Frame Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 5) (9 page)

He flipped it open.

“Hello, Michael?”

“Yes?”

“This is Carol Walker.”

And with that, he knew his problem was solved.

CHAPTER SIX:
 
AN EASY JOB

The following day, at four PM, a cab dropped Carol Walker at O’Hare International Airport.

She made her way toward Concourse 2, looking for United Airlines.

The check-in lines were not bad.

She swiped her ticket, punched in the appropriate numbers, and moved toward Security.

She placed the backpack, which contained the painting she’d been given, wrapped in plain brown paper, on the conveyor belt, took off her shoes, took all objects from her pockets, stepped into the x-ray frame where she was patted down, searched, and searched again.

All this time, she watched as the backpack rolled on revolving metal bars into the hooded area where it was to be x-rayed.

Nothing was found in her bodily cavities. She took the plastic tray from its rollers, bent awkwardly to put on her shoes, somehow got the rest of herself together, and watched as the backpack as well as the painting it contained, slid into view.

She thought back.

Just this morning, quite early, Nina Bannister had taken her to the small regional airport at Bay St. Lucy.

Upon arrival in Chicago, she had called Michael

Several hours later, they had met beside the lake.

She could still remember the conversation:

“What do you want me to do?”

“I have a painting and a ticket for you to Graz, Austria. Your flight leaves today at five PM. You will be met at the airport and told what to do from there.”

“And how am I to get this painting on the plane in the first place?”

“Carry it in your backpack, which you will stash in the overhead compartment.”

“You want me to smuggle a priceless stolen painting in my backpack?”

He nodded.

“First rule:
 
never leave the painting. Be sure that it never leaves you.”

“All right, I understand. But––Michael––I’ve––I’ve not done anything like this before.”

“I know.”

“So why trust me with something this big?”

“Precisely because you have not done this before. No one knows you. You have absolutely no record of existing. Even the places you’ve taught would not remember you. The people who look for these things may be watching me…but they will not, cannot, watch any person such as you.”

“Do you think they’re watching you? Do you think they’re watching you now?”

“It’s my business,” he answered, “to make certain they are not.”

She could not find anything to say.

“I must be honest with you,” he went on, quietly, “whoever is looking for this painting, is an agent of the Jewish people. Such agents will not bother with paperwork. If they do find you…”

“I know. They will kidnap me.”

“Yes. You will disappear. But that isn’t going to happen.”

Before them were the lights of the park. They could see, in a circular glare of lights, people ice skating.

“So do you want to do this?”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

“What is the painting?”

“A Durer.”

“My God.”

A Durer.

And now, here she was, Carol Walker, international art smuggler.

She waited. People flowed around her like she was a rock in a stream. Several other attendants went on about the process of groping between people’s legs and pressing hands flat against women’s breasts. The people themselves, though, had entered a zone of non-suffering by dent of being somehow, for a time, non-human. They were not angry; they were not happy. They were neither joyous nor content nor displaying any emotion connected with life and vitality; between two points in their lives, they had become the “Airport-Dead:” not even personal abuse could return them to the ground, since they were, mentally, five miles in the air and moving faster than sound.

Thirty minutes later, she was boarding the plane to Frankfort.

As she attempted to put the backpack into the overhead compartment, the Durer fell out, ripping the paper covering so that the painting itself was visible. The stewardess rushed over.

“You have a pretty picture there.”

“Thank you.”

“What’s it called?”

“Rabbit.”

“Could I see it a little closer?”

Carol showed her the Durer.

“It’s so cute! Somehow it doesn’t look like most rabbits.”

“It’s by my brother, Durer Walker. See the name in the corner?”

“I see! Your brother has real talent!”

“Thank you.”

“You tell him to keep at it; he’ll be painting real rabbits soon. Now, can I get you anything?”

“No, that’ll be fine.”

And, stowing the painting in the overhead compartment, Carol Walker settled back to fly to Europe.

Frankfurt Airport was no more of a problem than O’Hare had been. There were somewhat longer lines, but that did not bother her. She finally handed a bored woman her passport, and allowed two agents to look at her backpack.

Each of them regarded the painting with the same contempt with which they regarded her.

Then she changed planes and took off for Graz.

By late afternoon, she was in the city center, being dropped at the Main Square, or Hauptplatz, by a cab.

She got out of the vehicle, made her way through a crowd of people for a few steps, stopped, and breathed.

She had never been to Graz before.

It was a lovely place.

Red tiled roofs, a ring of mountains around the city...

And the hotel behind her came right from the nineteenth century.

