Dead Line

Chapter Ten

I occasionally wonder what it would be like to walk through the sleek lobby of a downtown office tower every morning, ride the elevator to, say, the twenty-eighth floor, and report to work in a windowless cubicle at a job in which the tomorrows are indistinguishable from the todays. A bad day at the office is when the markets dip in the triple figures or that surefire client decides to take his business to Acme Whatever down the street. A good day is when your best stock announces a split or when you lock down a sale you never really expected to make. It’s a tribute to the human psyche that you’re able to contain the euphoric onslaught of unmitigated joy.

Truth be known, it’s why I went into newspapers — that and the fact that my father worked for the Record as a pressman and newspapering is the only business that I have ever known. As a reporter, you can be sitting at Fenway Park one moment watching the Red Sox make an improbable journey toward the pennant, and the next moment, you’re being led by a pride of hairy thugs to a meeting with one of the most senior law enforcement officials in the city — all in the name of front-page news. You can challenge authority at will, make even presidents sweat, and tell people, regular, normal, God-fearing people, that which they would never otherwise know. All this, and no license required.

And yet, on days like this one, I looked longingly on those downtown towers, pining for the relative predictability and obscurity contained within — at your desk by 8:30, out by 5:00, all aboard the 6:07 to Wellesley Farms. Honey, sorry I’m one-and-a-half minutes late, but Mr. Talksalot wouldn’t let me go.

By way of explanation, my situation: One young woman dead, another likely on her way, an editor informing me that, in his words, all hell was set to break loose, and a colleague espousing an uncannily insightful theory involving my utter imbecility. And of course, add to this the fact that my fabulously intelligent and beautiful live-in girlfriend, one Elizabeth Riggs, was at that hour home packing her belongings to depart not just my house, but I suspect, my life.

“Tell Agent Jankle, please, that I am planning to post a story on our website very soon about the murder of a young woman in Boston that I think he will be very interested in.”

That was me, essentially lying to Special Agent Tom Jankle’s secretary. Look, someone was obviously lying to me about something, so I’m not going to sit back and be purer than a virgin snow. I was in the taxi, talking on the cabbie’s cell phone that he was nice enough to loan me because he knows I’m Jack Flynn and the urgent business of daily journalism never takes so much as a momentary break.

Well, actually, a loan might be something that would happen in St. Louis or Denver. This being Boston, I was paying to use it for the duration of the ride. And Jack Flynn, Jack Ass, no difference to him. He didn’t understand English when I initially inquired, but became well versed in the intricacies of capitalism when I pulled out a crisp $20 bill.

Anyway, the particularly ornery woman on the other end of the line seemed unimpressed. “Even if he cared,” she told me in a tone so dismissive it made me more jealous than angry, “I couldn’t reach him at the moment anyway. He’s on a flight right now to Washington.”

Ding, ding, ding. That, ladies and gentlemen, would be news we’ve just spotted there. Washington, D.C. is, last I checked, capital of the United States of America, home of, among other things, the White House, and more pertinent to the situation, the headquarters of the FBI. Someone wanted to see Jankle about something — and quickly. I punched out a couple of more numbers on the rented phone, tossing out lines to FBI officials I knew in Boston and Washington. That done, I placed a call to my condominium, to see how Elizabeth was faring, but got only the voice machine.

The phone rang in my hand and, without thinking, I answered it with my usual, “Flynn here.” A raspy voice on the other end of the line began a machine-gun-fire conversation in a language I had never before heard. I handed the phone up to the driver in the headdress and tunic.

I leaned back and closed my eyes and listened to his end of the indecipherable conversation and thought about how big this world we live in really is. This driver had fled his homeland, perhaps leaving a family behind, to journey across an enormous ocean to the mysterious shores of America, all in the name of freedom. Perhaps it was political freedom, perhaps financial. Didn’t matter, he had set out in a brave search for a better way in another part of the globe.

