City of War (36 page)

“How about a recount?” Archer said. “I’m claustrophobic as shit.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” General Damon said, in an unlikely Texas twang. “The scan takes a couple of minutes.”

“What kind of scan?” she asked, but Damon didn’t answer.

Shortly, the door banged full open, and a Ranger captain, also in camo and brandishing a .45 with the safety off, shouted, “Chief coming through!”

Not wanting to risk getting one between the eyes, I stepped aside so Hood could lead, then took Archer by the arm and followed. The passageway was long and the same green steel as the holding area. The floor was metal too, and our footsteps reverberated in the tight space. I noticed a slight give under my feet and suspected the tunnel was riding on some kind of shock absorber, which probably allowed the entire apparatus to be collapsed and removed.

We passed through two more locked doors following the same procedure. “Chief coming through!”

Archer looked at me. “Like this place is so fucking high-traffic, they might confuse him with the pizza guy.”

I heard General Damon laugh behind me and decided we weren’t being led to the lions. And then the passageway suddenly ended. I’m not easily surprised, but nothing could have prepared me for what lay before us. I heard Archer suck in her breath.

We were standing on a wide balcony looking through a four-story wall of glass into a space too big to be called a room—almost too big to be called a cavern. It was as if someone had strung together several dozen aircraft hangars, front to back and side to side, until they had become one
giant open structure. The girdered ceiling, some seventy-five feet above, was supported by evenly spaced rows of vertical I beams, X-ed at regular intervals for strength, and the light pouring in from somewhere was natural enough that I had to remind myself that we were hundreds of feet below the earth.

Below us, on the other side of the glass, dozens of workers—men and women—in white coveralls, white surgical hats and white plastic covers over their shoes drove forklifts and golf carts along wide, shiny cement thoroughfares that extended to vanishing points. Essentially, what we were looking at was a massive clean room far beyond anything NASA or private industry had ever conceived.

The focus of all this excess and activity were thousands of stainless steel storage vaults, each the size of a doublewide, stacked on braced shelves, reaching to the ceiling. Each vault contained a safe-type door with an electronic locking device and its own environmental system, indicating that the contents required individual regulation. They were being tended by mammoth blue cranes that rolled along the aisles on ten-foot balloon tires.

One crane was attempting to inch a long, coffin-shaped box into a vault on the third level, and the two men on the platform were having difficulty lining it up. When the crane rammed the box into one of the supports, the reverberation almost knocked the men off their perch.

“I’d be willing to bet not a single politician has ever seen this,” I said to Damon.

The general looked at me with mild amusement. “Why do you say that?”

“Anything this big would need to be carved up and moved to their districts.”

He laughed. “I think you’re right.”

I turned back to the glass and said to Hood, “The City of War, I presume.”

“Officially, Combat Impact Trust Installation 3. Shorthand. CITI-3.”

“CITI-3. The City of War. What are 1 and 2?”

Hood was slightly irritated. “I’m letting you peek up my skirt, Sergeant, not spread my legs.” Then he quickly turned to Archer. “I apologize for my crudeness, Ms. Cayne.”

“I’m sure I’ll survive,” Archer replied.

Hood looked at General Damon and said, “Tell Dr. Cesarotti we’re coming in.”

“Yes, Chief,” Damon said and departed.

30

Assholes and Apelles

They had some trouble fitting me, but half an hour later, dressed like a team of biotech scientists, Hood, Archer and I made our way through three gas disinfecting airlocks and into CITI-3. A very pretty, dark-haired, dark-eyed lady around forty was waiting for us. She extended her hand to me. “Dr. Bibiana Cesarotti,” she said, with a pleasant Tuscan accent. “And please call me Bibiana.”

Then she turned to Archer. “You’re Archer Cayne, aren’t you?”

Archer looked surprised. “Have we met?”

“The Michelangelo Caravaggio Competition,” Bibiana answered. “I’m the one who stopped it.”

Suddenly, Archer threw back her head and laughed. When she finished, she saw my blank look and said, “You ever see any Italian television?”

“Naked weather girls can pretty much erase a bad day.”

