Arsenic and Old Paint Read online

  “It just so happens I know a little. And don’t act so naive—surely your dear old grandpapa mentioned it from time to time. Speaking of whom, have you checked out his new blog?”

  I adored my grandfather, but whenever I thought about him my stomach clenched with worry and irritation. First Georges had published a memoir that not only outed the plentiful fakes and misattributed paintings hanging on the walls of museums from Antwerp to Zaire, but also functioned as a “how-to” manual for aspiring art forgers everywhere. Then he publicized his book with an international campaign whose antics rivaled those of Napoleon’s march across Europe. Interpol gnashed its teeth, but Georges was so well connected to the art world’s underground that he was able to remain one step ahead of the law. Lately, he had decided it was time to embrace technology and had started his own blog, the better to answer questions from his legion of adoring fans and to wage his ongoing war against the art establishment. My blood pressure had increased in direct proportion to the death threats against the flamboyant old man. I was hoping the yoga would help.

  “Where’s your curiosity? Your sense of adventure?” Michael asked, interrupting my thoughts.

  “On parole. Like you, if I’m not mistaken.” Curiosity and a sense of adventure had landed me in plenty of trouble in my life, which was why respectable people such as Inspector Annette Crawford—and even Frank—hesitated to associate with me.

  I glanced at the clock. It was too late in the day to start a new painting project, and the Thief Mobile was calling my name. If the College Club was willing to pay, results or no, who was I to refuse the gig? Besides, given my strange luck I might manage to stumble onto some sort of clue, and I wouldn’t mind getting back in Frank’s good graces. I put the computer into sleep mode, picked up a few bills and invoices I needed to mail, and grabbed my satchel.

  “Okay, fine. You’re so dead-set on playing Sherlock Holmes, let’s go find us a Hermes.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ll explain on the way. Right after you tell me where you’ve been for the last six days.”

  * * *

  As we drove across town Michael talked a blue streak but managed to tell me precisely nothing about his whereabouts the last week. I replied in kind, telling him precisely nothing about the identity of our client for the missing Resting Hermes. I imagined Michael would balk at working for his arch-enemy. A tense silence then descended, broken only when Michael started to hum the Marseillaise to “remind me of my roots.”

  His ploy worked, to a point. I recalled vividly that hanging out with criminals such as Michael and my grandfather Georges had almost always gotten me into trouble with the law.

  Nob Hill is about as Old Money as San Francisco neighborhoods get, which is to say it dates from the Gold Rush era. Jutting hundreds of feet above the rowdy Barbary Coast waterfront, Nob Hill became a retreat for the city’s elite, who led upper-crust lives on what Robert Louis Stevenson called “the hill of palaces.” The City’s Big Four—Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Collis Huntington, who made their fortunes in gold, silver, and railroads—took advantage of Nob Hill’s central location and spectacular views to build homes as grand as their images of themselves. The steep grade proved so hard on horses and pedestrians alike that in 1878 the residents had their own cable car line installed. Today that same cable car rumbled past, packed with excited tourists clutching cameras and plastic shopping bags filled with trinkets, loaves of sourdough bread, and Ghirardelli chocolate.

  My truck emitted an alarming groan as I pulled into a rare metered spot on Powell, not far from where the red brick College Club clung to the side of Nob Hill.

  On the corner, a large soapstone pedestal sat empty save for a metal rod sticking straight up from its core. Yellow police tape warned pedestrians to keep their distance lest one, in a feat of acrobatic clumsiness, trip and impale himself. The City’s ever-vigilant Visitors Bureau would not be amused.

  “Gouge marks.” Michael pointed to parallel grooves marring the surface of the pedestal. He jotted notes on a steno pad, muttered and scratched his head, to all appearances channeling television’s classic Columbo. I watched to see whether he was going to whip out a nasty stogie and start squinting. “Looks like the thieves used a crowbar.”

