Borrower of the Night: The First Vicky Bliss Mystery (3 page)

He was in the car, waiting, when I reached the street. That was a relief; I half expected him to drive off and leave me. As I got in I said meekly.

“Okay, Tony, I apologize. Of course I wasn’t going to hold out on you. You startled me, that’s all.”

“Oh, sure,” said Tony. But he was mollified; we started off with only a little skid, turning halfway around. Tony straightened the car out and we proceeded at a moderate fifty.

“I know you’re thinking what I’m thinking,” I went on. “But I also think we’re both going off half-cocked. It’s pretty vague, isn’t it?”

“Oh, sure,” said Tony.

He’s about as sly as Christopher Robin. His tone and his prompt acquiescence told me all I needed to know about where Tony was going to spend the summer.

I took advantage of his silence to make a few plans of my own. The evidence was far from conclusive. Burckhardt had not been specific about details, which was not surprising; I didn’t suppose for a moment that he had penned the letter with his own mailed fist. He was probably semiliterate, like many of his noble contemporaries. No, the letter had been dictated to a secretary or public letter writer, and Burckhardt would naturally avoid names. But the given details fit the case. How many objects of value could there be, belonging to a Count of Drachenstein, that had been “commissioned” from an old man of Würzburg? The letter even mentioned a bond, or surety, given by the old man for jewels such as the legend described.

I winced as Tony narrowly avoided a scuttling pedestrain, and went on thinking. The author of the book had not been concerned with art history or offbeat legends. He had only quoted Burckhardt because, in other parts of the letters, the count had described the fighting. Unless someone knew the legend, he wouldn’t notice the vital details, thanks to Burckhardt’s caution. But I was reasonably certain that the letters did indeed refer to Riemenschneider’s lost masterpiece. Burckhardt mentioned sending “it” home. Even with a strong guard, the trip would be hazardous. It was quite possible that the caravan had been ambushed and the shrine seized and broken up for the sake of the jewels set in its carving. It was also possible…

I hadn’t made any plans for the summer. If Riemenschneider’s shrine still existed, anywhere on the face of the earth, there was one obvious place in which to look for it. And there was nothing to prevent me from looking.

I had reached that point in my meditations when we skidded into a gatepost, bounced off, and continued along a dark, tree-lined drive. We had arrived, only half an hour late.

I was prepared to dislike Jacob Myers on sight, the way we always hate people who have more money than we do. He was bald and fat. His stomach hung out over his cummerbund. He came up to my chin. He had the mouth of a shark and the eyes of a poet. I felt an immediate rapport—with the shark, as well as the poet.

Myers’ house was something of a surprise. I knew his reputation as an art patron and collector, but that didn’t mean he had good taste; rich people can afford to buy taste. In size and sheer opulence the house was what I had expected, but the overall impression was unorthodox. The most unexpected objects were juxtaposed and somehow they looked right together. They had only one thing in common. They were all beautiful, from the faded Persian rug on the dining-room floor to the little glazed blue pot on the table. I recognized the pot by its glaze; one of the girls in the college makes them as a hobby, and they sell, in local specialty shops, for about six bucks.

Jake—he told me to call him that—answered the door himself. There was a butler. Jake called him Al, and so did Tony. He looked like a heavyweight boxer and addressed me in tones reminiscent of Sir Laurence Olivier. I was staggering slightly as Jake led us into the living room, bawling out orders for cocktails as we went.

It would take a couple of chapters to describe that living room, so I won’t try. There were more Persian rugs—I hated to walk on them—and pictures that could have hung in the Uffizi. There was also a man. He rose from a chair by the hearth as we entered. I had plenty of time to study him as we marched from the door to the fireplace; the room was about sixty feet long.

He was a big man. The breadth of his shoulders and chest made Tony look like an adolescent. He had crisp auburn hair, cut shorter than is fashionable, and his features were more notable for strength than harmony. He radiated animal vitality, plus that indescribable air of—how do I describe it? Competence is the word that comes to mind. He looked like a man who could do anything, and do it well. But maybe I was reading things into his face. I knew him, even before Jake introduced us. He told me to call him George. Everybody was very matey that night—everybody but Tony. He hadn’t expected this guest, and didn’t bother concealing his lack of enthusiasm.

“Hi, Nolan,” he said. “Climbed any more mountains lately?”

“Not since Everest,” said George, his smile broadening.

