Meany held up his hands. 'Still like this?'
'I don't need you to wave goodbye,' Parker said. 'Come along.'
On Sixth Avenue, just into Manhattan from the Holland Tunnel, Parker said, 'Let me off here.'
Surprised, Arthur said, 'Aren't I coming with you?'
'Not needed.'
'Oh. Okay.'
Arthur pulled to the curb by a fire hydrant. 'I was getting used to going places with you,' he said.
'Now you're retired again,' Parker told him, and got out of the Volvo. A block north, at a pay phone, he called Lloyd at home in Massachusetts: 'Tell the others, I'm finishing up here, I'll see them out there after tomorrow.'
'Good,' Lloyd said. 'You're all done there?'
'One last detail,' Parker said.
PART THREE
1
Horace Griffith was in Geneva, negotiating the sale of a Titian, when the e came from Paxton Marino: 'Need to talk to you soonest. Give me a number I can call.'
Paxton Marino was a very good customer of Griffith's, a dot-com nouveau riche who judged his happiness level by how fast he could spend his money, but he was also a difficult and a cranky customer—a spoiled brat, in fact— who had already caused Griffith more gray hairs than he could afford at fifty-six.
Still, the art market was always changeable and fraught with potential disaster, so it was good to have a cash cow the size of Paxton Marino still on the string. Because of that, Griffith did no more than sigh just the once before replying with the name and number of the Geneva hotel.
It was seven minutes later that the phone rang; Marino must have been more anxious to spend than
usual. It was 9:30 in the morning here; Griffith wondered where Marino was phoning from.
'I'm in New York,' Marino said, by way of hello. 'If you're in Geneva, I'll fly over today, we can have dinner at my place in Courmayeur.'
'Sounds urgent,' Griffith said. He didn't mention that Marino also sounded nervous, rattled, something Griffith had never experienced with the man before.
'No no,' Marino said, 'not urgent,' belying the words with the manner in which they were said. 'Just a chat, that's all, a little chat over dinner.'
I can drive down after lunch, get there before dark, Griffith thought, and said, 'It will be wonderful to see you again, Pax.'
'You, too,' Marino said, in a hurry, and hung up.
Weird, Griffith thought. To sound upset like that, to make a phone call at what had to be three-thirty in the morning his time, not to take ten minutes to describe all his latest acquisitions, to rush across the Atlantic merely for dinner and a 'chat'?
And Marino would have to open the house in Courmayeur, too, because this was far too early for the season there. It wasn't till December that the rich Milanese would come up to open their winter chalets high in the Italian Alps. Paxton Marino would never be caught dead at any of his residences in the offseason; what was going on?
The three-hour drive would have been a little shorter for a European, but Griffith, being an American, had to show his passport twice after getting onto the Route Blanche outside Geneva; first when crossing into France to reach the northern end of the Mont Blanc Tunnel at Chamonix, the second when emerging from the seven-and-a- quarter-mile tunnel into Italy near Courmayeur.
The tunnel itself, repaired now after the grim 1999 fire that had incinerated thirty-nine people, seemed brighter than before, larger, even cleaner, and much more free of the big trucks, that always used to give a sense of menace to this tube through the mountain, but Griffith couldn't escape a faint sense of ghosts hovering just beneath the rounded roof, a trembling memory of all those screams, the awareness of just how dark this burrow inside the Alps would be without electric lights.
Griffith didn't actually believe in ghosts, and yet he was always among them. He traded mostly in European paintings and sculpture, from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and most of the creators of those works had firmly believed in an unseen world, in spirits, in an often vengeful and occasionally merciful God. They'd painted saints and sinners, martyrs and miracles, and Griffith had steeped himself in their work.
He had also, in the darker side of his profession, showed himself to be at one with the world those artists had described. He, too, was merely human, full of error. He didn't really believe in all that cosmic moral accounting, but he couldn't help some faint awareness in the back of his mind that, if retribution ever did fall on him, he'd damn well deserve it.
Every dealer in valuable art, at a certain upper level of market worth, is offered the temptation now and again. To deal, in almost absolute safety, with stolen work, or forged work. Griffith at times envied those who had never fallen, but he also knew he could not possibly live as well, as comfortably, if he had been one of the virtuous ones. If virtue truly is its own reward, then Griffith regretfully had to go where the rewards were more palpable.
And if he'd remained a good boy, he'd never have known Paxton Marino, would he? Never have filled the amazingly lucrative position of being Marino's exclusive art agent, both in the legitimate deals ... and in the
