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 Konigsberg, 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.”
“Any theories about it?” I asked.
“Dozens. I researched it carefully because I intended to write a play about it.” She glanced across at me, knowing that I always chided her about her abandoned efforts. “Had to stick it in a drawer once your DNA buddies matched the Romanovs’ bodies. I had it all set to be reconstructed for Anastasia, who was found alive and well in-never mind.
“I take it you want the leading theories and not the obscure ones. Some professional treasure hunter showed up a few years ago with Xeroxes of documents signed by Himmler, claiming he could prove that the room had been redirected to burg but that the general transporting it had made an independent decision to change the route in the face of the Allied advance.”
“Quedlinburg,” Mike said. “That was a major Nazi stash, wasn’t it?”
He reminded us that in 1996 the Feds tried to prosecute two Texans for the return of several hundred million dollars’ worth of medieval reliquaries, stolen by their brother-an American soldier-at the end of World War II. German troops had looted the religious treasure-everything from ninth-century prayer books and lavishly painted manuscripts to gem-encrusted vases and figures. And in the process of the American liberation of Europe, lowlifes in our own army had made off with the already stolen cache of goods.
“So, one school has the amber buried in the quarry beside a seventh-century castle, while the latest claim is that the son of a German military intelligence officer who helped with the actual logistics of the move has used his father’s papers to establish that the stuff never even got to Germany, but is still buried in the Russian system of underground tunnels and mine shafts.”
Mercer had been unusually quiet throughout the meal. “Connect this to Denise Caxton for me, will you?”
“This all goes back to the Second World War. Lowell Caxton’s father lived in France, as you may already know by now.”
“Yes,” I said. “He made some reference about how his parents met, and his being raised in an apartment in Paris.”
“Although the senior Caxton spent the war years in the States, he never severed his ties with a guy called Roger Dequoy, who was later identified as one of the worst collaborators in the art world. Dequoy was selling paintings to all the Nazi leaders, and they in turn were trying to dump the Impressionist works they had stolen. Thought it was all too degenerate, if you can imagine that.
“The French government considered bringing charges against Caxton’s father for selling to the Nazis, but they were never able to build a case. What
“It seems to me,” Mike said, “that with all the wealth they had already accumulated, the old man could afford to sit on the stuff until the millennium. No need to try to sell it and show his hand, like most of the others who got caught.”
“The Caxton thing has never been about selling or making any more of a profit. That’s just sport for them, father and son. It’s all in the possession-sheer, unadulterated greed. You’ve been to the apartment, right?”
“Yeah. We were there over the weekend.”
“Lowell has suites, as you may know, each done in a favorite painter or period. Of course, I’ve never seen it myself, but rumor has it that somewhere, in one of his properties, he has rebuilt the Amber Room. It’s not complete-some of the wood was warped when the mine shaft was flooded. But he got most of the jeweled pieces out of Europe somehow, and found craftsmen to regild the mirrors and panels in separate units, so none of them had reason to suppose that he had actually found a whole room. It must be as close as anyone in the world is going to come to feeling like a tsar.”
“And Deni?” I asked.
“She certainly knew about it. Each of his wives did. That’s what Liz Smith was alluding to in her column this morning.”
“You’ll forgive me if I tell you I didn’t have a moment, between autopsies, to read the friggin’ society pages, won’t you?” asked Chapman.
“Sorry. Liz wrote something about how getting to Caxton’s inner sanctum was certainly the kiss of death for each of his three lovely wives. You know, like Bluebeard’s castle. Once he got them in his secret lair and made love to them there, he had to kill them.”
“Don’t lose me here, Joanie. Are you suggesting that Lowell-was trying to shut her up about the Amber Room, or that someone else was trying to use Deni to get to it? And please don’t tell me that your personal trainer is the source for this.” I knew that half of Joan’s best gossip came from the guy who worked her out at home every morning when she was in Manhattan, where she still kept an apartment. He had a fantastic client list, and something about lifting weights and doing inversions seemed to cause these well-toned, tight-lipped women to reveal their deepest secrets to him.
“The way I heard it, the Russian mob was pushing its way into the Chelsea art scene, hoping to put pressure on Deni to lead them to the amber so they could return it to the palace, which has been under restoration for twenty years. They’ve got a patron, a Soviet businessman who hit it big in the telecommunications industry, willing to pay the tab for what they assumed she could lead them to.”
“Ever been to Brighton?” Chapman asked Joan.
“Sure, my play had tryouts there and in Bath before it opened in London.”
“Not Brighton, England. Brighton
“You think
“So she’s not coming with us when we go poking around for double agents looking for Nazis looking for stolen art, huh?” Mike asked me.
Mercer picked up the thread. “What do you know about Bryan Daughtry?”
Joan laughed. “More than anyone needs to know, that’s for certain. Denise Caxton didn’t create that monster, but she was certainly feeding him.”
“Why was she so attached to him, do you think?”
“She was the classic underdog, Alex, and there was something in her that must have made her reach out to characters with the same background. I’m sure you remember that I used to buy from Daughtry, in the old days, before any of us knew about the dark side with the leather and young girls. Like Deni, he’s basically a dreamer, trying to create a fantastic life out of whole cloth. His business was riskier than anything that Lowell did, and she apparently liked that. I mean, it doesn’t take much skill to sell a Picasso, right?”
“Got any suggestions for who we talk to about their commercial enterprise?” Mike asked.
Joan thought for a moment. “Marco Varelli, perhaps.”
“I just heard that name today, but where?” I was tired, and confused as well.
“Sweetest little old guy you’d ever want to meet. He’s a restorer, perhaps the most respected in the field.”
Now it came to me. Marina Sette had mentioned him to me during our conversation at the Four Seasons this afternoon.
“I mean, if I tripped over something like the Amber Room, Varelli’s the person I’d go see to make sure