As a put-down, it was pretty good. He
had
climbed Everest. He had also won the amateur tennis singles and sailed the Atlantic in a one-man canoe, or a raft, or some stupid thing.
Sports Illustrated
loved to feature his activities. Certain less naïve publications had described other aspects of his expeditions—the Sherpa who didn’t get back down Everest, the animals whose pelts and heads decorated Nolan’s walls in defiance of protective laws.

I wondered at first how such disparate personalities as George and Jake Myers had become acquainted. As the conversation proceeded, I realized that it was not business or social interests that made them friends, but a common passion. They were both art collectors, and the rivalry between them added to the appeal of beauty for its own sake. Jake was brutally frank about the rivalry. No sooner had we been served with drinks than he burst out in a childish explosion of spleen. George had beaten him out in acquiring a van der Weyden painting, and the loss rankled.

“How much did you bribe that dealer?” he inquired. “He promised it to me, you know. That was the dirtiest piece of crummy underhanded swindling—”

“Since you stole the Sienese triptych out from under my nose,” George interrupted. “This makes us even. Keep cool, Jake; I told you I’d let you have the van der Weyden.”

“At a neat profit to yourself.”

“Naturally.”

Looking back, I can see that what transpired that evening was as inevitable as a chemical formula. If you mix the right amounts of the right chemicals (chemistry was never my forte), you always get nitroglycerin. You don’t sometimes get Caesar salad and sometimes Chanel Number Five. Here we had two men, each massively arrogant in his own fashion, who enjoyed their rivalry with the blind passion of nasty little boys; a third man, who was viewed by the other two with varying degrees of good-natured contempt; and little me. Poor Tony had obviously taken a lot from George Nolan; I could tell by the way they looked at each other, and by the barbed comments. Now I am not being a female chauvinist when I maintain that some men get awfully silly in the presence of a woman. They start showing off. Roosters and little boys fight; human males try to put the other guy down in more subtle ways.

George started moving in on me. He did it very well, but I knew his heart wasn’t in it; he was only trying to aggravate Tony. Jake saw what was going on, and sat back to watch. He liked Tony and he didn’t much care for George; but he loved dissension.

I never said he was a nice guy.

I don’t know when I saw the gleam in Tony’s eye and realized what he was going to do. It must have been before dinner, because apprehension ruined the meal for me. I was so annoyed with all three men that I munched my way grimly through a magnificent spread, wishing I could get my teeth into somebody’s hand. I couldn’t figure out any way of stopping Tony, short of falling on the floor in a fit, and that seemed a trifle drastic. George kept needling Tony; there were frequent references to ivory towers and effete scholars and muscles that had grown flabby from too much study. Yet in a way, what happened was my fault. If Tony and I hadn’t been feuding…

Sure enough, with the dessert, the inevitable name was introduced, by Tony, with all the subtlety of a bulldozer.

“Speaking of sculpture”—which nobody was—“how much would you give for a Riemenschneider?”

George had the face of an actor or a con man, beautifully schooled; but I saw him blink before he readjusted his mask. Then I knew. The guy was a fake. He’d never heard of Riemenschneider, and I felt sure his passion for art was not genuine. For him it was a device to outdo lesser men. As a kid he had probably collected rocks or bottles with the same single-minded fury, chiseling and outbidding other kids in order to get the biggest collection in town.

I would have tripped him up, then and there—and I had thought of a couple of ways in which to do it—but Jake outmaneuvered me.

“Riemenschneider,” he rumbled, in his bass bullfrog voice. “Yes—the German woodcarver. Saint Stephen in the Cleveland Museum. God that’s a masterpiece. That’s really great. Yeah, yeah; there was a theft, couple years ago. The Madonna from Volkach. German government ransomed it.”

“Not the government; the editor of
Der Stern
.”

“Shut up,” Myers said, glaring at Tony. “Twenty-five thousand ransom. That’s a lot of money. Yeah, sure, I remember the case. Nothing wrong with my memory. You just stop interrupting me, Tony.”

George, for one, had no intention of interrupting. He sat tapping his fingers gently on the table, a faint, knowing smile on his face. But the smile didn’t fool me. I couldn’t expose his ignorance now; foxy Grandpa had already told him what he needed to know. Myers really did have a fabulous memory. His enthusiasm was genuine, even if it was amplified by the old acquisitive instinct.

