Murder at the National Gallery (38 page)

“I don’t know,” his colleague replied in Italian.

Mason laughed and cried. Streaming tears of relief and joy.
It had worked. Better than he’d ever imagined it could, or would. “It worked!” he shouted at Pims.

“Get in, man,” Pims said. “The rain.”

Luther pulled the other wrapped painting from the car.

“What the hell are you doing?” Pims asked.

Luther said through tears and blowing rain, “Walking, Scott. Running. It worked!”

“You’re out of your mind. Get in the car!”

But Luther ran.

Pims’s girth precluded him from reaching the rear door over the seat. He shoved himself from the car, came around, and slammed the door shut. “Luther, come on!” he shouted, the wind seemingly slamming his words back against his face.

Pims didn’t know what to do. Pursue him on foot? Drive after him? By the time he had made up his mind to use the car and had wedged himself behind the wheel, Luther Mason was out of sight, having turned left on D Street and cut through the Navy Memorial in Market Square.

Lafroing was back in the car with Blond Curls and the New York man when they saw Mason running through the rain, a brown paper package held tightly to his chest.

“What’s he got?” Blond Curls asked.

“I don’t know,” was Lafroing’s reply.

“Looks like he’s got the same thing you got,” Blond Curls said.

Julian Mason and Lynn Marshall had been observing the Atlas Building from the protective overhang of a nearby doorway. They saw Lafroing leave, then watched as Julian’s father came down Ninth Street carrying a rectangle wrapped in brown paper.

“Where’s he going?” Lynn asked.

“Looks like he’s heading for the Gallery.” They followed.

Mason reached Constitution Avenue, turned left, and ran across the broad avenue and past the National Gallery’s West Building, before turning right on to Fourth Street, which cut through the courtyard separating the West and East buildings. He looked to the fountains, jets of water caught by the wind
and tossed into a swirl creating a grotesque series of patterns against the glass wall leading down to the interior concourse.

He went to the fountain and stood alone, the collar of his raincoat pulled up tightly around his neck. His shoes were soaked. He dropped the unopened umbrella to the ground and lifted his head into the wind and rain. Tears continued to flow; the rain was now a deluge. His body was numb, his mind very much alive. Visions of his mother, of Juliana and Julian, of the familiar comfort of his apartment and office at the National Gallery, of Lynn Marshall’s warm body, of his friend Scott Pims, of Caravaggio, swamped him.

He felt small and lost and giddy. Like a child again.

He never saw the person approach, becoming aware only when a hand reached around him from behind and grabbed the package he held. The motion caused him to turn; he now faced his attacker.

Mason hung on to the painting. “Oh, no,” he said, stumbling backwards in the direction of the tiny concrete steps over which the fountain’s water cascaded down to the interior-concourse window.

“No,” Luther shouted as he lost his grip. “Please. What are you—?”

The wet brown paper package was yanked from him with great force, sending him spinning out of control toward the man-made waterfall. He lost his balance and tumbled headfirst down the steps, propelled by the water’s force, his face striking one step, then another and another, breaking his cheekbone, his nose, down and down—thud-thud-thud—until reaching the window, into which his face smashed. Luther Mason felt nothing in the few seconds of life left to him except the sensation of being alone, cold and wet. Then, the damage to his brain prevailed. Blood flowed freely from his nostrils, turning the water a pretty Poussin pink.

Mason’s body was discovered that morning by a National Gallery security guard. At first, the guard didn’t believe what he saw wedged against the floor-to-ceiling window, the grotesquely misshapen face, the eyes opened unnaturally wide, the water gurgling in and out of the gaping mouth. Was it post-Impressionism? Performance art?

Now, at seven that morning, the exterior courtyard was filled with Washington police, the National Gallery’s own security people, and a burgeoning crowd of onlookers.

Two MPD detectives, one using a small video camcorder, photographed Luther’s body from the top of the steps leading down to the window; the other gave a play-by-play of what they were seeing: “Deceased is lying at bottom of steps—face against glass—Joe, get a closeup of the steps—there are—let me see, I’ll count—ninety-six steps—no, I lost count—”

Suddenly, the fountain’s twenty-four jets, which had been tossing water into the air, went dry.

