Cold Hit (17 page)

“Here’s the thing. I never knew Deni personally, but a lot of my friends did. And I’ve met Lowell more times than I can remember — at his gallery, at auctions, and even dinner parties. But there have been stories floating around town for years, for whatever they’re worth.”

“You gave Mike the names of two of her lovers when you called. Any significance to that?” I asked.

“I ran rap sheets on both of ’em,” Mike broke in. “Came up clean. Look like legit businessmen.”

“There’s Preston Mattox, who’s an architect,” said Joan. “Not much talk about him. The other one nobody really gets. He’s Frank Wrenley, an antiques expert and dealer. Scratch a bit below the surface on him and I’m not quite sure the kind of guy you’ll find. Maybe it’s just that he’s such new money. Sprang up on the art scene out of nowhere, and suddenly he’s in the big leagues, running side by side with Deni Caxton.”

“I’m telling you, Coop. This case has everything for an art caper except Nazis,” Mike said, eschewing the dainty shellfish fork in favor of slurping up an oyster.

Joan Stafford picked at her warm foie gras. “So it’s Nazis you vant, Herr Chapman? Then it’s Nazis I shall give you.”

“Have you ever heard of the Amber Room?”

The three of us shook our heads in the negative.

“I’m sure I don’t have to remind you about all of the art that was seized and stolen by the Nazis during the Second World War,” Joan said.

My father had insisted that my brothers and I learn about the Holocaust from our childhood on, both to understand the magnitude of its atrocities and to know its historical and cultural importance. As a Jew, and also as an art collector, he had followed the stories of families fleeing Europe before the war, and those sent to the death camps, whose personal treasures became the property of their conquerors. Recent years had seen a series of legal wrangles to reclaim such confiscated artworks and restore them to the survivors or the rightful heirs of their owners. I knew of many of the cases that had been brought in the courts as paintings surfaced at auctions or institutions after half a century of being secretly held, but I had never heard of something described as a room.

“In seventeen seventeen, King Wilhelm I of Prussia gave the tsar — Peter the Great — a unique gift. It was a set of gilded oak panels that were decorated with more than six tons of amber, elaborately carved and inset with Florentine mosaics and Venetian glass mirrors. The walls were installed in the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, and had actually been dubbed the ‘eighth wonder of the world’ by the British ambassador. So far as I’m aware, only a single photograph of this breathtaking creation was ever known to have been taken in its two-hundred-year history.

“When Nazi troops invaded Russia in nineteen forty-one, they brought their own art experts along to aid in the plundering of the Soviet bounty. The priceless Amber Room was taken apart and shipped off to a town called Königsberg, which is on the Baltic coast. But by the end of the war, as some of the treasures began to appear, there was not a sign of this enormous chamber.”

“Any theories about it?” I asked.

“Dozens. I researched it carefully because I intended to write a play about it.” She glanced across at me, knowing that I always chided her about her abandoned efforts. “Had to stick it in a drawer once your DNA buddies matched the Romanovs’ bodies. I had it all set to be reconstructed for Anastasia, who was found alive and well in — never mind.

“I take it you want the leading theories and not the obscure ones. Some professional treasure hunter showed up a few years ago with Xeroxes of documents signed by Himmler, claiming he could prove that the room had been redirected to burg but that the general transporting it had made an independent decision to change the route in the face of the Allied advance.”

“Quedlinburg,” Mike said. “That was a major Nazi stash, wasn’t it?”

He reminded us that in 1996 the Feds tried to prosecute two Texans for the return of several hundred million dollars’ worth of medieval reliquaries, stolen by their brother — an American soldier — at the end of World War II. German troops had looted the religious treasure — everything from ninth-century prayer books and lavishly painted manuscripts to gem-encrusted vases and figures. And in the process of the American liberation of Europe, lowlifes in our own army had made off with the already stolen cache of goods.

“So, one school has the amber buried in the quarry beside a seventh-century castle, while the latest claim is that the son of a German military intelligence officer who helped with the actual logistics of the move has used his father’s papers to establish that the stuff never even got to Germany, but is still buried in the Russian system of underground tunnels and mine shafts.”

