The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,194

said repeatedly. “She would have wanted a fresh start for you. Out of the city.” He was right. But how could I explain to him, in the chain of disorder and senselessness that had followed her death, exactly how irrelevant those old wishes were?

Still lost in thought as I turned the corner to the station, fishing in my pocket for my MetroCard, I passed a newsstand where I saw a headline reading:

MUSEUM MASTERWORKS RECOVERED IN BRONX MILLIONS IN STOLEN ART

I stopped on the sidewalk, commuters streaming past me on either side. Then—stiffly, feeling observed, heart pounding—I walked back and bought a copy (certainly buying a newspaper was a less suspicious thing for a kid my age to do than it seemed to be—?) and ran across the street to the benches on Sixth Avenue to read it.

Police, acting on a tip, had recovered three paintings—a George van der Mijn; a Wybrand Hendriks; and a Rembrandt, all missing from the museum since the explosion—from a Bronx home. The paintings had been found in an attic storage area, wrapped in tinfoil and stacked amidst a bunch of spare filters for the building’s central air-conditioning unit. The thief, his brother, and the brother’s mother-in-law—owner of the premises—were in custody pending bail; if convicted on all charges, they faced combined sentences of up to twenty years.

It was a pages-long article, complete with timelines and diagram. The thief—a paramedic—had lingered after the call to evacuate, removed the paintings from the wall, draped them with a sheet, concealed them beneath a folded-up portable stretcher, and walked with them from the museum unobserved. “Chosen with no eye to value,” said the FBI investigator interviewed for the article. “Snatch and grab. The guy didn’t know a thing about art. Once he got the paintings home he didn’t know what to do with them so he consulted with his brother and together they hid the works at the mother-in-law’s, without her knowledge according to her.” After a little Internet research, the brothers had apparently realized that the Rembrandt was too famous to sell, and it was their efforts to sell one of the lesser-known works that led investigators to the cache in the attic.

But the final paragraph of the article leaped out as if it had been printed in red.

As for other art still missing, the hopes of investigators have been revived, and authorities are now looking into several local leads. “The more you shake the trees, the more falls out of them,” said Richard Nunnally, city police liaison with the FBI art crimes unit. “Generally, with art theft, the pattern is for pieces to be whisked out of the country very quickly, but this find in the Bronx only goes to confirm that we probably have quite a few amateurs at work, inexperienced parties who stole on impulse and don’t have the know-how to sell or conceal these objects.” According to Nunnally, a number of people present at the scene are being questioned, contacted, and reinvestigated: “Obviously, now, the thinking is that a lot of these missing pictures may be here in the city right under our noses.”

I felt sick. I got up and dumped the paper in the nearest trash can, and—instead of getting on the subway—wandered back down Canal Street and roamed around Chinatown for an hour in the freezing cold, cheap electronics and blood red carpets in the dim sum parlors, staring in fogged windows at mahogany racks of rotisseried Peking duck and thinking: shit, shit. Red-cheeked street vendors, bundled like Mongolians, shouting above smoky braziers. District Attorney. FBI. New information. We are determined to prosecute these cases to the fullest extent of the law. We have full confidence that other missing works will surface soon. Interpol, UNESCO and other federal and international agencies are cooperating with local authorities in the case.

It was everywhere. All the newspapers had it: even the Mandarin newspapers, the recovered Rembrandt portrait amid streams of Chinese print, peeping out from bins of unidentifiable vegetables and eels on ice.

“Really disturbing,” said Hobie later that night at dinner with the Amstisses, brow knitted with anxiety. The recovered paintings were all he’d been able to talk about. “Wounded people everywhere, people bleeding to death, and here’s this fellow snatching paintings off the walls. Carrying them around outside in the rain.”

“Well, can’t say I’m surprised,” said Mr. Amstiss, who was on his fourth scotch on the rocks. “After that second heart attack of Mother’s? You can’t believe the mess these goons from Beth Israel