The Codex Read online

  He turned to Fenton. “What do you make of that?”

  “Drove a semi up here, had a key to the gate—these guys were professional. We’re probably going to find Broadbent’s cadaver in the house, you know.”

  “That’s why I like you, Fenton. You’re my second brain.”

  He heard a shout and glanced up to see three men crossing the lawn, coming toward him. The kids, walking right across the lawn.

  Barnaby rose in a fury. “Jesus Christ! Don’t you know this is a crime scene!”

  The others halted, but the lead character, a tall man in a suit, kept coming. “And who might you be?” His voice was cool, supercilious.

  “I’m Detective Lieutenant Hutchinson Barnaby,” he said, “and Sergeant Harry Fenton. Santa Fe Police Department.”

  Fenton flashed them a quick smile that did little more than bare his teeth.

  “You the sons?”

  “We are,” said the suit.

  Fenton gave them another feral twitch of his lips.

  Barnaby took a moment to look them over as potential suspects. The hippie in hemp had an honest, open face; maybe not the brightest bulb in the store but no robber. The one in cowboy boots had real horseshit on the boots, Barnaby noted with respect. And then there was the guy in the suit, who looked like he was from New York. As far as Hutch Barnaby was concerned anyone from New York was a potential murderer. Even the grandmothers. He scanned them again: Three more different brothers could not be imagined. Odd how that could happen in a single family.

  “This is a crime scene, so I’m going to have to ask you gentlemen to leave the premises. Go out through the gate and go stand under a tree or something and wait for me. I’ll be out in about twenty minutes to talk to you. Okay? Please don’t wander around, don’t touch anything, and don’t talk to each other about the crime or what you’ve observed.”

  He turned, and then as an afterthought turned back. “The whole collection is missing?”

  “That’s what I said on the phone,” said the suit.

  “How much—ballpark—was it worth?”

  “About five hundred million.”

  Barnaby touched the rim of his hat and glanced at Fenton. The look of naked pleasure on Fenton’s face was enough to scare a pimp.

  As Barnaby walked toward the house he considered that he had better be careful—there was going to be a lot of second-guessing on this one. The Feds, Interpol, God knows who else would be involved. He figured a quick look around before the crime-lab people arrived would be in order. He hooked his thumbs into his belt and gazed at the house. He wondered if the collection had been insured. That would bear some looking into. If so, maybe Maxwell Broadbent wasn’t quite so dead after all. Maybe Maxwell Broadbent was sipping margaritas with some piece of ass on a beach in Phuket.

  “I wonder if Broadbent was insured?” asked Fenton.

  Hutch grinned at his partner, then looked back at the place. He looked at the broken window, the confusion of footsteps on the gravel, the trampled shrubbery. The fresh tracks were the sons’, but there were a lot of older traces here as well. He could see where the moving van had parked, where it had laboriously backed around. It looked as if a week or two had passed since the robbery.

  The important thing was to find the body—if there was one. He stepped inside the house. He looked around at the packing tape, bubble wrap, nails, discarded pieces of wood. There was sawdust on the rug and faint depressions. They had actually set up a table saw. It had been an exceptionally competent piece of work. Noisy, too. These people not only knew what they were doing, but they had taken the time to do it right. He sniffed the air. No sweet-and-sour-pork smell of a stiff.

  Inside, the robbery felt just as old as it did outside. A week, maybe even two. He bent down and sniffed the end of a cut piece of lumber lying on the floor. It lacked that just-cut fresh-wood smell. He picked up a piece of grass that had been tracked into the house and crumbled it between his fingers—dry. Clots of mud tracked in by a lugged boot were also thoroughly dry. Barnaby thought back: Last rainfall was two weeks ago today. That’s when it had happened; within twenty-four hours of the rain, when the ground was still muddy.

  He wandered down the huge vaulted central hall. There were pedestals with bronze labels where statues had once stood. There were faint rectangles with hooks on the plastered walls where paintings had once been. There were straw rings and iron stands where antique pots had once sat, and empty shelves with dust holes where treasures had once stood. There were dark slots on the bookshelves where books had been removed.

