Crowns and Cabals

by Dina Rae

  A built-in desk with attached built-in dressers lined the perimeter of the small room. Chad unloaded a few more rounds at the built-ins until we could open the drawers. We expected valuables, but this bounty looked more like King Solomon’s treasure. We stuffed our garbage bags with Rolexes, diamond necklaces, ruby rings, sapphire bracelets, pearls, emerald earrings, and dozens of more trinkets. She had more jewelry than the Queen of England.

  One of the drawers seemed too shallow per the space. Once we emptied all of the contents into our bags, I kicked in the bottom of the drawer. Bingo. Below the mangled drawer bottom was a secret compartment lined with metal. A spectacular gold headpiece sat in the drawer by itself. It had a delicate antique or even ancient look to it. The thick band was encrusted with several precious stones. Seven peaks or points were perfectly spaced around its circumference. The gold thinned out into an elaborate filigree. On each peak was some kind of primitive looking animal. In between the peaks of the crown was a continuous pattern of a winged being or bird. Alberta was known for her jewelry, but this piece went beyond our loot expectations. I lifted the crown closer to the light, amazed and instantly obsessed.

  “Nice work, Raphael! Did Alberta and her husband rip off a museum? That’s not exactly something you’d buy at Harry Winston’s. What the hell? It’s gotta be priceless,” Chad said as he analyzed it like a scientist.

  “Certainly looks like that way.” I had only seen the piece for a minute and already plotted out how to keep it for myself. There was no way I would allow the gang to fence this, at least not until I knew what I had.

  “Look. There’s more,” Chad said with a smile. He took his gun and blew up a small safe door that lay tucked inside of the floor. Dozens of gold bars and old gold coins were inside. Our garbage bags would not hold them. I nodded and dashed upstairs, quickly finding the master bedroom. I took a large gym bag specifically for the crown. Two small matching Louis Vuitton suitcases looked big enough to hold the gold bars. Time was about to run out before Alberta’s private security might make an appearance.

  I tossed the luggage over the stair rail. Chad was on the main floor and quickly caught them. We stuffed them full of gold bars and coins. There was still plenty of room. Chad jammed bottles of wine from the adjacent cellar into the luggage.

  Looking at the walls, I could not leave without some of the artwork. With a broom I found in the linen closet, I knocked ten paintings off of the wall until Chad gave me the out-of-time look. He wildly cracked the frames, rolled up the oil canvases, and shoved them into a couple of garbage bags. I gingerly put the crown inside of the gym bag. We were pushing it-only three minutes left.

  Shit! I dragged the suitcases and bags onto the front stoop, and then greedily went back to the wine room, dumping more wine bottles into our extra garbage bags. I heard a few clanks. One of the bottles shattered.

  “C’mon, already!” Naturally, Chad was on the verge of a meltdown. We were about to get caught and I was going back for wine.

  The bags were picked up by Marta and Dylan. They left two large black briefcases in their place. Chad dragged one to the far side of the house and I left the other in the foyer. We ran out of the mansion as fast as we could. The van door to Joe’s Landscaping opened, we jumped inside, and peeled out of the neighborhood. Once we were safely on a main street in the city, we heard the faint sound of an explosion.

  Alberta Ross’s mansion was blown to smithereens.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Raphael

  We howled sounds of joy as we sped south towards Jun’s parents’ Chinese restaurant. The attic of the restaurant made the perfect meeting place. Dylan dropped Chad, Marta, and me off while he went to dispose of the van. We walked up the outer stairs with stash in tow. Jun Wong was in the attic with his laptop, scanning local police reports to see if we were in the clear.

  Jun’s real job like mine was a cover. He worked as an I.T. tech at the district office for Dallas’s school system. The district had no idea how lethal and brilliant he was behind a keyboard. Jun intentionally kept it that way by omitting his education and skill set to the school district. He did as little work as possible, flying low enough under the radar to avoid getting fired. No one even noticed him until they had a computer problem. The district was in a state of chaos as all public schools. Education around the world was getting a makeover.