“Tony,” I said gently, “do you think you ought—”

Jake leaned forward, elbows planted squarely on the table, and squinted at me.

“So you’re in on this.” His voice was unexpectedly genial. It made a chill run up my spine. “Well, well. That makes it even more interesting. Now don’t you interrupt me again, young woman! Let me talk. Let me think. Sure, I know Riemenschneider. I also know it would be virtually impossible to get hold of a major piece. Most of his stuff is in churches or museums. And you wouldn’t dangle a minor work in front of my nose….”

He wasn’t talking to us. He was thinking aloud. His squinty little black eyes shone like jet. Another chill explored my backbone. The old devil was smart, smart and hard as nails. With one halfhearted question Tony had set a bloodhound on the trail.

Tony, who knew him better than I did, was thinking the same thing. His mouth had dropped open, and there were two parallel lines between his eyebrows. He caught my eye, and his mouth tightened. He looked away.

“You’re not a dealer,” Myers went on. “Private collectors wouldn’t approach you. Which one are you planning to steal, and how do you propose to go about it?”

George laughed. My jaw dropped, in its turn. I shouldn’t have been taken aback. I know enough about rabid collectors to realize they will stop at nothing, including homicide, to get what they want. A little matter of robbery doesn’t bother them a bit. It’s common knowledge that dozens of “lost” art treasures, stolen from the world’s great museums, now repose cozily in locked and hidden vaults, where the millionaire owners can gloat over them in secret.

“Damn it, Tony,” I burst out. “Why can’t you keep your big mouth shut?”

George laughed again, and Jake grinned at me. He looked more like a shark than ever.

“Don’t blame him, honey. If you hadn’t stuck your two cents in, I wouldn’t have paid any attention to Tony. I know he goes off half-cocked all the time. But if there are two of you in this deal—and one of them is a girl like you—”

“Oh—” I began; but before I could get the dear old Anglo-Saxon word out, George interrupted. His face was purple with amusement.

“You’re the one who’s going off half-cocked, Jake. You know our moral laddy here; he isn’t going to steal anything. He’s a good boy. No; if I were to hazard a guess—and I always do hazard—I would say that our two experts have stumbled on an unknown work. Or,” he added, watching my face, “on a clue to such a work. Isn’t there a story…?”

He let the word trail off suggestively.

I was torn between self-reproach and admiration at the guy’s technique. He didn’t know a bloody thing about the legend of the shrine. He was guessing; but it was inspired guessing, the method of a skilled fortune-teller who uses his victim’s facial expressions as a guide to the accuracy of his surmises. And heaven knows my big, round, candid face was as readable as print.

I tried to freeze the face, and I watched Jake, who had responded to the hint as a fish to the lure. His brow wrinkled as he searched his capacious memory. My heart sank. I didn’t realize until then how deeply my emotions were involved. It was my discovery, damn it, and nobody was going to take it away from me.

“Nope,” Jake said finally. “Seems to me I did read something, once…. But I’ve forgotten. Can’t remember everything. Is that it, Tony? Found yourself a clue, boy?”

I felt like sagging with relief. Jake had accepted George’s reasoning, and, as a result, he was less excited. A robbery made sense to him. A vague, unspecified clue to an unknown work was not in his line.

His tone maddened Tony, as did George’s superior smile. He sat up straight in his chair and looked directly at Jake. His hair was hanging down over one eyebrow, but I must admit he had a kind of dignity.

“Are you interested?” he said. “Yes or no.”

“Sure I’m interested.”

“That doesn’t mean you’re going to get it,” George said gently. He smiled at me. “It’s a matter of pride not to let Jake get things away from me.”

“Now wait a minute,” I said indignantly. “Who’s offering what to whom? It’s just as much my idea as Tony’s, more so, because I saw the book first, and furthermore—”

Tony let out a yelp, but I didn’t need that to know what I had done. I shut up, thankful I hadn’t said more. Jake, who was shaking all over, let out a loud “haw-haw.”

“I should let you two go on arguing,” he said, when he had gotten his mirth under control. “It’s not only funny, it could be informative. But the information is apt to help Nolan more than it does me. So shut up, the pair of you. Tell you what I’ll do. I don’t know what you’ve got on your minds, or what your plans are, but if either of you turns up with a Riemenschneider, I’ll buy it. Fair price, no questions asked. I’ll even stake you, if you need money.”