Mourner (3 page)

For eighteen years, Parker had lived the way he wanted, to a pattern he liked. He was a heavy gun, in on one or two institutional robberies a year a bank, or a payroll, or an armoured car just often enough to keep the finances fat, and the rest of the time he lived in resort hotels on either coast, with a cover that would satisfy even the income-tax beagles. Then, because of a snafu in one job, he'd got fouled up with the syndicate. He'd thought he'd got that straightened out he'd even picked up a new face from a plastic surgeon and then, two months before in Miami, a syndicate heavy had tried for him, in his own hotel room, late at night. There'd been a girl in the bed with him named Bett Harrow, and when the syndicate heavy died, Bett had taken off with the gun that had helped kill him. The gun could be traced to Parker's cover name, Charles Willis, and that was bad. There was a lot of money and time and preparation tied up in that cover.

Bett had let him know he could have the gun back for a price, but he'd told her she had to wait while he got the syndicate off his back. He'd got in touch with Handy McKay, who'd worked with him on other jobs in the past, and this time the syndicate question was settled for good. Then Parker went back to Miami with Handy to find out what Bett Harrow wanted.

But it wasn't Bett who wanted anything, it was her father. Parker set up the meeting, but left Handy out of it. It might be useful sometime if neither Bett nor her father knew anything about Handy.

The Harrows came to Parker's hotel room at one-thirty in the afternoon. They knocked on the door and when Parker opened it there was Bett, tall and slender and blonde, with vicious good looks, and next to her an older man, short and stocky and grey-haired. He had no tan at all, and the suit he was wearing was too heavy for Miami Beach, so he'd obviously just arrived in town. He was looking uncomfortable and carrying a book under his arm.

Bett said, "Can we come in, Chuck?"

He motioned them in. Bett came in first, and her father followed, clutching the book protectively to his chest. It was a large, slender book with a red binding and a picture on the cover of some people in a balloon.

"Dad, this isn't Chuck Willis, but he says he is." Bett was enjoying herself. It was the kind of scene she liked, which was one of the reasons she was living on alimony.

Ralph Harrow was fifty-three, the principal stockholder of the Commauck Aircraft Company. He owned 27 per cent of that company's outstanding shares. And he was additionally a large stockholder in three airlines and one insurance company. He was also a member of the board of each of the five companies thus represented in his stock portfolio. He had been born to money, and had multiplied his inheritance. A staff of attorneys saw to it that nothing he did was technically illegal, and they earned their money.

He came into the room showing an unusual apprehension, and responded to his daughter's introductions with a brief, wary nod. "This is my daughter's idea, uh, Willis," he said. "I assure you, coercion is not my normal, uh, my normal policy."

"You haven't coerced me yet," Parker had answered. "First you got to tell me what you want."

Harrow licked his lips and glanced at his daughter, but she was no help. "To begin with, I'd like you to read a brief article in this magazine."

He said magazine, but it was obviously the book he meant. He held it up, and Parker saw above the picture a title: Horizon.And below the picture a date: September, 1958. So it was a magazine that looked like a book.

Harrow opened the magazine-book, muttering to himself, "Page sixty-two." He found the page and extended the open book.

Parker shrugged, not taking the book. "Just tell me what you want."

If it had been just the father he'd been dealing with, he'd squeeze the gun out of him now and throw him away. But the daughter was tougher stuff.

Harrow was looking pained, as though he had indigestion. "It would really be quicker if you'd read this first," he said.

"Go on, Chuck," Bett said. "It's short."

"Just two pages," Harrow added.

Parker said, "You read it, didn't you?"

"Well… yes."

"So you can tell me about it."

Parker turned away from the book and went over to sit at the writing desk, turning the chair around to face the room.

Bett was still smiling. She settled luxuriantly on the bed, catlike, and said, "You might as well do it his way, Dad. I don't think Chuck's a reader."

"Well, but…" Harrow was confused and unhappy; this wasn't the way he'd planned things.

Parker had had enough waiting around. "Either get to the point or get out," he said.

Bett said softly, "And go to the police?"

"If you want. I don't give a damn."