  Jun had many other ways of making money. Like Dylan and Marta, he found much success on the black market. When I met him, he cooked my order of Mongolian beef at his family’s restaurant.

  Outside of myself, Jun was the oldest of our gang at thirty-seven. He was half Korean and half Chinese, just under six-feet tall, and wore his jet black hair in a crewcut. His father forced him to speak Mandarin and cook Asian food. I met him shortly after moving to Dallas. His family’s restaurant had the best Chinese food since New York City.

  I became a regular at Wong’s Taste of China. Besides the food, I enjoyed conversing with Jun. Our friendly banter eventually led to Mai Tais after business hours of the restaurant. Jun’s politics meshed with mine. In a drunken moment, I blurted out a loose plan of revenge. He seemed receptive and asked plenty of questions. By the end of the night, I had my second recruit.

  Jun looked at us all with admiration as we quickly unloaded the suitcases, garbage bags and gym bag. Forty minutes later, Dylan walked in.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “I dumped it in Oak Cliff. Left the doors open and the key fob on the front seat. It’s probably gone by now. Burnt the landscaper sign and the uniforms in a dumpster,” Dylan said. “Any estimates on the job?”

  I smiled. “No idea. But I can tell you this-it’s our biggest payday to date. Funds will soon be available to take things up a notch.”

  Our heists funded our missions, but unlike Jaxie’s system among her Patriots, each of us took a personal cut. Self-interest was part of human nature. I wanted my gang motivated. Our robberies formed a pattern. First, we fenced the loot. Half of the money was individually pocketed while the other half went into a fund for future jobs.

  Using banks for financial purposes was like posting a neon sign that read ‘treason’ onto our heads. Out of all of the financial institutions in the world, only a few giant conglomerates survived post-war. These institutions merged into a single bank, now called the World Bank. The simplicity of this arrangement wielded the power of sniffing out money trails and spending patterns of every citizen. Any banker or even any hacker could find someone’s financial history with a couple of keystrokes. We avoided banks like the plague.

  In place of banks, I covertly ran up to my grandfather’s farm and stored our bounty deep underground in his vault. The farm could be confiscated at any time, but would the tunnels, rooms, and vault be found? It was another layer of protection. The system was far from perfect, but for now it worked.

  We emptied our plunder in the middle of the attic’s splintered floor. Jun pulled up a folding chair, got out a notebook, and carefully sketched each item for our inventory. He was a damn good artist. I couldn’t keep my eyes off of the crown. It hypnotized me. Shakespeare’s ‘all that glitters is not gold’ quote came to mind. Would this crown be my downfall or my greatest score of all time? Was it some kind of clue regarding those in power? Where did Alberta Ross get if from? Our thorough research never came across a photograph of her wearing the piece.

  This crown would definitely be missed. I felt warm and fuzzy thinking about her ordering staff around, trying to dig it out of the rubble of her once magnificent home. Maybe she wouldn’t even know it was taken. She might assume the piece melted from the blast of the bomb.

  As Jun sketched pieces of jewelry, I examined the circumference of the crown. It looked small for an adult’s size head. I impulsively wanted to try it on, but held back. There would be time to adore it later. It was much too fragile to be passed around the room. The stones wobbled inside of the loose mountings. The piece really needed a jeweler to tighten everything up, but I couldn’t
exactly take it in to a jewelry store for repair. We weren’t supposed to find this. It had to be part of a collection. What was its significance?

  Jun reached for a few of the canvases and said, “I’ll save that crown you keep on staring at for last. The gold bars are easy to move. What do we got here? Thirty pounds? No, closer to fifty or sixty pounds of gold bars and coins. About the only thing that ever held its worth. Dylan, contact your guy about the bars. Onto the paintings. I already recognize three of them. Good eye, Raphael. Mohammad Adin was the artist. They have his signature. He died a few decades ago, decapitated for speaking out against the Shah’s regime. Damn, these are a fortune. And look at this painting!”

