The School of Turin

by Dale Nelson

  Jack wasn’t religious. It wasn’t that he did or didn’t believe in a god, he’d just never spent the time to think about it. But whether there was a god or not, he knew Niccolò Bartolo didn’t have a soul.

  Jack wondered what it said about him that Bartolo said he saw a younger version of himself in Jack.

  Jack drove to the apartment he shared with Guilia. He didn’t bother driving through the passthrough to the courtyard where they parked the cars. Instead, he left the car running on the street and unlocked the door and slipped through. The stairway to their loft was inside a small alcove off the courtyard. There were a few people in the courtyard sitting around a table smoking and drinking wine. Jack entered the hallway and took the stairs, two at a time, to the fourth floor. He tried the door; it was unlocked.

  Their apartment was small, one bedroom off a living room that flowed out of the kitchen, which was where he entered. Guilia stood in the center of the living room, beneath the room’s single window. The TV was on. She wore designer jeans that might as well have been painted on and a sleeveless black shirt. Dark hair fell in waves to her shoulders, framing her face like an oval. Dusky eyes looked back at him, their expression unreadable.

  “Babe, we have to go,” Jack said, speaking in Italian. “I don’t have time to explain, but we’ve got to leave. There’s—” Niccolò Bartolo stepped into view.

  “There’s what?” Bartolo said.

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” Guilia said.

  Jack stared at them, mind going numb. It was like everything in his field of view darkened around the edges, forcing him to focus on that one image. Bartolo’s left hand rested on Guilia’s shoulder. It was an affectionate touch.

  And Jack understood.

  The next rung in the ladder.

  Bartolo looked back at him with those dead, soulless eyes.

  Bartolo was a handsome man, charming and every bit the dashing rogue. And he was rich. But, if the thing he was planning, the thing that he’d been training the School of Turin for paid off, he’d enter the class of wealth that would make him nearly untouchable by police.

  Guilia must have known that too.

  The next rung in the ladder.

  Jack was still numb when the shooting started.

  Something behind him in the kitchen exploded as a bullet hit the unseen object, snapping him out of his fog.

  Jack hit the ground, diving behind the kitchen counter, the only thing blocking Bartolo’s line of sight. What the fuck was happening? Bartolo took him in, trained him, schooled him. Jack came to him a robber, and Bartolo turned him into a thief. Now, he was trying to kill him.

  Over a woman?

  Something had to be wrong. Bartolo was coercing her. That was the only explanation.

  Jack reached for the pistol at the small of his back. He was getting his woman and then getting the hell out of here.

  Jack flipped the safety and crouched. He didn’t like guns and wasn’t particularly good with them. It was a gun—his gun—that botched the Loomis job and landed him in Turin in the first place. He’d have sworn them off then, but Turin was dangerous ground, so he carried.

  He took several deep breaths, a futile attempt to calm himself.

  “I thought you were one of us, Jack.”

  “You don’t need to do this, Nico. Just let Guilia and me go.”

  “Ha,” he said, scoffing. “This was her idea.”

  Jack popped up out of cover, eyes blind with rage. He fired right where Bartolo had been standing. He didn’t even bother aiming. He just fired. Three times, maybe seven, he didn’t even know.

  The television exploded in a shower of sparks.

  Guilia screamed.

  Jack froze, his entire body went into shock, like he’d just been dunked in an icy lake.

  Bartolo was on the ground.

  Guilia stood in the center of the room and screamed again.

  Jack couldn’t move, couldn’t think, didn’t know what to do. Everything was confused.

  Why wasn’t she running with him?

  Bartolo stood.

  Those eyes. Those soulless black eyes stared back at him. And then they narrowed.

  He was alive and unhurt.

  Alive. Everything but his eyes.

  Bartolo raised his pistol.

  Jack moved.

  He moved for the door in one long stride, and bullets followed him into the hallway.

