Hmm. Don’t know about that. A little too black helicopter, you know? Not being paranoid, just prefer to live a quiet life. Speaking of which, major oops: How do I know you’re who you say you are? Are you going to ask me to send cash to Nigeria?
Hahaha. Promise I’m legit. Here’s my office number at LAPD, West Los Angeles Division. You can also google me. I’ve solved a few cases.
A minute passed. Two, three, four.
Milo said, “So much for that. I’m amazed a professorial type even answered.”
“Ex-prof,” I said. “She got fired for speaking her mind.”
“Ah, a woman of taste and discretion.” Fourth look at the painting followed by a headshake. He paced, returned. “Okay, let’s think about which way to go on this.”
Ping.
A few cases? You’re downright Sherlockian, sir. I phoned the #, got transferred to someone named Reid, he assured me you’re his boss. So okay, let me think about it. I don’t like assholes getting away with spilling blood. My brother’s a lawyer, I check everything with him except clay, tools, paint, and brushes. He oks it, maybe but no promises.
More than I could hope for, Suze. Muchas gracias.
Bilingual, huh? Hasta la vista. S.
I rotated my index finger.
He said, “What?”
“Picking up a nuance of romance in the air.”
“If she only knew.” He grinned. “Hey, she comes through for me, maybe I can be flexible. Scroll back to the masterpiece.”
A few squinting seconds later. “Talk about un-fine art. So what, Okash always wanted to be a painter but has no talent, decides to work with human flesh?”
“I still think it began with Gurnsey and expanded. Look.” I tapped the screen. “The young guy’s the center of the composition. The light hits his face.”
“Okash and Ricky at that party,” he said. “Something happens that pisses Okash off — maybe being caught by Candace Kierstead, she blames Gurnsey for roping her in.”
I said, “We know she’s got a violent temper. Rage kicks in, she decides on payback, knows about the painting and goes about assembling the rest of the cast. Probably beginning with poor Benny Alvarez. Small-stature, challenged guy sweeping up her place.”
I tapped the jester. “She could’ve seen it as an omen.”
“Huh. Talk about a gift from the Devil.”
“After that, finding a hag would be easy with all those street people downtown. So all she needs to find is a black coachman and poor Roget has the bad luck to fit. She snags his number from the Caribbean bulletin board, calls him, hears his accent, asks where he’s from. He says Haiti, the casting phase is over and the execution begins.”
He grimaced. “Okash and someone who lives at the Clearwater house. That package you saw her bringing there, could it be this?”
I scrolled beneath the image, enlarged the legend below. Title, possible attribution to Carascelli, dimensions. Thirty inches wide, twenty-four high.
I said, “No, too small.”
“So Mr. Rolls could have more of this garbage... Göring. Now a Nazi angle, wonderful... Robin here?”
“In the studio.”
“Let me say it in person.”
Chapter 40
Hugs, kisses, a proclamation of “Genius!”
Robin said, “Aw shucks, just doing my job.”
Milo: “As what?”
“Loyal girlfriend.”
“More like Supergirl. What you did is incredible.” He eyed her bench. “What’s that?”
“Renaissance lute,” she said. “Something that pretty boy in blue might’ve strummed.”
Milo left, nearly running to the door.
Alone in my office, I wondered how to sink an informational hook into Asian-Occidental Concepts. The parent company had covered its tracks. Maybe one of its subsidiaries had opened a cyber-door.
I struck out with heigur and Western Import Export. Not expecting much, I tried niederschonhausen.
Fourteen-million-plus hits.
A district north of Berlin, in a borough of the German capital called Pankow.
Pairing niederschonhausen with art filled the screen with narrative.
Schloss Niederschönhausen, a Baroque castle in Pankow, had been the site of a gallery established in 1938. Furnished with over twenty thousand works of art stripped from the walls of German museums after being labeled “degenerate” by leaders of the Nationalist Socialist Party.
Germans during the thirties were a conforming bunch and sales fared poorly due to der Führer’s bad review. Many of the paintings and sculptures ended up in Switzerland, long a bastion of amorality pled down to neutrality. In Basel, Zurich, and Bern, museums, collectors, and dealers attracted by bargain prices pounced energetically, with the pieces soon dispersed around the globe.
The man in charge of what had essentially been a large-scale fencing operation was one Heinz Friederich Gurschoebel.
That made me sit up.
Hei-gur.
I typed.
Well educated, and respected as an art historian until he’d turned war profiteer, Heinz Gurschoebel had been a favorite of the Nazi high command and had also been implicated in selling the treasures of Jewish and gay art patrons sent to death camps. Captured by the Allies in 1945, he’d avoided prosecution by falsely claiming status as an undercover resistance agent and, some said, bribing Russian officers with icons and jewelry.
Gurschoebel had also lied about losing his personal art collection in the Dresden bombing, having sent it in installments to Damascus, where his wife and children had fled in 1942. The family had subsequently moved from Syria to Algeria to Sweden, then Argentina, then Belgium, where Gurschoebel and his wife had settled and died of natural causes.
Nothing more on the family.
Asian-Oriental Concepts had named one of its corporate offshoots after a Nazi agent and another after the site of his plunder-fest, so not a huge leap imagining a link to The Museum of Desire.
As a favorite of the Nazi high command, Gurschoebel might well have had access to Göring’s stash. Had he taken some or all of the collection after Göring’s cyanide suicide?
Passed choice pieces to his descendants?
Did The Museum of Desire hang in some clandestine chamber, to be appreciated in solitude?
Had randy oil paintings been only part of the inheritance? Had Gurschoebel also passed on a cold, callous nature?
The kind of malignant narcissism that segues easily to sadism.
Owning a masterpiece you could never exhibit. Pity.
Oh, well, reinterpret it in human flesh.
I spent hours grouping heinz friederich gurschoebel with museum of desire macao asia, asian occidental concepts aoc asian art, medina okash, and the addresses of the two galleries bordering Okash’s. Came up empty and tossed in Geoffrey Dugong’s given and assumed names, then those of the four victims in the limo.
A harvest of dead branches.
I left a long message on Milo’s office phone and went for a run. Ended up pushing myself harder than usual, reaching the top of the Glen and continuing half a mile east. I got back home drenched and sore, swigged a quart of water, showered, dressed, began heading back to the office, and stopped.
My body was thrumming but my brain felt like a chunk of cement.
Time to follow the advice I give to patients when they talk about feeling stuck: back off, regroup, rest the gray cells.
Chapter 41