Cold Hit (21 page)

“Yeah, well, Youngworth gave some Boston news reporter a few chips to support his claim that he could produce the goods. Our experts looked them over. Not authentic, not from the missing painting. That’s the latest on the Gardner case.”

“Who was your expert? Got a name for us?”

“No idea who it is. We’ll get it for you tomorrow.”

We spent the next half hour sorting through documents to see which ones I was legally entitled to examine at this point. At six fifteen, Mercer suggested we close up. “Let’s get over to the funeral parlor before the seven o’clock visiting hours. Maybe we can chat up some of Marco Varelli’s friends and family.”

Varelli’s wake was in a small, dark funeral home on Sullivan Street, in the narrow block just north of Houston. I had been in the neighborhood before, which had been home to Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, whom I had often seen there walking up and down the street in his bathrobe, feigning insanity, before his recent conviction and trip to federal prison.

I stepped out of Mercer’s air-conditioned car and onto the steamy pavement in front of Zuppelo’s funeral parlor. “You think they got a TV in there?” Mike asked.

“You are
not
watching
Jeopardy
! in front of the mourners,” I said. “Call your mother when we leave here and ask her what the question was, okay? Live without it for one night.”

The three of us presented ourselves to the manager of the mortuary. “The only one here at the moment is Mrs. Varelli. You’re a little early. Are you friends?”

“Distant relatives,” Chapman answered.

Mr. Zuppelo looked skeptically from Chapman to me, then frowned at Mercer Wallace’s dark skin.

“Northern Italian,” Mike said. “With a trace of Sicilian.”

He flashed his badge at Zuppelo, who led us into a dingy sitting area. The odor of more than thirty flower arrangements — mostly orange gladioluses and yellow carnations — was especially stifling in the intense late-summer heat. The open casket was in an alcove at the far end of the room, and Mrs. Varelli sat beside it, clutching a set of rosary beads. The jacket of her gray suit seemed to overwhelm her delicate shoulders, and she looked as if she had cried all the tears she was capable of shedding in the past twenty-four hours.

Mike nudged me and told me to introduce myself. “See if you can get her outta this hothouse and away from her husband’s body. Bond with her, Coop. Be sensitive — if you still remember how to do that.”

I left Mike and Mercer at the doorway and approached the widow. “Mrs. Varelli, I’m Alexandra Cooper. I’m—”

“So nice to meet you, Miss Cooper. You were, perhaps, a friend of Marco’s?”

“Actually, no, Mrs. Varelli. Would you like to come inside with me, to another room, and I’ll explain why I’m here?”

“Sixty-two years, Miss Cooper. Never apart for one night in sixty-two years. What am I going to do without him?” She grabbed the side of the coffin and started to talk to her husband. “I’m just going to be a few minutes, Marco. I go with this young lady to see what she’s going to try to sell me.”

She extended her hand, and I grasped the white cotton glove and braced her elbow, helping her to her feet. “Everyone thinks I just got off the boat from Napoli. Do I want a mausoleum, do I want a condominium, do I want a ticket back to the old country? I was born in Newark, New Jersey. Lived here all my life. These people think I’m stupid. Think I’m going to give away Marco’s paintings or turn his studio into the YMCA.

“All I want is for Marco to get up and walk around the corner with me to have our dinner at Da Silvano, sitting on the sidewalk, like we did almost every evening in the warm weather. Artists would look at Marco with respect, Marco would look at the young ladies with longing, I’d have a couple of glasses of wine, and together we’d go home very happy. It’s awfully lonely after sixty-two years, Miss Cooper. You want to sell me something, or you want to buy?”

As she talked, I walked her past Mike and Mercer and into an empty room decorated in somber, waiting-for-the-next-body tones of neutral palettes. There was an elegance to the old woman, with her perfectly erect carriage, fragile body, and very keen mind.

“I’m an assistant district attorney, Mrs. Varelli. A prosecutor.”

“Somebody make a crime here?”

