The Sirani Connection

by Estelle Ryan

  “Antonin.” Manny looked at me. “Doc?”

  I thought about this. “Both are important. Since we have basic background on Doctor Novotný and you’re already searching for more, I concur with Manny.”

  “Well, it’s settled then.” Francine wrinkled her nose as she looked around the office space. “I’m going to sit in that comfy-looking sofa in the gallery and work on my tablet—on something that will give me results.”

  “Good afternoon, everyone.” Phillip walked into the office. He was holding his dark blue wool coat over one arm, his bespoke suit fitting in well with the elegant surroundings. He glanced around the room, then stared at me for a second. “Are you well?”

  “Hi and bye.” Francine smiled at him. “I’m outta here. If you need me, I’ll be in there.” She nodded at the gallery and left.

  “I’m well. Did you learn anything of use?”

  “Unfortunately not.” The frustration was not only in his body language, but also in his clipped words.

  Manny briefed Phillip on everything that had taken place at the police station while I took a pair of latex gloves from their designated space in my handbag and put them on before opening a cupboard across from the desk. Even though this room was spacious, I was already feeling crowded.

  I turned my back on the others and narrowed my focus on the contents of the cupboard. Just like the cupboard Daniel was going through, this one also was filled with ring binders. I took the first one on the top shelf and exhaled in relief. It was not covered in dust.

  “What can you tell us about Antonin?” Daniel paused his search through the cupboard briefly as he looked at Phillip.

  Phillip pulled at his cuffs. “I’ve known him professionally for... hmm... I would say eleven or so years. I can’t remember the first time we met, but I remember the first time he pushed me for business. By that time I’d heard rumours that he was not always doing everything above board.”

  “Colin told us about some rumours.” Manny closed one desk drawer and opened another one. “But what rumours are you talking about?”

  “Well, it was whispered that Ant sometimes worked with art that didn’t have clear provenance. Some of his clients also had reputations for white-collar crime, but few of them were ever charged, much less found guilty. There have always been rumours of illegal activities around him and some of his clients, but nothing that could be proven.”

  “That is why you always had the clients he referred to you so thoroughly vetted.” It all made sense now.

  Phillip nodded. “Not only the clients, but the art as well. I didn’t want to be anywhere close to illegal art deals. But as you know, we never found anything.”

  Daniel straightened. “The sign of a good criminal. Hide in plain sight, continue doing transparent, legal business and be loud about it.”

  “Oh, he’s loud.” Phillip’s smile was not kind. “He’s arrogant and has no trouble telling anyone that he is the most successful art dealer in Europe.”

  “Is that true?” I never knew whether people were being truthful or merely boasting with hyperbole.

  “Hmm... I wouldn’t say he is the most successful.” Phillip tilted his head as he took a moment before he nodded. “But I would say he is the most successful dealer in Near Eastern antiquities.”

  “Near Eastern antiquities?” Daniel put his hands on his hips. “Shahab dealt in that stuff. All looted artworks.”

  Manny swore and Phillip’s lips thinned. He nodded. “Then Shahab might have known Antonin.”

  “I’m sure of it.” Colin was leaning against the doorframe, not entering the room. He smiled at me. “Ant has a reputation for his expertise. That was how I first heard about him. I had”—he glanced at Manny, his smile widening into a smug grin—“a sculpture that needed to find its way back to its original owners. Ant met with me and I must admit, I was impressed by his exhaustive knowledge about the area, the artists, the eras as well as individual pieces. He was like an encyclopaedia.”

  “We have to keep in mind that Ant didn’t only sell Near Eastern antiquities.” Phillip looked at me. “How many of the pieces we insured are Near Eastern antiquities?”

  “Two.” I remembered the detail of each case I’d investigated. “The others are masterpieces from different eras, all of them European in origin though.”

  “So what are we thinking now?” Manny closed a desk drawer and leaned back in the chair. “That Antonin Korn deals in legit art from Europe, but is also the middleman for looted art from the Middle East?”

