The Rembrandt Secret (35 page)

‘Nicolai? No,’ Marshall replied, ‘not him. He wasn’t the type. He wouldn’t have hurt my father.’

‘You never know who’s the type and who isn’t. People
change type when they’re under pressure.’ Teddy could hear the sounds of the crowded Amsterdam bar in the background. ‘Have you got the letters with you?’

‘No.’ Marshall replied, wanting to add –
only in my head.
He knew that he didn’t need them on his person as every word was committed to memory. The actual letters were to remain in the bank for safekeeping, with no one but himself able to get at them. As for the key, Marshall had put that in an envelope and posted it to the Zeigler Gallery, London.

‘There’s been a break-in at a gallery on Dover Street.’

‘Another?’

Teddy sighed. ‘Lillian Kauffman was burgled too. She called the police.’

‘Did you talk to her?’

‘Yeah, she said nothing to them about the letters, just said she’d been burgled. And then she asked me where you were. Said I should help you out, because you’d make a crap hero.’

‘That sounds like her,’ Marshall said, scrutinising the drinkers around him. Suddenly he noticed a man watching him across the bar, and put down his drink. The man regarded him levelly, without blinking. Marshall looked away, and when he looked back, a woman had joined the man and they were laughing. God, he thought, calm down.

‘What now?’

‘Keep an eye on Georgia,’ Marshall said firmly. ‘Make sure she’s all right, you hear me? Look after her until I get back.’

‘She’s fine.’

‘Don’t let them get to her,’ he said urgently, thinking of his father’s violent death, and of Nicolai Kapinski. ‘I should never have got her mixed up in this, Teddy.’

‘I’ll see she’s OK, I promise,’ Teddy reassured him. ‘Trust me. What are you going to do now, Marshall?’

‘I’ll be in touch—’

Teddy butted in quickly. ‘Before you go, I saw Tobar Manners today. He interrupted me when I was talking to Lillian – he thinks the peasants are deaf – but he was in a panic and he was talking about the letters.’

‘What did Lillian say?’

‘Told him to fuck off and grow up.’

‘How did he take that?’

‘Badly. He said that she’d take it more seriously if the letters turned up. Then she asked him if he was worried that the paintings coming up for sale in New York would turn out to be fakes. He looked like he wanted to slap her, but you know Lillian Kauffman. She just fiddled with one of those doorstop earrings of hers and smirked at him. Said it would be justice for cheating your father.’

‘God, she doesn’t care what she says, does she?’

‘Nah, but Tobar Manners was really shaken, I could tell. She went on to say that it would be a blessing if someone got hold of the letters, a favour to the business, and then she said that if anyone had them it would be Rufus Ariel.’ Teddy paused. ‘Tobar Manners looked stunned, like maybe he hadn’t thought of that. Then he let it slip that a person
could be in real trouble if they tried to hold on to the letters. Even killed.’

‘
He said that?
’

‘He said it.’

‘And Lillian?’

‘Said that she was looking forward to seeing two fake Rembrandts being exposed, and how it was a shame, seeing as how Tobar was acting as broker. But then again, what goes around, comes around.’ Teddy laughed. ‘She cares about you, said if you got strapped for cash, she’d help. I think she’s excited by the whole affair, wants to be in on it.’ Teddy paused for a moment, then took a shot in the dark. ‘You’re going to New York, aren’t you?’

It was Marshall’s turn to be surprised. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Because of the sale. Because if there’s one place on earth you should be now it’s New York,’ Teddy replied. ‘They’ll try and stop you, you know that, don’t you?’

‘I know.’

‘Are you up for this?’

‘Hell, no,’ Marshall replied frankly.

‘All the dealers will be in New York for the sale. The people after you will be there too. It could be any of them.’

‘I know that.’

‘So how are you going to find out who it is?’

‘I’m going to flush them out,’ Marshall replied evenly. ‘He – or they – will have to show their hand. They want the letters, so they’ll have to try and get them off me.’

‘Then what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Like I said, keep to the crowds,’ Teddy warned him, hearing the mobile connection breaking up. ‘Keep to the crowds.’

