Scarlet Night (17 page)

O’Grady ground his teeth, not knowing what to do or say, helpless and now angry besides, and feeling a little sick with all that food on top of a full stomach. “Tell them it’s time we went home. You can give them your name and number. I’m much obliged to you for the meal.” He pushed away from the table.

“You won’t call her for them? There’s a phone in back.”

“I wouldn’t know where to find her, and if I did I still wouldn’t call her, not if the devil himself gave me a message for her. Tell them that. I’ll wait for them out on the street.”

Gatto turned back to the boys and shrugged. He took out his wallet and extracted a card from it which he gave to Tommy.

O’Grady went out the side door and waited. They weren’t long coming out, preening themselves like peacocks. He caught Tommy by the shoulders and shook him, the way his mother had shaken him as a youngster until his teeth rattled.
“Stupido,”
he kept saying,
“stupido!”

When he looked around, the lame man had left the table and was in the doorway watching him.

I
T WAS DISCONCERTING TO
be able to track another person’s lies even as they were being told. Julie could not get over that conversation with Ginni: she was such a stylish liar. She was probably a stylish thief and smuggler too.

She finished painting what could now be called the mirror wall in time to call Jeff at ten, the hour they had arranged. She went over his mail with him.

“The more things change, the more they are the same,” Jeff said of the situation with the coal miners. “The rhetoric and the wretchedness. The only new ingredient is ecology. How are you doing with the gentleman gangster?”

“I’m going to have a great story, Jeff. Not at all what I started out after. I want to tell you the whole thing, but not until it’s over.”

“You be the judge,” he murmured.

“It’s wild…Jeff, do you know when you’ll be home?”

“No. Does it matter?”

“I just don’t want to involve you in any way in case something goes wrong.”

“That sounds rather sinister. Are you in any danger, Julie?”

“I don’t really think so.”

“I doubt if I’ll be home until this time next week. Call Tony if you need advice and don’t want to involve me, as you say.”

“I might do that. Jeff, you’ll understand when I tell you.”

“I expect I will. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I do. Wish me luck.”

Afterward she thought about how her mother used to say that: I hope you know what you’re doing. Which, with her mother, implied that she didn’t know but would do it anyway and it would be disastrous.

J
ULIE WOULD HAVE PREFERRED
not to go to Forty-fourth Street in the morning at all, but one flush of the toilet when she got there told her that the less things changed the more they were the same: this time it really overflowed. Following Mrs. Rodriguez’s directions, she tracked down the building superintendent, whose name was Orlie, in a tenement across the street. It was one of several in the neighborhood he serviced—if you could call his services servicing. She used her best Miss Page diction on him and put across the idea of a pot of gold if he could get things moving again.

A few minutes later he showed up with what he called his root-toot-tooter, a huge plunger, several wrenches, something that looked like a car jack, and something else that looked like an old bedspring. He was equipped to tackle the whole Manhattan sewage system. Cheerfully. Julie was not prepared to have confidence in anybody that cheerful about that kind of job. He reassured her with an account of his problems upstairs. Juanita was in the habit of drowning a doll every week or so, presumably a naughty one. Or maybe it was euthanasia.

After a half-hour of bellowing and Spanish blasphemy, he gave a cry of triumph. He would not allow Julie to come near until he had washed the offending object thoroughly in a basinful of Woolite. He came out drying the pocket-knife on his shirttail, its blades, screwdriver, scissors, corkscrew, etcetera, wide open. O’Grady’s pocketknife had turned up after all.

“Yours?” Orlie said proudly.

“Well, not exactly.” She should have made it a simple “Yes.”

“I keep it then.”

“No. It belongs to somebody I know. How long do you think it’s been down there?”

Orlie shrugged. “It don’t got no rusty. A couple days maybe?”

“Yeah.” Julie went into the bathroom and tiptoed through the tools to where she could stand up on the bowl lid. She unlatched and opened the window. The knife marks were plainly visible. She looked out the window and down to where the iron grill lay on the ground below.

Orlie was making noises of distress. When Julie gave way, he climbed up and looked down. He pulled his head in. “You go to the police?”

The phone was ringing and Julie let his question hang for the time being. She’d have a lot of trouble explaining why she hadn’t gone to them sooner.

It was Alberto. “Mr. Romano wants to know how soon you can come. You don’t have to go back to the library. We have information.”

“A half-hour?”

“Shall I send Michael?”

“No thanks. I’ll run.”

Alberto laughed, a nice sound.

To Orlie she said, “I’ve got to go out now. I’ll decide later about the police.”

Orlie hauled his tools out the front door. “I don’t tell if you don’t tell,” he said, “and I fix the window real good.” He pointed upstairs. “The señora, she don’t like it when the police come.”

“I’ll bet. I’ll need the knife, Orlie.”

He surrendered it reluctantly, but no more reluctantly than Julie took it from him.

“It’s clean. No shit.” He grinned at her.

Julie wrapped it in a paper towel and put it into a drawer. She brought her pen and a ten-dollar American Express check from her purse. “Okay if I write your name on one of these and you can cash it?”

He was still grinning. “I don’t leave home without it.”

“My dear Miss Julie, I do believe things are falling into place.”

“They sure are,” she said. They certainly were falling into place at Forty-fourth Street.

“Yes?” Romano was very alert. He looked scrubbed and polished and wore pale blue slacks and a matching shirt. “Has something more happened? I’ve just awakened from a nap. I was up at three. Too early, it turned out, for the French. I had to wait an hour. We are fortunate it’s not yet August. I’d have had to wait a month. What’s your news?”

“I told you last night about the note from Mrs. Ryan—O’Grady’s pocketknife?”

“That gentleman seems to be going to pieces,” Romano said when he had heard the rest of it. “We may as well start with him. Shall we have some orange juice first? Come along.”

They went through the foyer and the dining room into the kitchen, at the sight of which Julie could not repress an “Oh, boy.” There was an island in the middle of the room with a six-burner stove, two ovens, and a grill. A variety of skillets hung overhead and the polished copper pots gleamed on a wide stretch of white wall. A chef in costume except for his hat, which hung on a peg between a string of onions and a mesh bag of shallots, was chopping vegetables.

“May I present Monsieur André, Mrs. Hayes?”

The man was tall and skinny and looked more like a dentist than a cook. He bowed formally and showed no sign whatever of being glad to meet her. He probably wasn’t. She didn’t look like an eater.

“We won’t disturb you,” Romano said as he took a surreptitious look at what was in preparation. He padded across to the refrigerator and took out a half-dozen oranges. He put them through an electric juicer and then started to take the washable components to the sink.

“Leave them, monsieur. Please.”

Romano raised his hands—a plea for peace—and he and Julie, taking their glasses, went out of the kitchen—not on tiptoe, but softly. They settled in operational headquarters, the office.

“Let us now consider Mr. O’Grady,” Romano said. “I do want to say it sounds as though you handled Ginni beautifully.”

“That’s how she thinks she handled me.”

“Exactly as it should be. She would seem to have arrived and taken over at once. I find that reassuring. But would you believe, she has brought with her two Italian members of the circus, two acrobats?”

It took Julie only a beat. “The ones who broke into the gallery in Venice?”

“Isn’t it marvelous, the sheer bravura of it? She has housed them with O’Grady, and last night those three gentlemen cut quite a caper on Mulberry Street. You may wonder how I know…”

Julie was away ahead of him, but it would have been impolite to say so.

“You will remember in our concern over Peter Mallory I was aware of your conversation with a brash young comic at The Guardian Angel?”

Julie nodded.

“Another of my interests is a restaurant, Piccolo Paradiso.”

“I know.”

“Ah, of course you do. I’d forgotten. But what I want you to understand about my curiosity, Miss Julie: I do not violate people’s privacy. I merely share in it.”

All right. Julie didn’t say anything. This was the Romano she had first come to see. In trepidation.

“Each night Michael makes the rounds of the establishments where I have interests, and brings back such information as my people think warrant my attention. I shall play part of a tape for you in a moment and you will be astonished at how interwoven our paths are with those of the conspirators we are conspiring against.

“There is a festival in Little Italy at which the two young acrobats from Italy volunteered their talent. I have a man named Tony Gatto who coordinates certain of my enterprises. Entirely without my knowledge, he proposed last night to book these young men into The Guardian Angel for a week. Needless to say, he will change his mind today. But last night he took them to Piccolo Paradiso…” Romano started the machine. “I shall translate where necessary.”

