Dead Line

Chapter Twenty-seven

Sunday, September 28

Vinny Mongillo was wearing the type of matching black sweatsuit you associate with a Mafia don or a New York gynecologist. He showed up on my doorstep a few minutes after eight on Sunday morning, his face coated in perspiration, and said, “I jumped off the treadmill as soon as you called.” I couldn’t help but wonder if he planned to sit on the furniture.

He was the first one to arrive from my round of morning alerts. He walked past me, into the living room, and said, “Come on, Jack, don’t make me beg. Where is it? Where is it?” He sounded like a schoolgirl on her way to her first ’NSYNC concert.

I led him into my small, hunter green study, where I had the canvas resting flat on my antique desk. When he saw it from a few feet away, he stopped short. He wiped his hands on the thighs of his sweatpants, put them up to his face, and then wiped them anew. In frustration, he said without looking in my direction, “Get me a towel.” So I did.

He dried off his face, his hands, his arms, and his neck, as if he were a doctor cleaning up for surgery. Then he inched closer to the painting, one small step at a time, as if he were trying to surprise it. When he got within touching distance, he rested his right hand on the corner of the desk and said, “Mother of a benevolent Christ, I can’t believe it.”

He kept staring in silence, seemingly entranced, his eyes caressing the painting but never leaving it. Still without looking at me, he said in a hushed, faraway voice, “Did you look at it, Jack? Did you really look at it?”

I didn’t answer, mostly because I didn’t think he was looking for one.

He said, “Did you see the light? Did you appreciate the way it draws your eyes to these haunting waves, to the fear and the futility of the men on board, so overwhelmed by a force that they’ll never be able to understand? Did you see that, Jack?”

Again, I didn’t answer. Of course, I had a question of my own: Where’d my Vinny Mongillo go, and who was this guy standing in my study? Of course, I knew the answer to that already. Vinny was just a more complex human being than I had ever allowed myself to believe.

“Did your eyes then drift from the line to the dark? Did they see the Christ figure, sitting in the shadows, Jesus himself, surrounded by passengers who have a serenity that belies the fact that they may very well be on the brink of death? They are being violently tossed about in an open boat on stormy seas, and yet they are calm and collected in the company of Christ, knowing that their faith will carry them on. It’s brilliant how your eye shifts from one to the other. Just brilliant.”

He stopped and continued to stare. In a slightly different, almost disbelieving tone, he added, “This is Rembrandt’s only seascape. Some scholars and art dealers have said it’s far from his best work. They say it pales in artistry compared to Vermeer’s The Concert. Maybe that’s true. But look at it, Jack. For chrissakes, look at it. It tells a story. It takes us from one emotional pitch to the next. Fuck the critics.”

And finally, he swung around and looked at me. At first, I thought he had fresh sweat rolling down his face, but then I saw the droplets were really tears — tears of joy, tears of appreciation, maybe tears of sorrow that in his own vibrant mind, his life would never be more beautiful than this one exquisite moment when he found himself essentially alone with one of the greatest art treasures the world has ever known.

“Who knows about it, Jack? Who knows you have this here?” He asked this with a voice that seemed to emanate from a different part of his brain.

“You, Martin. Me. The guy who delivered it. The guy who asked the guy to deliver it. So far, that’s it.”

“Let’s kill Martin and take the painting and fly away.”

I laughed a low little laugh. He repeated himself, word for word. Now he was starting to scare me.

“We’re not going to kill Peter Martin,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because that wouldn’t be nice, or legal.”

“If we do, this painting is ours. We can be on the next flight to Rio.”

“So we’d sell the damned thing and live happily ever after, you and me, on a South American beach? You wouldn’t like my bowed legs.”

He stared at me in disbelief. “Who said anything about selling it? We’d live together, me and you, and worship this treasure every day of our lives.”

At that exact moment, the doorbell sounded, and I didn’t so much leave as escape. It was Peter Martin, also dressed in a sweatsuit. I must not be up on the latest in journalism couture. For the record, I was clothed in old jeans and a white polo shirt, untucked.

“You working out?” I asked.

“Curling lessons.”

Of course.

When Martin came into the study, he and Mongillo didn’t bother greeting each other. Instead, Vinny said, “I can already tell you it’s authentic. When this was cut from its frame, investigators found paint chips on the floor of the museum, and if you look here, you can see where it flaked.”

