Cold Hit (33 page)

“Not bad, Detective. It was an interior scene by a great colorist. I was guessing Vermeer, who was known for his pearlcolored reflections and the fantastically luminous shades of blue and yellow. I pored over textbooks until I found what I was looking for. Have you ever heard of a painting called
The Concert
?”

Neither one of us had.

“You know about the break-in at the Gardner Museum?”

Mike was following the story intently. “Yeah, we do. Why?”

“Along with the great Rembrandt that was taken,” Cannon said, acknowledging Chapman as he went on, “which you clearly seem to be aware of, there was one Vermeer stolen that has never been found either. It’s called
The Concert
, and it depicts a young woman playing a pianoforte for two others. I believe I’m one of the very few people in the world who has seen that painting — at least, any portion of it — in the last ten years. The other two who saw it with me that day — Mrs. Caxton and Mr. Varelli — are dead. Maybe now you can understand why I’m reluctant to speak about it.”

Mike had no sympathy for Cannon’s fear. “What’s its value?”

“Not as great as the Rembrandt, but still in the multimillions. Vermeer is known to have painted only thirty-five works in his lifetime.”

“Was it still at Varelli’s studio when you got there the next day?”

“No. I never saw it again. Nor did he mention it to me. We went right back to work on the portrait we had been commissioned to restore for the Tate, the one we were immersed in before Denise Caxton asked to drop by. I came in that next morning eager to hear what he and Mrs. Caxton had found after he had dismissed me. Not a word. But then, the texts I had consulted were written before the Gardner theft, so I had no idea the Vermeer had been stolen. I thought that perhaps the museum was deaccessioning the painting, and it made sense to me that the Caxtons were among the few collectors with the means to acquire it — legitimately.

“It wasn’t unusual for Marco to work in silence. Finally, when we broke for lunch, I thought I’d impress him with my knowledge. I’d be the perfect pupil and answer the questions he had asked me when he had started to uncover the picture in my presence.”

“Did it work?”

“It backfired colossally. Marco almost took my head off. I told him that not only did I think I knew the century and the school to which the painting could be attributed, but that I also knew the artist and the work itself. He looked surprised and challenged me.” Cannon looked up at us rather sheepishly. “When I said the words aloud, he became furious at me.

“‘But why?’ I asked him. ‘Why are you so angry?’ ‘You have never,
never
seen that Vermeer, do you understand, my boy? It has
never
been in the studio of Marco Varelli.’ He went on to rant and rave about the fact that Denise had brought him a fraud, some lousy copyist’s effort to re-create a Dutch domestic scene, that Denise was a rank amateur who had occasionally been lucky but had made a bad guess. He practically made me swear that the event I witnessed had never taken place.”

“Have you ever told anyone about it?”

“My girlfriend, sure. No one else. I had gone right back to the library and searched the periodicals. That’s when I realized that it must have been the stolen Vermeer, and that Varelli wanted no part of it. I respected him for that, and thought that would be the end of it.”

“You mean it wasn’t? Did Deni come back?”

“Of course she did. Several times, not too long after, just trying to regain favor, I guess. Lots of good wine, charming coquettishness, gifts. Marco wasn’t at all materialistic, but she’d find wonderfully whimsical things — small sculptures, paintings, objets d’art that he couldn’t resist — and bring them by to appease him.”

“Any talk of the Vermeer?”

“None. And again Marco wanted me around when she showed up and made a fuss over him. So they weren’t alone very much those next few visits. Then,” Cannon said, rubbing his eyes with his hand, “there was another tempest. Perhaps, if I hadn’t been such a coward, I’d have done something about it at the time. Deni came in one day very excited, very flustered.”

“When was this, do you remember?”

“Not off the top of my head.”

“Months later, Don?”

“No, no. Three or four weeks at most. But I’m pretty sure she had been away, out of the country, in the meantime. I think it was shortly after she and her husband had some kind of huge fight and split up. Anyway, I knew immediately that something different was going on.”

“How?”

“As soon as she arrived, it was Denise who asked me to leave. Even Marco looked puzzled, because she dispensed with the usual flirtation. ‘You don’t mind, do you? I’ve got some personal matters to discuss with Signor Varelli. It’s the middle of the afternoon, Marco — let him have the rest of the day off, okay?’