“I’m working on another case, a murder case. A woman who was killed last week. I understand that Mr. Varelli had done work with her. We — the detectives and I — had planned to come see him later this week. Then we learned about his death. I’m so sorry for your great loss. I don’t mean to burden you now, but maybe you could give me the name of your husband’s assistant, who could tell—”

Her back was straight as a rod as she poked herself in the chest. “I am the only one he trusted with his work, Miss Cooper. He had several workmen who helped him with the physical labor, the movement of large pieces, the arrangement of supplies, and from time to time he had an apprentice. But there is nothing
I
didn’t know about his business. Who is this lady who was killed?”

“Caxton. Denise Caxton.”

Mrs. Varelli turned her face ninety degrees, away from me. She was silent.

“You knew her, then?”

“It’s not good to speak ill of the dead, is it?”

“What kind of business did she have with your husband?”

“The same as everyone, Miss Cooper. You know about Marco?”

“I have to admit that I had never heard his name until this week. But all the people I’ve talked to say what a wonderful man he was.”

“A genius. Did they say that, too? Mostly, he was a genius.”

I nodded to her.

“As a boy, in Firenze, he studied art at the Accademia. Paint is what he loved — not the canvas, but the substance that made color — and he had even more passion for that than for beautiful women. But he never did it so well himself — the drawing or the creation. What he did brilliantly was to find the beauty in the paintings of others who had gone before him.

“Marco could stand in his atelier for hours, some eager dealer at his heels watching, working on what appeared to be a dirty old piece of burlap. He’d fasten his binocular headset on — that was the only thing that even looked like it connected him to this century. Gently, ever so gently, he would swab at the tired colors with a little touch of cotton.

“Behind him, some greedy collector or dealer would be urging him on. ‘What do you see, Marco? Who do you think it is, Marco?’ You have no idea what treasures he has found over the years. Even so recently, his eyes saw things through the filth of centuries that no one else could dream possible.”

“And his illness — he was still working until recently, even with his heart condition?”

Mrs. Varelli snapped at me. “Illness what?”

“I, uh, I knew that a doctor had come when he collapsed.”

“A touch of arthritis, that’s what the doctor was for. Marco’s skill depended on two things, his eye and his hand. Neither one of us — no pills, no machines, no medicines. He only had a doctor to help him when his hand ached from the arthritis and it hurt him to hold a scalpel for so long.
Un po’ di vino
, Marco believed in. The medicine from the grapes.”

“It was his heart that gave out,” I said, hoping it was gentle enough a reminder of what the doctor had told the M.E.’s pathologist.

“There was nothing wrong with Marco’s heart. His heart was so good, so very strong.” Mrs. Varelli became tearful.

“Were you always in the studio with your husband?”

“No, I was rarely there. We have an apartment in the same building. We had our coffee together in the morning, then he would go upstairs to work. Back home for lunch and a nap. Then more work, always. Sometimes into the evening, if he found himself in the middle of a surprise or a painting he had come to adore. Then he would come home to bathe himself, to get rid of the oil and varnish and streaks. Together we would go off for dinner, alone or with friends. A simple life, Miss Cooper, but a very rich one.”

“Had you ever met Denise Caxton?”

“It was her husband I met first. I can hardly remember when, it was so long ago. He was not a warm man, but he was very good to Marco. Lowell Caxton bought a portrait at an auction house in London, maybe thirty years ago. It had been miscatalogued in England and sold as an unidentified portrait of a young girl. Lowell bought it only because he said it reminded him of his wife, whichever one that happened to be at the time. He didn’t believe it had any value, and he brought it to Marco simply to clean it up to be hung.

“But Marco thought she was a beauty, too. ‘Overpainted,’ he complained to me every time he came downstairs. He didn’t use many words, Marco. He didn’t need to with me. Days and nights he worked on it, until there was life in the child’s face and her petite blue dress had texture and the warm glow of silk. One afternoon, Marco came down for lunch. I give him his soup and he looks across the table. ‘ Gainsborough,’ he said to me, ‘it’s a Gainsborough.’ Every museum in England wanted to buy it back.

“Many people would just have paid Marco the price he asked for the restoration, and still my husband would have been happy. Lowell Caxton did that. But then he came back the next week, when Marco had come home for his lunch. I let him in the house — that’s when I met him. He had under his arm a small package wrapped in brown paper. It was a Titian — very small, very beautiful. We have it still. You come to my home, you’ll see it.”

“In your apartment? A Titian?”

