The School of Turin

by Dale Nelson

  As the car moved along the road, Jack rolled that cryptic text he received over in his mind. He hadn’t responded to it yet. He wasn’t ready for that.

  Anton stepped out and stretched. It was just about one in the morning. Anton bypassed the terminal and walked straight for the Cessna Citation V idling on the tarmac. “Let’s go,” Anton said, seemingly brighter than he was on their ride here. Jack noted a wry smile cracking his lips as he turned his head back to the airplane. As they approached, the entry door lowered, showing the bright interior lights.

  “Private jet? You’ve been holding out on me, Anton. You sure you needed to do this job?”

  “My boss chartered it,” he said. “And not for my benefit. I’m coming back empty-handed. I’m surprised I’m not walking home.”

  “Your boss,” Jack said skeptically, but he said nothing else. He followed Anton up the stairs and into the Cessna’s cabin. The interior was an off-white, with navy carpeting and cream-colored seats. There were wood accents along the walls of the cabin going up to about waist height. There was one occupant in the aircraft, seated in the front left chair with a glass of whiskey sitting on the current issue of The Economist. Jack put him in his mid-sixties. He had a tanned complexion, large brown eyes, and an angular, patrician nose. His hair was brown but turning gray at the temples. He was well-dressed, wearing gray pants, a light blue shirt, a tie, and a blue and white windowpane waistcoat.

  In a move of practiced elegance, the man rose upon seeing Jack enter the aircraft. Anton proceeded down the aisle to make way. The man extended his hand. “Welcome aboard. I’m Rafael Castillo. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Burdette.”

  Three

  The words echoed in Jack’s mind like a church bell on a winter morning.

  How did this guy know who he was? No one in the crew knew his identity. They may have suspected, but none of them knew. Alonso was the only one he’d ever worked with before, and Jack had always used the Raymond Carver alias.

  Jack accepted the man’s hand and shook it, but his mind was racing. He looked to Anton, who was now seated in the back of the aircraft. Apart from a wry, thin-lipped smile, Anton’s expression was otherwise neutral. Jack moved his eyes back to Castillo, whose own face was difficult to read. It was a bemused sort of look, but more benign and less “hand in the cookie jar.”

  An olive-skinned, black-haired flight attendant appeared from the cockpit. She wore a black skirt that was technically business attire, but in the loosest sense of the term, a white blouse, and a black vest. “We’re ready for takeoff, Mr. Castillo.”

  Castillo motioned to the chair across from him. “If you’re ready?”

  Jack sat.

  Castillo looked up at the flight attendant. “Carolina, would you get Mr. Burdette a drink, please?”

  “Of course.” She turned her dark eyes to Jack. “What may I offer you?”

  “Scotch?”

  “I have a Lagavulin 16 and The Macallan 18.”

  “The Lagavulin, please. Neat.”

  “Excellent,” she said and disappeared to the rear of the aircraft.

  “We have much to discuss,” Castillo said, “but one moment, please.” He leaned down the aisle, looking toward Anton. “Well done, Viktor,” he said. Anton … Viktor … said nothing, but simply nodded his head. Jack turned his attention outside the aircraft to give the illusion that he wasn’t paying attention to their conversation. He saw the driver of the Peugeot pulling a backpack and another bag out of the trunk and walking it over to the aircraft. He handed it to a ground crew, who disappeared under the jet. Jack heard the sound of something closing. The backpack was identical to the one that Anton was carrying in the hotel. And the one he told Jack he threw into the Seine.

  Well played, Anton, Jack said to himself. My kind of thief.

  The aircraft began to taxi. Carolina set the scotch on a cocktail napkin on Jack’s tray and asked if there would be anything else. Castillo told her no, and she moved to the jump seat right behind the cockpit door.

  Jack picked up the scotch and took a sip. “This is an impressive operation you have, Mr. Castillo,” Jack said, ignoring the obvious question about how Castillo knew who he was.