Mercer had been unusually quiet throughout the meal. “Connect this to Denise Caxton for me, will you?”

“This all goes back to the Second World War. Lowell Caxton’s father lived in France, as you may already know by now.”

“Yes,” I said. “He made some reference about how his parents met, and his being raised in an apartment in Paris.”

“Although the senior Caxton spent the war years in the States, he never severed his ties with a guy called Roger Dequoy, who was later identified as one of the worst collaborators in the art world. Dequoy was selling paintings to all the Nazi leaders, and they in turn were trying to dump the Impressionist works they had stolen. Thought it was all too degenerate, if you can imagine that.

“The French government considered bringing charges against Caxton’s father for selling to the Nazis, but they were never able to build a case. What
is
quite clear is that the Caxtons were positioned — both financially and politically — to have had access to an unbelievable number of the pillaged works. What they also had was the ability to move them around Europe pretty well, too.”

“It seems to me,” Mike said, “that with all the wealth they had already accumulated, the old man could afford to sit on the stuff until the millennium. No need to try to sell it and show his hand, like most of the others who got caught.”

“The Caxton thing has never been about selling or making any more of a profit. That’s just sport for them, father and son. It’s all in the possession — sheer, unadulterated greed. You’ve been to the apartment, right?”

“Yeah. We were there over the weekend.”

“Lowell has suites, as you may know, each done in a favorite painter or period. Of course, I’ve never seen it myself, but rumor has it that somewhere, in one of his properties, he has rebuilt the Amber Room. It’s not complete — some of the wood was warped when the mine shaft was flooded. But he got most of the jeweled pieces out of Europe somehow, and found craftsmen to regild the mirrors and panels in separate units, so none of them had reason to suppose that he had actually found a whole room. It must be as close as anyone in the world is going to come to feeling like a tsar.”

“And Deni?” I asked.

“She certainly knew about it. Each of his wives did. That’s what Liz Smith was alluding to in her column this morning.”

“You’ll forgive me if I tell you I didn’t have a moment, between autopsies, to read the friggin’ society pages, won’t you?” asked Chapman.

“Sorry. Liz wrote something about how getting to Caxton’s inner sanctum was certainly the kiss of death for each of his three lovely wives. You know, like Bluebeard’s castle. Once he got them in his secret lair and made love to them there, he had to kill them.”

“Don’t lose me here, Joanie. Are you suggesting that Lowell-was trying to shut her up about the Amber Room, or that someone else was trying to use Deni to get to it? And please don’t tell me that your personal trainer is the source for this.” I knew that half of Joan’s best gossip came from the guy who worked her out at home every morning when she was in Manhattan, where she still kept an apartment. He had a fantastic client list, and something about lifting weights and doing inversions seemed to cause these well-toned, tight-lipped women to reveal their deepest secrets to him.

“The way I heard it, the Russian mob was pushing its way into the Chelsea art scene, hoping to put pressure on Deni to lead them to the amber so they could return it to the palace, which has been under restoration for twenty years. They’ve got a patron, a Soviet businessman who hit it big in the telecommunications industry, willing to pay the tab for what they assumed she could lead them to.”

“Ever been to Brighton?” Chapman asked Joan.

“Sure, my play had tryouts there and in Bath before it opened in London.”

“Not Brighton, England. Brighton
Beach
. Home of the Russian mafia.”

“You think
I
don’t do the West Side, Mikey? Well, Joan doesn’t do the outer boroughs. Forget Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx. They’re just places she has to drive through to get where she wants to go.”

“So she’s not coming with us when we go poking around for double agents looking for Nazis looking for stolen art, huh?” Mike asked me.

Mercer picked up the thread. “What do you know about Bryan Daughtry?”

Joan laughed. “More than anyone needs to know, that’s for certain. Denise Caxton didn’t create that monster, but she was certainly feeding him.”

“Why was she so attached to him, do you think?”

“She was the classic underdog, Alex, and there was something in her that must have made her reach out to characters with the same background. I’m sure you remember that I used to buy from Daughtry, in the old days, before any of us knew about the dark side with the leather and young girls. Like Deni, he’s basically a dreamer, trying to create a fantastic life out of whole cloth. His business was riskier than anything that Lowell did, and she apparently liked that. I mean, it doesn’t take much skill to sell a Picasso, right?”

