Paul Christopher - Michelangelo_s Notebook

The sergeant squatted by the culvert, staring at the ground. He’d been with the little band for more than six months now, him and the others taken out of Antwerp just after Holland was liberated and attached to G2 by orders of God knows who. Since then they’d been working their way across Europe, mostly talking to people without the slightest sign of combat. Two weeks ago they’d been sitting around fifty miles from Koblenz waiting for the Brits to make up their minds and Cornwall had found out something that had them pushing south and east like a coon dog with a bitch’s scent up his schnoz. Maybe what he was sniffing was this: a phony SS unit out in the middle of the fucking Bavarian nowhere and six Opel Blitzes.

At this stage of the war a gas guzzler like the Blitz-capable of at least thirty miles an hour, or even more with a good enough road-was worth its weight in gold, and that had the sergeant thinking quick. The trucks had to have some kind of special designation and documents to get this far south, and from here they could head for Switzerland, Italy or Austria. The Russkies were to the east, the Allies were to the west and they were being squeezed like a pimple. Odds were they were heading for Switzerland, since Italy had already surrendered and Austria wasn’t far behind. That meant Lake Constance, no more than sixty miles away.

The sergeant looked through the culvert, wondering how much trouble his curiosity could get him into. Say the shipment in those six Opels really was valuable, and say that Cornwall meant to take it. But the real question was, what did he intend doing with it after that. His job was to recover the stuff then get it through proper channels back to its owners, but he was beginning to wonder. Maybe now they were past war, and playing finders keepers. Maybe it was every man for himself. Maybe it was time for the boy from Canarsie to cut himself a big slab of that pie. Maybe.

The sergeant let his hand drop to the butt of the firearm holstered on his hip. Three phony officers who weren’t really army at all, who all had soft jobs stateside, who were probably true-blue as all get-out. It would be easy enough, but then what would he do with the six trucks? It was all in the paperwork.

He stood up. The dawn was coming on pretty quick and the ground fog was running through the trees like so many torn rags. Six trucks and close enough to the Swiss border to make it in a day, maybe two. It was worth thinking about. He peered through the patchy fog at the distant entrance to the farm. For a moment he was almost sure he saw a figure moving across the gated opening. He lifted his binoculars. Not a guard. A man in uniform. A general, right down to the red stripe on his fucking jodhpurs. But he was way too young-hawk-faced, pointy chin, young side of forty. Some kind of disguise, maybe. He stopped at the edge of the gate and a second figure appeared. A woman in a sweater and a head-scarf. The guy in uniform lit her cigarette. They were laughing about something. A young woman; now that was interesting. The farmer’s wife or daughter, someone along for the ride? Six Opel trucks, a phony general and a woman. What was that all about?

Gatty’s residence was a six-story house on West Seventy-second that looked as though it had been transported away from beside a canal in Amsterdam a few hundred years ago. To the left was a brownstone, to the right there was a fair-sized apartment building. The front door was in the basement and they had to walk down into a little well surrounded by a wrought iron fence. The door knocker was huge: a black hand on a hinge holding something that looked like a small cannonball. In the middle of the cannonball was an unblinking eye. Valentine tapped the knocker twice against the heavy oak door. They could hear it echoing inside and then they heard the sound of footsteps on stone.

“Spooky,” said Finn.

Valentine smiled. “The kind of money that can afford a house like this on the West Side usually is,” he answered. A light went on over their heads. There was a short pause and then a man in a plain black suit answered the door. He was in his seventies and the little hair he had on his head was silver-white. He had dark eyes that had seen too much and a thin mouth. A scar pulled his upper lip upward, revealing a piece of yellow tooth. He’d been born before operations for split lips and cleft pallets were commonplace.

“We’d like to speak to the colonel, if you don’t mind,” said Valentine. “It’s to do with Greyfriars Academy. He was just visiting there, I believe.”

“Wait,” said the man. There was a slight snuffle to his voice but it was clear enough. He closed the door on them and the light went off, leaving the two standing in the darkness.

“The butler did it,” said Finn. “He’s really spooky.”

“Not just a butler,” Valentine commented.

“Bodyguard. He’s wearing a shoulder rig. I saw it when he turned away.”

The butler-bodyguard returned a few moments later and let them in. They followed him into a gloomy, slate-floored foyer set with old-fashioned wall sconces, then up a wide flight of worn oak steps to an enormous room on the main floor. It was two stories high, a blend of church nave and baronial hall. The ceiling was plaster, worked in ornate clusters of ivy and grapes, the walls paneled three quarters of the way up in dark oak, the floor done in wide planks. At one end of the room three arched windows, heavily leaded, looked out onto Seventy-second Street while at the other end more than a dozen smaller windows rising from floor to ceiling looked out onto a small walled garden, dark except for two or three small lights set into the corners of the wall.

There were dozens of paintings on the walls, almost all of them Dutch: meticulous DeWitte architectural renderings, DeHooch domestic interiors, seascapes by Cuyp and Hobbema’s gloomy castles. The only exception was a large Renoir, the head of a young girl, placed in a position of honor above the large tiled fireplace.

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.