Excerpt from Gallery of Fools
GALLERY OF FOOLS
A Novel Based on a Celebrated Manhattan Art Theft
PROLOGUE
The stretch of avenue on Madison between Seventy-fifth and Seventy-sixth Streets was peaceful this time of night. The art galleries and chic boutiques had shut down a few hours earlier, and the only sign of life was in the coffee shop half a block away where an elderly couple enjoyed a final cup of coffee before going home to sleep.
A blue garbage truck inched up Madison Avenue like an enormous mechanized mastodon and came to a stop in front of the Stephen Hahn Gallery at 960 Madison. There was nothing unusual about the appearance of the truck or the nature of its business. Most of the city’s private haulers made their rounds after the rush-hour traffic subsided and the streets were free of the day’s congestion. The only unusual thing a careful observer might have questioned was the number of men riding on the blue monster. Most trucks carried a contingent of two—the driver and the helper who did most of the heavy lifting. This truck was carrying four men dressed in green coveralls.
Before the garbage truck came to a complete stop, three men jumped off onto the sidewalk. The driver remained where he was. One of the three busied himself with the heavy metal cans in front of the gallery while his two colleagues disappeared into the dark shadows in the alley alongside the building. Silently, one of the two men in the alley took out a large ring of keys—not keys really, but an array of long metal picks with flat tips and ridges on the sides. For the better part of ten minutes, he fitted the picks into the upper lock on the back door of the gallery while his partners checked the streets for approaching pedestrians or, worse, a policeman on the beat.
Finally, after trying more than two dozen picks in the stubborn lock, he found one that unlocked the bolt. This accomplished, he put the picks back in the right hip pocket of his coveralls and went to work on the lower lock. This one was easy. It was a simpler model. He smashed it in with a heavy tool that looked like a giant punch and left a gaping, round hole where the lock had been.
Inside the gallery now, the two men seemed to know exactly what they were looking for. Most of the paintings they were interested in were hanging on the far wall. They removed seven in all, leaving more than thirty others untouched throughout the gallery. Working quickly, they wrapped the paintings in heavy canvas, in bundles of two and three, then carried the paintings in their wrappings out to the waiting truck. The huge blue truck was already in motion by the time they were back on its sides, inching north on Madison, slowly at first, then picking up speed when the light turned green. Within minutes, they had disappeared into the night. The whole job lasted a little more than fifteen minutes from beginning to end.
“The paintings were among the most valuable in the collection,” Stephen Hahn told the media later that night. “Nympheas alone, painted between 1900 and 1910 by Claude Monet, was worth a fortune,” said Hahn.
(Nympheas would fetch the equivalent of $36 million dollars at a Sotheby’s auction in London on June 19, 2007.)
Mr. Hahn said he had closed the gallery around 6:15 pm, securing the door with two locks—the upper one, which he had been told was unpickable, and the simpler lower lock—and went off to a meeting of the Art Dealers Association of America.
“As a matter of fact,” said Hahn, “the main subject we discussed was the thievery that has been going on in New York lately.”
Hahn was awakened shortly after 11:30 by a telephone call from his assistant, Paul Herring, who informed Hahn that the cleaning lady had found the door unlocked when she arrived for work about 11:00 and called the police. The FBI was also notified immediately, and according to a spokesman for the bureau, alerts were dispatched to airports and other embarkation points to prevent the paintings from being taken out of the country.
Stephen Hahn speculated that the thieves’ real intent might be to hold the paintings as ransom for the insurance money rather than to sell them. “It would be extremely difficult to sell them,” said the art dealer, “because they are so easily identified. I just don’t see who would buy them. They’re all collectors’ items, high-quality paintings … major, important pictures. You cannot dispose of these things.”
PART ONE
THE PAINTINGS
CHAPTER ONE
In May 1973, I was celebrating my birthday with my family in North Hollywood, California, which was called Studio City back then. I had arrived earlier in the day with my wife, Marie, and two children, Jerry and Christine, at the home of friends after a long drive down the coast from San Francisco. Our host and I had grown up together in a working-class battleground in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx, and we both considered ourselves blessed to have escaped from its stultifying embrace. Danny had gone west to pursue his dream of becoming an actor and a screenwriter, and I already had two books published with a third one due out later that year. We were proud of our accomplishments, being two sons of the Bronx. My father was a first-generation American, and Danny’s father was born in Ireland. Neither of them had any education to speak of.
We were sitting around after dinner, enjoying a final glass of wine before retiring, when the phone rang. Danny picked it up and turned immediately toward me.
“It’s for you. I think it’s your sister.”
“It has to be. She’s the only one who knows I’m here.”
My sister, Carol, sounded frantic on the other end of the line. “You’ve got to come home right away,” she said. “Something terrible has happened to Dad.”
“What’s wrong?”
“He’s in the hospital. He’s been hemorrhaging something awful. He’s lost a lot of blood. I don’t think he can last that long.”
“Oh, my God! What happened?”
“I think it’s his intestines. I can’t handle this all by myself. I need you to get here as soon as you can.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s in Saint Agnes in White Plains, in intensive care. I don’t know what I’ll do if something happens to him.” She started to weep loudly, a piercing plea from three thousand miles away.
“Take it easy. I’ll get there as soon as possible. I’ll see if there’s a flight back tonight.”
“What is it?” Marie asked after I hung up the phone.
“It’s my father. He’s in the hospital. Carol doesn’t think he can last long. We have to call the airline and see how soon we can get back to New York.”
Carol greeted me at the door to Salvatore’s room when I arrived the following afternoon. She hadn’t slept all night, and she looked unusually haggard and stressed. She hugged me tightly and kissed me on the cheek.
