The Dali Deception

by Adam Maxwell

  “I worked with your mother,” Fegan said.

  Simply stated, no frills. Less likely to be a lie, Violet thought. Or he knows that and it’s a trick. She took another moment to weigh up the man. Thick black hair, streaked with white. He’s older, might have been going bald if he had different genes, so that fits. She knew his name, his reputation. In their profession there weren’t many who stuck around as long as he had. His name was enough for it to draw her back to Kilchester.

  But tempting is different to trustworthy.

  “She may have mentioned me?” Fegan had stopped stroking his coat. This was his pitch. He was selling the job, selling himself to her.

  Violet half-nodded her head. “And my father, I suppose you’ve worked with him too? Perhaps you should just get them on board instead of me?”

  “Your mother stopped working after she broke her leg. And why would I need your father? This is not a job for a conman, even one as accomplished as your father.” Fegan sipped at his water, his eyes twinkling. “Did I pass the test?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said impatiently. “You can’t be too careful, though, can you?”

  Violet watched as Fegan once again scanned the periphery of the room for wanderers then leaned back and began fondling his lapel.

  “Tell me about the painting,” Violet said. “You’ll want to tell me all about it, won’t you? Who does it belong to at the moment?”

  Fegan barked a couple of belly laughs. “At the moment! At the moment it belongs to Rollo Glass, the chairman of the Kilchester Bank.”

  “A banker. So presumably the security is…”

  “…your worst nightmare.”

  “And the painting itself?” asked Violet.

  “Tell me why you left Kilchester,” said Fegan blankly.

  Violet stared at him for a moment, weighing him up before she spoke again. This was how he wanted to play and if he was going to finance the job then she had to play along.

  She nodded and took a breath.

  “I left because I wanted to keep my head down.”

  Fegan nodded. “And I appreciate you popping it over the parapet.”

  “And I wanted to keep my head down because I was betrayed by members of my own crew. And by my treacherous fucking ex.”

  Fegan gave that belly laugh again. “Betrayed by your lover?” He sucked air through his teeth.

  Violet didn’t flinch, just waited for him to stop, the feelings welling in her stomach again. Another deep breath.

  “We were inside. The security had been disabled. I was up to bat. All we had to do was get into the containers that held the diamonds.”

  Fegan leaned forward, studying her face, savouring the story.

  “I took off my coat just to be comfortable to pick the locks and Jenny – did I mention Jenny? She was the brains of the operation. Knocked out the alarm system. She picked up my coat and put it on. Said she was cold or something like that.

  “But then my phone rings and it’s my ex.

  “‘Surprise!’ he texts. And a picture of a bag full of diamonds. Next thing I know two massive heavies are storming out of a janitor’s room towards me and Jenny. I started scrambling backwards and she’s watching me with this look of confusion on her face…”

  Fegan was frowning with concentration, staring at Violet, his mouth hanging open.

  “I was pointing and… I don’t know if I was shouting but one of the guys shoves a knife into her as she starts turning around and…”

  Violet stopped talking.

  Fegan traced his finger from the far side of his glass clockwise to the side closest to him, the condensation parting for a moment and allowing the droplets above to pour down into the gap.

  “But you escaped?” he said eventually.

  Violet nodded.

  “And I guess that means it’s my turn to show you mine?”

  Violet nodded once more. She leaned forward, sliding her drink to one side. “If I come back to Kilchester then I’m not coming for some half-arsed job. If I kick in the doors of this town then I’m kicking them wide open…”

  “Scores to settle, all that melodramatic poppycock?” Fegan rolled his eyes.

  “All that shit,” said Violet. “And I am prepared to do it. For the right job. Enough time has passed.”

  “And this ex…” said Fegan. “Is he likely to take another shot at you?”

  “Try to kill me?” Violet stared over Fegan’s shoulder out into the street, watching the people bustling by, all of them happily oblivious. She had to balance the truth with the bravado that she could pull off the job. Being away had given her time to think about the situation. If wanting her dead was Percy’s sole purpose then he would have sent someone after her when she retreated. After all this time she was resigned to the fact that he was probably too inept to try anything else.

  “No,” she said, finally. “It wasn’t about me being alive or dead. It was about the job.”

  Fegan nodded. “Usually is.”

  “But if I come back then I’ll need to deal with the situation in some way. Two birds and all that…”

  “One stone,” Fegan said. “Well, that’s where it gets interesting,” he grinned. “Because the painting I want you to steal is actually blank.”

  Chapter 6

  “Salvador Dali?” said Violet. “You want me to steal a Dali? That’s blank? If it’s blank how can it be a Dali?”

  “Did you know that in the 1960s Salvador Dali realised that if he signed a blank sheet of paper he could sell it for forty dollars?” Fegan had finally summoned the waiter and in front of the pair of them now sat several plates of tiny, neat objects of undesignated origin that neither of them were touching. “With one person sliding a piece of paper under his pencil and another person taking the finished article away he could sign one every two seconds. This meant that he could earn seventy two thousand dollars in a single hour.”

  “But,” said Violet, beginning to see the fatal flaw in Fegan’s scheme. “If he was signing that many then he would have flooded the market. You would be lucky if they held their value, let alone...”

  Fegan raised a finger to his lips and shushed her.

  Violet resisted the urge to snap off his finger and drop it in his drink, fixing a fake smile across her face instead.

  “You are a very perceptive woman,” Fegan continued. “The actual number of papers he signed... some say it was as high as four hundred thousand... the Dali camp puts it rather more conservatively down at the fifty thousand mark.”

  “And yet,” interrupted Violet, unwilling to be shushed. “Even fifty thousand would make them worth less than this plate of...” she glanced back down at the plate. “What exactly are they supposed to be?”

  “Buggered if I know,” replied Fegan before picking one up and inspecting it. “And yes, you are ahead of me, which is incredibly rude since I’d gone to the trouble of preparing a whole monologue which–”

  “Which is now a dialogue.”

  “Quite.”

  “Which you will now bring to a rapid conclusion if you wish my interest to be sustained.” Violet had had quite enough of indulging Fegan’s love of his own voice; either he showed her how it was worth her while or she would head to the station.

  “Greed,” said Fegan with a flourish.

  “Sorry?” said Violet.

  “It’s all about greed,” continued Fegan. “Dali was even kicked out of the surrealists for it. They said he was too bloody greedy, gave him the moniker ‘Avida Dollars’, an anagram of his own name which literally means ‘greed for dollars’. The irony of which, given the nature of our current conversation, is not lost on you?”

  “What is lost on me is the part where you want to pay me a great deal of money for me to put myself in harm’s way for something I could grab from eBay for twenty quid.” Violet snapped.

  “Very well,” said Fegan reluctantly. “The point... is that every greedy idea stems from something. The mass-producing of pencil signatures came from
an event way before. Dali had been commissioned to produce a painting on canvas but he had fallen ill. On the appointed day the client had travelled to Dali’s studio to collect the painting and Dali was still in bed. One of his aides went to raise him and in the meantime the client wandered into the studio. The foolish fellow spotted the untouched canvas and by the time Dali arrived had convinced himself that the great surrealist had left the canvas blank deliberately.”

  “You have got to be kidding?” said Violet.

  Fegan shook his head, “Not a bit of it. The story goes that Dali looked on whilst this idiot heaped praise on the blank canvas then congratulated the artist on his intellect and vision. The man handed over the money for the canvas but before he left, Dali couldn’t resist pushing the poor bastard a little further.

  “While the man looked on Dali instructed his aide to mix paint and then signed his name, in oils, in the bottom right hand corner. Lastly he told the man to leave his studio because the painting would not be dry for another week.”

  Violet laughed and picked up something from the plate between them. She examined whatever it was and then changed her mind and carefully put it back.

  “Avida Dollars,” Fegan puffed up his chest.

  “So this is Dali’s first,” said Violet.

  “And the only canvas. Every other one is on paper. At least every one we’re aware of.”

  “Okay, now I almost like the sound of this,” said Violet, finally warming to the job. “So how exactly do we pull this off?”

  “That’s down to you, my dear, but I’ll tell you the terms I’ve been given. Some of them I have no doubt you’ll like, some of them you will object to, but they must all be met. The bad part first. The mark cannot know that you have taken the piece.”

  “So I’ll need a forgery? Of a signature? That’s not so bad. I can probably live with that.”

  “You’ll have to. Also,” Fegan interrupted, “the nightmare security is made worse by the fact that the flat the banker owns, the flat that contains the painting... it’s underground.”

  “Oh for fu–” Violet began.

  “A bunker of sorts. One way in–”

  “One way out,” Violet chorused.

  “Those are the bad bits. The question is, does that pose a problem?” Fegan leaned forward.

  Violet stared at Fegan for a moment, relishing the opportunity to make him sweat, to have placed almost all his cards on the table and to be waiting for her. “I can live with the bad bits.”

  Fegan clapped his hands.

  “I’ll need a crew.” It was a statement.

  “I had no doubt you would,” said Fegan.

  “And money for them, for setting the whole thing up, equipment,” Violet continued.

  Fegan smiled and nodded.

  “And the money to pay for the forgeries, too.”

  Fegan’s left eye twitched almost imperceptibly but he smiled through it and nodded once again.

  “And what price are you offering for me to perform this miracle for you?”

  Fegan stopped smiling.

  3rd September

  * * *

  5 weeks to go…

  Chapter 7

  Zoe Zimmerman wasn’t like the other children, and she never had been. Of course she wore the same school uniform as all of the other kids spilling out of Kilchester Central Comprehensive School, the same black blazer. She even wore the same garish blue and yellow striped tie that was, of course, tied in the same non-conformist way as all the other girls in the lower sixth-form so that the knot was precisely three times as wide as it should be and only three inches of the tie poked through to hang down.

  But Zoe wasn’t like the other girls and boys. She was very much an odd sock.

  If you’d been walking down the other side of the street looking for Zoe at that moment, and, as it happens, somebody was, you would have had a great deal of difficulty in spotting the girl. Zoe was practised. Zoe blended.

  Mostly.