So if this world around us was so big, then why, I wondered in my current state of exhausted angst, did mine seem so suddenly small? Everywhere I looked, there were walls of misery and an impenetrable haze of helplessness. I thought of Hilary Kane’s parents, probably planning her burial. I thought of desperate Maggie Kane running for her life. I thought of Elizabeth, home sadly packing up her things, maybe drying the inevitable tears that streamed down her cheeks on the top of Baker’s soft head. Everyone and everything seemed to be going away.

Before I came to terms with any of it, the car stopped. I opened my eyes and saw the familiar and sometimes friendly front doors of the Record. The driver said, “$18.75.” With tip and the phone bill, the ride cost me $45. As Martin would probably point out, it wasn’t so long ago that you could fly from Boston to Washington on People’s Express for about the same amount. But no matter. Time now to head inside and peer into the looseness of a broken hell.

A s I strode through the newsroom, I could see Martin pacing along a distant aisle, his head down, his hands moving as if he were carrying on a conversation with himself, which he probably was. I stopped at the reception desk and asked Barbara, my surrogate mother and the chief gatekeeper of all things Record, if she could see her way to finding me a replacement phone.

“Honey, I don’t know which looks worse, you or this Nokia,” she said in her thick South Boston accent when I handed it over. I tried to think of a witty response, but that rather large part of my brain had apparently ceased to function, though hopefully not for good.

When I got to my desk, Martin was already standing there, accompanied by Edgar Sullivan, the paper’s longtime director of security — and when I say longtime, I’m talking in multiples of decades. Edgar couldn’t catch a cold these days, never mind a thief, but he’s always been our security director, thus he always will be our security director until the day that he decides not to be, which is just one more reason why I loved this newspaper so.

I said, “All right, Edgar, you’ve got me. I refilled my Coke in the cafeteria last week and forgot to pay.”

Edgar, a longtime friend, laughed an appreciative laugh and replied, “Up against the desk, Jack. Don’t make this hard on either one of us.”

Martin, ever impatient and equally humorless, said simply, “Why don’t we turn off the laugh track while we get down to business.”

And business, I suspected, was this rather large tube wrapped in brown butcher’s paper that sat propped against my desk, with an envelope taped to the top that said in handwritten letters, “Jack Flynn.”

We all looked at it together, silently, until Edgar said, “I already scanned it once downstairs, through a machine, but I brought the handheld up with me to show you it was safe.” And with that, he produced a portable magnetometer that he flicked on and casually waved around the perimeter of the package.

Around the room, reporters were openly peering in our direction. Some had actually wandered by to watch. Subtlety isn’t a trait of even good journalists. Martin, standing directly beside me, rubbed his hands together and said, “Let’s have a go.”

Not quite yet. Edgar pulled a pair of latex gloves from the breast pocket of his ancient and wrinkled blue blazer, and handed me a second pair of the same. “I’d advise that you wear these, Jack,” he said in his soft, gravelly voice. “We might be dealing with important evidence here.”

Indeed, we might. Now’s as good a time as any to note that this would be the exact kind of package in which a painting might be shipped, which had been Martin’s unstated point since he reached me on the phone in Copley Square. You don’t need Carl Bernstein kicking around the newsroom to know when news might be about to hit us flush in the face.

Finally, Edgar, who had already exhibited more knowledge of protocol than I ever would have imagined that he had, gently pulled the envelope off the package and handed it to me, unopened. He then pulled a letter opener out of his coat pocket — what the hell else does he keep in there? — and said, “Keep it as intact as you can.”

And I did, which wasn’t easy, given how many sets of eyes were on me. It was about four o’clock, rounding the corner from the casual ease of another newspapering afternoon to the full tension of deadline. But everyone in the room seemed to have nothing but time.

I pulled the note out, sat down in my chair, and read.

“It’s real,” it said in the same crude, almost childlike handwriting that was on the envelope. “We have the others.” And then, in a direct quote from what the thieves told the Gardner Museum security guards that night, the note concluded, “Tell them they’ll be hearing from us.” It wasn’t signed, as these things usually aren’t. It just ended, unceremoniously so, right there.

