The Collection

by Lance Charnes

  I tell her the very abridged version of what happened in the conference room. “Do you have someplace to stay tonight? You can’t go home.”

  She looks off toward the fountains, thinking. “I have the friend in Navigli. But I am not afraid of Lorenzoni.”

  “You should be.” She shrinks back a bit. Pull it in. “Sorry. I’m worried about you. Go stay with your friend tonight. Take our car.” Carson rolls her eyes then stalks off, beating on her phone. “Call in sick tomorrow. Give him time to cool off.”

  “No!” Gianna puts on her indignant face. “I do nothing wrong. I do not hide anymore.”

  I like the attitude, but not what it might do to her. “You may need to if you want a job on Friday. Think about it.” I brush a stray curl from her face. “I’m sorry. I had no idea he’d react this way.”

  “Texted the driver,” Carson announces. “Should be waiting when you cross the bridge.” She gives me a dark look. “Ours’ll be here in fifteen.”

  “Thanks.” I brush my hands over Gianna’s shoulders. Her eyes are huge and too active—she’s more rattled than she wants me to know. I’d like to gather her up in my arms and tell her it’ll be okay, but it may not be and I can’t do it with Carson watching. “Cut through there and cross the footbridge. Look for a black S-class Mercedes. Tell the driver where to go. We’ll stay here and backstop Lorenzoni if he comes this way.” I squeeze her shoulders, then let go. “See you tomorrow night. Be careful.”

  Gianna gives me a quivering smile. “Mille grazie.” She pecks my lips, tries the smile on Carson—who just stands there with her arms crossed—then trots off.

  I carefully step toward Carson. “Thanks for everything. I know you don’t like her—”

  “Nobody deserves to have Belknap beat on them. What I don’t like? You go all gooey over her, lose focus. Your eyes just…” She makes a throwaway gesture. “This ain’t Tinder.”

  No, it’s better than Tinder. Gianna’s perfectly my type. Telling Carson that isn’t going to help things, though.

  We stand side-by-side, close but not touching, watching the walkway for a Belknap sighting that doesn’t come. Carson pulls out a compact—she carries a compact?—and fixes her lipstick.

  “Since when do you speak Russian?” I ask Carson. Her eyebrows go up. “We had Russian clients at the gallery. I know what it sounds like.”

  “Parents taught me when I was little.”

  “I thought you’re Canadian.”

  “I am. They’re Ukrainian. Morrone say anything?”

  Nice redirect. “Nothing useful. I think we were clicking before asshole busted in. Angelo said Morrone liked talking with me. Lucca looked like he wanted to skin me. Total hostility from ‘go.’”

  She frowns. “What’s his beef?”

  “No idea.” I probably shouldn’t say this to her, but… “Nine days left, and I don’t have a clue what to do next.” I feel as pathetic as that sounds.

  “We’ll think of something.” A drift of fountain mist blows over us. It’s cool and clean. Carson closes her eyes and tilts up her head to catch it. “By the way, you’re a good kisser.”

  “Yeah?” I guess I haven’t forgotten. “You’re not bad, either.”

  “Whatever.” She opens her eyes, checks her phone. “Let’s go.”

  It’s well after midnight by the time I get back to the suite. The literal and metaphorical bad taste I’ve had in my mouth since seeing that meat market at the Expo hasn’t gone away yet. Since it’s Wednesday, I still have to scam my PO. Another problem up ahead: he thinks I’m coming home on Friday. As if.

  My bed’s been turned down, and my nightly box of little chocolate cookies sits on the shelf next to my pillow. I sit there rocking the box in my fingers, trying to figure out how I got here. Then I bring up the hotel website on my phone and find the rack rate for this room.

  Nine hundred fifty euros. A thousand fifty bucks. A night.

  One night in this room costs more than either of my parents has to live on for a month.

  They’ve never been in a place like this. They never will be. They worked all their lives and have nothing to show for it. No, Hoskins the bloodsucker gets all this. I get to be here—me, a fraud and a felon, playing dress-up and trying to fix a First World problem.

  I hurl the box at the nearest wall.

