Murder at the National Gallery (21 page)

“Well, Watson, you may not like going there, but you will. The phone line comes in this morning. Jacob signed the lease. It went to the landlord first thing this morning.”

Jacob Will, a Maryland artist, had been arrested by Jordan a year ago for laundering hot art. A deal was struck to avoid prosecution. When Jordan needed a front, in this case renting a studio in the Atlas Building on a month-to-month basis, Jacob provided it.

“Check in with me after lunch,” Jordan told Gloria.

Jordan’s meeting was at MPD Headquarters, Second District, on Idaho Avenue, N.W. Present were representatives from the law-enforcement agencies investigating the murder of Carlo Giliberti. Jordan knew everyone in the room except for two men sitting together at the head of a conference table. They were introduced by Washington MPD chief of detectives Emil Vigilio as New York City detectives.

One explained their reason for being there. “We’d been investigating Carlo Giliberti for six months,” he said. “Customs tipped us to the possibility that Giliberti was smuggling in stolen art from Italy and selling it to a gallery down in Soho. We put the arm on the owner. Helped him to see the light, and he decided to cooperate. The last stuff Giliberti brought in was a couple of paintings by an artist named”—he consulted a scrap of paper—“Preti. Mattia Preti.”

“Stolen from San Francesco di Assisi, in Cosenza,” Steve Jordan said.

“Right.”

“Jordan heads up our art squad,” Vigilio said. “Go on. We’re listening.”

“We couldn’t do much with Giliberti. Diplomatic immunity and all. Diplomatic impunity is more like it. We were ready to pass the information on to authorities in Italy when he got it in the neck, down here.”

“What was his source of stolen art?” Jordan asked.

The New York cop again checked his notes. “Hard to say. From what the Italians tell us, stealing art is getting to be big business for the local mafiosi.”

Which wasn’t news to Jordan. Unlike organized crime in the
States, with drugs, extortion, prostitution, and other crimes providing the major sources of income, art theft was an important criminal industry in Italy. The fact that Italy had more priceless art to steal undoubtedly had something to do with it, supply equaling demand.

The New York detectives completed their report, and after some discussion and a promise of further cooperation, left.

“Giliberti wasn’t as clean as we thought he was,” said Vigilio. “I’d say Mr. Giliberti’s untimely departure from this world wasn’t a random killing. Looks like a mob hit to me.”

“Over some paintings?” one of Vigilio’s detectives said, laughing. “Drugs, maybe. But art?”

Jordan had heard it before. In a city whose murder rate increased every month, his focus on recovering stolen paintings was viewed by many colleagues as dilettante police work. Who cared whether some rich art collector got ripped off when the city’s citizens were being gunned down over a pair of sneakers, or a Washington Redskins jacket?

“You have any information on Giliberti smuggling art into the country?” Vigilio asked Jordan.

“No, but it’s happening all the time through embassies. Diplomatic pouches are getting bigger and heavier every day.” He opened a small notebook. “Italy leads the list, although there’s plenty of action from other countries, too. The old Soviet Union for one. Italy’s loaded with art, a lot of it in churches and convents. They can’t afford to pay for security. Easy pickings.” He went on to cite statistics from a conference in Rome he’d attended a few months ago. Drawing law-enforcement officials from sixteen countries, it had been held in conjunction with an unusual art exhibition featuring stolen art taken back by the art-recovery division of Italy’s
carabinieri
, its police department.

“Twenty-nine thousand pieces of art were stolen last year in Italy alone,” said Jordan. “They recovered maybe five thousand of them. The Mafia, as the New York guys said, is heavy into art theft over there. No doubt about that. Ten billion dollars’ worth of art stolen every year around the world.” He looked at the detective who’d made light of stolen art. “Yeah,
the numbers are worth killing for. I had a meeting last week with the Bureau’s Interstate Theft Unit. They estimate there’s at least fifty thousand pieces of stolen art floating around this country alone. We recover ten percent.”

“Unless you get lucky like we did,” said Carl Kelley, head of the National Gallery of Art’s three-hundred-person security force.

“Caravaggio?” Jordan said.
“Grottesca?”

“Right. Didn’t take the police to find it. A curator. Luther Mason.”

“We have to keep these curators off our turf,” Jordan said, laughing.

“Amazing,” said Kelley. “Finding it after a couple of hundred years.”