“I just got in,” I said.
“Where’s Marie and the kids?”
“I dropped them off at the apartment. They haven’t slept, and the kids are wiped out.”
Salvatore appeared to be on the point of death when I entered the room. A vigorous sixty-two years old, with thin, silvery hair and a blocky body, he seemed to be the picture of health the last time I saw him, a couple of weeks before. Now he was thin and shrunken, his face hollow with dark half-moons under his eyes. Plastic tubes ran into his arms and legs. A breathing pump was connected to a hole in his throat. His older sister, Molly, immense inside a black house dress that looked like an enormous bat’s wing covering her body, sobbed hysterically at the foot of Salvatore’s bed. Beside her stood her older son, Georgie, who was twelve years older than I despite his juvenile nickname.
“My baby brother!” Molly howled. “He was so good. The best! The best of all of us! Why you, Salvatore? Why not me?”
“He’s got enough hard-ons left to last another twenny years,” said Georgie. “Right, Jerry?” My cousin looked at me, shaking his head from side to side. “Who’s gonna use them all up if you die on us now, Unc? Jerry? He don’t need your hard-ons. He’s young. He can lend you and me some.”
“He was the best!” Molly screamed, freezing the room with an Antarctic chill. Her use of the past tense regarding my father was premature and unsettling.
“He’s too tough to die, Ma,” said Georgie. “Old bastids like him don’t die so easy. They got to stick knives and shoot bullets in people like us to make us die. Right, Jerry?”
Georgie once told me about his theory that all men came into the world with a fixed number of hard-ons, somewhere around seven thousand of them, and they would not die a natural death until all of their hard-ons were used up. So, his theory went, if men squandered their hard-ons recklessly in their youth, they were susceptible to an early death. Georgie’s prescription for a long life was to hold back from ejaculating when getting laid and save his hard-ons for another day.
“Salvatore!” Molly unearthed a penetrating shriek. She looked as through she might topple over onto her comatose brother, burying him beneath about two hundred and sixty pounds of heaving flesh. Georgie grabbed her arm before she fell, and I ran around behind her to support her on the other side. Together, Georgie and I lowered her into a chair next to the wall. Up close, my aunt gave off a pungent smell of unwashed flesh and soiled clothing that was strong enough to make me catch my breath. She smelled like antiquity itself, like all the unbathed legions of humanity rolled together in the body of one enormous woman.
“Take it easy, Ma,” said Georgie. “Uncle Sal’s gonna be OK. He can’t croak yet. Who’s gonna take care of alla young stuff if he croaks? Tell him, Jerry.”
Salvatore lay there without moving a muscle. His eyes were closed, and the only movement was in his chest where the breathing apparatus pumped oxygen in and out of his lungs. A nurse entered the room and felt his forehead, read the gauges on the tubes that ran into his body, checked the level of liquid in the plastic bag that held his intravenous nutrients, then turned around and asked us all to step outside. She was a pretty blonde who fit snugly into her white uniform, and for one bizarre moment, I thought Georgie was going to pat her on the ass before we all left the room.
“Thank God they left,” Carol said as Georgie and Molly disappeared into the elevator. “All that yelling and screaming as though Dad was dead already! And Georgie’s so crude. I’m so glad you’re here now.”
“How’re you holding up?”
“I feel terrible. All this has been very hard on me.”
There was no question that Salvatore’s death would be a lot harder on Carol than it would be on me. She had been abused both physically and psychologically by our mother, and her father had been her anchor all her life. I, on the other hand, had never been close to Salvatore. The truth was I had hated him since grammar school when he repeatedly called me a “little puke” after I failed to defend myself properly when the neighborhood bully pushed me around. No, our mother’s death a few years earlier had been something of a relief for both me and Carol, and Salvatore’s demise would not cause me much emotional pain either, even while it might traumatize my sister.
“These last few days have been unbelievable,” said Carol. “I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. Thank God you’re here now.”
I loaded up on Chinese food at a restaurant on Mamaroneck Avenue and brought Carol back with me to our apartment on Windsor Terrace. Marie had not been able to get much sleep on the cross-country plane ride, and she appeared tired and anxious when Carol and I got there.
“The kids are sleeping,” she said. “They’re both exhausted. How’s your father doing?”
“Not well,” I said. “He looks terrible.”
“It’ll be a miracle if he makes it,” said Carol, who was a registered nurse. “It’s his intestines. If he’s strong enough, they’re going to operate on him tomorrow to see exactly what’s going on in there.”
Neither Carol nor Marie had much of an appetite. Carol pushed the food around on her plate indifferently, alternating between sobbing silently and crying out loud. She lit one cigarette after another, stubbing one out in the ashtray when it was halfway smoked and absent-mindedly lighting another. Everyone smoked just about everywhere back then. Marie had given it up a year or so earlier, and my preference ran to an occasional cigar rather than cigarettes.
“I don’t know what I’ll do if we lose him,” Carol said. “We can’t let him die.”
“I’m sure the doctors are doing everything they can,” I said, at a loss for something helpful to say to her.
“He’s so stubborn,” she said. “He’s had blood in his stool for weeks, but do you think he would do anything about it? I tried to get him to a doctor two weeks ago.”
“Doctors cost money,” I said. “You know what he thinks of them. ‘Bloodsuckers,’ ‘thieves,’ he calls them. He wouldn’t spend a nickel on them if he didn’t have to.”
Marie started clearing the dirty dishes from the table, and Carol and I got up to help her. When the dishes were washed and stacked in the kitchen, the three of us returned to the dining area with another bottle of wine.