  Chapter 33

  I had so much else to think about after the party that the whole Carson-speaking-Russian thing didn’t hit me hard until my morning run.

  Allyson said Carson has “useful skills.” Does she think it’s useful to have somebody around who speaks Russian instead of, say… Italian? Why? The only Russians I’ve heard about so far are the mafia types trying to take over Morrone’s turf. Do we need to talk to them?

  I’d love to say no. The way things have been going, I can’t.

  Who’s the dude in that silver AMG?

  An email’s waiting on my burner phone when I get back to the hotel from my run. I open it and find an Italian phone number. Only one person has the burner’s address.

  His phone rings twice. “Yes?”

  “Burim?”

  “Neutra. I have it. You want, yes?”

  That was fast. He’s better than I figured. “Yeah. Where do we meet?”

  “Via Raffaele Rubattino, 91. Is factory, no one is there.”

  I look it up on my computer and see an abandoned industrial complex melting into the landscaping. Graffiti seems to be holding the front wall together. Nice place to get my throat cut. “No way in hell. Hold on.” I mute my burner and scroll the map around. I want someplace sort-of public but not so much that we can’t do business. A promising spot shows up after a minute of poking. “Bar Bianco, in Parco Sempione. They don’t open ‘til ten. I’ll meet you there—” I check the time: just past seven “—at eight. Got it?”

  “Yes, yes.” He sounds peeved. So much for the ambush. “No police, or bad for you.”

  Burim maybe wants to ambush me? Okay. This time, I’m taking Carson.

  Of course, that means I have to tell her.

  “Now you’re telling me?”

  Because she runs faster, she’s already showered and changed into jeans and another long-sleeved tee, while I’m still in my sweats. I’ll always see her in that dress from last night even if she wears jeans for the rest of this job. She’s barefoot and her hair’s damp, which ought to soften her, but her look’s more like she just climbed out of a swamp with a bayonet between her teeth.

  “It was kinda a long shot.” I edge back against her room’s front door, just in case. “I didn’t know if it would go anywhere. It looks like it will.”

  “Great.” She’s pacing in a circle. It’s not a good sign. “This your buddy in the Albanian Mob?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “Fucking great.” She paces some more. “What’s your plan?”

  “Olivia sent me a GPS tracker chip and battery. I’ll install it in the canvas’ stretcher. Burim fences it to Belknap. If all the stars line up, Belknap adds it to Morrone’s stash and we’ll find out where it is.”

  “Or Belknap sticks it in that storage room of his.”

  There’s that. “Even if he does, we’ve confirmed where Morrone gets at least some of his stolen art. We’re only out the couple hundred bucks for the chip.”

  Carson slows down a bit. Her mouth untwists a notch. “What do you need me for?”

  “To watch my back, like last night.”

  “Don’t trust this Burim, eh?”

  “Not so much.”

  Parco Sempione is a big swath of grass and trees reaching northwest from the Castello Sforzesco. The looming fifteenth-century brick fortress is one of the other places I’ve wanted to see, so I’m glad the gates are open when Carson and I march through on our way into the park. Too bad I don’t have the couple hours I’d like to spend here.

  Bar Bianco is a two-level, open-air pavilion near the center of the park, all concr
ete, gray stone and royal-blue steel. A conical glass canopy covers the balcony and seating area overhanging the ground-floor terrace and service spaces. Trees crowd the back and line the path to the west.

  I do a full lap around the place, checking for some sign of Burim. Up on the balcony, I claim a white vinyl sofa and stow my shopping bag full of goodies. I can look down from here on the wood-plank terrace’s outside edge, the intersection of two wide gravel paths, and the runners puffing along them. I keep my eyes moving while I worry at my go-cup of black hotel coffee.

  Carson’s out there somewhere. We split up inside the castle. She brought her big purse, so I figure she also has her arsenal, not that it makes me feel a lot safer.

  “Neutra?” Burim stands near the bench ringing the tree in the middle of the terrace. Today’s track suit is a vivid shade of eggplant. He has something flat and squarish in a green trash bag under his arm.

  “Stay there.” I trot down the stairs and lead him to a nearby table. “Show me what you’ve got.”

