Michelangelo_s Notebook

29

The priest, this time using his Larry MacLean persona, sat at an empty table in the enormous, high-ceilinged Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library. High over his head, the frescoed clouds were lost in the gloom above the dusty chandeliers. The only real light came from the old-fashioned shaded lamp on the table in front of him.

For the past few hours the library’s dumbwaiters had delivered him every possible piece of information concerning the Grange Foundation from the miles of stacks below him. He’d been making notes on a pad of yellow paper but it didn’t amount to much. In fact, most of the information was contradictory.

According to the public record the Grange Foundation was established in 1946 from the bequests of Frederick Henry Grange (1860-1945), and his wife, Abbie Norman Grange, nee Coleman (1859-1939). His wife had been an heiress and Grange himself had been a self-made man, a shanty-Irish son of a Boston Back Bay cop. He rose to become an investment banker, entrepreneur and brokerage owner with Kennedys and Fitzgeralds as both partners and clients.

One of his most lucrative investments had been in the Chicago stockyards. By the early 1900s he was a millionaire and began investing in railroads. By the time of his death he had profited from two world wars and had assets of 172 million dollars, while his wife had left behind a second, earlier trust worth almost twice that much.

As a fully private trust the Grange Foundation was not required to file anything but the most basic disclosure documents. Since all of its activities were not for profit and dispensed from tax-paid funds they were not required to report to any government agency. The foundation was located on St. Luke’s Place in Greenwich Village, looking into the park that had once been the churchyard where Edgar Allan Poe had meandered, composing his strange, unsettling poetry.

According to the foundation’s brochure it was dedicated to supporting museums, all types of performance groups, visual arts organizations, art service organizations, community arts programs and organizations providing high-quality arts experiences for young people.

It also had a separate section, the McSkimming Foundation, that provided art law services, particularly focusing on Holocaust victims, forgery and stolen art. McSkimming had been a close friend of Frederick Grange, an avid collector of art and the senior partner in the law firm that managed Grange’s interests and those of his wife. They were close in another way: McSkimming’s son, James, had married Grange’s daughter, Anna-James dying during the war, and his wife predeceasing him, dying in childbirth in 1940. The child was born with severe mental retardation and was institutionalized.

All very well, at least superficially. A closer look revealed that most of it was either misdirection or an outright lie. According to his Google search after logging on to one of the library’s computers, he had discovered a great deal about both Frederick Grange and his foundation. Grange had indeed been shanty Irish and the son of a cop, but he had never been an entrepreneur, brokerage owner, investment banker or railroad tycoon. He had, in fact, been a clerk in the firm of Topping, Halliwell amp; Whiting, where McSkimming had been a junior partner.

Topping, Halliwell amp; Whiting basically dissolved at the close of the war with the blasting away of half its partners and even more of its younger associates, although the firm still existed in corporate fact. It was purchased in 1945 by several unnamed partners and hired its own lawyers-and it was this group of lawyers who created the Grange Foundation and the McSkimming Art Trust, purportedly given family trust tax status by the use of the institutionalized heir, Robert McSkimming.

In 1956, following the death of the boy at the age of sixteen, the foundation was quietly reincorporated as a tax-deductible charity while retaining its name. It was no longer a family trust or a foundation; it was the shell of one, run from behind the scenes by several directors, who, under the charter of the organization were not required to identify themselves. Nowhere did there seem to be any record of the names of those directors, since the directors of the public board were all the newly recruited lawyers now operating under the defunct Topping, Halliwell amp; Whiting banner. By 1956 all traces of the original participants in what had to be a completely fraudulent operation had vanished. But the foundation remained, on its way into the early part of the next century, still in existence after sixty years. It didn’t make any sort of sense; an elaborate, complex and very expensive hoax, but to what purpose and what eventual end?

Since the regular audit statements filed of their grants to other institutions with the IRS had never been a cause for suspicion, that meant that the three or four hundred million dollars’ worth of assets held by the Grange Foundation were real enough even though they obviously had not come from bequests made by Frederick Grange or his wife.

The Grange Foundation was a front to disperse funds that had no real source. It was money laundering on an enormous scale, and it had now been going on for more than half a century. It was quite extraordinary, and remarkably simple. But where was the money coming from that needed laundering, and how was a small boy spirited away from a convent in the north of Italy involved? The Grange Foundation was a small part of his quest here in America. According to his contact in the Vatican, the boy from the past and his present whereabouts were crucial. He scrawled his name on the pad:

Frederico Botte

He knew that once, the boy had been given another name-a dangerous name-and it was his job to make sure it would never be revealed. He wrote the second name below the first:

Eugenio

He glanced at his watch. It was well into the afternoon but there was probably time to get back to the hotel and change into his Father Gentile garb before going off to his meeting with the good friars at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village.

While checking out the Grange Foundation on the Internet he’d run a quick check on the staff at the Community of Sant’Egidio and discovered that there was no one working there who went back as far as Frederico Botte’s arrival in their care, but he knew he could probably find out something of use.

He switched off his lamp and left the football field-sized room, the clouds in the frescoes far above him frozen in a perpetually blue and sun-drenched sky. Unfortunately real life wasn’t quite that simple. He went across the main lobby, his footsteps echoing on the shiny marble floor, then pushed out through the main doors and discovered that in real life it was raining hard. Ducking his head he ran down the steps, paused to buy an umbrella from one of the enterprising vendors who always seemed to forecast the weather better than the weathermen, then headed for his hotel.