by Ritter Ames
I smiled, but turned away to keep myself from being sidetracked, dropping the key onto the tabletop next to my Prada. “Who paid for all of this? Cassie, did you—”
“I called in some favors,” Jack said over my shoulder. “We need a place to work and the stuff out of Cassie’s flat. For its safety and hers.”
“Have there been any attempts—”
Cassie shook her head and Jack said, “No, but the risk was always there. A whole new group of people know us now and will be looking at who we’re each connected to.”
I knew a great security system protected my assistant’s flat. The building’s owner took its historical status seriously. Which was why she’d taken possession of the files in the first place. But Jack was right. As we investigated the bad guys and their connections, the bad guys were likely investigating ours too. Any additional risk to Cassie was unacceptable in my book.
“So what’s new on the agenda?” I asked. “I assume the office tour wasn’t the only reason you cleared your schedule.”
Jack walked back to the door and removed a smartphone from his inside jacket pocket. “Since you came up with your brainstorm in Cologne suggesting we focus on incoming shipments with multiple copies of artwork entering through various customs posts, I began inquiries. A number of interesting developments came to light.” He moved to the flat screen and synced his phone to it. Soon, his recently received email attachments on art copies and forgeries were readily viewable to the three of us.
As Jack’s thumb brushed the face of his phone, crates appeared on the widescreen with different agents pulling out sample pieces of art from each. He explained, “I expanded on the ideas you and I spoke about on the return flight from Cologne, Laurel, to follow artwork coming in labeled as copies and then see where it goes and whether it changes classification later. I’ve been in touch with the customs departments of all the European countries, but because I have better opportunity for faster information about pieces going in and out of the U.K., I convinced the various offices to trail bona fide copied art labeled with anywhere in Great Britain on the bill of lading.”
He carouselled through the pictures of the shipments separated by countries of origin. Each country’s initial photo showed confiscated crates in groups of three or four.
“How many in all?” I asked.
“Copies, or numbers of works in all?”
“Both.”
He sighed. “Dozens of different pieces, and at least five copies of each.”
There were several shots of the single pieces, both crated with its mates and shown close up for detail. I was mesmerized by the varied objects, from religious icons to reproduction tiaras, ancient statuary to Chippendale chairs. But as Jack changed the screen with a swipe of his thumb, I saw the majority of the shipments were paintings.
“And this is all within…?”
“The last six months,” Jack said. He quickly flipped a few screens and added, “This is the latest. Came in last week to Calais with a shipping label to London. Spanish shipping papers, but they look to be forged like the others. Different this time, as there are just two copies, but both have forgers’ marks matching one we’ve flagged. I don’t have a theory on the anomaly of just the pair. The thieves may be shipping the rest of the copies separately, but it’s another trail to follow.”
All the air left my body. I heard Jack talking, but my concentration remained locked on the painting’s sharp contrast between the dark and light images, a knife showing its use with dark scarlet, the way the clothing realistically draped on the bodies, and—like a spotlight—the image of the artist’s face at the top of the crowd of five. An excellent forgery of the same Caravaggio masterpiece I’d liberated a few hours ago.
I leaned against a table and gripped the edges. Jack and Cassie remained focused on the screen and didn’t notice I was trying to stay vertical. Then he said, “Isn’t this a copy of the same painting we saw in France last week?”
Words wouldn’t come from my mouth. When I didn’t answer right away, he turned and looked at me. I took a deep breath, then cleared my throat and waved a hand. “Frog in…throat. Caramel…coffee.”
He raised an eyebrow.
I tried again. “Yes, I think…it’s the same composition.”
“It was supposed to be some kind of special printing, right? That’s what I remember the director saying.” Jack kept his damned questioning eyebrow lifted, and I knew his puzzlement had nothing to do with the image on the wall.
I nodded. “Digital. New process.” There was no point in trying to say anything else. My vocal cords felt paralyzed.
Throughout the exchange, Cassie’s gaze flipped back and forth between us like a spectator at a tennis match. I didn’t want her trying to connect dots. I coughed. “Jack, why don’t you fill Cassie in on the painting we saw while I head down to the kitchen for a glass of water.”
“I can go—”
“No, I’ll be fine.” I felt in my pocket to make sure my phone was there, then I removed the jacket from the doorknob and laid it carefully across the end of the closest table. “Just down the stairs and right back. Maybe I’ll introduce myself to a few of our neighbors. You and Cassie stay here and talk.”
I shot out the door before he could say anything else, dialing my phone as I walked.
“Nico, where are you?” I was on the next landing, halfway down the first step toward the middle floor so Jack couldn’t see me if he looked out the door.
“Nice to talk to you, too,” Nico replied. “Why are you whispering?”
“Because I don’t want Jack to hear me.”
“I should have known.”
I blew out a breath. “Don’t make this more frustrating. I…Oh my god, Nico. We may have screwed up our best lead yet.”
