Paul Christopher - Michelangelo_s Notebook

“A tangled web,” said Valentine. “But it still doesn’t explain why Cornwall appointed Crawley to succeed him. You said you saw a letter.”

“That’s right.”

“Saying what?”

“Saying that Sandy was aware of James’s involvement in some sort of secret club and if he wasn’t appointed to the director’s position he’d have no choice but to go to the press.”

“And you assumed it had something to do with Cornwall’s sexual history?”

“It must have. What else could it have been?”

“Cornwall didn’t tell you?”

“No. And I didn’t ask.”

“Did this club have a name?”

“Yes. The Carduss Club.”

Valentine frowned. “Latin for thistle.”

“I know,” said Taschen. “Strange name for a gay sex club. Sounded more like a college frat.”

“Did he tell you anything about the group?”

“Not a word,” Taschen answered, shaking his head. “Not a single word.”

A telephone purred somewhere in the back of the apartment. Taschen took a last swallow from his drink, put the glass down on the coffee table and rose to his feet. He left the room, not in any hurry, and disappeared. The ringing stopped and Valentine was vaguely aware of the sound of the art consultant’s muffled voice.

Valentine stood up and went to examine the crusty Schnabel on the wall. It showed a vaguely Ethiopian figure against a mountain background with a skull off to one side. The bottom half of the painting was full of broken crockery. He’d never much liked Schnabel’s work and this piece wasn’t changing his opinion very much. The broken plates always reminded him of Zorba the Greek. On the other hand, the artist had made his reputation on the basis of the idiotic potsherds. Obscurity as art.

He turned as Taschen came back into the room. “That was Peter Newman.”

“Yes?”

“He knew you were coming here. He thought you should know. He just heard it on the news.”

“Heard what?”

Taschen let out a long breath. “George Gatty. He’s been murdered. Someone ran him through with a Nazi ceremonial sword.”

Lieutenant Vincent Delaney of the chief’s Special Action Squad stood in the middle of Colonel George Gatty’s living room staring at the body, spitted like a side of beef on the brown leather couch. Whoever’d done the ugly old man in had really outdone himself. According to Assistant M.E. Bandar Singh, twenty-three inches of cold steel had been shoved down the old man’s throat, the point poking through his perineum, which meant it had come out somewhere between his withered old nuts and his puckered asshole.

Putkin the criminalist said that accounted for the smell; on the way through the razor sharp sword had sliced through half a dozen major organs, the stomach wall and both intestines. They knew it was a Nazi sword because of the big swastika between the talons of the silver eagle that made up the hilt. The worst part of it was that everything was there to see. Gatty had been murdered in his dressing gown and every inch of his old wizened body was splayed out in public. Flashbulbs popped as Putkin and his cronies measured and tested. A fucking Hollywood premiere for the dead.

Billy Boyd came rolling up to him, notebook clutched in his beefy hand. “So I guess this fits with the other one?”

“And the call we got from Deputy Dawg in Alabama.” Delaney shook his head. “I never knew Alabama even had a coastline.”

“Me neither,” said Boyd. “I thought it was, you know, landlocked.”

“Not that it has anything to do with the dead guy.”

“This one?”

“The one in Alabama.”

“But there’s got to be a connection, right?” Boyd didn’t seem too sure.

“Art creep gets a knife shoved down his throat on Fifth Avenue, the guy in Alabama is some kind of big-time art collector and gets stabbed with an Absolut bottle and the colonel here gets taken out by some kind of Nazi Vlad the Impaler? Yeah, Billy, I’d say there’s just the tiniest chance of a connection.”

“Who’s Vlad the Impaler?”

“A guy on Wide World of Wrestling.” Delaney sighed. “Go talk to Singh, Billy. Get me a time of death if you can.”

“Sure, Loo.”

Delaney didn’t really need the confirmation. From the way he was dressed it was obvious he’d been in bed or on his way when he’d been killed, which made the TOD sometime last night. The man’s butler, a man named Bertram Throens had an apartment in the basement with his wife, the colonel’s cook, and neither one of them had heard anything out of line.

Like with Crawley, the guy from the museum, there were going to be lots of suspects. In the museum guy’s case there were about five hundred of them at the reception being held on the main floor and by the looks of things here the colonel’s late-night caller had probably come with the supposed intention of selling the old man the sword that was used to kill him.

They’d already found the leather-bound, silk-lined presentation case in the front hall. Delaney knew about as much German as he did Gaelic but the names Rommel and Adolf Hitler had jumped out at him. At a guess, the detective assumed there would have been real money involved, and real interest on the part of the colonel. By the look of the house he was a serious collector, so maybe seeing people late at night in his bathrobe wouldn’t have been that much out of the ordinary. Interviewing the Swiss butler had led him to the same conclusion: the colonel often had late-night visitors.

Delaney sighed and tried not to breathe too deeply as the meat wagon boys lifted the body onto a snap-down morgue gurney. The real question nibbling away at the edge of his thoughts was the strange connection between all of this and the beautiful redhead that seemed to be at the center of events. And that led to the even bigger question-Just what had happened to Fiona Ryan, and where exactly was she?

They began moving out of the camp with the last of the night. The moon had set long ago and tattered clouds shifted from the north, fading the dim light from the stars. Most of the men except Reid and the sergeant were city boys; the depth of the darkness still spooked them. That velvet night was like something otherworldly, too close to the shadow of death that always hung looming in the back of their thoughts each and every moment of each and every day.

They moved through the woods quietly, keeping to the paths, pausing at the small depressed clearing that marked the fork of the trails. The men split into two groups there. Winetka, Bosnic, Biearsto and Terhune, armed with the bazooka and the two-inch mortar, took the south path leading to the road by the sniper’s tower. The rest, with the sergeant bird dogging the artsy officer types, headed for the burnt-out old tank at the top of the rise.

The plan the sergeant had put to Cornwall was a simple one. Their raggedy little group was made from the remains of a 2nd Ranger Battalion from the Normandy invasion. They’d inherited most of a company’s worth of ordnance. Terhune and Biearsto would take out the sniper and his tower with the bazooka while Winetka and Bosnic would use the two-inch mortar to lay down covering fire over the main entrance. When the sergeant heard the first bazooka round being laid down he’d open up with the twin 7.92mm machine guns, softening the flank for the squad made up of Patterson, Dorm, Teitelbaum and Pixie Mortimer, led by Reid and followed by the three officers. If necessary, the sergeant could also provide covering fire if they had to retreat, which he doubted would happen. As well as the bazooka and the two-inch mortar, Teitelbaum and Dorm made up gunner and assistant for the Browning Automatic Rifle. The others carried an assortment of relatively heavy weapons including a couple of Thompsons, a Johnson light machine gun, an M3 grease gun and Patterson’s beloved Pah-pah-shah 71-round Russian machine gun: more ordnance by far than the Krauts in the farmhouse were likely to have.