“I’m sure. Well, when I was living overseas, one of the networks decided to run a contest to find the next Caravaggio. Grand prize: a hundred million lire.”

“What was that back then? About a hundred grand?” I asked.

“Less,” said Bibiana, “but it didn’t matter. In America, everybody wants to be a singer. In Italy, every good family has at least one successful priest and one failed artist.”

I liked this lady.

She continued. “At that time, Signorina Cayne was the most beautiful woman in Europe. People would go wild just seeing her step out of a taxi.” She turned back to Archer. “How many magazine covers?”

Archer was enjoying the trip down memory lane. “I did thirty-seven…not counting the North African knockoffs.”

Bibiana looked back at me. “The network’s plan was to put the Caravaggio contestants through a series of competitions. And at the end, the two finalists would paint your friend.”

“In the nude, I trust,” I said.

“Absolutely,” said Archer. “And on national television.”

I had to admit it beat the hell out of some plus-sized dame choking out a Celine Dion tune on
American Idol
. “So how did this show not sweep the planet?”

Bibiana turned very serious. “
I
am what happened. There are scholars who devote their entire professional careers to Caravaggio. And ordinary people who spend their life savings to just walk past one of his paintings. He’s an Italian national treasure, not a subject for a voyeuristic gangbang. And as Deputy Minister of Culture, I had the prime minister’s ear.”

General Hood smiled. “In addition to being beautiful, the lady has integrity.”

I saw Dr. Cesarotti blush, and she wasn’t the blushing type. You didn’t need a program to know this is where Mrs. Hood’s coffee cup had been aimed. “So what do you do in this place besides
not
produce reality shows?” I asked.

Bibiana looked at Hood, who nodded.

“Let’s proceed while we talk,” she said. “It’s more productive.” And she commandeered a small electric bus, which we climbed aboard.

While the driver threaded his way through the skyscraping caverns of vaults and past more blue cranes, General
Hood took over as tour guide. “When the current army was organized in 1791 to deal with Indian conflicts, it quickly began to accumulate artifacts and treasure. In a time when long-distance communication with battlefield commanders was spotty at best, and not wanting a mercenary fighting force that might choose objectives to enrich themselves, Congress drew up rules governing anything of value that might fall into the military’s hands. These were loosely called the Museum Regulations, but they had nothing to do with museums as we think of them. They simply designated the army to hold in trust all items of real or intrinsic value until a final disposition could be determined. And to free fighting units from additional burden, the army created special collection teams to secure the spoils.

“There the matter sat for almost a century. By then, we had hundreds of warehouses full of all kinds of things, and there still wasn’t enough space. So even though the regulations had initially precluded lending, we began contracting with public institutions for long-term storage, often just to get stuff out of the rain. For the accommodation, we expressly didn’t limit what these institutions could do with the items, thereby opening the door to study—and display. Today, many of the collections in our most prestigious institutions—especially Native American artifacts—are still technically army property. We don’t want them back, but the paper trail is there.”

“And classified, I’m sure,” Archer said.

The general became thoughtful. “I’m not at liberty to comment on that, but for the past several decades, we’ve been working to return identifiable objects to their original tribes, presuming they are still in existence. The difficulty is that record keeping at the time of collection was highly unreliable. And there are many competing claims.”

We had arrived at an open square where tables and chairs were arranged for workers to take breaks. On one side of the square was an elaborate clean room within the clean room
that was lined with thick windows through which I could see people painstakingly restoring paintings and sculpture. On another side was a glass-walled laboratory containing rows of bench-mounted microscopes that generated images on high-resolution monitors. These were manned by technicians, some of whom were matching colors to a spectrum while others compared metals and stone to photographs. The third and fourth sides of the square were taken up by an L-shaped, windowless, two-story building.

As we dismounted from the bus, Hood held us for a moment. “By the turn of the twentieth century, what had begun as a temporary custodial program to safeguard important and valuable items had mushroomed into a conservator and arbitrator responsibility. And no one was happy about it—especially at budget time.”

“Such are the responsibilities of victory,” I said.

Hood nodded. “They are.”

“And thus, CITI-3.”

Archer looked up at the stacks as if for the first time. “My God, so many wars. I can’t even imagine what’s here.”