  Jack ran down the stairs two, three at a time, slipping on the first landing and hitting the floor with a crash. The gun clattered to the ground when he hit. Pain shot through his knee and shoulder where he’d landed, hard, and for a second Jack thought he’d been shot. He righted himself just at the door from the hallway opened. He was on his feet and moving, gun forgotten. Jack hit the ground floor and ran for the large, wooden double doors of the car passthrough and his waiting car. He threw it in reverse, blasting across the street and smashing into a parked car. Tires squealing, he fired into the night.

  In the rearview, Jack saw Niccolò Bartolo staring back at him.

  Even in the night he could see those dead eyes.

  Jack ran.

  Part One

  One

  April 2019

  “What the fuck was that?”

  Jack shot Alonso a look that would curdle milk. The man’s initial response in his mother tongue had been much, much worse. Jack knew enough Spanish to know you couldn’t say that within three blocks of a church. The second, more muted curse was in English, for Jack’s benefit, but it was unnecessary. Jack heard that sound too, and it was unmistakable. The look was to silence his partner, but he knew exactly why Alonso said it.

  Gunfire.

  Not just a shot or two. A burst.

  Jack stood up from the open jewelry case he was bent over and looked around, listening. His face was hot from the balaclava he wore over his nose and mouth. There was a moment of silence, and then there were screams. It quickly crested into full panic and crashed into pandemonium. Jack looked over at the store manager, a buttoned-up Frenchman in a black pinstripe suit that cost at least as much as some of the pieces in his display cases. “Are the security guards in this hotel armed?” Jack asked in English.

  He already knew the answer to this question. They’d confirmed this in their initial target assessment, plus Jack knew from previous work that French law prohibited private security from carrying firearms, but they would still have batons, and LeClerc had told him at least two of them were ex-legionnaires, which meant hand-to-hand training and a favorable attitude toward casual violence.

  Anton, the second member of his crew, took a step forward, but Jack shook his head to wave him off.

  Jack waited a beat for the manager to respond. The man, gray-haired, thin, and with a mustache one would call “delicate,” shrugged and looked confused, as though he didn’t understand. That, too, Jack knew was bullshit. The French had an unnatural attraction to their own language, and many wouldn’t deign to speak another, regardless of whether or not they knew one, but there was no way that the manager of a jewelry store in the Hôtel Ritz wouldn’t speak half a dozen languages. Jack picked up a hatchet that they’d brought with them as a last resort if the display case locks were too complicated or electronic. He immediately got a sick feeling threatening violence, even the suggestion of it, but he also wasn’t in the mood for games. They did not have much time.

  “I’m not asking again,” Jack said.

  The store manager held up his hands and said, “No, no, they do not carry guns.”

  His English was perfect and had only a trace of a French accent.

  Jack dropped the hatchet in his black backpack. “I’m going to find out what in the hell is going on,” he said to Alonso and Anton. “Get what you can, but be out of here in sixty seconds.” Alonso didn’t even nod, he was back at his own case scooping up jewelry pieces and dropping them in a velvet bag. Anton stared at Jack for a second, as though he were waiting on confirmation of something and then went back to his
task. There were five high-end boutiques in this hotel. Alonso and Anton both started at one of the smaller stores, and then joined Jack here when they finished. Jack made a last, two-arm scoop within his own case, dumped them in the bag, and then dropped that in the backpack.

  Jack made his way into the chaos.

  One Week Ago

  Jack stood outside the Hôtel Ritz in Paris and snapped photographs with the rest of the tourists.

  He captured, to the extent that he could in a single frame, the massive, sprawling palace-like structure that dominated the Place Vendôme. Indeed, it was so large, he needed to set the phone in landscape mode to get it all. The hotel looked every bit like the city home of a French king—if “city homes” occupied most of a block. The hotel wrapped around the northwestern corner of the Place Vendôme like fat, cream and black-colored caterpillar poised above the thin ribbon of asphalt that cut a line through the plaza. But the building the hotel was part of was even larger than that, massive, dominating. The building’s other occupant was the Ministry of Justice, a fact Jack tried not to remind himself off too often. He appreciated irony, but there were limits.