“But so very little. It’s a study, just a piece of one of his great works. You know
The Rape of Europa
?”

Of course I knew it. Everyone who had ever taken an art course in college had studied it. Rubens had called it the greatest painting in the world. And I had seen it many times because it was part of the collection at the Gardner Museum. Was this just another coincidence? “When did you say Mr. Caxton gave you the Titian?”

Mrs. Varelli thought for a moment. “Thirty, thirty-five years ago.”

Before Denise, before the Gardner Museum theft.

“And Denise Caxton, was she a client of Mr. Varelli’s?”

“First she came many times with her husband. Then alone. Then with other people — maybe dealers, maybe buyers. I never met them in the studio. Sometimes Marco would tell stories about them.”

“Did he feel the same way you did about Mrs. Caxton?”

Mrs. Varelli tossed back her head and laughed. “Of course not. She was young, she was quite beautiful, and she knew how to make an old man feel wonderful. She’d practice her Italian on Marco. She’d flatter him and tease him and bring him fascinating paintings to examine. Always looking for gold where there was none. Wasting Marco’s time, if you ask me.”

“Do you know who the men were that she brought recently?”

“No, no. For this, I give you the names of my husband’s workmen. Maybe they were introduced or can tell you what these men looked like. You give me your card, and next week I call you with their telephone numbers.”

“Is that the only reason you didn’t like Denise?”

“I don’t need many reasons. She was trouble. Even Marco thought she was trouble.”

“How, Mrs. Varelli? What did he tell you about her?”

“Like I said, Miss Cooper, Marco didn’t use a lot of words. But these past few months, on the days that Mrs. Caxton came to see him, he didn’t come home smiling like he used to. She was trying to get him to work on something that upset him, gave him
agita
. That he did say. ‘At this age, I don’t need any
agita
. ’”

“But didn’t he get any more specific than that?”

“Not with me. I was just glad he didn’t want to work with her any longer. He didn’t seem to like the people she was bringing around.”

“Did Mr. Varelli talk about Rembrandt ever?”

“How could one make his life in this world and not talk about Rembrandt?”

I was grateful that she had not responded by saying what a stupid question I had asked. “I mean recently, and in connection with Denise Caxton.”

“You don’t know, then, that Marco is” — her chest heaved visibly as she breathed deeply and changed the wording. “Marco was the world’s leading expert on Rembrandt, no? Perhaps you’re too young to know the story.”

Mrs. Varelli went on. “Rembrandt’s most famous group portrait is called
The Night Watch
. Have you ever seen it?”

“Yes, I have. It’s in Amsterdam, at the Rijksmuseum.”

“Exactly. Then maybe you know that originally, more than three hundred years ago, it had a different name.”

“No, I’ve only heard it called by this one.”

“When he painted it, it was entitled
The Shooting Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq
. Over the decades, it became so covered with grime that people assumed that the setting was at nighttime — the name you know it by. Well, after World War Two was ended — in about nineteen forty-seven — when Marco was just getting a reputation as a restorer, he was part of the team of experts put together to restore the enormous painting. During the cleaning, it lightened brilliantly. That’s the first time anyone in the twentieth century realized that it wasn’t a night scene at all.

“Marco was the only member of that restoration group still alive fifty years later. When anyone — and I mean
anyone
, Miss Cooper — has a question about the attribution of a Rembrandt today, it was only my Marco who knew the truth. Monarchs, presidents, millionaires — they all came to see Marco Varelli about their paintings.”

“Denise Caxton, did she ever bring him a Rembrandt?”

“This I don’t know.”

“Did your husband ever say that she or anyone else asked him to look at paint chips recently?”

Again Mrs. Varelli looked at me as though I had no brain at all.

“That’s what my husband did every day of his life. Paint, paint chips, paint streaks, paint fragments. From this, Miss Cooper, come masterpieces.”

“Excuse me, Alex. Could I see you a minute?” Mercer was speaking to me from the hallway.

“May I go back to Marco now?”

“If you’d give us another few minutes, Mrs. Varelli, we’ll be out of your way,” he said to her.

I thanked her for her graciousness at such a terrible time and walked back to the room in which the coffin rested. Mike was standing next to the dead man’s head.