The Cézanne Chase (3 page)

Heston stood, shook hands around the table, then eased himself out of the meeting room. He went on to his car, walking with long, deliberate strides. He was tall and angular, with the build of a distance runner, which he had been during his school years. His hair was unruly and would likely fall across his forehead. His face, like his body, was long and narrow, and it had the inquiring look of a policeman, and he wore gold-rimmed glasses selected by his wife, who insisted they gave him a scholarly air. His driver saw him taking the steps two at a time and pulled the car forward.

“The Abbey,” Heston said, getting in beside the driver.

The car maneuvered around Trafalgar Square onto Whitehall, past the government buildings to Victoria Street. Heston entered Westminster Abbey by the west door where he was confronted by a half-dozen tour groups. He walked along the north aisle to the transept and stopped between the choir and the high altar. An organ played, accompanied by a brass trio. Unusual, he thought; perhaps a rehearsal for a special event. Then he turned toward the choir, where, as he suspected, seated in the first row was a man keenly involved with whatever he was writing in a notebook perched on his lap. Heston circled around a group of tourists, came up behind the man, and leaned down and said in a heavy accent, “You got a special pass to sit in there?”

Without looking up, the man replied, “That's an obscenely terrible accent, Elliott.”

Heston smiled and sat next to the man, whose attention remained fixed on his notes. Heston had come to the Abbey numerous other times to find his man in the choir or, if the crowds were unusually thick, in the small and quiet Chapel of St. Faith. Heston had attended the memorial service for a popular assistant commissioner of New Scotland Yard and another time had witnessed an
Easter service at the urging of his wife. Otherwise he rarely visited the great abbey and knew it mainly as a tourist attraction or as a spiritual hideaway for the Arts and Antiques Squad's Detective Chief Inspector Jack LaConte Oxby.

“They know me, but they might ask you to step down from the choir,” Oxby said matter-of-factly.

“Then use your considerable influence, as I rather like the view from here. What's the music about?”

Oxby said, “It's for old King Ed the Confessor. It's his nine hundredth birthday.”

“Has it been that long? It hardly seems it.” Heston hoped to raise a smile from his obstinately independent companion.

Oxby turned. No denying he was a small man, though it seemed there was a largeness to him, because even as he sat, his eyes were nearly level with Heston, who stood several inches taller. When he shifted his weight or moved his arms, it was apparent that he had a coordinated and well-conditioned body. His nose was long but somehow it did not dominate his face. No, the real fascinations about Oxby were his eyes and his voice. The eyes were perfect; a blue-gray that penetrated with curiosity or warmth, humor or intense determination as the circumstance required, and his rich baritone had been trained for both singing and acting. He spoke French with the ease of a Parisian and Italian with the singsong fluency of a very proper Florentine. Oxby had also mastered the infinite ranges of accents and idiosyncratic slang of the language spoken throughout the British Isles. He could identify and mimic a solicitor from Glasgow as well as a Liverpudlian stevedore.

Heston's smile faded. “Something's come up, and you've got a new case.”

Oxby widened his eyes in acknowledgment and to signify he wanted to hear more.

Heston placed a copy of The
Sun
on top of Oxby's notebook and paused while Oxby stared at the screaming headline and a photograph of the portrait taken before its destruction. “I know you're just back from the country, but don't you ever read a newspaper?”

“Certainly not that one,” Oxby said disdainfully, his eyes focused on the front page of the newspaper. “I'd rather you told me what happened.”

Heston took the paper back and swacked it across his thigh.
“There's not much to tell. Whoever did it created a diversion, then sprayed the painting with some kind of exotic acid or solvent, then disappeared.” He filled in with the sparse details that he had picked up earlier.

Oxby turned to a clean sheet in his notebook. “What's a Cézanne self-portrait worth these days?”

Heston laughed. “A ridiculous amount, I'm sure. I don't buy them, you know. Depending on size, and which one, I suppose ten million ...fifteen? More?”

“Much more,” Oxby said firmly. “And perhaps a little more now that one has been permanently removed.”

