Treasure of Saint-Lazare (11 page)

“You were a fighter pilot?”

“Good one, too. I flew P-51s toward the end of the war and had a lot of kills, which is why I was a lieutenant colonel at 28. They sent me to Munich to run administration after I was shot down and hurt. Shot off my cock and balls, nothing else much damaged. They wouldn’t send me home.”

“Tough injury.”

“Like anything else you learn to live with it. Anyway, I became a paper pusher. I looked for a chance to send some of this artwork home for my retirement fund, but it was guarded real well so I never got anything of real value. I think Sonny’s dad may have done a little better.”

Eddie turned to Sonny. “Your father worked with Roy and Artie?”

“He was an MP in Nuremberg. He was the guard when they did interviews with some of the prisoners, trying to find out more about where all the missing artwork went. He was lucky, too. He was able to send quite a few nice pieces home. He worked for the colonel here for a lot of years after the war.” They spoke of their thefts like a trip to the supermarket.

Eddie turned back to the colonel. “It doesn’t sound like Roy told you anything that might lead to his killers. If this painting is gone, or in Russia, I wonder why he was killed now?”

“That puzzles me, too,” Sommers said. “He kept to himself, or with that daughter of his, and wasn’t active in any new business deals or much of anything, as far as I know. The last time we talked about the missing painting was six or seven years ago, when he got back from helping make some French TV show about it. He said then he’d met some new people but they didn’t seem to know anything concrete. One of them was an art dealer, as I recall. I think he might have been an Arab. Or maybe he was a German. I don’t really remember.”

Sommers glanced at the TV and Eddie could tell he was getting tired, so he stood up to leave. At the door, Sonny stopped him and asked, “How long will you be in town?”

“Not long. I’m here only because Roy wrote my father about the painting, and it looks now like both of them had already dropped the subject. I don’t see that there’s much for me to do here, and I don’t want to get in the way of a police investigation. And I have a business to run back home in Paris.”

He said goodbye to Sommers and Sonny escorted him to the front door. “The gate will open when you get close,” he said.

Eddie walked to the gravel parking area and, as he unlocked the car, looked quickly toward the back of the property. To the right stood a small barn, big as a triple garage and two stories tall. Directly behind the house was an earthen mound that he would have recognized as a fallout shelter even without its rusty steel door. The property appeared to end fifty feet behind the barn at a solid wood fence seven feet tall, weathered but substantial. A trail was worn in the grass from the house to the barn.

The horses were still munching the grass as he left.

He used his key to go through the front door and found Jen in Roy’s study, reading in a bathrobe at the desk. Eddie’s laptop, a first-edition super-lightweight MacBook Air, sat on the cor
ner of the desk.

She looked up and told him, “Jump in the shower pretty quickly if you’re going to. I’ve made dinner reservations at the Columbia, a really good Cuban restaurant. We need to be there in an hour.”

A half-hour later they backed out of Jen’s driveway in her black BMW 335i. She had opened the hardtop and the evening breeze was warm on their skin as she drove across the brilliant blue-green of Sarasota Bay. The view from the high bridge both up and down the barrier island was the magnet for thousands of wealthy retirees who choose the city for their homes. For the first time, he understood the appeal of its escape from Midwestern winters.

“This bridge is pretty new,” Jen told Eddie as they passed its crest. “The old drawbridge was far out of date, but when the state proposed replacing it there was a huge hue and cry. Now that the deed is done, we’re happy with it. It’s a beautiful bridge.”

She drove once around the full circumference of St. Armand’s Circle, bright and clean-looking home to expensive shops and restaurants, then stopped at the valet space in front of the restaurant and handed her key to the attendant.

The restaurant was all Jen had promised. They started with its famous garlicky salad and went on to paella and flan, all accompanied by a strong Rioja Gran Reserva from northern Spain.

“Eddie, do you drink white wine at all?” Jen asked.

“Not really. France has some good whites, as does Germany, but I’m pretty faithful to the French reds. Some people could spin a long line about the finish and mouthfeel and a lot of other BS, but I just like the taste. If I’m just going to have a glass or two I’ll generally pick a Bordeaux, but if I want to drink a lot of it I go for Burgundy, a Pinot Noir or a Beaujolais, more like the one we had last night. I even have a little cellar in the basement of the hotel, but I’m not an expert by any means. I thought we’d like this Spanish wine with Spanish dinner, and it did turn out to be pretty good.”

After the flan, she said, “Let’s skip coffee here. I can make better at home.”

They were silent during most of the drive back over the bridge and through town. He rested his hand lightly on her thigh, and she held it tightly until she had to take hers away to shift the six-speed manual transmission. “If I’d thought more about this problem I’d have bought an automatic,” she said with a laugh, as she took his hand once again and pressed it between her legs.

They left the car in the driveway near the rear of the house and went in through the kitchen door. As he closed and locked it, and Jen reached into a cabinet to find her coffee press, he said, “Maybe we don’t need coffee after all.”

“You’re so right,” she said, taking his hand and leading him toward the bedroom.

Victor leaned back in his oversized chair, rubbing his forehead. Eddie could see he was trying to recall something, so didn’t interrupt but looked at the picture of the basketball player on the wall to his left and wondered how that athletic younger man had turned into the overweight lawyer.