“Who turned off the goddamn water?” a detective yelled.

“We have to get the body up out of there,” another said.

“Turn the goddamn water back on until we finish taping—come on, get real—we need to show the body like it was, with the water running over it.”

Word was passed; the fountain sprang into action again.

Videotaping completed, the water was once again shut off, and two criminalists from MPD gingerly descended the
succession of tiny steps to the body. Minutes later Luther Mason’s corpse was on dry ground, on its back on a piece of white canvas.

A forensics supervisor knelt next to the body, took Mason’s jaw between thumb and index finger, and slowly moved it back and forth, saying as he did, “Rigor has started in the face.” He looked up: “Get everybody out of here who doesn’t need to be here.”

As uniformed officers pushed back the crowd, the forensics chief pulled open Mason’s raincoat, unbuttoned two shirt buttons, and inserted his hand beneath his armpit. “A little warmth, not much,” he said to an assistant jotting down his comments. “But with all that water running over him, he’s cooled off faster than normal.”

After some debate about whether to attempt to take Luther’s temperature by inserting a thermometer into a body cavity, it was decided to rush the corpse to the forensics lab, where it could be done under less public scrutiny.

Two hours later, after preliminary forensic tests had been conducted in the lab, it was determined that the time of death had been approximately midnight, the cause multiple fractures of the skull.

Mason’s possessions had been carefully catalogued. His wallet was intact. More important, an envelope was found in his pocket containing fifty thousand dollars in cash. If the deceased had been pushed down the steps to his death—and that was only a possibility; he could have fallen on his own—robbery was an unlikely motive. An assailant would have had to go down the slippery steps to retrieve the envelope. Of course, Mason might have been carrying something else that was taken from him prior to his fall.

That afternoon, MPD chief of detectives Emil Vigilio convened a meeting of homicide detectives. “First,” he said, “let’s deal with the obvious. There’s no evidence to indicate the deceased was pushed down those steps. Is there?” Muttered negatives. “On the other hand, it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense to me why this top guy from the National Gallery would be out there at midnight in the pouring rain, fifty big ones in his
pocket, and just happen to take the wrong step. Anybody here explain that to me?”

“Doesn’t make any sense.” “Doesn’t add up.”

“So,” Vigilio continued, “let’s say somebody else was there and gave him a shove. Why? And if this somebody did it to kill Mason, is there any connection between it and the Italian cultural attaché, Carlo Giliberti, getting it in Rock Creek?”

“Why would there be?”

“They were good friends.”

“Yeah. And they were both involved in the Caravaggio show going on at the National Gallery. I just got off the phone with Steve Jordan. There’s rumors goin’ ’round that there’s been some hankypank where that one painting is concerned. What’s it called? Grotesque?” He consulted a yellow legal pad. “
Grottesca
. Jordan says that Mason was under suspicion of pulling some kind of switch at the National Gallery. That could upset a few people, huh? Maybe enough to kill him.”

One of Vigilio’s detectives grunted and shook his head. “The two are so different, Emil,” he said. “Giliberti got it with the ice pick in the back of the head, gangland style. Mason falls down the stairs and fractures his skull. If there was somebody else involved, sounds to me like he got into an argument and got this individual mad enough to take a swing at him. Give him a shove. Maybe a girlfriend—he’s divorced, right?—or maybe a street guy looking to mug him.”

“And this top curator just happens to be standing there in the rain,” Vigilio said.

“What about that swap of paintings? This Mason pulls off a scam, hangs on to an original? Worth a lot of money?”

“Right,” said Vigilio. “According to Jordan, Mason probably had the original of this—” He glanced at the paper again. “This
Grottesca
. Jordan says it’s worth fifty mil. Maybe more. If Mason was walking around with that thing last night, it’s like havin’ fifty million bucks in your pocket.”

“And fifty grand green in his pocket, too,” said an admiring detective.

“Uh huh. Only if he did have the painting with him,
that
wasn’t in his pocket. Let’s say he’s carrying the original on his
way to meet somebody, maybe somebody interested in buying the painting. And let’s say somebody else knew where he was going and why. Knew what he had. The guy Mason was supposed to meet doesn’t show, or he’s late, but this somebody else is there, grabs the painting, and shoves Mason down the steps.”

Another detective, a grizzled old-timer who’d been silent, muttered, “Or maybe Mason was a fruitcake who likes walking in the rain. He slips, falls, and cracks his head. In which case, what are we messing with it for? It’s an accident. Case closed.”

Vigilio ignored him. “Until we prove otherwise, I’m treating this as a possible homicide,” he said. “Let’s check it out. Bobby, take somebody with you to the National Gallery and talk to everybody who worked with him, worked for him, especially anybody who knew what was going on with this
Grottesca
thing. George, find out the players in Mason’s personal life. Lovers, family, friends. Nail down where everybody was last night between, let’s say, ten and one. I’m meeting with Jordan as soon as we break up to get a better handle on the art slant.”

Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio was being discussed late that morning by people with loftier titles than chief detective.

The president of the United States, Walter Jeppsen, received a special briefing by his vice president on the most recent of dispatches the VP had received from the Italian government.

“Why are they making such a big deal of it?” the president asked.

“I suppose because it
is
a big deal, Mr. President,” Aprile said. “They don’t view it as the irrational act of one man. They consider it some kind of grand conspiracy on the part of the United States.”

Jeppsen leaned back in his Oval Office chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and mumbled an uncharacteristic four-letter word. “The Koreans are threatening to scrap the nuclear treaty,” he said. “Castro is threatening to take over Haiti, as though he could. The French want to dismantle NATO. I can’t
get new social legislation through on the Hill. Health-care legislation looks doomed again. My polls are the lowest they’ve been in a year. And we have to worry about a painting by an Italian madman. Who has the original?”

“As far as we can ascertain, Mr. President, this curator, Luther Mason, who died last night, had the original and sent a forgery back to Italy. But the painting wasn’t with him when he was found this morning. Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Shouldn’t be hard to find, should it?” the president said.

“Probably harder than you or I can imagine, Mr. President. The police are doing everything they can. One of my staff spoke with the head of MPD’s art squad, as it’s called. They’re looking for it.”

“Well,” said Jeppsen, “one thing I don’t need is the Italian government accusing the government of the United States of stealing one of its paintings. I have a reception to get to. Bring me up to date later tonight. Better, bring me a solution.”

The assistant secretary of state for Mediterranean Affairs met in the modern State Department building on C Street, NW, with the Italian ambassador to the United States. He spoke soothingly. “We’re well aware, Mr. Ambassador, that your government is extremely upset by what has happened. I can assure you that every possible avenue is being explored to find the original and to see that it is returned to you as quickly as possible.”

“I am sure that is the case,” said the ambassador. “I am also certain you can understand that what has happened here raises a serious question about the loaning of any future works of Italian art to your National Gallery—or to any other American museum.”

“I don’t think you need go to that extreme, Mr. Ambassador. This was the work of a demented person. Surely, you can’t hold the United States government responsible for the works of one warped individual.”

“It does not matter who did this or why this happened, Mr. Secretary. What does matter is that one of the world’s most precious masterpieces has been stolen from us. What will be taken next by some ‘demented person,’ another Caravaggio
currently on exhibition at your National Gallery? It is my recommendation to my government that the Caravaggio exhibition be canceled immediately and that all works of art be returned to Italy as quickly as can be practically arranged.”

“I believe that would cause more problems than it would solve,” said the assistant secretary. “I’ve met with the leaders of the National Gallery. They assure me their security is sufficient to protect works currently on loan from you.”

“We were told that when we allowed
Grottesca
to travel here under the most unusual of circumstances. No, Mr. Secretary, unless the painting is found and returned to us within the next few days, I am afraid I have no choice but to urge my government to close down your exhibition. At least our part of it. Thank you for your time. Good day.”

Whitney, impeccably groomed as always, but his face a mask of stress, sat in his office with senior curator Paul Bishop. They’d just come from a series of emergency meetings.