“I thought of that. An interesting speculation.”

“Do we know how many self-portraits there are?”

“Canfield told me that Cézanne painted twenty-six in all. We still have one in England, owned by an Alan Pinkster who I believe you know.”

“I've met him, twice perhaps. Lot of money, bit of a pain.”

“One of the twenty-six is owned by a New Yorker. Also wealthy. It came into his family a few generations ago, and it's still there. We don't know much about it.”

A man dressed in plain cleric's clothes came up to Oxby and touched his arm. “I'm terribly sorry, Mr. Oxby. The choir's coming along for their rehearsal any minute now.” The man spoke with a rich cockney accent.

“It's all right, Teddy. We're moving on.” Oxby motioned for Heston to step down from the choir. “Now there's authentic cockney,” he said with admiration. “Teddy's fifth-generation East End.” He led Heston through the accumulating crowd.

Heston's driver had pulled beside a row of taxis. Oxby said, “I'll walk. Officially, I'm still on holiday.”

“It's important that we talk, Jack. There'll be hell to pay if we don't nip this thing right off. There's a call in from the director and—”

“We'll talk,” Oxby said, moving away. “You know, Elliott, I'd be mad as hell if this were happening to a Manet or a Degas.” He shook his head slowly. “Cézanne isn't one of my favorites.” Then he brightened. “Cheerio... see you in your office.” Instantly he was absorbed by the crowds converging on the great cathedral.

He crossed Victoria Street and continued to Broadway, covering the half mile in six minutes and arriving at New Scotland Yard ahead of
Heston. He was surpised to find two of his assistants waiting, both wearing worried expressions. Detective Sergeants Ann Browley and Jimmy Murratore were young, bright, and ambitious. Ann was a bit of an anomaly, as her family was old money with strong links to London society, while Jimmy's Italian-born parents worked long and diligently to make a living from their bakery shop in Brixton.

“Something's gone wrong,” Oxby guessed.

“Very wrong,”Jimmy said. “We just got word that the self-portrait in Alan Pinkster's collection was destroyed.”

Oxby's eyes narrowed. “Acid, or whatever they're using?”

“I'm afraid yes,” Ann replied. “Pinkster himself called, mad as a hornet and as much as saying it was our fault.”

“And him with a security system good enough for the queen's jewels,” Jimmy said.

Heston arrived, frustration clearly showing. “Bloody damned press will have us responsible... see if I'm not right.” He went into his office, the others following. “When did it happen?”

“Probably during the night,” Oxby said. “Pinkster's collection isn't open to the public except by special arrangement.”

“A group from the Danish embassy was on a tour, eighteen in all,” Ann said. “They were gone from the the gallery before five, and apparently everything was in good order when they went off.”

Heston said, “Jack, you're on this now. Tell me what you need, but get something sorted out quickly.”

Oxby instructed Ann to assemble a file on Pinkster and his collection. To Heston he said, “I want Nigel Jones.” Then he went to his office and collected a notebook and palm-sized tape recorder. At the precise moment he picked up his phone to order a car, it rang. A voice said, “Detective Tobias is in the lobby. Shall I send him up?”

Oxby sighed heavily and said softly to himself, “Alex old friend, you promised that you'd give me fair warning.” He called Ann into his office and thrust the phone at her. “Alex Tobias is at the reception desk. Get him on the phone and tell him I've got to run off but say that I'll stop to see him on my way to the garage. And Ann, see if you can have a decent car waiting for me.”

 

“Alex, you scoundrel,” Oxby said, reaching the reception desk, “You promised to call ahead of time.”

“Don't lecture me, young Jack, I've been taking orders from
every member of my family since we left New York, and I don't need any more of it from you.” His scowl turned to a smile and he extended his hand.