  He reached the bedroom door and looked at the parade of dirty footprints coming and going. More dried mud. Christ, there must’ve been half a dozen of them. This was a big moving job, and it must have taken a day at least, maybe two.

  A machine sat inside the bedroom. Barnaby recognized it as a foam-in-place machine, of the kind you see at UPS. In another room, he found a shrink-wrapping machine for doing the really big stuff. He found stacks of lumber, rolls of felt, metal strapping tape, bolts and wing nuts, and a couple of skill saws. Couple of thousand dollars’ worth of abandoned equipment. They hadn’t bothered taking anything else; in the living room they’d left a ten-thousand-dollar television, along with a VCR, DVD, and two computers. He thought of his own crappy TV and VCR and the payments he was still making, while his wife and her new boyfriend were no doubt watching porno flicks on them every night.

  He carefully stepped over a videotape cassette lying on the floor. Fenton said, “Lay you three to five the guy’s dead, two to five it’s an insurance scam.”

  “You take all the fun out of life, Fenton.”

  Someone must have seen the activity up here. The house, sitting on its mountaintop, was visible to all of Santa Fe. If he himself had bothered to look out the window of his double-wide in the valley two weeks ago he might have seen the robbery, the house ablaze all night long, the truck headlights winding down the hill. Again, he marveled at the moxie of the robbers. What made them so sure of pulling it off? It was too casual by half.

  He glanced at his watch. He didn’t have much time before the crime-scene van arrived.

  He moved swiftly and methodically through the rooms, looking but taking no notes. Notes, he had learned, always came back to bite you. Every room had been hit. The job had gone to completion. In one room a bunch of boxes had been unpacked and paper lay scattered on the floor. He picked up a piece; some kind of bill of lading, dated a month ago, for twenty-four thousand dollars’ worth of French pots and pans, German and Japanese knives. Was the guy starting a restaurant?

  In the bedroom, in the back of a walk-in closet, he found a huge steel door, partway open.

  “Fort Knox,” said Fenton.

  Barnaby nodded. With a house full of million-dollar paintings, it kind of made him wonder what was so valuable that it had to go into a vault.

  Without touching the door he slipped inside. The vault was empty save some scattered trash on the floor and a bunch of wooden map cases. Slipping out his handkerchief, he used it to open a drawer. The velvet bore indentations where objects had once nested. He slid it shut and turned to the door itself, giving the lock a quick examination. There were no signs of a forced entry. None of the locked cases he’d seen in the rooms had been forced, either.

  “The perps had all the codes and keys,” said Fenton.

  Barnaby nodded. This was no robbery.

  He went outside and made a quick circle of the gardens. They looked neglected. Weeds were coming up. Nothing had been tended to. The grass hadn’t been cut in a couple of weeks. The whole place had a seedy air about it. The neglect, it seemed to him, stretched back even more than the two weeks since the so-called robbery. It looked like the place had been going downhill for a month or two.

  If insurance was involved, so were the sons. Maybe.

  3

  He found them standing in the shade of the piñon tree, arms crossed, silent and glum. As Barnaby approached, the guy in the suit aske
d, “Did you find anything?”

  “Like what?”

  The man scowled. “Do you have any idea what’s been stolen here? We’re talking hundreds of millions. Good God, how could anyone expect to get away with this? Some of these are world-famous works of art. There’s a Filippo Lippi worth forty million dollars alone. They’re probably on their way to the Middle East or Japan. You’ve got to call the FBI, contact Interpol, shut down the airports—”

  He paused to draw in air.

  “Lieutenant Barnaby has some questions,” said Fenton, taking up the role he played so well, his voice curiously high and soft, with an undercurrent of menace. “State your names, please.”

  The one with the cowboy boots stepped forward. “I’m Tom Broadbent, and these are my brothers, Vernon and Philip.”

  “Look, officer,” the one named Philip said, “these artworks are obviously headed for some sheik’s bedroom. They could never hope to sell these paintings on the open market—they’re too well known. No offense, but I really don’t think the Santa Fe Police Department is equipped to handle this.”