  Jack shifted his focus to the hotel’s entrance—four subdued glass doors, each covered by an individual white awning. Unlike modern hotels that wanted to impress entrants with their spaciousness and grandeur, the Hôtel Ritz funneled its patrons through these small entryways and down a red carpet so lush that it made him feel guilty for just walking on it and insulting its existence with his feet. While the building itself signaled that the Ritz was one of the world’s ten most elite hotels, the front door had a way of reinforcing that notion, reminding a patron of how insignificant they were next to it.

  Jack selected the video mode on his iPhone and tracked from the front door, across the wide plaza of the Place Vendôme to the exiting street—a slash in the urban canyon that was Paris. He took several other photos of the exterior before dropping his phone to his side and walking to the hotel itself.

  Jack dressed like a tourist, and a wealthy one at that. Navy blazer, scarf, bright white sneakers, a black ball cap that looked as expensive as the jacket, and a pair of blue-lensed Persol Steve McQueens. The expertly dressed doorman sized him up upon his approach and offered a greeting when he decided that Jack looked like he belonged here. The doorman’s words were welcoming, and yet also haughty. Only the French could make the act of just doing their job seem like they were actually doing you a favor. Jack passed through the doors—immense, gilded works of a bygone age. From the size of them, it appeared that they remained open during business hours. Not only would it be impractical to open and then close these for each guest, but it would take a small team of horses to do it.

  The lobby was small and, as with the entryway, not like a modern hotel. The reception desk was to the side at the end of a small tributary off the main walkway, as though the conversations there must be held beyond earshot, or that the management wanted to keep the tedious logistics of running a hotel away from the grandeur of the entrance. Perhaps both were true.

  Jack walked the ground floor’s labyrinthine corridors to get a sense of the place, to commit it to memory.

  He looked up and down the hallway. It was blue and gold carpet over white marble. Columns and gilded chairs in the same color scheme lined the walls. Jack preferred the subtle pretension of the English or the over-the-top ostentatiousness of the Italians to the assured, classical pretension of the French. In the corridor, all he saw were frantically running patrons and overwhelmed, panicking staff. He didn’t see his three other crew members. That was the other problem with this place. It was too big to keep an eye on your own team, let alone all the potential threats. And that’s when it was calm. The layout was all wrong—narrow wings and odd angles, architecture that was so eighteenth century it was almost jarring to look at, like it demanded to be considered, to occupy one’s mind. To simply fathom it.

  He stopped in the gift shops and paused to peruse the menus at the hotel’s two Michelin starred restaurants. He pulled his phone out to surreptitiously take photographs of the interior that he would reference later. Whenever Jack passed the black bubble of a surveillance camera lingering in one of the upper corners, he declined his head and busied with his phone. He eventually made his way to Bar Hemingway, named after the writer who spent so much of his time in it, pulled out a small notebook from his backpack, and transcribed everything he saw while he sipped a Negroni. Jack made diagrams of the hallways and jewelry stores. Of the latter, he didn’t enter them directly but instead cased them from the hallway. While they would have their faces covered during the job, Jack didn’t want to take any chances.

  Casing a jewelry store in a hotel was different than the typical street side boutique that Jack typically worked. Orders of magnitude different. It wasn’t the security. Ultimately, security was the same regardless of the target, it just varied by complexity as the sophistication increased. No commercial security was truly unbeatable. No, the challenge with hotels was understanding the patterns. You needed to know when shift changes happened, because those were always periods of elevated chaos and inattention. You also had to know whether all of the staff changed over at the same time or not.

  There wasn’t a good time of day to hit a jewelry store in a hotel. Hotels never really stopped, though they did quiet down, but the jewelry store would be locked during those hours.

