TWENTY-SIX

The harsh afternoon light spilled through the windows, casting everyone in a hyperrealistic glow and drawing attention to every line in Andre Jacobs’s worn and creased face. He stood in his living room on Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Ninth Street surrounded by expensive furnishings and a lifetime of memories and confronted the Matisse Marie Grimshaw was unwrapping as if it were a rifle and he were a demoralized soldier about to be executed. As she pulled off the final layer of covering, Jacobs groaned.

“Mr. Jacobs? Are you all right?” Lucian asked.

Ignoring the question, the old man walked to the painting, gripped it with his arthritic hands, turned it around and, without being told where to look, bent down to examine the lower left corner, where there was a red circular mark no one at the Met had been able to explain.

The museum could run all the follow-up tests it wanted. The combined look of wonder and horror in Jacobs’s eyes told Lucian what he needed to know. This had to be the painting stolen from Jacobs’s workshop that day so long ago; the painting Solange had been killed over.

Jacobs leaned the canvas against the wall, then he stood back and stared at the beach scene, or what was left of it.

“A fitting memorial…” he said softly.

Only Lucian and Emeline were close enough to have heard him.

“A fitting memorial…for my Solange.”

Lucian saw his shoulders slump and anticipated the collapse, so that he was there to catch Jacobs as he fell. Olshling ran over to help.

“I’ll call an ambulance,” Tyler Weil said, punching in 911 on his cell.

Emeline knelt down beside her father. His eyes fluttered open.

“Emeline?”

“It’s all right-you’re all right,” she reassured him, and his eyes closed again. Emeline looked up at Lucian and Olshling. “Can you help me get him into his bed?”

“Are you sure we should move him?” Olshling asked.

“Yes, this has happened before. He’ll be okay.”

Together the two men lifted Jacobs, who was far too light to be healthy, and followed Emeline into the master bedroom.

Sixty seconds after they had lowered him onto the bed, Jacobs came to again. With glassy, bloodshot eyes, he searched the faces peering down at him. “Emeline?”

“She’s in the bathroom getting your medicine. She’ll be right back,” Lucian said.

“Can you give us some privacy?” Emeline asked when she returned with a handful of pills and a tumbler of water.

The two men joined Grimshaw and Weil, who were repacking the painting in the living room. The EMS team arrived less than five minutes later, and Lucian showed the medics into the bedroom. While they worked on the old man, he returned to discover that everyone from the museum had left. Even with the heavy sun beating in through the windows, and despite the painting’s pathetic state, with it gone, some of the light in the room seemed to have gone away. He dropped into a seat at the antique card table and stared out at the same view he’d been mesmerized by twenty years before. The Upper West Side skyline stood proudly above thousands of trees. It was June, and the trees formed a solid green canopy made up of a hundred different shades. He spent the next fifteen minutes dissecting their nuances, mixing the colors in his mind on an imaginary palette. Ultramarine blue and lemon yellow for a dark green. A touch of alizarin crimson to make it olive. Cerulean blue and permanent yellow blue for a forest green. It was a silly exercise, and it failed totally to keep his mind off what had happened earlier in Dr. Bellmer’s office. Only Andre Jacobs identifying the Matisse had managed that feat.

Lucian didn’t believe in reincarnation. He’d studied it extensively the year he’d been on the Malachai Samuels case. Regressions were only proof of our ability to make up stories, to manufacture dreams. Yes, there was a sense of inevitability to the young sculptor’s pain that seemed to mesh with Lucian’s, but wouldn’t there be? Wasn’t it logical? The drama was a manifestation of his own mind.

When Emeline finally walked the medics, with their empty stretcher, to the door, Lucian was still sitting by the window, mixing colors in his mind.

After seeing them out, she sat down opposite him. “His vitals are stabilized. They didn’t need to hospitalize him,” she said wearily. “It was probably just the shock of seeing the painting.” Without looking down at the cordovan-leather tabletop, she found the fancy gold scrollwork along the edges and traced the design with her forefinger. Her hands were so small.

“You must be relieved.”

“Yes, we’ve had enough of hospitals for a while.”

“Does he have a history of passing out?”

She nodded. “He has very low blood pressure.”

Lucian was sure that the gin he’d smelled on Andre Jacobs’s breath had contributed to the incident, too.