“There’s something I’ve got to tell you,” Carol suddenly blurted out. “Dad swore me to secrecy, but I can’t keep it to myself any longer. I can’t deal with it alone.”
“What is it?”
My sister proceeded to unburden herself of a story that she had kept bottled up inside her for the past two years. Marie and I sat in stunned silence as the words poured from her mouth. The story she told was beyond incredible; the impact of her words defied credibility. I didn’t realize it immediately, but I was about to embark on a course of action that would turn our lives into an Elmore Leonard crime novel for the next three years—although I was too closely involved back then to see the dark humor in it until many years later.
“Right now, in Dad’s cellar in the Bronx, there’s about … oh, I don’t know how many millions of dollars worth of paintings hidden away. Let me tell you what happened before you say anything, all right?”
Marie and I nodded in agreement.
“After I split up with Mike the second time, I moved back in with Dad, remember? One night, about ten o’clock, he got a phone call, and he was very secretive about it, whispering in his bedroom where he thought I couldn’t hear him. An hour later, Georgie showed up, and the two of them started acting very strange, like something urgent was about to happen. They told me to go back to bed and not to worry; they had to do some work in the cellar … something about the boiler being broken. It sounded logical enough. Georgie’s pretty handy, and Dad was having trouble with the heating system that winter. But it just didn’t sit right with me. I could sense that something was going on they weren’t telling me about.”
Carol paused while Marie and I fidgeted in our chairs. No one broke the silence. Then Carol continued, “Well, I couldn’t sleep all the time they were down there. The banging that went on was unbelievable. It didn’t sound like they were working on any boiler to me. It was more like hammering and sawing wood. One o’clock, two o’clock in the morning. It went on half the night. I had to get up early for work in the morning, but I was wide awake wondering what was going on. Finally, about four o’clock, Dad came back upstairs covered with sawdust and plaster, I guess it was. It looked like chalk dust. I jumped out of bed, and I could see his face drop when he saw I was still awake. ‘I think we got it fixed now,’ he said, and I told him he was full of shit about the goddamned boiler. I wanted to know what the hell was really going on.
“He wouldn’t tell me right away, but finally, he gave in. I think he was a little proud of himself actually, like a kid who just did something wicked and wanted somebody else to know about it. He asked me not to tell anybody, not even you. It was very serious, he said, and he might go to jail if anyone found out. Georgie had called him up to tell him he had a fortune in stolen paintings he had to hide someplace right away. He asked Dad if it would be OK to hide them in his cellar. So Dad—he’d do anything for Georgie—told him to come on over, it would be all right.”
“This is absolutely astounding,” I said. “Are you sure it’s true? I can’t believe this.”
“What kind of paintings are you talking about?” asked Marie.
“Masterpieces,” Carol said. “Monet, Matisse, Marc Chagall … seven or eight of them, I think. I can’t remember all their names.”
“But how did Georgie get them?” I asked.
“That part I’m not sure about. All I know is they’re still in Dad’s cellar, and now Dad could die anytime. That’s why I’m telling you. I can’t keep this to myself anymore. It’s too much for me to handle alone. Georgie doesn’t know that I know about them. He doesn’t know anybody knows where they are, except Dad.”
“What part of the cellar are they in?” asked Marie.
“They built a wall that night behind the boiler. There’s a recess in the basement wall, and they put the paintings in there and built a new wall in front of them with sheetrock and boards to hide them.”
“And nobody’s seen them since?”
“Not as far as I know. The wall’s still there. Nobody’s touched it. The paintings must still be behind it.”
“Where did Georgie get them?” I asked again. “Did he steal them himself?”
“I don’t know all the details. Somehow, he got hold of them and tried to sell them, and the FBI found out about it. That’s why he needed Dad … or someone … to hide them for him.”
The enormity of what Carol had just revealed began to sink in deeper and deeper. It was the most incredible story I had ever heard, and I couldn’t quite believe that what Carol had told us was true.
“You should have told me before,” I said.
“Dad swore me to secrecy. I was afraid. Besides, I had other things on my mind at the time. I was raising two kids by myself without any help from their fathers, working double shifts in ICU. My life was like a runaway train. I just put the paintings out of my mind.”
“Did you tell him to get rid of them before the FBI found out and put him in jail?”
“He told me everything would work out fine,” said Carol, “and I shouldn’t worry about it. Besides, I didn’t want to make any waves. Georgie’s our cousin and all, but he’s a racketeer and I’m afraid of him. You know how those people are when anyone gets in their way. I don’t know what he’s capable of doing.”
“This is insane,” said Marie. “We can’t just leave them there. We’ve got to do something about it.”
“I have to talk to Georgie,” I said. “I have no choice. I can’t leave them sitting there in my father’s cellar.”
It was getting late. My head was aching, and there seemed like no good way to resolve the dilemma. A million thoughts coursed through my mind simultaneously. Would it really be as simple as calling up my cousin and telling him to get his paintings out of my father’s cellar immediately? Would there be any repercussions? Would my knowledge of what he had done put me in danger? Did I have a legal obligation to call the authorities and report what I had just learned? What was my father’s legal exposure? What was mine, Carol’s, and Marie’s now that we knew about the crime? What condition would the paintings be in after all this time in a damp basement? Didn’t I have a moral obligation to make sure they didn’t suffer any further damage? I looked at Marie and found her staring speechlessly back at me. We both turned and looked at Carol who looked back and forth at the two of us. The three of us sat there for an interminable moment without speaking a word.
A simple solution seemed highly unlikely at best.
