Happy birthday, 1926. What secrets would the new year keep, and which ones would finally be unraveled?
Joe unwrapped his scarf as he made his way through the marble lobby. Passing the stairs to the basement, he heard a few jailed men ushering in the new year by rattling their mesh steel cages. Before the night was over, every one of those cells would be full. They always were on this night.
At his desk, he removed his coat. Slapping his notebook on the blotter, he wrote in it what Big Red had told him, then flipped back through his notes from the Hotel Astor.
Then he pulled out the desk drawer and thumbed through the files until he came to the ones related to the forgeries. After rewriting his notes from tonight and tucking them into a folder, he flipped back to the first reports he’d filed once Lauren had started consulting with him.
Frustration surged that he still hadn’t found the art buyer Daniel Bradford. Bradford had to be an alias not yet registered with the police. Joe withdrew another file folder, this one containing all the information he had on Bradford, scant though it was.
—Buyer who supplies pieces for Tomkins.
—Private dealer for Thomas Sanderson, who purchased from him the set of four canopic jars.
—Physical description, given by Mr. Sanderson on Dec. 5, 1925:
About 5′11″. Grey hair, brown eyes. In his sixties. A gentleman’s hands, manicured fingernails. Muscle twitches under left eye when agitated.
Joe stared at the description. How many men in Manhattan were in their sixties and had grey hair, brown eyes, and trimmed fingernails? That nervous twitch wasn’t something that would show up in a photograph or measurement, even if they had that. He could be any one of the men Joe saw a hundred times a day. He could be Dr. Daniel DeVries, for pity’s sake, were it not for the fact that Joe already knew he was a surgeon.
A surgeon who, like all other surgeons, had a gentleman’s hands and neatly manicured fingernails.
A surgeon who’d studied art in Italy and continued to paint with those long, steady fingers.
A surgeon who happened to be on the board of an organization that had sold a forged antiquity.
Whose first name happened to be Daniel.
That was a lot of coincidences.
Unbuttoning his cuffs, Joe rolled up his sleeves and pulled out theprovenance documents for the forgeries owned by Thomas Sanderson, Sal Caravello, and Newell St. John. The latter had never been under investigation, but Joe was nothing if not thorough with his paperwork, and he had made a copy of it just in case. All three documents indicated that their respective artifacts had come directly from Egypt.
He reread the narratives describing all three, looking for something that could tie them together. Years ago, before the Italian Squad had taken down the Black Hand Society, copycat criminals sent notes to citizens, claiming to be the Black Hand and trying to extort them. But the detectives could tell the difference. Though it could have been different members of the Black Hand Society who had written their notes, the same speech patterns, the same wording, and the same symbols were in each one.
These provenance documents had no symbols, but Joe studied them afresh for similar speech patterns, wording. Words.
On the document for the horse and rider that came from the Napoleon Society, Joe read,The carving of this horse and rider creates an indelible impression of movement, power, and strength so associated with the Egyptian people.
Indelible. He’d heard Dr. DeVries use that word twice tonight. Everyone had their favorite words, Joe supposed, and this one was obviously one of the doctor’s. Finding it in this document wasn’t a revelation, since it was no secret this artifact came from Dr. DeVries’s Napoleon Society.
He moved on to the other provenance documents. One called Mr. Sanderson’s particular canopic jars bothindubitableandinimitable. He checked again the document for St. John’s ointment jar and found none of these words. The style and vocabulary were completely different.
Indelible. Inimitable. Indubitable. These were uncommon words, and yet he’d heard Dr. DeVries say each of them in one night. Did that make him the author of both provenance documents? Did it mean the surgeon had a double life as an art dealer named Daniel Bradford?
That seemed like a stretch, but it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.
Joe blinked at the documents splayed on his desk. He unearthed his notebook and began writing.
Why would DeVries masquerade as an art dealer? What does he gain?
Is he knowingly working with a forger and profiting financially?
Why resort to illegitimate means of income when a surgeon’s salary ought to be more than comfortable?
Is he not just an art dealer but a forger, too?
After all, it wasn’t the art dealer’s job to write up the provenance documents. Those documents were provided by the seller, and the dealer simply passed them on to the buyer.
If DeVries forged the horse and rider for financial gain for the Napoleon Society, or even if he simply knew it was fake and sold it anyway, could he have done the same thing to other new members that he’s done to Sal Caravello?