“The
carabinieri
just recovered a Raphael missing for two hundred years,” Jordan offered. “Worth a cool twenty-four million.”

“I never worry about anybody stealing our art,” Kelley said. “The wife buys it all at tag sales.”

“Back to Giliberti,” Vigilio said. “If he was killed by the mob for whatever reason—art, drugs, sleeping with the wrong woman, forgetting to kiss the godfather’s ring—we can stop looking for the murderer in the general population.”

“I’ll do some more checking,” Jordan said. “Maybe I can narrow it down a little.”

“Yeah, do that, Steve,” Vigilio said. “If it pans out to be a mob hit, we’ll pass what we know on to the Italians and the FBI. Anything else?”

The meeting ended.

In Cincinnati, Ohio, Harry Whitlock had recently received a generous bonus from his employer, prompting his wife to buy new furniture and to sell the old at a tag sale. The orange-and-white zebra-pattern couch went quickly. Cindy had returned to the flea market to buy another print from the dealer who’d sold her Fragonard’s
A Stand of Cypresses in an Italian Park
, which had gone nicely with the old couch. The new couch was green:
She bought a landscape by someone who’d signed it “Carracci” to hang over it.

No one at the tag sale showed interest in the Fragonard print until a couple stopped by, perused what was left, and huddled at the far end of the driveway, talking quietly. “I’m telling you, that picture is worth a lot of money,” the man told his wife.

“I don’t like it,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. They’re selling what could be a rare masterpiece.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Because they don’t know anything about art. Like I do. I’ll do the negotiating. They’re asking thirty bucks.”

A few minutes later, the couple left the Whitlock house carrying the Fragonard print, as well as a table lamp with a frayed cord. Cindy wouldn’t take less than thirty dollars for the print but threw in the lamp.

Annabel awoke with a start. It was as dark outside as in the bedroom. Mac felt her sudden movement and sat up. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I—”

“Just a bad dream.”

“Yes. No.” She snapped on the reading lamp. “Mac. I think I know who smashed my Tlatilco.”

His light came on, too. “Who?”

“I can’t be sure. But I know how to find out.”

They got up, showered, dressed, and sipped coffee in the kitchen until sunrise.

“What time does it open?” he asked.

“Eight.”

When Annabel Reed, now Annabel Reed-Smith, closed her legal practice in search of fulfillment as a gallery owner, she had put the contents of her office in a self-storage facility in Alexandria. She hadn’t visited those dead files in over a year.

“You don’t remember his name?” Mac asked as they crossed the Potomac River on the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge.

“Cedro. Cedras. Something like that. They were Costa Rican. It shouldn’t be hard to find the file. I had a special drawer for spousal-abuse cases.”

Annabel’s storage unit was on the ground floor of a two-story prefab metal building painted a garish pink. Mac opened the door with the key she handed him and rolled up the corrugated metal door. Inside, beige metal file cabinets were stacked on top of one another from floor to ceiling. Her desk, chairs, and other furniture were carefully placed on top and against each other to make optimum use of the space. Fluorescent ceiling lights cast a greenish glow over everything.

Annabel looked at labels on the front of each file cabinet. “This one,” she said, kneeling, opening a bottom drawer, and fingering through the folders it contained. “Here.” She withdrew one and handed it up to him. The label read:
MARIA AND JOSEPH CEDRAS
.

They stepped outside to read the folder’s contents.

“You think it was him?” Mac asked after they’d finished going through it.

“I can’t be sure. But he was the same size, same general appearance as I remember him from the one time he came to the office. He was furious that his wife was leaving him. I’ve had angry people in my office before, but he was frightening. He was so—irrational. He threatened her. Threatened me.”

“You should have reported him,” Mac said.

“I considered it but decided to give him time to calm down, get used to the fact that Maria wanted a divorce. That was the
last I heard from him. He’d beaten her on a number of occasions. I got her into a battered-women’s shelter and put through the divorce papers. He didn’t formally contest the action. The last I heard, he’d gone home to Costa Rica.”

“The wife?”

“Stayed around here, I think. I really don’t know. I lost touch.”

“What did he do for a living?” Mac asked.

“Had his own business. Import-export.”

“Did Mrs. Cedras ever report being beaten to the police?”

“Once, I think. The last time it happened. She was scared to death of him.”

“The police arrest him?”

