Treasure of Saint-Lazare (24 page)

“The next day was a Saturday, potentially a busy day at the gallery. But he told me he wanted to meet Al Sommers. I thought if I gave him what he wanted he would leave town, so I took him out there and left him. Sonny brought him back later. Roy was in France consulting on a film, so Erich stayed three more days and then he disappeared as silently as he’d arrived.”

“The Loire dinner party,” Eddie muttered.

Jen continued, “The next time he appeared he wanted something more specific. He’d been officially living in the States for six or seven years and had a green card, and he wanted me to vouch for him to become a citizen. It wasn’t until I signed the form that I realized he’d also stolen my name. The son of a bitch had renamed himself Erich Wetzmuller.

“I didn’t see him again until last year. I finally got up the courage to tell him if he touched me again I’d cut his dick off and feed it to the garbage disposal, and after that he stayed with Al. He seemed to have lost interest in me.”

She put her face in her hands and wept, her back heaving as she sobbed.

“I’ve done such stupid things. All I wanted was to live my own life my own way.” She looked at Eddie, tears streaming down her cheeks, and put her hand on his. “And I so hoped that we ….” 

He did not move, could not move. “Jen, there can’t be a we, not now.”

Paul asked her, more gently, “Do you know what he was here for last year?”

She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “He was working with Al and somebody in France on finding the missing Raphael. Al was having money troubles and he wanted to restart the search for some treasure he thought might be hidden near the Saint-Lazare railroad station in Paris. There was supposed to be some gold with the painting and the price was going through the roof. It was a fatal combination of need and greed. Erich was representing someone over there. I never found out who. But it was money Al needed. His bank had failed and the legal problems from that almost wiped him out. He had some church silver he brought home at the end of the war but there wasn’t much of it left and he was having a hard time selling it since the FBI came and questioned him about it. It made him afraid to try.”

“Do you know the identity of his partner in Paris?” Paul asked.

“No, I never heard the name, but I could tell Al was afraid of him, and so was Erich. Roy and I went to dinner at Al’s house a few years ago, while he was still riding high as the hotshit banker. Sonny was there and they all talked quite openly about the painting. Roy told them how he’d tried to trace it but failed. He’d picked up one good lead at a dinner party but it turned out to be a dead end. He said he’d quit working on it several years ago when his friend died. That was Mr. Grant, I guess.”

“Ask him to bring Aurélie, too,” Eddie said as he left. “She gathered a lot of interesting information for me and if she’ll help it will make everything much easier.”

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?” his mother responded.

“That’s what Philippe said. But I don’t want her to think it’s personal.”

“It’s not?”

He raised one eyebrow and walked through the repaired front door into the waiting elevator.

Today he had to plan the next step. He’d given up any idea of dropping the search for either the Raphael or Erich Kraft, although the painting had faded into near insignificance after he learned that Erich was his father’s killer — for that, he would pay dearly. He didn’t want to just turn it over to the police. He thought Philippe would eventually find Erich but he wasn’t so sure he would search for the treasure with the same diligence, and it was the treasure that would lead to the mastermind behind Erich.

“The art is detective work,” he said to himself. “Paul and I can do that, and if we track down Erich so much the better. We need to find out what’s behind Erich. He was an apparatchik, not an art critic. He wouldn’t know what to do with a Raphael if it arrived in the mail.”

A half-hour later he left for his mid-morning appointment with Philippe, who in semi-retirement had borrowed an office in the
Préfecture de Police
on the Île de la Cité. From long habit he walked, starting with the stairs down to the lobby and continuing on a path that took him down Rue de Rivoli under the looming dark stone wall of the Louvre, across the north arm of the Seine on the Pont Neuf, along the charmingly named but in fact utilitarian Quai de l’Horloge, then across the center of the Île to a side entrance of the
préfecture
, where a suspicious policeman demanded his identity card but softened considerably when he heard Eddie was there to visit Philippe.

With a halfhearted salute he waved Eddie through to a wide staircase. On the third floor, Philippe waited at the head of the stairs. They walked to the end of the hall and into a large office full of heavy wooden furniture, ornately carved, the chairs tightly upholstered in red. A flag stood in the corner behind the oversized desk.

“Bigger than I had when I was a commissioner,” he said with a broad grin. “It’s temporary and I don’t know how long I’ll get to keep it. The next one may be a cleaning closet, so let’s get this all wrapped up. Tell me about your adventures in Sarasota.”

Eddie told the story of his kidnapping and narrow escape, then of the arrest of Al Sommers and Sonny Perry, and the death of Dmitri.

“With just an electric outlet and a pair of pliers? Very creative,” Philippe said.

“Not a lot of choice,” Eddie replied. “We had a couple of screwdrivers, but he had a Glock. The Americans say you should never take a knife to a gunfight, and screwdrivers wouldn’t even have been as good as knives.”

“What is your next step?”

“I want to go down to the Loire and talk to an old art dealer. He gave a dinner party in 2001 that Roy Castor attended. Roy’s memo to Artie said this dealer intimated he knew where some World War II art and maybe some other valuables were hidden. He claimed later it was just the wine talking, but Roy thought it was significant enough to ask Artie to follow up, which he did, but the old guy wouldn’t talk. Things might have changed by now, if he’s even still alive.”

