Murder at the National Gallery Read online

  “A DAZZLING SERIES …

  Murder at the National Gallery is the most satisfying sort of popular fiction, a thoughtful thriller.… The reader is swept along in a torrent of intrigue that is as subtle and intricate as it is fast-moving.”

  —Atlanta Journal & Constitution

  “Seasoned with Miss Truman’s observations of the Washington scene, which add color to a coherent and carefully developed plot.”

  —The Washington Sunday Times

  “By far, Truman’s spiciest offering is the character M. Scott Pims, the outrageous gadfly of art.… Her writing, which at times hints at a detached and delicious wit, sustains a brisk, pleasurable pace.”

  —West Coast Review of Books

  “This intricate tale of a conniving art curator’s ingenious plan establishes [Margaret Truman] as a star of the genre.”

  —Staten Island Sunday Advance

  A Fawcett Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1996 by Margaret Truman

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Fawcett Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Fawcett is a registered trademark and the Fawcett colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-91019

  ISBN 0-449-21938-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5282-2

  This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

  First Ballantine Books Edition: July 1997

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Other Books by This Author

  Excerpt from Murder in the House

  1

  COSENZA, ITALY

  Who was Mattia Preti anyway?

  That was all Saltore had time to think about as he ran to keep ahead of the three men.

  Breathing hard, he thought next: What had he done to deserve this? He’d asked only for what was fair. They’d told him to steal one painting, but he’d stolen three. Steal one, you get paid for one. Steal three, you get paid for three. Fair’s fair. Simple.

  He’d been stealing for them for over two years. He was good at it. They always told him that. Mostly he stole cars to order, turning them over to his gang, run by local hoods and tithed to Luigi Sensi’s Naples empire, Camorra, which had customers waiting for the green Fiat or silver Lamborghini. Sometimes he stole silverware and cash from the homes of the rich on hilltops overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea or from guests at the seaside hotels built to accommodate the increasing flow of tourists into the arch of Italy’s boot.

  But cars were his specialty. He’d never stolen art before because no one had told him to. He didn’t even like art.

  Saltore pressed the paintings close to his chest, huffing harder now, and ran up a narrow winding street leading from the old section of Cosenza, across the Busento River, to the more modern city.

  Who was Mattia Preti?

  He’d never even heard of him. All he knew was that he was told to sneak into the monastic complex of San Francesco di Assisi and remove a painting by this guy Preti. But once he saw how easy it was to pull one from the wall, he wanted them all. More money for him. But the priest came by; Saltore wasn’t about to get into a confrontation with a priest. Bad enough at confession.

  So he took off with the three paintings and dutifully delivered them to his brooding boss at the cafe, as usual. But when he balked at turning them over unless he received triple pay, his boss, whose reputation in southern Italy had not been built upon diplomatic negotiation, pulled a gun. That sent Giovanni Saltore running from the cafe, with his boss after him, joined by two colleagues who’d been sipping espresso at a nearby table. All this for three ugly paintings that were too old to be worth much, painted by some dead old guy.

  Although young, Saltore was not in good shape. His legs went leaden, and each breath drove daggers into his lungs. They caught him when, not thinking, he found himself in a dead-end alley. The three men, guns in hands, walked slowly toward him, backing Saltore against the cement wall. They smiled and softly muttered insults: “Imbecille buon a nulla!” Useless imbecile. “Alienato!”

  “Crazy? You want this junk?” Saltore shouted. He threw the three small paintings to the ground. “Take them. Not even pretty. No good colors. I don’t want them. You don’t owe me nothing. Niente!” Nothing.

  His boss picked up the paintings, casually examined them, tucked them beneath his arm, and, as casually, turned and slowly walked away, leaving Saltore with a profound sense of relief. He grinned and raised his hands in a gesture that said all this was just an exercise, a silly mistake. “Scherzo, huh?” Just a joke.

  He widened his arms and approached the youngest of his pursuers still in the alley. They’d gone to school together. “Hey, Gino, my friend,” Saltore said, flashing a broad smile and shaking his head at the silliness of it all. As he reached to embrace his schoolmate, both revolvers fired at once. Their bullets struck Saltore in the chest within inches of each other. He dropped to his knees. The smile was gone, his eyes were wide with disbelief. Still, he held his arms out. Why? the open arms asked.

  He was answered with two more shots, this time to the head.

  The last thought Giovanni Saltore had before crossing the threshold into that other, better life promised by his church was: Who the hell is Mattia Preti anyway?