  “Some of the Near Eastern pieces he sold were one hundred percent legal, but I wouldn’t put it past him to deal in looted art. Not at all.” Phillip shook his head. “I always had a bad feeling about him.”

  “Then why did you take on his clients?” Ivan asked.

  I thought about this. “Those eleven clients had other works insured by you.”

  Phillip looked at me, his smile slight. “And they begged me to insure those pieces. It was only because I had done business with them before and I knew their integrity that I accepted them. Ant must have sent maybe fifty more clients my way, but I rejected them without any further consideration.”

  Colin and Phillip started talking about the many artefacts Ant had sold and ventured further off topic, discussing Near Eastern art. Ivan, Daniel and Manny returned to searching through the office. I turned my attention back to the binders in front of me.

  An hour later, Phillip and Colin had left and I was looking through the last binder. I was doing a simple scan through each one, hoping to get an overall sense of Antonin Korn’s filing system.

  All the binders in this cupboard held paper copies of receipts for transactions dating back as far as 1995. But it was the binder I was currently paging through that held the most interesting information so far. I took another five minutes before I was satisfied that my conclusions were as near to accurate as possible. And that was when I saw something that sent a rush of adrenaline through my body. I reached for Mozart’s Symphony in F major, closed my eyes and focused on mentally writing the first three lines of the Allegro.

  Only when I felt calmer did I look up. Ivan and Daniel were paging through what looked like an accounting ledger. Manny was sitting on the leather chair behind the desk looking through an open briefcase on his lap.

  “I think I have a list of Antonin Korn’s clients.” I blinked when everyone’s heads jerked towards me. I looked down to the binder in front of me. “I also think there’s a list of his suppliers in here.”

  “Well, let’s have a look at it.” Manny put the briefcase on the desk and walked towards me.

  I shrank back. A quick look around confirmed that the office had remained the same size as before. Yet it felt smaller. I swallowed and looked towards the door. “Can we meet with the others out there?”

  “Oh, bloody hell, Doc.” Manny sighed. “Of course. I could take a break from getting killed by papercut.”

  “It would have to become severely infected to kil...” I sighed and picked up the binder. Once again I’d taken someone’s words literally.

  Daniel and Ivan chuckled as they followed Manny out of the office. I held the binder away from my body in the likely case of it containing germs. The yellowed pages with the darker sections on the edges were proof of a lot of contact with hands that had not been gloved and very likely not been clean.

  “What’s cookin’, good-lookin’?” Francine looked up from her tablet and smiled at Manny as he sat down on the large leather sofa next to her. This was the living area, the first display when entering the gallery. Two uniformed officers were standing in front of the shop window, watching the street. Their postures appeared relaxed, but I saw the tightness in their shoulders as they took note of everyone passing them on both sides of the street.

  “Doc found something.” Manny lifted his chin towards me.

  “Ooh!” Francine looked at the binder in my hands and frowned. “Paper? Really? Man, I hate this old-school system.”

&
nbsp; “What did you find, love?” Colin left the large landscape painting he’d been looking at and joined us. He pulled two beautifully carved wooden dining room chairs closer and put one down next to me. “Sit and tell us.”

  I inspected the tapestry-covered seat and decided it looked clean enough, so I sat down. “There seem to be two lists in this binder. One I assume is a list of clients. I came to that conclusion because I saw the names of the eleven clients Antonin had referred to Phillip. A lot of the names on the other list appear to be Arabic, which leads me to believe they might be his suppliers of Near Eastern antiquities.”

  “Give the lists to Francine.” Manny ignored Francine’s melodramatic mumbling about having to copy everything from paper. “She’ll check them all out.”

  I pulled the binder a bit closer to my body, but still made sure it didn’t touch me. “Shahab is on the second list.”

  “Motherfucker.” Vinnie’s nostrils flared as he crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Bloody hellfire, Doc! Why didn’t you say so earlier?”

