Hemlock Bay (33 page)

“So are we,” Lily said. “Why did they want to kill us so badly, Mr. Jorgenson?”

“Well, you see, it was my intention to let the Frasiers deal with you. I understand they bungled the job several times, for which I am now grateful. I hadn’t realized what you looked like, Lily. When Ian showed me your picture, I ordered the Frasiers to stay away from you. I sent Alpo and Nikki to California to fetch you back to me. They were clumsy also, but it turned out not to matter because you, my dear, are here at last.”

Lily said slowly, “I don’t look like anyone special. I’m just myself.” But she knew she must look like someone who mattered to him, and so she waited, holding her breath, keeping still as his fingers stroked her arm, up to her shoulder. She saw that his nails were dark and unhealthy-looking.

The old man said finally, “You look exactly like Sarah Jameson when I first met her in Paris a very long time ago, before the Great War, when the artistic community in Paris broke free and flourished. Ah yes, we enraged the staid French bourgeoisie with our endless and outrageous play, our limitless daring and debauchery. I remember the hours we spent with Gertrude Stein. Ah, what an intelligence that one had, her wit sharper than Nikki’s favorite knife, and such noble and impossible ideas. And there was the clever and cruel Picasso—he painted her, worshiped her. And Matisse, so quiet until he drank absinthe, and then he would sing the most obscene songs imaginable as he painted. I remember all the French neighbors cursing through the walls when he sang.

“I saw Hemingway wagering against Braque and Sherwood—it was a spitting contest at a cuspidor some eight feet away. Your grandmother kept moving the cuspidor. Ah, such laughter and brilliance. It was the most flamboyant, the most vivid time in all of history, all the major talent of the world in that one place. It was like a zoo with only the most beautiful, the wildest and most dangerous specimens congregated together. They gave the world the greatest art ever known.”

“I didn’t know you were a writer or an artist,” Simon said.

“I’m neither, unfortunately, but I did try to paint, studied countless hours with great masters and wasted many canvases. So many of my young friends wanted to paint or to write. We were in Paris to worship the great ones, to see if perhaps their vision, their immense talent, would rub off, just a bit. Some of those old friends did become great; others returned to their homes to make furniture or sell stamps in a post office. Ah, but Sarah Jameson, she was the greatest of them all. Stein corresponded with her until her death right after World War Two.”

“How well did you know my grandmother, Mr. Jorgenson?”

Olaf Jorgenson’s soft voice was filled with shadows and faded memories that still fisted around his heart, memories he could still see clearly. “Sarah was a bit older than I, but so beautiful, so exquisitely talented, so utterly without restraint, as hot and wild as a sirocco blowing up from the Libyan desert. She loved vodka and opium, both as pure as she could get. The first time I saw her, another young artist, her lover, was painting her nude body, covering it with phalluses, all of them ejaculating.

“She was everything I wanted, and I grew to love her very much. But she met a man, a damned American who was simply visiting Paris, a businessman, ridiculous in his pale gray flannels, but she wanted him more than me. She left me, went back to America with him.”

“That was my grandfather, Emerson Elliott. She married him in the mid-1930s, in New York.”

“Yes, she left me. And I never saw her again. I began collecting her paintings during the fifties. It wasn’t well known for some time that she’d willed paintings to her grandchildren, such a private family matter. Yes, she willed eight beautiful paintings to each child. I knew I wanted them all for my collection. You are the first; it is unfortunate, but we managed to gain only four of the originals before the Frasiers became convinced that you were going to leave their son, despite the drugs they were feeding you. They knew you’d take the paintings with you, so they decided to kill you, particularly since your husband was your beneficiary after your daughter’s death.”

“But I didn’t die.”

“No, you did not, but not for their lack of trying.”

“You’re telling me that my husband was not part of this plot?”

“No, Tennyson Frasier was their pawn. His parents’ great hopes for him were dashed, but he did manage to make you his wife. It’s possible he even fell in love with you, at least enough to marry you, as his parents wished.”

She’d been so certain that Tennyson had been part of the plot. She asked, “Why didn’t you just offer me money?”

“I knew you would turn me down, as would your siblings. You were the most vulnerable, particularly after your divorce from Jack Crane, and so I selected you.”