  None of the other children spoke to her. She didn’t make eye contact, just pushed a lock of her shoulder-length auburn hair behind her ear whilst letting another fall forward over her right eye. Camouflage. She glanced behind her, checking to see if anyone had noticed her. Of course, none of the other kids had, they were too absorbed in their own social bubbles. Pulling the strap of her heavy satchel up a little higher she quickened her pace and began to draw away from the pack to cross the road towards the library.

  A half a dozen or so other children broke off, to shouts of 'teacher's pet', 'swots' and 'fucking nerds' from the more cerebrally challenged.

  Kilchester, as a city, housed some architectural gems. The pillars and colonnades, the spires and steeples, from the gothic to the Victorian; you could scarcely walk three hundred metres without the sorts of stonework that stood shoulder to shoulder with the most beautiful listed buildings of London and Edinburgh.

  The library was not one of those buildings. Kilchester library hadn't so much been designed and built as summoned into existence through satanic ritual. The grey concrete jutted out of the ground as if the devil's own Lego set had been thrust through the earth's crust. Counterpointing the angular Lego were thin triangular shards of windows grinning like teeth across each of the four upper floors, giving the impression that the library may in fact be made from two sets of disembodied jaws. If that wasn't bad enough the space between the library’s teeth was covered with patches of pebbledash, which had eroded over time and now appeared like the patches of Satan's spew.

  Zoe's eye's flicked upwards to the familiar building as she entered through the single sliding door. She moved quickly through the corridors to the back of the library, where the stairs to all floors guided anyone who wasn't interested in 'general' fiction or getting a book stamped by a real, live librarian.

  "Excuse me." Zoe approached the desk of the librarian on the second floor in the children's section of the library. "I booked a computer."

  "Oh, hello dear," said the librarian with a smile. "You here again? They must give you an awful lot of homework at that school."

  Zoe smiled and nodded in recognition before once more pushing her hair behind her ear.

  "I think there's someone using your usual computer," the librarian continued. Zoe's face dropped as the librarian looked at a piece of paper on the counter in front of her. "Oh, no, my mistake. Computer four is free. I'll get today's password for you, love."

  A moment later and Zoe was crossing the picture book section of the library, heading towards the best seat in the house, the one computer with a view. Whilst every other workstation was dropped next to the nearest plug point and facing the wall, Zoe's spot offered a view of the bustling high street. It was nice to see life flowing by as she worked. And best of all it was tucked around a corner so no-one could see what you might be up to.

  "What on earth are you doing you horrible little boy!" A woman bellowed into the picture book area and barrelled into Zoe, knocking her bag from her shoulder in her haste to leave. "Oh, sorry," she muttered, picking up Zoe's bag and handing it back to her.

  Zoe snatched the bag and stomped off to finally take her place in front of the computer. Glancing over her shoulder to ensure she was unobserved, she slid her satchel to the floor and slipped out a small, grey box. Zoe turned it over in her hand. It was, perhaps, the size of a pack of cards but, unlike a pack of cards, the side of the box had a single, square opening. Zoe plucked a wire from her blazer pocket and, with practised skill, plugged one end into the computer and the other into the box.

  The computer's screen flickered for a moment, collapsed in on itself then jumped back into life.

  Except it wasn’t quite the same.

  Zoe’s fingers clattered across the keyboard, only stopping when her hand darted over to the mouse. Within a couple of minutes she was up and running. If anyone had walked past they would have seen Zoe the schoolgirl surfing the web, looking at videos on YouTube, occasionally checking the library catalogue and typing rando
m nonsense into a word processor.

  Which was, of course, exactly what Zoe wanted them to think. She definitely wouldn’t have wanted them to see that she had tapped into the security feed of the bank opposite the library and was streaming it in the guise of YouTube. Or that the word processor she appeared to be using was transmitting her keystrokes to allow her to dip in and out of the bank’s network, particularly the cash machine that sat just inside the lobby. And there was no doubt that she would have had some difficulty explaining that in the library’s ‘catalogue’ the space that should have displayed Author, Title, ISBN instead showed the words Name, Card Number and PIN.

  Those were the sorts of things that someone would struggle to explain in polite society.

  Chapter 8

  Zoe Zimmerman wasn’t like the other children. And one of the primary reasons for that was because none of the other children at Kilchester Central Comprehensive School were in the habit of hacking into bank’s computer systems and stealing people’s card details before cloning their cards and taking their cash.

  There was also the fact that none of the other children at the school were twenty two years old, either.

  When she had been in the lower sixth form it hadn’t been a great deal different. When she walked with the other kids she was ignored in the same way she was today. With one notable exception. But then you would expect other kids to notice you when you had the police escorting you from the computer labs.

  Fortunately for her they never did manage to prove anything in the eyes of the law. In the eyes of the teachers, however, it was another story. They knew there was only one child capable of framing dear old Mr Coleman.

  As it happened, Zoe was guilty of everything the teachers suspected her of doing. She had indeed created evidence that Mr Coleman had been up to no good in chatrooms on the internet, but she was younger then and hadn’t really realised how quickly what she thought was a pretty funny joke would escalate.