The High Line is one of New York’s most wondrous rehabilitations, crafted from a rotting, rusty unused elevated subway line into a 1.5-mile pedestrian’s garden walk. Its immediate success drew restaurateurs who knew the neighborhood, adjacent to the former Meatpacking District, would be a vibrant nexus for people to gather, eat and drink, and The Standard Grill in the Standard High Line Hotel has become an anchor, with the boisterous Biergarten next door.
      The Standard is a grand space, with a lovely all-white room as you enter, then, beyond, a big handsome room with a copper penny floor, spacious booths and high barrel-vaulted ceiling. When full, it can be loud, so ask for a table nearest the open kitchen, away from the bulk of diners. 
      Its website describes The Standard as “classic New York, blending traditional steakhouse with New American cuisine,” which is a fair enough description for a menu that thoroughly covers all the bases without becoming a screed. Executive Chef Jean-Paul Lourdes knows his way around a grill as well as he does the seafood station, and his French onion soup ($14), thick with Comté cheese and an onion relish, would be a paragon of the form had it not used rye bread.
     The raw bar offers three kinds of oysters by the piece ($3-$4.50), shrimp cocktail ($24) and a chilled half lobster ($36), followed by a selection of cheeses, cured meats and snacks.  For starters there is that wonderful onion soup and a fine, meaty Jonah crab cake with stone ground mustard ($32). Beef tartare gains some punch from Calabrian chilies and texture from sunchokes ($23).
     From the grill you can opt for six cuts, including a very good 12-ounce dry aged New York strip with smoked harissa—at $48 something of a bargain these days. Go up to 38 ounces for the tomahawk and fermented rye mustard and you’ll pay $145, but that will easily serve three people. Quite remarkable and intensely flavorful was an 18-ounce slow-roasted Nebraska Angus Prime rib ($58) that has been aged for 45 days and then fermented for 72 hours in sushi rice before going in the oven for four hours. It’s a magnificent piece of beef with the right tang of aging, and it is lavished with a reduction of sweetened juices that makes it all the more savory. Our table of four each enjoyed an ample slice and then I still took almost half of it home for lunch.

Photo: John Mariani

     Half of a well-fatted “Million Dollar Chicken” ($30) has equal heft, enhanced by Aleppo pepper and preserved lemon, again with impeccably reduced juices. So, too, the lime leaf broth buoying a roasted sea bass with saffron and potato ($36) was as hearty a seafood dish as you’ll find. 
      Indeed, no one would dare complain about the portions here and prices that are just as easy to swallow. By the way, don’t fail to order the fabulously rich salt baked potato puree ($12), of which my tablemate observed, “They might even have added potato to the butter!” White asparagus ($14), which don’t travel well, were that night sinewy and tough to chew through.
      You should get a dessert or two at The Standard Grill because they are lavish and as satisfying for a big guy as for a small child: A gloppy ice cream sundae ($9); a good cheesecake ($9); a chocolate-coffee mousse with whipped cream explosion called “The Deal Closer” ($14); and irresistible warm chocolate chip cookies ($9) with a glass of milk. If you like.
         The wine list is entirely appropriate for this kind of fare and, for its size, unintimidating. There are a lot of interesting whites under $60, and about a dozen reds under $100.
         The Standard Grill has clearly attracted a New York crowd—the women guests dress well though most of the men dress down—but it’s obviously become a good introduction for foreign visitors to learn about American beef, cosmopolitan taste and bang for the buck.

Open daily for dinner.

