Michelangelo's Notebook (14 page)

Heraldic banners hung around the room from a second-floor gallery running around three sides of the room, and there were four blue-black suits of armor, one in each corner. A bright red rug covered most of the floor and on it, facing each other were two large, tufted leather sofas in caramel brown. Between the sofas, resting on a large, splayed zebra skin was a square coffee table framed in teak and surfaced in squares of heavy beaten brass. There were end tables and side tables here and there loaded with photographs in silver frames and assorted small treasures from ornate gold cigarette boxes to at least three silver koummyas that Finn could see.

“I see you are enjoying my things,” said a voice from somewhere above them. “Please, enjoy yourself.” Finn looked up and saw the face of a heavily jowled man looking down at them from the gallery. The man disappeared and there was a low humming sound. A moment later the man appeared at the far end of the room. He was dressed in a very formal-looking Saville Row suit at least thirty years out of date. He had a full head of flat black hair that might have come out of a tin of shoe polish, Ronald Reagan-style, and his large blue eyes were washed out and pale. He had large liver spots on his gnarled hands and when he walked, he leaned heavily on a three-point cane. His right leg appeared to hitch a little as he moved and his left shoulder was fractionally higher than his right. Despite the black hair he appeared to be well into his eighties. Using his left hand, he gestured with the cane.

“Sit,” he said pleasantly, pointing at the brown leather couches. Finn and Valentine did as he asked. The old man chose a heavy-looking straight-backed wooden chair at right angles to them. The butler-bodyguard appeared carrying an antique silver coffee service. The man put it down and disappeared. “Edward Winslow,” said the old man. “People often mistake it for Paul Revere.” He took a gnarled briar pipe out of his jacket pocket and lit it with a World War Two-vintage, black, crackle-finish lighter. He snapped it shut with a practiced motion and blew out a cloud of apple-scented smoke.
One mystery solved,
Finn thought.

“Winslow was much earlier than Revere, though,” commented Valentine. “And better, in my opinion, especially his smaller pieces. Revere was like his politics, a little bit melodramatic.”

“You know something of silver?”

“And politics.” Valentine smiled. “Especially the melodramatic kind.”

“Who is your young and singularly pretty companion?”

“My name is Finn Ryan, Colonel. We’re here about the koummya you donated to Greyfriars.”

“The one that wound up being shoved down poor Alex Crawley’s throat, you mean?” The old man laughed. “Much as I would have enjoyed doing it, I seriously doubt that my arthritis would have allowed it, not to mention the stroke I had a year or so ago. I don’t get around the way I used to.”

“You knew Crawley?” asked Valentine.

“I knew him well enough to dislike him. He was what they refer to as a bean counter. Had no feel for the art he represented.”

“How did you know him?” Finn asked. “Through the museum or through Greyfriars?” The old man gave her a long, almost predatory look that made her skin crawl.

“Neither. Not that it’s any of your business. Look around you, Miss Ryan. Do I have your name right? I live for art. I purchase a great deal of it. When you buy art at the scale I do you often find yourself making purchases from deaccessioned works from places like the Parker-Hale.

They had a number of Dutch works—Dutch is what I collect.”

“Except for the Renoir,” Valentine commented, nodding toward the painting over the fireplace.

“Yes, I purchased that just toward the end of the war.”

“Oh.” Valentine let it hang. Gatty was a collector—a vulgar one, if the decor of his living room was anything to go by—and collectors loved to boast.

“In Switzerland, as a matter of fact.”

“Odd posting.”

“Not really. I was army liaison to Allen Dulles in Berne.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Cloak-and-dagger stuff. Still can’t talk about most of it.”

“Dulles ran an OSS listening post. How does Renoir come into it?”

The colonel seemed surprised that Valentine knew as much as he did. He raised an eyebrow, then smiled. “There was a great deal of art for sale in Europe. Before, during and after the war. I merely took advantage of what one might call a downturn in the market. The provenance is perfectly legitimate.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” Valentine answered mildly.

“I still buy from them now and again.”

“Who might that be?”