  Barnaby flipped open his notebook and checked his watch. He still had almost thirty minutes before the crime-lab truck arrived from Albuquerque.

  “May I ask a few questions, Philip? Okay if I use first names here?”

  “Fine, fine, just get on with it.”

  “Ages?”

  “I’m thirty-three,” Tom said.

  “Thirty-five,” said Vernon.

  “Thirty-seven,” said Philip.

  “Tell me, how is it that all three of you just happened to be here at once?” He directed his gaze toward the New Age type, Vernon, the one who looked like the least competent liar.

  “Our father sent us a letter.”

  “What about?”

  “Well ...” Vernon glanced at his brothers nervously. “He didn’t say.”

  “Any guesses?”

  “Not really.”

  Barnaby switched his gaze. “Philip?”

  “I haven’t the slightest.”

  He swiveled his gaze to the other one, Tom. He found he liked Tom’s face. It was a no-bullshit face. “So Tom, you want to help me out here?”

  “I think it was to talk to us about our inheritance.”

  “Inheritance? How old was your father?”

  “Sixty ...”

  Fenton leaned forward to interrupt, his voice harsh. “Was he sick?”

  “Yes.”

  “How sick?”

  “He was dying of cancer,” said Tom coldly.

  “I’m sorry,” said Barnaby, putting a restraining arm on Fenton as if to stop him from asking more tactless questions. “Any of you got your copy of the letter?”

  All three produced the same letter, handwritten, on ivory laid paper. Interesting, Barnaby thought, that each one had his copy. Said something about the importance they attached to this meeting. Barnaby took one and read:

  Dear Tom,

  I want you to come to my house in Santa Fe, on April 15, at exactly 1:00 P.M., regarding a very important matter affecting your future. I’ve asked Philip and Vernon as well. I have enclosed funds to pay for your travel. Please be on time: one o’clock sharp. Do your old man this one last courtesy.

  Father

  “Any chance of a recovery from the cancer, or was he a goner?” Fenton asked.

  Philip stared at Fenton and then turned to Barnaby. “Who is this man?”

  Barnaby shot a warning glance at Fenton, who often got out of hand. “We’re all on the same side here, trying to solve this crime.”

  “As I understand it” Philip said grudgingly, “there was no chance of recovery. Our father had gone through radiation treatments and chemotherapy, but the cancer had metastasized and there was no getting rid of it. He declined further treatment.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Barnaby, trying unsuccessfully to summon up a modicum of sympathy. “Getting back to this letter, it says something here about funds. How much money came with it?”

  “Twelve hundred dollars in cash,” said Tom.

  “Cash? In what form?”

  “Twelve one-hundred-dollar bills. Sending cash like that was typical of Father.”

  Fenton interrupted again. “How long did he have to live?” He asked this question directly at Philip, thrusting his head forward. Fenton’s was an ugly head, very narrow and sharp, with thick eyebrow ridges, deep-set eyes, a huge nose with each nostril projecting a thicket of black nosehairs, crooked brown teeth, and a receding chin. He had olive skin; despite the Anglo name, Fenton was a Hispano from the town of Truchas, way back up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. He was scary, if you didn’t know he was the kindliest man alive.

  “About six months.”

  “So he invited you here for what? To do a little eeny meeny meiny moe with his stuff?”

  Fenton could be awful when he wanted. But the man got results.

  Philip said icily, “That’s a charming way of putting it. I suppose that’s possible.”

  Barnaby broke in smoothly. “But with a collection like this, Philip, wouldn’t he have made arrangements to leave it to a museum?”

  “Maxwell Broadbent loathed museums.”

  “Why?”

  “Museums had taken the lead in criticizing our father’s somewhat unorthodox collecting practices.”

  “Which were?”

  “Buying artwork of dubious provenance, dealing with tomb robbers and looters, smuggling antiquities across borders. He even robbed tombs himself. I can appreciate his antipathy. Museums are bastions of hypocrisy, greed, and cupidity. They criticize in everyone else the very methods they themselves employed to get their collections.”

