Borrower of the Night - Elizabeth Peters [9]
‘How much did you bribe that dealer?’ he inquired. ‘He promised it to me, you know. That was the dirtiest piece of crummy underhanded swindling – ’
‘Since you stole the Sienese triptych out from under my nose,’ George interrupted. ‘This makes us even. Keep cool, Jake; I told you I’d let you have the van der Weyden.’
‘At a neat profit to yourself.’
‘Naturally.’
Looking back, I can see that what transpired that evening was as inevitable as a chemical formula. If you mix the right amounts of the right chemicals (chemistry was never my forte), you always get nitroglycerine. You don’t sometimes get Caesar salad and sometimes Chanel Number Five. Here we had two men, each massively arrogant in his own fashion, who enjoyed their rivalry with the blind passion of nasty little boys; a third man, who was viewed by the other two with varying degrees of good-natured contempt, and little me. Poor Tony had obviously taken a lot from George Nolan; I could tell by the way they looked at each other, and by the barbed comments. Now I am not being a female chauvinist when I maintain that some men get awfully silly in the presence of a woman. They start showing off. Roosters and little boys fight; human males try to put the other guy down in more subtle ways.
George started moving in on me. He did it very well, but I knew his heart wasn’t in it; he was only trying to aggravate Tony. Jake saw what was going on, and sat back to watch. He liked Tony and he didn’t much care for George; but he loved dissension.
I never said he was a nice guy.
I don’t know when I saw the gleam in Tony’s eye and realized what he was going to do. It must have been before dinner, because apprehension ruined the meal for me. I was so annoyed with all three men that I munched my way grimly through a magnificent spread, wishing I could get my teeth into somebody’s hand. I couldn’t figure out any way of stopping Tony, short of falling on the floor in a fit, and that seemed a trifle drastic. George kept needling Tony; there were frequent references to ivory towers and effete scholars and muscles that had grown flabby from too much study. Yet in a way, what happened was my fault. If Tony and I hadn’t been feuding . . .
Sure enough, with the dessert, the inevitable name was introduced, by Tony, with all the subtlety of a bulldozer.
‘Speaking of sculpture’ – which nobody was – ‘how much would you give for a Riemenschneider?’
George had the face of an actor or a con man, beautifully schooled; but I saw him blink before he readjusted his mask. Then I knew. The guy was a fake. He’d never heard of Riemenschneider, and I felt sure his passion for art was not genuine. For him it was a device to outdo lesser men. As a kid he had probably collected rocks or bottles with the same single-minded fury, chiselling and outbidding other kids in order to get the biggest collection in town.
I would have tripped him up, then and there – and I had thought of a couple of ways in which to do it – but Jake outmanoeuvered me.
‘Riemenschneider,’ he rumbled, in his bass bullfrog voice. ‘Yes – the German woodcarver. Saint Stephen in the Cleveland Museum. God that’s a masterpiece. That’s really great. Yeah, yeah; there was a theft, couple years ago. The Madonna from Volkach. German government ransomed it.’
‘Not the government; the editor of Der Stern.’
‘Shut up,’ Myers said, glaring at Tony. ‘Twenty-five thousand ransom. That’s a lot of money. Yeah, sure, I remember the case. Nothing wrong with my memory. You just stop interrupting me, Tony.’
George, for one, had no intention of interrupting. He sat tapping his fingers gently on the table, a faint, knowing smile on his face. But the smile didn’t fool me. I couldn’t expose his ignorance now; foxy Grandpa had already told him what he needed to know. Myers really did have a fabulous memory. His enthusiasm was genuine, even if it was amplified by the old acquisitive instinct.
‘Tony,’ I said gently, ‘do you think you ought – ’
Jake leaned forwards, elbows planted squarely on the table, and squinted at me.
‘So you’re in on this.