  The other challenge with casing a hotel was that you had to be inside to do it. You could watch a jewelry store for days or even weeks from the opposite side of the street, and likely no one would notice. But if you spent too long in a hotel store, eventually security or an attentive staff member was going to pick up on it.

  There was a lot about this job that Jack didn’t like.

  Most of all, the fact that he was doing it.

  A retired thief named Remy LeClerc tipped him to the job. The Ritz was one of the oldest and most storied hotels in Paris, if not the world. It was also one of the most frequently robbed. The hotel had just re-opened earlier that year after being closed for several years to renovate, rebuild and modernize following a disastrous 2016 fire. LeClerc told him that his source inside the hotel said they wanted to open big and show off to their high-class clientele. He said the Cartier boutique would have nearly ten million dollars’ worth of jewelry and watches on hand, and a lot of that would be on display.

  Flash for the high rollers.

  LeClerc, who’d retired several years before, was now using his network of sources and informants to set jobs up for people like Jack in exchange for a commission. How much he got depended on what he did for them. In this case, they had detailed information on the hotel’s revamped security, shift schedules of all the staff, and estimated values for each of the hotel’s high-end jewelry boutiques. For this, he’d get five percent.

  Jack reclined in the booth and sipped his drink, careful to keep the pages of the notebook obstructed from passersby and waitstaff. But, if anyone saw it and asked him about it, he’d simply tell them the diagrams were for a warehouse redesign that he was planning for his California winery. The notebook was also written in a shorthand to make it look like schematics. The jewelry stores in the hotel’s interior were called “wine storage,” the cameras were labeled “bottle racks,” and security guards were called “staff.” Jack paid for his drink and made another pass of the first floor. This time, he was making note of the exits.

  He left the hotel and went back to the safe house where Alonso would be prepping the crew. Each member of the crew would do a walk-through of the hotel, which, while somewhat risky, was also necessary because of the byzantine layout. Jack didn’t want one of them to get confused if something went wrong. This job would be hard enough as it was. This was the youngest crew he’d ever worked with, and none of them had experience with big work.

  April 2019

  The hotel was a shitstorm.

  People were running in all directions, women screaming, men shouting, all of their voices
soaked in fear. Jack never liked this hotel as a target, and he was painfully reminded of why. The first floor was too large, too spread out, and it made crowd control impossible. There were simply too many places for people to just be. Instead of an open floor plan around a central foyer the way a modern hotel would be designed, the Ritz had a small, narrow guest reception area that unfolded into thin, long wings that sported many small rooms, bars, shops, and other areas one could disappear into. It was impossible to get a count of the number of people on the main floor, and now that they were panicking, people were flooding into the same tight spaces as water through a hose that was too small. On top of that, you couldn’t easily identify and separate the security guards.

  The team was split into two groups. The most experienced, Jack, Alonso, and Anton, worked the actual stores. The other three were supposed to act as lookouts and, only if absolutely necessary, crowd control. But Jack was clear—no guns. No guns for this exact reason.

  Police would be on their way.

  They had minutes.

  Jack stepped back into the jewelry store.

  “Let’s go,” he said. It wasn’t quite sixty seconds, and Alonso shot him a look that Jack could read through the ski mask. We’re leaving millions.

  The decision was made.

  “We’re going.” And Jack was gone.

  He took off at a dead run, strong legs and long strides carrying him down the hallway to one of the rear entrances. There were several exits that led out of the backside of the hotel to the Rue Cambon, though most went through stores or the hotel’s two bars, all of which would be packed at this time of day. Jack found a service entrance that was easily accessible from the main hallway, avoiding them. Jack saw, as he ran, that people were dashing out. His crew was supposed to be covering both of those locations. Whichever of those fools had brought a gun, it was a good bet that’s where he was. Bar Hemingway was the closest, and it sounded like the gunshot came from that direction.