“I have some information for you,” he offered.

“About the e-mail?”

“I spoke to Broderick before I came over. He had the department put a rush on the trace yesterday, and-”

“Let me guess. He told you they hadn’t been able to figure out where the e-mail was coming from?”

“Did he call you?” Lucian asked.

“No, but I’ve read about how easy it is to send untraceable e-mails.”

“Just because they haven’t figured it out yet doesn’t mean they won’t be able to get a lead.”

She looked at him skeptically.

“They’re really good at this, Emeline. Broderick told me two more letters came in that they haven’t even started working with yet. They could yield different results. The sender only has to make one mistake.”

She shivered.

“You read them?”

She shrugged. “I know you both told me not to, but I couldn’t help it. There’s someone out there. It’s impossible to see the e-mail there and ignore it.”

“We don’t expect you to ignore it, but the police are monitoring your e-mail now. You don’t have to put yourself through that.”

“Could you stop yourself from reading them if it was happening to you?”

“No, probably not. Broderick said the message was the same.”

“I’ll kill you and your father, too.” Her voice trembled.

“It’s normal for it to get to you.”

“It’s not that.”

“What?”

“I’m sure it’s nothing…”

“Okay, but it’s clearly bothering you. What is it?”

When she didn’t respond, he repeated his request. “Tell me,” he insisted.

“I think someone was following me today.”

“When?”

“This afternoon when I left the store to come here.”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened? Whatever you remember. Even something you might think is insignificant can be crucial.”

“I was walking on Madison, from the store here. And I just got this crazy feeling.”

When she hesitated, Lucian nodded and said, “People say that about being followed. They often sense it first. Go on.”

“I turned around, but everything looked normal. I figured I was being paranoid.”

“What else happened?”

“I kept walking and then, as I passed by a store, I noticed a man reflected in the windows. I walked a little more. The street’s all stores there, so I kept watching. He stayed behind me for another block and a half. I got spooked and stopped in E.A.T, a restaurant on Eightieth Street, to get away from him.”

Lucian nodded. “I’ve been there. Expensive.” He smiled. “What did the man do? Could you see from inside?”

“He walked by.”

“Did he look in?”

“No.”

“Could you see his face?”

“He was moving too fast.” She stopped to think, to try to picture the scene. “No, there was a woman blocking my view.”

“Do you remember any details at all? Color of his hair?” Lucian had taken out his Moleskine notebook and had a pencil ready. “No.”

“What was he wearing?”

“He had a baseball cap on. Dark. Blue or black.” She seemed surprised to have remembered.

“Was he tall? Short?”

“I don’t know. Tall. This is crazy. Could anyone really think that even if I was…reincarnated…that I would…that Solange would remember?” She sounded contrite, as if she were blaming herself. “Some man was coincidentally walking in the same direction I was. That’s all. I’m overreacting.”

While she was talking she’d started running her finger up and down on the fluted edge of her chair. Lucian wanted to reach out and still her hand. She was scared, and he didn’t blame her. It didn’t matter if reincarnation were possible or not, only that some lunatic out there believed it was. All these years he’d wanted nothing more than a chance to find out who had stolen the Matisse and murdered Solange. Was that possibility finally presenting itself? Was there a way to scare the perp and smoke him out? Was Emeline brave enough to help them if it came down to that?

“It’s probably nothing. Those e-mails would make anyone nervous. But I’m going to ask Broderick to give you a security detail for a few days, anyway.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“I think it is. Where do you live?”

“I have an apartment on the west side, but I’ve been living here for the past four weeks, since Dad got home from his last trip to Mount Sinai.”

“Is your apartment in a doorman building?”

“No, in a brownstone.”

“Don’t go back there until we get to the bottom of this.”

“I wouldn’t anyway-Dad’s not ready for me to leave yet.” She paused, then asked, “Will you do me a favor?”

“If I can.”

“Ever cautious.” She managed a smile.

“Okay, I will. What is it?”

“Don’t tell my father about this. He doesn’t need anything else to worry about.”

“I won’t.”

She looked away from him then and out the window as if there were a message somewhere beyond this place and this moment. She was as still as one of the marble sculptures across the street in the Greek and Roman galleries, and her expression was just as indecipherable. So why did he feel as if he knew what she was thinking?