I turned around to show Martin, but he had already read the entire thing over my shoulder.

I began rereading the brief note, when Martin said in a tone as taut as a rope, “Open it.” He knew, I knew, what was very well inside.

I reached for the tube, when Edgar put up his wrinkled hand and said, “Let me do it.” My old friend Edgar was suddenly equal parts Dirty Harry and Sherlock Holmes. He flipped a box cutter out of his breast pocket and, like a surgeon, cut the paper wrapper off the tube in one precise stroke of his gloved hands. He pulled off the top and handed me the package.

I reached inside and pulled out a heavy piece of scrolled paper and handed Edgar the empty tube. It had the odor of age to it, of history, something significant that had been passed through the years, studied by scholars, and in this case, perhaps hidden for too long in a dark corner of a distant safe. I pushed the old newspapers and used legal pads and assorted books off the top of my desk and unfurled the canvas. Before I could fully synthesize that which I saw, I heard the familiar voice of Vinny Mongillo, who must have arrived on the scene with uncharacteristic silence, utter the following memorable words: “Holy fucking fuck.”

I was looking at what seemed to be an oil painting, though in truth, how the hell do I know these things? It could have been done in Crayola pastels and I wouldn’t have known the difference. Anyway, the painting showed three people — two of them sitting, the third, a woman, standing — on the far side of what seemed to be a checkered-floor conservatory, with two of them playing some sort of musical instruments and the third leading them in song. It reminded me of one of those incredibly complicated thousand-piece puzzles that my grandmother used to assemble over the course of weeks on her dining-room table.

“Vermeer,” Mongillo said, stepping forward, in a distant voice that made it sound like he might be under a hypnotic spell. I looked at him for a long moment as he stared wide-eyed at the canvas. “The Concert. You’re looking at one of the great art works of all time, the most valuable painting stolen from the Gardner Museum thirteen years ago, a priceless treasure too great for words, too beautiful for anyone to ever assign mere human emotion.”

By now, my massive friend was standing directly beside me, hovering over the painting like a Yellowstone bear regarding a finely sculpted piece of Nobu sushi. It’s important to have a full appreciation for the aesthetic — as an art dealer might call it — of Vinny Mongillo. He is big in the way a mountain is big, with an unwieldy girth that sprouts oversize limbs coated in a constant sheen of oil and sweat. His hair is thick and black and always matted down — and not just on his head. His odor is that of Italian cold cuts. His clothes — rugged khakis, flannel shirts, heavy shoes — are bought from specialty shops that supply outsize construction workers making an honest day’s wage for a hard day’s work. In short and sum, he looked like the type of guy that would collect various renditions of Elvis on felt, but here he was ready to fall to intellectual pieces over a painting by this master called Vermeer.

“What do you see?” he said to me, still in that faraway tone. He said this as he continued to drink in every last detail of the canvas, never taking his eyes off the muted colors of the paint.

“I see three women in a room—” and here I borrowed off the title to make what I thought was an impressive-sounding assumption—“giving a little concert in the way they used to do.”

“Yeah,” he said. He repeated that, saying, “Yeah,” softly, slowly, and then in that same absent voice, “You really are an ass, aren’t you?”

I didn’t think so, but mine is a subjective view. Before I could reply, Mongillo said, “First off, that figure in the middle with his back to us, that’s a man.”

I peered more closely at the painting and saw from the robes and possibly the long, flowing, Christlike hair that Mongillo was indeed correct in his gender identification.

“And you’re right, there is a, ahem, little concert going on, but there’s so much more. It looks so innocent, doesn’t it, but it’s not.”

He paused here to stare harder still at the painting, and I did as well, though he seemed to be seeing things that I couldn’t find.

He glanced at me for a flicker of a moment and said, “Look at the depth of light, at the richness of color, at the enormous meaning.”

I saw a few people playing a song.