Bett laughed and looked challengingly at her father. Harrow sighed. "Very well. It would have been easier if you'd… but very well. This article concerns a group of eighty-two statuettes in a monument at Dijon, in France." He turned the book around so Parker could see. "You see the title? 'The Missing Mourners of Dijon', by Ferdinand Auberjonois."

"You want me to steal a statue," Parker said, and Bett laughed again.

"I want you to understand the background." Harrow answered unhappily. "It is important that you understand the background."

"Why?"

"Dear Dad's a romantic," said Bett, with honeyed venom in her smile.

Parker shrugged. He didn't care what the Harrow family thought of each other.

"These statuettes, eighty-two of them, were made for the tomb of John the Fearless and Philip the Good, Dukes of Burgundy," Harrow said. "John was murdered in 1419, but not before ordering the tomb to be built. Philip was his son, and survived till 1467, when he"

"The statues," Parker said.

"Yes. The statues. They are sixteen inches high, made of alabaster, and were placed in niches at the base of the two memorials. No two of them are precisely alike, and they all express an attitude of mourning. Every possible variation on mourning, both true and false. There are monks, priests, choirboys Well. At any rate, they are priceless. And at the time of the French Revolution, many of them were stolen or lost. At the present time, seventy-four of the statuettes are still in Dijon; some were always there, others have been found and returned. Of the remaining eight, one is owned by a private collector in this country, in Ohio, and two are in the Cleveland Museum. The other three mourners are still missing."

He closed the book, but kept his finger in the place. "That's what this article would have told you," he said, "and just as quickly as I have told it to you."

Parker waited, controlling his impatience. None of this was necessary. Harrow wanted a statue stolen, that was the point. If the job looked easy enough, and if the price was right, he might do it. Otherwise, no. All this talk was a waste of time.

But Harrow wasn't finished yet. "Now, for you to understand what I want, and why I want it, you must understand something about me."

"Why?"

Ben said, "Let him, Chuck. It's the only way he knows how to talk."

"Elizabeth, please."

"Get on with it," Parker said.

"Very well. Very well. I, Mr Willis, am in a very small and special way a collector of medieval statuary. I say in a special way. My collection is small, but if I do say so myself it's excellent. I have at present only eight pieces. This is because my criteria are very high indeed. Each piece must be unique, must be one of a kind, must have no counterpart anywhere in the world. Each must be valued so highly as to be for all practical purposes priceless. And each must have an unusual and fascinating history. My daughter is right, Mr Willis I am a romantic. I am fascinated by each piece in my collection, by its creation and by its history. You understand this collection is for my own satisfaction, and not on display."

Bett laughed and said, "Because they were all stolen."

"Not so!" Harrow looked indignantly at his daughter. "Every piece was paid for, and handsomely too."

"But the fascinating history,"she said, mocking the words. "It always includes a theft or two, doesn't it?"

"That is not at allmy concern. I myself have"

"Shut up,' said Parker.

They stopped their bickering at once, and looked at him, startled. "You want me to steal one of these statues, right? From a museum?"

"Good heavens, no!" Harrow seemed honestly shocked. "In the first place, Willis, all the statuettes mentioned in this article are far too easily traceable. They're unique,you see, each a separate and distinct figure. Here, look." He came forward, opening the book again, shoving it under Parker's nose. "Here are pictures of some of them. See? They're all different."

Five of the statuettes were pictured, and Parker looked at them, nodding. Five sad, robed, weeping mournful little people, in five different postures of grief.

"Besides," added Harrow, "besides, none of these has the kind of history I mean, the sort of background I want for the pieces in my collection."

Parker shoved the book away. "What then?"

"Let me tell you." Harrow stood in front of him, suddenly beaming, a glint of excitement in his eyes. "You remember, three of the mourners are still missing? No one knows where they are. But I've located one of them!"

"And that's the one you want me to get?"

"Yes. Yes. Now, the way it"

"Sit down. You're making me nervous."

"Oh, of course. I'm sorry. Yes, of course."

Harrow retreated, and sat poised on the edge of the chair by the door. Parker's tone had drained some of the excitement out of him, and he went on more normally. "The way I happened to discover this mourner was rather odd. My company, about three years ago, received a small order for cargo planes from Klastrava. Six planes, I believe. You know the country?"

