Chapter 13

CHAPTER 13

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4, 1925

S now flurried against a sky of gunmetal grey. Giant wreaths with red bows encircled the two stone lions flanking the Met's broad entrance. It was Christmastime in New York, but Joe felt none of the spirit.

He'd paid a visit to Aaron Tomkins's art dealership yesterday morning, with a message for Bradford to get in touch with Joe as soon as he could. He seriously doubted that the dealer would pass the message along, though, and called Lauren to tell her. So on her lunch break, she'd taken a cab there and offered to at least examine the Egyptian antiquities he had in stock, to catch any fakes before they left his gallery. Tomkins threw her out.

Yesterday had been an exercise in futility. He'd called every D. Bradford in every city directory the NYPD had, to no avail. He wasn't surprised that the man's number was unlisted, but he did wonder how he got enough business to support himself if no one could reach him. Then again, if Bradford was in as high demand as Sanderson and Tomkins claimed, the work found him.

It was a long shot, but Joe even took Bradford's physical description to the Rogue's Gallery at NYPD headquarters, where five-inch by three-inch cards were cataloged in long, narrow drawers with the precise measurements and photographs of known criminals.

But Joe didn't have precise measurements or a photograph. He had one man's recollection of another.

Joe stepped in a puddle of slush and shook his shoe, grimacing. Bradford wasn't a ghost. He'd find him. But today, he had other plans.

Forgoing the main front doors, Joe cut a path around to the side of the building. For the first time in weeks, he was visiting the Met and wouldn't see Lauren, since she and Elsa were traveling to Boston today. It was just as well.

"Morning, Caravello," the security guard, Jefferson, hailed him as he entered. "Here for Dr. Westlake?"

"Not this time." He unbuttoned the collar of his wool overcoat and stuffed his gloves into the pockets. "I've got a meeting with the restoration department for Egyptian art." They didn't know about the meeting yet, but they soon would. "This way?" Joe guessed at a direction.

Whether it had occurred to Lauren or not, men employed by the most prestigious museum in the country to restore Egyptian art had the tools, space, and knowledge to create convincing fakes.

Jefferson pointed down the corridor. "Down the hall, first staircase on the right, all the way down. You'll see signs to direct you once you're in the basement."

Joe thanked him and set off.

Minutes later, he entered the Egyptian department's underground lair. He held up his badge and introduced himself. "I'm looking for a forger wreaking havoc with your patrons, and it would be helpful to my investigation if I could ask a few questions here."

A man with receding blond hair straightened a tie, tugged his jacket until it closed enough to button in place, and came forward. "Elliot Henry, Egyptian collections manager." His thick fingers completely engulfed Joe's as they shook. "How can we help?"

Joe tucked the badge away. "For starters, I imagine that certain materials used in forging Egyptian art can be hard to come by. Not the sort of thing you'd pick up at the local market. Could you give me a list of what a forger might be shopping for?" He knew the basics from what Mr. Feinstein had told him was out of stock in the tri-state area, but adding the Met's perspective would be helpful.

"A forger's shopping list?" Mr. Henry smiled, showing a row of short, straight teeth that revealed a preference for coffee. Joe judged him to be about fifty years old, if not older.

"That's the idea. Then I'll want to know where he might find those things. But first things first." Joe poised a pencil above his notebook.

"Come on back to my office. I'll take a look at our recent invoices. That should tell you what you want to know."

Gold. Pure gold.

Would Mr. Henry be so willing to divulge this information if he had anything to hide?

Maybe. Maybe he didn't know that someone working for him was a crook.

"Here we are." Mr. Henry's chair squeaked as he sat and swiveled around to a four-drawer filing cabinet. He pulled out a folder, spun back toward Joe, and slapped it on the desk. "Our purchases for the last quarter are inside. Help yourself."

Joe opened to a sheaf of papers that might as well have been written in hieroglyphs for all the sense they made to him. "I'm going to need you to translate, Mr. Henry."