“The Hoffman Gallery,” replied Gatty. Finn made a small startled movement. Valentine casually dropped his hand onto her knee and left it there. Finn wasn’t sure which was more shocking—the touch of Valentine’s hand or the name of the gallery. Hoffman was the same name as the one on the computer file for the provenance of the Michelangelo drawing. It was no answer to the mystery, but at least it was another piece of the puzzle put into play. The dagger, Greyfriars, Gatty’s connection to Crawley and now the Swiss art gallery linking everything together. Connections, but no real meaning.

“Doesn’t it seem a little strange that a murderer would go to all the trouble to break into a school in Connecticut for a murder weapon he used in New York?”

“As far as I know it was a coincidence. A robbery in one place, the dagger turning up in another. The killer could just as easily have purchased the knife from a pawnshop here; there’s nothing to say they were one and the same person.”

“I suppose if you were defending yourself in court that would be true.”

“But I’m not, am I?” Gatty answered. “And not likely to be.”

“No, I suppose not,” answered Valentine. One finger tapped lightly on Finn’s knee. Valentine stood up and she followed suit. The old man remained in his seat. The white-haired bodyguard appeared as though Gatty had pressed some kind of hidden button.

“Bert, show these two people out.” The old man gave them a cold smile and the bodyguard led them to the front door.

“What was that all about?” asked Finn as they walked down the block to the rental car. “You never really asked him about anything except the Renoir. And how did you know there was a connection to the drawing?”

“I didn’t,” said Valentine. “I knew I’d seen the Renoir before, though.”

“Where?”

“The same place as the Juan Gris back at the school—on an International Fine Arts Register Bulletin. The Renoir disappeared along with a Pissaro landscape in 1938. It was being shipped from Amsterdam to Switzerland. Supposedly it never arrived. That’s two pieces of stolen art in one day.” He paused. “And that’s two too many.”

The top floor loft of Ex Libris was as stark as the lower floors were overflowing. Returning from Gatty’s, Valentine keyed the big freight elevator and they rode up in silence. Finn stepped out into a five thousand square foot expanse that looked like something out of a Fellini film. One huge, high-ceilinged room led into the next. The first had faux brick walls in pressed tin painted Chinese red with a centerpiece table surfaced with a huge slab of black Georgia marble. From there they went into a wide hallway set out with John Kulik neon sculptures on deep green walls and round Chinese carpets on the gleaming black tile floor. The third area, obviously a living room, had more Chinese carpets on the floor and a huge Sidney Goldman surrealist canvas of nudes and nuns on the far wall. Finn sat down on one of three couches in the room and looked around. Valentine disappeared around the corner and came back a few minutes later with a tray holding two immense, stacked bagels and a couple of long-necked beers.

“Blatz?”

“From Wisconsin.” Valentine smiled. “I went to school in Madison and got a taste for it.”

“My dad taught at UW,” said Finn, taking a swallow of beer. She bit a chunk out of the bagel and chewed, staring across at Valentine as he sat down across from her.

“That’s right.” Valentine nodded. He drank from his bottle and ignored the sandwich on the tray in front of him. “That’s where I met him.”

“How did you meet him?”

“He was my anthropology prof.”

“When was this?”

“Late sixties, early seventies.”

“He must have been young.”

“He was. So was I—even younger.” He laughed.

Finn took another bite of her sandwich and another swallow of beer. She looked around the room at the furniture and the art, thought about the piece of New York real estate she was sitting on top of, thought about Valentine. It was all so tiring. Her head began to whirl. Overkill.

“You didn’t buy this place selling old books, Mr. Valentine.”

“It’s Michael, and that sounds like a passive-aggressive statement, Ms. Ryan.”

“I’m really not a fan of dime-store shrinkology. You do more than sell books and do research.”

“Yes.”

“You’re some kind of spook, aren’t you?”

“Spook?”

“Spy.”

“No, not really.”

“And my dad, what was he?”

“An anthropology professor.”

“When he died they shipped his body back to Columbus for the funeral.”

“Yes?”

“It was a closed-coffin funeral. I didn’t really think about it much back then. I was just mad that I’d never get to see his face again.”

Valentine said nothing.

“But later, a lot later, I started thinking about all the places he’d been—always politically unstable, always dangerous—and then I wondered why he had a closed coffin when he supposedly had a perfectly innocent heart attack.”

Valentine shrugged. “He died in the jungle. Maybe it took time to get his remains back to civilization.”