Chapter Two
The next morning, I showered, dressed, and started off for work as I normally did and then decided on the spur of the moment to take the day off. I didn’t say anything to Marie about my change of plans—indeed, I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do initially. I left the apartment at the usual time, but instead of driving to the station to take the train into Manhattan, I found myself on I-95 heading south toward the Bronx. It was almost as though an outside force had taken over my life and was orchestrating my actions. I suddenly felt like an actor in a movie being manipulated by some cosmic director.
Turnpike traffic slowed considerably as I approached New Rochelle, where construction work further constricted the normally heavy rush-hour traffic. A bottleneck developed when three lanes merged into two, and then finally to one, and then opened up again as I passed the Kafkaesque nightmare known as Co-op City. It was a self-contained community of high-rise co-op apartment buildings set in the middle of what once had been a marshy wasteland in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx. When I was a kid growing up not too far from here, in the days before Co-op City was even a glimmer in some urban developer’s eye, my friends and I used to bicycle into the swamps with our dates and picnic on a rocky rise where it was relatively dry. As dusk approached, we would sneak off two-by-two and fumble inside each other’s clothing in the privacy of the high swamp grass that surrounded our picnic site. All that was an eternity ago, but it came back to me as vividly as yesterday as I sped past the surrealistic city-within-a-city trying to figure out exactly where our old picnic grounds had been.
I turned off the highway at the East Tremont Avenue exit and drove slowly along the service road. These were my old stomping grounds of thirty years ago, before the highway was built, when the quiet, residential streets of Throgs Neck still retained some of their old, rural flavor. At one time, this neighborhood had been a blunt peninsula of dirt roads, farmlands, and swamp grass jutting into Long Island Sound across from the Borough of Queens. By 1973, it had become a somewhat blighted blue-collar enclave, a nest of bars, beauty parlors, pizza joints, tacky stores and shops, and semi-attached brick houses with stamp-sized lawns. It was a final bastion of the city’s white ethnic working class. Italian and Irish dwelled there mostly, toiling away in the police, fire, and sanitation departments and in the construction trades, fighting off a steady invasion of blacks and Puerto Ricans while they waited to collect their pensions. It was a neighborhood where the strip of bars along the main thoroughfare, East Tremont Avenue, boiled with violence from Friday through Sunday nights, and strangers entered at their own risk. Years back, the Germans and Irish had banded together against the Italians, and now that most of the Germans were gone, the Irish and Italians stood together against everyone else. This was the neighborhood where I was raised, where I grew up, and from which I fled as soon as I was able to. It was the neighborhood where my parents lived together until my mother’s death in 1968 and where Salvatore’s house still stood on the corner of East Tremont Avenue and Bruckner Boulevard.
I parked my car along the curb out front and walked across the sidewalk toward the main entrance. A fruit-and-vegetable stand abutted the side of the building facing Bruckner Boulevard, which ran north and south between the South Bronx and the Westchester County border. When I was a kid, a bar called Paddy Maher’s had sat beside Salvatore’s house. A generation earlier, the bar had been owned by my grandfather, Joe Marano, my mother’s father, and it functioned as the most successful speakeasy outside of Manhattan during Prohibition. The land around it had been fertile farmland that rolled and undulated all the way to the edge of Long Island Sound. Eminent domain had claimed the tavern and the large gravel parking lot beside it, which enabled the city to widen Bruckner Boulevard from a narrow, two-lane thoroughfare into the broad, multi-tiered expressway that had become an extension of I-95. All that was left next to Salvatore’s house was a narrow swath of land, which he rented out to a fruit-and-vegetable merchant from the South Bronx named Jimmy Westheimer.
As I approached the building, I could see a fat boy weighing grapes on a hanging scale, chatting with a woman from the neighborhood who looked vaguely familiar. Perhaps she had gone to St. Benedict’s Elementary School in Throgs Neck when I did. Perhaps I had danced with her in the gym after a Friday night basketball game. Perhaps I had held her too close during one of the slow dances, and one of the priests who chaperoned the dance had darted out onto the dance floor and told us to leave some room for the Holy Ghost. They always did that when horny teenage boys tried to dry hump one of the Vestal Virgins on the dance floor. The fat kid was the youngest of Jimmy Westheimer’s sons. They minded the store while Jimmy drank himself footless in one of the bars along East Tremont Avenue.
I let myself into the vestibule, picked up a batch of mail that was strewn across the floor behind the mail slot, and walked up toward the kitchen on the second floor. It was dark and cool inside the house, and the air was stale, musty, and cloyingly sweet-sour as the windows had been shut tight for close to a week now. It had been some time since I had been here last. Just being on these premises again conjured a plethora of memories, most of which were too painful to dwell on at this stage of my life. I had spent most of the past thirteen years trying to put as much distance between those childhood memories and myself—geographically and emotionally—as was humanly possible.
I spent the next couple of hours rummaging through my father’s things. He had pared his possessions down to bare essentials since Virginia had died. He had given a couple of her antiques to Marie and me, which we used to furnish our apartment. Carol had acquired the lion’s share of them and most of what was left—furniture, photographs, mementos—which she had been dragging around with her through a couple of unhappy marriages so far. I sorted out his mail, discarding the junk and making a pile of the rest, mostly bills to be paid and checks to be deposited. His mail was measured primarily in dollars and cents; he had never gone in much for personal correspondence. There were items that had to be removed now that his house was unoccupied: cash stuffed in envelopes, negotiable bonds he had not yet gotten around to putting into his safe-deposit box, bank books, his will, insurance policies, and other legal papers.
