Collar Robber (12 page)

The Second Wednesday in April

Chapter Thirty

Jay Davidovich

“Who just joined?” Proxy's question, right after a mellow tone sounded on the conference call line.

“Andy Schuetz.” Andy and I get along fine. He joined Transoxana after mandatory retirement from the FBI. Still has some friends at the Bureau, and knows guys in Brooklyn who'd like to get off with community service if the subject ever comes up. Gets his calls returned, so it doesn't take him long to put together a dossier.

“Is that everybody?” I asked, ready to click off ESPN.com on the computer on my kitchen table.

“It'll have to do.” I visualized Proxy glancing at the clock in the lower right corner of her computer screen at her office. “I have another meeting in twenty minutes.”

“Okay. Alma von Leuthen.” Andy cleared his throat. “Sixty-two years old. Austrian family that goes back to before the Thirty Years War. Had the ‘von' from birth, but by the time she came on stage it didn't have much money attached to it anymore. Fine arts degree from Salzburg University. Married twice, widowed once, divorced once. Husbands were a concert pianist and a banker, in that order. Bounced around Europe a bit, but Vienna has always been home.”

“She apparently started bouncing around again recently, according to Willy Szulz's lawyer,” I said.

“Specifically, on the day this Ertel dude passed away.” I distinctly heard pages in Andy's old-school spiral steno notebook riffling over the line. “Caught a flight for Geneva around three o'clock that afternoon.”

“Suggestive,” Proxy said.

“Suggests she didn't kill the guy.” Andy sounded like a cop on a roll.

“But maybe knew about it before it happened.” I threw that in just for luck.

“Because why?”

“Because otherwise it's a damned funny coincidence.”

“I think you're ahead of the data curve, Jay,” Proxy said. “But it's a provocative thought.”

“So where is she now?” I asked.

“Don't know, except not Vienna and not Geneva. And wherever it is, I'm betting she didn't get there on a passport issued to Alma von Leuthen, because it's not showing up, and it should be.”

Dong!

“Who just joined?” You had to have a delicately tuned ear to pick up Proxy's impatience at the late entry.

“Dan Quindel. Sorry I'm late.”

“You get a pass since your department is footing the bill for Andy's work.” Every piece of internal work at Transoxana gets charged to somebody's budget, and Proxy gets a real thrill when it's not hers.

“What have I missed?”

“I'm emailing you a recap right now,” Proxy said. “We're just getting to the good part—I hope.”

“Guess I have the floor again.” Andy cleared his throat. “Frau von Leuthen has a bit of a rep. Known in certain circles as a notch-cutter.”

“Meaning what? She's a slut?” That came from Quindel, so I relaxed while the inevitable Quindel/Andy “mine is bigger than yours” thing ran its course.

Andy
: “More like a power groupie. A Pamela Harriman. Back in the early days of the space program, when the original seven astronauts were training at Cape Canaveral, this bevy of hotties would run around at cocktail parties, saying ‘three' or ‘four' or something to tell how many of the guys each one had gotten into the sack with. Same idea here, except without the advertising.”

Quindel
: “I didn't know they had astronauts in Vienna.”

Andy
: “In von Leuthen's league it was more like royalty, prime ministers, ambassadors, generals, some of the senior UN types that Vienna is crawling with, and the occasional cultural superstar when things got slow. Sometimes actual affairs and sometimes one-night stands. She never nailed anyone who helped elect a pope, but not because she didn't try.”

Quindel
: “Too bad they didn't have G-Eight summits when she was in her prime.”

Andy
: “At least one guy from last year's G-Eight summit would say she's
still
in her prime.”

I started paying attention again because I figured the back-and-forth had finally reached Proxy's choke-point. It had.

“Very entertaining.” She didn't sound entertained. “But what does all that have to do with
Eros Rising
?” It says a
lot
about Proxy that none of the males on the call came close to chuckling at that question.

“Not certain,” Andy said, absolutely dead-pan, “but anytime you put a little black dress and a little black book together, you've got a chance for pillow talk, blackmail, and back-door influence. That stuff might come in handy if you're working some kind of international scam involving a pricey pic.”

Time for me to chime in.

“That same stuff could come in handy if you were trying to rig bids on a gas pipeline or subvert a central Asian government. I'm the one who brought von Leuthen into the conversation, so I feel a little responsibility here. Do we have anything except a Pittsburgh lawyer's intuition and a Vienna cop's question to me to make us think that Alma von Leuthen has something to do with the painting we insured?”

Absolute silence for five seconds. Seriously, you could have heard crickets chirp. Then Andy spoke up.

“Well…yeah.”

“Well yeah, what?” Proxy asked.

“I mentioned that she has a fine arts degree and she's an arty type. She's a painter. She paints.”

“Oh,” I said.

“She paints,” Proxy said.

“Shit,” Quindel said.

“Yeah, she paints,” Andy said. “You know, like Hitler.”

