An even longer pause. “Uh, I did already.”
“And?”
“All right, the phone call came from a limo rented for two days by a guy named Warren Elkind, from New York City.”
She hesitated. “Know anything about the guy?”
“Nothing.”
“Do me a favor. Forget to mention to Peter you told me about this guy, huh?” There was a long silence. “Hello?”
“Yeah, I’m here. All right. Understood,” Teddy said reluctantly.
“Thanks, Teddy. I owe you. Oh, and one more thing.”
“Now what?”
“Can I have the tape?”
“The what?”
“The tape from Valerie’s answering machine.”
“You asking me to get it transcribed? Or copied?
“I want the original.”
“Shit, Sarah, why are you doing this? It’s in the evidence locker already-”
“Because we have jurisdiction. She’s one of our informants.”
“It’s not going to do you any good, Sarah-I already told you what’s on it.”
“Can I borrow it for a little while anyway?”
He sighed. “I’m hanging up before you ask me for anything else.”
“Ms. Cahill? Excuse me.” Hector, the database trainee, approached her awkwardly. He was holding a long sheet of computer paper and smiling bashfully. His face looked like that of a child who’d accomplished something for which he knew he’d be praised.
“We got six hits,” the trainee said.
Sarah perused the computer printout. The six names had little in common. One was a United States senator whose name had come up in a bribery investigation. Another was a professor at Harvard Law School who specialized in defending celebrities; he was probably being watched for no other reason than that someone high in the Bureau disliked him. A third was a well-known construction executive tied to the Mob; then there were two lowlifes who’d done time for drug trafficking.
And there was Warren Elkind: a prominent New York banker, the chairman of the Manhattan Bank, the second-largest bank in the country. The accompanying biographical information indicated that he was a leading fund-raiser for Israel and had been the target of numerous threats from Palestinian and Arab groups.
Sarah called the Ritz and asked for the security director.
“Is there a problem?” he asked in a pleasant baritone.
“Absolutely nothing involving the hotel,” she reassured him. “We’re looking for someone we believe stayed there four days ago. I’d like to get a list of all hotel guests from Monday night.”
“I wish we could do that, but we’re very protective of our guests’ privacy.”
Sarah’s tone cooled slightly. “I’m sure you’re aware of the law-”
“Oh,” he said with a tiny snort, “I’m quite familiar with the law. Chapter one hundred forty, section twenty-seven, of the Massachusetts General Law. But there is a legal procedure that has to be followed. You’ll have to get a subpoena from Suffolk District Court and present it to our keeper of records. Only then can we release documentation.”
“How long would that take?” she asked dully.
“After you get the subpoena, you mean? It takes several days for us to go into our records. A two-week register check will take at least three days. And then you’ve got to make sure the scope of the subpoena is specific enough. I doubt any judge will issue a subpoena for the names of all hotel guests that stayed here on any given night.”
Frustrated, Sarah lowered her voice and asked confidentially: “Is there any way we can speed things up a bit? I can assure you the hotel will not be involved in any way-”
“Whenever the FBI comes here asking for the names of our guests, we’re involved, by definition. My job is to protect the security of our guests. I’m sorry. Bring me a subpoena.”
The second call she placed was to the Four Seasons, and this time she decided to take a different tack. When she was put through to the accounting department, she said: “I’m calling on behalf of my boss, Warren Elkind, who was a guest at your hotel recently.” She spoke with the glib, slightly bored assuredness of a longtime secretary. “There’s a problem with one of the charges on his bill, and I need to go over it with you.”
“What’s the name again?”
Sarah gave Elkind’s name and was put on hold. Then the voice came back on. “Mr. Elkind checked out on the eighteenth. I have his statement here, ma’am. What seems to be the problem?”
CHAPTER TEN
“I see you collect pictures,” Baumann said.
“You know something about art, I take it?” Malcolm Dyson asked, pleased. The word “pictures,” as opposed to “paintings,” seemed to indicate that Baumann was not entirely ignorant about the art world.
The conversation had been relocated to the main house, whose walls were crowded with paintings, mostly old masters but a few contemporaries, from the marble-tiled entrance hall to the immense Regency dining room-even, Baumann observed, in the washroom off the conservatory. A Rothko nestled between a Canaletto and a Gauguin; canvases by Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, Twombly, and Miró jostled against a Correggio and a Bronzino, a Vermeer, a Braque and a Toulouse-Lautrec. An astonishing collection, Baumann saw, but grotesquely jumbled together. A collector with a lot of money and no taste.
Hanging above a Louis XIV gilt console table in a hallway-poorly lighted, Baumann thought, and ineptly displayed-was a Nativity by Caravaggio. In one corner of the sitting room, oddly juxtaposed, were Antonella da Messina’s Ecce Homo and a Modigliani. Only after they had moved into the library did a switch go on in Baumann’s head, and he suddenly realized what many of these paintings had in common. The Caravaggio had disappeared thirty or so years ago from the oratory of a church in Palermo, Sicily; Ecce Homo had been looted by the Nazis from the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna. Much of the art in Dyson’s collection had been obtained on the black market. The stuff had been stolen.
They sat in the library, an enormous, high-ceilinged, dimly lit chamber lined with antiquarian books and paneled in mahogany. It smelled strongly, and not unpleasantly, of fireplace smoke. Dyson had boasted that he had purchased the library in its magisterial entirety-from the books to the vaulted ceiling-from a baronial estate outside London.
The floors were covered in antique Persian carpets, over which Dyson had navigated his wheelchair with some difficulty. He sat behind a small writing table; Lomax, taking notes on a yellow pad with a silver ballpoint pen, sat beside him. Both of them faced Baumann, who was sunk into a large, plump armchair upholstered in green-and-white-striped taffeta.
“Just a passing familiarity,” Baumann said. “Enough to know that the Brueghel used to live in a gallery in London. And the Rubens-Baccanale, is it?-vanished from a private collection in Rome sometime in the seventies.”
“Baccanale it is,” Dyson said. “Very good. The Brueghel’s called Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery-very special, I’ve always thought.” He sighed. “Most of the Renoirs are from Buenos Aires; the El Greco came from Saarbrücken, as I recall. The Vermeer, I’m told, came from the Gardner in Boston, but what do I know? The Dalís were picked up in Barcelona, and the Cézanne… Marty, where the hell’d the Cézanne come from?”
“A private collection outside Detroit,” Lomax answered without looking up from his notes. “Grosse Pointe Farms, I believe.”
Dyson extended his hands, spread them out, palms up. “Don’t get me wrong, Baumann. I don’t put on my cat-burglar togs and rip off the stuff myself. I don’t even commission the heists. They just come to me. Black-market dealers around the world must just figure me for an easy mark-man without a country and all that.”