  He eyes a full circle around him before he edges to the table. Then he pulls an unframed canvas, twelve by sixteen or so, from the bag. It’s a still life, a glass vase of showy white roses on a wooden stand with a pile of blooms off to the right. Pretty. Then I notice “Fantin 1881” printed on the upper right and think, seriously?

  “No papers,” he says. “Is old, yes? Much dust before I clean.”

  “Good job.” I point to the intersection. “Go have a smoke or three. This’ll take a few minutes.”

  “What you do?”

  “I need to make sure this is something he’ll want. It’s part of the deal, remember?”

  Burim snorts, then scuffles down the little grass slope to the edge of the path.

  As soon as I’m back upstairs, I bring up StolenArt on my phone and plug in “Henri Fantin-Latour.” The FBI lists Still Life with Grapes—no grapes in this one—and both INTERPOL and ALR have Bouquet de Roses Dans un Verre, stolen in Milan in 1992. Bingo. I check Blouin to see if Fantin’s floral still-lifes are popular now.

  Are they ever.

  Two similar works sold last year through Christie’s and Sotheby’s for $787,000 and $695,000, respectively. Good job, Burim. The sad part is, he probably doesn’t know or care. To him it’s just a dusty old painting worth a few grand.

  I’ve fiddled with canvases before, but never did anything like this to potentially three-quarters of a million dollars’ worth of painting. No pressure.

  I fish a hotel bath towel out of my shopping bag, cover the nearest table, and flip the piece on its face. The canvas is unlined—one less layer of material to deal with—and the tacking margin’s in pretty good shape considering it’s a hundred thirty years old. I lay out the tools I bought at an art supply store earlier in the week, crack my knuckles, then pry the tacks out of three inches of one edge of the canvas.

  Burim check: he’s leaning on the open-rail fence, looking up at me over his shoulder with a cig dangling from his lower lip. I point toward the intersection. He snorts out a plume of smoke and turns around.

  Cutting the slot for the chip is the part that gives me hives—if I break the stretcher, I could damage the canvas. I take a deep breath. A pin vise with a drill bit removes most of the wood; an X-acto knife with a thin chisel-like blade finishes it. The sawdust goes onto a scrap of tinfoil.

  Rustling in the trees off to my right makes me look up. It’s not the breeze; there isn’t any. All I see is leaves. Burim’s fiddling with his phone. The joggers and moms pushing strollers pay zero attention to him. They can’t see me, but I feel somebody’s eyes on me.

  The chip’s about half an inch square and five millimeters thick, with two battery leads soldered to one edge. Olivia said this is Israeli tech, based on the GPS chips in cell phones. The battery’s about half its size, also flat, with wires sprouting from one end. It’ll power the GPS chip for about four days with the chip reporting every fifteen minutes.

  A minute after I connect the leads, a little red dot appears in more-or-less the right place on the tracking app’s map on my business phone. I pinch on a couple patches of electrical tape to keep the wires joined, then ease the chip into the slot I cut in the stretcher.

  A thud to my right startles me so bad I almost snap off the chip. Burim and I both swivel toward the noise. I peer down into the trees until my eyes threaten to bleed, but I can’t see anything that isn’t green. Burim climbs the fence and trots up the path toward the sound. He loses headway fast and ends up standing between me and the noise, his head whipping back and forth between it and me.

  “You come alone, yes?” he barks.

  “Did you come alone?”

  He turns away, takes another step toward the sound, then falls back to the fence. “Finish.”

  “Chill.”

  I snug the chip home, then nestle the battery beside it. I tell the app to interrogate the chip. A few seconds later, the red dot disappears, then pops up again in the same place.

  I fill the slot with two-part epoxy, then tamp in sawdust. Sixty seconds later, I run the corner of a small sheet of very fine sandpaper over the now-closed wound. It feels smooth under my fingertip, but it’s clearly lighter than the rest of the aged wood around it.

  A dash of coffee goes into the upturned lid of my cup. I wet a small paintbrush and stroke it over the scar. A little light; I give it a second coat, then a third. Coffee makes a great natural dye. I’ve aged provenance documents with it.