  LONDON

  On the day that Giovanni Saltore’s art education ended in an alley in Cosenza, Italy, Lord Adam Boulridge, descended from the Duchess of Monmouth, and whose castle on the Northumberland coast was in such disrepair that it was deemed unsafe for tourists and had been condemned, received a late-night visitor. He and his guest spent an hour looking at Lord Adam’s collection of paintings by British artists, including a stunning Gainsborough landscape, a departure from the painter’s more famous portraits; a Hogarth party scene dripping with social commentary; a tranquil Richard Wilson lakeside scene that had been badly damaged by one of hundreds of serious leaks in the castle’s roofs; and a George Romney portrait of a young lady, painted toward the end of the Raphael-inspired artist’s life, when his technique had clearly waned. Dozens of other paintings hung haphazardly on the castle’s cracked walls. Many were not lighted; Lord Adam trained a flashlight on them for his visitor’s benefit.

  Follow
ing this hour of art appreciation, they retired to Lord Adam’s study to negotiate the terms. Lord Adam would take a two-week holiday. In his absence, his visitor would return to the castle and remove the most valuable of the paintings. Upon his return, Lord Adam would be appropriately aghast at the brazen theft of British treasures and would promptly report it to Lloyd’s of London, which had insured the paintings for all these many years, or, as some Englishmen put it, donkey’s years.

  PARIS

  Also on the day Giovanni Saltore lost his life, Jacques Saison put the finishing touches on a copy of Vermeer’s The Concert, the original having been stolen years before from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Saison had been provided with excellent color slides of the painting by his client, of whom he had not, of course, asked questions. Once he’d been given the “commission,” Saison had scoured Paris for just the right old painting, not for the painting itself, but for the canvas that would approximate the age of canvases used in Vermeer’s time. He’d found an especially smooth one consisting of twenty-six threads per centimeter to the warp and twenty-four to the weft. Not perfect, but close enough.

  Within days he’d painstakingly stripped the original painting from the canvas, and, using a variety of chemical substances, further brought the canvas to its necessary “age.” He then smoothed it, using a pumice-stone, which also served to soften the threads to better accept his, Saison’s, “version” of The Concert. Finally, after experimenting for days to obtain precisely the right proportions, he worked a mixture of rabbit glue, gypsum, and anhydride into the canvas with a paintbrush. Now, a month later, he stepped back to admire his “Vermeer.” Perfect.

  That came as no surprise to Jacques Saison. He belonged, after all, to an elite fraternity. The world’s finest art forgers were not organized into a guild, but they might well have been. Famous in a small circle, infamous in the larger one of art police.

  What a shame, he sometimes thought when drinking, that he could use his prodigious talent only to copy the works of others. Try as he had since his early days as a student, he’d never been able to come up with an idea of something worthwhile to paint on his own.

  But painting on someone else’s own, so to speak, paid well.

  CINCINNATI

  Cindy Whitlock and her husband, Harry, proudly hung the print of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s A Stand of Cypresses in an Italian Park above the couch in their den. They’d chosen this particular print at the flea market because its sepia tones would go nicely with the orange-and-white zebra pattern of the couch. They’d paid thirty dollars for it. They could have opted for Rembrandt, Degas, or some pretty landscapes by Thomas Cole, all prints reproduced illegally in New York City and sold by flea-market vendors across the country.

  TOKYO

  Giovanni Saltore, even if new to the group, wasn’t the only art collector to die that day.

  While his wife and two daughters prepared dinner in the kitchen of their opulent home outside of Tokyo, wealthy Japanese businessman Yakoto Kayami, dressed in a pure white kimono of Samurai style and sitting on a small white carpet, his legs bound with rope, removed white tissue paper from a short sword on the floor in front of him, lifted the sword so that its point faced his large belly, and fell forward onto it. Better to die than to face the shame of it having recently been revealed to him that his extensive art collection, considered one of Japan’s finest, consisted mostly of masterpieces forged and stolen.

  NEW YORK—A WEEK LATER

  The International Arrivals Building at Kennedy Airport was busy. This Friday afternoon, among hundreds of passengers deplaning from the Alitalia flight from Rome was Carlo Giliberti, Italy’s cultural attaché to the Italian Embassy in Washington, D.C. His trolley was laden with luggage, including an oversized black-leather portfolio. He chatted amiably with the Customs inspector.

  Nearby, a short young woman with a large bosom, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a mildly obscene message on it, and sporting multiple earrings, was taken aside and searched by a female inspector in a private room reserved for such activity. An instant breast reduction occurred when three small plastic bags of marijuana were removed from her bra.

  Carlo Giliberti reached the taxi line and gave the driver the address of an art gallery in New York’s Soho district, where he soon delivered three unframed paintings by the seventeenth-century Italian artist from Taverna, Mattia Preti, that had been concealed between worthless papers in his portfolio. He thanked the gallery owner for the envelope filled with cash, took another cab to LaGuardia, and boarded a Delta shuttle flight to Washington.

  All in all, just another week in the swirling world of international art.

  2

  THE NAVAL OBSERVATORY—WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Annabel’s eyes opened wide, her laughter irrepressible. “You still have that?” she said.

  “Of course I do,” said Carole.

  The two women sat at a long French pine kitchen table in the “Admiral’s House” on the grounds of the Naval Observatory on upper Massachusetts Avenue. The so-called Category II Historic Landmark house had been the official residence of the vice president and family ever since Congress decreed it to be so in 1974.

  Annabel picked up the faded Polaroid to examine it more closely. “You had so much … hair then,” Annabel said.

  “And less weight. Don’t be tactful.” Carole Aprile was the wife of the vice president of the United States, Joseph Aprile. “Can you believe we ever looked like that?”

  “No.”

  Carole Aprile, then Carole Peckham, and Annabel Reed, now Reed-Smith, had been college roommates. The photo showed them primed and painted for a dorm Halloween party.

  “Burn it,” said Annabel.

  “Never. I can always use it to blackmail you with Mac. More coffee?”

  “Thanks, no. So, Carole, tell me more about this intriguing assignment you’ve handed me.”

  Both women turned as a Secret Service agent passed outside the kitchen window. “I’m still not used to having strange men surrounding me day and night,” Carole said. Her husband and the president he served had come into office slightly less than a year ago.

  “We would have welcomed it back when that picture was taken,” Annabel said.

  “You bet. I’m so pleased you’ve agreed to serve on the commission, Annabel.”

  “I was flattered to be asked. Mac and I were pleasantly surprised when the president announced that the White House would have an arts commission. The arts weren’t on anyone’s priority list in the last administration.”

  “And still aren’t in Congress. Maybe we can change a few minds. This Caravaggio exhibition is a wonderful place to start.”

  “It must tickle you to see Caravaggio come to Washington,” Annabel said. “Your master’s thesis on him was a real valentine.”

  “Got an A, too. Well, an A-minus. He’s always fascinated me.”

  “He’s beginning to fascinate me, too, ever since you asked me to get involved. I’ve done some reading about Caravaggio and his work. A monumental talent—”

  “Just the word. And certifiable nut. Look, Annabel, let me be a little more candid than I was when I asked you to be my liaison to the National Gallery and the Caravaggio show. There’s more involved than I let on.”

  “Oh? I will have more coffee. Half a cup.”

  Carole poured. She’d excused the member of her household staff who’d stood by to serve the two old friends. Carole Aprile was known to be as much of a hands-on “second lady” as her husband, the vice president, was known to be more than an accessory to the president. Still, the fiftyish black woman hovered outside the kitchen in the event she was needed.

  “You’re probably aware of problems we’ve been having with the Italians. They accused one of our embassy people there of spying …”

  “I also read about the bribery charges against those defense contractors—”

  “Business as usual, they say, bribing foreign governments to get big contracts—”


  “And the drug-trafficking stories.”

  “And more. We’ve got a lot more going with Italy than most people think. We’ve also got a sizable Italian-American population, most of whom voted for this administration. The point is that we don’t need some scandal to come out of the Caravaggio exhibition. Cathy Eder is doing a good job as my official contact with the Gallery. But that’s the problem. She’s official. Not privy to everything going on behind closed doors over there. You, on the other hand, might be more readily accepted because of your stature in the arts. And as my college chum.”

  “It sounds a little as though you want me to … well, would ‘snoop’ be the appropriate word?”

  Carole smiled. “Not at all. Maybe a little. Court Whitney is an enigma. Do you know him?”

  “Barely. A few social meetings. I know Luther Mason a lot better.”

  Carole sat back and sighed. “Ah, dear, sweet Luther. I love him.”

  “So do I, in a metaphorical sense. He was very supportive when I opened my gallery. Still is, even though pre-Columbian art isn’t his thing.”

  “ ‘His thing.’ Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio. That’s his thing. If he isn’t the world’s leading authority on Caravaggio, he’s one of two or three. Curating this exhibition is the highlight of an already highlighted career. He’s in heaven.”

  “Good for him. You say Whitney is an enigma. Why?”

  “He’s hard to read. From what I hear, he’s doing a good job as the Gallery’s director. But Cathy told me last week she senses some sort of rift between Whitney and Luther. And the other senior curator, Paul Bishop.”

  “Artistic temperaments at odds?”

  “I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  “After I do a little snooping. Okay. I have my first meeting there tomorrow morning. I’ll report back.”

  “Great. I just want to be sure everything will go smoothly with the Caravaggio show. I’ll feel more secure knowing I have a trusted friend on the scene.”