Michelangelo's Notebook (16 page)

She went to his bed and found him still awake in the darkened room, hands clasped behind his head, staring at the ceiling, perhaps reliving a distant violent past. He turned to her as she stood beside the bed, the moon at her back, unbuttoning her shirt, staring down at him.

“You don’t have to do this, you know.”

“I know.” She pulled off the shirt, then reached behind her back to unclasp her bra, tossing it on the floor. She slipped the buttons on her jeans one by one, knowing that he was watching her, trying not to think about what he was thinking, trying not to think of anything at all except the moment. He said nothing more.

She slid off her jeans and the plain white cotton panties with them and stood there finally, naked in front of him, the light from behind her turning her hair into a glowing tangled halo, catching the curve of her hips and the long, strong muscles of her thighs with a soft plain glow. She waited like that for a moment, letting him see her, wanting him to see everything that she was, simple in the moonlight, and then she got into the bed with him, slipping under the covers, remembering the touch of his hand on her thigh at the colonel’s house, knowing this was going to happen even then, the touch like a fist in an iron glove and also as tender as a lover.

For the second time she wondered about the abstract moments and twists of fate that could turn a person’s life upside down within the space of time from one sunrise to another. For a split second she thought about Peter and that final, terrible cry, and bizarrely she suddenly had an image of her mother’s dressing table in the house on Doderidge Street back in Columbus and the wedding photograph in its silver frame.

Her mother and father standing together, somber-faced, her father in tweeds and tortoiseshell-rim glasses towering over her mother—so much younger, bright-eyed in a perfect wedding dress and holding a spray of white flowers in her hand, the tall trees and the rose gardens of Whetstone Park in the background, all in that pale yellow of old black-and-white photographs. For a moment she felt very young as she brushed against the hot dry skin of Valentine’s hip and then it was too late for good and all and he reached out and put his hand on her flat, taut belly and she turned to him and he slipped into her immensely as though he had belonged there from the beginning.

He began to move and she moved with him and none of the other things mattered even though she had no idea if she was doing it for him and his pain, for her father or for herself. Nothing mattered at all except right now and that was enough for both of them.

Lieutenant James Cornwall of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives unit attached to the ALIU—the art-looting division of the OSS—in western Germany sat on a rock with his sergeant trying to find a way into the farmhouse hidden behind the screen of trees. He wasn’t having very much success. His group was running out of food, there were dozens of retreating German patrols in the area, and according to the sergeant, they were sitting ducks if even one German tank decided to move in their direction. He lit a Lucky, pushed his metal-rimmed glasses up on his forehead and wondered how a man who’d completed two years of study at the Sorbonne in Paris and graduated summa cum laude from Yale could wind up sitting on a rock in Bavaria beside a man who stank of sweat and cigarettes and who carried a Garand rifle strapped to his back. He was assistant curator of prints and drawings at the Parker-Hale Museum. Right now he should have been having breakfast at the Hotel Brevoort and palling around with Rorimer and Henry Taylor from the Met, not getting shot at in Bavaria.

“So what do you think, Sergeant?”

“I don’t get paid to think, sir.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“Yes, sir.” The sergeant paused and lit a smoke from the crumpled pack he kept in the well of his combat boot and looked out over the early-morning mist that lay on the hillside and filtered in through the trees. “Well, sir, except for the sniper, I don’t think we’re dealing with combat troops. It’s something else, sir.”

“Like what?”

“Some kind of special mission. Six trucks—Opels, not Mercedes. That means they’re gas, not diesel, and that means they’re meant to move fast. Six trucks like that wouldn’t be used to guard troops, and they wouldn’t waste more gas on them lights like they were doing last night. It’s maybe bigwig Krauts taking a powder, but you’d think they’d be in staff cars. The officer I saw was wearing a general’s uniform but he was too young, no more than thirty-five. He’s gotta be a phony.”

“Your conclusion?”

“Like I said, some kind of secret thing, hot-footing it, you know. They’re carrying something—loot, papers, something valuable.” He paused and cleared his throat. “And then there’s the broad.”