“You believe your job is to protect him the way he’s always protected you, but it’s not.”

She jerked her head around. “You don’t know me well enough to know what I believe my job is.”

“You’re right,” he said apologetically.

“He’s sick. He’s so sick. And his drinking makes it worse, but he doesn’t seem to care. He usually holds back during the day, but as soon as the sun starts to set, it’s as if it pulls his resolve down with it.”

Telling him that much seemed to have broken the seal of secrecy on her life with Andre Jacobs, and now that she’d gone this far, she shrugged her shoulders as if she didn’t care how much further she went. In a long river of words, she told Lucian what had happened to her as a girl after her accident, out of her coma but still recovering.

“I overheard my aunt and uncle talking to the social worker about me when they thought I was sleeping. The hospital had assumed Andre and Martha were going to take me home with them when I was released, but they were saying they didn’t think they could. I pretended to stay asleep and listened to the whole conversation. They said they were still grieving for their daughter, that they didn’t think they could cope. It was too soon, Andre said.

“My mother and father and my brother had died. I was all alone except for my aunt and uncle. I didn’t understand everything that had happened, but I knew there was no one else. I had to make them take me home with them. But how?

“When the doctors had taken my bandages off and my aunt had seen the scar on my forehead, she’d started to cry because Solange had had a scar a lot like it in almost the same place. Martha couldn’t look at it at first. Andre had to take her out of the room.

“I don’t know now how I came up with my pathetic little plan, but after the social worker left, I pretended to wake up and I told my aunt and uncle I’d had a dream that Solange had come to visit me and told me the scar on my head was a mark to show everyone that she was part of me now. It was all make-believe-inspired fiction from a scared kid with an overactive imagination. But it worked. I lied, and my lie worked. Too well. It’s what started the whole craziness with them thinking I was reincarnated.”

“You can’t blame-”

Emeline interrupted him. “I can. Martha believed me without reservation. I don’t think Andre did, but he wanted to. He tried to. It was too much for him, though. Too strange. Too incomprehensible. I think that’s when his drinking became a problem. He’d come home from the framing store drunk, and he and my aunt would argue. They didn’t scream when they fought. Their voices got really low. I’d hide in the hallway and listen to them, but I was always on the other side of the door. I should have told them the truth once they took me to the Phoenix Foundation. I should have. But it was too late. It had grown into something much bigger than me. And I was still afraid they’d send me away.”

“I’m so sorry. You must have been very lonely,” Lucian said.

Emeline started to respond, then twisted around and looked toward the bedroom. “I think he’s up. Let me go check.”

Lucian waited at the table where he’d sat so often with Solange the summer they’d lived in this apartment. There was a spot on the cordovan, oblong and irregular, where the leather had bleached out. He hadn’t noticed it before but now he remembered a night when Solange had been joking around, using a French accent and mimicking a waiter pouring wine, and had overfilled his glass so that the liquid had spilled all over the tabletop.

“If you want to come in for a few minutes, my father’s awake.”

Lucian turned in the direction of the voice. She was bathed in a dusty glow from the setting sun. Emeline was light to Solange’s dark-cool to her warm, closed to her open, but for a moment he’d seen Solange standing there so vividly he had to catch his breath and focus on what he knew instead of what he imagined.

“What is it?” Her voice was low and urgent.

“The light-this is the kind of light painters kill for.” He hadn’t expected to say anything, least of all this.

Back in the bedroom, where the thick ivory damask drapes were drawn against the sunset, Lucian found Andre Jacobs propped up against the pillows, wearing a navy silk bathrobe and looking very frail. Emeline lowered herself into a big armchair in the shadows on the other side of the bed, and Lucian remained standing. “I’m glad you’re all right, Mr. Jacobs.”

“No thanks to you.”

Lucian bowed his head slightly, accepting all blame. “There wasn’t anyone else who would know about the mark on the back of the canvas. You’re integral to helping us in this case.”

Jacobs let his left hand rise and fall, like a dried leaf buffeted by the wind. “So the old man is all you have left. I’m not the best, but I’m the last. Is the painting still here?”

“No. It’s back at the museum.”

Jacobs nodded.

“You do believe it was the Matisse that was stolen from your framing gallery? You recognized the mark?”