“Or maybe he was missing his fingernails, or maybe he was tortured, or maybe it really wasn’t my father’s body in that coffin at all.”

“You’re saying you think your father was a spy?”

“I’m from Columbus, Ohio. I’m what my teachers used to call a linear thinker. Straight lines, you know—line up the facts like dominoes and see where they take you. In this case my mother gives me your phone number, you’re definitely no stodgy old bookseller and you used to be a student of my dad’s… probably more than a student. Is my analysis wrong? My boyfriend gets murdered, I get attacked, my ex-boss winds up with a dagger stuck into him and you don’t turn a hair… Michael.”

“You sound just like him.”

“Who?”

“Your dad. He used to count facts off on his fingers like that too.” He smiled. Finn looked down and realized what she’d been doing with her hands. She flushed, remembering her father at the dinner table, explaining something, his hands playing over each other, one finger on another. When he ran out of fingers the lecture was usually over.

Finn closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted. What she really wanted to do was find a bed and fall into it for the next month or so. How long had it been, twenty-four, thirty-six hours? Something like that. Like a bolt of lightning. Like driving in a car one second and finding yourself wrapped around a telephone pole the next. Life didn’t happen this way, or it wasn’t supposed to. She’d done all the right things, got good grades, brushed her teeth from side to side as well as up and down, played well with others, colored inside the lines, all of that, so this just should… not… be… happening.

She opened her eyes.

“I don’t want any more bullshit, Michael. I’m not playing games, and I’m not playing Holmes and Watson. This is my life—or maybe my death we’re talking about. Murder. I want the truth. And I want to know just who the hell you are.”

“You may not like it.”

“Try me.”

“Do you know anything about your grandfather—your paternal grandfather?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“A great deal.”

“He was some kind of businessman. My father never talked about him. He was Irish, obviously.” She sighed. “This is all ancient history.”

“Ancient history is what we are and where we came from. You know the old saying ‘Those who forget history—’ ”

“ ‘Are doomed to repeat it.’ ”

“Lots of people know the quote, but do you know who said it?”

“No.”

“A Spanish philosopher named George Santayana. He was born in the middle of the nineteenth century and died in 1952. Your grandfather actually met him once.”

“You always go the long way to get home?”

“Your grandfather was born in Ireland but his name wasn’t Ryan. It was Flynn, Padraic Flynn— which figures, because Flynn in Gaelic is O’Flionn, which means red-haired.”

“Jesus wept,” Finn groaned. “You mean my name is really Finn Flynn?”

“He changed it legally when he left Cork in a bit of a rush. He was part of the Easter Uprising in 1916 and had to get out of town. He came to Canada and he wasn’t in business. He was a bootlegger. He got rich by taking rowboats full of booze across the Detroit River from Windsor.”

“This is all very interesting, but where’s it leading?”

“When he got to the American side of the river he met up with my grandfather, Michelangelo Valentini. He changed his name too. He called himself Mickey Valentine but everyone called him Mickey Hearts. He was famous for a while, like your grandfather. Patrick Ryan retired after Prohibition and moved to Ohio. Mickey Hearts was gunned down in the seventies gang wars in New York. After that, Gotti and his freaks took over.”

“Okay, so we both come from criminal backgrounds—if it’s true, which I’m beginning to wonder about any of this. Just what is your point?”

“The point is neither my grandfather nor yours wanted their children growing up criminals. For them it was rooted in the necessities of poverty. For their children there was the freedom of education. They both went to Yale, you know. During the war my father worked for the judge advocate general and your father worked for the OSS.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Finn, “but I still don’t see what it has to do with Crawley’s murder or my boyfriend, Pete’s.”

“I’m beginning to think it has a lot to do with it, at least peripherally.”

“So finish your story.”

“After the war my father went to work for the CIA and your old man taught anthropology—which meant, in the early days, the fifties and early sixties, he did a lot of traveling, mostly to Southeast Asia and Central America. He even looked the part—horn-rimmed glasses, bald, red beard, big smile, tweed jacket with elbow patches… he even smoked a pipe. Nobody paid any attention to him. He wrote papers on the Hmong and the Montagnards in Vietnam and Cambodia before most people could find the places on the map. He also correctly predicted the revolution in Cuba and pointed out Fidel Castro as a potential problem several years before he came to power.”