Michelangelo_s Notebook

21

Gatty’s residence was a six-story house on West Seventy-second that looked as though it had been transported away from beside a canal in Amsterdam a few hundred years ago. To the left was a brownstone, to the right there was a fair-sized apartment building. The front door was in the basement and they had to walk down into a little well surrounded by a wrought iron fence. The door knocker was huge: a black hand on a hinge holding something that looked like a small cannonball. In the middle of the cannonball was an unblinking eye. Valentine tapped the knocker twice against the heavy oak door. They could hear it echoing inside and then they heard the sound of footsteps on stone.

“Spooky,” said Finn.

Valentine smiled. “The kind of money that can afford a house like this on the West Side usually is,” he answered. A light went on over their heads. There was a short pause and then a man in a plain black suit answered the door. He was in his seventies and the little hair he had on his head was silver-white. He had dark eyes that had seen too much and a thin mouth. A scar pulled his upper lip upward, revealing a piece of yellow tooth. He’d been born before operations for split lips and cleft pallets were commonplace.

“We’d like to speak to the colonel, if you don’t mind,” said Valentine. “It’s to do with Greyfriars Academy. He was just visiting there, I believe.”

“Wait,” said the man. There was a slight snuffle to his voice but it was clear enough. He closed the door on them and the light went off, leaving the two standing in the darkness.

“The butler did it,” said Finn. “He’s really spooky.”

“Not just a butler,” Valentine commented.

“Bodyguard. He’s wearing a shoulder rig. I saw it when he turned away.”

The butler-bodyguard returned a few moments later and let them in. They followed him into a gloomy, slate-floored foyer set with old-fashioned wall sconces, then up a wide flight of worn oak steps to an enormous room on the main floor. It was two stories high, a blend of church nave and baronial hall. The ceiling was plaster, worked in ornate clusters of ivy and grapes, the walls paneled three quarters of the way up in dark oak, the floor done in wide planks. At one end of the room three arched windows, heavily leaded, looked out onto Seventy-second Street while at the other end more than a dozen smaller windows rising from floor to ceiling looked out onto a small walled garden, dark except for two or three small lights set into the corners of the wall.

There were dozens of paintings on the walls, almost all of them Dutch: meticulous DeWitte architectural renderings, DeHooch domestic interiors, seascapes by Cuyp and Hobbema’s gloomy castles. The only exception was a large Renoir, the head of a young girl, placed in a position of honor above the large tiled fireplace.

Heraldic banners hung around the room from a second-floor gallery running around three sides of the room, and there were four blue-black suits of armor, one in each corner. A bright red rug covered most of the floor and on it, facing each other were two large, tufted leather sofas in caramel brown. Between the sofas, resting on a large, splayed zebra skin was a square coffee table framed in teak and surfaced in squares of heavy beaten brass. There were end tables and side tables here and there loaded with photographs in silver frames and assorted small treasures from ornate gold cigarette boxes to at least three silver koummyas that Finn could see.

“I see you are enjoying my things,” said a voice from somewhere above them. “Please, enjoy yourself.” Finn looked up and saw the face of a heavily jowled man looking down at them from the gallery. The man disappeared and there was a low humming sound. A moment later the man appeared at the far end of the room. He was dressed in a very formal-looking Saville Row suit at least thirty years out of date. He had a full head of flat black hair that might have come out of a tin of shoe polish, Ronald Reagan-style, and his large blue eyes were washed out and pale. He had large liver spots on his gnarled hands and when he walked, he leaned heavily on a three-point cane. His right leg appeared to hitch a little as he moved and his left shoulder was fractionally higher than his right. Despite the black hair he appeared to be well into his eighties. Using his left hand, he gestured with the cane.

“Sit,” he said pleasantly, pointing at the brown leather couches. Finn and Valentine did as he asked. The old man chose a heavy-looking straight-backed wooden chair at right angles to them. The butler-bodyguard appeared carrying an antique silver coffee service. The man put it down and disappeared. “Edward Winslow,” said the old man. “People often mistake it for Paul Revere.” He took a gnarled briar pipe out of his jacket pocket and lit it with a World War Two-vintage, black, crackle-finish lighter. He snapped it shut with a practiced motion and blew out a cloud of apple-scented smoke. One mystery solved, Finn thought.