"You bet." He rolled his chair closer, and the smell of hot dog relish lifted from a dark spot on his tie. "We use what the Egyptians used for paint colors." He pointed to a list of abbreviations and explained. "Lamp soot for black, calcium sulfate and huntite for white. We also tint clay with mineral oxides like the red and yellow ochres. The blues and greens come from synthetic materials called Egyptian blue, or frit. From this basic palette, we mix to get all the colors we need."

Joe scribbled all of that down, then looked at the vendor's name and address on the corner of the invoice. "And do you always buy from this art supplier? Could a person get these shades from anywhere else?"

"These paints you could find almost anywhere. But the gold leaf is the best here."

The next several minutes followed in similar fashion, Mr. Henry explaining the invoices and Joe taking copious notes. When they reached the end of the folder's contents, Joe cocked an ear toward the noise coming from the other side of the wall.

"What kind of work is your team doing now?" he asked.

Mr. Henry filed the folder away. "A few different things. Our carpenter is working on display cases for Dr. Westlake's upcoming exhibition, for one. That's the sawing and drilling you hear. The other projects are much quieter. Have time to take a look? It's remarkable what they're able to do."

"I'd love to see."

"I'm not surprised there have been so many forgeries lately," Mr. Henry told him as they left his office and headed into a separate room across the hall. "Forgeries of Egyptian art have been common for ages, although I admit it seems to be spiking. Everyone wants a piece of King Tut." He chuckled. "Have you seen what we've got at the sales desk?"

Joe passed that desk often on his way to visit Lauren. "King Tut keychains, Christmas ornaments, miniature King Tut coffin paperweights ... I didn't see one of those on your desk, by the way."

Mr. Henry chuckled. "No, although I did purchase a few of the ladies' scarves printed with King Tut hieroglyphs for my sister and mother. They have no idea what the text means."

"Could you tell them?"

"Only so far as to say it's a partial spell meant to protect the dead in the afterlife. I studied museum management, not hieroglyphs. That's one reason I'm not a conservator. Here's the other." He held up his hands. "Great for college football. Not so great for those tiny hair brushes we use for fine-tuned work. I'd fumble the job, for sure. Only took one try for me to know that's a job best reserved for the experts."

Joe believed him. Especially since a man who dripped hot dog juices on his tie—and continued to wear the tie anyway—did not concern himself with details. Elliot Henry would make a terrible forger.

Stopping at a worktable with its own special lamps craning over it, Mr. Henry introduced Joe. "This is our lead conservator for Egyptian antiquities." Henry clapped the slender shoulder of a man currently hunched over what appeared to be a delicate process.

"Watch it!" The man jerked an elbow backward toward Mr. Henry. Grey streaked the dark brown hair at his temples. Joe guessed him to be around forty-five.

Mr. Henry smiled at Joe. "Meet Peter Braun. The best in the business. He's so good, in fact, he can afford to be rude and know his job remains secure."

"Can't say the same for yours if you bump me into making a mistake," Braun muttered. He barely spared Joe a glance. "You'll pardon me for not shaking your hand."

"I see you're occupied. Can you tell me what you're doing?"

A long-suffering sigh blustered from the slight man. "Performing surgery on a shroud that happens to be more than three thousand years old, a rare example from the eighteenth dynasty." Columns of hieroglyphs covered the linen.

Mr. Henry explained that it had been sitting in inventory for fifty years and had never been unfolded. "Dr. Westlake wants to see if it would be worth showing in her exhibition. Peter is stitching the fragile textile with silk thread, right along the fold there, so that when we open it, it won't break apart."

"You're blocking the light," Braun said.

Irritation snapped in Joe's chest at the man's tone. Even so, he stepped aside.

Braun grunted. "By the way, if Henry hasn't told you yet, you won't find any fakes here."

"Ease up, Peter," Mr. Henry said. "He's on our side."

"Well, in that case." Sarcasm dripped from the man's words.

