NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts is located on Fifth Avenue in the French-styled James B. Duke House, one of the few surviving “millionaire mansions” from New York’s Gilded Age. James Duke—yes, my beloved alma mater, Duke University, is named for his father—made his fortune as a founding partner in the American Tobacco Company, modernizing the manufacturing and marketing of cigarettes. The old adage is that behind every great fortune there is a great crime—or, as in this case, if not a great crime, the fortune was certainly built on a pile of dead bodies.
The institute has a boatload of security for obvious reasons. I pass through it all and find Pierre-Emmanuel Claux pacing alone in the second-floor conservatory. He wears a white lab coat and latex gloves. When he turns toward me, I can see something akin to terror on his face.
“Thank God you’re here.”
The conservatory is a hybrid of the old-school mansion and a state-of-the-art research center. There are long tables and special lighting and tapestries and paintbrushes and scalpels and what look like microscopes and dental tools and medical testing equipment.
“I’m sorry for the dramatics, but I think…”
His voice fades out. I don’t see the Vermeer, that image of the girl at the piano. The longest table holds but one item, a possible painting facedown, and it is approximately the correct size of the Vermeer. Next to it sits a Phillips-head screwdriver and several screws.
Pierre-Emmanuel walks toward it. I follow.
“First of all,” he says, his tone steadier now, “the painting is authentic. This is indeed The Girl at the Piano by Vermeer, most likely painted in 1656.” There is a hushed awe in his voice. “I can’t tell you what an honor it is to be in its presence.”
I give him this moment of silence, as though this is a religious service, which, for him, may be apropos. When I meet his eyes, Pierre-Emmanuel clears his throat. “Let me get to why I so urgently needed to see you.” He points to the back of the painting. “First off, there was a Masonite backing board covering the entire reverse of your Vermeer. It’s not original obviously, but Masonite backings are not uncommon. They protect the painting from dust and physical impact.”
He glances over at me. I nod to show that I am listening.
“The backing board is screwed in, so I carefully took out the screws and removed the Masonite in order to inspect the painting more thoroughly. That’s the backing board over there.”
He points to what looks like a thin school blackboard. On it, I can see the faded Lockwood family crest. Pierre-Emmanuel turns his attention back to the flip side of the Vermeer. “You can see here the stretcher up against the back of the canvas. That’s not uncommon either, but the thing is, first you need to remove the backing. Then you need to look under the stretcher. It’s not easy to do. But that’s where someone hid them—under a screwed-in backing board and taped between the stretcher and the canvas.”
“Hid what?” I ask.
He has it in his gloved hand. “This envelope.”
It had probably started life as white, but it is now yellowed to the point of being near manila.
“At first,” he continues, his words a rushed babble now, “I was so excited. I thought maybe it was a letter of historical importance. Oh, and it wasn’t sealed. I wouldn’t have slit it open or looked inside, if that was the case. I would have just put it to the side.”
“So what was inside?” I ask.
Pierre-Emmanuel leads me over to a desk and points. “These.”
I look down at the brown yet transparent images.
“They’re film negatives,” Pierre-Emmanuel continues. “I don’t know how old they are, but most people take digital pictures nowadays. And those screws hadn’t been removed in years.”
The shape of the negatives appears odd to my layman’s eyes. You usually think of negatives as being rectangular. These, however, are perfect squares.
I look at Pierre-Emmanuel. His lip is now trembling.
“I assume you looked at them.”
His voice is a terrified whisper. “Only three,” he manages to tell me. “That’s all I could handle.”
He offers me a set of latex gloves. I snap them on and turn on his lamp. I carefully lift one of the negatives with the pads of my thumb and forefinger. I raise it to the light. Pierre-Emmanuel has taken a step back, but I know that he is watching my face. I show nothing, but I feel the jolt everywhere. I gently put the negative back and move to a second. Then a third. Then a fourth. I still show nothing, but there is an eruption going on inside. I won’t lose control. Not yet.
But the rage is coming. I will need a way to channel it.
After I view ten of the negatives, I say to him, “I’m sorry you had to see these.”
“Do you know who those girls are?”
I do. More than that, I know where the photographs were taken.
In the Hut of Horrors.
CHAPTER 32
It is dark by the time I arrive at the faculty housing area of Haverford College.
I drove myself from the airport because I want no one around. I drive fast. I drive with a fury. When Ian Cornwell sees me at his door at this late hour, he is unsure how to react. Part of him still fears my name and how important my family is to this institution—but more of him, I have come to believe, wants nothing to do with me or the awful past I keep dragging back to his doorstep.
“It’s late,” Ian Cornwell tells me as I stand on his stoop. He blocks the door so that I cannot enter. “I already told you everything I know.”
I nod. Then without warning, I punch him hard in the stomach. He folds at the waist as though it has hinges. I shove him inside and close the door behind me. The punch was well placed, so as to knock the wind out of him. His eyes are wide with fear as he retches, seeking air. I know that I should feel bad, but as I explained previously, violence gives me a rush. It would be dumb to lie and pretend otherwise.
He drops to the ground. Having the wind knocked out of you just means the impact to your celiac plexus causes a temporary diaphragmatic spasm. It doesn’t last. I pull over a chair and sit next to him. I wait until he can breathe.
Through gritted teeth, Cornwell says, “Get out.”
“Look at these.”
Pierre-Emmanuel helped me make rudimentary reproductions of two of the negatives. I drop them next to him. He looks at them and then he looks back at me in abject horror.
“These were hidden in the frame of the Vermeer,” I say.
“I don’t understand.”
“These girls,” I continue, “are victims from the Hut of Horrors.”
His eyes go wide again, a mixture of fear and total confusion. It doesn’t compute for him. Not yet. “What does that have to do—?”
“I don’t have time for this, Ian, so I’ll ask you one more time. What really happened the night of the heist?”
He puts his hand on his stomach and rolls into a sit. The stomach will be sore tomorrow. I can see his mind searching for a way out, and what that tells me, with very little doubt, is that Ian Cornwell knows more than he is saying. I say “very little doubt” rather than “no doubt” because, of course, I can be fooled as easily as anyone. The stupidest men are the ones who think they can’t be wrong. The stupidest men are the ones who are most sure. The stupidest men are the ones who don’t know what they don’t know.