  “Oh,” he said with a humility that sounded genuine to Jack. “This is not mine. Viktor and I work for Aleksander Andelić. I am his attorney, among other things.”

  Jack could only imagine what “other things” he was referring to.

  “I assure you this is for your benefit. Normally,” Castillo said ruefully, lifting his drink off the tray, “we fly commercial.”

  Jack leaned back in his seat and sipped his drink while the aircraft taxied and took off. When they were airborne, the plane vectored to the south. Jack needed to find a way to recover the advantage, and the only thing he could think of for that was to have the conversation on his terms.

  He didn’t know the name Aleksander Andelić. That was not a cause for concern in and of itself. While Jack knew many of the thieves of consequence, he couldn’t possibly know them all. There was the additional facet that if Andelić was worth his salt—and the current situation would lead Jack to believe that he was—he probably went to great lengths to make sure no one knew his real name. The thing that was cause for alarm was the name itself. More the point, its country of origin.

  “So, Mr. Castillo, I presume that you weren’t in Paris just to give Anton—I’m sorry, Viktor—and I a ride home.”

  “That’s correct,” he said and returned his magazine to his tray.

  “There were some matters regarding this job that I had to see to.”

  “That was fast,” Jack said. He wanted to add, You must have known it was going to go south before I did, but he didn’t. That would be tipping his own hand a little too much.

  “Well, we had a sense of the risk before Viktor started.”

  “If everything had gone according to plan, Viktor probably would have walked away with about three hundred thousand dollars. That seems a little light for an operation like this,” Jack said, motioning to the cabin.

  Castillo smiled, picking up on Jack’s strategy. “The money was secondary, in this case. Mr. Andelić, and I have to admit myself, wanted to meet you.”

  Carolina appeared and refreshed both of their drinks.

  “Tell me,” Castillo said, “how do you balance your two lives?” There was something in the way he asked that suggested genuine curiosity.

  But, at the mention of his alias and the life associated with that, Jack’s defenses were up. This was no casual conversation anymore. There were only six people who could definitively connect Gentleman Jack Burdette with Frank Fischer, and Jack knew none of them had any connection to a Rafael Castillo. Frank Fischer’s attorney and friend, Hugh Coughlin, and his now estranged former winemaker Megan McKinney. Then there were Jack Burdette’s associates, Enzo Bachetti and Rusty. And Reginald LeGrande, currently on year four of a ten-year prison sentence.

  The last one was Special Agent Katrina Danzig of the FBI. But she’d never been able to prove it, at least not officially, and that had cost her. In her zeal to arrest him, she’d overstepped her authority and came dangerously close to entrapment. As a precaution, Jack kept tabs on her via Rusty. Danzig was currently in Miami chasing money launderers in the FBI’s version of the penalty box.

  Jack rotated his chair to look at Rafael Castillo and dead-eyed the man over the top of his glass. “Your information is very good. I commend you,” Jack said in an even voice. “If you know about my other life, then you know the lengths I go to protect it.”

  “Yes, we do. I’d also like to assure you that my intention in bringing that up was not to threaten.”

  Jack took a sip of his scotch and said nothing, letting his silence speak for him.

  Castillo cleared his throat. “Milan Radić used to work for us.”

  Jack’s eyes narrowed, and he suddenly found himself wishing he had weapon.

  Milan Radić was a violent psychopath and had very nearly
killed Jack in his winery.

  With Special Agent Danzig, who fatally shot Radić.

  That made Jack’s relationship with her a little complicated.

  Castillo continued. “By the time he came into contact with you, Aleksander had already cut him out. He was too dangerous, too reckless, facts of which I know you are aware. We appreciated your handling of the Carlton job. It was inspired work. Aleksander never would have sanctioned Radić attempting to steal it away from you like that.”

  Milan Radić, like Ozren Stolar, was a member of the international thievery syndicate known as the Pink Panthers and was Stolar’s superior in that organization before Ozren’s ouster. Jack originally passed on the Carlton job, but his crew decided to go ahead with it anyway, led by Enzo. Ozren double-crossed them, intending to steal the take as a way of getting back in with the Panthers. Stolar and Radić didn’t know that Jack was also making a play for that score and beat them to it.

