Frame Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 5) (26 page)

“Nina, if I…”

“What did football
teach
you, anyway, if not how to
hit
people!”

“All I know is, Moon and his people are doing everything they…”

“I want to go home.”

Jackson stared at her for a moment, then said:

“I don’t know if you should do that.”

“Well, I’m going to damn well do it! Try and stop me!”

“Your home is a crime scene, Nina. The people from the lab are there, and it can’t be cleaned until they finish their job.”

“Then get them the hell away. It’s my home! I live there, and I want to go home!”

Moon Rivard had gotten off the intercom. He stepped forward and asked:

“What did you say, Ms. Bannister?”

“I said I want to go home!”

“I’m not sure we can let you do that.”

“So who are you, dad?”

“No, ma’am, but…”

Jackson intervened:

“Moon, are the lab people still there?”

He shook his head.

“No. They finished up about six this morning. But we don’t know if it’s safe for…”

Nina, furious now, shouted:

“Safe! Safe! Yeah, that’s right isn’t it! The Moon Rivard safety team! If anybody knows about safety, it’s you guys!”

He blushed.

She calmed down a bit.

When she was able, she said, quietly:

“I’m sorry I said that.”

Both men had their heads hung.

“I had no right to say that. It’s just…well, listen:”

She took a deep breath.

“I’ve been thinking about this. We all heard Carol last night. She was confused, delusional.”

“Yes, Ms. Bannister. That’s why…”

“Just give me a minute, Moon.”

Silence

She continued:

“She was saying all this insane ‘international smuggler’ nonsense. As though Carol could ever be an international smuggler. She’s a farm girl from Georgia, for God’s sakes. She was completely off her head. Now it’s just possible that after Dobie—who was probably trying to find Maynard––let her walk out under his very nose, she went, I don’t know, down to the beach or something. She could just be wandering around.”

“We’ll keep looking for her,” said Moon, “but in the meantime, Alanna has offered you a room at the Auberge until your place is cleaned up.”

Nina thought for a moment. “What about Furl?”

“I’ll instruct my officers to keep an eye out for him. If they find him, we’ll bring him to you at the Auberge.”

And with that assurance, Nina agreed to be a temporary guest at the Auberge des Arts guest residence.

While at precisely the same time, two Land rovers were making their way slowly, single file, over the narrow snow-covered road that led to Eggenburg Palace.

The great pale yellow building, floodlit and shimmering through a haze of slow-falling snow, seemed to encircle them as they made their way around the gravel driveway.

The main façade was two-hundred feet long.

At intervals of every twenty feet, stood an armed guard.

These men all seemed the same height.

They seemed, in fact, identical in every way.

They were Franz Beckmeier’s private army.

Just as there were urban gangs in cities such as Chicago and New York, so were there private armies in parts of Europe.

This, its members outfitted in black uniforms and carrying automatic machine guns, was such an army.

Beckmeier surveyed it as he stood down from his vehicle.

The hawk-nosed man from the second vehicle walked to his side.

Beckmeier turned and looked at him, then asked:

“So, where is this army of the Red Claw now, at this moment?”

No answer.

The snow could be heard hissing through pine boughs in the surrounding forests.

Beckmeier reached into the vehicle, picked up a bullhorn that lay on the floor in front of the passenger seat, turned it on, put it to his lips, and spoke into it:

“Na, Manner…”

All right, men.

“Jetzt ist so weit.”

Untranslatable.

The closest thing?

The time is at hand.

“Kommt denn nah.”

Come close.

“Ich will euch ganz klar sagen, welcher Kamp vor uns liegt.”

I want to tell you as clearly as possible, about the battle that lies before us.

As though he knew.

But he did know.

He knew his men were well trained.

And he knew they were experienced fighters.

They would prevail.

“So,” he repeated, “kommt euch her!”

Come here.

He watched them.

They remained precisely where they were.

His heart began to pound erratically.

Then he looked at the hawk-nosed man next to him.

