Catherine broke in. “The foreman cracked up and the rest of the jurors followed. I never saw anyone run for his seat as fast as Warner. Rich is going to sum up tomorrow. We took him through it when we got out of court tonight and he’s going to do fine. You still have time to go to the hospital to visit Sarah and the baby?”
It was after six. “Sure. I told Nan Toth to be downstairs at my Jeep at six fifteen.”
“You two ride with me,” Chapman said to Catherine and Marisa. “They can meet us up there.”
I finished returning phone calls before going out to meet Nan. We headed up First Avenue to New York University Medical Center and parked the car on Thirty-fourth Street, stopping to buy flowers before going in. Keith Raskin was getting off the elevator as we waited for it on the ground floor. A brilliant orthopedic surgeon, he had painstakingly reconstructed the bones in my right hand after they were shattered in a horseback riding accident several years earlier. I flexed my fingers and made a fist to demonstrate how successful the operation had been.
“After that Dogen murder case you worked on this spring, I never thought I’d see you inside a hospital again,” Keith remarked, referring to the tragic slaughter of a neurosurgeon inside one of the city’s largest medical centers.
“Just a visit to the obstetrical floor, Doctor. In and out as fast as I can make it.” We caught up with each other briefly, and Nan and I continued on our way to Sarah’s room.
We arrived in time to join Catherine, Marisa, and Mike in admiring the baby as she squinted up at us through teeny brown eyes. The room was well stocked with bouquets, Beanie Babies, and oversized stuffed animals, and the phone rang constantly while we each took turns holding Janine in our arms.
When the aide came to take her back to the nursery, Sarah put on her slippers and padded down the hall for a few laps of exercise around the maternity floor. Mike grabbed the clicker and turned the television on to Jeopardy!, having timed his visit to be sure to get in for the final question. The screen lit up just as Trebek displayed the category for the night, which was Famous Quotations.
We looked at each other and I shrugged my shoulders, knowing this could go any which way, depending on the subject of the quotation. “You guys in for ten?” Chapman asked all four of us.
Marisa, Catherine, Nan, and I each dug in our pocketbooks to match the ten-dollar bill that Mike had thrown on Sarah’s bed.
“And tonight’s answer is: John Hay referred to it as ‘a splendid little war.’ ”
“So much for all your fancy degrees and the twelve years of law school among you. This is the quickest fifty bucks I ever made,” Chapman said, scooping up the money and fanning it in our faces.
There was not much about American history-and nothing about military history-that Mike Chapman didn’t know. I looked at the other women and told them I conceded defeat. Not one of us had a serious guess.
Before any of the contestants revealed their answers, Mike announced, “The Final Jeopardy question is: What was the Spanish-American War?”
“That’s exactly right,” Alex Trebek said, remarking on the answer given by the poultry inspector from Lumberton, North Carolina, which earned him $ 8,700 and the evening’s championship.
“Eighteen ninety-eight was the year. And John Hay, ladies,” Chapman continued, “was our ambassador to Great Britain during that conflict. Later he was secretary of state. His comment may have seemed appropriate at the time, since it was a very short and one-sided war. Now, more than a hundred years later, we’re still dealing with the fallout-Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.
“A little less time shopping at the Escada sample sales and a bit more with your noses in the books-and I don’t mean Dorothy L. Sayers or Anthony Trollope, Mrs. Toth-and you’ll be able to hold on to your husbands’ well-earned money. C’mon, blondie, we got work to do.”
“We’re meeting my friend Joan Stafford for dinner. She claims to have some inside poop about the deceased. See you in the morning.”
We said good night to Sarah and the others near the nursery. It was a quick ride up to Forty-sixth Street and the quiet elegance of the best steak house in Manhattan, Patroon.
Mercer and Joan were already seated at the front corner table when we entered. I kissed the top of her head before sliding into the banquette and told her how much I missed having her in town, now that she was spending all her time in Washington with her fiancé. Ken Aretsky, the owner, sent a round of drinks over to the table.
Mike was already buried in the menu and banking on Joan’s inimitable generosity. “I’m starting with a dozen oysters. Then the veal chop with the garlic mashed potatoes. Let’s order so we can talk business.” He raised his glass in Joan’s direction. “Cheers. So whaddaya know that we don’t?”
“Here’s the thing. I never knew Deni personally, but a lot of my friends did. And I’ve met Lowell more times than I can remember-at his gallery, at auctions, and even dinner parties. But there have been stories floating around town for years, for whatever they’re worth.”
“You gave Mike the names of two of her lovers when you called. Any significance to that?” I asked.
“I ran rap sheets on both of ’em,” Mike broke in. “Came up clean. Look like legit businessmen.”
“There’s Preston Mattox, who’s an architect,” said Joan. “Not much talk about him. The other one nobody really gets. He’s Frank Wrenley, an antiques expert and dealer. Scratch a bit below the surface on him and I’m not quite sure the kind of guy you’ll find. Maybe it’s just that he’s such new money. Sprang up on the art scene out of nowhere, and suddenly he’s in the big leagues, running side by side with Deni Caxton.”
“I’m telling you, Coop. This case has everything for an art caper except Nazis,” Mike said, eschewing the dainty shellfish fork in favor of slurping up an oyster.
Joan Stafford picked at her warm foie gras. “So it’s Nazis you vant, Herr Chapman? Then it’s Nazis I shall give you.”
13
“Have you ever heard of the Amber Room?”
The three of us shook our heads in the negative.
“I’m sure I don’t have to remind you about all of the art that was seized and stolen by the Nazis during the Second World War,” Joan said.
My father had insisted that my brothers and I learn about the Holocaust from our childhood on, both to understand the magnitude of its atrocities and to know its historical and cultural importance. As a Jew, and also as an art collector, he had followed the stories of families fleeing Europe before the war, and those sent to the death camps, whose personal treasures became the property of their conquerors. Recent years had seen a series of legal wrangles to reclaim such confiscated artworks and restore them to the survivors or the rightful heirs of their owners. I knew of many of the cases that had been brought in the courts as paintings surfaced at auctions or institutions after half a century of being secretly held, but I had never heard of something described as a room.
“In seventeen seventeen, King Wilhelm I of Prussia gave the tsar-Peter the Great-a unique gift. It was a set of gilded oak panels that were decorated with more than six tons of amber, elaborately carved and inset with Florentine mosaics and Venetian glass mirrors. The walls were installed in the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, and had actually been dubbed the ‘eighth wonder of the world’ by the British ambassador. So far as I’m aware, only a single photograph of this breathtaking creation was ever known to have been taken in its two-hundred-year history.
“When Nazi troops invaded Russia in nineteen forty-one, they brought their own art experts along to aid in the plundering of the Soviet bounty. The priceless Amber Room was taken apart and shipped off to a town called Königsberg, which is on the Baltic coast. But by the end of the war, as some of the treasures began to appear, there was not a sign of this enormous chamber.”