Tomorrow's Vengeance (24 page)

‘That's great, Izzy,' I said, trying to infuse my voice with an enthusiasm that was being sapped by the little men in my head, who were now hurling miniature thunderbolts at one another. I scooped two aspirin out of the sink and chewed them up whole. ‘It's really great. I'll let Hutch know. It might make a difference.'

‘You'll call him? You'll call him now?'

‘Just as soon as I hang up the phone.'

After Izzy thanked me profusely and wished me a goodnight I staggered down to the kitchen, filled the teakettle with water and switched it on. While I waited for the water to boil, I texted my brother-in-law.

9/18/43 = Sabbath. BS forged?

By morning my headache had thankfully vanished. When I checked my phone there was an I heart U text from Paul and Hutch had texted me back – K. Thx – but I didn't hear another peep from my brother-in-law for three more days.

When the call finally came, it was early morning and I was in the shower. I put the phone on speaker. ‘Hutch, glad you called. Do you have any news?'

‘I do,' he said, sounding as pleased as if he'd just been invited to the White House for dinner. ‘Can you find Izzy and bring her to my office at, say, ten this morning?'

I grabbed a towel and started rubbing briskly at my hair. ‘I don't see why not. Can you give me a head's up?'

‘It's very good news, Hannah. The Baltimore Art Gallery might well have come to this decision on their own, but the information you gave me about the date on the bill of sale was probably the clincher. Izzy is getting her paintings back.'

I leaned against the cool tile wall, slid down it until I was sitting on the bathmat. ‘All three?'

‘All three.'

‘I don't believe it.'

‘Believe it. The fax came through this morning. I'm holding the letter right here in my hot little hand.'

‘Izzy and her family are going to be over the moon.'

‘It won't be immediate, you understand. There'll be papers to sign, and …' He paused. ‘Look, you'd better prepare Izzy for a press conference. This is big news and there's going to be a lot of hoopla. The gallery's publicity machine is going to swing into action. Izzy's face is going to be all over the media.'

‘Shall I tell her to buy a new dress then?'

‘Absolutely.'

‘How about the other paintings? There were thirteen in the Piccio sale, as I recall.'

‘They could be anywhere by now, Hannah, and tough to track down. The best thing to do is register them as stolen. There's the Art Loss Register in London, plus databases at Interpol, Scotland Yard and the FBI. The next time someone tries to sell one it should crop up in the database. But don't worry, I'm going to take care of that for her.' He paused, and I could almost hear him smile. ‘No charge.'

‘How about the paintings pictured in her mother's scrapbook, Hutch, the one hundred and ten paintings that weren't part of the Piccio sale?'

‘Let's hope the scrapbook turns up. Right now, the only evidence we have of the Rossi family's ownership of all hundred and twenty-three works is on that inventory Piccio made back in 1943, and some of it's rather vague. “Still Life with Oranges” or “Study #3” doesn't tell us very much, even if we know who the artist was. And another thing,' he said. ‘A few of the works in the Rossi collection had never been cataloged. They were painted when the artist was a relative unknown, so nobody knew the works even existed, let alone what they looked like.'

‘Hutch, do Raniero and Filomena Buccho know about this?'

‘Unavoidable. The researchers contacted them both, first individually and then together. Just so you know, there's going to be no blame attached to the Buccho family. It's impossible to say what Adriano Buccho knew when he bought those paintings back in fifty-eight, of course, but we're convinced that Raniero and his sister had no idea that the paintings were stolen. It's just their rotten luck that both Ysabelle and the paintings ended up in the same museum at the same time.'

‘I'm relieved to hear it. The last thing Raniero needs right now is another charge hanging over his head.'

‘Has he been arrested for Masud Abaza's murder, then?'

‘Not yet. He's back at work, but his sister expects him to be carted away in handcuffs at any minute.'

‘Too bad.' After a beat, my brother-in-law added more jauntily than the turn in our conversation warranted, ‘And if he needs an attorney, you have my number. I'll have a referral for him.'

Because we were celebrating Izzy and I ordered wine with our crab cakes in the dining room that day. Filomena hadn't been on duty when we came in, but she showed up at our table, chilled Sauvignon blanc and corkscrew in hand. ‘Susanna said you asked for wine. How nice! It is a special occasion?'

