Nicola Griffith - The Blue Place

“When you say ‘ridiculous,’ just how much?”

“I don’t know, but probably something like four thousand dollars a day.”

A day. “So he wasn’t under any financial pressure.”

“Not that I know of. But he was a very private person.”

I pulled out my notebook, made a note to check out Lusk and to ask a few questions about the recovered cocaine. The salad came. I paid attention to the food for a few minutes, then flipped back a couple of pages for the notes I had made reading Julia’s file.

“Tell me about the transfer of the painting from the banker to your premises. One of your staff picked it up from an address in Marietta—was that Honeycutt’s home or an office?”

“His home. He works downtown, at Massut Vere.”

“Was the painting received from his hand, or from one of his representatives?”

“Ricky and Maya—that is, Ricard Plessis and Maya Hall—who have both worked for me for a long time, took one of our trucks to Honeycutt’s house at ten in the morning and took delivery of the painting from his housekeeper. It was already crated. They gave her a receipt.” Fast, clear, detailed: she had obviously been through all this herself before talking to me.

“Did they unwrap it to check what it was before giving the receipt?”

“No.”

“Did the fact that it was all crated and covered up not make Ricky or Maya suspicious?”

“No. It’s usual to protect such valuable objets .”

“Yet you uncrated it to check.”

“No. That is, yes, I uncrated it, but that’s usual, too. If I’m to be held responsible for the safe transportation of a painting, I like to pack it properly from scratch in-house. Owners sometimes have very odd ideas about wrapping pictures. I’ve heard horror stories of Old Masters wrapped in newspapers and arriving with ghostly copies of the funnies imprinted on a stately old forehead.”

“Do you think the clients know you will unpack their careful work?”

She considered that. “I don’t know. Those that ask are told we carry our own packing materials to protect the work during the transfer from client to Lyon Art, but not many do ask, so I suppose they assume we’ll just crate up around their packing.”

“How well was the Friedrich—or the fake Friedrich—packed?”

“Very well. Clean linen wrappings. Properly measured wooden frame crate with the correct filling. Actually, it came wrapped in the same packing I used when I first brokered it to the original owner, Charlie Sweeting, two years ago.”

I made a note to ask for Sweeting’s address. “Tell me about the painting.”

Apparently Caspar David Friedrich was arguably the most important German Romantic. His technique was impersonal and meticulous. The picture was painted in 1824, insured for three million dollars. “It would probably fetch a little less than that at auction, of course. Two years ago, when I first brokered it to Sweeting, it sold for one and a quarter.”

“And you were quite persuaded of its genuineness two years ago?”

“I was.” Her pupils were tight and small.

I said easily, “I don’t know as much about art as I need to for this, so if I ask questions that seem to question your expertise or, even worse, your integrity, chalk it up to my ignorance, but please answer them. I need the information.” She nodded infinitesimally. “What made you so sure, then, that it was genuine, and equally sure now that it was not?”

“There is a certain quality in Friedrich’s work, a haunting, prismatic loneliness.” She didn’t sound the least self-conscious. “It doesn’t editorialise. It doesn’t try to manipulate the emotions the same way, say, Turner did with his tinted steam.”

“Tinted steam?”

“Something that Constable said about Turner. Anyway, when I first saw Crushed Hope it seemed to me that this clarity was present. When I saw it again, ten days ago, it was not.”

Interesting, the way her speech got more formal as she discussed art. “So, if pushed, would you say you might have been mistaken two years ago, or that there were two different paintings?”

Our entrees arrived then and she used them as an excuse to delay her reply, but after a while, she sighed and said, “I don’t know. I think they’re different paintings, but I don’t know how to prove it.”

We ate for a while longer. If it was the fake painting that had gone up in smoke, where was the real one? “When you first brokered the deal to Sweeting, did you check the painting’s provenance?”

“I took a look, of course. The then-owner had had possession for more than thirty years, and he showed me the provenance he had been given by the auction house in the sixties.” I frowned, but before I could say anything, she said, “A provenance from a reputable auction house is a bit like the deed to a house, like a bank note. You just…accept it.”

“Do you have a copy of that provenance?”

“Yes.”

“I think we need a division of labour. I’ll check on the people, you take the painting.” She needed to be clear about the provenance; doubt about her own judgement was eating her up. “Find out everything you can. Check back more than a hundred years if you have to. I’ll need addresses for Honeycutt and Sweeting. And Julia, when I say division of labour, I mean it. Stay away from Honeycutt and Sweeting. Stick to the painting. Can you do that?”

“Why?”

“Because I’m making it a condition of working with you.” I took the oversized cheque from my pocket. “If you don’t agree, I’ll tear this up now and we’ll part on friendly terms.”

“But why—”

I held the cheque up. “Yes or no.”

“I don’t have much of a choice, do I? Yes, all right. I’ll stay away from Honeycutt and Sweeting.”

We talked some more but said nothing useful. I paid. We walked out into the sunshine, stopped by our respective cars. After chi sao, it seemed ridiculous to shake hands.

“I’ll call,” I said.

“Benny? It’s Torvingen. Yes, I know it’s been a long time but why would I want to spend my days hanging around the evidence locker when I don’t have to? Pretty good, pretty good. Listen, Benny, just curious: What can you tell me about the coke that was fished out of that Inman Park burn earlier this week? No, Benny…Benny, I don’t need to know everything. Just tell me if it was the real thing or dreck cut a hundred times. It was? You’re sure? Yeah, me too. How about later this week? There’s a new Katherine Bigelow coming out.”

Ben Heglund was a movie buff. He would do anything to get a free pass and see a film a week before the general public. He was also five-foot-eight and thin as a rail and could eat more junk food at one sitting than anyone I have ever known.

So the cocaine was pure. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of it left to be found by the police. Why? It no more fit the drug killing scenario than the murder itself.

Drug killings generally fell into two categories: simple, gang-related turf warfare—who controls what parts of the neighbourhood, who decides on the volume of product; and struggles among the real power brokers which usually led to the spectacular executions of whole families and sometimes even friends and acquaintances, executions gruesome enough to serve as a dire warning to other little fish who were tempted to grow bigger. The burn that killed Lusk, though, had been surgically precise.

Three names: Lusk, Honeycutt, and Sweeting. Lusk was dead and out of the game, and it wasn’t to Sweeting that Julia had talked about Lusk and her doubts about the painting’s provenance. There was no hurry. Honeycutt would have no reason to think anyone suspected him of anything, and complacent people are rarely dangerous.