“The woman you mentioned.”

“Yes, sir.”

“A phantom perhaps, wishful thinking?” Cornwall said with a faint smile.

“No, sir. She was real enough.”

“You mentioned before that it might have been some relation to the occupant of the farm. What about the hypothesis?”

I don’t know about any hypo thing, but I know she was real and if she was some farmer’s wife or something she wouldn’t have been walking around free like that in the middle of the night.”

“Do you think it might be important? Tactically.”

“Tactics aren’t my business any more than hypo-watsits. I saw a broad. I thought you should know, that’s all.”

“All right,” said Cornwall. “Now I know.”

“So what do you want to do?” the sergeant asked. “The sniper saw us coming. They’ll make a move before we do, try to break out, maybe.”

“What would you do?”

The sergeant smiled. He knew that Cornwall was looking for more than just advice. He was asking for some kind of plan because he didn’t have any fucking idea of what he was doing.

“Depends on whether or not you want to keep those trucks from getting blown to shit or not.”

“That would be preferable.”

“Then we hit them first, before they can do anything. Hold them down with the fifty-caliber, blowing the fucking sniper out of his fucking tower with Terhune’s M9 and go in hard.”

“Day or night?”

The sergeant resisted the urge to tell Cornwall not to be an asshole. “Night.”

“All right,” the lieutenant said again. “Let me think about it.”

Just so long as you don’t think about it for too fucking long,
thought the sergeant, but he kept his mouth shut and thought about the broad and the bogus general instead.

He reached out and let his long, bony index finger play over the faded photograph pasted neatly into the Great Book beside the careful drawing of the farm: Stabsfuhrer Gerhard Utikal of Einsatzstab Rosenberg, last seen in the early spring of 1945 near Fussen and Schloss Neuschwanstein in the Bavarian Alps. In the picture he was in his early thirties, wearing, illegally as it turned out, the uniform of a Wehrmacht Hauptman, squinting into the sunlight in three-quarter profile, trees and a large ornamental pool behind him, the snapshot probably taken at Versailles or the Tuileries Gardens in Paris sometime between 1941 and 1943, his years of duty there.

The naked, gray-haired man smiled vaguely, remembering. Gerhard Utikal had been the first, so long ago now. According to all the files Utikal had vanished like smoke, but in time he’d found him, living in Uruguay, dividing his time between an apartment on the Playa Ramirez in Montevideo and a huge ranch in Argentina on the far side of the River Platte. By then Eichmann had been taken and the Butcher of Riga, Herberts Cukurs, had been liquidated by an Israeli death squad after boasting to journalist Jack Anderson that he was “invincible.”

Utikal wasn’t invincible, just smarter. Instead of keeping a set of neatly pressed Nazi uniforms in his closet like the Latvian had, he had chosen instead to hide in plain sight, adopting the identity of one of the interned sailors from the scuttled battleship
Graf Spee
. It worked for the better part of twenty-five years, but not quite long enough or well enough.

The naked man put the tip of his finger over the face in the photograph. The first of many, and more to come. Utikal had screamed as the first tenpenny nail was pushed slowly into his left eye, then died, twisting horribly in the chair as the second three-inch sliver was pushed into the right. The naked man closed the Great Book.

“Mirabile Dictu,”
he whispered softly.
Miraculous to say. “Kyrie eleison.” Lord, have mercy on our souls.

Valentine’s kitchen on the top floor of Ex Libris was a paean of praise to a fifties that Finn had never known. The floors were covered in blue and white linoleum tile, the cupboards were yellow with chrome handles and white interiors, and the two small country-style windows that looked out onto the roof garden planted with staked tomatoes were trimmed in blue chintz.

The stove was a forty-inch Gaffers & Sattler factory-yellow four-burner gas range with a thermal eye, heat-timer griddle, and a fifth burner. The refrigerator was a 1956 turquoise Kelvinator. There was a Rival waffle maker on the yellow-flecked Formica countertop along with a bullet-shaped chrome toaster and a huge chrome breadbox that actually hid a very up-to-date microwave.