“Yes. That was the day before he came to my office. That’s what set him off.”

“Good,” Mac said.

“Why good?”

“Chances are MPD fingerprinted him and took his picture. We’ll call Steve Jordan and go through his mug-shot books.”

Two hours later they sat in Jordan’s pleasant little art gallery-cum-office. A photograph of Joseph Cedras was already on the desk.

“Look, Annabel,” said Jordan, “you may be right. You probably
are
right about this guy. But even if we pick him up, you won’t be able to ID him. You said you never saw his face.”

“But I saw his hat and coat. And his hammer. My read on him was that he was unstable, capable of violence. People like that sometimes don’t hesitate to take credit for their violent acts.”

“But violence against an inanimate object. Why?”

Mac asked his wife, “Did you give him your patented two-heads-are-better-than-one speech? You know, using the Tlatilco?”

“Not as I recall. Wait a minute. He and Maria ended up in a shouting match.
She
mentioned it because I’d given my what you call ‘speech’ just before he barged in.”

“We’ll issue a warrant on him, Annabel. If we pick him
up—and if we come up with his favorite hat and coat—we’ll do a lineup best we can.”

“Thanks, Steve. I appreciate it.”

“Keeping busy, Mac?”

“Uh huh, only the lady here these days is making me look like I’m retired. You?”

“Yeah. Got a bulletin this morning from Norway. They convicted the four guys who stole the Munch painting,
The Scream
, from the National Gallery in Oslo a couple of years ago. The art-and-antiques unit of the Yard posed as potential buyers and nailed them. Only took them three months. Know what I love?”

“What’s that?” Mac asked as he helped Annabel on with her coat.

“They snatched the painting in less than a minute, and left a note that said, ‘Thank you for little security.’ ”

Mac and Annabel laughed.

“And what was that little goody by Mr. Munch worth?” Mac asked.

“Twenty mil. The legitimate art market may be depressed, but the underground is flourishing. How’s the Caravaggio exhibit shaping up, Annabel?”

“Fine. Although Carlo Giliberti’s murder threw things into a tizzy for a while. Luther Mason wanted to cancel the exhibition because of it.”

“He
did
?” Jordan said. “From what I know of Mason, it would take mass genocide for him to call off anything to do with Caravaggio.”

“He’s changed his mind. Took a week’s vacation in Europe.”

“He does get around,” Mac said.

“Seems to have done wonders for him,” said Annabel. “At least according to Court Whitney. Anything on Carlo’s murder, Steve?”

Jordan decided not to share what he’d learned from the New York City detectives and shook his head. “Thanks for coming in, folks. I’ll be in touch if we come up with Señor Cedras.”

Annabel was relieved Jordan hadn’t hinted at the arrangement she’d entered into with him to help recover the missing Dumbarton Oaks artifacts. She’d intended to tell Mac about it since making the decision to help out, but the time never seemed right. Besides, she assured herself, nothing would come of it anyway. It was a shot in the dark. Her only obligation was to check the answering machine in the Atlas Building studio once a day, and she could do that by telephone. Her involvement was nothing more than a gesture, one she was glad she’d made. How often were you called upon to help law enforcement, especially when you would be helping recover what had become precious to you, pre-Columbian art?
Ask not what your country can do for you
 …

Just as long as she didn’t end up like the fools who’d broken into Watergate because they’d been duped into thinking
their
cause was worthwhile.

The months flew by quickly for everyone involved in the exhibition. The paintings loaned to the National Gallery began to arrive by Alitalia, each protected in a climate-controlled box designed and built by conservator Don Fechter’s staff. Most conservation work on the paintings had been accomplished at their sites-of-origin, although permission had been granted by some lenders for Fechter’s experts to complete the work in Washington, paid for through a private fund.

The publicity mill was in full gear. The media were bombarded
with press releases, and the Gallery’s Speaker’s Bureau fielded an unprecedented number of requests. As might be expected, most were for Luther Mason. To the surprise of the National Gallery’s staff—Courtney Whitney III no exception—Mason graciously, even enthusiastically agreed to speak to the most important of the groups. He’d been reticent in the past about making public appearances. There were certain public relations efforts expected of curators—scholarly papers presented within the National Gallery and at other leading art centers, curatorial conferences, an occasional presentation to the trustees. Mason had always fulfilled those obligations, but not without his penchant for making dramatic protestations: