Painted Ladies (15 page)

He glanced at me with a look that said, “You meet all kinds in Cambridge.” But he opened the box, and there was a very large pizza. With mushrooms and peppers.

“Thanks,” I said.

Susan paid him and took the pizza while keeping her leg between Pearl and the door’s opening. Pearl kept barking. But it was just her usual “Hey, who’s that?” bark. I locked and bolted the front door. The pizza guy got back in his car and drove away.

Another hair’s-breadth escape.

S
usan managed to serve the pizza as if it deserved the good china. She had some white wine with hers. I had beer. Old school. Susan took a barely measurable bite off the very end of a slice and chewed it carefully. Then she sipped her wine and put the glass down. I often had trouble putting the glass down.

“I acquired Ashton Prince’s doctoral dissertation,” she said, “from the BU library.”

I drank some beer.

“It’s about
Lady with a Finch,
” she said.

“How long?”

“One hundred and seventy-three pages.”

“About one painting?” I said.

“Oh, don’t pretend to be boorish,” she said.

“Oh, good,” I said. “You think it’s pretense.”

“You know there is much to say about a great painting, just as there is about a great poem.”

“Anyone done one hundred and seventy-three pages on
Sonnet Seventy-three
?” I said.

She smiled.

“Probably,” Susan said. “It is difficult to imagine a topic too small, or too silly, for a doctoral dissertation.”

“So,” I said. “He like the painting?”

“Yes,” Susan said. “But that’s not really the thrust of the dissertation. It traces the history of the painting, as artifact, from Hermenszoon on.”

“Really?”

“Or at least to the time when the dissertation was written.”

“Did he trace it to the Hammond?” I said.

“No,” Susan said. “At the time he finished the dissertation, the painting was still missing.”

“Where did he last locate it?”

“In the possession of someone named Amos Prinz, who had been in the camps with the only surviving member of the Herzberg family. Judah Herzberg looked out for his son Isaac, and for Amos Prinz, who was fourteen when he was sent to the camp, and already orphaned. Isaac was nine when he arrived at Auschwitz.”

She paused and drank some wine. And swallowed it slowly and shook her head.

“Nine years old,” she said. “My God.”

“I’ve always claimed,” I said, “that if I could think of it, someone would do it. But I don’t know; I’m not sure I could have thought of the Holocaust.”

“I know,” Susan said. “Should I go on? Or is it too boring.”

I waited until I had chewed and swallowed the large bite of pizza I had taken. Then I said, “It’s not boring.”

“Okay,” she said. “So after a while Judah dies, and Prinz takes over the care of Isaac, you know, sort of like a big brother. They both survived, and when they were liberated, Amos took Isaac back to Amsterdam, where the family had lived. The house had been looted and was boarded up, but Isaac found the painting in a secret place he remembered. His family had hidden it there when the Nazis came.”

“Probably the most valuable thing they owned,” I said. “What happens next.”

“They sold it,” Susan said. “Two kids, about fourteen and eighteen by then, destitute. They sold it to an art dealer in Rotterdam for . . . I think he calls it ‘a pittance.’ And where it went after that, the dissertation doesn’t know.”

“Do we know the name of the art dealer?”

“No,” Susan said. “But I thought it a fascinating story, especially for a doctoral dissertation.”

“It’s more fascinating than you know,” I said. “Did Prince offer any further identification of Amos Prinz?

“No,” Susan said. “He says that both Prinz and Herzberg disappeared, as he puts it, ‘obscured by the fog of historical events.’”

I nodded and ate some more pizza, and drank some beer, and gave Pearl a crust.

“You know we don’t feed her from the table,” Susan said.

“Of course we don’t,” I said.

“It just encourages her to beg.”

“What could I have been thinking?” I said.

“Your capacity for tough love gets very low scores,” she said.

“Always has,” I said.

“However,” she said, “your capacity for other kinds may have retired the trophy.”

“Pizza,” I said, “beer, and you. This is the trophy.”

“So how much more fascinating is it?” Susan said.

“Ashton Prince is Jewish, like you,” I said. “His real name is Ascher Prinz. His father was at Auschwitz.”

“His father?” Susan said.

“I found a phone number and the name Herzberg on a note tacked to the corkboard in his home office.”

“Did you call the number?”

“I did,” I said. “The answering machine said that it was something called the Herzberg Foundation.”

“Did you leave a message?”

“No.”

“Did you ever get a live person?”

“No.”

“Did you call the phone company?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a nonpublished number.”

“So they wouldn’t give you an address,” Susan said.

“No.”

“But you can find a way to get it,” she said.

“Quirk or Healy,” I said.

We were quiet.

“You think it’s the same people that Prince wrote about in his dissertation,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You think he’s Amos Prinz’s son,” she said.

“Yes.”

“That would be how he would know the things in the dissertation.”

“I’d say so.”

“So what does it all mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Yet.”

“If he was guilty of some kind of criminal behavior,” Susan said, “or even if he just wanted to conceal his identity, wasn’t it foolhardy to get that close to it all in his dissertation.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Or maybe,” Susan said, “he had to write a dissertation, and that’s what he had.”

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe he felt some need to sort of confess,” Susan said. “In which case, where better than a dissertation?”

“Your secret will be safe?” I said.

Susan smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “I think mine went from my typewriter direct to university microfilms, unseen by human eye.”

“You mind that?” I said.

Susan grinned at me.

“I was grateful,” she said.

“Bad?”

“It took me two weeks to write it,” she said.

“But it got you the Ph.D.,” I said.

“That’s what it was for,” she said.

I
called Healy in the morning. He said he’d get back to me. I hung up and sat at my computer and typed up a report of what I knew, how I knew it, and what I made of it. I printed out two copies, put them in self-sealing envelopes, put first-class stamps on them, and walked to the end of my hall, where there was a mail chute. Healy called back in less than an hour.

“Phone number is listed on Market Street in Brighton,” he said.

“Pays to be a state police captain,” I said.

“Not in real money,” Healy said.

He gave me the address.

“You want to tell me more?” he said.

“I just sent you a letter, and a copy to Belson,” I said.

“Quirk’s man?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I talked with him yesterday,” Healy said. “He filled me in on the bomb.”

“I have written down everything I know, and everything I suspect, and how I know it, and why I suspect it. I reread the thing before I mailed it, and it’s beautifully written.”

“In case they win and you lose?”

“Expect the best,” I said. “Plan for the worst.”

“Well, at least I’ll have a keepsake,” Healy said.

“That doesn’t sound like a vote of confidence,” I said.

“They seem to know what they’re doing,” Healy said.

“And they’ve missed me twice.”

“If you hadn’t had the dog the first time. If you hadn’t thrown your bag the second time,” Healy said. “You’re alive mostly through luck.”

“ ‘Luck is the residue of design,’ ”I said.

“You quoting somebody again?”

“Branch Rickey,” I said.

“Jesus,” Healy said. “You know stuff most people don’t even care about. You going to go visit the Herzberg Foundation?”

“Yep.”

“Belson told me about your lure theory.”

“Nothing wrong with it,” I said. “It’s a way to keep contact with them. We lose that and we got nothing.”

“Did you like this guy Prince?” Healy said.

“Hell, no,” I said.

“But you’re willing to die to catch his murderers.”

“I’m not willing to die,” I said. “I’m willing to risk it. I was supposed to keep him alive.”

“I know,” Healy said. “I know. How’s Susan feel about it?”

“She doesn’t like it, either,” I said. “But she knows I need to do this.”

“She understands?” Healy said.

“Yes.”

“Most women don’t.”

“Susan’s not most women,” I said.

“No,” Healy said. “She certainly isn’t.”

We hung up.

I
made some fresh coffee and poured myself a cup and sat at my desk and sipped it. I kept my right-hand top drawer open in my desk so I could reach the .357 Mag in case of emergency. I brought my memo up on the computer screen and read it again. It was a surprising amount of information when you looked at it listed there. Proving anything was maybe an issue. I could go over to the Herzberg Foundation in Brighton and see what was shaking there. I could go talk to Lloyd the Lawyer, see if I could pry loose any information on the Herzberg Foundation, which I could then take with me when I went over there to see what was shaking. Normally you don’t get much out of lawyers, but maybe if Mort the Tort understood that he was sitting on at least two murders and two attempted, he might loosen up a little.

My office door opened. I put my hand on the .357. Quirk came in. I took my hand off the .357.

“You look like you just had a date with Renée Zellweger and things went well,” I said.

Quirk smiled, which was not common for Quirk. He got some coffee from the fresh pot and sat in one of my client chairs.

“Good news and bad news,” Quirk said. “Bad news: the plates on that Lexus were stolen, so we got nothing there. Good news . . .”

He smiled again. Twice in the same morning. He must have been ecstatic.

“We traced the tattooed ID numbers,” he said.

“So the hell with the Lexus,” I said.

“Went through the Holocaust Museum,” Quirk said, “in D.C. Epstein was helpful; got an agent to go over from FBI headquarters. They told us about a place in Germany where they keep a huge collection of Nazi stuff. We got hold of the American embassy. Needed a senator and two congressmen to do it, but we got them to send somebody up there, and she said that there were something like five hundred three-ring notebooks filled with names and tattooed ID numbers of everybody that was in Auschwitz. Every prisoner.”

“Imagine keeping track,” I said.

“Imagine,” Quirk said.

“And who had our tattoo?” I said.

“Fella named Judah Herzberg.”

“Hot dog!” I said.

“Listed as deceased,” Quirk said, “and a date: August 1943.”

“The people who’ve been trying to ace me must be part of something to do with him,” I said.

“How ’bout the Herzberg Foundation?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Them. I sent a memo to Healy this morning, copy to Belson. Lemme print it out.”

Quirk must have exhausted himself, smiling twice. He sat silently as I printed out the memo and handed it to him. He read it. And nodded when he finished.

“Amos Prinz,” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“In Auschwitz with Judah Herzberg,” he said. “And he stole the picture, and sixty years later his son is involved in the theft and attempted retrieval of the same painting.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So where does the Herzberg Foundation fit in?” Quirk said.

“I don’t know. Getting the painting back? Maybe. Revenge? Maybe. Justice or something? Maybe.”

“Think they’re the ones tried to kill you?”

“Yes.”

“You got an address for them?” Quirk said.

“Yep.”

“You thinking about going over there,” Quirk said. “Ask them this?”

“I am.”

“Good,” Quirk said. “We both know if I show up, or Healy, these people will disperse like the morning mist.”

“How poetic.”

“Fuck poetic,” Quirk said. “We need to hang on to them until we can connect enough dots to arrest them.”

“For what, exactly,” I said.

“Somebody killed Prince,” Quirk said. “And your building super.”

“And you’re sure it was the Herzberg Foundation?” I said.

“That’s one of the dots,” Quirk said. “You got something better?”

“No,” I said. “I think you’re right.”

“You got fewer rules to follow,” Quirk said. “Just don’t scare them off.”

“And what if they attempt to kill me?” I said.

“Try to avoid that,” Quirk said. “At least until you’ve found something we can use.”

“Not only poetic,” I said, “but sentimental, too.”

“You gonna do it or not,” Quirk said.

“Sure,” I said.

I
was back in the Hammond Museum. In the director’s office. Looking at the bare branches through the window, and talking to Richards, the director.

“I am sympathetic, Mr. Spenser, and I appreciate the integrity of returning our check because you felt you hadn’t done the job well enough.”

“I’m hired to protect a guy and he gets killed,” I said. “How much worse could I have done it?”