The man was holding a machine gun trained upon him.

And suddenly, he knew where the Red Claw’s army was.

CHAPTER NINETEEN: SEE THE REAL PAINTING

Nina was relieved to leave the hospital, and sank thankfully into an overstuffed armchair in the Auberge study. She heard a crinkle and remembered about the note she’d crammed into her pocket.

She took it out, glanced at it, and read:

“Dear Nina…”

My God.

This was from Carol.

She read:

“I’m so sorry for what has happened. It’s all my fault. I just want you to know that I love you very much, and I love Bay St. Lucy, and I’m sorry for the violence I’ve brought to your little town.”

“It’s over now, though. I’ve gone somewhere else. Please don’t try to find me for a while. I’m sorry, but that’s all I can say now. The police may want to ask me more questions. I’ll try to help as much as possible.”

“The main thing is, and I want you to believe this: you are all safe.”

“There will be no more bombs.”

“There will be no more guns.”

“Again, I love you all,”

“Carol”

She was crying by the time she finished the letter.

She was still crying as she walked out of the study and into the garden.

She thought about the letter. None of this made any sense.

That Carol had been able to leave the hospital unseen was insane enough—but this letter?

How was any of this conceivably the fault of Carol Walker?

Carol was a college teacher and a museum docent.

How had Carol been responsible for that?

And where was Carol now?

She could not have gone far.

Georgia. Clearly she was going home.

So, what was she––Nina––to do?

Take the letter to Moon Rivard, and to Jackson Bennett.

There must be a way to find Carol’s parents. East of Atlanta, north of Athens. In a small town. A farm family named Walker.

There had to be some record.

So thinking, she walked back into the study, resolving to call either Moon or Jackson––she was not entirely sure whom.

She glanced out beyond the sliding glass door.

There, sitting on a bench in the garden, where she’d just walked, was a man.

She caught her breath.

For a time, he simply stared at her.

She was frozen, her hand paralyzed on the phone.

He rose, took a step toward the closed glass door….

…and smiled.

Then she recognized who he was.

Five minutes later, the two of them were sitting at the table in the Auberge parlor.

“I hope you don’t mind the intrusion. You were easy to find; I just asked at the hospital.”

“This is not making any sense to me,” she was saying.

He was the same man who’d come to Elementals a few weeks earlier.

Michael.

The man who’d been close once to Carol.

Who’d even wanted to marry her.

Who had come to Bay St. Lucy in order to attempt to persuade her to go back with him to Chicago.

“I’m genuinely sorry,” he was saying. “I’ve caused you both a great deal of pain.”

“That’s just what Carol said in her letter.”

“What letter?”

Nina took it out of her pocket and handed it to him.

He read it and smiled.

“Yes. This sounds like her.”

“Michael, has she gone back home?

“I think I should say ‘yes’ to that. Then you will not worry.”

“What you should do is tell me the damned truth. I think we’ve all earned that. We may be small town rubes…”

“You’re not rubes. Not any of you.”

“Ok, we’re not. But whatever we are, we deserve the truth.”

He nodded his head, slowly:

“All right. But you may find some of this hard to believe.”

“As opposed to last night and this morning? Which are easy to believe?”

There was just the smallest hint of a smile. Then he continued:

“What do you know about international art smuggling?”

Nina stared at him for a time, then said:

“Last night. Carol had just been forced to––well, to do that awful thing. We went to see her in the hospital room. She seemed out of her head. She kept talking nonsense about being a smuggler…”

“It wasn’t nonsense.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t nonsense. It was the truth.”

“Are you insane?”

A shake of the head:

“No, I’m a criminal. And so is Carol.”

“That’s impossible!”

“Smuggling, my dear Ms. Bannister, is not impossible.”

“Smuggling drugs, yes, but…”

“Drugs are cheap, compared to paintings.”

“But, but—what paintings?”

