William Lashner - Marked Man

“Arizona?”

“It’s nice there.”

“Hot.”

“But it’s a dry heat.”

“Clear up my sinuses.”

“That it will.”

“I miss her.”

“Your mother?”

He turned to me, and it was strange, the way this old man could appear, in the shadows, like the youngest of children. The lights from the boardwalk collected in his eyes and then began to roll down one cheek.

“What do you think?” he said. “She’s my mother.”

“Okay,” I said.

“She’s dying. I’m too old to keep running. I’m tired. And I’ve changed.”

“You too?”

“I’m not the hood that I was. Can you do it? Can you make that deal? Can you get me home again?”

That’s when I felt it, that little spurt of emotion that trembled my jaw and left me helpless in the face of his want. If there’s any part of being a lawyer that I can claim to be a natural at, it is the empathic connection to my clients. Yes, I had a retainer of riches that kept my imagination warm at night, and yes, I kept my billable hours with a banker’s care, but it wasn’t the money that drove me, at least not anymore. Frankly, the way my business was tanking, I could make more as a salesclerk in the tie department at Macy’s. Polyester is the new silk, trust me, and that red is just fabulous with your eyes. But a client in desperate need, that was what really got my juices going, and that’s what Charlie Kalakos surely was. A marked man, on the run, hunted by both sides of the law, desperate to make his peace with the dying mother who had tortured him all his life. And now he was asking me to bring him home.

“I can try,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, “then try.”

“How do I get in touch with you?”

“You want to talk to me, talk to my mother. She’s the only one I trust with a number.”

“Okay. But I have to know more. You have to tell me what the FBI is looking for.”

“Do I got a choice?”

“Not if you want me to have any leverage,” I said.

“It was just a small job.”

“Not so small if the FBI is still looking.”

“Maybe it wasn’t so small at that. Was a blonde I used to hump when I still had some meat on my bones. Her name was Erma.”

“The name alone gives me chills.”

“She was big and beautiful, Erma was.” The hint of a smile, a blush of pride, like one bright memory in a life of infantile failure. “And so was what we pulled.”

I stared at his silhouette in the dim light of the dark beach, the excitement starting to build. “Tell me, Charlie. What the hell is it that you can get your hands on?”

“You ever hear,” said Charlie, “of a guy named Rembrandt?”

The Randolph Trust sitson a leafy suburban street in the heart of the Main Line. You’d expect to find a mansion or two on that street, sure, a few swimming pools and a tennis court, a purebred Dalmatian patrolling a front yard as big as a football field, and closets full of shoes you couldn’t afford. You wouldn’t expect to find one of the finest art galleries in the entire world. But there it sat, in a great granite building set down in that incongruous location by the iconoclastic real-estate magnate Wilfred Randolph. In a series of small galleries in that granite building were hung some of the finest paintings ever wrought by human hand, the fruit of Wilfred Randolph’s maniacal passion for art, his entire collection except for two masterworks that went missing long ago.

I knocked on the great red doors of the granite building and waited. A few minutes later, one of the doors opened a crack and an old guard with a bulbous nose stuck out his head.

“No visitors today,” he said. “The galleries are closed on Tuesdays. We allow visitors only on the second Monday of every month and alternating Wednesdays.”

“No Thursdays?”

“We have classes on Thursdays.”

“What about Fridays?”

“We’re open on Good Friday only.”

“Quite a schedule.”

“It’s all according to Mr. Randolph’s will.”

“Quite a will. But I’m not here to tour the galleries. I have an appointment with Mr. Spurlock.”

He looked me over before examining a clipboard in his hand. “Are you Victor Carl?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Why didn’t you say so? Come on in, we’re expecting you.”

When I stepped inside, he closed the great door behind me with a gloomy thunk and locked it shut. Then he led me through a narrow foyer and into a large room with benches in the middle and paintings on the walls. It all sounds a little pedestrian, paintings on the walls, like nothing we haven’t all seen hundreds of times before, but trust me when I tell you this was nothing like I had ever seen before. The artwork on the walls left me speechless.

“Mrs. LeComte wanted to personally escort you to Mr. Spurlock. She’ll be with you shortly,” the guard said before leaving me standing there alone, eyes wide with amazement.

Wilfred Randolph made his fortune the old-fashioned way, by buying up swampland and selling dreams. The Randolph Estates was the most exclusive residential development in Florida: What with the mangrove and mosquitoes, nobody lived there. But even so, plenty bought the dream and the sales made Wilfred Randolph a rich man. Newly wealthy and anxious to rise in the world, Randolph spied opportunity within the thorny thatches of high culture, and in that unlikely landscape he found his purpose in life. He would buy art. His brokers and his bankers descended like a plague of locusts on a Europe economically devastated in the aftermath of the First World War, and whole swaths of the Continent were denuded. He bought old masters and overlooked masterpieces at bargain rates and snatched up new works by struggling unknowns still fighting for recognition in their native countries. He had too much money and too many advisers not to make a hash of it, but he also had something else that made his collection different from anyone else’s. Wilfred Randolph happened to have a golden eye, and those unknown artists whose paintings he bought for pennies turned out to be the giants of twentieth-century art, painters like Matisse and Renoir, Picasso and Degas, Monet. And there was the very fruit of their genius, hanging on the walls around me.

“It’s quite astonishing, isn’t it?” said a woman’s voice from behind me.

“Is that a Seurat?” I said gesturing toward a huge pointillist piece raised above a door on the far wall.

“Very good, Mr. Carl.”

“How come I’ve never seen that one before in any art books?”

The woman behind me sniffed. “We don’t license photographs of our art. Mr. Randolph believed the only way to experience a work of art was to view it in the flesh.”

I turned around and faced the woman. She was tall and straight and elegantly gray, a well-dressed and well-aged woman in her seventies. She had once been quite pretty, you could tell, with a narrow face and dark features, but with time everything had pinched together.

“I am Mrs. LeComte,” she said. “I’m to accompany you to Mr. Spurlock.”

“Accompany away.”

“Could you tell me first the purpose of your meeting with Mr. Spurlock?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t.”

“You’re a criminal lawyer, Mr. Carl, aren’t you?”

“You make it sound like I’m more criminal than lawyer.”

“I am just curious to know why a criminal lawyer is meeting with Mr. Spurlock here at the trust. It is quite unusual.”

“I’m sure it’s not that unusual. But as I’ve said, I can’t talk about our meeting. It’s a matter of privilege, you see.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I am the chief administrator of the trust, have been for over forty years. I was appointed by Mr. Randolph himself to this post.”