  Because it would’ve led to a shutdown. “I...”

  I didn’t know whether it was the movement on the street that caught my attention or the one officer’s shoulders tensing even more. The shock of seeing Shahab’s name and now this? I froze.

  “Jenny?” Colin put his hand on my forearm. “Love?”

  I focused on my breathing. Thirteen slow breaths later, I raised a shaking hand and point at the street. “Her.”

  “Who do you see, Jen-girl?” Vinnie walked to the shop window and looked up and down the street. His whole body jerked. “Fuck!”

  “The hell?” Manny jumped up, but Vinnie was already out the door, running down the street. Manny swung around, stared at me, then looked at Colin. “Get her to talk.”

  “Millard.” The reprimand was clear in Colin’s tone.

  I mentally wrote next two lines of the Symphony’s Allegro. “I saw the woman from the police station.”

  “Bloody hellfire.” Manny walked to the gallery door and looked out. He shook his head. “I don’t think the big guy found her.”

  “How did she know to come here?” Colin took my hand between both his and rubbed it as if I was cold. “Tomas told us he’d revealed nothing to her when she’d questioned him.”

  “He’s a bloody thief, Frey. He lied.”

  “He didn’t.” I was sure of it. “But I don’t think he told us everything.”

  I thought about this some more. The woman from the police station had been leaning against the building across the street, eating a cupcake. She hadn’t looked worried or expecting danger. “There are other possibilities. She could’ve followed us, she could’ve found out about Antonin Korn’s reputation and decided to question him or...” I looked at Francine. “If she was the one who hacked the police system and deleted the footage of Tomas Broz’s interviews and her presence, she could also have listened in on our interview with him.”

  “Holy mother of all the saints.” Manny rubbed his hand hard over his face and stepped away from the door. I frowned. Manny looked pale.

  Vinnie opened the door, the scar running down the left side of his face white. “She’s gone.”

  “What do you mean she’s gone?” Manny tried to push his hands in his trouser pockets, but missed. Then he swayed on his feet. His usual scowl changed to a confused frown. “I don’t fee...”

  His eyes rolled in his head and his legs crumpled under him.

  Vinnie moved faster than I’d thought possible in time to catch Manny and gently lowered him to the ground. “Old man?”

  “Manny!” Francine jumped up and ran to them.

  Colin was already on his knees next to Vinnie, his fingers pressed against Manny’s neck. “He has a pulse, but it feels very weak.”

  I couldn’t move. It felt like my body had locked itself into this position. The only voluntary movement I could manage was blinking. And no amount of blinking forced Manny to stand up, scowl at me and demand illogical answers from me.

  “We need to get him to a hospital.” Daniel pushed Vinnie and Colin out the way.

  “I’ll drive. It will be faster than waiting for an ambulance.” Ivan was already out the door, keys in his hand.

  “I’ll carry him.” Vinnie elbowed Daniel out the way when the latter lifted Manny’s arm. With the same tender care he showed towards Eric, Vinnie lifted Manny from the floor and rushed out the door. Francine ran behind him, swearing at Manny, using language I hadn’t known she would utilise on a loved one.

  I wanted to go with them. I wanted to shake Manny and demand he wake up. I wanted to make sure only the best doctors took care of him. I couldn’t. My brain held my body hostage while it reeled from being overloaded with strong emotions.

  My breathing was shallow and I had nothing grounding me. I blinked non-stop and looked around me. Everyone had left the gallery. Francine’s laptop and tablet were abandoned on the sofa, Manny’s coat carelessly thrown over the sofa’s armrest. I was alone.

  Everything went black.

  Chapter SEVEN

  “JENNY.” COLIN RUBBED my hand between his. “Come on, love. Millard is going to be okay.”

  My eyelids refused to open. I had no idea how long I’d been shut down. I didn’t even know where I was. Colin continued to talk to me as I forced Mozart’s Symphony in F major into my mind.