"Never heard of it."

"I'm not surprised. It's one of the smallest of the Slavic nations, north of Czechoslovakia. For all I know it was a part of Poland at one time; most of those countries were. The point is, it's a nation on the other side of the iron curtain, so of course we were somewhat startled to get this order from them. The satellite nations are encouraged to deal with the Soviet Union, you know."

"No news reports," Parker answered. "Just tell the story."

"I'm trying to give you the background."

Harrow was beginning to get petulant. Parker shrugged. Over on the bed, Bett was smiling dreamily at the ceiling.

"It turned out," said Harrow, plunging on with his story, "that this was one of the de-Stalinization periods and Klastrava was taking advantage of the milder climate to do some of its purchasing in the more competitively priced Western market. Needless to say, we never sold them any more planes, but in the process of that sale I met a gentleman named Kapor, from the Klastravian embassy. What Kapor's normal duties are I don't know, but at that time he was handling the negotiations for the sale of the planes. I met him, as I say, and we discovered we had quite a bit in common"

This set the daughter to laughing again, and Harrow glared at her. Then, before Parker could say anything to hurry him along, he went quickly back to his story. "At any rate, he was a house guest in my home two or three times, and once or twice when I was in Washington he invited me to stay with him. And it turned out that he too has a small collection of statuary, but of no particular value. However, his collection did include an alabaster figure of a weeping monk, approximately sixteen inches high."

Harrow smiled broadly, and rubbed his hands together. "I suspected what it must be at once, and learned that Kapor had no idea that it was anything more than an interesting piece of early-fifteenth-century statuary. I also discovered where he'd bought it. I made discreet inquiries, and gradually pieced together this little monk's history, working backward, of course, to its original home in Dijon."

"I don't need all that," Parker interrupted. Harrow seemed ready to play the romantic all week.

"Let him go, Chuck," Bett said. "He's just bubbling over to tell you all about it."

"The information cost me quite a bit," Harrow added defensively. "At one point, I even had to hire a French private investigator to check on a piece of information for me.

Parker shrugged.

"At any rate," said Harrow, hurrying now in an attempt to keep Parker from interrupting, "this particular statue was one of those looted in 1795, when revolutionaries desecrated the tomb. Who stole it I have no idea, but it did turn up in Quebec as a result of the Rebellion of 1837. Economic reprisals against one Jacques Rommelle, a follower of Louis Joseph Papineau, forced him to sell most of his possessions and move to Nova Scotia. Among the household goods sold was this small alabaster statuette. Rommelle had a knack for aligning himself with the wrong people. He'd left France for Canada in 1795, primarily because he was one of the strongest supporters of Robespierre. It's possible Rommelle personally stole the statue from Dijon, but unlikely, because he'd lived most of his life in Rennes, which is in Brittany, on the other side of France. I think it more likely that the original looter was killed during the Terror, and that Rommelle was the second owner."

He paused, cleared his throat, rubbed his hands together briskly, and smiled. "There's such a fascination in this," he said. "At any rate, Rommelle sold the statue in 1838, to a dealer named Smythe. Smythe didn't manage to re-sell it, and when he died in 1852, his business was inherited by a grandson who had emigrated to the United States and was at the time living in Atlanta. The grandson sold most of what he'd inherited but he did hold on to a few items he liked, among them the statue of the weeping monk, but it was stolen by a Captain Goodebloode, a Union cavalry officer in 1864, when General Sherman's army captured the city. Captain Goodebloode brought the statue to Boston, where it remained in the family till 1932, when the Goodebloode finances were depleted by the depression, and the contents of the ancestral house were sold at auction. A Miss Cannel purchased the statue in Boston and brought it home to Wittburg, a small town in upstate New York, where, for some reason best known to herself, she was attempting to set up a museum. If she'd had the wit to hire a professional curator, of course, the game would have been up right then, but this was a one-woman museum, and Miss Cannel apparently had more money than sense. At any rate, the statue went into the museum and when Miss Cannel died in 1953, the entire contents of the museum were sold to various dealers. One of them, in 1955, sold the statuette to Lepas Kapor. Finis."