“Oooo-KAY.” I imagined Proxy block-deleting the emails she'd undoubtedly been reviewing while we chatted. “Thanks to all of you for your helpful input. Jay, I'll call you right back.”

Click!
Eight seconds later my phone buzzed. Proxy. I answered.

“Jay, I think you need to track von Leuthen down and have a talk with her.”

“Got it.” I said that as if I had some idea of how I was going to find a foreign national Andy hadn't managed to locate. “By the way, how did you manage to dump the budget hit for Andy's work on Quindel?”

“That's right, I haven't told you yet, have I? The Museum wants a quote for insuring
Eros Rising
against loss, theft, or damage while it's on loan to a museum in Vienna and traveling back and forth. Quindel's department has to rate the risk.”

“On loan to a museum in Vienna. Sounds like the deal Nesselrode floated when we were there.”

“Yeah, it sounds a lot like that.”

Oh.

Chapter Thirty-one

Jay Davidovich

How do you find a needle in a haystack? You get a big magnet and make the needle come to you. Or if you don't have a big magnet, a lot of small magents.

I called Dany Nesselrode. No answer, left a message, said it was important. Checked my watch. Still early evening in Vienna, so I had a shot.

I called Jakubek, the shysterette. No answer, left a message, said it was important.

I called Father Utica, the rector of the seminary in Albuquerque. No answer, left a message, said it was important.

I made a list of all the guys I'd known in the army who at some point had found themselves less than six degrees of separation from the State Department. Short list, because I ran out of names after I reached one: Tat Baldwin. I don't think “Tat” is short for anything. Just the name his mom and dad had hung on him. Marine lifer whose last pre-retirement gig put him on the security detail of a U.S. embassy somewhere in the Balkans.

Ordinarily a Marine veteran wouldn't give an ex-Army National Guardsman the time of day. Tat, though, kind of liked me. During beer call at an Enlisted Personnel Club in Baghdad, one of my fellow PFCs noticed Tat and decided it would be hilarious to refer to a cat house raid we'd done the day before as “Operation Tit for Tat.” If you're a guy, you can make fun of another's guys looks, or his sexual prowess, or his athletic skill, or any number of other things without getting anything more than verbal pushback. But there are two things you don't make fun of: a guy's mom, and his name. So the second time I heard the “Tit for Tat” thing I told the perpetrator that I thought he'd exhausted the comedic potential of the idea. (I didn't put it quite that way.) Tat appreciated that, because otherwise he would have had to kill the guy, which might have gotten him busted from gunnery sergeant down to lance corporal.

Fingers crossed, I clicked on the number my contact list had for Tat.

“Thank you for calling Pelican in the Wilderness Holiness Gospel Church.” Hmm. “‘I am like a pelican in the wilderness.' Psalm one-oh-two, verse six. At the tone, please leave a brief message including the nature of the ministry you require and a number where you can be reached. May God be with you, and have a blessed day.”

Beep!

“Hey, Tat, blast from your past. Jay Davidovich. Listen, I need to talk—” I didn't get any farther because Tat's voice interrupted my message.

“Davidovich! Man, that brings back memories! Where are you now?”

“Transoxana Insurance.”

“Thank God you called! It's
so
hard to get life insurance when you have leukemia!”

“I'm not in sales.”

“Yeah, that doesn't come as a complete surprise.”

“I've got a name for you. Alma von Leuthen. I'm wondering whether she ever showed up on a list of people embassy staff shouldn't play footsie with when they're out sightseeing.”

“Hmm.” Tat let that syllable hang in the air for a second or two. “Believe it or not, you're actually on to something. They did circulate what they called a DCM List every month when I was in Belgrade. DCM stands for Deputy Chief of Mission. He's the pro, even if the ambassador is a political appointee. Or she, I guess. The names on that list belong to people who, when you're around them, your lips and your fly both stay zipped.”

“Alma von Leuthen's name ever show up, that you can remember?”

“Oh, man, that list wasn't for the likes of me. That was for real foreign service officers. And I wouldn't remember anyway.”

“Can you ask around?”

“Sure, but it'll cost you.”

“Name your price.”

“First, you have to ‘Like' Pelican in the Wilderness Holiness Gospel Church on Facebook.”

“Can do.”

“That's just for starters. The big one is you have to go to
www dot chapultepecanniversary
dot org. There's an online petition there to make September thirteenth a state holiday in Virginia, in time for the one hundred-seventieth anniversary of the American victory in the Battle of Chapultepec in the Mexican War.”

Rang a bell. I recalled mentioning Manifest Destiny to an Austrian cop not long before. Still…

“Are you yanking my chain, Tat?”

“No, sir, I am most certainly
not
yanking your chain. I am as serious as a hernia exam about this. You get the point, right?”

“No.”

“That's where the ‘Halls of Montezuma' in the Marine Hymn comes from. Chapultepec. Sons of Virginia such as George Pickett and Harley Grafton were heroes in that battle.”