“In the last month? Van Gogh’s
Poppy Flowers
. Said to be worth fifty million dollars.
View of the Sea at Schweiningen
. Also a Van Gogh. Priceless.
The View of Auverse sur Oise
, Paul Cezanne, not signed by the artist, who felt it unfinished. Seventy million dollars.
Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence
. Caravaggio. Priceless, as are all Caraveggios.”

“But how––why…”

“When I first hired Carol, in the early fall, I merely wanted her to take paintings from Chicago through the Frankfurt Airport and into Austria. She was to leave them in a hotel in Graz. There the representatives of a––let’s call him a ‘private collector’––would pick them up. For each painting she delivered, she was to be paid twenty thousand dollars.”

“My God. But the story about your relationship beforehand…”

“Was a complete lie. A complete and utter lie. When I first saw her, she was doing her presentations at The Chicago Art Museum. I felt that she would be perfect for my purposes. She knew her way around paintings, and around Europe. She was plain. Unassuming. And, I instinctively felt, completely honest. I found out all I could about her. No alcohol use to speak of. No boyfriends. No drug habit that had to be supported. She was perfect.”

“So the trips she made in the early fall, after she came to live here…”

“Were made for me.”

“But how did that lead to…”

“How did it lead to yesterday? It led there because things are simply never perfect. All of the paintings we were delivering to the collector I spoke of were at an earlier point in time stolen by the Nazis.”

“From whom?”

“From a group of wealthy Jewish families named ‘Reklaw’ who lived in the Caucasian Mountains of Russia. One of the descendants of these families, a character called ‘Lorca Reklaw,’ has apparently gone on a mad binge to get the paintings back. He heads an organization—we are not certain how large it is—that calls itself the Red Claw.”

“After the family name ‘Reklaw.’”

“Precisely. At any rate, as this organization somehow became richer and more sophisticated, it began to be, almost impossibly, aware of every move I made. My operatives were taken at various airports around the world.”

“Taken?”

“Yes.”

“Were they murdered?”

“We don’t know that. It’s still an open question. All I—and my employer––knew was that they simply disappeared. We thought they were to be sold back, for a huge ransom. We simply didn’t know.”

“You know now?”

“Let me continue: at any rate, once it became too dangerous to go through airports, we needed a new—well, a new method.”

“Which was?”

“We used you, Ms. Bannister.”

You used…

And finally, Nina began to see.

“The paintings I sold…”

“Covered the masterpieces I told you about.”

“Oh, my God.”

“I’m sorry. It was cruel to use you in this way. But neither I nor Carol ever thought Reklaw would find out what was happening.”

“And the people who paid $350 each for Old Red Mill and Old Red Barn…”

“…were actually taking away from Bay St. Lucy some of the most valuable masterpieces in the world.”

She could only sit for a time.

Finally she said, quietly:

“My viscous luminosity…”

Again, the figure across the table from her shook his head.

“As I say, I’m sorry.”

Silence.

The screeching of peacocks on the grounds interrupted the silence...

“And so, Carol, now…”

Michael pursed his lips, then said:

“This is going to be very difficult for you, Ms. Bannister.”

She looked at him:

“What? Is Carol…”

He shook his head:

“I received a phone call a short time ago.”

“Is she dead?”

“No. But the caller claimed to be a representative of Lorca Reklaw. He said that Carol was now en route to Austria.”

“Oh no…”

“He said that I would very soon be in the same situation. That, within days, all of the thieves would be brought together at the castle. That the castle would be burned, just as the Jewish ghettos were burned during the war. The thieves would be made to watch the burning, just as the Jews were forced to watch the destruction of their homes and property. That after watching this, the thieves would be loaded into trucks, taken away, and…dealt with.”

“This is unthinkable. Inhuman.”

A shrug.

“I suppose those adjectives could be made to apply to a great deal that was done in the twentieth century.”

“So…what are you going to do now?”

Another shrug.

“I could go into hiding.”

“Do you think that would work?”

“No. If Reklaw’s people could find Carol in Bay St. Lucy, then they could find me.”

“So what will you do?”