Turning off his phone, Marshall left the bar and moved over a bridge. The sun was high, but giving little warmth, the bare trees were reflected in the canal below. He found himself thinking about his father, remembering. Many years earlier they had gone on a weekend to the Cotswolds, just after his mother had died. Owen had been rigid with grief and totally ignorant of how to cope with a young boy, and Marshall had been withdrawn. His memory shuddered as an image came back to him. One evening father and son had sat in the plush dining room of an expensive hotel, eating dinner, Marshall in his public-school uniform, Owen in a business suit. Their conversation had been forced, Marshall refusing to eat his fish, Owen embarrassed, his charm only working on the waitress.

Refilling his wine glass, Owen had finally looked across the table at his son and said, ‘We could go for a walk tomorrow.’

Almost as though it was happening to him at that moment, Marshall could feel the dessert spoon in his hand, the metal cool and heavy … He thought of what to say, what he
could
possibly say, wishing that the following day would disappear, simply pass without the excruciating walk and intermittent silences. He wanted to throw the spoon at his father and ask him why he was even bothering to try, because it was obvious he didn’t want to be
there. In that old-fashioned dining room. With his resentful son.

‘Marshall, what d’you think?’ Owen had persisted. ‘About having a walk?’

He had let go of the spoon in that instant. The resounding clatter as it hit the plate had made Owen jump, the surrounding diners turned to stare and the waitress watched from across the room. And then Marshall had looked into his father’s face and realised that his mother’s death wasn’t
his
fault. That he was as lost and wretched as the child in his care. As sick to the heart with the beef stew and the apple pie and the blathering conversation of diners who had no inkling of his crucifying grief.

In that moment Marshall had pitied his father. ‘I’d like a walk,’ he had said at last. ‘A walk would be good.’

And some kind of empathy had passed between father and son, a complicit understanding which would have to do in place of comfortable companionship … Time would change them, mellow them. Time would make Marshall sympathetic and Owen comfortable. But in that dining room, that dusty summer evening, they had made a form of truce.

Still staring into the murky canal water, Marshall then remembered finding his father’s body, and shuddered involuntarily. No one should have died like that, he thought, and especially not Owen Zeigler. Dying in war was bad enough, dying with cancer, with dementia, with
the crumble of old age was bad enough. Dying to protect something was another matter. Dying for another person’s story, another human’s trust, was noble. And that was how, finally, Marshall became close to his father. The letters didn’t mean anything to him personally, but Owen Zeigler had died for them. And in his dying, they had become precious.

Marshall turned his head, staring at the pedestrians walking past, wondering if one of them was watching him; if one of them had already broken into his Amsterdam flat, or followed him to the bank; if the man in the bank – Nicolai Kapinski’s brother – was coming after him. Oddly, Marshall found himself smiling. He was so out of his depth that he felt the fleeting bravery of many desperate men. He had no real idea who to trust. He was trusting Teddy Jack because Teddy had been attacked; because he had been close to his father; because he had offered help. And because he was tough enough to protect Georgia. His guilt pricked like a needle in his skin. Jesus, why had he told her? Why put her in danger? Of all people, Georgia would have been the one person he should have kept safe …

Consoling himself with the thought that Teddy was watching over her, Marshall suddenly found himself outside the Waterlooplein Flea Market and remembered the advice to
keep to the crowds.
Moving into the overcrowded arena, he felt the press of people and paused beside a stall selling cheap tourist mementoes. Pretending to be
interested, he picked up a book. Underneath was a reproduction of Rembrandt’s
The Night Watch.

‘You want to buy that?’ a stout woman asked, leaning towards him over the stall and raising her voice. ‘You English, right?’

‘How did you know?’

She smiled, benign in a headscarf. ‘You’re pale and you’re looking at tourist stuff.’

Out of the corner of Marshall’s eye he could see a man glance at him. He moved on, the stall owner calling after him, ‘Make me an offer! I can do a special price for the English!’

Moving down the aisle between the stalls, Marshall could smell the scent of fruit mixing with the dry cement chalkiness of reproduction statues. Men with vacant eyes sat on low stools behind their stalls, some smoking, some just watching the shoppers pass. Behind a worn-down clock stall, three men played cards, one smoking a Turkish cigarette, the tobacco pungent. Everywhere Marshall looked people seemed to be looking back at him. When he turned, there always seemed to be someone pressed up against him, or brushing into him, their eyes catching his, their expressions furtive. Everyone seemed suddenly suspicious, untrustworthy, dangerous.