Alexander Tobias was on the comfortably portly side, with a thick, fluffy crop of gray hair and heavy-rimmed glasses set on a slightly bent nose. He wore a mustache, a nearly solid thatch of hair, and had a florid face that showed equal amounts of curiosity and compassion. Tobias had had a successful career and was considered a superb detective. But he had never mastered the nuances of police politics, which meant that while he had edged into the top ranks of the New York City police department at age fifty-five, he had been passed over for appointment to a deputy commissioner's spot. At fifty-eight, and at his request, he took the rank of sergeant detective and was reassigned to the major case squad, where he investigated art forgeries and thefts. He and Oxby had first paired up on a Rembrandt stolen from a London gallery and traced to New York. The case began a professional relationship that had grown into a deep friendship.

“We flew in from Dublin a day ahead because once our son was married there wasn't any purpose in staying around, and Helen was anxious to visit her sister, who couldn't come to the wedding because of some damned bone problem.”

“So they took away all the telephones in Dublin and in the airport, and you want me to believe you couldn't call me,” Oxby said, chiding his friend.

“Believe what you damned want to believe. Your sergeant said you've got to run down to Surrey, something about another Cézanne?”

“Want to come with me?” Oxby asked. “They've destroyed three of them now, and it's damned serious destruction that's going on.”

“I can't, Jack. I've got to meet Helen, and we leave tomorrow. It's why I took a chance I'd catch you this morning.”

“I'd like for you to come,” Oxby said.

Tobias shook his head. “And I'd like to go.”

 

Oxby was assigned a standard Ford Escort with a black exterior, gray interior, both in need of a thorough scrubbing. He drove south from London over the Vauxhall Bridge, through Kensington, then on the A23 to Surrey.

Oxby and Pinkster had met at a furniture auction, but it was doubtful the wealthy art collector would remember their brief encounter.
Oxby remembered. Alan Pinkster was thirty-eight years old, tenuously married to his third wife, and the father of one daughter, now ten, who lived with her mother. Wife number one, on whom Pinkster had settled a small fortune, had recently been in the news about her own remarriage. Although Pinkster had been labeled a billionaire in New York, the financial community in London wondered how much of his assets were offset by deals and heavy borrowing. Having learned the art of arbitrage from a trio of infamous Wall Streeters with whom he had worked for three years, Pinkster knew that a small percentage of a massive amount of money was a surefire route to great wealth. An expert in junk bonds, he had made megamillion-dollar leveraged buyouts by the time he was twenty-seven. There was little doubt on either side of the Atlantic that Alan Pinkster knew how to make and spend money on a grand scale.

His home was near Bletchingly, a country town in the heart of Surrey. Over several years, aided consecutively by his three wives and twice as many interior designers, he had put an old manor house through an arduous renovation. Pinkster had also built a modest-sized gallery to house his surprisingly impressive art collection.

Waiting beside an elongated Mercedes parked next to the gallery was a clearly agitated Alan Pinkster.

“Are you from the police?” he asked abruptly.

Oxby was equally abrupt. “Yes,” and offered his card.

Pinkster had an intensity about him: firm set mouth, and dark eyes that fixed on whomever he was talking with. His hair was brown and groomed, and his body was fit and covered with expensive clothes.

“I want the bloody bastard that did this to pay an awful price,” Pinkster said angrily.

“What price had you in mind?” Oxby asked.

“I'm serious. I want whoever did it to be hurt. Hurt painfully, then put away for a good long time.”

“That would indeed be a high price,” Oxby agreed.

Pinkster led the way into the gallery. There had been a gala celebration when Alan Pinkster officially opened his gallery two years earlier. A grand affair, by all accounts, replete with tents and sculpted ice and buffet tables lined with food and fine wines. CNN televised it, and the BBC put it on the news. It had been another attempt mounted on a monumental scale for Pinkster to crash into London society.

The basement of the gallery was half display, the other half given over to restoration and repair. On a large table under bright lights was the self-portrait. A glance at the painting proved to Oxby that its condition was even more grotesque than he had imagined. The face of the artist was discernible but as if drawn by an insane hand. An ear had come loose from where it belonged and was about where the nose should be. The mouth was a gaping red hole. The eyes had slid into the blackness of Cézanne's beard. Oxby's revulsion was as much over the painting's hideous distortion as the cruel fact that a great painting had been senselessly destroyed.