She checked in and went up to her room.

Again, from another time. Great goose down comforters lay upon the beds, and wall-length windows let in the light of the sun, which was setting over city hall.

Situated directly under the window was an ebony desk, massive, incorruptible, and as subtly decorated with gold trim as an Austrian General’s tomb might have been decorated with rank and insignia. The drawer slid open as though it had been permanently oiled, revealing a thick envelope and black ball point pens that had the weight and solemnity––not of utensils––but of artifacts.

She took the Durer out of her backpack and propped it against the desk.

Then she opened the envelope.

Sure enough:
 
a cashier’s check for twenty thousand dollars.

She caught her breath.

It can’t be this easy
, she found herself thinking.

And, in thinking this, she was entirely correct.

END OF PART ONE

CHAPTER SEVEN:
 
FRAME CHANGE

It was a big Friday night for New Orleans, an even bigger one for the French Quarter, and a bigger one still for Bourbon Street. LSU was playing Alabama the following day at three PM. That game was to be played in Baton Rouge, of course, but a distance of ninety or so miles meant nothing to ardent fans of: (A) big time SEC college football, (B) drinking, and (C) sex. (Well, all right, it wasn’t
real
sex, since prostitution had been practically nonexistent in the Quarter for decades. But it was good
fake
sex, with pictures of naked or near naked women flashing in garish lights above all the bars, and naked or near naked women dancing on makeshift stages down inside the bars.)

Everyone pretended they were genuinely sinning, and they could all go back to Ruston or Opelousas or Tuscaloosa the following week feeling proud of their debauchery without actually having to pay for it in the afterlife, since they hadn’t really done any of it in the current life.

And not only that, the Saints were in town to play the hated Dallas Cowboys on Sunday.

It was, in short, the kind of weekend the Quarter lived for.

By eleven PM, Bourbon Street was a sea of people, all shouting, all drinking, all being carried along like a brackish and slow-winding river which was running either toward or away from Canal Street, depending on celestial forces unknown to anyone being moved by them.

Michael Gellert blended into the scene.

He was a bit smaller than the football and sex fans who surrounded him on both sides, but he had learned over the years how to blend in with all environments, and he was doing so now.

As was the man walking beside him––Beckmeier, his employer. The man seemed out of place in New Orleans, but he was a man of strange habits, most of them unknown to the people who worked for him, as Michael Gellert did. He had, of course, appeared out of nowhere, just as he always seemed to appear out of nowhere, just as he had appeared some months ago near midnight on the far side of the dark and deserted Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

The man who was now saying, in that raspy voice that seemed always to be produced by vocal chords that had been burned by acid:

“Something has happened. You need to change your way of doing business.”

Horns were everywhere around them: car horns, horns that resembled musical instruments, and devils’ horns that seemed to sprout from the foreheads of florid and beefy men who were awaiting either hangovers or heart attacks, and not caring, at this point in the evening, which came first.

“What are you talking about?”

“The Red Claw.”

“It exists?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“I employ people other than yourself to move paintings.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Last night I received, in the mail, a note. The note mentioned the name of one of these operatives, and said that I would not be hearing from her again. Nor would anyone else. It said that she’d been—well, ‘taken.’ The note went on to say, ‘I have the painting that the operative was carrying. Thank you. Now I want the rest of them.’ The note was signed, ‘Lorca Reklaw.’”

“Where did he intercept the courier?”

“Montreal International Airport.”

“And the courier’s identity?”

“Is not something that should concern you.”

“So what do you plan to do about this Reklaw?”

“I have several men in my employ. I pay them well to guard my estate in southern Austria, and the things that are in it. I like to think of it as a private museum, meant for the enjoyment of a few special people. No authorities have ever bothered me in connection with the pieces I possess and display. If they did, I would show them all appropriate papers, proving that I own the works.”

“Of course.”

“If this man Reklaw or any of his agents comes near my property—well, let us just say that I and my people would be ready, and would know what to do.”

“I see.”

“Nor do I intend to stop collecting. The paintings have been located and paid for. I want them brought to me, ‘Red Claw’ be damned.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Be more careful. Avoid airports. Disguise the paintings.”

“How the hell am I supposed to…”

“I don’t care. That’s what I pay you for—just do it!”

And, so saying, Beckmeier was gone.
          

By the twentieth day of October, fall had begun to arrive in Bay St. Lucy. The air was still somewhat warm, of course. But the sea breeze had freshened, the light had changed and become golden, and the sky, more brittle somehow, had deepened its shade of blue.