  A man walked into the Carlton InterContinental Hotel in Cannes the morning that the film festival opened and stole one hundred forty-five million dollars in loose stones from a jewelry exhibition. It took less than ninety seconds.

  Outwardly, that was all true. In reality, Jack hadn’t stolen a thing and was more an accomplice in one of the more elaborate insurance scams of all time. The collection’s owner, an Israeli diamond merchant named Ari Ben Hassar, had gone broke, or at least what passes for it among the super-rich. Hassar learned through his security people, all former Mossad agents, that someone was going to make an attempt on the collection that he was planning to display at the Cannes Film Festival. Hassar contacted Jack and offered him a small fortune to “steal” the collection and deliver it to him before the real thieves could get it.

  Hassar would then write it off at a loss with his insurers and sell the remaining stones on the gray market, effectively giving him the seed money he required to build his business back up.

  Which is not to say that the actual theft, or the appearance of one, was not flawlessly executed, which it was. While Hassar paid Jack a sizable amount for the job, it was a fraction of what he’d have made if he’d actually stolen those gems.

  If Milan Radić worked for Aleksander Andelić, he must have been one of the Panthers as well. Despite the comical name, they were among the most ruthless and dangerous criminals Jack had encountered in his career. The Panthers were mostly ex-Serbian soldiers, primarily special forces, who turned to crime after their country collapsed in the early nineties.

  “Well,” Jack said, his tone light and conspiratorial, as though finally letting Castillo in on the joke, “it seems the problem of Milan Radić has been solved favorably for both of us.”

  “Indeed,” Castillo said. “I’ll have to hear the story of that someday.”

  “Once the statute of limitations has expired,” Jack said in the same tone. “So, you were asking how I manage both lives?”

  They talked.

  He needed to know what the Pink Panthers wanted with him. It wasn’t simply a revenge murder for Solar and Radić. If that were the case, Jack wouldn’t have seen the end of the runway.

  They wanted something from him, and the question was what.

  Instead of playing defensive and acting as though the knowledge of his alter ego had rattled him, even though it absolutely had, Jack played along. He acted affable and conversational. He spoke a little of his wine business, though he stuck to those subjects that were publicly available.

  Jack found Castillo educated, worldly, and an interesting conversation partner. In another setting, he could see himself sitting next to the man and talking for most of the flight. They also had wine in common. Castillo’s father had been a farmer and had grown grapes in Spain’s Rioja region when Rafael was a boy. Wine was not a luxury product in Spain and was generally regarded as inferior to the more storied productions of its two neighbors, France and Italy, and the elder Castillo never looked at it with the passion that his counterparts, or Jack, for that matter, did. It was only a crop that he grew and sold to others, but it had kindled an interest in the son. When Rafael became a successful lawyer, he became a connoisseur. Castillo spoke little of Aleksander Andelić after the initial mention, other than to say that wine was an interest that his employer shared as well and was very interested to speak to Jack about it.

  Mostly, though, Castillo wanted to know about the wine and how Jack had chosen that as his alter ego.

  “I spent several years working in Turin in the nineties,” Jack said. “I’d worked for a man there who sort of showed me the finer things in life. I was twenty-five at the time and had been on the run, more or less, since I was seventeen. I stole to survive. He introduced me to the life you could have as only an Italian can.” Jack smiled. “So, that gave me the wine bug. I didn’t think about doing anything with it for about ten or twelve years. Around 2009, I decided that I needed to have a retirement plan. My mentor in the US had already done time, which wiped him out financially.”

  “That would be Reginald LeGrande?”

  Jack nodded. “You’ve done your homework.”

  Reginald knew Ozren Stolar and Milan Radić both, though Jack didn’t know about the latter until he’d made a play for the Carlton money. This was something else for him to explore—how exactly Castillo knew about Reginald.

  “I run Kingfisher Wines, and it’s a completely legitimate business. All things being equal, I’d rather be making wine.”

  “Why, then, if I might ask, are you still stealing things?”

  Jack shrugged. “Making wine is an expensive business,” he said and left it at that.

  In truth, Jack initially bought the winery because he wanted a way to legitimize the money he’d made by stealing. Part of Frank Fischer’s legend was that he was a tech mogul who’d made a fortune in the early 2000s but was also a crazy libertarian and parked all of his money in offshore tax shelters. Most wineries were expensive, cash dependent small businesses with high overhead. He could appear every bit the rich entrepreneur investing in a vanity project, happy to lose millions just to have his name on a label.

  The economics of it were better than what a money launderer would charge, and he was actually making some damn good wine.

  “So, you’re planning on retiring?”

  “I was semi-retired before the Carlton job. The winery’s accountant embezzled about ten million dollars that was supposed to go to purchase a tract of vineyard in Napa Valley. I had to clean out my personal holdings to keep the winery afloat. That’s why I’m still working now.”

  Castillo smiled grimly and nodded. “Well, at least you’ve got a substantial payout to bolster things, eh?”

  “Not as much as you might think,” Jack said. “Besides, I couldn’t sell them off all at once.” The prevailing theory in the media was that the take was much too large to be able to sell all at once and that it would likely be sold off in small quantities over a decade or more. Rusty and Enzo alone knew that Jack and turned the stones back over to Hassar and had been paid about twenty million or so for it, of which Jack kept about fourteen. “I should have my stores replenished in about three years, and then I plan to retire for good.”

  “America must be a wonderful country. Everywhere else in the world, you need to be a peasant to be a farmer. In America, you have to start as a rich man.”

  Carolina provided each of them with a warm towel, which Jack used to wipe away any last vestiges of his day. Then, she served them both a small charcuterie plate. Jack consumed this greedily, as it had been several hours since he’d eaten. “So,” he said, “I assume then that Mr. Andelić and I are in the same line of work.”

  “Oh, I think you’ll find that you have quite a lot in common.” Castillo used that to steer the conversation back toward wine and, in particular, the Spanish wine industry and how it had changed since his youth. Jack took that as an unsubtle hint that any discussion on his still-mysterious benefactor would have to wait. As Castillo spoke, Jack’s mind went back to the t
ext he’d received earlier that night.

  The Headmaster.

  That could only mean Vittorio Verrazano.

  He was Niccolò Bartolo’s right hand man in the School of Turin.

  The nickname was a joke, what they called Vito on occasion, as though he were running a school for wayward boys instead of a group of highly skilled professional thieves.

  Jack’s mind raced with the possibilities. I found it. He didn’t say what “it” was, but Jack already knew. Could he really? That Bartolo even escaped with it at all was subject to no small amount of mystery and debate. But, if Vittorio found it and he was contacting Jack, that meant he needed help to get it.

  If true, it was a sum of money that would allow Jack to walk away from this life for good. No reservations, no second guesses, no strings.

  The Antwerp diamond heist.

  Jack’s mind swam with the possibilities.

  The original School of Turin was broken up in 1997 after a sting by the Italian state police following the gang’s successful theft of a Fiat payroll truck. Most of the gang was arrested, but some evaded capture. Bartolo narrowly avoided arrest and went into hiding for several years. But when Bartolo reappeared in 2000, he was ready to set his plan back in motion. The job the School had originally been preparing for. Bartolo reassembled some of the School—the ones who hadn’t been rolled up in Castro’s sting—and recruited new members to round out his team. Bartolo did an interview with an American magazine a few years into his prison sentence and referred to them only by nickname: Keeper of Keys, Wizard, Monster, and Speedy. Of them, only Speedy was publicly identified, but Jack knew them all. They’d come up together in Turin.

  There was some speculation that Keeper of Keys, purportedly a legendary locksmith, was none other than Enzo Bachetti, which Enzo had repeatedly denied.