Susan put her coffee cup on my counter.
“I think I’ll get her started,” Susan said.
“Good idea,” I said. “How long you think it’ll take you to get there?”
“Oh, I don’t know, five minutes maybe?”
“Which will make it approximately ten o’clock,” I said.
“Yes, but I don’t want to be late.”
“You’re always late,” I said.
“Not on Pearl’s second date,” Susan said. “What kind of a mother would I be?”
She was playing, and we both knew she was. And we both knew also that she wasn’t altogether and entirely playing. We cleaned up the breakfast, put the dishes in the washer, and headed over to the Public Garden. It was ten-fifteen.
34
At eleven-oh-three Susan and I were leaning on the railing of the bridge over the frozen pond where late the sweet swan boats plied. Pearl was snuffling through the vestigial snow at the Arlington Street end of the bridge, alert for a discarded doughnut. No one would, of course, discard a doughnut, so I knew her search was aimless. Still, I liked to let her cultivate her hunting impulse. I didn’t want to impose our realistic limits on the soar of her imagination.
“‘To strive,’” I said to Susan, “‘to seek . . . and not to yield.’ ”
“Of course,” Susan said.
Pearl stopped suddenly and lifted her head. She did an olfactory scan of the air, head lifted, short tail out straight, body motionless and rigid, one forepaw raised. Then she put the forepaw down carefully, posed like that for another few seconds, and exploded on a dead run toward Boylston Street. Coming like a tidal wave through the gate from Boylston Street was Otto. They met in exuberant collision somewhere near the far end of the frozen swan boat pond. Otto bowled Pearl over and then tripped over her and fell down, too, and they rolled on the ground, mock fighting, with their tails wagging ferociously. Otto’s mother was there, with a good-sized man, who turned out to be Otto’s father. Otto’s father had a definite New York City look about him.
Both dogs got their feet under them and faced each other with their back ends elevated, front paws extended, chests near the ground, growling lasciviously, and head faking at each other. Then suddenly they straightened and began to dash in widening gyres about the Public Garden as pedestrians dodged and some cringed. Susan and I and Otto’s mom and dad stood watching like chaperones at a freshman dance.
“They’re adorable,” Otto’s mother said.
“Absolutely,” Pearl’s mother said.
There was a Scottie and a Jack Russell off leash in the garden as well as Otto and Pearl, and they made a kind of halfhearted attempt to get in on the frolic, but they couldn’t keep up, and neither Pearl nor Otto paid them any mind.
“We take him almost everywhere,” Otto’s mom said. “Do you like pictures?”
“I love pictures,” Susan said.
Otto’s mom took out a digital camera and began to click through the stored pictures as Susan leaned over, looking at them and saying “Oh my God” and “Totally adorable,” and things like that. What made me smile was that I knew she meant it. She loved looking at other people’s pictures, especially pictures of Pearl’s first real romance.
“Stop there,” Susan said. “Where is this?”
“Oh, that’s a gala we took him to,” Otto’s mom said. “We posed him in front of that painting because we thought it looked a little like him.”
Susan said to me, “Look at this.”
I looked. It was a picture of Otto, beaming and self-confident, in front of the painting of a prosperous-looking seventeenth-century merchant who did, in fact, look a little like Otto.
“Frans Hals?” I said.
“Yes,” Otto’s mom said. “It was a benefit for a small museum in New York of seventeenth-century Dutch art.”
“Same period when they founded New Amsterdam,” I said.
“Exactly,” Otto’s mom said.
As they had on their last meeting, Pearl and Otto finally burned themselves out and came and flopped down with their tongues hanging from their mouths. Otto’s dad bent over and patted them both.
“Do you know people at this museum?” Susan said.
“Oh, yes,” Otto’s mom said. “I’m on the board.”
“Is there anyone at this museum with a specialized knowledge of Dutch art, and the art business?”
“Sure.” She looked at Otto’s dad. “That lovely man, with the salt-and-pepper beard. You know, Carl something?”
“Carl Trachtman,” Otto’s dad said. “Probably the leading expert in the world in low-country art.”
Susan nodded at me.
“Do you suppose he’d talk with the big ugly one here?”
“He talks to me,” Otto’s dad said.
I grinned at him.
“Then I’m golden,” I said.
Otto’s dad smiled and took out a cell phone.
“We’re practically in-laws,” he said. “I’ll give him a call.”
“See,” Susan said. “I told you I’d find somebody.”
The two dogs were lying between us, Pearl’s head resting on Otto’s.
“She has a Ph.D. from Harvard,” I said to Otto’s dad.
“Wow!” he said, and punched up a number on his cell phone.
35
The Museum of the Dutch Renaissance was on upper Madison Avenue in Manhattan, several blocks north of the Viand Coffee Shop. The museum was a lovely low building that had once been a church, and Carl Trachtman was the curator.
“Otto is a glorious dog,” Trachtman said when I sat down.
“So is Pearl,” I said.
Trachtman smiled.
“Proud parents,” he said.
“You have a dog?” I said.
“I do,” Trachtman said. “A Piebald dachshund named Vermeer. We call her Vee.”
“She glorious?” I said.
Trachtman smiled.
“Completely,” he said.
“Many dogs are,” I said.
Trachtman went around behind his ornate antique desk, doubtless of low-country origin, and sat down and smiled.
“Now that we’ve exchanged bona fides,” Trachtman said, “let me say that I’m very familiar with this case. I’ve followed it with great interest. My great hope is that it wasn’t Lady with a Finch that exploded.”
“Wasn’t enough left to test,” I said. “But for what it’s worth, I don’t think it was destroyed.”
“Its life has been so hazardous,” Trachtman said, “for the nearly four hundred years since Hermenszoon painted it.”
He looked at my card.
“You’re a private detective,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“What is your interest in the case?”
“I was Dr. Prince’s bodyguard when he got killed,” I said.
Trachtman nodded slowly. He was a smallish overweight man with a Vandyke beard and receding gray hair.
“And you wish to get what? Revenge?”
“You might call it that,” I said. “I cannot let people murder somebody I was hired to protect.”
Trachtman nodded.
“So it would be, perhaps, more about you than poor Dr. Prince,” he said.
“Probably,” I said. “But whatever it is, I’m on it, and I’m not going to let go of it.”
“Determination is not a bad thing,” Trachtman said. “Properly applied. How would you like me to help you.”
“Tell me about the painting, tell me about Prince; you may correctly assume that I know nothing.”
“I suspect you know more than you pretend to,” Trachtman said.
“Hard to know less,” I said.
“Where shall I begin,” Trachtman said. “Background on seventeenth-century low-country realism? What makes this painting so special? What makes Hermenszoon so special?”
“Probably a paragraph of that stuff, so I can sound smart talking about the case,” I said. “But mostly I’m interested in the history of the painting and whatever you may know about Ashton Prince.”