  Impatient with his newly formed PI persona, I sent Michael into the College Club to ask for the representatives listed on the police report. A few moments later the club’s tall front door creaked open and two men in expensive suits emerged. A tanned fifty-something, who looked as though he took full advantage of the club’s vaunted athletic facilities, shook our hands vigorously and introduced himself as Duke. The withered, elderly man at his side announced his name was Brown, making me wonder if a prerequisite for membership in the College Club was being named for a stuffy private school.

  “The club bought Resting Hermes from the Italian government after the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition,” Brown piped in a querulous voice. “For years he sat in the rotunda, until our former president suggested we share him with the neighborhood. I told him it was a bad idea, but would he listen?”

  He glared at us, and I surmised that the club president had not, in fact, listened.

  “The Pan-Pacific Exposition was held only a few years after the earthquake and fire,” the sportier Duke explained. “Hermes represented San Francisco rising from the ashes, and assuming its rightful place among the world’s greatest cities. Hermes said to the world, ‘We’ll be back! Better and stronger than ever...’ ”

  Duke’s voice trailed off and he gazed in the direction of Chinatown and the Ferry building. Brown, too, had a faraway look in his rheumy eyes. They were a little over the top, but then again every artist should be lucky enough to create for such an appreciative audience.

  “Do you have any clues as to the identity of the thieves?” I asked. “A disgruntled employee? Anyone been laid off recently?”

  Brown shook his glossy gray head. “Most of the help have been with us for years.”

  “Does the College Club have any enemies? A rivalry with the Fleming-Union, perhaps?”

  The three men stared at me as though I were one sandwich short of a picnic. The suggestion sounded far-fetched even to my own ears, but the frat-boy nature of these clubs made me ask.

  Duke shook his head.

  “Has anyone shown any undue interest in the statue?” I persisted.

  “Hermes was taken once before, in 1974, but it was merely a schoolboy prank. He was found in a student’s apartment, holding a cigarette and wearing a fur coat.”

  “And last month someone painted pink polish on his toenails,” Brown added. “Cretins!”

  Michael coughed to cover a throaty chuckle.

  “I hope nothing untoward has happened to him,” Brown said.

  “Don’t worry,” I replied. “Bronze is sturdy stuff. There might be a few scratches, or a nick in the patina. But those are easy to fix. I’m sure he’ll be fine. So, have you canvassed the neighborhood for witnesses?”

  “Don’t worry about a thing, gentlemen,” Michael interrupted in a crisp tone. “We’ll take it from here. Leave it to the professionals, I always say.”

  “It’s a relief to know you’re on the case,” Duke said.

  “It’s the least we can do for the venerable College Club.” Michael touched his forehead in a salute.

  I waited until Duke and Brown made their way back up the stairs and into the club before turning to Michael.

  “If we go home now, we can still charge for the full hour, right?” I was still trying to work the kinks out of this consulting game.

  “We haven’t done any actual investigating, Annie.”

  “That’s because we’re not investigators. I said I’d look into Hermes’ whereabouts, but there’s no evidence, nothing to go on. I did the best I could.”

  “This was your best?”

  “Listen, apparently we get paid whether we produce results or not.”

  Michael gave me a disgu
sted glance. It was unsettling to have a career criminal look at you as though you had the ethics of a bedbug.

  “Couldn’t you just make some calls or something and track it down?” I asked.

  “Track it down, how, exactly?”

  “You probably know some people....”

  “You think I know the people who stole the sculpture?”

  “I thought you might run in the same circles. Use the same fence, maybe?”

  The world-class thief’s jaw tightened in anger and his eyes swept over the buildings in front of us, avoiding mine. Nothing like implying that swiping something off the street was in the same league as stealing something from a wealthy, well-defended adversary. It didn’t escape my notice that I was making the same sort of assumptions about Michael that Frank had about me.

  I squirmed.

  “I apologize. I forgot you’re no longer a crook. And even if you were, you wouldn’t be snatching sculptures off public streets.”

  “Damned right.”

  “Okay,” I said with a martyred sigh. “What do you want to do?”

