Collar Robber (2 page)

Chapter Three

Cynthia Jakubek

We made it back to the Museum with no more drama. The receptionist promptly showed us into an anachronism. The Olivia Stannard Room featured a long, blond table that was all lines and angles with form-follows-function chairs around it, like you might see in a
Perry Mason
rerun. An oil portrait of President Eisenhower graced the north wall, and a painting depicting the Japanese surrender aboard the
USS Missouri
took up at least sixty square feet of the intersecting west wall. Heavy glass ashtrays sat on the table, with a cylinder of cigarettes in the center.

“No kidding?” Willy said. “We can smoke in here?”

“I'm guessing no.” I noted a flicker of relief cross Shifcos' face as I answered my client.

“But…?” Willy pointed at the cigarettes.

Fortunately for me, Tally strolled into the room at that moment through a discreet door under Ike's grinning face. Picking up the gist of Willy's protest, he saved me the trouble of explaining.

“Grace Stannard Dalhousie donated six-hundred-thousand dollars to the Museum in 1963, in memory of her mother, Olivia. One of the stipulations in the deed of gift was that this room would be kept in exactly the condition it was in on October 10, 1958, when Mrs. Stannard succumbed to a heart attack immediately after presiding over her last board meeting.”

“Oh,” Willy said.

“Ms. Huggens will be joining us presently.” Tally moved to a chair immediately to the right of the table's head. With his perfectly cut ash-gray blazer and navy blue slacks contrasting nicely with the green vest, he looked like he had been born to occupy chairs like that in rooms like this. “Please help yourselves to coffee or water, and feel free to find a seat.”

I went to the sideboard for coffee, and I took my time about it. I figured that Jennifer Stannard Huggens would let us cool our heels for at least ten minutes to punish us for my client's tardiness. I didn't particularly blame her, but I wanted to keep Willy under control in the interim. He'd let loose with some standard-issue Willytude on the way over, when we found red lights facing us for over five seconds from both directions at Fifth and Wood. “So
no one
gets to move! Great! It's like living in a Third World country!” His Jersey hustler routine could get old fast, and I didn't want him to blow up the negotiations before they started.

“Any for you, Tally?” I gestured toward him with the orange-topped carafe.

“No, thanks.” He smiled pleasantly and did the pocket-watch thing again. If it said the same thing my Citizen wristwatch did, he saw that we were now just past three-ten, on the verge of starting our meeting forty-five minutes late.

Tally and I had intersected on another matter I was handling, which he'd gratuitously alluded to with his “free-thinker” crack. So far I had him down for a bronze medal in the asshole Olympics. This afternoon, though, I was counting on him. Huggens was the third managing director he'd worked under in his not-quite-fifteen years as inside counsel for the Museum. The first director had had a reputation as an old-school, old-money, model of rectitude. The second had wanted to jack up the endowment without a lot of chat about technicalities along the way. Huggens was a by-the-book pragmatist who dreamed of someday reading in the
New York Times
that Pitt MCM had put together a world-class collection.

Tally had gotten along smoothly with all three. He'd tacked nimbly to the prevailing winds, deftly shaping his advice and his formal opinions to get his client of the moment wherever she wanted to go. And in all three cases he'd generally gotten her there without abrading the delicate susceptibilities of heirs, trustees—or courts. That made my job simple: make Tally think Jennifer Stannard Huggens wanted to spend Transoxana's money to save a painting for the Museum.

I choked back vestigial blue-collar resentment as Huggens entered with a gracious smile and a firm handshake for each of us. Not her fault she'd been born blond and rich. She'd worked full time at real jobs in the twelve years since completing her second degree—not as hard as I had, but not many people outside Chinese sweatshops do. I could tell she charmed Willy right out of his socks. For a second I was afraid he was just going to hand her the goods right then and there.

Once we finally took our seats, Tally spent thirty seconds on the usual thanks-for-coming-and-welcome-to-the-Museum palaver. Then he looked at me.

“It's your party, Ms. Jakubek. What's your pleasure?”

I began by passing around a redacted photocopy of a handwritten German bill of sale dated 23 March 1938. It documented Dietrich Heinzen's purchase of a painting titled
Maiden in Apron
from Scholeim Himmelfarb for eight thousand marks. Or at least it would have documented that purchase if I hadn't blacked some stuff out. I had an English translation attached to it, with blanks instead of blackouts. I'd stapled the two-page packets into blue construction-paper backings like lawyers used for Very Important Documents fifty years ago. I hoped that would make them seem more like something worth the kind of money my client wanted.

“Why have you blacked out the names of the seller and buyer and the painting sold?” Huggens asked.

“Because I don't want to tempt Transoxana to try to track down a duplicate original of this bill of sale instead of buying the one Mr. Szulz is offering.”

“So the painting isn't the one the Museum owns, Klimt's
Eros Rising
?”

