Survival Is a Dying Art

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “That kind of passion is important in a case, as long as you don’t let it blind-side you.” She paused for a moment, her lips pressed together. Finally, she said, “I’m in the middle of an investigation into pre-Colombian art that may be moving through Miami,” she said. “So my plate is full. But I’d be happy to mentor you if you want to look into this situation. As long as you have Vito’s OK.”

  I was excited. I felt a visceral connection to this case, and not just because I wanted to help Tom Laughlin get into a relationship with Frank Sena. Like I said to Special Agent Washington, the gay connection mattered to me, as it had in several other cases I’d worked.

  “Vito sent me to talk to you, but I’ll verify with him tomorrow. What would I need to do to get started?”

  “First thing is to get up to speed on the period when the painting was created, and the painting itself. For example, there may be details provided by this intermediary that don’t ring true. You know anything about art?”

  “I took one art history course in college, but that was years ago.”

  “They have a good art history department at FIU. Call over there, see if you can talk to one of the professors. Get him or her give you some quick basics. Go online, learn about the painter, and the group he belonged to. Research past auction prices, where his other work is held—is it in museums? Private collections? Anything up for sale right now? You’re going to need a whole dossier. And get copies of all this gentleman’s documentation.”

  I was staggered by how much I had to learn. “I have everything except a copy of the 8-millimeter movie. You want me to report back to you when I’ve got the information?”

  “Call it liaise rather than report back,” she said. “We’re not doing anything official at the moment. Though it’s not often violent, for the FBI’s purposes art theft does fall under Violent Crime, so it shouldn’t be that great a stretch for you to spend some time on this if Vito doesn’t need you. But before you do anything else, forward me the documentation you have. Let’s make sure we’re starting from good intel.”

  5 – Hiding in the Bushes

  Early the next morning, I had a Skype call scheduled with my brother Danny, who was on a summer study program in Florence. Because Italy was six hours ahead of Miami, I’d been having trouble connecting with him in the evenings. So as soon as I woke, I turned on my computer. We’d be able to talk while he was on a lunch break from his classes.

  As I waited for the Skype software to initialize, I thought about the art theft case. I was intrigued to learn about a different kind of crime, and interested in learning more about art and art crimes because it tied in with Danny’s interests. He was a rising senior at Penn State, majoring in art history with a minor in Italian. Both not very useful degrees career-wise, but I was happy he’d found something he enjoyed. And I knew from my own experience that as long as you knew how to read, think and communicate you could eventually find a path that suited you.

  He’d tried to convince me to come join him at the end of his course and spend a week traveling around Italy together, but my student loan debt put the kibosh on that idea, even though I very much wanted to see him, and to travel to some of the exotic places I’d learned about from our dad.

  When I was a boy, I used to sit on my father’s lap and look through the atlas with him, and he’d point out all the exotic places he wanted to go someday. Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific, where the Bounty mutineers had landed. Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, Red Square in Moscow. He loved places that had a history to them, places so different from Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he’d lived his whole life.

  He’d never gotten to travel, though; he was always working to support us until he died when I was ten. Those memories were all I had of my father, along with a bunch of photographs my mother had saved, from his childhood and the years they’d been married. When I was a teenager I used to stare at those photos, forcing myself to remember the few moments we had shared together. He was a big man, tall and broad-shouldered, with dark hair and eyes, and every year I struggled to hold on to those fading memories.

  Danny and I took after our mother, with her slim build and fair coloring, though Danny had our father’s cleft chin. To keep his memory alive, I’d tried to position myself for the kind of adventurous life he’d longed to lead. And now that I had the chance to head to a foreign locale, I was stuck financially just the way my father had been.

  I was determined to be upbeat when I spoke to Danny. I’d only spoken to him once before through Skype – between the time difference and his classes and my work schedule, it was hard to connect, especially as he didn’t have Wi-Fi in the student apartment he was sharing with three other guys. Instead, we’d exchanged long emails.

  My heart felt good when his face appeared on the screen. Danny looked a lot like me, though his hair was more gold than red, but we had the same square face, slim nose and dimpled cheeks. He’d gotten a bit of a tan and he was smiling broadly.

  “Hey, bro. How’s it going with that gorgeous Italian girl you’ve been crushing on?”

  “I asked her out last week, but she shot me down. Has a boyfriend. But the good news is that I was totally able to communicate with her in Italian.”

  “I’m jealous,” I said. “You can flirt in two languages now.”

  “You bet. Too bad I’m leaving here in two weeks.”

  I was delighted to feel he was finding his bliss. I’d struggled and sacrificed to make sure that Danny had what he needed when we were growing up, working two jobs in high school and college, buying him clothes that our mom and step-dad wouldn’t, making sure he could go on school trips and had the entrance fees for Penn State. Seeing him happy made it all worthwhile.

  “How are things with your boyfriend?” Danny asked.

  “Lester? All good. We spent some quality time over the weekend, though he left today for a whiskey competition in California, so I won’t see him for a while.”

  We talked for almost a half hour. I asked if he’d ever heard of Mauricio Fabre or the Macchiaioli. “Too recent for anything we’re studying here,” Danny said. “You have to be dead for at least a couple of hundred years to make it into our curriculum. But I can ask my professor if you want.”

  I said I’d email him the details, and told him about my visit to the flea market to track down counterfeit goods.

  “The other day I was walking down the street and this guy was wearing a T-shirt that read ‘University of Princeton,’” Danny said. “Like, he had no clue it was a fake. Just loved that it was American.”

  We finally ended the call. “I have a few days’ vacation coming to me,” I said. “Maybe I’ll come up to Penn State and see you when you get back.” That ought to be a cheap trip, especially if I flew to Philadelphia and then took the bus to State College, in the geographic center of Pennsylvania.

  “That would be terrific, Angus. I haven’t seen you in person since you left for Florida.”

  I agreed. It had been nearly a year, too long, and I missed him.

  We ended the call, I showered and hurried to work, where I went over to Vito’s office as soon as I could. I felt like an eager puppy dog—can I work with Miriam Washington? Can I, can I please? I had to rein myself in. I was a Federal agent, after all. I had been through Quantico. I’d had major roles to play in two big operations.

  Before I could ask, though, he said, “I got permission to bring you into the loop about Venable,” he said, as he motioned me to the seat across from him. “What do you know about Turkey?”

  “The country? Or the Thanksgiving centerpiece?”

  “Wiseass,” he said, but there was no heat behind his words. “Right now, Turkey is number two in the world in the production of counterfeit goods, with a market of over ten billion dollars.”

  “Wow. I had no idea Turkey was involved to that degree.”

  “And unlike the shit they make in China, a fake Rolex will have a ceramic bezel, sapphire glass, stainless steel, a quality band, and a
Japanese movement, all of it assembled in Turkey. In the bazaars in Istanbul, they make a practice of charging at least ten percent of retail because they have the quality.”

  “And you think Jesse Venable is importing these fake watches?”

  “That’s the intel I have. Turkey’s a tough place right now,” Vito said. “Lots of refugees from Syria and other trouble spots flooding in, looking for transportation to Greece. Looks like the guys who smuggle the watches are getting in on the lucrative business of smuggling refugees, since they already have the connections and the boats.”

  He shifted his computer screen so I could see the picture on it. A small boat was wrecked on the shore of what looked like an island. “Fifty Syrian refugees and twelve cartons of counterfeit watches were on this boat when it sank,” he said. “Only two men survived, both of them passengers who were lucky enough to get free of the wreck and have the strength to swim to safety.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Sure, I saw images like this on the news regularly, but they’d been so removed from anything encountered in my daily life.

  “One of the guys who survived was smart enough to grab something from the boat to use as a bargaining chip with the authorities who showed up.”

  “What?”

  “A shipment manifest for those twelve cartons of watches. Want to make a guess where they were destined?”

  “The United States?”

  “Keep going.”

  “Florida? Miami? Fort Lauderdale?”

  “You’re a sharp guy when you use your brain instead of running your mouth,” Vito said. “Yeah, there was paperwork that indicated the watches were headed here. Of course, there’s no name or street address. That would make it too easy.”

  “But you think they were going to Venable?”

  “We suspect he received a similar shipment last year, but couldn’t make anything stick. He’s a very slippery fellow.” He looked up at me. “What did Miriam Washington say last night?”

  “She’s willing to mentor me as I look for the stolen painting, as long as it’s okay with you.”

  He nodded. “I want to go after Venable with everything we’ve got. We catch him with this stolen painting, then maybe we leverage him for information on these smugglers. Stop the flow of watches.” He waited a beat. “And make a connection to these refugee smugglers that can save some lives while we’re at it.”

  I let that sink in for a minute. I wasn’t just looking for a single stolen painting to help Frank Sena. Whatever I discovered could save lives, too.

  I had learned early on that any investigation the Bureau took on was an important one, even if I didn’t fully understand the reasons. Every innocent victim needed to be helped, every criminal needed to be prosecuted.

  Of course, the lines were never that clear, and I was learning to use my own judgment. But saving lives? That trumped everything.

  As I walked back to my office, I felt a new urgency. I followed Miriam’s suggestion and called the Department of Art + Art History at FIU. I introduced myself to the secretary and explained I was looking for a professor who knew something about Italian art from the late nineteenth century. “Closest we can probably come is Professor Jose Barry,” she said. “He teaches our art history survey courses, so he has a pretty broad knowledge. He has office hours tomorrow afternoon from two to four.” She gave me his office address, on the second floor of a building called Viertes Haus, or VH.

  I was curious to learn as much as I could about the incident that Vito had mentioned, the crash of the boat carrying Syrian refugees from Turkey to Greece. I looked online and I was horrified to see how many similar incidents there were. People were paying over a thousand dollars each to cross the Aegean Sea. The winter months were particularly treacherous, and more than three hundred sixty people had lost their lives on such trips.

  My roommate Jonas texted me as I searched, asking if I’d meet him at the gym after work, and I agreed.

  When I went back to my search, I couldn’t find any mention of an incident that combined smuggling goods with people in any of the mainstream media. I was frustrated, following every link I found through Google, Facebook and Twitter, until I stumbled on a gay news site that focused on international issues. There I read about a man named Elyas Ahmadi, who had dared to come out to a circle of family and friends in Damascus, where homosexuality was illegal and punishable by imprisonment, and ISIS rebels in the country had been videoed throwing gay men off buildings.

  Someone had told the police about him, and Ahmadi had been arrested and tortured. He was released when his family and friends raised enough money to buy him away from the police, and then pay smugglers to get him to Turkey, and then onto a boat to Greece.

  The boat had been hit by bad weather, however, and had crashed on a rocky shore. Ahmadi was one of only two men to survive.

  So far the details matched. Why hadn’t Vito mentioned that the man who survived was gay? He certainly knew that I was.

  However, his sexuality didn’t matter to Vito, as long as Ahmadi had that manifest of stolen goods. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it was the same boat, because there was no mention in the article about any stolen watches on board. Ahmadi had been shipped to a detention camp on one of the Greek islands, hoping to establish an asylum claim based on his persecution in Syria and a fear for his life if he returned.

  I shut down my computer for the night and drove home, thinking about how lucky I was to live in a country where I could be open about my sexuality. Sometimes life in Wilton Manors took a frivolous turn, with strippers and X-rated movie launches, and it was easy then to ignore those who lived in less tolerant places.

  Jonas and I belonged to a gay gym a short drive from our house, and as I drove him there he bubbled over with excitement about his new boyfriend. “He’s a phlebotomist, which is like one step removed from being a doctor. He knows so much about medicine and anatomy and all that stuff.”

  I knew that phlebotomist was a fancy name for someone who took your blood in a doctor’s office, spending the day wrapping rubber bands around upper arms and asking you to squeeze a rubber ball. Not exactly life-saving, but I let Jonas have his moment. When I met him, he’d been overweight and perpetually sad-faced, the kind of guy other gay men avoided for fear his attitude might be catching.

  With his shambling gait, the extra pounds that still remained on his waistline, and the hair already starting to sprout from his ears, he wasn’t a catch, but in the last six months, he’d begun to work out more regularly, he’d lost some weight and gained some self-confidence. If the phlebotomist was helping with that, more power to him.

  We worked the circuit more slowly than I would with Lester, stopping to comment on cute guys, and then we went out for sushi together. “What’s up with you these days?” Jonas asked over rainbow and shrimp tempura rolls.

  I told him about seeing Lester over the weekend, my call with Danny that morning, and the chance to get onto a new case at work. Of course I couldn’t give him too many details, but he was more interested in talking about himself anyway.

  I wondered how much longer we would live together. When I was assigned to the Miami office, I’d looked around for a gay neighborhood where I could live, and I’d landed in Wilton Manors, which wrapped around the western side of Fort Lauderdale. Or, as someone had told me, it hugged Fort Lauderdale’s ass.

  The house I shared with Jonas was a run-down ranch in a rapidly gentrifying part of town. The huge oak tree in the front yard kept the grass from growing, and the walls were painted puke green, but it was home. Our lease would be up at the end of the summer, and I assumed we’d have the chance to renew if we wanted. Our rent would probably go up a lot, if the landlord didn’t sell the place as a tear-down.

  But if Jonas was moving on with his blood-taking boyfriend, would that mean I’d be on my own? Was it too soon to consider moving in with Lester?

  It was too much to consider, on top of my usual worries about paying my down my student loans, k
eeping things going with Lester, and doing a good job at work, so I pushed the idea away to focus on when I had to.

  When Jonas and I got home, he went into his room to call his boyfriend, and I pulled out the big hard-bound text from my one college class in art history. There wasn’t more than a couple of paragraphs about the Macchiaioli, all of which I already knew, but I did read some more about the Impressionists, and got some insights from that into what the Macchiaioli were trying to do.

  The next morning, I had some follow up work to do on the Male Power case, and when I finished that I checked in with Miriam Washington. I found her in an office on the other side of the building. She wore another smartly tailored suit, this one in a navy blue, and a gold filigree necklace in complicated pattern that looked like it had been made by an artist.

  Photos of famous paintings and other artwork were on her walls. “All of these stolen?” I asked, as I sat down across from her.

  “Some recovered, others still in the wind,” she said. “Vito agreed to let you work with me for a while?”

  “He did. I did some research on the artist, the painting and the movement, and I have an appointment at FIU this afternoon with an art history professor.”

  “I did some checking myself,” Miriam said. “If Venable really has a line on this painting, it’s very interesting to officials here and in Italy. And I understand Vito has an interest in Venable, too, so we need to move very carefully.”

  I agreed to check back with her after I’d met with Professor Barry. Then I drove south to the FIU campus.

  It was my first time there, and it took me a while to get my bearings. I discovered that Viertes Haus was German for “fourth house.” Seemed weird to me, as I was looking for information on Italian art, but I went with the flow.