  “What about leaving the collection to a university?”

  “He hated academics. Tweedy-dums and tweedy-dees, he called them. The academics, especially the archaeologists, accused Maxwell Broadbent of looting temples in Central America. I’m not spilling any family secrets here: It’s a well-known story. You can pick up just about any copy of Archaeology magazine and read about how our father was their version of the devil incarnate.”

  “Was he planning to sell the collection?” Barnaby pushed on.

  Philip’s lip curled with contempt. “Sell? My father had to deal with auction houses and art dealers all his life. He would die the death of a thousand cuts before he’d consign them one mediocre print to sell.”

  “So he planned to leave it all to you three?”

  There was an awkward silence. “That,” said Philip finally, “was the assumption.”

  Fenton broke in. “Church? Wife? Girlfriend?”

  Philip removed the pipe between his teeth and, in a perfect imitation of Fenton’s clipped style, answered him: “Atheist. Divorced. Misogynist.”

  The other two brothers broke out laughing. Hutch Barnaby even found himself enjoying Fenton’s discomfort. It was so rare that anyone got the better of him during an interrogation. This Philip character, despite his pretensions, was tough. But there was something sad in the long, intelligent face, something lost.

  Barnaby held out the bill of lading for the shipment of cookware. “Any idea what this is all about or where the stuff might have gone?”

  They examined it, shook their heads, and handed it back. “He didn’t even like to cook,” said Tom.

  Barnaby shoved the document into his pocket. “Tell me about your father. Looks, personality, character, business dealings, that sort of thing.”

  It was Tom who spoke again. “He’s ... one of a kind.”

  “How so?”

  “He’s a physical giant of a man, six foot five, fit, handsome, broad shoulders, not a trace of flab, white hair and white beard, solid as a lion with a roaring voice to match. People say he looks like Hemingway.”

  “Personality?”

  “He’s the kind of man who’s never wrong, who rides roughshod over everyone and everything to get what he wants. He lives by his own rules in life. He never graduated high school, but he knows
more about art and archaeology than most Ph.D’s. Collecting is his religion. He despises other people’s religious beliefs, and that’s one reason why he takes so much pleasure in buying and selling things stolen from tombs—and robbing tombs himself.”

  “Tell me more about this tomb robbing.”

  Philip spoke this time, “Maxwell Broadbent was born into a working-class family. He went to Central America when he was young and disappeared into the jungle for two years. He made a big discovery, robbed some Mayan temple, and smuggled the stuff back. That’s how he got started. He was a dealer in questionable art and antiquities—everything from Greek and Roman statues that had been spirited out of Europe to Khmer reliefs chiseled out of Cambodian funerary temples to Renaissance paintings stolen in Italy during the war. He dealt not to make money but to finance his own collecting.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Maxwell’s methods,” Philip said, “were really the only way a person nowadays could acquire truly great art. There probably wasn’t a single piece in his collection that was clean.”

  Vernon spoke: “He once robbed a tomb that had a curse on it. He quoted it at cocktail parties.”

  “A curse? What did it say?”

  “Something like He who disturbs these hones shall he skinned alive and fed to diseased hyenas. And then a herd of asses will copulate with his mother. Or words to that effect.”

  Fenton let a laugh escape.

  Barnaby shot him a cautionary glance. He directed his next question to Philip, now that he had the man talking. Funny how people liked to complain about their parents. “What made him tick?”

  Philip frowned, his broad brow furrowing. “It was like this. Maxwell Broadbent loved his Lippi Madonna more than he loved any real woman. He loved his Bronzino portrait of little Bia de’ Medici more than he loved any of his real children. He loved his two Braques, his Monet, and his Mayan jade skulls more than the real people in his life. He worshiped his collection of thirteenth-century French reliquaries containing the alleged bones of saints more than he worshiped any real saint. His collections were his lovers, his children, and his religion. That’s what made him tick: beautiful things.”