There was a four-seat yellow vinyl and chrome dinette set in the middle of the room, and off in one corner there was a sky blue vinyl breakfast nook under one of the windows. Finn, wearing her panties and one of Valentine’s crisp Sea Island cotton white shirts, was lounging in the breakfast nook, drinking coffee brewed in the big silver GE percolator. Valentine, nude except for an idiotic barbecue apron that said “A little sugar for the chef makes sure the cookin’ is sweet,” was making scrambled eggs at the stove. Finn reached out onto the breakfast nook table and toyed with the green-skirted, hula-dancing, ukulele-playing ceramic boy and girl salt-and-pepper shakers. According to the tail-swinging, eye-rolling cat clock over the sink it was just after eight in the morning. Apparently everything in the fifties had been in pastel shades of “cute.” Tellingly, there was no visible dishwasher—or at least one that she could see at first glance.

The whole thing was ridiculous to the point of fetish, but she knew it was almost certainly accurate down to the plastic laminated cowgirl placemats and the bright yellow “Mornin’ Ma’am” cowboy coffee mugs. She felt herself remembering their time in his bed the night before. She stretched in her seat, a shiver running through her from the back of her neck to the pit of her stomach. There was no doubt that Valentine was a perfectionist in everything he did.

“You always show your women a good time like this?” She grinned.

He turned and smiled, looking at her, the expression on his face taking ten hard years off his face.

“There aren’t that many to show a good time to,” he answered. Finn almost said something but stopped herself. She had a pretty good idea that Valentine was a lot like the guys she’d yearned after in high school. They didn’t have the slightest idea they were attractive, which in itself made them even more so. On the other hand, his love-making had been smooth, practiced and knowledgeable. Could you know a lot about women without knowing a lot of women? She stopped herself from thinking about it at all. They’d made love for hours and it had been wonderful. That was all she needed—or wanted—to know right now, certainly not his reasons for doing it, or hers. Maybe she’d been in school for too long; this was the real world. And she didn’t want to think about
that
too much either.

Valentine took two plates out of the warming oven, slid a mound of scrambled eggs onto each then went back for the toast and bacon. He picked up both plates and fitted them into his right hand, then snagged the ketchup off the counter with his left. He brought the meal expertly across the room, put everything down on the breakfast nook table and slid onto the blue vinyl seat. He slid the plates onto the placemats, and they began to eat, talking easily between bites with no obvious discomfort at their situation. To Finn it felt as though they’d been lovers forever, which was a little scary.

“What’s with the retro stuff?” she asked.

“It’s the easiest way to decorate a room,” he said. “Pick an era and then pick up things from the period. It’s fun. You get to look for things without it being serious. I can get as excited about a 1954 first edition of the
Betty Crocker’s Good and Easy Cook Book
as I can about finding a Vermeer stolen from an Irish country house.”

“I heard about that when we were doing a Dutch masters class,” said Finn, her eyes widening a little. “
Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid.
They even wrote a book about it. That was you?”

“It was the second time the painting had been stolen. There was a drug connection. I helped track it down from this end.” He shook his head and took a sip of coffee from his cowboy mug. “Once upon a time art theft was something you saw in the movies starring David Niven or Cary Grant. Now it’s usually got some kind of other link—usually with drugs, sometimes with guns.”

“I don’t get it,” said Finn. “They don’t have anything to do with each other.”

“Sure they do,” responded Valentine.

“Explain.”

“Most criminal activity deals in large volumes of cash. Cash is hard to keep and hard to spend. Stealing art helps both problems.”

“How?”

“It’s currency. Most works of art, valuable ones, have a well-established value. A painting or drawing can be sold for X amount. Instead of doing deals for money, big drug dealers and weapons dealers—especially the ones in the terrorist market—trade in art. It’s portable, it’s easy to move across borders and it’s usually insured in one way or another. I can name you half a dozen galleries in Europe that knowingly traffic in stolen art and twice that many just in New York. It’s a very big business.”

Finn shifted on the seat across from Valentine, tucking one leg up underneath herself, thinking. “Is that what we’re dealing with here?”