A Novel Based on a Celebrated Manhattan Art Theft
PROLOGUE
The stretch of avenue on Madison between Seventy-fifth and Seventy-sixth Streets was peaceful this time of night. The art galleries and chic boutiques had shut down a few hours earlier, and the only sign of life was in the coffee shop half a block away where an elderly couple enjoyed a final cup of coffee before going home to sleep.
A blue garbage truck inched up Madison Avenue like an enormous mechanized mastodon and came to a stop in front of the Stephen Hahn Gallery at 960 Madison. There was nothing unusual about the appearance of the truck or the nature of its business. Most of the city’s private haulers made their rounds after the rush-hour traffic subsided and the streets were free of the day’s congestion. The only unusual thing a careful observer might have questioned was the number of men riding on the blue monster. Most trucks carried a contingent of two—the driver and the helper who did most of the heavy lifting. This truck was carrying four men dressed in green coveralls.
Before the garbage truck came to a complete stop, three men jumped off onto the sidewalk. The driver remained where he was. One of the three busied himself with the heavy metal cans in front of the gallery while his two colleagues disappeared into the dark shadows in the alley alongside the building. Silently, one of the two men in the alley took out a large ring of keys—not keys really, but an array of long metal picks with flat tips and ridges on the sides. For the better part of ten minutes, he fitted the picks into the upper lock on the back door of the gallery while his partners checked the streets for approaching pedestrians or, worse, a policeman on the beat.
Finally, after trying more than two dozen picks in the stubborn lock, he found one that unlocked the bolt. This accomplished, he put the picks back in the right hip pocket of his coveralls and went to work on the lower lock. This one was easy. It was a simpler model. He smashed it in with a heavy tool that looked like a giant punch and left a gaping, round hole where the lock had been.
Inside the gallery now, the two men seemed to know exactly what they were looking for. Most of the paintings they were interested in were hanging on the far wall. They removed seven in all, leaving more than thirty others untouched throughout the gallery. Working quickly, they wrapped the paintings in heavy canvas, in bundles of two and three, then carried the paintings in their wrappings out to the waiting truck. The huge blue truck was already in motion by the time they were back on its sides, inching north on Madison, slowly at first, then picking up speed when the light turned green. Within minutes, they had disappeared into the night. The whole job lasted a little more than fifteen minutes from beginning to end.
“The paintings were among the most valuable in the collection,” Stephen Hahn told the media later that night. “Nympheas alone, painted between 1900 and 1910 by Claude Monet, was worth a fortune,” said Hahn.
(Nympheas would fetch the equivalent of $36 million dollars at a Sotheby’s auction in London on June 19, 2007.)
Mr. Hahn said he had closed the gallery around 6:15 pm, securing the door with two locks—the upper one, which he had been told was unpickable, and the simpler lower lock—and went off to a meeting of the Art Dealers Association of America.
“As a matter of fact,” said Hahn, “the main subject we discussed was the thievery that has been going on in New York lately.”
Hahn was awakened shortly after 11:30 by a telephone call from his assistant, Paul Herring, who informed Hahn that the cleaning lady had found the door unlocked when she arrived for work about 11:00 and called the police. The FBI was also notified immediately, and according to a spokesman for the bureau, alerts were dispatched to airports and other embarkation points to prevent the paintings from being taken out of the country.
Stephen Hahn speculated that the thieves’ real intent might be to hold the paintings as ransom for the insurance money rather than to sell them. “It would be extremely difficult to sell them,” said the art dealer, “because they are so easily identified. I just don’t see who would buy them. They’re all collectors’ items, high-quality paintings … major, important pictures. You cannot dispose of these things.”
PART ONE
THE PAINTINGS
CHAPTER ONE
In May 1973, I was celebrating my birthday with my family in North Hollywood, California, which was called Studio City back then. I had arrived earlier in the day with my wife, Marie, and two children, Jerry and Christine, at the home of friends after a long drive down the coast from San Francisco. Our host and I had grown up together in a working-class battleground in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx, and we both considered ourselves blessed to have escaped from its stultifying embrace. Danny had gone west to pursue his dream of becoming an actor and a screenwriter, and I already had two books published with a third one due out later that year. We were proud of our accomplishments, being two sons of the Bronx. My father was a first-generation American, and Danny’s father was born in Ireland. Neither of them had any education to speak of.
We were sitting around after dinner, enjoying a final glass of wine before retiring, when the phone rang. Danny picked it up and turned immediately toward me.
“It’s for you. I think it’s your sister.”
“It has to be. She’s the only one who knows I’m here.”
My sister, Carol, sounded frantic on the other end of the line. “You’ve got to come home right away,” she said. “Something terrible has happened to Dad.”
“What’s wrong?”
“He’s in the hospital. He’s been hemorrhaging something awful. He’s lost a lot of blood. I don’t think he can last that long.”
“Oh, my God! What happened?”
“I think it’s his intestines. I can’t handle this all by myself. I need you to get here as soon as you can.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s in Saint Agnes in White Plains, in intensive care. I don’t know what I’ll do if something happens to him.” She started to weep loudly, a piercing plea from three thousand miles away.
“Take it easy. I’ll get there as soon as possible. I’ll see if there’s a flight back tonight.”
“What is it?” Marie asked after I hung up the phone.
“It’s my father. He’s in the hospital. Carol doesn’t think he can last long. We have to call the airline and see how soon we can get back to New York.”
Carol greeted me at the door to Salvatore’s room when I arrived the following afternoon. She hadn’t slept all night, and she looked unusually haggard and stressed. She hugged me tightly and kissed me on the cheek.
