Nothing about the building containing American Mercantile seemed to be special in any way but there had to be a reason Cornwall and his cohorts from the Grange Foundation had chosen it as the storage facility for their shipment. Clearly it had something to do with the foundation’s choice of an office but according to the plat books and Valentine’s ancient, dusty collection of Manhattan reverse directories the foundation hadn’t moved into the old brownstone on St. Luke’s Place until long after the shipment had disappeared.
After carrying a half dozen reference books back to his office, he dropped down into his chair and closed his eyes, trying to see the problem in some kind of rational order. What did Cornwall know about the location that wasn’t immediately obvious to someone browsing through the history books, or more directly through the thousands of volumes and books of records surrounding him now? Irritated by his inability to figure it out for himself, he turned to his computer, booted up the ISPY program Barrie had custom-built for him and punched in Cornwall’s name. A brief biography appeared almost immediately.
Name: Cornwall, James Cosburn
Date of Birth: 1904
Place of Birth: Baltimore, Maryland
Date of Death: 2001
Place of Death: New York, NY
HDescrip: Cornwall was born to Martin and Lois Cornwall, the latter a prominent interior designer and teacher at the Baltimore School of Art. The young Cornwall attended private schools, where he was especially interested in monastic and church architecture. He studied in Europe before college for two years at the Йcole Sebastien in Paris. In 1922 he returned to the United States, attending Yale University the following year. He graduated cum laude from Yale in 1927 and joined the Parker-Hale Museum the same year as an assistant in the department of decorative arts. He was assistant curator 1929-32 before being advanced to associate curator. Beginning in 1930, he worked with Parker-Hale director Joseph Teague (1885-1933) in planning the new medieval extension to the museum. Cornwall was named assistant curator of medieval art in 1934 after Teague’s death. He was named curator of the medieval department the same year. He married Katherine Metcalfe in 1942. In 1943 he joined the army and quickly rose to an appointment as lieutenant in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the Seventh United States Army, Western Military District. His chief responsibilities were the discovery and preservation of art treasures hidden by the Nazis. Cornwall was responsible for seizing the looted collections of Goering, Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg, among others. Returning to the Parker-Hale, he was made director in 1955. In June of 2001 he suffered a fatal heart attack after a particularly contentious board meeting and was succeeded by his protйgй, Alexander Crawley (q.v.).
The biography didn’t tell him very much he didn’t already know but a notation in the bibliography of Cornwall’s published works leapt out at him. A reference to his PhD thesis at Yale: “Giovanni Battista de Rossi and the Catacombs of San Callisto: A Biographical and Architectural Evaluation.”
Using that as a starting point Valentine skittered around through the Internet putting the pieces together. Cornwall’s interest in the subterranean world hadn’t ended with his doctorate. Over the years he’d published a dozen articles on the subject, edited and compiled several scholarly works and had even been an advisor on a series of History Channel programs about crypts, mausoleums, cemeteries and catacombs all over the world. The last program in the series was called “New York Dead.”
Within an hour the pieces had all fallen into place and he had the answer. He searched through the sociological history of Greenwich Village to confirm his theory.
“My God,” he whispered, as the reason for Cornwall’s choice of the Hudson Street warehouse became blindingly clear.
What was now a park where young children played had once hidden the underground crypt of Holy Redeemer Church, connected to the convent on the other side of the road by a “priest’s hole” tunnel so the nuns and “disadvantaged” girls would not be seen in daylight as they made their way to prayer. Cornwall and his fellow conspirators, along with two hundred twenty-seven tons of crates and boxes-six truckloads of looted booty-had vanished under the streets of New York.
And it was still there.
46
The false priest moved through the cluttered rooms of the dank, verminous-looking apartment on Ludlow Street, far below the trendy stores and salons that lined the narrow one-lane thorough-fare above Delancey. As he examined the pitiful rooms, he carried the Beretta at his side. Rooting through the old woman’s apartment in Queens had led him here, but the place was empty. There were only terrible ghosts and memories left behind. The floor was covered with stained and cracked linoleum that might have been blue once. The ceiling sagged in seams and lumps, threatening to split open like overripe fruit. With each step, shining roaches scuttled greasily toward the open baseboards and silverfish fled under the scraps of old carpeting that lay here and there.
It was, without a doubt, the horrible den of a madman. The crumbling plaster and ancient floral wallpaper were covered with newspaper clippings, drawings, pictures from magazines, annotated maps, scrawled letters in script so small it could barely be read, reproductions of paintings and here and there the broken pieces of plaster or plastic saints and angels, glued, tacked, nailed or simply placed in niches dug with spoons into the soft spongy walls themselves. It was a museum dedicated to the insane meanderings of an obsessed heart, the obsession impossible to penetrate or analyze except that it concerned the old war and people who had taken part in it, artists, art and the deaths of a hundred nobodies in a score of countries and most of all the life and times of a single hawk-nosed man in steel spectacles wearing the robes and mitred headpiece of a pope. The man from Rome had lost his faith long ago and sometimes found himself agreeing with the cynics that man had been placed on the earth to do no more than eat, fornicate and excrete but being here he knew there was something else: this man had been created to prove that hell existed. This place was a petri dish meant to provide a culture of the damned.
There were more rooms than he would have expected, as though perhaps two or maybe even three of the decrepit tenement apartments had been joined together. The only thing new in the place was the metal-clad front door and the locks that guarded it, easily picked. The kitchen lay in the middle of the apartment in the old-fashioned style with a pass-through into the small, dark parlor beyond. It was a horror, the chipped enamel sink resting on its own plumbing, open without cabinetry, stacked with crusted plastic plates and bowls and cups, a jar of grape jelly open and moldy on the counter along with a box of cornflakes, a soured pint carton of milk and a half-empty mug of coffee. A choked twist of old-fashioned flypaper hung from the overhead light fixture. Reaching up with thumb and forefinger the false priest tried the dangling pull cord but nothing happened.
He went into the parlor. An old rag rug, brown and curling at one side. A drawing in ink directly on the left walclass="underline" Christ on a cloud above a grotesque Calvary below and words beneath the triple crucifixion:
THOU WILT SHEW ME THE PATH OF LIFE
A closer look and the man saw that the figures on the crosses were women, bleeding from breasts and eyes and that there were strange inscriptions in faint winding circles above Christ’s head, vague and indecipherable.
There was a short hall and then another door, old and scarred but painted bright, fresh, robin’s egg blue. Inscribed on the door was a single word: