Daniel had been right, there was a gold mine in Pierre Lafontaine’s library and computer.
Well, at least a silver mine.
Remi and Béatrice pored over the research Monsieur Lafontaine had conducted on the paintings of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and their painters—Death by Jacob van der Veer, War by Jan Mertens, Pestilence by Geert Janssens, and Famine by Frerik Peeters.
Lafontaine had been busy. He had assembled scraps of information from a dozen archives in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. The man had hired a translator for the German archive material but knew Dutch himself. Remi wondered if he had taught himself the language in order to better research the four painters. This research certainly showed an obsession stretching back at least ten years. Remi didn’t read the language, which left a gap in what she could read of Lafontaine’s discoveries.
But she could see enough.
What was immediately apparent was that this was no simple art theft. Two different paintings in two different countries had been stolen, neither of major value. The owners did not appear to know one another. Béatrice had checked the customer database and found no record of the gallery ever having any contact with Montgomery Dyson.
Then there was the style of the thefts, imitating the subjects of the paintings themselves. Whoever was committing these killings had some other motive than just acquiring them. He wanted to make a point.
But what?
The answer must lie in the lives of the painters themselves, and their patron, the mayor of Haarlem.
And that’s where it got interesting.
Remi had gotten a wrong impression about these artists through the surviving paintings of Jacob van der Veer. Of the few pieces of his to make it to the modern day, they were all relatively tame—two landscapes, some religious paintings of the apocalypse that were bloody but no bloodier than similar works of their type, and a portrait of the wife of the mayor of Haarlem.
Surviving paintings from the other members of the quartet told a different story.
Jan Mertens had not only painted the horseman of War; he had painted several paintings of battles and massacres in grisly detail. There was even a record of a patron refusing to pay for a commission because it was “of suche a bloode thirstie natur that mine familie shunned its verie presence.” The patron asked for the painting to be toned down and Mertens had refused, stating that, “I painte the truthe, not the honied dreames of a burgher’s fancie.”
Mertens never got his money.
The other two were even worse. Geert Janssens was kicked out of Amsterdam for “unholy paintings.” The records gave no details other than the fact that the paintings had been seized by church authorities and destroyed, and Geert Janssens was named persona non grata in Holland’s greatest city.
Frerik Peeters did time in jail for the murder of a child before being released for “lack of evidence.” While the details of the trial had been lost sometime over the ensuing centuries, this piqued Remi’s curiosity. If there had been insufficient evidence to keep him in jail, how had the court found sufficient evidence to put him in there in the first place? Frerik Peeters was also known for contributing some rather macabre engravings to alchemical texts. While such texts were in great demand at the time, the examples she saw went far beyond what the Church accepted and that made him a figure of controversy. Many showed demons in a neutral or even positive light, quite unacceptable at the time. There were oblique references to Geert Janssens and Jacob Van der Veer also contributing to illustrations to books of alchemy, although none seem to have survived.
With three out of four of the artists having been involved in alchemy, Remi had to wonder if Jan Mertens had participated as well. Unfortunately, there was no evidence of this.
Sadly, despite Lafontaine’s extensive research over the years, so little information had survived about these four minor artists that there were huge gaps in his data.
Still, the strangeness of the works, the common link of alchemy, and the similarity in style and tone between the four artists, hinted at some sort of collaboration before they had been commissioned by the mayor to paint the Four Horsemen.
Pierre Lafontaine had done some research on the mayor as well, but there he, and Remi, hit a dead end. Hendrick van Berckenrode held the post from 1622 to 1630, during the height of the city’s wealth, but seemed to be nothing but a respectable, wealthy businessman who had come into a position of political power. He donated to the poor. He paid for repairs and an expansion to his local church. In his younger years he had been captain of the city militia. Not a whiff of scandal touched him. He had his political opponents, to be sure, but even they did not level any charges of corruption or impiety at his feet.
So why hire a religious dissident, an accused child murderer, and painters who dabbled in the controversial subject of alchemy? A man of his position would be scrutinized. Granted, he had chosen Jacob van der Veer, the least controversial of the four, to paint his wife, but even van der Veer had done illustrations for alchemical texts, something the more religious members of the Haarlem community would have looked at askance.
