“What do the French cops tell you?” I said.
“Guy had their name on an appointment calendar for the day he was killed.”
“Not much,” I said.
“Enough to want to interview them,” Belson said.
“True,” I said. “Anybody got any thoughts about the tattoos?”
“Nobody knows anything about that,” Belson said.
“Puts us in good company,” I said.
“We’re talking with folks at the Holocaust Museum in D.C.,” Quirk said.
“Progress?”
“They’re trying to run down an outfit in Germany. Supposed to have everything about the Third Reich.”
“Is that hard to do?” I said.
“Apparently,” Quirk said. “And it’s not just a matter of locating the stuff. It’s getting access to it with somebody fluent in German.”
“American embassy?”
“I’m sure mine would be the first call they’d take,” Quirk said.
“We got art, and Dutch stuff, and Jewish stuff, and German stuff, and Holocaust stuff, and a guy got killed on Route Two, and a guy got killed in France,” I said. “We figure this out, I’ll get promoted to lieutenant.”
“Maybe not,” Quirk said.
“Not if you don’t take the freakin’ test,” Belson said.
Quirk smiled.
“Excellent point, Frank,” he said.
33
Susan and Pearl came for breakfast on Saturday morning. “Hurry up,” Susan said. “Eat something quick. Otto and his mom are in town, and they’re going to meet us for a playdate.”
“What time?” I said.
“Eleven,” Susan said. “She e-mailed me. Isn’t that great? Said we should meet by the little bridge in the Public Garden.”
“I don’t think we have to hurry much,” I said. “It’s eight-thirty. You want coffee.”
“Yes, but let’s not dawdle over it.”
Pearl had gone directly to the couch and assumed her normal position. Which was prone. She looked to me as though she would be content to dawdle the whole day. Despite her excitement, Susan was able to eat some homemade corn bread with blackberry jam and drink a cup of coffee. I had the same thing, only more, plus some orange juice. Susan checked her watch every couple of minutes. Otherwise, she was very civilized. Susan in a hurry can be something of a tempest.
“How,” she said quietly, looking fully at me, the way she does, “is your case coming about the murder and the stolen picture.”
“It gives me a headache,” I said.
“Do they know who the men were that tried to kill you?”
“Couple of Dutch mercenaries,” I said. “Joost and Van Meer.”
“Do you know why they wanted to kill you?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, they probably wanted to kill me because they’d been employed to. But who employed them and why?” I shook my head.
She sipped her coffee and looked at her watch.
“Is there any way I can help,” she said.
“Actually, yeah, maybe,” I said. “I need to talk with an expert in seventeenth-century low-country art, somebody got no stake in this case.”
“I don’t know anyone like that at this minute,” Susan said. “But I have a Ph.D. from Harvard.”
“So you’ll find somebody.”
“Of course.”
She checked her watch. According to the clock on my stove, it was five minutes to ten. Actually, the clock, being digital, like they almost all are, read nine-fifty-six. But I was pretty loyal to the old ways, and I translated and rounded off, just as I had in the happy years before digital. On the couch, Pearl was snoring calmly.
Susan put her coffee cup on my counter.
“I think I’ll get her started,” Susan said.
“Good idea,” I said. “How long you think it’ll take you to get there?”
