Consigned to Death

“Right.”

“Me, too. I didn’t find the paintings listed there. I found them on a specialized site tracking Nazi thefts before and during World War Two.”

Alverez leaned back and shook his head. “What are you saying?”

“You asked me before about Mrs. Grant’s ledger. The entry that indicated that Mr. and Mrs. Grant bought all three paintings from ‘A.Z.,’ right?”

“Right. Do you know who or what that is?”

I shook my head. “No. Maybe a person. Maybe a gallery.” I shrugged. “No idea.”

“What do you know?”

“I know Renoir’s Three Girls and a Cat was one of several paintings taken from the Brander family home in Salzburg in 1939. Cezanne’s Apples in a Blue Bowl with Grapes was stolen from a well-respected Viennese collector and businessman, Klaus Weiner and his wife, Eva, also in 1939, except that they called it collecting the ‘Jew tax.’ Matisse’s Notre-Dame in the Morning was owned by the Rosen family. They’d lent it to a small museum in Collioure, France, in 1937. In February of 1941, the curator reported it stolen along with, if I recall right, seventeen other paintings.” I shrugged. “Maybe the Nazis got that one, too. I can’t confirm that. But I do know it was stolen, and it had been owned by a Jew.”

Alverez’s eyes narrowed as he listened, and when I was done, he shook his head.

“We figured they were stolen. Why else keep them under wraps?”

“Well, a legitimate owner might be afraid of theft,” I ventured.

He shook his head. “Then you wouldn’t leave a gimcrack lock on the front door.”

“Good point,” I acknowledged.

“Where did you find them?”

“In a hidden compartment behind other paintings.”

“How did you know to look there?”

“Intuition? Luck? I don’t know. I noticed a three-sided frame on the workbench in the basement. A few hours later, tossing and turning in bed, something clicked.”

“Where are they now?”

I turned to Max. He nodded encouragingly.

“I’ll show you. I won’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“I want that receipt as I hand them over.”

He nodded. “When we’re done here, we’ll go together.”

“And you’ll give me a receipt?”

“On the spot.” He rat-a-tat-tatted the table with his pen. “We need to get the paintings authenticated.”

“Yeah.”

“I want to alert our expert that they’re coming.” He pushed back his chair and stood up.

“I thought I was your expert.”

He smiled. “You are on appraisals. Not on authenticating art.”

“Who are you going to use for that?”

“Leo Snow from Dartmouth.”

I nodded. “He’s an expert, all right. Good choice.”

“I’ll be right back.” He punched the Off button and left the room.

Max and I sat quietly. When he returned, he started the recorder, and said, “I got Dr. Snow on the phone. He’ll be here in the morning with his chemistry set, and we’ll have confirmation by the end of the day.” He paused. “Josie?”

“Yeah?”

“Congratulations on finding them.”

I smiled. “Thanks. I was pretty pleased.”

He smiled back. After a moment, he asked, “Change of subject. How do you set values?”

“You mean on the Cezanne or the Matisse?”

“Yes. Or anything.”

“It’s complex,” I said, explaining the intricacies of the process.

“But,” Alverez objected, “you’re saying there’s no intrinsic value to things.”

“That’s true. Think of it as the last bastion of pure capitalism.”

“My God.”

“Why are you asking?” Max chimed in.

Alverez looked at us for a moment before settling back in his chair. He pushed it out farther from the table, and the scraping noise startled me. “We have several suspects, and I’m hoping you’ll help us narrow the field.”

“What do you mean?” Max jumped in before I could speak.

“If a junkie boosts a diamond pin and pawns it, I know how it would be valued. I could send in a guy undercover and he could hold his own in the conversation. With a Cezanne or a Matisse,” he said, gesturing hands-up, “we’re a little bit out of our depth.”

“You’re thinking of asking Josie to do something undercover?” Max asked, incredulous.

“Or maybe to educate us, so we can do it. We have options.”

Neither Max nor I spoke.

“So, can you give me an example,” Alverez asked me, “of how you’d set a price?”

Remembering the binder I’d prepared for Fred, I pulled it out of my purse. “I just happen to have… ta-dah!” I laid it on the table, opened the cover, and said, “This is a summary of the protocol I established,” I explained, pointing to the first page. “But, in a sense, showing you this first is bass-ackwards.”

Alverez looked amused.

“That’s a perfectly good word, coined, as far as I know, by my mother. My mother was a lady who never in her life said a bad word. Given that standard, she found that she needed to be creative in order to properly express herself.”

“Of course. That explains it,” Alverez said, half smiling. “Bass-ackwards. You were saying…”

“The first thing you do is look for comps. Just as in real estate, you need to find similar items with which to compare your piece. I found three. Two references came from printed catalogues that I had on my bookshelf. The third came from a Web site we subscribe to.”

“When you say catalogues, do you mean listings from other company’s auctions?”

“Exactly.”

“Why do you have this with you?”

“We have a temporary researcher coming in to help us with the Grant appraisal. I thought I might want to review it later so I brought it with me.”

“May I see?” he asked, reaching for the binder. He flipped through the pages.

When he got to the title page from Shaw’s catalogue, I stopped him. “This page shows you which catalogue I’m referring to. One important thing to note is what, in the industry, is referred to as ‘recency.’ Obviously, the more recent the sale, the more valid the comparison. I decided five years is a reasonable window.” I turned the page and pointed to the catalogue entry itself. “You see how this text details the factors that were used to authenticate the clock? And then the writer, in this case Shaw, added provenance information. That’s very helpful in figuring out whether the price this clock sold for might be higher than others that sold around the same time.”

Alverez nodded, his eyes scanning the entry.

“What else is here?” he asked, flipping the page.

“Another catalogue entry.” Reading upside down, I said, “You can see that this one is from one of Barney Troudeaux’s auctions in 2002.”

After scanning the paragraph criticizing the quality of Troudeaux’s research, he looked up, and asked, “Why include it at all if you think it’s so bad?”

I shrugged. “Because it’s there. I don’t mean to be flippant. I’m serious. Troudeaux’s sold a clock that was similar and we know how much it sold for, so we’ve got to include it. But it’s also important to consider whether