“Winslow was much earlier than Revere, though,” commented Valentine. “And better, in my opinion, especially his smaller pieces. Revere was like his politics, a little bit melodramatic.”

“You know something of silver?”

“And politics.” Valentine smiled. “Especially the melodramatic kind.”

“Who is your young and singularly pretty companion?”

“My name is Finn Ryan, Colonel. We’re here about the koummya you donated to Greyfriars.”

“The one that wound up being shoved down poor Alex Crawley’s throat, you mean?” The old man laughed. “Much as I would have enjoyed doing it, I seriously doubt that my arthritis would have allowed it, not to mention the stroke I had a year or so ago. I don’t get around the way I used to.”

“You knew Crawley?” asked Valentine.

“I knew him well enough to dislike him. He was what they refer to as a bean counter. Had no feel for the art he represented.”

“How did you know him?” Finn asked. “Through the museum or through Greyfriars?” The old man gave her a long, almost predatory look that made her skin crawl.

“Neither. Not that it’s any of your business. Look around you, Miss Ryan. Do I have your name right? I live for art. I purchase a great deal of it. When you buy art at the scale I do you often find yourself making purchases from deaccessioned works from places like the Parker-Hale.

They had a number of Dutch works-Dutch is what I collect.”

“Except for the Renoir,” Valentine commented, nodding toward the painting over the fireplace.

“Yes, I purchased that just toward the end of the war.”

“Oh.” Valentine let it hang. Gatty was a collector-a vulgar one, if the decor of his living room was anything to go by-and collectors loved to boast.

“In Switzerland, as a matter of fact.”

“Odd posting.”

“Not really. I was army liaison to Allen Dulles in Berne.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Cloak-and-dagger stuff. Still can’t talk about most of it.”

“Dulles ran an OSS listening post. How does Renoir come into it?”

The colonel seemed surprised that Valentine knew as much as he did. He raised an eyebrow, then smiled. “There was a great deal of art for sale in Europe. Before, during and after the war. I merely took advantage of what one might call a downturn in the market. The provenance is perfectly legitimate.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” Valentine answered mildly.

“I still buy from them now and again.”

“Who might that be?”

“The Hoffman Gallery,” replied Gatty. Finn made a small startled movement. Valentine casually dropped his hand onto her knee and left it there. Finn wasn’t sure which was more shocking-the touch of Valentine’s hand or the name of the gallery. Hoffman was the same name as the one on the computer file for the provenance of the Michelangelo drawing. It was no answer to the mystery, but at least it was another piece of the puzzle put into play. The dagger, Greyfriars, Gatty’s connection to Crawley and now the Swiss art gallery linking everything together. Connections, but no real meaning.

“Doesn’t it seem a little strange that a murderer would go to all the trouble to break into a school in Connecticut for a murder weapon he used in New York?”

“As far as I know it was a coincidence. A robbery in one place, the dagger turning up in another. The killer could just as easily have purchased the knife from a pawnshop here; there’s nothing to say they were one and the same person.”

“I suppose if you were defending yourself in court that would be true.”

“But I’m not, am I?” Gatty answered. “And not likely to be.”

“No, I suppose not,” answered Valentine. One finger tapped lightly on Finn’s knee. Valentine stood up and she followed suit. The old man remained in his seat. The white-haired bodyguard appeared as though Gatty had pressed some kind of hidden button.

“Bert, show these two people out.” The old man gave them a cold smile and the bodyguard led them to the front door.

“What was that all about?” asked Finn as they walked down the block to the rental car. “You never really asked him about anything except the Renoir. And how did you know there was a connection to the drawing?”

“I didn’t,” said Valentine. “I knew I’d seen the Renoir before, though.”

“Where?”

“The same place as the Juan Gris back at the school-on an International Fine Arts Register Bulletin. The Renoir disappeared along with a Pissaro landscape in 1938. It was being shipped from Amsterdam to Switzerland. Supposedly it never arrived. That’s two pieces of stolen art in one day.” He paused. “And that’s two too many.”