“No.”

“Then what good would this document be to us?”

Tally came in right on cue.

“Comparable sale would be my guess.”

“Explain. Please.” Huggens added the “please” as an afterthought, but give her credit: she got it in.

“On the tenth of October, 1937, Gustav Wehring sold
Eros Rising
to a Swiss industrialist for seven thousand marks. Not chump-change, but it might strike many as a derisory sum for a painting purchased by a generous American benefactor for three million dollars in 1973, appraised at more than twenty million when he donated it to the Museum in 1996, and valued at fifty million today.”

“Comes the dawn.” Huggens gave Tally the kind of smile that high school teachers offer students who combine clever with earnest. “Wehring's heirs are claiming that he sold
Eros Rising
for far less than its real worth in 1937 because he was forced to by the Nazis, making that sale illegitimate. But if a comparable painting sold around the same time for something like the same price and without any hint of coercion, that would show that the original sale of
Eros Rising
was a legitimate, arm's-length transaction at a fair price.”

“Exactly.”

Huggens turned her plum-colored eyes toward me.

“And you're saying your client could prove that happened?”

“No.” I wanted to be real clear on this next part. “I'm saying Mr. Szulz can sell you documentation of a roughly contemporaneous sale, in the same price range, of a painting that has gotten appraisals in the same ballpark as appraisals of
Eros Rising
at around the same time. What that proves will be up to you.”

“Or up to a court.” Huggens' smile now had
Gotcha!
written all over it.

“Not exactly,” Shifcos said, shifting her gaze to Huggens. “The statutes of limitation have run on all possible legal theories that could be used to challenge the sales. You have a bulletproof defense to any legal action seeking to recover
Eros Rising
—unless you choose to waive that defense voluntarily.”

“What about the Washington Convention?” Huggens' eyes darted back and forth between Shifcos and me, as if we were in the middle of a long rally in a tennis match. “Doesn't that treaty waive the statute of limitations and other technical defenses? And hasn't the United States signed it?”

“The United States has signed the Washington Convention, but the Pitt MCM hasn't,” Shifcos said. “The Convention binds most European museums because they're essentially government institutions. The Pittsburgh Museum of Twentieth-Century Art is a private entity and therefore not bound by the treaty.”

“Ms. Huggens is aware of that,” Tally said, lying with angelic sincerity. “But ethical private American museums have informally agreed to abide by the Washington Convention's waiver of technical defenses as a moral obligation in cases where they feel that a claim for a particular work of art is valid on the merits.”

Shifcos gave Tally and Huggens a cocked eyebrow, which I roughly translated as:
Transoxana Insurance Company isn't in the moral obligation business. You blow off a killer defense, we don't write a check. Save your souls on your own dime.
This struck me as a good time to jump back into the conversation.

“I agree with Mr. Rand. Especially the ‘on the merits' part. If the Museum decides that the claim for
Eros Rising
is meritorious, it may feel morally compelled to waive technical defenses. But if the Museum itself reaches the opposite conclusion, there'd be no reason for any waiver and therefore no basis for a judge even to look at the bill of sale Mr. Szulz is offering—much less decide what it proves or doesn't prove. You're the sole judge of that. All you'll ever have to say in court is, ‘Statute of limitations, we win.'”

Willy beamed. “Is this a great country or what?”

Chapter Four

Cynthia Jakubek

Tally looked at my client like he was a glass of Ripple at a lobster dinner. Then he smiled at me.

“Fair enough. Even if we're judge and jury, though, we're not just going to go through the motions. We'll take a good faith look at the heirs' claim—and we can't verify anything with a redacted photocopy and an interesting story.”

“You won't have to. For two hundred thousand dollars Mr. Szulz will provide you with an authenticated duplicate original of the 1938 bill of sale for a comparable painting. You can verify it to your heart's content.”

That answer earned me my second
Gotcha!
grin from Huggens.

“And how much do we pay Mr. Szulz if we decide that your documentation isn't enough to validate that 1938 sale?”

Yeah, like THAT'S going to happen. “Good faith look” my ass. All you want is enough paper to cover your fanny and we both know it
. Saying that out loud would have been rude, so I said something else.

“In that case, of course, you will feel morally obligated to turn
Eros Rising
over to the heirs who are demanding it. If you surrender the painting within three months, Mr. Szulz will return seventy-five percent of your payment; within six months, fifty percent; within nine months, twenty-five percent. If you keep the painting for at least two hundred seventy-one days after we give you the original bill of sale, then Mr. Szulz keeps all the money.”

“Two hundred thousand is a lot of money,” Tally said.

“Less than one-half of one percent of fifty million.”

“Sorry.” Shifcos shook her head. “Two hundred is too high. I think it's out of line, and in any case I don't have authority for a payment that large.”