“That’s crazy. You invent this convoluted plan just to bilk me out of my grandmother’s paintings?”

“Sarah’s paintings belong with me, for I am the only one who can really appreciate them, know them beyond their visual message and impact, because I knew her, you see, knew her to her soul. She would talk to me about her work, what each one meant to her, what she was thinking when she was painting each one. I fed her opium, and we talked for hours. I never tired of watching her paint, of listening to her voice. She was the only woman I ever wanted in my life, the only one.” He paused for a moment, frowning, and she saw pain etched into the deep wrinkles in his face. From the loss of her grandmother or from illness?

He said, his voice once again brisk, “Yes, Lily, I selected you because you were the most vulnerable, the most easily manipulated. Most important, you were alone. When you moved to Hemlock Bay, I had Ian approach the Frasiers. Tell them, Ian.”

“I played matchmaker,” Ian Jorgenson said and laughed. “It was infinitely satisfying when it all came together. I bought the Frasiers—simple as that. You married Tennyson, just as we planned, and his parents told him to convince you to have your Sarah Elliott paintings moved from Chicago to the Eureka Art Museum. And there our greedy Mr. Monk quickly fell in with our plans.”

Simon said to the old man, “You managed to have four of them forged before I got wind of it.”

Those brilliant blue eyes swung to Simon, but he sensed that the old man couldn’t see him all that clearly. “You meddled, Mr. Russo. You were the one who brought us down. You found out through your sources, all that valuable information sold to them by an expatriate friend of mine who betrayed me, and then it was sold to you. But that is not your concern. If she had not betrayed me, then I would have all your paintings now, and you, Lily, would be dead. I am not certain that would have been best.”

“But now you’ll never get the other four,” Lily said. “They’re out of your reach. You won’t be hanging onto those you do have very long. Surely you know that.”

“You think not, my dear?” The old man laughed, then said, still wheezing, “Come, I have something to show you.”

Three long corridors and five minutes later, Lily and Simon stood motionless in a climate-controlled room, staring at fourteen-foot-high walls that were covered with Sarah Elliott paintings. The collection held at least a hundred fifty paintings, maybe more.

Simon said as he stared at the paintings, slowly taking in their magnificence, “You couldn’t have bought this many Sarah Elliott paintings legally. You must have looted the museums of the world.”

“When necessary. Not all that difficult, most of them. Imagination and perseverance. It’s taken me years, but I am a patient man. Just look at the results.”

“And money,” Simon said.

“Naturally,” Ian Jorgenson said.

“But you can’t see them,” Lily said as she turned to look at Olaf Jorgenson. “You stole them because you have some sort of obsession with my grandmother, and you can’t even see them!”

“I could see them all very well until about five years ago. Even now, though, I can see the graceful sweeps of her brush, shadows and sprays of color, the movement in the air itself. Her gift is unparalleled. I know each one as if I had painted it myself. I know how the subjects feel, the texture of the expressions on their faces. I can touch my fingers to a sky and feel the warmth of the sun and the wind caressing my hand. I know all of them. They are old friends. I live inside them; I am a part of them and they of me. I have been collecting them for some thirty years now. Since I want all of them before I die, it was time to turn to you, Lily. If I’d only known at the beginning that you were so like my Sarah, I wouldn’t have allowed those fools to try to kill you. Because you are resourceful, you saved yourself. I am grateful for that.”

Lily looked down at the old man sitting in his wheelchair, a beautiful hand-knitted blue blanket covering his legs. He looked like a harmless old gentleman, in his pale blue cashmere sweater over a white silk shirt with a darker blue tie. She didn’t say anything. What was there to say, after all? It was crazy, all of it. And rather sad, she supposed, if one discounted the fact that he was perfectly willing to murder people who got in his way.

She looked at the walls filled with so many of her grandmother’s paintings. All of them perfectly hung, grouped by the period in which they were painted. She had never seen such beauty in one room before in her life. It was her grandmother’s work as she had never seen it.