Joe chafed at the unprovoked hostility. "I'm aware I'm interrupting you, but if I could have a few minutes of your time, I'd greatly appreciate it."

When the conservator didn't respond, Mr. Henry cleared his throat. "That shroud has waited fifty years and thousands more besides. It can wait another ten minutes."

Still nothing.

"It's up to you," Joe said, voice even. "We can talk here, or I can bring you down to the station."

With cold precision, Mr. Braun set his needle on a metal tray, swiped off his glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose. "What."

Pulling a stool closer, Joe nodded to Mr. Henry, who left the two alone. He sat, propping one foot on the bottom rung. "Mr. Henry said you're the lead conservator. How many others work with you?"

" For me," he corrected Joe.

Interesting. The hierarchy was obviously important to him. It only took a few questions about his conservation team to realize he considered them his underlings. To conclude that Braun was confident in his skills would be a vast understatement.

Behind the conservator, two young men bent over a slab of stone. Wearing gloves, they dipped cotton swab–tipped wands into some kind of solution and carefully went over the stone.

Mr. Braun sighed. "I trust them to clean without my direct supervision, but not much else."

"Then why hire them if they're so incompetent?"

"Do you have any idea how hard it is to find qualified conservators who specialize in Egyptian antiquities? Next to impossible. We have to train them ourselves."

"Did you learn on the job here, too?"

A laugh puffed through his nose while he wiped his lenses with a handkerchief. "No, I came with my résumé in perfect order, ready for responsibility. Before the war, we had more help. Bright, promising young men. But they enlisted and came back with tremors in their hands. Their careers were over. I've been trying to train up a new team ever since."

"That sounds challenging," Joe conceded.

"You have no idea." Braun replaced his glasses on his nose and peered at him again. "You've been working with Dr. Westlake, have you? I guarantee that when the upcoming exhibit opens, she, Lythgoe, and Winlock will be the ones who get all the credit. The public will be looking at my handiwork but will have no idea the time and skill it takes for the artifacts to be deemed worthy of display."

"Will your name be in the catalog?"

He crossed thin arms over an apron-covered oxford shirt. "I doubt it. The director wants to keep this work quiet, even though all of it is standard. Coward."

Joe scratched the word into his notebook. "What is he afraid of?"

"Scandal. Or even the slightest whiff of it. Don't tell me you don't know about Cesnola."

Joe racked his brain, mentally searching through all he'd read as background for this case. "The first director of the Met," he supplied at last. "Luigi Palma di Cesnola, the Italian American war hero who donated his own artifacts to the museum in its early years."

Mr. Braun picked up his needle again and bowed his head over the shroud. "His legacy haunts us."

Sleet ticked against the enormous arched windows of the New York Public Library's Main Reading Room. Beneath a ceiling mural that billowed with cloud and sky, Joe placed his pencil beside the book he'd been reading and studied the notes he'd taken. He was on to something.

Cesnola, first director of the Met , he'd scrawled at the top of the page. What kind of haunting legacy had the conservator been referring to?

It had taken Joe the better part of the day going through old books and newspaper accounts, but he'd finally pieced the story together.

The legacy, at least as perceived by Peter Braun, had been scandal. Forgeries, to be exact.

Luigi Cesnola had been accused of displaying forgeries in the Met, and even though the board of directors had given him a vote of confidence, the stain had never quite left the public's mind. Later, there were more accusations that the Met's restoration efforts under Cesnola's direction had altered the artifacts so substantially as to be classified as forgeries. Cesnola denied guilt once again but, to silence the critics, ordered the plaster noses that had been formed on broken statues be dissolved.

No doubt the current director wished to avoid attention that might lead to similar controversy.

No wonder Peter Braun felt unappreciated, though his expertise proved invaluable to the Met. The chip on his shoulder was large enough to park a Buick.

Joe turned the page in his notebook and wrote Braun's name at the top of his list of suspects as a forger.