“Neither could we. That’s why I lured Dr. Cesarotti to America. It was time to find out.” Hood smiled and put his hand on Bibiana’s shoulder. “She’s the absolute best there is.”

Bibiana looked admiringly at Hood. “The general says if I work fast, I might finish in twenty-five hundred years.”

The cutie-pie act was a bit much, so before I had to put on my hip-waders, I said, “With all due respect, Doctor, with your background, you’re not here for the tom-toms and teepees.”

There was an uncomfortable silence and an exchange of glances with Hood before she answered. The lovey-dovey had disappeared. “No, Mr. Black, my expertise is European art. Why don’t you follow me.”

I saw Archer look at me; she mimed touching a hot stove and pulling her hand back sharply. You can get two things
from hitting a nerve—silence or justification. Shortly, we’d find out which I’d prompted.

When we entered the L-shaped building, it was dark. Then the lights came up, and I still wasn’t sure what I was seeing. We were in a long center aisle, and on either side were rows of tall, thin, vertical walls like you’d find displaying bedspreads or Oriental rugs. Only these were thirty feet high and twice that in length and draped in heavy-gauge, clear plastic. I wandered between the two nearest walls and realized that they were made of stainless steel and perforated like pegboards. Affixed to them were hundreds of battlefield drawings and paintings, some framed, most not.

General Hood came up beside me. “The essence of battle. Drawn by eyewitnesses.” There was a catch in his throat, and I believed it was genuine. Though many of the works were of uneven quality, they projected the kind of drama that a dispassionate observer could never achieve. Hood pointed to a small painting of a World War I dough-boy straining under the weight of a wheeled cannon. The work was entirely in shades of brown. “Done in the artist’s own blood,” he said.

It was indeed powerful, and I said so.

“We used to rotate these in and out of army installations,” he said. “Then we discovered that many weren’t coming back. So now, Bibiana has hired artists to reproduce them, and those are the only ones that go on the circuit.”

“There must be thousands,” said Archer.

“Eleven thousand six hundred and four, to be precise,” answered Hood. “But it’s only about a fifth of the collection. In 1775, newspapers began sending artists into the field with the Continental Army to document the Revolution. It was one of the only ways to get the story, and often, accounts of battles were written not from a correspondent’s observations but from an artist’s drawings and description. In the 1800s, soldier-artists began to emerge alongside the civilian ones, and the army finally went exclusively to military personnel during the First World War.”

“What happened when there weren’t any wars going on?”

“The artists would travel to various installations and memorialize commanders, camps, equipment and sometimes more frivolous endeavors.”

“So embedded reporting wasn’t invented in the desert,” said Archer.

“You’d be surprised at the names on some of the early work,” answered Hood.

“Let’s go into the other wing,” said Bibiana.

She and Hood led, and Archer and I followed.

Unlike the first room, this one needed no explanation. The stainless pegboards here ran along the center aisle, and on them were hung life-sized portraits of some of the world’s most bloodthirsty despots and mass murderers.

“I call this the Walk of Assholes.” Bibiana smiled. “Unofficially, of course.”

The description was apt. The first dozen paintings, each at least eight feet tall, were of Himmler, Goebbels, Heydrich, Goring, and the rest. Most of the canvases had sustained water or bullet damage or both. “From our Reichstag collection. Danced under by kings, prime ministers and presidents. Also Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford,” said Bibiana. “Curiosity pieces of no particular monetary value but historically worth preserving.”

As we passed another of a white-uniformed Joseph Stalin being handed tulips from adoring schoolchildren, Hood said, “This was hanging in the Grenada post office. Evidently, they hadn’t gotten the memo he’d been dead for thirty years.”

It was a unique rogues gallery. Kim Il Sung (seized by MacArthur from a spy in Inchon), Juan and Eva Perón dancing the tango (a gift to a U.S. military attaché), a young Che Guevara (courtesy of the Bolivian army), Pablo Escobar (from an informant in his Medellín villa) and, of course, Saddam Hussein. I said to Hood, “I’ve always found it fascinating that murderers and despots can’t have their portraits painted often enough…or large enough.”