Last, best, and final offer. Take it or leave it
. I wanted to say that more than I've wanted anything in a long time—more than I'd wanted a cigarette after dinner the first day I quit smoking, nine years earlier. But I choked the words back and shrugged at Shifcos.

“I understand. As a goodwill gesture, Mr. Szulz will wait twenty-four hours before transferring the document in question to any other buyer.” I paused to look at Tally and then back at Shifco. “No charge for that accommodation.”

“Ms. Jakubek,” Tally asked, “are you representing to us that there is another prospective buyer in the picture?”

Opening my briefcase, I took out three copies of a four-page contract and passed them around. I hadn't bothered with blue backings for these.

“This is an agreement spelling out the terms I just offered. As you'll see, it disclaims all representations and warranties except for the authenticity of the bill of sale.” Then I caught Tally's eye and held it. “But if you didn't think there was another buyer in the picture, you wouldn't have insisted on having this meeting on such short notice.”

Tally, Shifcos, and Huggens eye-fenced for about six seconds before Huggens spoke.

“Would you mind stepping outside for a few minutes? We'd like to caucus.”

Chapter Five

Cynthia Jakubek

“Why didn't you use that ‘take-it-or-leave-it' line with them? I love when you do that.”

“Tally might have thought his manhood was on the line if I'd said that. It takes a very self-confident man not to let his insecurities and his mom issues and all that crap get in the way when a woman hands him an ultimatum—especially if he's sitting between two other women.”

“But you would have been giving our ultimatum to one of the chicks, not Tally.”

“Tally is our real target.” Didn't appreciate “chicks,” but I had thick skin and bigger fish to fry. “They're caucusing so Shifcos can ask Huggens how much the Museum will chip in. Tally is the key to that discussion.”

“Got it.” Willy rubbed his hands together. “We want him thinking from behind his eyebrows instead of his zipper.”

“Bingo.”

“You gotta gimme a pass on ‘chicks,'” Willy said then, a bit sheepishly. “It kinda just slipped out. You know, Willy being Willy.”

“Speaking of which, try to keep the Willyisms on ice once we're back within earshot of the big guy.”

“I hear ya. I noticed he wasn't coming on to you while we walked back over here, so I figure he's gotta be gay, right? I'll watch my mouth.”

“Or maybe he just loves whoever has the wedding ring matching the one he's wearing. But what concerns me is the other ring, on the little finger of his right hand. Silver signet ring with a Torah-scroll-and-candle design.”

“Blond hair, blue eyes, the build of a small forward—and you think he's Jewish?”

“I don't think he got that ring for being the best altar boy at St. Stanislaus. Might be a good idea to skip light-hearted remarks about stormtroopers taking five-finger discounts on fine art.”

“You got it.” He nodded vigorously. “No wisecracks until we've got Transoxana's signature on the dotted line.”

I sensed movement behind us and turned back toward the inside of the reception area. A substantial woman in her mid-fifties moved ponderously toward us.

“Not sure what her problem is,” Willy muttered, “but I think we can rule out anorexia.”

I sighed.
No wisecracks
. Right.

“Ms. Huggens asked me to tell you that they're ready for you in the conference room,” she said seven seconds later when she reached us.

I thanked her and herded Willy back toward the hallway that led to the Oliva Stannard et cetera. I wanted to put distance between us and the woman before Willy dropped another impulsive
mot
.

“Think we've got a deal?” he asked.

“Nope. If we had a deal, Tally would have come out for us.”

I was right. As soon as we were seated, Shifcos squared up and looked directly across the table at me. She had her forearms on the table and her hands folded lightly in front of her. No tension. Her face with its peaches-and-cream complexion seemed open and empathetic. What I read in her eyes wasn't hard-nosed bitchiness or cold ruthlessness but something scarier: confident certainty. She
knew
that well south of two hundred thousand dollars would mean more to my client than fifty million meant to her company. Even more important, she
knew
that the Museum would put more on the table than it had while Willy and I were passing time in the reception area.

“We need a week. Possibly less, but a week to be safe.”

Shit. With someone maybe following Willy around, delay struck me as a bad idea. But we couldn't look like we were afraid to give them a chance to check out Willy's story. At the same time, it might be interesting to know how much they wanted it.

“Twenty-four hours was free. Weeks are going for ten thousand each these days.”

“Five thousand.” Shifcos shook her head, the way an assistant principal might when telling you she's sorry but she has to give you detention. “We appreciate your position, but five is the best we can do. And if we do make a deal, the five thousand counts against our final payment.”

“Well we
are
going to make a deal so it's a zero-cost concession for you anyway. Let's just split the difference.”

Again with the head-shake. Again with the certainty.

“Five thousand. Last, best, and final offer. Take it or leave it.”

“We'll take it,” Willy said.

Willy can be a pain in the butt, but he is a self-confident pain in the butt.