“If you have to go to every bank in Southwest Florida it will take days. Maybe — just maybe — I can help.

“When Roy came to me all those years ago he asked for a bank recommendation. Because my practice is contracts I get a lot of requests like that, so I have a list. He might have stored his records in one of them.”

He pulled a single sheet of paper from a drawer and handed it across the desk. “Jen, do any of these look familiar to you?”

She ran her carefully manicured fingertip down the page. “Here’s a possible. Arcadia. He went there more than anywhere else I remember. I went with him sometimes but it’s been a couple of years.”

“Is that very far away?” Eddie asked. “I didn’t know there was an Arcadia in Florida.”

“It’s an old farming town out near the middle of the state. Its main claim to fame is a rodeo once a year. I never understood why Roy liked it. He would only say it reminded him of when he was poor.”

“Looks like you get one more lunch in Arcadia. Do you have your estate papers?”

“Two copies. I’ll drive.”

“Jesus, that was a ride,” Eddie said as Jen slowed the black convertible under a canopy of trees lining Magnolia Street. “Where did you learn to drive like that?”

“Like I told you, I had a wild youth. It cost Roy some money, but I learned you
can drive pretty much any way you want as long as you don’t speed over hills or around curves. I’m a pretty dowdy middle-aged driver most times, but it’s still fun to push the limits.”

On the way they had passed miles of pasture and low scruffy palms, the original landscaping of old Florida. But once past the ring of RV parks and auto dealers guarding Arcadia they saw the unmistakable signs of faded affluence side by side with swaybacked frame houses that long ago had been visited by shingle-siding salesmen.

Jen turned into a downtown area that still showed the signs of early-twentieth-century prosperity. The stone pediments bore construction dates a hundred years before, and many had been partially covered by new facades that appeared to date from the sixties and seventies. Once they had housed department stores and cattle feed suppliers but those had given way to antique stores and tea rooms, and the upstairs floors were mostly vacant. Jen pointed to a café on the left. “That’s where we usually went for lunch. Great chicken-salad sandwiches.”

She parked and Eddie took out the list of banks, which held only one name for Arcadia — a big chain bank. “It’s probably just around the corner. That’s the direction Roy always took when he left the café,” she said.

A cheerful receptionist greeted them in the lobby. She heaved herself up to lead them to a small conference room, her three hundred pounds unconcealed and unrestricted by her loose dress. Jen saw the look of surprise on Eddie’s face as she closed the door and said, “That’s what more and more of us look like. Some of it’s poverty, but mostly it’s McDonald’s.”

“We don’t have it in Paris yet. Never, I hope, but we do have McDonald’s.”

The door opened and a balding man well into his sixties entered. He introduced himself as William Maxwell — “call me Billy Joe” — and said he had been the manager through three owners, for almost forty years.

Jen told him briefly that she was the executor of her father’s estate and believed he had kept a safety deposit box at Jim’s bank. “This is the key,” she said, holding up the one Eddie had found in Roy’s library.

He looked carefully at her driver’s license and the state letter of administration naming her personal representative.

“I hate to be so picky but we’ve had to be a lot more careful since 9/11. Yes, Roy opened a box here more than thirty years ago. He also kept a checking account, which he used only to pay the rent on the box, as far as I can tell.”

“Funny. I haven’t seen any statements,” Jen replied.

“That’s because Roy didn’t want anyone to know. He had me send all the mail to Jimmy Dean, a lawyer here in town. Once a year he made a cash deposit to cover the rent. But you’ve already talked to Jimmy, haven’t you?”

Eddie looked at Jen, who had a puzzled expression on her face.

“I haven’t heard his name until today,” she said.

“Well, he called me and said he’d read of Roy’s death in the Sarasota paper. He said he had your number and would call you.”

“I haven’t heard from him. We probably should go ask him what happened.”

“Jimmy’s getting on, a few years older than Roy. He’s pretty sharp, but forgets things from time to time. He doesn’t really practice much law anymore, but you’ll find him either at the courthouse or his office most days. Would you like to see what’s in the box first?”

He handed Jen an index card to sign. She pointed out Roy’s last use of the box, almost a year before. Until then, his visits had been more frequent, about every three months. “Bet that’s when he gave up,” she said.

The three went into the vault. Billy Joe took the key Jen had brought and knelt to insert it into one of the locks on a box near floor level. He took the bank’s key from an envelope and slid it into the other lock, then turned both and swung open the door. Eddie and Jen watched silently as he pulled a long, dark-green steel box from the wall, then stood and carried it into an inspection room just outside the vault door. Placing it on a counter, he said, “come out and call me when you’re finished.”

Jen looked up at Eddie as she opened the box. Inside they found a Leitz file binder, its labels brown with age, and under it a large brown envelope.

“Roy always was organized,” she said. “This is the type of binder the Germans use for their files, which probably means he brought it with him from Frankfurt.”

She opened it to find a two-inch stack of paper, each sheet neatly punched in the center of its left margin to fit the two binder posts of the heavy cardboard notebook.

Eddie felt a chill as he lifted the cover page from the little stack and saw his father’s neat script in a note at the bottom. He took a sharp breath.

“What is it?”

“My father really was in this. That’s his note.”