His anxiety increasing, Marshall bought himself a coffee from a nearby stall and sat down to drink it. He had to control himself. A woman bumped into his seat and he jumped up, accepting her apology as she moved past with a child’s pram. He felt as though he was illuminated by
some incandescent light, marked out, and obvious to everyone. As easy to spot as a coffin in a bread tin. Around him the voices and footsteps echoed eerily, rising into the high, glassed roof of the market.

Why was Dimitri Kapinski following him? Marshall thought, sipping his drink. Why him? Then he remembered what Teddy Jack had said about the man.

‘
Wasn’t all there. By the time he was twenty odd, Dimitri had spent time in jail and been married. Then he’d bunked off to London, worked there for a short while, selling drugs. He’d become pretty violent too …
’

But why was he involved? Marshall’s glance moved to a middle-aged man who had sat down at his table. The man nodded at Marshall, then began to read his evening paper.

Was Dimitri Kapinski working alone? Or working with someone else? The names spun like a roulette wheel in Marshall’s head: Tobar Manners, Rufus Ariel, Dimitri Kapinski, God knew who—

‘Sugar, please.’

Marshall stared at the man across the table. ‘What?’

‘Can you pass the sugar?’

Nodding, he pushed it towards the man, watching him curiously. ‘You spoke English to me. How did you know I wasn’t Dutch?’

‘I heard you order your coffee in English,’ the man replied reasonably, turning his attention back to his newspaper.

Marshall looked around, surprised that he had made such an elementary mistake in using his own language.

‘Waar woon je?’ he asked the man, watching as he put down his paper.

‘Plantage Middenlaan,’ he replied, offering up the street where he lived. He then asked, in English, ‘Do you know it?’

‘Yes, I’ve lived in Amsterdam for a while,’ Marshall replied, wondering if the man was watching him or merely taking time out to read his newspaper. ‘Hoe heet je?’

‘Gerrit Hoogstraten.’ He put out his hand, Marshall shaking it as Hoogstraten asked, ‘And what’s your name?’

‘Marshall Zeigler.’

He nodded, smiling. ‘You seem … nervous.’

‘A little, yes.’

‘Are you in trouble?’

‘Why would you ask that?’

‘You seem like someone with problems, and you keep looking around as if you expect someone to be watching you. And you obviously suspect me of something … Are the police after you?’

‘No.’

The man put down his newspaper, looking steadily at Marshall.

‘I used to be in the police myself, before I retired. I was a detective in the Amsterdam force.’ He sipped his drink. ‘Perhaps you need help?’

‘Why would I?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t turn round now, Mr Zeigler, but there’s
a man staring at you. He has been ever since you sat down. I noticed him because he wasn’t interested in the stalls, just in you.’

Marshall stiffened in his seat. ‘What does he look like?’

‘Around thirty, clean shaven, very short hair.’

‘I think I know him. He’s been following me for a while.’

‘I would say – looking at you and looking at him – that perhaps he is not the injured party here?’ Gerrit Hoogstraten said perceptively, smiling again as though they were having a light-hearted talk about the weather. ‘Perhaps I could help?’

‘Why would you want to get involved?’

‘Why not? I’ve a good instinct for people, and I don’t like the man who’s following you.’

Marshall finished his drink, then glanced over to his companion. ‘How could you help me?’

‘If you want to get out of the market, just tell me when, and I’m sure I can hold up the man who seems so interested in you.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘Why not? You can trust some people, you know, Mr Zeigler.’ He glanced around idly, as though merely talking and passing the time of day.

‘Is he still there?’

‘Yes.’

Marshall nodded. ‘I’m going to get up in a minute and head for the door.’

‘Excellent,’ Gerrit Hoogstraten replied. ‘I’ll make sure he’s delayed.’

Saying goodbye, Marshall rose from his seat. Then, without looking round, he headed for the nearest exit onto the Waterlooplein. As he left the table, the man followed him, passing Gerrit Hoogstraten who immediately put out his foot. Tripped up, the man fell, Hoogstraten apparently trying to help him to his feet, but delaying him instead.

‘Zorgig! Zorgig!’ he said, trying to brush the man down as he struggled to get away.