“I just got in,” I said.
“Where’s Marie and the kids?”
“I dropped them off at the apartment. They haven’t slept, and the kids are wiped out.”
Salvatore appeared to be on the point of death when I entered the room. A vigorous sixty-two years old, with thin, silvery hair and a blocky body, he seemed to be the picture of health the last time I saw him, a couple of weeks before. Now he was thin and shrunken, his face hollow with dark half-moons under his eyes. Plastic tubes ran into his arms and legs. A breathing pump was connected to a hole in his throat. His older sister, Molly, immense inside a black house dress that looked like an enormous bat’s wing covering her body, sobbed hysterically at the foot of Salvatore’s bed. Beside her stood her older son, Georgie, who was twelve years older than I despite his juvenile nickname.
“My baby brother!” Molly howled. “He was so good. The best! The best of all of us! Why you, Salvatore? Why not me?”
“He’s got enough hard-ons left to last another twenny years,” said Georgie. “Right, Jerry?” My cousin looked at me, shaking his head from side to side. “Who’s gonna use them all up if you die on us now, Unc? Jerry? He don’t need your hard-ons. He’s young. He can lend you and me some.”
“He was the best!” Molly screamed, freezing the room with an Antarctic chill. Her use of the past tense regarding my father was premature and unsettling.
“He’s too tough to die, Ma,” said Georgie. “Old bastids like him don’t die so easy. They got to stick knives and shoot bullets in people like us to make us die. Right, Jerry?”
Georgie once told me about his theory that all men came into the world with a fixed number of hard-ons, somewhere around seven thousand of them, and they would not die a natural death until all of their hard-ons were used up. So, his theory went, if men squandered their hard-ons recklessly in their youth, they were susceptible to an early death. Georgie’s prescription for a long life was to hold back from ejaculating when getting laid and save his hard-ons for another day.
“Salvatore!” Molly unearthed a penetrating shriek. She looked as through she might topple over onto her comatose brother, burying him beneath about two hundred and sixty pounds of heaving flesh. Georgie grabbed her arm before she fell, and I ran around behind her to support her on the other side. Together, Georgie and I lowered her into a chair next to the wall. Up close, my aunt gave off a pungent smell of unwashed flesh and soiled clothing that was strong enough to make me catch my breath. She smelled like antiquity itself, like all the unbathed legions of humanity rolled together in the body of one enormous woman.
“Take it easy, Ma,” said Georgie. “Uncle Sal’s gonna be OK. He can’t croak yet. Who’s gonna take care of alla young stuff if he croaks? Tell him, Jerry.”
Salvatore lay there without moving a muscle. His eyes were closed, and the only movement was in his chest where the breathing apparatus pumped oxygen in and out of his lungs. A nurse entered the room and felt his forehead, read the gauges on the tubes that ran into his body, checked the level of liquid in the plastic bag that held his intravenous nutrients, then turned around and asked us all to step outside. She was a pretty blonde who fit snugly into her white uniform, and for one bizarre moment, I thought Georgie was going to pat her on the ass before we all left the room.
“Thank God they left,” Carol said as Georgie and Molly disappeared into the elevator. “All that yelling and screaming as though Dad was dead already! And Georgie’s so crude. I’m so glad you’re here now.”
“How’re you holding up?”
“I feel terrible. All this has been very hard on me.”
There was no question that Salvatore’s death would be a lot harder on Carol than it would be on me. She had been abused both physically and psychologically by our mother, and her father had been her anchor all her life. I, on the other hand, had never been close to Salvatore. The truth was I had hated him since grammar school when he repeatedly called me a “little puke” after I failed to defend myself properly when the neighborhood bully pushed me around. No, our mother’s death a few years earlier had been something of a relief for both me and Carol, and Salvatore’s demise would not cause me much emotional pain either, even while it might traumatize my sister.
“These last few days have been unbelievable,” said Carol. “I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. Thank God you’re here now.”
I loaded up on Chinese food at a restaurant on Mamaroneck Avenue and brought Carol back with me to our apartment on Windsor Terrace. Marie had not been able to get much sleep on the cross-country plane ride, and she appeared tired and anxious when Carol and I got there.
“The kids are sleeping,” she said. “They’re both exhausted. How’s your father doing?”
“Not well,” I said. “He looks terrible.”
“It’ll be a miracle if he makes it,” said Carol, who was a registered nurse. “It’s his intestines. If he’s strong enough, they’re going to operate on him tomorrow to see exactly what’s going on in there.”
Neither Carol nor Marie had much of an appetite. Carol pushed the food around on her plate indifferently, alternating between sobbing silently and crying out loud. She lit one cigarette after another, stubbing one out in the ashtray when it was halfway smoked and absent-mindedly lighting another. Everyone smoked just about everywhere back then. Marie had given it up a year or so earlier, and my preference ran to an occasional cigar rather than cigarettes.
“I don’t know what I’ll do if we lose him,” Carol said. “We can’t let him die.”
“I’m sure the doctors are doing everything they can,” I said, at a loss for something helpful to say to her.
“He’s so stubborn,” she said. “He’s had blood in his stool for weeks, but do you think he would do anything about it? I tried to get him to a doctor two weeks ago.”
“Doctors cost money,” I said. “You know what he thinks of them. ‘Bloodsuckers,’ ‘thieves,’ he calls them. He wouldn’t spend a nickel on them if he didn’t have to.”
Marie started clearing the dirty dishes from the table, and Carol and I got up to help her. When the dishes were washed and stacked in the kitchen, the three of us returned to the dining area with another bottle of wine.