  Jun unrolled an oil of an angel. I didn’t even notice it in my frenzy. “Priceless?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s a fallen angel. I’m guessing Renaissance. This is Lucifer, right? Alberta liked her art. This is going to be one hell of a payday. I know an art dealer who will give us at least two or three hundred thousand units for each of these. What a shame. They got to be worth a few mil.”

  We conversed with each other while Jun continued to sketch each item. Almost two hours had passed. Finally, Jun sketched the crown with amazing detail.

  “Could that be a pharaoh’s crown?” Chad asked.

  “No, no. Pharaohs wore cone-shaped crowns, right? They sat high up on one’s head?” Jun said with uncertainty.

  I nodded. This crown had a completely different style. “Maybe Babylonian or Greek? I don’t know. It just looks really old. Extraordinary,” I said. “Museum worthy.”

  Dylan said, “Let’s call Alberta and ask her where she got it.” We chuckled. He held out his hands and Jun passed him the crown. Dylan’s murky blue eyes looked at it with the same kind of lust that I did. “Seriously, we need an ancient history professor. Raphael, you are as close as we have. You know professors. You have access to a library…”

  I interrupted at once. “Yeah, a library with cameras in it. Books you have to download or books with computer chips in them. Computers that you log onto and track every site you look at. And librarians who would be gossiping like crazy about my sudden interest in ancient crowns. But I like your idea about using another professor. There’s an ancient world history professor across the hallway from me. She kind of likes me. Maybe I could show her a pic. She would at least get us on the right track.”

  Jun handed me his drawing. It had the detail of a photograph.

  Marta then added, “If you could get a time period, a region, something, I could use the information and play ghost in the computer at the airport. I have a phony log-on, but I can’t be on the computer for too long. That would create attention, and attention creates flags, you all know routine.”

  We continued passing the crown around, admiring it like it was magic.

  Jun kept on jotting down notes and sketching our booty. Finally, he said, “How did you find this?”

  Chad replied, “It was in the safe room, false drawer, underneath her jewelry. Safely locked up and hidden by itself.”

  “Give me a minute. Are we splitting up the gold?” Jun asked as he took an old fashioned battery-operated calculator out of his bag and started totaling up our bounty.

  I looked at my crew’s faces. Their eyes said it all. They wanted the gold bars. I nodded. “Keep what we can evenly split. The rest goes in the fund.”

  “I count fifty one bars of gold and thirty-seven coins,” Chad said. “There are five of us, so ten bars each, one for the fund. How about all of the coins in the fund as well? They could be worth much more.” Everyone nodded. Jun asked, “Anyone want to recount?” No one did. We had the so-called ‘honor among thieves’ mind set at the time. Chad passed the gold bars out as Jun played accountant.

  “Okay, not taking into account the crown or gold, we have between four and five million units of loot. Figure I can move it for at least eight hundred thousand. I am guessing a lot more. Fund gets half and we, as a group, get half. Not a bad payday. Please, I beg of you, do not get stupid with your new found wealth. Sorry, but I gotta ask before I start looking to unload this. No one was hurt, right? No one was seen?”

  We all nodded in unison.

  I said, “No neighbors around. Not much was said on the news. They believe it was a gas leak or something.” I smiled at the ridiculous explanation. One could always count on the media to down play a bomb. After WWIII, no one wanted the public to suspect terrorism.

  “Give me a few weeks, maybe a month and it will be fenced.”

  Dylan then asked, “Raph, where do you take our loot?”

  “Grampa’s farm.”

  Dylan continued to challenge me. “Yeah, yeah. Give us a location already. Don’t you think we have a right to know? This is our fourth heist. It’s time to trust us. We trust you.”

  I looked around the room and all eyes were on me. “It’s in Oklahoma, buried deep below in a vault. I promise to take you there soon. I’m not gambling it away, and I don’t think of the loot as mine. It’s ours. Just trust me for a little longer. I’ve got us this far, all of you have plenty of money, and we are making one hell of a difference. Our next mark, if done right, will be even bigger, maybe show the country if not the world that we are serious. I’m keeping the crown for myself, but I will keep you all informed on what I learn,” I said. All backed off of me for the moment. No one objected, and I kept my prize.