Nina and Carol were now settled into their routine.

Nina would work mornings at Elementals, while Carol stayed at the bungalow and cleaned up, or read, or submitted teaching applications for positions to begin at mid-semester.

Afternoons, the roles were switched, except that Nina took on the chore of buying dinner groceries.

And she painted.

It was remarkable, she found herself thinking, how therapeutic the hobby had become to her, especially when sweetened as it now was by her surrogate daughter, who praised her lavishly.

And it was about painting she was thinking at ten fifteen—about how skillful she might have become, and how much she might have added to her life had she started as a young girl and not an old woman—when the small bell tinkled on the front door of the shop and a slightly built, blond, young man stepped inside.

“Sorry—sorry to bother…”

There was an accent of some kind, perhaps central European, she wasn’t sure.

But, at any rate, she stepped out from behind the huge potted fern she’d been watering and announced:

“No bother! Please, please, come in! Welcome to Elementals:
 
Treasures from the Earth and Sea!”

The man smiled uncertainly, took two steps inside, and allowed his head to swivel around.

“What a lovely store!”

‘Thank you!”

“You have wonderful paintings here!”

‘We like them!”

“By local artists, I assume?”

“Most of them, yes. Some from New Orleans or Vicksburg or Jackson. We sell them on consignment. Please, feel free to look around,”

He did so, walking slowly, nodding in approval as he passed various pictures or pots or silverware displays.

“Yes, yes, all things of great quality.”

“Well, Bay St. Lucy is an artists’ village.”

“So I see.”

“You’re new in town?”

“Just drove in. I spent last night in—where was it?—Starkville, I think.”

“And you’ve driven down from?”

“Chicago.”

“Aha. Here. Please. Sit down, and have a cup of coffee!”

“You’re very gracious.”

“No, it’s no bother. We’re nothing here if not homey.”

He sat. She poured.

They smiled at each other across the small glass table.

“You’re a long way from Chicago. What do you do there?”

“Investment banking.”

“I see. Or rather I don’t. I’m an ex-school teacher myself. ‘Investment banking’—that’s an alien world to me. I’m not even sure what investment bankers do.”

“Neither are we!”

Obligatory mutual laughter.

“So you’re making a driving vacation along the gulf coast?”

He sipped the coffee and shook his head:

“No. No, actually, I’ve come to Bay St. Lucy for a very specific reason, and I’m hoping—actually I was told elsewhere in town—that you might be able to help me.”

“Me?”

“Yes. Are you Ms. Bannister? Ms. Nina Bannister?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Do you know, then, Carol Walker?”

Nina was surprised and showed it.

“Yes! Yes, of course I do!”

The man across the table from her smiled:

“It is she that I’ve come to see.”

“You are…”

“A very old friend. Well. Perhaps not so very old as all that. But a friend of some years’ standing. Let me explain: Carol was teaching at a community college south of Chicago. College of DuPage. As it happened, we were both living in a small town near the campus. I was commuting each day into the city. And so, somehow, we found ourselves at a coffee shop one day—Starbucks, I guess—and started chatting. One thing led to another and we became—well, quite close. We remained that way up until last year when she began her duties as docent at the museum. We had talked about marriage, but…well, you know, those things don’t always work out.”

“Of course.”

“I think Carol will always be a farm girl.”

“From Georgia.”

He smiled and nodded:

‘Ah, yes, you have come to know her well, I see. At any rate, I think her ultimate plans require her to return home and be with what is left of her family, live on the land.”

“Those were not your plans, Mr…”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Michael. You may simply call me Michael. The last name is—well, it’s complicated.”

“Very well, Michael.”

“At any rate, our engagement broke off.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“As I say, such things happen. The main point is that Carol has many friends in Chicago.”

“I’m sure she does.”

“We were all shocked to learn of her dismissal.”

“She was, too.”

“Of course, she was. She must have been. And the woman who fired her is such a––well, I can’t say what she is. I must ask, though:
 
how is Carol doing?”

“Very well. You probably heard in town, that she’s staying with me.”

“I did.”
 

He finished his coffee and asked:

“May I?”

“By all means,” said Nina, pouring another cup.

“This is excellent.”

“We southerners enjoy our coffee.”

“I can see.”

“So, Carol’s not expecting you?”

He shook his head:

“I must admit, no. And it’s shameful of me not to have called her. But––I have gifts in the car from several of her friends, all of whom miss her, and miss her very much. We all feel that we were perhaps not ‘there’ for her when she needed us. She’s a very quiet girl, as I’m sure you know.”