry hit the floor painfully, her head striking something solid on the way down. Her pistol bounded from her hand, clattering away in the dark. She lay flat on her back under an immovable weight, pinpoints of white-hot comets spinning crazily across her vision.

Simultaneously, another double flash and concussive explosion came from the hallway outside, countered by a volley from within.

Terry felt something hot pulse wetly against her jaw, again and again. She opened her mouth to shout, to scream at Erlich to get off her; as she did, the metallic taste of fresh copper pennies flooded her mouth.

For a single panicked moment, she knew that the torrent of blood was hers, that she was bleeding out from some horrendous pumping wound high on her neck. She tried to reach up with her left hand to find the severed artery, to somehow stopper it with her fingers. But she could not free her arm, pinned underneath Erlich’s now-inert body.

Then there was another gunshot flash, a double tap, and in the blue-white light of it she saw the terrible wound that had torn away the side of Erlich’s throat.

She twisted frantically, trying to free herself. Then a fresh fusillade of gunshots erupted from both in front and behind her, and the stroboscopic supernova provided an irregular-spaced, surreal illumination.

At the wall beside the door, she saw Mel Bird kneeling, his upper body bent around the jamb and both arms extended in a shooting stance. Then Bird was looking at her, his face contorted and his mouth moving as if in speech.

There were more flashes now, each stark in her vision as bolts of forked summer lightning; but she no longer heard the discharges that generated them, nor the words that her partner must have been shouting to her. The world had become a silent film, moving in a jerky, slow-motion parody of reality.

Terry saw a hand that might have been her own, the one that had held her lost pistol, push futilely at the leather-jacketed weight that held her down; it was no use. She looked up to see her partner moving to help, impossibly slow, and reached up toward him and safety.

Instead, the doorframe against which Bird had been leaning erupted into splinters, exploding once, twice. The third shot was into flesh, high on Mel Bird’s upper body—a shuddering impact that threw his body back into the hallway out of Terry’s sight.

But not before the shock of the bullet had flung Mel’s gun arm against the wall, knocking his heavy automatic loose from his grip. The pistol careened against the plaster and landed, spinning, on the hardwood inches from Terry’s outstretched arm. She stared at it for what seemed like an eternity, then strained the extra inch required for her fingertips to brush the weapon into reach.

Terry snatched up Bird’s pistol in a hand whose tremors she could not control. Then there was movement, two figures silhouetted against the window behind moving forward in a wary half crouch.

Terry twisted one last time, enough to center the luminous three-dot sight of Bird’s pistol on the foremost of the two figures. She fired, and in the recoil felt the slide lock back on an empty magazine. For an instant the muzzle flash dazzled her vision. She could not tell if her target had fallen, or what the second figure had—

The pistol flew from her hands even before she felt the pain of the kick that smashed against her wrist.

And then a man was standing over her. Terry could not see him clearly; all she could see was the impossibly large bore of the revolver he held, arm extended downward so that the muzzle was only inches from her forehead.

“My friend seems to have been wounded,” a voice from above said cheerfully; for the first time, Terry heard a low moaning from behind him. “You shoot well. That, or you are quite lucky. Let us see.”

She heard the double click as he thumbed back the hammer an instant before he pulled the trigger.

Instead of the explosion Terry expected, there was only the snap of a firing pin on an empty chamber.

“As I thought, fortune has smiled on you,” he said, and she heard the slight accent of his words. “But in the future, be advised: luck is a fickle mistress.”

Before she could react, the dark figure kicked her again, this time viciously alongside her temple. Her world went black as suddenly as a lightbulb is extinguished.

She did not see him study her, almost fondly, before he stepped nimbly over her pinned form and was away through the doorway.

• • •

I flipped through the faxed pages that had just been hand-delivered from the police department across the hall. Quickly, I scanned them.

“Gil, we got an NCIC hit on the second guy—the one Terry shot,” I said. “His name is Vladimir Kolchenk. It’s the guy Sam Lichtman was talking about. He’s got a rap sheet a yard long, and that’s just what we know about in
this
country. There’s a notation that he’s suspected of involvement in overseas organized crime.”

I read further; the National Crime Information Center’s conclusion was clear.

“Gil, he’s Russian Mafiya. We need to sweat him about all this and about the other one. The one Sam Lichtman called Mikhail.”

Cieloczki was silent for a moment, and I could hear the murmur of voices talking in the background.

“Davey, we’ve got all we’re going to get out of Kolchenk. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Shock and loss of blood.”

“Damn.”

I could almost hear Cieloczki thinking. “Look, we’ve got to find out how all this fits together. Call Santori again, tell him what we have. Let’s get some federal support on this. Whatever we can pull together, let’s do it, now.”

“Gil, I want to take this outside,” I said. “Some of it, at least. All of a sudden, we’re knee-deep in Russians on this case. And remember, Levinstein had a history with them on the Jewish emigration issue. There are people, experts, who might have a better handle on the Mafiya angle—give us a new direction to start looking, maybe. I could make a couple of calls.”

“Make the calls,” Cieloczki said, and his voice was grim. “We need answers. I want them before anybody else gets killed. What else do you suggest?”

“We need to find Sonnenberg fast,” I said. “Vladmir Kolchenk and this Mikhail thought they hit a dead end on finding the painting. But they had seen Sonny creep the Levinstein house and come out empty-handed. By now, Mikhail knows he wasn’t just some unlucky break-in artist. Sonny may be all any of us have as a lead on the missing artwork.”