  We loaded up Jun’s battery-operated Chevy with our bounty, counting on him alone to fence it all. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure that Jun was one hundred percent honest. I guess that was the cost of doing business. He was honest enough for what we were involved in. As he drove off, the rest of us took our gold bars and strapped them around our arms and legs. Once our loot was cleverly hidden, we hailed self-driving cabs and smiled all of the way home.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Raphael

  I tore through my townhome looking for a decent place to stash the gold bars, coins, and crown. To my knowledge, I had never had a break-in, and nothing was ever stolen. The neighborhood seemed quiet and safe. Not that any of it mattered because I didn’t have a choice until I could get to my grandfather’s farm.

  My home was nothing compared to my Manhattan brownstone, but many would consider it extravagant. Like Jaxie’s townhome, many people’s homes were confiscated. The lucky ones with high productivity factors were relocated. As a professor, I had some freedom with obtaining my address. My grandfather’s gold helped me secure a roomy townhouse without a roommate. Soon there would be questions. My salary could not sustain my lifestyle.

  I didn’t like the potential exposure. However, a roommate would sacrifice my privacy and an unsafe neighborhood would increase my chances of getting robbed. I frequently stashed my valuables in the freezer. Two empty ice cream containers sat in the back corner. Not enough room for my booty. I headed for my spare bedroom. After analyzing the few contents of the closet, I chose a ripped up Nike duffel bag as a place to hold my new crown. I planned on soon getting up to the farm to hide everything.

  Every time I thought of the farm, I thought of George. He was my rock, my mentor, my parent, and best friend all rolled up into one. He was a carpenter by trade, but a con man at heart. George had a gift. His friends used to say he could sell ice to an Eskimo. He thought I had the same gift, and I supposed he was right. I just used it differently.

  George warned me about where the world was going. He died years before his prediction came true. I remember when he bought the farm. He worked hard and conned harder, all for building the perfect hideout. The farm’s deed belonged to layers of trusts and my dead father. I technically owned the property, but never changed the deed. The change in public legal papers might draw attention.

  No one ever questioned the ownership. A thirty-foot trailer on a thirty acre parcel of land in the Middle-Of-Nowhere, Oklahoma, wasn’t high on the government’s confiscation list. The farm wasn’t worth much, but to me, it kept George King alive in my thoughts. He wo
uld be proud of me and my band of vigilantes.

  My grandfather took me in as a baby. I didn’t remember my parents. George’s son and my father, Samuel King, died before my first birthday. My father was a stockbroker who sometimes worked out of Building One of the World Trade Center. He went to work on the wrong day and died along with three thousand others. My grandfather told me that was the day he lost all trust for the government. My grandmother had a heart attack a few months later. George blamed her attack on the stress of losing their only child. Instead of living from one day to the next, George took me in and planned for my future.

  I never knew my father because he died, but I never knew my mother because she left. Olivia Gutierrez-King cut and ran. I never knew why. There was more to the story, but I was never told her reasons. All I really knew about her was her name and that she named me Raphael after an angel in the Bible. I saved a few pictures of her. She was from Peru and very beautiful. I favored her with my black hair, olive skin, and dark eyes over my dad and grandfather who both had strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes. Maybe my mother was still alive. Peru had been spared during the war. I never tried to locate her, and I assumed she never tried either. Some things were better left alone.

  My parents lived in New York City where I was born. Before my first birthday, my grandfather came to New York City and took me home. I lived with him in Oak Park, Illinois throughout my childhood. The loss of my parents haunted me throughout my life. I had to deal with death and abandonment. George worked so hard to make up for it.

  George was hardly the conventional father figure. Instead of coaching baseball and taking me to the movies, he taught me how to make a fake passport, use a stolen credit card, and many other things that now proved to be useful, even life-saving. He was a carpenter by trade, and taught me how to build. I idolized the man and wanted to be just like him, but he wanted more for me.