  I wrote the first three lines of the unusual second movement—the Menuetto—before my body obeyed the messages sent from my brain and I opened my eyes. I looked at Colin. “Manny.”

  “Hey there.”

  “Manny.”

  His smile was understanding. “He tested positive for an opioid overdose and the doctors gave him Naloxone to neutralise the overdose.”

  “Is he conscious?” One of the many articles I’d read about the opioid crisis was an in-depth look into what happened once Naloxone reversed the depression of the central nervous and respiratory systems caused by the use of opioids.

  In limited cases the use of Naloxone caused nausea, sweating, trembling and headaches. Those were the milder side effects. I was more concerned with the adverse cardiovascular effects it could have, including the very rare possibility of a coma.

  “He was feeling a bit shaky and complained about a headache. Now he’s sleeping.” Colin narrowed his eyes. “How are you?”

  “Well enough.” I shifted in the chair and looked around me. “Where are we and how long have we been here?”

  “In the hospital staff conference room. Daniel and Ivan should be on their way back from the police station. Francine went to the washroom and Vinnie went to get coffee. Phillip is taking a call outside.”

  “How long?”

  Colin knew what I was asking. I hated shutdowns—losing the time, losing control over my body and environment, being vulnerable and exposed. He squeezed my hand. “I went back into the gallery as soon as Vin and the others left with Millard. You were... it was a rough one.”

  I swallowed. That meant I had been rocking and keening loudly. I nodded for him to continue.

  “I decided it was best to stay put, but after about twenty minutes Vin phoned and told me to get out of there. Manny got exposed by touching something.”

  I crossed my arms. “That means it had to be very strong for Manny to react so quickly and badly by only touching it. But wait. He was wearing gloves.”

  “Yeah. We’ve been speculating about it a lot.” He smiled at my frown. “We’re thinking that either he touched the powder when he took off his gloves or it might have transferred to his clothes and he touched his clothes with his bare hands.”

  “Do you...” I stopped when he kissed my knuckles.

  “Let me finish telling the story. I’ll be quick.” He waited until I nodded. I wanted—no, needed—to know the details, yet was impatient and at risk of dismissing possible important information. “I brought you here and the decontamination team went through the gallery. They found concentrated levels of fentanyl on the brie
fcase Manny had been going through. Only on the briefcase though. Nowhere else.”

  I blinked a few times. “How long?”

  “Altogether now, five and a half hours.” He glanced at the door. “The others were worried.”

  “But you said Manny will be well.”

  He moved closer until our noses almost touched. “They’re worried about you, love.”

  “She’s with us?” Vinnie rushed over, placed a tray of steaming coffee mugs on the table and sat down on the chair on my other side. “I was so lonely without you, Jen-girl. There was no one here to debate the fourth dimension of the truth behind unicorns and energy fields causing lovesickness.”

  I frowned. “There is no...” My lips thinned. “Why didn’t you just say you were worried?”

  His smile was wide, genuine and relieved. “Because teasing you is a little bit of fun and also because it’s your punishment for adding to my worries. It’s bad enough the old man gave us such a scare.”

  I followed his glance towards the door and for the first time paid attention to my surroundings. The large room we were in was bright and airy, a landscape painting on one wall the only decoration. Eighteen chairs stood around the oval wooden table. The shiny surface was covered in takeaway boxes, empty water bottles and a few documents.

  It was clear Francine had made herself at home across from where we were sitting. Her laptop was open, her tablet next to it and three phones on the other side of the laptop. Behind us were large windows overlooking a dimly lit courtyard. It was dark outside.

  “My sugar bunny pumpkin love is coming home with us...” Francine stopped two strides into the room, her shoulders sagging in relief. Then she straightened and smiled at me. “Hey, you.”

  “Who or what is a sugar bunny pumpkin?”

  Vinnie barked a laugh. “I’m totally using that on the old man.”

  “Ooh, don... no, please do!” Francine grabbed a cup of coffee and walked to her seat. “I’m using all kinds of ridiculous names on Manny to irritate him.”