“For once he seemed reluctant to let me walk out. I think, at that point, he didn’t quite trust her anymore. But she was insistent, and he gave me the back of his hand.”

“Do you have any idea what she wanted? Was she carrying the same bag?”

“She wasn’t carrying any sail bag this time. Just her pocketbook. I took off my work shirt, said good-bye, and closed the door behind me.”

“Didn’t Varelli ever tell you what it was about?”

“He didn’t have to, Detective.” Cannon pursed his lips and looked away from us before speaking again. “I’m not proud of this, but I really couldn’t help myself. Instead of leaving, I ran down the steps from the atelier door, then I slipped off my sandals and walked back up, sitting on the top of the stoop, so that I could listen against the door.

“It was Denise Caxton at her best, pulling out all the stops. She was pleading with Marco to look at what she had brought with her — coaxing and cajoling him with her limited vocabulary of Italian platitudes. ‘My little gems,’ she kept repeating. Then I heard her tell him that he was the only person in the world who could know the truth. That this adventure would crown his illustrious career and be his great heritage — to restore a priceless painting to the world.”

“Little gems?” Chapman asked. “Could you see what they were talking about?”

“I never saw them, but it became quite obvious. She had a small pouch, which she opened, and placed the contents on Marco’s workbench. Chips, a dozen tiny pieces of paint chips.”

“From the stolen Rembrandt?”

“That’s precisely what she wanted to know.”

“I realize Varelli’s expertise,” I said, “but is that the kind of thing that a restorer would be able to determine with any certainty?”

“I guess you both know that when
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
was taken in that theft, the burglars were unusually sloppy, just slicing it out of the frame with a knife and leaving behind a dustpan full of chips. That probably means that slivers continued to flake off the edges of the actual painting itself, so whoever possessed the painting would have more pieces like the ones collected by the police. A science lab would have to make the ultimate determination of the authenticity of the age of the chips. They can do it with electron and polarized-light microscopes, like the F.B.I. uses. Specialists have uncovered frauds, for example, by proving that minuscule amounts of chalk in a paint primer were made twenty years ago, not three hundred. That’s technology.

“But Marco wasn’t a bad place to start, to get a first opinion. What lab technicians do with their tools or their scopes, he did with his nose and his fingers and his infallible eye. It was the trait that made him a genius at restoration. Besides that, Ms. Cooper, Denise Caxton could hardly walk into an F.B.I. office and ask whether the fragments she was holding actually matched the ones that had fallen behind at the Gardner during an unsolved theft, could she?”

“Did Varelli look at the chips?”

“I never found out. When I left, he was still being obstinate and refusing to entertain Mrs. Caxton’s request.”

“Why didn’t you wait?”

“Believe me, I wanted to stay there. But a couple of the workmen were coming back with some large frames that Marco had sent out to be regilded. We had been expecting them earlier in the afternoon. When I heard the buzzer ring from downstairs, I was afraid Mr. Varelli would open the door and find me hiding there. So I left.

“The next day, he carried on as usual. And after what had occurred with the Vermeer, I didn’t dare ask him about these paint chips. I don’t think I ever mentioned Rembrandt’s name to him for a couple of months.”

“Didn’t he talk about Deni anymore? Didn’t she still come to visit?”

“Less frequently, so far as I know. But whenever she showed up, he insisted I stay to help him or have a glass of wine with them. And he was much too discreet to talk about her. After she’d leave, he’d shake his head and say she was crazy. ‘
Bella pazza
, ’ my beautiful crazy one. That’s what he called her more recently.”

“And when she was killed, what did he have to say about her then?”

Don Cannon shook his head at us. “Don’t know. I was on vacation with my girlfriend, camping out in Yosemite. My family couldn’t even find me to tell me that Marco had died. But those scenes with the Vermeer and then the paint chips were the cause of the breach that developed between him and Deni, I’m sure of it. The other thing,” he said, stretching a bit and arching his back, “the other thing was also a bit odd, at least to me.”

“What other? I thought you said there were two things that estranged them — meaning the Vermeer and the chips.”