THREE
Standing on the beige vinyl floor of that landing, guilt and regret washed over me. We’d been waiting for a break, and like the rest of this ill-fated case it looked like my midnight venture with Nico destroyed everything. Our spiriting away the painting meant we couldn’t follow it to the auction which it was slated to join. My brain whirled with the possibilities. The fact there were only two copies in the confiscated case likely meant our art heist criminals also learned about the auction and had to move faster than normal to substitute a copy for the original.
My flight from the office and the scrutiny of Jack and Cassie was a desperate attempt to reach Nico and see if he had any ideas on how to salvage the situation. In that moment, however, I came to a decision. “Nico, hang on, I’m going back up.”
“What?”
“Just a minute.” I stared upward, toward the door, but couldn’t yet make myself move.
No. At some point I had to be a grown up and realize I couldn’t withhold information my whole team needed. It was time to ’fess up. Another look up the steps, knowing what was behind that steel door, and I nearly changed my mind. Down the next half-flight, in the hall of the floor below ours, a man poked his head out of a doorway. I stared at him. His eyes grew wide. He hurriedly ducked back inside his office and clicked the lock.
Great. I knew the kind of expression I wore at times like these, with eyes like blue lasers. I might as well introduce myself as the weirdo new neighbor.
Nico asked what was happening, and I told him to wait. I clattered up the stairs and grabbed the doorknob when I reached the top floor, then slammed into the dark red immovable object. “Dammit.” I looked at the keypad and realized my key with the code was where I’d left it on the table. Before I could knock, Jack threw open the door.
“Forget something?” He grinned, then frowned. “What’s the matter?”
I held up my phone and hit the speaker option, then I set it onto the table closest to our group as the door latched behind us. “Nico, this is now officially a conference call. We need to fill Cassie and Jack in on what little we know,
and we need to get you back here to London. Copies of the painting we…rescued…last night hit an email to Jack as incoming through customs.”
“Rescued?” Jack growled.
“Last night?” Cassie’s blue eyes widened.
Nico cursed in Italian over the speaker. I looked at Jack and nodded.
“I know you think I lied to you,” I began. “But the painting has been on the foundation’s ‘lookout’ list for decades. We truly were recovering it for foundation business. Just not exactly the way I’d implied.” I looked down to momentarily escape his angry glare. “We were going to have Max return it to the true owner and maintain our anonymity.”
“Jack, I can send you the file with the list Laurel is talking about,” Nico said. “She’s telling the truth.”
“Oh, I’ll bet you can send me all manner of data to shore up Laurel’s story.” Jack turned away from me and put his hands on his hips. Then he whirled back around and demanded, “That doesn’t explain why you have to hare off by yourselves. Nor why it had to be a super-secret middle-of-the-night escapade.”
I leaned against the tabletop, crowding him. “Because we found out late yesterday the painting was going to be sold at auction. The pickup was scheduled by noon today. Since the forgers worked off-script by sending only two copies for your pals to confiscate, it sounds like the criminals were caught off-guard by this maneuver as well.”
“An auction? A legitimate one requiring provenance? Or the shady kind?” Jack asked.
“I didn’t have time to check. Just like we didn’t have time to canvass document forgers to see if anyone at the France facility had ever had papers forged to show ownership of the painting. My guess was no, since the director lied about it being a copy,” I said, crossing my arms tightly across my chest. “I’d already put some plans in place to get the painting back through proper channels once we had some breathing space in our schedule. But my quiet inquiries brought surprising results instead, and I learned from one of my personal connections about the sale. If we didn’t want to lose the painting again, we had to…re-appropriate it last night.”
“You mean steal,” Jack said.
“I’m not sure it’s stealing when it’s already stolen, and we’re going to return it to the actual owner.”
“Pretty it up all you want. But if the timetable was as tight as you say, the two of you took a huge risk without an adequate window to prepare.”
Okay, that made me mad. “I’m standing here, aren’t I?” I turned toward the phone. “You’re not in handcuffs or jail, right, Nico?” The only answer I received was a chuckle. Yeah, I thought, laugh while you’re a safe distance away from Jack’s scowl. “Where are you anyway?”
“Heathrow,” Nico replied. “My plane landed a half hour ago, and I’m almost to the Tube entrance.”
Jack spoke up, “I have everyone in a new location. The address is—”
“No. I won’t have the items until later,” Nico said. “I’ll pick them up and go to Laurel’s hotel. It will be after six.”
“In my room or the lobby?” I asked.
“Whichever you prefer.”
“We’ll meet you in her room,” Jack said. “And what do you mean by items? You stole something other than the painting?”
“A figurine,” I said. “Small.” I held my hands a few inches apart.
He shook his head.
I felt like shaking Nico. That he was in London and the items in question weren’t with him had me on edge. “Why did you separate from the…you know…stuff?”
My techno wingman chuckled again. “You make it sound like I’m moving drugs.”
“This isn’t funny, Nico.”
“Dio Mio, don’t worry. Clive is taking care of everything. He said to tell you hello, by the way.”
“Clive with Whyte Noyse?”
“Sì.”