“It’s so serene on one level, isn’t it? And yet, the serenity is a mask for the turbulent, sexual undertone that nearly engulfs the entire work.”

I, again, saw a few people playing a song.

I asked, “How the hell do you know all this?”

“I know,” he said, “because it’s beautiful.” He paused for a moment and added in words that were now hardened by some frustration, “You don’t see the meaning, do you?”

“Well, I, I think—”

“Look,” he said, cutting me off, “at the Van Baburen on the wall, The Procuress. Look at what it tells us about these three people. Look at the sexuality it exudes.”

At that point, Mongillo reached out his hand as if to touch the part of the canvas where The Procuress was depicted, and poor Edgar, standing sentry, slapped his arm up and barked, “No touch.”

Martin, seeing an opening, piped in, “Can we can the art history lesson while I ask just one very plebeian question: Is it real?”

Mongillo looked at Edgar and then at Martin and finally back at the painting. All around us, reporters stood on tiptoe or climbed up on desks for a view of the proceedings. Ringing phones, including mine, went unanswered. Emails sat unread. All eyes were now on Mongillo as he was set to explain whether one of the most significant treasures ever stolen in the refined world of art sat right here in the Record newsroom.

He said, “Only experts, trained chemists, could tell you for certain. They’ll test chips of paint scraped from the perimeter. But I’ve got to tell you, it looks real to me.”

There was an audible buzz in the room. Edgar, God bless him, moved closer to the painting, as if to protect it. Martin called out for all to hear, “People, we publish 365 days a year, and tomorrow would be one of those days. Don’t you have stories you need to write?” And then he added, “No one, and I mean absolutely no one, is to tell anyone anywhere outside of this room what we correctly or incorrectly believe we might or might not have. That’s a job-dependent order.”

Then he looked at Mongillo and at me with a cross of anger and intrigue. “You two, in my office. Edgar, please carry the canvas in with us.” And the ever-efficient Peter Martin turned and walked away.

Roughly six years before, a reputable reporter for the rival Boston Traveler was driven along a “circuitous and somewhat paranoid” route under the cover of dark by an informant who was never named in print. He was taken to what he would only describe as a “run-down warehouse” in a “barren and forsaken” district somewhere in the Northeast.

There, the informant opened a pair of airtight caps at each end of a heavy-duty poster tube, then unfurled what he claimed was Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, another treasure stolen in the Gardner heist. The only illumination in the warehouse was the informant’s flashlight. No photographs were allowed, no fragments of the painting could be taken, and within fifteen minutes, the reporter was sent on his way.

At the time, it was widely believed that the informant was working for a pair of convicted swindlers and thieves who were trying to broker the return of the stolen paintings and drawings in return for legal immunity and the $5 million reward posted by the museum.

A couple of months later, the Traveler obtained photographs and some minuscule paint chips which, when tested by art experts, were deemed not to be from the stolen Rembrandt. At that point, the negotiations dissolved into a fit of accusations and name-calling.

And now this. Edgar had placed the canvas back into the tube, sealed it up, and sat in a chair in the corner of the office with the tube between his legs. The three of us — Mongillo, Martin, and myself — sat around a cheap, circular conference table. Martin immediately broke the ice with this memorable line: “What the fuck.”

“Five minutes,” Mongillo said, apropos of nothing. “Just let me hang that thing in my apartment for five minutes. Let me revel in it. Let me luxuriate in its presence. For Christ’s sake, let me die a happy man, and this is the only thing that can possibly allow for that.”

Martin looked at Mongillo, opened his mouth as if to say something, then thought better of it. Instead, he looked from one of us to the other and said, “Okay, before we get lawyers and all the bullshit involved, let’s just hash things out for a moment. From my quick review of our situation, we have two broad options. First, we keep the painting and figure out what to do with it. Second, we immediately turn it over to authorities.”