         David filled Katie in on his conversation with Kiley, indicating that he was doing his best at least to alert his Interpol colleagues of his suspicions.  David also mentioned the arsenic in Saito’s blood.
         “Kiley said the medical examiner said it might be in the blood as some sort of Asian treatment for Saito’s syphilis,” said David. “I’m going to call a guy I know who works in the coroner’s office here in New York. What are you up to?”
         “I have an appointment with Coleman,” Katie said. “I’m not sure how much I want to hint at about what you and I believe, but I think I need to feel him out about the fact that three people on the list of six possible bidders, plus Saito, have not exactly had a good year.  He’s still got, what, three more profiles to do? He got that trimmed down list from us, remember, but I doubt he’s put two and two together about the group yet. I’ll let you know what he thinks.”
         David’s contact at the coroner’s office was considered one of the city’s top forensic scientists, Dr. John Malone, who’d been at his job for nearly thirty years. David had worked with him on a number of cases of people rubbed out by the mob, admiring the ultra-clinical way Malone would describe the blows a victim took to the head and neck from a metal, not a wooden, baseball bat.  “The metal bats don’t have any give and thereby inflict more damage with fewer blows; also, no wood splinters to work with,” David remembered Malone once saying.
         Malone was never less than official in his statements, both to the police and to the press, refusing to give any details he had not positively pinned down, so David knew Malone would not conjecture about the arsenic in Saito’s blood beyond what he was told.
         “Can I get a copy of the autopsy?” was the first thing Malone asked David over the phone. David doubted Kiley had gotten hold of the document, which would have been in Japanese anyway.
         “I could ask, but it might take a while.”
         “Well, then, I can’t say anything specific or in any way definitive. At one time arsenic was a good way to slowly get rid of your opponent by building it up in the bloodstream, but it’s been pretty much out of favor as a poison for fifty years. Of course, massive doses would kill you immediately—it’s nasty stuff, destroys your blood cells, sends you into shock.
         “It is interesting to note that many historians and forensic scientists believe the last Chinese emperor, Guangxu (left), was poisoned with arsenic by the empress—her name was  Cixi (below)—and her political ally Yuan Shikai.  Reports were they found that Guangxu had 2,000 times the amount of arsenic in him that is naturally extant in the body. The day Guangxu died, Cixi appointed a new emperor—he was just shy of three years old. Then, the very next day Cixi died. Lots of intrigue in that court.”
          “And did Cixi have arsenic in her blood?”
         “I don’t think that was ever tested for. More to the point, David, it is very true that arsenic was once considered a miracle drug for treating syphilis. They even called it ‘the Magic Bullet.’ Maybe you read the book or saw the movie with Edward G. Robinson, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet? Ehrlich had been working on a cure for bubonic plague, but in 1909 he hooked up with two Japanese bacteriologists, Sahachiro Hata (left) and Shibasaburo Kitasato, and a year later they came up with a compound called Salvarsan they marketed as ‘the arsenic that saves live.’ It was a pretty good treatment for advanced syphilis before penicillin came along in 1928, though it wasn’t used until 1942 and certainly unavailable in Japan during the war.”
         “So you’re saying that Saito might have been on an arsenic treatment for his advanced syphilis and that’s what showed up in the blood?”
         “Possibly.  I’d have to know the concentration of the arsenic to say much more, and if it had been a very large amount—enough to kill him quickly—it had probably left his blood before the autopsy found it.”
         “But it’s not out of the question that Saito was poisoned with arsenic?”
         “That’s not something I would ever answer unless I did the autopsy, and that body is now in the ground.”
         As always, David was astounded at Malone’s breadth and depth of knowledge, which seemed requisite for a job in forensic science. He used to occasionally call Malone “Sherlock,” a comparison Malone swept away as complete nonsense, saying,  “What Holmes knew back then would just about fill a syringe compared to what we know today,” then adding, “Though that’s not Holmes’s fault.”

                                             *                         *                         *                        

         Katie’s appointment with Coleman took place outside his office.
         “The a/c is on the fritz,” he told her. “Can you meet me at the coffee shop around the corner? We can speak more privately there anyway.”
         The coffee shop was nearly empty at three o’clock, and, this being Friday, Coleman looked exhausted, nursing a cold.
         “You don’t look so good,” Katie told him.
         “Lingering summer cold.  Working too hard, too. I just hope when this whole Vermeer auction thing is over I can take some time off.  A place where the only art on the wall is a poster of the Caribbean island I’m on.”
         “So, any more news?”
         “Nothing that wasn’t in Wednesday’s edition.”
         Both of them ordered tea with lemon.         
         Katie filled him in on some of the new things she had learned in the past two weeks but avoided the subject of any criminality.  She spoke about Balaton, Stepanossky, Dorenbosch, Shui, Danielides and Correia but added little to what Art Today had already published.
         “Is there a date for the auction?” she asked.
        “Some time in November, maybe before Thanksgiving. Nobody will know until the approved experts take a look at the painting.”
         “Do you know who they’ll be?”
         “I have the names of a couple; there may be others. I know that a Vermeer expert from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam will be going and another from the Kunstmuseum in Vienna (left).  They own a Vermeer and are considered first-rate in restoration of old paintings. I suspect someone from the Louvre will go; they own a couple of Vermeers, including The Astronomer.”  
      “What about technical experts, the ones who look at the paint and canvas and what’s underneath?”
         “There’s a lot of debate about scientific methods versus the eye of the experts.  An X-ray can tell you if there’s painting underneath or some initial sketches, and chemical analysis of the paint itself is the new frontier in the field.”
         “Will any of those people go to Hong Kong?”
         “I don’t know.  It’s hard to figure what the Chinese will allow because they haven’t been in this kind of market very long. They certainly have little expertise in 17th century Dutch painting. I doubt very much they’re going to allow much scientific analysis because it will take too long.”
         “But, if they don’t have absolute authentication, will they really be able to sell it as a Vermeer, much less for $100 million?”
         “You’re asking me questions I don’t know the answers to, Katie,” Coleman said, sounding annoyed. “Aw, Jeez, Katie, I’m sorry, I just feel lousy.  I didn’t mean to snap. I gotta go home and get in bed for the weekend.”
         “I understand. Just tell me one thing: Is there someone I can contact who is an expert of a kind who might have a deeper understanding of how this is going to play out? My art professor friend at Fordham is very smart but she’s not an expert of that kind.”
         “Okay,” Coleman said, “write down this name. She’s an expert on the period in the Netherlands and has written a lot about the masters of the time. I know she’s done a monograph on Vermeer.  Her name is Alexandra Janson and she’s currently teaching at Columbia.”
         “Thanks, John,” said Katie. “Now go home and get some rest.”