“Got any suggestions for who we talk to about their commercial enterprise?” Mike asked.

Joan thought for a moment. “Marco Varelli, perhaps.”

“I just heard that name today, but where?” I was tired, and confused as well.

“Sweetest little old guy you’d ever want to meet. He’s a restorer, perhaps the most respected in the field.”

Now it came to me. Marina Sette had mentioned him to me during our conversation at the Four Seasons this afternoon.

“I mean, if I tripped over something like the Amber Room, Varelli’s the person I’d go see to make sure whatever the treasure might be is not a fake. He looks like a gnome — must be well over eighty by now. Varelli might have known some of Deni’s secrets. You’ll find him in a small atelier he keeps in the Village.”

“We expect to be getting as many of the gallery records as we can. With a little luck, maybe she kept notes about her love life, too,” Mercer said.

Joan shook her head. “ ‘Good girls keep diaries; bad girls don’t have the time.’ Tallulah Bankhead, by the way. I don’t think that’s very likely.”

“You said you were going to tell us why Lowell Caxton wasn’t welcome at the legitimate houses any longer,” I reminded Joan.

“The Gardner Museum heist, almost ten years ago. Has that come up in any of your interviews yet?”

“You should stick to your fiction, Joan,” Mike said. “Wanna pour me another glass of that red wine?”

I knew that around the turn of the century Boston socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner had built a Venetian-style palazzo to house one of the country’s most spectacular art collections, which she had put together with the aid of her close friend Bernard Berenson. I had been to the museum many times when I was in college, and even once last year on my way through the Fenway section of the city.

“I remember the break-in, but it was years ago. Hasn’t that ever been solved?” I asked.

“Never. Listen, guys,” said Joan, telling the story of what remains to this day the costliest art theft in United States history, “this is where Lowell may have gotten his hands even deeper in the dirt.

“In March of nineteen ninety, two men disguised as Boston cops presented themselves to the museum’s security officers at the side door of the building, and were let in. The robbers locked up the guards, disabled the unsophisticated alarm system, and made off with about ten paintings. Estimated value? Almost
three hundred million dollars
. ”

“Are you serious? What was in the place?” Mercer asked.

“A few Impressionists — I think a Manet and a Degas — an ancient Chinese bronze work, a finial from a Napoleonic flagstaff, a Vermeer, and most importantly, the masterpiece that all the fuss has been about. It’s a three-hundred-and-sixty-year-old Rembrandt that hung in the Gardner’s famous Dutch Room. The title of it is
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
, and it was the only seascape that he ever painted.

“Nothing from the heist has ever been found. Not a trace. The Gardner had so little insurance at the time of the theft that the reward they offered was only a million dollars. Just a year or two ago, the FBI upped it to five million. There have been rumors in the art world for years, but not a clue to follow up on. Except the chips.”

“What chips?”

“I’m just being dramatic, Alex. Paint chips, of course. Most of the works were small enough to be taken frame and all. But — maybe because of the way the Rembrandt was fastened to its mountings — the robbers actually
cut
it out of the frame. Isn’t that awful? Anyway, the varnish on it — and its great age — must have made it so stiff that literally dozens of paint chips fell onto the floor, and that’s all that was left behind.”

“Get me from there to Caxton,” Mike said, licking the chocolate sauce from the profiteroles off the side of his mouth.

“Everyone knows the painting is too hot to handle. Over the years, several mobsters who’ve turned up dead in the Boston area have been linked to the robbery. And each time there’s been a buzz in the galleries and auction houses that the Rembrandt’s at the heart of it. If anyone could hide this kind of booty, or better still, transport it anywhere in the world, it could only be an individual with the means of a Lowell Caxton, or someone who flirted with danger as freely as Deni.

“There was an opening at Lowell’s gallery in the Fuller Building a few months ago. Deni had left before I arrived. Everyone said she was high and kind of mouthing off about this astounding coup she was about to make that would turn the art world on its ear. Be sure and ask Lowell about it when you see him again.”