Uh oh, I thought, this might be awkward, but Izzy dove right in.

‘It is,' Izzy said. ‘As you may have heard from the Baltimore Art Gallery, I'm getting my paintings back.'

‘Oh! I am so very glad.' Filomena set the wine bottle down on the table and started to remove the seal. ‘You must believe me when I tell you, my brother and I, we had
no
idea. No idea at all.'

‘Did your grandfather buy any of my father's other paintings, Filomena, maybe at another sale?' Izzy's voice cracked. ‘
Abba
had so many.'

Filomena jammed the point of the corkscrew into the cork and began twisting. ‘I know what the lawyer said, Mrs Milanesi. But when my father died there were only those three. The boy with the dog, the still life with the water jug and lemons, and that nice one of the girl holding a bowl of cherries.' She extracted the cork. ‘That was my favorite.'

‘Only three?' Izzy asked.

Filomena scowled. ‘You don't believe me?'

Izzy cheeks flushed and she apologized. ‘Sorry, I didn't mean for it to come out that way.'

‘There were only the three. I swear to you that. If my father had owned more than three, I would have sold them all, and Raniero and I would have no trouble paying for the restaurant. You see?'

I did see. Hutch had told us there had been a lot of interest in the Piccio sale. Clearly, another buyer or buyers had purchased the rest of Giacomo Rossi's paintings from Vittorio Piccio. If Izzy had the scrapbook, Hutch could supplement the data he was entering about the paintings in the international databases by including indentifying photographs. But even with the inventory, the scrapbook and the databases she'd have to wait for the paintings to surface again, which might be years, or even never.

Filomena screwed the bottle into a pewter bucket filled with ice. ‘You call me if you need anything else, OK?' She turned to leave, thought better of it, and turned back. ‘I am so happy for you, Mrs Milanesi. It is not right what the Nazis did to your father.'

Izzy went home to take a nap while I trotted over to Spa Paradiso for a good long soak before it was time for me to show up in the memory unit. I'd promised Nancy I'd look at her drawings, not that she'd remember, but a promise was a promise. I eased into the hot tub until the water was up to my chin; the bubbles danced, exploding all around me, tickling my nose.

Now that the question of Izzy's paintings had been settled, my mind wandered back to whoever had murdered Masud Abaza. Had the murderer died in the Blackwalnut Hall fish tank? Or was his killer still at large? What was Safa's role in all this? Did she say something to Masud that inadvertently set into motion a chain of events leading to his murder?

Nor was Masud's slate squeaky clean. Why hadn't he reported Raniero's jiggery-pokery with the meat supplier?

I closed my eyes, relaxed my limbs and focused on my mantra –
kerim, kerim, kerim.

The jets had shut off automatically and the water had grown as tepid as my brain so I climbed out of the hot tub, dried off and headed to the locker room to get dressed.

When I arrived at the memory unit Nancy was busy, sitting happily with Eric in the lounge watching television. On the screen Richie Cunningham was making out with Fonzie's girlfriend. This wasn't going to end well, I thought with a grin. I hadn't seen
Happy Days
since I was in college, so I sat down for a minute to reminisce and – guilty – liberate some Hershey's Kisses from the candy bowl.

At the break, WBAL reported about the lack of progress in the Abaza murder. While I watched, sucking on a chocolate, a picture of Masud filled the screen.

‘Look, at that,' Nancy said, waving a finger badly in need of a manicure. ‘That's the man from the garden.' She smiled and patted Eric's knee. ‘He looks like Frank.'

Except for their abundant salt-and-pepper hair, I didn't think Masud looked the least bit like Jerry. But … hadn't Nancy mentioned seeing a man in the garden before? And Lillian had heard noises over by the trees … What if it wasn't her ‘babies' she heard ‘squabbling?' I had to draw Nancy away from the television while she appeared to be alert and relatively lucid.

I would tell Paul later that the Devil made me do it.

The television, I knew, was controlled by a remote kept out of residents' reach in the nurse's office. With Nurse Heather as a willing co-conspirator we switched off the TV.

‘Oh, no!' Heather cried. ‘The cable seems to have gone out.'

Eric rose stiffly to his feet. ‘Fuck that,' he said.