We both got closer. Mongillo warned us, “Don’t touch.” We stood there awkwardly, Martin and I unsure of what to do or say, and Mongillo in silent worship. A few minutes later, I led them back out into the living room and opened up the sliding door to cool everybody down. We all sat on the couch and chairs.

I explained the scuffle in my living room earlier that morning and showed them the note that accompanied the painting.

Martin said, “All right, scrap the plan to go after the mayor. I want both of you on the Rembrandt’s return. I’ll hire the same company to authenticate it and tell them it’s a rush job. We need it by deadline. This may be even bigger than last time. One by one, we’re getting these priceless treasures back. I suspect that soon enough, we’re going to be hit with a ransom note for the rest of them.”

Mongillo nodded in agreement. He was right about a lot, Martin was, as he so often is. It was going to be huge. We’d probably end up as the intermediaries in a ransom bid. We — hell, meaning I — might even be asked by the FBI or the museum to deliver the ransom money. But Martin was wrong in one key area. This was no time to abandon the story of the mayor. Why? Because my gut told me so, and it was time I started listening to myself a little bit more.

“Peter, I have a theory,” I said. Well, okay, I really didn’t, not a well-thought, coherent one, anyway. But it was coming to me as I spoke, surprisingly clear and endlessly sensible.

“Whoever is returning these paintings to me, they want me off Hilary Kane’s murder. They don’t want us probing around in that, so they’re trying to divert our attention, hoping we get so caught up in the fame and the follows that go along with the Gardner story that time passes us by on the Kane death.”

Martin sat staring at me for a long moment. Mongillo got up and walked out to the refrigerator in search of a bite to eat.

Before either could say anything, I added, “It could well be the mayor, directing his kid to start giving paintings back before he gets caught in Kane’s murder. That’s my operating theory.”

“Makes an odd, convoluted kind of sense,” Martin finally replied, his brow furrowed. “If true, it certainly worked with me. I want to throw all our firepower onto the paintings, because we know we have it. It’s rock solid. The other thing’s still a work in progress, and there’s nothing definitive about it, intriguing as it might be.”

Mongillo returned empty-handed and asked, apropos of nothing, “Where’s the pooch?”

Understand, non-dog people — and Mongillo is a card-carrying member of the club — always call dogs pooches — an utterly ridiculous word that means absolutely nothing. They pet dogs with outstretched arms. They think nothing of asking if, say, a golden retriever bites.

“Long story,” I said, not wanting to get into it. Mongillo let it drop.

Martin said, “Okay, so we’ll keep Mongillo on the mayor while you work the return of Rembrandt. That keeps us going on both fronts, right?”

It did, but I still didn’t like it. I wanted the mayor, alone. I wanted him one on one that very day, preferably sitting in his office or in the back of his car or wherever else he’d deign to meet me. He lied to me last we spoke, lied about the last time he had seen or heard from his son, and now I was in a position to call him on it, and I wanted to see the fear on his face, gauge his reaction, determine myself if he had been desperate to pull the trigger on the young and innocent Hilary Kane.

“Flip it,” I said. “Mongillo has forgotten more about art than I’ll ever know. Give him the Rembrandt”—I looked over and Vinny’s eyes lit up at the very notion—“and me the mayor. Maybe we’ll wind up with the best Monday front page in the Record’s history.”

Martin asked, “Do we call the Feds in on this? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of doubt that you’re going to be asked to mediate a ransom for a return.”

I thought about that for a long moment. The breeze, cool and salty, wafted through the open door. The sun outside broke through some high clouds and cast fresh, warm light all across the living room. I said, “Let’s hold off. They might leak to the Traveler.”

They probably wouldn’t. The FBI hates the Traveler. But I was flying on instinct, and my instincts told me to keep this all within the paper, even if I didn’t understand why.

Martin nodded and stood up. He told Mongillo, “I have security outside, with a van, to transport the painting back to the news-room. You want to join us?”

“The only time I lose sight of this treasure is when we send it back to the museum,” he replied. With that, he picked up the painting like it was a baby, and the two of them, looking like teammates in their matching black sweatsuits in some sort of dysfunctional basketball league, headed out the door.

“Don’t lose radio contact,” Martin told me.

I nodded.

He said, “It’s going to be some day.”

Yet again, he was right. It was going to be some day indeed.