Marked Man

6

The Randolph Trust sits on 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.”

“Really? What was he like?”

“He was an extraordinary man, very fierce and very loyal. He gave me complete authority over all matters pertaining to the trust and its educational mission during his lifetime, and I’ve held that authority since. I’m sure I could help you with any inquiry.”

“Maybe it’s my mistake,” I said. “I thought Mr. Spurlock was the president of the Randolph Trust.”

“That is his title, yes. But, you see, I run things.”

“I’d just as soon talk to the title. Is he waiting for me? I don’t want to be late.”

She fought to control the anger that was twisting her mouth into a thin, wriggly worm. “This way, please,” she said.

Mrs. LeComte led me out of the ground-floor gallery, up a wide staircase, and through an upstairs gallery filled with giant canvas bouquets of wild color.

“Matisse,” I said.

“Yes. We have five of his works in this room.”

I stopped and spun around. “These are amazing.”

“If you want to see the artwork, Mr. Carl, buy a ticket. We are open to the public the second Monday of each month and alternate Wednesdays.”

“Let’s not forget Good Friday.”

“Mr. Spurlock is waiting in the boardroom,” she said, her voice shivering with cold. There is nothing more bracing than a frigid blast of anger, though I couldn’t help wondering where it was coming from and why it was directed at me.

“We should have coffee sometime, you and me,” I said to her.

She stepped back, tilted her head, and gave me the once-over, not like I was a vile specimen in a jar, more like she was determining whether I was a man worth another slice of her time. Whatever she was now, Mrs. LeComte had surely been something once.

“Maybe we will,” she said, “if you behave. Now, come along. It doesn’t do to keep Mr. Spurlock waiting.”

At the end of the hallway, Mrs. LeComte knocked lightly before pushing open one of the double wooden doors and leading me into the boardroom.