She watched Simon walk slowly around the large room, studying each of the paintings, lightly touching his fingertips to some of them until he came to one that belonged to Lily. It was
The Swan Song,
Lily’s own favorite. The old man lying in the bed, that beatific smile on his face, the young girl staring at him.

Olaf said, “That was the first one of yours I had copied, my dear. It was always my favorite. I knew it was at the Chicago Institute of Art, but I couldn’t get to it. It was frustrating.”

Simon said, “So it was the first one you stole from the Eureka Museum.”

“Nothing so dramatic,” Ian Jorgenson said, coming forward. He laid his hand lightly on his father’s shoulder. “Mr. Monk, the curator, was quite willing to have the painting copied. He simply gave it to our artist, replacing it with a rather poor, quickly executed copy until the real copy was finished. Then they were simply switched. No one noticed, of course. You know, Mr. Russo, I had hopes for you, at least initially. You yourself own a Sarah Elliott painting. I had hoped to convince you to join me, perhaps even to sell me your painting in return for a generous price and my offer of a financially rewarding partnership in some of my business ventures.”

Ian looked toward Simon and his eyes narrowed, but when he spoke, his voice was perfectly pleasant. “My father realized you wouldn’t agree after Nikki and Alpo described your behavior on the long trip over here. You were in no way conciliatory, Mr. Russo. Actually, my father’s desire to make use of you in his organization was the only reason we bothered to bring you to Sweden. My father wanted to test you.”

“Give me a test,” Simon said. “Let’s just see what I would say.”

“Actually, I was going to ask you to give me your Sarah Elliott painting,
The Last Rites;
it is one I greatly admire. In exchange, I would offer you your life and a chance to prove your value to me.”

“I accept your offer, if, in return, you give Lily and me our freedom.”

“It is just as I feared,” Olaf said and sighed. He nodded to his son.

Ian looked at his hands, strong hands, and lightly buffed his fingernails on his cashmere sleeve. He said to Simon, “I look forward to killing you, Mr. Russo. I knew you could never be brought to our side, that you could never be trusted. You have interfered mightily.”

Simon said, “You had your chance to get
The Last Rites,
Mr. Jorgenson. Freedom for Lily and me, but you turned it down. Let me promise you that you will never get that painting. When I die, it goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

Olaf said, “I do detest making mistakes in a person’s character. It is a pity, Mr. Russo.”

Lily said to Ian, “Is it true that you have Rembrandt’s
Night Watch
aboard your yacht?”

Ian Jorgenson raised a blond brow. “My, my, Mr. Russo has many tentacles, doesn’t he? Yes, my dear, I had it gently removed from the Rijksmuseum some ten years ago. It was rather difficult, actually. It was a gift to my wife, who died later that year. She was so pleased to look at it in her last days.”

The old man laughed, then coughed. Nikki handed him a handkerchief, and he coughed into it. Lily thought she saw blood.

Ian said, “As my father said, the Chicago Institute of Art is a difficult place, more difficult than even I wished to deal with. In the past ten years they’ve added many security measures that make removal of art pieces very challenging. But most important, my only contact, a curator there, lost his job five years ago. It was a pity. I didn’t know what to do until you moved to that ridiculous little town on the coast of California. This Hemlock Bay.”

Olaf said, “My son and I spent many hours coming up with the right plan for you, Lily. Ian traveled to California, to Hemlock Bay. What a quaint and clever name. It was such a simple little town, generous and friendly to newcomers, such as you and your daughter, was it not? He liked the fresh salt air, the serenity of the endless stretches of beach and forest, the magnificent redwoods, and all those clever little roads and houses blended into the landscape. Who could imagine it would be so simple to find such perfect tools? The Frasiers—greedy, ambitious people—and here they had a son who would be perfect for you.”

“Did they murder my daughter?”

“You think the Frasiers killed
your daughter?” Ian Jorgenson repeated, his voice indifferent. He shrugged. “Not that I know of.” Lily suddenly hated him.

Olaf said, “I know you felt sorrow over your daughter’s death. But what does it matter to you now who is responsible?”

“Whoever struck her down deserves to die for it.”

“Killing them won’t bring back your little girl,” Ian said, frowning at her. “We, in Sweden, actually in most of Europe, do not believe in putting people to death. It is barbaric.”