I’d flown with the heavy metal band recently to Florence, and they brought Jack back home when he’d been wounded in a rescue attempt. Clive was the band’s amazing roadie. Nico and their publicist, Patricia, had some kind of relationship. I asked, “You arranged everything with Patricia, right? Are you with her now?”
“We’re meeting for a late dinner. But I’ll see Clive before. Our package is coming with the instruments.”
It all made sense again. Clive would get our items through with the band’s gear. “We’ll try not to keep you too long tonight. Patricia probably doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
Again, we heard a chuckle.
But Jack didn’t see anything humorous. “In the meantime, come on into the office and you and Laurel can fill Cassie and me in on all the unilateral decisions the two of you made last night and why.”
“No,” Nico replied. “I’ll meet you both tonight and hand over the package. I have something to do before I come in.”
“What is too important—”
Nico interrupted. “I’m getting into the train, and I’m turning off my cellphone. Ciao.”
And that was it. Nico was gone.
Jack gave me a blank look, his mouth opening and closing, but no words came. I looked at Cassie, and the two of us broke into peals of laughter.
“What the bloody hell?”
I held up a hand of acknowledgment, but there was no way either of us could stop laughing and explain to him how many times we’d seen Nico do exactly the same kind of thing to Max. Jack had heard the stories, but a person’s first experience was always the funniest—for everyone else.
We stopped when Cassie looked at her watch and gasped. “You’ll have to fill me in later. We have a conference call with Max in fifteen minutes.”
“Max? Our boss Max?”
She nodded.
A glance at my phone screen said it wasn’t even eight a.m. in New York. “He’s not in the office yet.”
“He’s in Paris, meeting with a funder. He wants our input.”
Paris! Where was my early warning signal for when Max entered my time zone? I shoved my phone into my Prada and tossed Jack his blazer. “You handle Max, Cassie. Give him the virtual tour of the new space, but don’t you dare give him the entry code to get in the door.”
“Where are you going?”
“Jack’s taking me to brunch. Or early lunch.” I opened the door and waved for him to follow. “Anywhere but here.”
She started to follow. “But Max—”
“You scheduled the appointment, Cass. This is your chance to make management points.”
“The funder—”
“Can be handled by Max,” I assured her, standing back so Jack could move into the hall ahead of me. “He just wants a pretty face for the funder to look at. I guarantee your smile during a web call this morning will look infinitely more natural than the forced one I’d muster. Good luck!”
Jack was already on the next landing and checking his phone messages when I sailed down the stairs. He looked up. “Isn’t video conferencing with the head of the foundation part of being manager of the London division of the Beacham Foundation?”
“Fifteen minutes is not enough time for me to prepare to meet with Max under any circumstances,” I said, continuing down to the next floor. He stayed close on my heels. “He’ll go easy on Cassie. And we really do have other critical things to discuss.”
“So where do we go?”
I sighed and slowed down. “I don’t care. Anywhere quiet and private is fine. But I don’t want to go too far in case Cass does need me for some reason. I may have acted like I’m throwing her to the wolves, but I don’t want to do it literally.”
“You simply don’t want to be there for moral support.” He grinned.
I hitched my purse strap higher on my shoulder and faced him. “Do you want to know what you said you wanted to know? Or do you want to wait three hours while I double team with Cassie to satisfy Max?”
“Point taken.”
“Thank you.” We resumed our trek down the stairs, and I asked, “Are we driving somewhere? Or what?”
We reached the ground floor, and he turned me into the short hallway to the left. “They should be setting up for lunch,” he said. “But I’ll bet we can find some privacy in the restaurant. Maybe even a cup of tea if you’d like.”
“Anything more substantial?”
“You truly are always hungry, aren’t you?”
I grinned at him.
“If you already know the answer to the question, why bother asking?”
Minutes later, Jack charmed the hostess, Lea, and introduced us. She settled us into a corner booth on the edge of the empty sea of tables. I slid into the half circle of black pleather and surveyed the crimson, ebony, and gold décor. I peeked through the lattice separating the dining area from reception and saw a huge lit fish tank for good luck. Hopefully all that feng shui good fortune funneled in an upward direction toward the top floor and didn’t homestead on ground level.
“Tea in just a few minutes,” Lea promised and started to turn away.
“Could we have something else too?” I asked quickly. She faced us again and tilted her head to the side. My mind ran through Asian menu items. “Maybe some crab rangoons? Or anything fast and easy?”
“Soup?” she asked.
The lovely chicken broth with fried onions floating in the bowl. “Absolutely. Thank you.” I smiled. She nodded and turned away.
“Happy now?” Jack asked as she moved at an elegant quick step toward the kitchen.
“We’ll see. But probably,” I pulled out my phone to text Cassie where we were and to warn her not to tell Max I could readily make a command appearance. She texted back that I’d better bring her some rangoons too.
Minutes later we had our soup, a teapot and cups decorated with Chinese scenes, and a matching plate covered in warm crab rangoons resembling edible lotus blossoms. Yes, I was definitely happy with the selection. As Lea moved away, Jack said, “I guess we start with what you know.”