“There’s something I’ve got to tell you,” Carol suddenly blurted out. “Dad swore me to secrecy, but I can’t keep it to myself any longer. I can’t deal with it alone.”
“What is it?”
My sister proceeded to unburden herself of a story that she had kept bottled up inside her for the past two years. Marie and I sat in stunned silence as the words poured from her mouth. The story she told was beyond incredible; the impact of her words defied credibility. I didn’t realize it immediately, but I was about to embark on a course of action that would turn our lives into an Elmore Leonard crime novel for the next three years—although I was too closely involved back then to see the dark humor in it until many years later.
“Right now, in Dad’s cellar in the Bronx, there’s about … oh, I don’t know how many millions of dollars worth of paintings hidden away. Let me tell you what happened before you say anything, all right?”
Marie and I nodded in agreement.
“After I split up with Mike the second time, I moved back in with Dad, remember? One night, about ten o’clock, he got a phone call, and he was very secretive about it, whispering in his bedroom where he thought I couldn’t hear him. An hour later, Georgie showed up, and the two of them started acting very strange, like something urgent was about to happen. They told me to go back to bed and not to worry; they had to do some work in the cellar … something about the boiler being broken. It sounded logical enough. Georgie’s pretty handy, and Dad was having trouble with the heating system that winter. But it just didn’t sit right with me. I could sense that something was going on they weren’t telling me about.”
Carol paused while Marie and I fidgeted in our chairs. No one broke the silence. Then Carol continued, “Well, I couldn’t sleep all the time they were down there. The banging that went on was unbelievable. It didn’t sound like they were working on any boiler to me. It was more like hammering and sawing wood. One o’clock, two o’clock in the morning. It went on half the night. I had to get up early for work in the morning, but I was wide awake wondering what was going on. Finally, about four o’clock, Dad came back upstairs covered with sawdust and plaster, I guess it was. It looked like chalk dust. I jumped out of bed, and I could see his face drop when he saw I was still awake. ‘I think we got it fixed now,’ he said, and I told him he was full of shit about the goddamned boiler. I wanted to know what the hell was really going on.
“He wouldn’t tell me right away, but finally, he gave in. I think he was a little proud of himself actually, like a kid who just did something wicked and wanted somebody else to know about it. He asked me not to tell anybody, not even you. It was very serious, he said, and he might go to jail if anyone found out. Georgie had called him up to tell him he had a fortune in stolen paintings he had to hide someplace right away. He asked Dad if it would be OK to hide them in his cellar. So Dad—he’d do anything for Georgie—told him to come on over, it would be all right.”
“This is absolutely astounding,” I said. “Are you sure it’s true? I can’t believe this.”
“What kind of paintings are you talking about?” asked Marie.
“Masterpieces,” Carol said. “Monet, Matisse, Marc Chagall … seven or eight of them, I think. I can’t remember all their names.”
“But how did Georgie get them?” I asked.
“That part I’m not sure about. All I know is they’re still in Dad’s cellar, and now Dad could die anytime. That’s why I’m telling you. I can’t keep this to myself anymore. It’s too much for me to handle alone. Georgie doesn’t know that I know about them. He doesn’t know anybody knows where they are, except Dad.”
“What part of the cellar are they in?” asked Marie.
“They built a wall that night behind the boiler. There’s a recess in the basement wall, and they put the paintings in there and built a new wall in front of them with sheetrock and boards to hide them.”
“And nobody’s seen them since?”
“Not as far as I know. The wall’s still there. Nobody’s touched it. The paintings must still be behind it.”
“Where did Georgie get them?” I asked again. “Did he steal them himself?”
“I don’t know all the details. Somehow, he got hold of them and tried to sell them, and the FBI found out about it. That’s why he needed Dad … or someone … to hide them for him.”
The enormity of what Carol had just revealed began to sink in deeper and deeper. It was the most incredible story I had ever heard, and I couldn’t quite believe that what Carol had told us was true.
“You should have told me before,” I said.
“Dad swore me to secrecy. I was afraid. Besides, I had other things on my mind at the time. I was raising two kids by myself without any help from their fathers, working double shifts in ICU. My life was like a runaway train. I just put the paintings out of my mind.”
“Did you tell him to get rid of them before the FBI found out and put him in jail?”
“He told me everything would work out fine,” said Carol, “and I shouldn’t worry about it. Besides, I didn’t want to make any waves. Georgie’s our cousin and all, but he’s a racketeer and I’m afraid of him. You know how those people are when anyone gets in their way. I don’t know what he’s capable of doing.”
“This is insane,” said Marie. “We can’t just leave them there. We’ve got to do something about it.”
“I have to talk to Georgie,” I said. “I have no choice. I can’t leave them sitting there in my father’s cellar.”
It was getting late. My head was aching, and there seemed like no good way to resolve the dilemma. A million thoughts coursed through my mind simultaneously. Would it really be as simple as calling up my cousin and telling him to get his paintings out of my father’s cellar immediately? Would there be any repercussions? Would my knowledge of what he had done put me in danger? Did I have a legal obligation to call the authorities and report what I had just learned? What was my father’s legal exposure? What was mine, Carol’s, and Marie’s now that we knew about the crime? What condition would the paintings be in after all this time in a damp basement? Didn’t I have a moral obligation to make sure they didn’t suffer any further damage? I looked at Marie and found her staring speechlessly back at me. We both turned and looked at Carol who looked back and forth at the two of us. The three of us sat there for an interminable moment without speaking a word.
A simple solution seemed highly unlikely at best.