He paused and looked down at a legal pad he had in front of him and scratched out a couple of notes in the brief quiet. “Under Option One, we run a story in tomorrow’s paper saying this painting — what the hell did you call it, Vinny, The Concerto?”

“The Concert,” Mongillo replied urgently, as if Martin had just mispronounced the name of his girlfriend. “Vermeer’s The Concert.”

“Right. Okay, so we can run a story saying that someone delivered this canvas to the Record and we’re trying to ascertain if it’s real. Or Two, we wait and have it tested and base any story — if it warrants one at all — on the results.”

I nodded. Martin locked in on me for a moment. Then he continued, “Under Option Two, we lose control of the painting, but legally, we’re probably on safer footing, no? And if we’re good doobies and relinquish control, the FBI and the museum might feel the obligation to play ball with us as the story unfolds. And whoever sent us the painting, we should assume, will still continue to use us as a conduit, giving us better bargaining power with the Feds.”

You know, you go through too many days listening to too many ridiculous ideas from too many self-indulgent people who know far less than they could ever possibly imagine, and half the time protocol requires that you sit there and nod with an occasionally murmured “Sure.” And then every once in a rare while, you come across pure genius like this. Understand, Martin can be as skittish as a rodent. He can be shortsighted, recklessly impatient, and just plain aggravating. But time and again, in the toughest of situations, he can distill the most complicated situations down to their most basic ingredients, always with a mind toward getting the story into print.

He looked at me here and said, “What’s your take?”

My take was that the first half of Option One wasn’t a viable option at all, and I sense he knew that. You can’t ramble into print with raw speculation, especially when you’re putting the good name of the newspaper on the line in more ways than one. Option Two wasn’t much to my liking either because of the level of control that we’d lose. I’d rather be the one gunning for birdies than sitting in the clubhouse hoping that the final players on the eighteenth green miss their putts for par.

That left Option One-b, so to speak, which I liked very much. Find out what we have or don’t have. Keep our hand on the wheel. Be the public’s agent in a case that the government has failed to solve for thirteen years. Have we received stolen merchandise, in this case, a priceless painting? Maybe, but we can’t and won’t know that until we get it tested. There would be a proper time to turn the canvas over to authorities, but right then wasn’t it. For all we knew, the canvas we had contained little numbers beneath the paint.

So I said all this, and concluded, “Keep it and test it.”

Martin nodded and turned to Mongillo, who said, “What he says. And I’d be glad to hold on to it until you find a suitable expert.”

Martin, looking down again at his legal pad, said, “I’ll run interference with our company lawyers. We’ll run no mention of this in tomorrow’s stories.” He turned and looked at Edgar. “You’ll stay with me and the painting will stay with you. Do you have relief who you can pass it on to?”

Edgar replied with great certainty, “I don’t pass this on to anyone. I’m with it until I’m ordered to give it up.”

I never again looked at him in the same way. Before I could stand and make my escape, Martin said to us, “So what do we have for tomorrow’s paper?”

My mind flashed back to the scene in Hilary Kane’s apartment, to my lunch at the University Club, to the single gunshot in Copley Square. No sense in lying to him, so I explained to Martin how I had essentially squandered my day in pursuit of a hunch that hadn’t yet panned out.

Barely able to contain his frustration, he said to me, “Well then, I guess we’ll just lean on Smitty and Hasbro”—our federal court and FBI reporters—“to write the investigation story. Let me know if something falls in your lap.”

That last phrase, for anyone keeping track at home, is an insult in my business, implying that to break something on this story, it would have to just be effortless luck. Ah, the difference a day makes.

Vinny and I walked out of the glass office together, and halfway toward our respective desks, with the buzz of deadline all around us, he said to me in a tone of uncharacteristic earnestness, “Fair Hair, I really need to talk to you. Today.”

“Vin,” I replied, not even looking at him, “my whole world is caving in. Don’t get too close or you’ll be gone with it.”

And I kept walking, knowing the enormous pit in my stomach had less to do with Vermeer or the Kane sisters than the events of the night ahead.