  “Think about it, Annie. The sculpture weighs hundreds of pounds. It would take at least two men and some heavy equipment to move it. This street isn’t exactly off the beaten path. Someone had to have seen something.” Good humor restored, his eyes sparkled in the muted light, reminding me of an Antonello da Messina portrait in London’s National Gallery that I had admired for two entire days. It almost made me forget my irritation with him.

  “Let’s start knocking on doors.” Michael grasped my elbow, intent on steering me across the street.

  This from the man who still hadn’t accounted for his whereabouts for the last six days.

  “I’ve got a better idea. You start knocking on doors,” I said, getting back in touch with my annoyance and yanking my arm away. “You can make up for your unexcused absence. I need coffee. I’ll catch up with you.”

  I puffed up the steep grade of California Street until I reached the very top of Nob Hill, where the Fleming Mansion sat, silent, somber, and foreboding. Ornate bronze filigree gates, greenish with the patina of a century of urban life, guarded the lush grounds; discreet plaques studded the walls, reminding passersby that the building was PRIVATE. MEMBERS ONLY. These Fleming-U boys could out-snob poor Duke and Brown with their silver spoons tied behind their backs.

  Several cop cars crowded the mansion’s rear parking lot, and the press had arrived and set up their vans nearby, cameras trained on the building’s back door. The beleaguered blond guard/parking attendant was back at his post, but still looked ashen. I noted several expensive cars parked in amongst the police units, including a dusty red Aston Martin convertible that I recognized as belonging to Geoffrey McAdams, chairman of the board and the man who had hired me. Next to it sat a mud-splattered black Mercedes sedan proudly proclaiming itself to be a V-12 Biturbo. The police must have tracked down a few of the F-U boys and called them back from their bohemian frolic in the woods.

  In contrast to the flurry of activity in the rear, the front door of the building was quiet. As I walked by I noticed that there was a blue U.S. Postal Service mailbox right up on the porch.

  Typical. The powers that be had removed all mailboxes within a two-mile radius of my apartment in Oakland, but here the F-U boys had their own right up on the porch. Mounting the broad stone steps, I extracted my bills from my backpack, dropped them in the mailbox, and stole a quick peek through a front window into a messy office with a Diet Coke can perched on a stack of files. Disappointingly normal.

  “They won’t let you in this way,” a voice came from behind me.

  I started, stifled a squeak, and turned around to see a tall man at the bottom of the stairs. He had wavy reddish-brown hair and wore heavy, horn-rim glasses, like Mr. Science.

  “Women have to go round the back,” he said with a sheepish smile. His accent was pure California, but his demeanor and sentence structure made him seem as though he had walked off the set of a British comedy featuring an affable Lord of the Manor. “And I’m afraid even then you’ll need to be invited in by a member. Beastly tradition, that. And in any case, there seems to be something untoward going on. Didn’t you see all of the police vehicles?”

  “Um, yes I did.”

  “I saw it all from my balcony, right up there,” he said, pointing to a very tall, sixties-style building a block northwest of the Fleming-Union. “The police started arriving a couple of hours ago. I was going to go see if I could be of service when I noticed you trying to get in through the front door. I wanted to save you any embarrassment. Women can’t use this entrance, except during special events, and even then only with club escorts.”

  “I wasn’t actually going in,” I said, returning his smile and trying to calm my still-pounding heart. “Just mailing a letter and couldn’t resist a peek. Are you a member here?”

  “They had to let me in, didn’t they?”

  “Did they?”

  “I’m Wesley Fleming the Third.”

  “As in the Fleming Mansion?”

  “Indeed. My great-grandfather built this place. And you are...?”

  “Annie Kincaid,” I said, extending my hand. His was cold and clammy as we shook. Still, his puppy-dog eyes were so open and eager it was hard not to like him. It dawned on me that I could ask him a few questions about the F-U members Victor Yeltsin and Balthazar Odibajian, thereby killing two birds with one stone. Could I double-bill for my time? “Listen, Wesley, could I ask you a few questions about this place? I’m doing a kind of research project about this area....”

  “You’re a student?”

  “Um...”

  “I love students.”

  “Sure am.” A student of life, I always say.

  “What do you study?”

  “Ar—, uh... architecture,” I stammered.

  “I love architecture!” He checked his wristwatch. “Sure, I have a few minutes.”

  “I saw a sign for Peet’s over at the cathedral. Could I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  “Love it.”

  We both turned and started down the stairs. Wesley moved as though all his parts weren’t exactly held together, reminding me of an old marionette I had as a child, whose lone surviving string barely kept all its parts connected, much less in alignment.

  “After the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed nearly all the mansions on Nob Hill, Arabella Huntington donated the land her house had sat on to the City of San Francisco to be used as a public park,” Wesley said, taking on the role of tour guide. “My grandfather’s home was the only one to withstand the flames. Good, solid stone. The Fairmont Hotel was under construction at the time and though it was gutted, the walls remained intact. Julia Morgan later redid the interior.”

  We walked past the park’s central fountain.

  “That’s a replica of Rome’s Fontana delle Tartarughe, by Taddeo Landini,” explained Wesley. “Grace Church was destroyed in the fire as well, and the cathedral was built in the style of Notre Dame to take its place. The front doors are bronze casts of the Ghiberti doors made for the Baptistery in Florence, depicting scenes from the Old Testament. Michelangelo had called the original Ghiberti doors the porta del paradiso, the gates of heaven. Shouldn’t you be taking notes?”

  “It’s all up here,” I said, tapping my temple. “Like a steel trap.”

  In fact, I already knew both the fountain and the doors well, both here and in their original incarnations in Europe. Along with painting techniques my grandfather had insisted on teaching me the basics of Western Civilization, which somehow, in his mind, justified his forgery of the finest in Old Master art. Speaking of forgeries...

  “Say, Wesley, do you happen to know the Odibajian brothers?”

  Wesley stopped in his tracks and gawked at me.

  “You can’t just go around talking about people like the Odibajians.”

  “I can’t?”

  “Good Lord, no. How did you know Balthazar belonged to the Fleming
-Union? The membership list is secret.”

  “It is?”

  “Good heavens. Wait—I just assumed you knew he was a member, didn’t I? I just gave it away. The brethren always tell me I talk too much. Don’t you have any questions about architecture? I know all about architecture.”

  “I’d love to see inside the club.” I was pushing my luck, but ol’ Wesley was so easygoing I figured it was worth a shot. “Perhaps you could get me into the Fleming-Union for lunch sometime? As your guest? I’m happy to go in the back.”

  “Good Lord, I don’t think so.” He looked decidedly uncomfortable and avoided my eyes. “I know nothing about you. Could you even pass the background check?”

  “They do a background check on prospective guests?”

  “That’s why they need twenty-four-hours’ notice. Besides, you’re not at all my type. We wouldn’t fool anyone.”

  “Oh.”

  The last thing I wanted was to have Wesley Fleming the Third’s love child, but all the same...I wasn’t bad-looking, and I was awfully interesting. I looked down at my outfit. What would he think if he saw me in my overalls?

  “Do you know about the reproduction of the Chartres labyrinth?” Wesley asked in a blatant attempt to change the subject, pushing his heavy glasses back up the thin bridge of his nose. “Let me show you.”

  He gestured toward the church, where a handful of shivering tourists, tricked by the day’s earlier sunshine into donning shorts and T-shirts, admired the cathedral’s soaring stained glass windows. Wesley insisted we mount the great flight of steps and then paused halfway up, pointing to the outdoor terrazzo labyrinth, a duplicate of the one created at Chartres Cathedral around 1220.

  “Unlike mazes, labyrinths have only a single path. The twists and turns are symbolic of the course of a human life, and walking the labyrinth is intended to encourage contemplation.”

  Two boys jumped from one path of the labyrinth to the other, while a third raced through as fast as he could, arms held out airplane-style, as he emitted an array of engine noises. An eight-year-old’s version of contemplation.

  Wesley and I shared a smile at their antics, and I decided to try again to get my new pal to talk.