Michelangelo_s Notebook

28

The Newman Gallery was located in Chelsea, on West Twenty-second Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. The gallery had moved with the times, from Greenwich Village in the thirties to Soho in the seventies to Tribeca in the eighties and finally to its present Chelsea location in the early nineties. During all that time a series of Newmans had stuck to the credo laid down by the gallery’s founder in 1889: “Don’t buy what you can’t sell.” To the founder, Josef Neumann of Cologne, that meant buying quality, which meant sticking to the proven. In more than a hundred years the Newman Gallery had never succumbed to the vagaries of taste. Because of that, they had prospered, riding out waves of flash-in-the-pan art, quietly expanding over the years, stocking up on Dutch masters and French Impressionists when they were out of favor, trickling them back on the market when the tide turned, which it inevitably did.

The gallery occupied a narrow space on the ground floor of a renovated warehouse building and was bracketed by a nouveau Japanese restaurant and an upscale kitchen store. The walls of the gallery were painted flat white, the floors were heavily polyurethaned oak planks and the ceiling was a black steel grid capable of virtually any lighting arrangement.

There were only three paintings on display: a Franz Hals portrait a yard square, a Jacob van Ruisdael about the same size on the opposite wall and, at the rear of the gallery, a massive Petrus Christus religious scene as large as the other two put together. By Valentine’s quick estimate there was at least twenty or thirty million dollars’ worth of art in the long narrow room. Valentine also knew that the three pieces were only the very tip of the iceberg; the gallery’s real inventory was in a climate-controlled storage vault in New Jersey.

As Valentine stepped through the door, Peter Newman came out of the office in the back. Newman, as usual, was dressed in funereal black. He was in his early seventies, bald and stooped. He looked more like a mortician than an art dealer, although it occurred to Valentine that both professions were similar: a mortician cared for dead bodies, an art dealer of Peter Newman’s stature cared for dead art. Both jobs were remarkably profitable.

“Michael,” said Newman, smiling as Valentine came down the room. “It’s been ages. How have you been?”

“Well enough,” said Valentine. “Taking care of business.”

“Business,” huffed the old man irritably “Feh! Art is supposed to be art, not business. ‘I got fifty million worth of Van Gogh,’ says one of the little Japanese businessmen. ‘That’s nothing,’ says the man beside him at the sushi bar. ‘I got a hundred million in Picassos in the trunk of my car.’ ” Newman made a snorting sound. “And by sushi bar I don’t mean the restaurant next door.” He slipped his arm through Valentine’s and led him into the rear office. The little room was cramped. An old and probably valuable escritoire stood against one wall, and the other wall was taken up by floor-to-ceiling bookcases crammed with ledgers that probably dated back to the gallery’s origins. In them Valentine knew were the sales records and provenances for every painting the Newmans had ever sold, and in a sense it was those records that were the real value of the gallery-the family trees of ten thousand individual pieces of art and the record of a hundred thousand transactions that covered Europe and North America like an invisible network. What wasn’t in the records was probably crammed into Peter Newman’s head, information handed down from father to son for more than a hundred years.

Valentine sat down in an old wooden office chair and watched while Peter Newman shuffled around in front of the coffeemaker at the very rear of the cell-like office. He brought back two ancient Delftware cups and saucers and handed one to Valentine. Then he sat down at the escritoire and sighed as he settled into his seat.

“So?” he said, sipping his coffee, peering at Valentine over the milky edge of the cup.

“Juan Gris.”

“He’s dead,” Newman cackled.

“The Nazi connection.”

“He was Spanish. He stayed in Paris during the war. He was one of the so-called ‘degenerates.’ The Nazis looted some of his early work. He’s part of the whole mudslinging match between European galleries about who did what during Hitler’s reign. I never had much feeling for the man myself.”

“Renoir, Head of a Young Girl.”

“More Nazi loot.”

“If I told you I’d seen a looted Juan Gris and the Renoir portrait in one day what would you say?”

“I’d say you’d paid a visit to Colonel George Gatty.”

“Why haven’t I heard of him before?”

“He lives in a very rarified strata. He never buys at a public auction. Very discreet.”

“Both the Gris and the Renoir are reasonably well known. Why doesn’t somebody tell the police?”

“The colonel has some very important connections.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“Is the president of the United States particular enough?”

“Impressive.”

“Not in the art world. The man is a pig. No one reputable would buy or sell for him.”

“Somebody is.”

“Who said the art world was entirely reputable?” Newman cackled again, finishing his coffee.

“Come on, Peter, it’s me you’re talking to.”

Newman sighed and put down his cup and saucer. “I would not like to be accused of being a bigot,” he said. “Such things are not good when you are an old Jew like me. Bad for my reputation.”

“Spit it out,” Valentine said, smiling.

“Let me say only this,” Newman murmured.

“The archdiocese of New York has some very fine collections under the purvue of its archives division. They also have ready access to the Vatican collections in Rome. Colonel Gatty, by the way, is what they refer to as a ‘Friend’ of the Vatican museums.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not at all,” countered Newman. “The Vatican museums were founded in the 1500s. Their collection is… how shall I put this… extensive. Like any other museum, they regularly deaccession. When they do, the colonel is first in line.”

“The Vatican is dealing in looted art?”

“I never said that. Not really.” Newman pursed his lips into a small smile.

“Christ,” Valentine whispered.

“I seriously doubt that he was directly involved,” said Newman, cracking himself up again.

Valentine tried to clear his thoughts. “All right,” he said after a moment. “Forget about the Vatican. What about the Parker-Hale?”

“Private art museum with an endowment about as big as the Whitney but smaller than the Getty.”

“A player?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Alexander Crawley?”

“Like Juan Gris, he too is dead. Nasty.”

“His reputation?”

“Academically it was unblemished. Columbia, Harvard or Yale-I forget which. Studied conservation in London at the Courtauld Institute of Art, curator at the Fogg in Boston, that sort of thing. Went to the Parker-Hale under the wing of the director, James Cornwall, in the mid-nineties. Took over as acting director a year ago when Cornwall passed on.”

“Passed on?”

“It is how alter cockers like myself refer to dropping dead. And by the way, in Cornwall’s case it was peacefully-Az a yor ahf mir, May I be so lucky-in his sleep. He’d had several heart attacks. He was in his eighties, I believe.”

“You said Crawley was academically clean; what about otherwise?”

“Socially very good with people, an excellent fund-raiser. He tended to cheat when it came to buying and selling.”

“How so?”

“It was in the way of being a ring; you know what that is, of course.”

Valentine nodded. In the business of art and antiquities a ring was a secret association of dealers who conspired to keep the prices down at auction. Not only were they frowned upon, they were illegal, constituting both fraud and price-fixing.

“He had his friends, then?”

“That’s right, and it was a circle that is very difficult to break in to.” Newman frowned. “An interesting connection, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“What’s that?”

“He often sold works to the archdiocese of New York and vice versa.”

“Any idea why someone would want to kill him?”

“He was not a very nice fellow, I’m afraid, unlike his predecessor. James Cornwall was a good and fair man. He showed no favorites.”

“He must have thought well of Crawley, though.”

“Perhaps at first. They had a falling-out toward the end. I hear rumors to that effect. He certainly wouldn’t have been Cornwall’s anointed heir.”

“But he became acting director.”

“James Cornwall’s health had been failing for some time. The man he’d chosen to take over when he retired had resigned under something of a cloud.” The old man shrugged his shoulders. “Although it should not be so, these things are sometimes political. Crawley had his friends on the board of directors. He stacked the deck in his favor, so to speak.”

“Who was the man who resigned and under what sort of cloud?”

“His name was Taschen, Eric Taschen, and the cloud had quite a purple tinge to it.”

“Sex?”

“I’m afraid so, Michael.” The old man in the black suit let out a heartfelt sigh. “As ever it was and ever shall be.”