Chapter Two
The next morning, I showered, dressed, and started off for work as I normally did and then decided on the spur of the moment to take the day off. I didn’t say anything to Marie about my change of plans—indeed, I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do initially. I left the apartment at the usual time, but instead of driving to the station to take the train into Manhattan, I found myself on I-95 heading south toward the Bronx. It was almost as though an outside force had taken over my life and was orchestrating my actions. I suddenly felt like an actor in a movie being manipulated by some cosmic director.
Turnpike traffic slowed considerably as I approached New Rochelle, where construction work further constricted the normally heavy rush-hour traffic. A bottleneck developed when three lanes merged into two, and then finally to one, and then opened up again as I passed the Kafkaesque nightmare known as Co-op City. It was a self-contained community of high-rise co-op apartment buildings set in the middle of what once had been a marshy wasteland in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx. When I was a kid growing up not too far from here, in the days before Co-op City was even a glimmer in some urban developer’s eye, my friends and I used to bicycle into the swamps with our dates and picnic on a rocky rise where it was relatively dry. As dusk approached, we would sneak off two-by-two and fumble inside each other’s clothing in the privacy of the high swamp grass that surrounded our picnic site. All that was an eternity ago, but it came back to me as vividly as yesterday as I sped past the surrealistic city-within-a-city trying to figure out exactly where our old picnic grounds had been.
I turned off the highway at the East Tremont Avenue exit and drove slowly along the service road. These were my old stomping grounds of thirty years ago, before the highway was built, when the quiet, residential streets of Throgs Neck still retained some of their old, rural flavor. At one time, this neighborhood had been a blunt peninsula of dirt roads, farmlands, and swamp grass jutting into Long Island Sound across from the Borough of Queens. By 1973, it had become a somewhat blighted blue-collar enclave, a nest of bars, beauty parlors, pizza joints, tacky stores and shops, and semi-attached brick houses with stamp-sized lawns. It was a final bastion of the city’s white ethnic working class. Italian and Irish dwelled there mostly, toiling away in the police, fire, and sanitation departments and in the construction trades, fighting off a steady invasion of blacks and Puerto Ricans while they waited to collect their pensions. It was a neighborhood where the strip of bars along the main thoroughfare, East Tremont Avenue, boiled with violence from Friday through Sunday nights, and strangers entered at their own risk. Years back, the Germans and Irish had banded together against the Italians, and now that most of the Germans were gone, the Irish and Italians stood together against everyone else. This was the neighborhood where I was raised, where I grew up, and from which I fled as soon as I was able to. It was the neighborhood where my parents lived together until my mother’s death in 1968 and where Salvatore’s house still stood on the corner of East Tremont Avenue and Bruckner Boulevard.
I parked my car along the curb out front and walked across the sidewalk toward the main entrance. A fruit-and-vegetable stand abutted the side of the building facing Bruckner Boulevard, which ran north and south between the South Bronx and the Westchester County border. When I was a kid, a bar called Paddy Maher’s had sat beside Salvatore’s house. A generation earlier, the bar had been owned by my grandfather, Joe Marano, my mother’s father, and it functioned as the most successful speakeasy outside of Manhattan during Prohibition. The land around it had been fertile farmland that rolled and undulated all the way to the edge of Long Island Sound. Eminent domain had claimed the tavern and the large gravel parking lot beside it, which enabled the city to widen Bruckner Boulevard from a narrow, two-lane thoroughfare into the broad, multi-tiered expressway that had become an extension of I-95. All that was left next to Salvatore’s house was a narrow swath of land, which he rented out to a fruit-and-vegetable merchant from the South Bronx named Jimmy Westheimer.
As I approached the building, I could see a fat boy weighing grapes on a hanging scale, chatting with a woman from the neighborhood who looked vaguely familiar. Perhaps she had gone to St. Benedict’s Elementary School in Throgs Neck when I did. Perhaps I had danced with her in the gym after a Friday night basketball game. Perhaps I had held her too close during one of the slow dances, and one of the priests who chaperoned the dance had darted out onto the dance floor and told us to leave some room for the Holy Ghost. They always did that when horny teenage boys tried to dry hump one of the Vestal Virgins on the dance floor. The fat kid was the youngest of Jimmy Westheimer’s sons. They minded the store while Jimmy drank himself footless in one of the bars along East Tremont Avenue.
I let myself into the vestibule, picked up a batch of mail that was strewn across the floor behind the mail slot, and walked up toward the kitchen on the second floor. It was dark and cool inside the house, and the air was stale, musty, and cloyingly sweet-sour as the windows had been shut tight for close to a week now. It had been some time since I had been here last. Just being on these premises again conjured a plethora of memories, most of which were too painful to dwell on at this stage of my life. I had spent most of the past thirteen years trying to put as much distance between those childhood memories and myself—geographically and emotionally—as was humanly possible.
I spent the next couple of hours rummaging through my father’s things. He had pared his possessions down to bare essentials since Virginia had died. He had given a couple of her antiques to Marie and me, which we used to furnish our apartment. Carol had acquired the lion’s share of them and most of what was left—furniture, photographs, mementos—which she had been dragging around with her through a couple of unhappy marriages so far. I sorted out his mail, discarding the junk and making a pile of the rest, mostly bills to be paid and checks to be deposited. His mail was measured primarily in dollars and cents; he had never gone in much for personal correspondence. There were items that had to be removed now that his house was unoccupied: cash stuffed in envelopes, negotiable bonds he had not yet gotten around to putting into his safe-deposit box, bank books, his will, insurance policies, and other legal papers.
posted by Jerome Tuccille at 8:25 AM
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