Julie listened hard, for there was the clatter of dishes and a murmur of peripheral conversation throughout. About all she heard in English for a while was the repeated, “Beautiful boys.” Romano watched her face, smiling at the mention of Ginni. Then: “Mr. Gatto, would you do me a favor and tell me what this is all about?”

“That’s O’Grady!” Julie cried.

The tape played on. Julie shook her head in sad sympathy with O’Grady when he said, “I’ve a good voice. I sing a song and read a bit of verse now and then.”

Romano played the segment of tape through, cutting it off when O’Grady left the restaurant to wait for his companions in the street.

“Now, we’ve spent enough time on that unhappy Irishman—unless we have use for him.”

“That’s what I was wondering,” Julie said. “If we need him, it might be possible to convert him.”

“He’s anticipating a considerable amount of money for his part in their undertaking.”

“Acquiring money isn’t exactly an Irish thing, Mr. Romano.”

The Little King raised his eyebrows. “That is folklore, my dear. It isn’t an Italian thing either. Some of us simply happen to be good at it.”

“Right,” Julie said and knew she was blushing. “Nevertheless, most of them aren’t good at it.”

“He is a member of the I.R.A.?”

“According to Mrs. Ryan. I imagine that’s what he’d want the money for.”

“Then I don’t see how he could be diverted. That’s my point.”

“It would have to be a conversion. We’d have to put it to him in some patriotic disguise—you know, like saying what if somebody stole the Book of Kells? That might work.”

“But think if it didn’t work.” Romano remained doubtful. “And then there’s the Irish antipathy toward informing. It seems to me their whole dramatic literature dwells on the informer.”

“Yeah, but it wouldn’t be that way if there weren’t any informers,” Julie said.

“Impeccable logic.”

Julie smiled broadly. That certainly had never been attributed to her before.

Alberto had come in with an armful of books, auction catalogues. He said they had to be returned by afternoon.

Romano said: “There’s something at the back of my mind about the theft of a painting from the National Gallery in London some years ago. Or it might have been the National Portrait Gallery. The thief was an Irishman—I think an I.R.A. man—but the reason I remember: there was a great outcry over the painting’s having been first stolen—in effect, not actually—from the Irish National Gallery in Dublin, a gallery wanting in so many areas while the British were storing things they hadn’t room to show.”

“We’ve got to find that story,” Julie said. “I think I know how to use it. And I’d like to have O’Grady on our side—on account of Mrs. Ryan. I know it’s sentimental, but I would. She’s very fond of him.”

Romano nodded sympathetically. “Do you suppose he has the usual Irish bonhomie with members of the police force?”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

“P
LEASE JOIN US, ALBERTO.”
We need all three heads to put to this business. Now: Concerning the paintings which were allowed to leave France: the Picasso went to a British collector; where the alleged Degas went is not known. It seems probable that Rubinoff kept it. At the time, at least. Which is in itself interesting, since he disposed of the other four he had purchased from Dufayard almost at once.

“But here is the treasure, my dears: Seurat’s
Musicians
was the most valuable of the lot, and to whom did it go? A Zurich dealer by the name of Edmund Schoen.”

“Neat,” Julie said.

“Provocative, not yet neat, I’m afraid. Schoen sold it almost at once, along with two other paintings, to a collector named Peyton Wade in Dallas.”

“Dallas, Texas?”

“All is not lost. Forgive me if I ask that neither of you interrupt for a few minutes. I want to put this together as quickly and accurately as I can.”

Alberto had not said a word.

“We know something about Peyton Wade: he collects works of art concerning music and musicians. One thing that is immediately apparent is that if our Leonardo nude is a musician he is well disguised. No, I feel sure we can assume Peyton Wade is not our collector. But the fact that Schoen sold him three paintings, including Rubinoff’s Seurat, is significant. There are collectors who simply will not buy single paintings. The famous Hirshhorn was one. Schoen may have bankrolled Rubinoff’s purchase from Dufayard. He was probably waiting for the Seurat to complete his sale to Wade. In which case, Rubinoff did him a great favor in obtaining it and passing it along.