“It’s been twenty years. That’s a long time to remember the painting so exactly.”

“Yes. It has been a long time.”

“A lifetime ago. A ruined lifetime ago,” Jacobs said, and turned to Emeline. “I’m sorry. I’m not thinking clearly. That was a cruel thing to say.”

“No,” Emeline said, reaching out and taking her father’s hand.

“Let me talk to the agent alone, Emeline.”

“You’re sure?”

He nodded and then watched her leave the room. Only then did he glance back at Lucian with faded green eyes that once had been the same vibrant jade as Solange’s.

“I’m all the family she has. So pathetically little for someone who lost so much.”

“You both lost so much.”

Jacobs didn’t respond except to close his eyes and lean back even farther on the pillows. He didn’t say anything at all for a moment and then, with his eyes still shut, he started talking, as if he were telling a story.

“The Matisse only had one owner. Aaron Flaxman bought it from the artist and kept it. Cherished it. Got it out of Paris before Hitler arrived. Flaxman was one of the lucky ones who heard the rumors, believed them and arranged to have his collection shipped out of France before that monster looted the city. He paid an American businessman half his fortune to do it. Thousands who tried the same thing weren’t as lucky.

“The mark is on most of the paintings he smuggled out. Like a brand. Usually it’s hidden on a part of the canvas that wraps around the stretcher. He put them there in case they were lost and he needed to prove they were his. I don’t think he told many people about it…not sure he would have told me either…but on the Matisse it was slightly more obvious. He never needed to rely on the marks, though. His courier was honest and didn’t disappear with the collection when he reached the States.

“The Flaxman family made it to America, too. That cost Aaron the other half of his fortune, but as far as he was concerned he had all that really mattered-the people and the paintings he loved. And with those things my friend rebuilt his life in New York, becoming a dealer once again, this time buying and selling paintings on Madison Avenue and Sixty-Sixth Street instead of the rue de la Boétie. The ten paintings he’d smuggled out of France, the ones he left in his will to the Metropolitan Museum, were the cornerstone of his collection and the only ones he never traded or upgraded. The survivors, he called them-more special for what had happened to them, more beautiful after the war than before, as if what they had gone through had imbued them with something magical. He donated them restored and framed. I’m guessing the Met never took them apart and found the marks. But they’re there.” Jacobs sighed and closed his eyes. For a moment Lucian thought he might have fallen asleep, but then, with his eyes still shut, he continued talking about his old friend and customer.

“He was a romantic. Hitler’s army had decimated the German side of his family, he’d seen the worst things man could do to man, and yet he believed that his paintings had grown more beautiful for their ordeal. That Matisse survived the Gestapo and the gas chambers and a fate that felled six million Jews, and then because of me…”

The confirmation was complete. Lucian knew what he needed to know from the one man who could tell him. He stood to go and had started for the door when the thin voice reached out and stopped him. Jacobs, it appeared, wasn’t finished.

“You know what I’ve never forgotten? He never blamed me. Never said one word to me in recrimination. He came to Solange’s funeral and sat shiva with me every day and night of that week. Sitting shiva for his painting, I think now. He cried with me and offered me solace even though there was no comforting me. I’d left her there that day. I…left…her…there…I did! Can you imagine living with that?”

I can, Lucian wanted to say.

Jacobs opened his eyes and looked at him, his expression changing to one of surprise. “You almost died, too, that day, didn’t you?” He said it as if he was just now remembering that part of the story.

Lucian nodded.

“I wish you had. I wish you had died instead of my daughter.”

Lucian turned, walked the last few steps, opened the door and walked out. Sometimes, probably too many times, he’d wished the same thing.

“Would you like some wine?” Emeline was sitting at the table in front of the windows. She held out a glass to him as if it held something much more precious that wine. Like her, caught in the sunset, it glowed.

“It’s way past five o’clock,” she said, as if reading his mind. “You’ve put in a full day. And there are some things I’d like to ask you. About my father. About Solange. About who she was. No one else would ever tell me. It’s been like living in the shadow of a ghost. Please, Lucian?”

“I wish I could, but I have to go back to the office. This is an ongoing investigation,” he said. Then he added, perhaps more curtly than necessary, “I can let myself out.”

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