“To me,” the young man replied, “those two were part of the same headache — the Gardner Museum heist. The other one was something else again.”

Mike was jotting notes on his pad, while I added points to my list of questions. “A bit later on, Denise came back to the studio. It was well after she and her husband had separated, I know that. She had another man with her and—”

“Who?”

“Sorry, I can’t help you with that. I never got much of a look. He was standing quietly off to the side, and like Varelli, all my attention was on Mrs. Caxton. It wasn’t unusual for her to have men with her who were clients. They rarely entered into her conversation with Mr. Varelli and I never paid them much mind. Anyway, she was telling Marco about the breakup, and she said she had brought a gift, this time for Gina — for Mrs. Varelli. It was a necklace of beads — very large amber beads — and a carved figurine that matched them. ‘Come look, Dan,’ she said to me. She’d met me a few dozen times, but she was a bit too self-centered to bother to learn my name. Always called me Dan instead of Don. ‘Come look, you’ll never see anything like these. They’re quite rare. Lowell gave them to me, and I really don’t want to wear them anymore. Might give him too much satisfaction. Gina will adore them, don’t you think, Marco? You don’t have to tell her they’re from me.’

“Mrs. Caxton reached over with both hands to pass them to Varelli, but he recoiled instantly and the strand fell onto the floor. ‘Not in my house,
signora
, not under my roof. Too many people have been killed for these trifles with which you amuse yourself.’ ”

“And she left?”

“She got down on her knees to pick up the beads. One end of the strand had broken and they were rolling across the floor like golf balls. I helped her gather them up and put them back in her purse. Then she and her friend left.

“But they left behind the little amber statue. By accident, I would think. Mr. Varelli didn’t even notice it. But when Gina came upstairs the next morning to bring us some tea, she saw it there. She spotted it immediately and admired it. Just picked it up with her and took it down to the apartment.”

“Didn’t he say anything then?”

“Only to himself, under his breath. He rarely said no to Gina — about anything. But when she carried off her little treasure, Marco muttered something about Nazis. It meant nothing to me then, but a few more hours at the library, and the computer research came up with stories about the Amber Room. I even found a few articles that connected the lost room to Lowell Caxton.”

Chapman was holding his notepad in his right hand, tapping it against his other fist. “There must be some way to reconstruct the dates that these things happened, no? You keep any kind of appointment book or calendars?”

“No reason to, Detective. I went to work at the same place every day at the same time. I keep journals about exhibits I’ve gone to see and I keep loads of sketchbooks, but they don’t have any engagements in them.”

“How about Varelli?” I asked. “People made appointments with him, there were deliveries, someone paid the bills—”

“Gina Varelli, of course. She was the only one who Marco let control his business.”

“The widow, right?”

“Yes. She made most of the arrangements. Marco didn’t like to be bothered by telephone calls and mundane things.” Cannon laughed. “Like money. Didn’t she give you that book when you spoke with her? It’s got everything in it — every visitor, client, bill, receipt. I’m sure it would be a great help to you in your investigation.”

“No. We’ll get it from her when we see her this week,” I said, adding to my list and nodding at Mike. “Perhaps we can get her to talk about the amber piece, too. Maybe Marco and she spoke about it at home, privately.”

“Yeah. I’ll call her tonight and see if I can go over in the morning and pick up the journal and the statue, okay, Coop?”

I didn’t have to answer.

Don Cannon spoke. “Not tomorrow, Detective. About two hours before the funeral that had been scheduled for last Friday, Gina got a call from the mayor of Florence. It’s where Marco was born. The Italian government offered to fly the body home for burial in the family’s church, somewhere up north, in the mountains, alongside all his ancestors. Kind of like a national hero — which shows the respect they have for artists over there.

“Gina Varelli left for Italy last evening. Some little town in Tuscany. I don’t even know how to reach her.”

“Your to-do list is getting to be a mile long,” Chapman said after Don Cannon left the office and we were eating our sandwiches at the lieutenant’s desk.

“I’ll call down to my paralegal now and see whether she can get a number for the mayor of Florence. You double-check with the guys from Crime Scene to see whether they took any kind of book when they processed Varelli’s studio.”