“Tat, like every American, I've heard of the Halls of Montezuma. And I've heard of Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg. But who in the bloody hell is Harley Grafton?”

“The great-great-grandfather of a particularly prosperous member of our congregation who is a great believer in both Gospel holiness and in celebrating this battle.”

“Comes the dawn. Done, Tat. I will sign the petition.”

“Okay, then, I'll call you back when I've got something.”

“I'd appreciate a call-back for sure, Tat, but the main idea is to put von Leuthen's name out in this connection to as many people as possible.”

“What will that accomplish?”

“If she wasn't on any of those lists, it won't accomplish a thing. But if she was on, say, one or two of them, some ambitious desk officer is going to get the bright idea of circulating an email to a long list asking for information about von Leuthen's whereabouts.”

“Well, I hope you know what you're talkin' about, 'cause I surely don't. But I'll start the ball rolling.”

“Much appreciated.”

“Remember that website, now.”

“Will do.”

I quick-stepped over to Rachel's computer table in the dining room to find something I could use to write down Tat's website while I still remembered it. Murphy's Law operated in its usual way, and I knocked a manila folder on the floor in the process, scattering its contents onto the rug.

Nuts.

I scooped the pages up to replace them in the folder. All of sudden I found myself looking at a print-out of the head-and-shoulders shot from Cynthia Jakubek's website. Plus a lot of other stuff about Cynthia Jakubek, with yellow highlighting over words like
Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy
, “federal court clerkship,” and “Calder & Bull.” Hmmm. Nice to have your spouse take an interest in your work, but even so…

Well, I had other things to worry about, so I went back to worrying about them. Such as, what's the connection between the computer hacking investigation I'd abandoned and the
Eros Rising
matter? Because the more I thought about it, the more it seemed there had to be a connection. Did someone wonder why Jay Davidovich had been called into the
Eros Rising
mess, instead of some other loss-prevention specialist who wasn't already busy on something else? Getting the answer to that question made at least as plausible a reason for trying to grab Proxie's attaché case as the long-shot chance of diverting a wire-transfer payment.

Forty minutes later I hadn't come up with an answer, and nothing else important had happened. I checked my emails. Some genius in Hartford had blitzed a Transoxana directory list that included my name to ask, “Is anyone licensed to practice law in Nevada?” Someone else had hit REPLY TO ALL and answered, “Yes, several thousand people. I'm not one of them, but good luck!”

It came as a great relief when Nesselrode returned my call. After something in Yiddish that I didn't understand he asked what was so important.

“Alma von Leuthen.”

“What about her?”

“She's a painter, or at least she knows how to paint.”

“That's like saying someone in Nashville knows how to play guitar.”

“Someone who knows how to paint could forge a painting. She got out of Vienna just before a guy who was supposed to take you and me to a forged painting was killed. Plus, one of the American players in the
Eros Rising
sweepstakes was in Vienna at the same time, and I heard von Leuthen's name from his lawyer. I don't believe in Santa Claus, but it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.”

I heard the distinctive
whoosh-click
of a butane lighter being fired up and then snapped shut. I waited. Nesselrode finally rewarded my patience.

“And so you're looking for her?”

“Yes, and I'm not the only one. I need to talk to her.”

“And you think I can help?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Wild guess.” I hate it when guys play dumb—especially smart guys. “Look, Dany, Transoxana is a great big multi-national company, and one of the places it lives is Austria. We can't afford a rep as a bad corporate citizen there. I've got a typical, head-up-his-ass, by-the-book corporate careerist telling me we should whisper Frau von Leuthen's name to the Vienna cops. I need a good reason not to do that, and the only way I can get one is to talk to her.”

That was not, of course, strictly speaking, true. But Quindel
would
have been telling me that if he'd had the street smarts of a crack mule, and sooner or later even he was going to figure it out.

“Okay, Alma von Leuthen has nothing to do with either the original or any forgery of
Eros Rising
. I know this with absolute certainty, and I give you my word on it as a diaspora Jew.”

“Dany, your word is good enough for me. End of the day, though, it's not my call. So let me make a suggestion. If, by some wild chance you find yourself in contact with von Leuthen in the next couple of days, please ask her to give me a call. Meanwhile, I'll try to stall the numb-nuts up in Hartford.”

“‘Couple of days.' Wait a minute.” Dead air followed for ten seconds or so. “Look, I'm coming to New York on Monday. We could talk face to face on Tuesday evening if you could get up there. Can you stall him until then?”

“‘The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little time.' Sure, I can stall him until then.”

“Thank you.”

“And how do you know about Nashville and music?”

“Everyone in the world knows about American popular culture. That's why they hate you so much.”

“Thank you for explaining that.”

“Also, I'm sorry I cursed you the last time we saw each other. I was drunk.”

“No problem. Forget about it.”

Yes, Dany, you
were
drunk. I tried that excuse on Rachel once and her answer was, “
In vino veritas
”—which, roughly translated, means, “Drunks tell the truth.”