‘Nancy,' I said, materializing at her elbow. ‘Weren't you going to show me your drawings?'

Back in Nancy's room I easily found the portfolio Mindy had mentioned resting on the bookshelf next to a basket of postcards that Nancy – or one of her family members – had been saving.

Mindy had been right. The pencil drawings were perfection. I recognized Nancy's dog, Rosco, the Buddah in the garden and a magnificent tulip poplar. For the poplar, she'd used the sides of the paper to draw closeups of its four-lobed, heart-shaped leaves and its distinctive tulip-shaped blossoms. There were seven drawings of the tree in all, but one in particular captured my attention. Standing under the umbrella of its branches, pressed up against its slightly furrowed bark, a couple stood, locked in an embrace. The woman's back was to the artist, while the man's head was bowed. His hair had been meticulously rendered – Nancy'd drawn every strand – and it certainly could be Masud, but in spite of the detail, the couple was too far away to identify.

Holding the drawing I wandered over to the window and pulled the drapes aside. In a corner formed by the hedge of the Tranquility Garden where it met the wall of the secret garden the dementia patients used stood a lush tulip poplar, a twin to the one in the drawing in my hand. A perfect spot for a rendezvous, I thought, tucked out of sight of anyone except the patients here in the memory unit. If they noticed any hanky-panky, who were they going to tell? And who would believe them?

I leaned forward, propped my elbows up on the sill, laced my fingers and rested my chin on top of them. ‘The garden's really beautiful at this time of year, don't you think so?'

‘I love gardens,' Nancy said. ‘But Frank does the weeding because my knees are so bad.'

‘I don't see Frank in the garden today. I wonder where he is?'

Nancy tapped the glass. ‘He likes it there.'

‘Where?' I asked her. ‘By the cherry tree?'

‘No, the
liriodendron tulipifera
.'

‘Ah, the tulip poplar. Does he stand there often, Frank, I mean?'

‘It is what it is,' she said cryptically. Suddenly she turned to me, her eyes wide and wild. ‘Where's Frank?'

I reached out and patted her hand. Poor Nancy. If Jerry wasn't where she could actually see him it was as if ‘Frank' had vanished. Although sometimes yesterday made an appearance, tomorrow, tonight, this afternoon, soon … those concepts seemed foreign to her. ‘You ate breakfast with Frank,' I fibbed, and hated myself for doing it. ‘He's probably in the bathroom.'

‘It's not fair,' she said after a moment.

‘What's not fair?'

‘If she can have a boyfriend, I can have a boyfriend!'

‘She?'

‘That cheerleader. Think's she's so smart!' Nancy drew out the ‘O' in so, turning it into four syllables – O-O-O-O – wagging her head from side to side as she spoke.

I decided to wait her out. After a bit, she said, ‘It's not allowed, you know. Teachers aren't supposed to mess around with students.'

‘So, you saw a teacher messing around with a cheerleader?'

‘Oh, yes, I certainly did.'

‘What does the cheerleader look like?' I asked, not really hoping for an answer that would make any sense.

‘I see her all the time, that blonde,' Nancy said. ‘“Only her hairdresser knows for sure!”' she sing-songed. ‘Bitch.'

Somewhere in Nancy's past a cheerleader had done her wrong, and she wasn't about to forget it.

‘Where do you see the cheerleader?' I asked, hoping to get her back on track.

‘She has a board job. In the dining hall. At least
I
don't have to wait tables.' She gave me a slow wink. ‘My father is very rich.'

So, Nancy was back in college. I'd waited tables at Oberlin College – Dascomb Hall, if you'd like to know – and I'd often felt looked down upon by the more privileged few. Oh, the tricks I played when they got my goat! Maybe Nancy's cheerleader had done the same to her.

‘She was supposed to be working, but no, she was having sex. And I know sex when I see it,' Nancy said dreamily.

It wasn't Jerry having sex with a pretty blonde in the garden, I knew, but someone Nancy thought looked like Jerry. Masud Abaza? ‘The man from the garden,' she had said when Masud's picture had popped up on the television screen. And unless I was mistaken, the only person working the dining room who would qualify as a cheerleader waiting tables was our own young blonde, Filomena.