  There’s a strangled yap behind the bar building, like a dog with laryngitis. Burim glares at me. I hold up my palms in the universal no-clue gesture. I’m thinking these aren’t just the natural sounds of the park, though.

  Finally, I carefully stretch the loose canvas back to its original location and replace the tacks. My surgery’s now invisible.

  Then I start breathing again.

  I take the Fantin down to the terrace. “All right, Burim, it’s yours.”

  Burim mutters something in what’s probably Albanian and crushes his cigarette on the sole of his gym shoe. The butt goes into his jacket pocket while he stalks my way. He picks up the Fantin the way he would an empty pizza box and rolls it around. “What you do?”

  “Made sure it’s authentic. Are you taking it to Lorenzoni today?”

  “Why?” He’s looking around like he’s lost his dog.

  “So I know when to start looking for it. Remember why I’m doing this?”

  “Yes, yes.” His head’s on a swivel. He’s getting edgier by the minute.

  His squirrel act plus the mystery noises equals Carson. I’m getting to appreciate that woman. “One more thing. Don’t tell Lorenzoni about me. He’ll find out when it’s time. Understand?”

  Burim squints at me. “Maybe I do. Maybe I get more money, yes? How much you pay?”

  What a surprise. “How about this: what just happened to your guys, the ones who came with you? I don’t make it happen to you.”

  Threatening a gangster should make me melt into my shoes, but the look on his face is worth the potential near-death experience. It’s like I just turned into a T-rex in front of him.

  I give him a little salute. “Have a good day, Burim.”

  Chapter 34

  It takes over an hour for Carson to wrangle a car and get us next to the red dot in Lambrate, a run-down district east of downtown. At least she got an Italian car this time—a sapphire-blue Fiat Bravo, a little four-door hatch just a bit too big to fit in a Suburban. Monday’s driving ordeal convinced us both that the chance of getting into a high-speed chase around here is zip.

  We’re parked in a vacant lot next to an autostrada overpass. Big trucks make booming noises when they drive over us, and we hear every landing airliner at Linate go into reverse thrust. We hardly notice it after a couple hours. The red dot’s on the other side of the freeway in either a block of fleapit apartments or the rathole of a garage behind it. We can just see the driveway from here.
/>   “Don’t keep pulsing the chip,” I tell Carson. “You’ll run down the battery.” I shouldn’t have given her the tracking app, no matter how much sense it made at the time.

  “Wanna sit here all day?”

  “The chip isn’t going to move the canvas, Burim is. Aren’t you used to stakeouts?”

  “Hated stakeouts.”

  Figures. I gave up on trying to chisel personal information out of Carson an hour ago, so now all I can do is sit here and worry about Gianna. When I texted her this morning to see if she was okay, she said she was going to work. Ever since I’ve been seeing mental videos of what Belknap might do: fire her, slap her around, have one of his Mob buddies kill her. All of it my fault.

  Carson hunches over the steering wheel and squints toward the ratty jumble of buildings. “They’re moving.” She cranks the engine and backs fast to the curb cutout. “Check the chip.”

  A pair of hatchbacks—one silver, the other a curdled white—bounce into the street and buzz west, toward downtown. I poke the painting’s GPS chip and after a few seconds see it’s also heading west. “They’ve got it.”

  Instead of streaking out at felony speed to catch up, Carson brings us within sight of the trailing silver hatch and lets a couple cars get between us and them.

  “You know, we don’t have to follow them,” I tell her. “We can watch the chip.”

  She glances at me, then refocuses on the cars. “And if they wrap that thing in foil?”

  “Just don’t spook them.”

  We’re heading down an unlovely two-lane road, graffitied wall to our left, railroad tracks to our right. Once we cross the tracks, we’re on a road flanked by apartments and split by a park. A depressing thought: it looks like the one we came in on last Saturday, like we’ve driven in a big circle and we’re back where we started.

  Carson keeps us within a few car lengths of the two hatchbacks even as the traffic thickens. The farther west we go, the nicer the parked cars and the cleaner the walls. It’s not hard to keep track of Burim’s convoy as the buildings scroll by at city speed, so my mind wanders back to Gianna.