One of the last, great wonders of the world!
“Jesus, Sol,” I said, looking around wide-eyed, “you have been a busy fucking bee.”
“C’mere…” Sol took me by the arm. On a wooden easel, set in the center of the room, I saw what I had only heard described before. In a simple gold frame. A washerwoman in a gray dress. At a basin. Her back to the viewer. A ray of gentle light illuminating her as she worked. I noticed the signature at the bottom.
Henri Gaume.
In every direction there were masterpieces. Another Rembrandt. A Chagall. I shrugged at Sol. “Why this?”
Sol stepped over to the painting. He gently lifted the canvas. To my shock, there was another painting hidden behind it. Something I recognized. A man sitting at a table in a garden. Fuzzy red hair peeking from under his white cap, sharp blue eyes. There was a thin, wise look on his face, but his eyes were cast in a melancholy frown. My own eyes stretched wide.
“Ned,” Sol said, and stepped back, “I want you to meet Dr. Gachet.”
Chapter 115
I BLINKED, fixing my eyes on the sad, hunched man. It was a little different from the likeness I had seen in the book Dave left me. But it was unmistakably the van Gogh. Hidden, all this time, beneath the Gaume.
“The missing Dr. Gachet,” Sol announced proudly. “Van Gogh painted two portraits of Gachet in the last month of his life. This one he gave to his landlord, and it spent the last hundred years in an attic in Auvers. It came to Stratton’s attention.”
“I was right,” I muttered, anger building up in my chest. My brother and my friends had died for this thing. And Sollie had it all along.
“No,” Sol said, shaking his head, “Liz stole the painting, Ned. She found out about the phony heist and came to me. I’ve known her family a long time. She intended to blackmail him. I’m not sure she even knew what was important about it. Only that Dennis treasured it above all else and she wanted to hurt him.”
“Liz…?”
“With Lawson’s help. When the police first responded to the alarm.”
Now I was reeling. I pictured the tall Palm Beach detective who Ellie thought was Stratton’s man. “Lawson? Lawson works for you?”
“Detective Vern Lawson works for the town of Palm Beach, Ned,” Sol said, shrugging. “Let’s just say now and then he keeps me informed.”
I stared at Sollie with a new clarity. Like someone you thought you knew but now saw in a different light.
“Look around you, Ned. You see that Vermeer. The Cloth Weavers. It’s thought to have been missing since the 1700s. Only it wasn’t missing. It was just in private hands. And The Death of Isaac, that Rembrandt. It was referred to only in his letters. No one’s even sure it exists. It sat undetected in a chapel in Antwerp for three hundred years. That’s the ultimate beauty of these treasures. No one even knows they’re here.”
I couldn’t do anything but stare in amazement.
“Now the Michelangelo over there…” Sol nodded approvingly, “That was hard to find.”
There was a space on the wall between the Rembrandt and the Vermeer. “Here, help me,” Sol said, and lifted the Gachet. I took it from him and hung it on the wall between two other masterpieces. We both stepped back.
“I know you won’t understand this, son, but for me, this completes the journey of my life.
“I can offer you your old job back, but as a man of some means now, I suspect there’re other things you want to do with your life. Can I give you some advice?”
“Why not?” I said with a shrug.
“If I were you, I would go to the Camille Bay Resort in the Cayman Islands. There’s a check for the first million dollars waiting for you there. As long as this remains our little secret, they’ll be another check every month. Thirty-five thousand dollars for five years wired to the same account. That should last longer than me. Of course, if you have second thoughts and the police happen to find their way down here, we’ll consider our accounts cleared.”
Then the two of us didn’t say anything for a while. We just stared at the missing Gachet. The swirling brushstrokes, the sad, knowing blue eyes. And suddenly I thought I saw something in them, as if the old doctor were smiling at me.
“So, Neddie, whaddya think?” Sol stared at the Gachet, his hands behind his back.
“I don’t know…” I cocked my head. “A little crooked. To the left.”
“My thoughts exactly, kid.” Sol Roth smiled.
Chapter 116
THE FOLLOWING DAY I caught a plane for George Town on Grand Cayman Island. A blue island taxi took me along the beach-lined coast to the Camille Bay Resort.
Just as Sollie said, there was a room reserved in my name. Not exactly a room, but an incredible thatched-roof bungalow down by the beach, shaded by tall, swaying palm trees, with my own little private pool.
I put down my travel bag and stared out at the perfect turquoise sea.
On the desk, my eye came upon two sealed envelopes propped against the phone with my name on them.
The first was a welcome note from A. George McWilliams, the manager, with a basket of fruit, advising me that as a guest of Mr. Sol Roth, I should feel free to call on him at any time.
The second contained a deposit slip from the Royal Cayman Bank in my name for the sum of one million dollars.
A million dollars.
I sat down. I stared at the slip and checked the name one more time, just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Ned Kelly. A bank account made out to my name. All those beautiful zeros.
Jesus, I was rich.
I looked around, at the breathtaking view and the lavish room, at the basket of bananas and mangoes and grapes, at the expensive tiled floor, and it sort of hit me: I could afford this now. I wasn’t there to clean the pool. I wasn’t dreaming.
Why wasn’t I jumping for joy?
My mind drifted to being in my old Bonneville two years before, after triggering those alarms. I was about to make the biggest score of my life, right? I was dreaming of sipping orange martinis with Tess on some fancy yacht. A million dollars in the bank.
And now I had it. I had my million dollars. More. I had the palm trees and the cove. I could buy that yacht, or at least rent one. In a twisted, ironic way, everything had come true. I could do anything I wanted in life.
And I didn’t feel a thing.
I sat there at the desk, and that’s when my eye fixed on something else right in front of me.
Something I’d been staring at, more like staring through, next to the ripped-open envelopes. Hesitantly, I picked it up.
It was one of those old Matchbox toys, a replica of a car. Except this one wasn’t a car at all.
It was a little Dodge minivan.
Chapter 117
“YOU KNOW HOW HARD it is to find a real one of those down here?” Ellie’s voice came from behind me.
I spun around. She was standing there, nicely tanned, in a denim skirt and a pink tank top. She was sort of squinting into the sun that was setting behind me, her freckles almost bouncing off her cheeks. My heart flared, like an engine starting to rev.
“The last time I felt like this,” I said, “an hour later, my whole life fell apart.”
“Mine, too,” Ellie said.
“You didn’t come,” I said, pretending to be hurt.
“I said I was going to be out of the country,” Ellie said. “And here I am.” She took a step toward me.
“I had to ride two hours back to Palm Beach with Champ doing wheelies in a classic twenty-year-old Caddie. You know what torture that is? Worse than prison.”