Philippe thought a moment then responded, “I may be able to help with that. I used to do some work among the art dealers, maybe twenty years ago, and I know a few of them. I’ll make some calls and try to have something ready for dinner. What was this guy’s name?”

Eddie opened his old brown briefcase and found Roy’s message to his father and Artie’s unmailed response.

“Artie went to see this man on his next-to-last monthly inspection trip to our property in Rennes. He wrote a report to Roy but never mailed it, and Margaux found it in his office.  Here’s the name. Jacques Ranville d’Estres. He used to have a gallery near the Champs Élysées.”

“Jacques! That old thief. I got pretty close to arresting him in the late eighties, but couldn’t quite get enough evidence together to satisfy the magistrate. He was guilty as hell of diverting funds from his customers. He paid a big tax penalty, as I recall, then he sold the gallery.” Philippe beamed at the prospect of another shot at his old adversary.

“It’s too bad you can’t talk to his wife. Former wife, actually. She died about five years ago but she was really the crooked one.

“They were like two scorpions in a bottle. They married right after the war and together built a tiny gallery into a pretty good business, after time had washed away most of the stench of collaboration. But she’d fuck anything. He finally divorced her in the sixties but they couldn’t come to an agreement on the gallery, so she continued to work there. It drove him crazy.”

Eddie asked, “Could she have anything to do with the missing painting?”

“Impossible to say. She handled a lot of Jacques’ business with the Nazis before they married. She could easily have been the round-heeled source Roy asked about. I heard she made a pass at Artie once, but I don’t think anything came of it.

“I’ll call him and soften him up. He’ll probably think I have something new on him, but of course I can’t say that. But I’ll talk to him today if he’s there.”

“That would be great,” Eddie said. “I’d like to go down and interview him as soon as possible. We can make more detailed plans at dinner.”

Dinners with Margaux were normally sparkling affairs, but this one dragged. Philippe had Eddie go over the story of Sonny’s questioning three times, and would have asked for a fourth if Aurélie hadn’t put her hand on his arm and told him, “Enough. If Édouard thinks of anything else he’ll tell you. Let’s go on.”

“If you say so,” Philippe responded sourly. “But the prosecutor in Sarasota is playing games with me and I suspect he’s going to resist giving me everything he has until they’ve tried Sommers and Sonny Perry. Of course I want both of them tried here as well, but I know we won’t get that. But I do want Erich, and I was hoping Eddie might think of some little fact he’d overlooked.”

Eddie said, “I agree with you, by the way. Prosecutors are prosecutors, and the one in Sarasota is going to protect his case by telling us as little as he can get away with. So we’ll have to dig Erich out of his dunghill ourselves. Jacques Ranville may be a help. Supposedly Roy Castor and an unknown other person went to him after the dinner and asked about his broad hint that he knew something about a painting. He said, as I recall, it would someday rise like Lazarus.”

“I talked to him today,” Philippe said. “Old Jacques hasn’t changed much. He’s always been crooked, but that’s hardly even illegal in his world. He did think I had something new on him, and he understands he needs to respond fully to your questions. He’ll see you at 10 day after tomorrow. Is that a good time?”

Eddie responded, “The only better time would be tomorrow, but that will do.” He turned to Aurélie, who’d been quiet since the dinner began, other than her effort to keep her father from hectoring Eddie. “Would you be willing to go with me? It would improve our chances of getting worthwhile information. Your stuff has been really helpful so far.”

She pulled an iPhone from her purse and made a show of checking her calendar. “Day after tomorrow. Thursday. I’m clear that day, but I do have to teach the next. Can we do it in one day?”

“I think so. It’s less than an hour and a half on the TGV, then a drive of less than an hour. It may be a long day but we can do it. Are you game?”

“What’s my role?”

“We can talk more about it on the train down, but you’re our expert on the art itself, and I hope you’ll be able to tell when he’s lying, as he surely will. Can you talk to one of your specialist colleagues about questions we might put to Jacques, and what lies he might tell us?”

Philippe added, “I don’t know how long he’ll be able to talk to you. He’s 92 years old and sounded weak.”

The TGV pulled into Gare de St. Pierre des Corps near downtown Tours at nine o’clock. Fifteen minutes later they drove away from the Hertz parking
lot in a blue Renault Megane, the largest and fastest car available. A minute later Paul followed in a white model. In less than a mile they crossed the River Cher on the A10, with a brief view down at the east tip of an island park named for Balzac. Eddie immediately looked for the exit to highway D976, which would take them the twenty miles up the river, past the famous Château de Chenonceau with its often-photographed arcade spanning the river.

“There’s the main entrance,” Aurélie said a half-hour later, pointing to a stone archway marking the only visible opening in a high brick wall that extended for several hundred yards ahead of them. On the wall next to the entrance an elegant new sign advertised “Château Tours.” Under the name and telephone number, “Corporate Retreat” was repeated in French, English and Japanese.

“We drive to a service entrance two hundred meters further, then turn in and follow the dirt road for 100 meters. His house is on the left. Used to be a groundskeeper’s cottage.”

As they turned, Eddie saw Paul’s car pass behind him. They had agreed he would wait in the parking lot of a country hotel five hundred yards away.

“Does he always follow you like this?” Aurélie asked after they passed through the gate.

“Only when there’s somebody out there trying to kill me,” Eddie replied with a rueful smile. “This is the first time that’s happened, but I don’t want us to take any more chances than necessary and he’s very good at his work.”