Paul Christopher - Michelangelo_s Notebook

“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.”