No, a man in such a position would not have risked political backlash over the artists he hired unless he absolutely needed to hire these particular men.
That hinted at some greater purpose. Remi knew that despite all the public displays of piety, many people in that era were fascinated by the darker side of life. Paintings of martyrdoms and military atrocities were popular. Public executions and freak shows drew large crowds. Some historians theorized that witch hunts actually uncovered a resurgent folk religion with a faith based on magic and nature worship outside the control of the Church. Mysticism and alchemy, while claiming to be aligned with Christian teachings, often went far beyond mainstream doctrine and got their practitioners in trouble. Court documents from several nations recorded the discovery of numerous secret societies devoted to strange religious practices.
Perhaps Hendrick van Berckenrode and the four artists were members of one such society, a society that devoted itself to the macabre. It would explain the outré subject matter of so many of the paintings and well as the criminal records of two of the painters.
If so, Lafontaine had found no evidence of it beyond the works themselves. He also hadn’t found any evidence of where the other paintings ended up. Of course, he didn’t have police powers to demand that art dealers give up their sales records. Hopefully Torsson would be able to do better.
Because if not, this investigation would be stalled until the murderer showed himself for a third time.
* * *
While Remi busied herself with researching the artists, Daniel and Torsson were at the local precinct going through flight and police records.
Torsson had phoned a judge to try and fast-track a search warrant for sales files on the painting of Pestilence. While waiting for that to come back, they looked through flight records of people who had flown between the United States and France in between the times of the two murders and who also had criminal records in either the United States or the European Union.
The matching up took some time. There were dozens of flights a day between the two countries, flying from several different cities. A smart criminal would not have flown out of New York, the scene of the first murder. Instead, he would have tried to cover his tracks by flying out of a different city or even a different state. Daniel decided not to widen the search to Canada and Mexico yet. The killer probably wouldn’t have had time for that, and the search was big enough already.
And it came up with a lot of hits. Daniel snorted when he saw the list. If only the average airline passenger knew how many ex-cons they flew with, they might never go on another vacation again.
Pickpockets, wife beaters, drunk drivers, it was amazing. No murderers, though.
One name, however, did stand out. Jean-Baptiste Gagneux, 47 years of age, originally from La Rochelle but now living in Paris, had spent seven years on the inside for jewel theft. While that wasn’t art, it was in the same category. Stealing jewelry wasn’t like stealing cars or stereos. You had to know something about the upper crust of the black market to move that sort of thing.
Daniel brought up his file and while Torsson translated, he grew even more interested.
Gagneux had stolen a collection of antique jewelry from a pawn shop in Lyon. Not only that; he had been charged with numerous other counts of theft—antiquarian books, rare letters from famous people, and paintings.
“Bingo,” Daniel muttered. Torsson nodded. They read on.
Other than a pawn shop heist, which had been a clever break-in foiled only because the guy he fenced the jewelry to copped a plea bargain and fingered Gagneux, none of the other charges stuck. While in prison for the jewelry charge, he went through three more trials for theft, including a collection of late medieval French religious paintings; but in each case, he was found innocent for lack of evidence.
His lawyer was a pricey one who Torsson said was famous for getting criminals off the hook, so Monsieur Jean-Baptiste Gagneux obviously had some good money squirreled away.
Gagneux got out of prison four years ago and had been the target of no charges or investigations since then.
He had either retired or gotten more careful.
Daniel voted for more careful. In his experience, professional criminals rarely reformed. Prison was a mere temporary setback in a lifelong career of wrongdoing.
“Do we have a record of where he’s living now?” Daniel asked once they had finished looking through Gagneux’s criminal file.
“All former convicts have to register their address. One moment,” Torsson murmured, tapping away on the computer. “Aha! Here he is, and he’s right here in Paris. An apartment in a nice district. He still is making good money somehow.”
“No prizes for guessing his source of income. Hold on. I need to call Remi,” Daniel pulled out his phone.
“The civilian consultant? Do we really need her along for an arrest?”
Daniel smiled. “I want her to take a look at this guy’s apartment. She’ll see a lot of things you and I won’t see. Besides, if I don’t take her along for the arrest, she’s going chew me out all the way back to the States.”