by Dale Nelson
“What happened?” Enzo asked, clearly confused.
“I saw someone,” Jack said, “in the museum.”
“Who?”
“Viktor Petrić. He works for Andelić.”
“Do you think he was checking on us? Making sure we went through it with?”
“It’s possible, but I was pretty clear with Aleksander that I was doing this my way and without any of his people. Plus, he’d have to know that I would be able to spot Viktor.”
“Could be that was the point. But that’s not why you called it off.”
Jack looked again but couldn’t see a sign of Viktor leaving the Doge’s Palace. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
They made their way to the portage, where they caught a personal water taxi, a Chris Craft speedboat, to take them out of there. The driver took them to the Isola Nova del Tronchetto, an L-shaped concrete island that served as Venice’s connection to the mainland and a parking lot for vehicles in the city. They were silent the entire trip, assuming that the driver probably spoke a little English and not wanting to risk it. Jack knew Enzo would be burning with questions, ones that Jack didn’t really have an answer for himself. The whole thing happened, or rather didn’t happen, so fast. It was an impulse. When the driver let them off, they walked through the massive parking lot until they found the rental car.
When they both closed their doors, Jack said, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t.” Traffic was slow on the bridge, and the honking, which was akin to a second language in Italy, was constant. “I’m done, Enzo. I’ll take my chances with Paris. If Andelić dimes me out, so be it, but I don’t want to be a party to this.”
“You’re sure?” Enzo asked. “I mean, I’m with you, but I want to make sure you are. We’re trading a lot of money for a lot of trouble.”
“I know. I mean, I was standing there doing the math in my head. This is a priceless collection, owned by the rulers of a country. We do that, and we’re never safe. They have an intelligence service at their disposal. Word will get out. But it was also how quickly Andelić forced me into it. A job like this should take months to plan, not hours. It was all so haphazard; I just couldn’t see it for what it was at the time. He wanted me to get away with it, but not cleanly.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Andelić is planning something big, and I think he wants me to be a diversion. A shiny object for the police to chase. If I get caught, I can’t do that. He was probably counting on me to be able to pull the job off, but because we didn’t get much time to do it right, it’d be sloppy, and the authorities would figure out who did it.”
“How’d you figure that out?”
“Something you said last night about me being the common thread, the one person everyone could identify. I think my crew tanked the Ritz job on purpose, put me in a place where I’d owe Aleksander a favor. It was too convenient that his lawyer and fixer was there to clean up the mess. They said it was a preemptive measure at the time, but I don’t buy that now. You don’t just pay off judges on a whim. But it also places me in Europe. I mean, he said that he cleaned that mess up, but I’m taking him at his word. I’m also taking him at his word that he doesn’t leak my name later on. He uses that to force me to do this job. Now, law enforcement in two countries and INTERPOL are all looking for me while he goes and does something bigger in the background.”
“Well, shit.”
“I broke into Aleksander’s office a few nights ago to see what I could learn. I took several pictures from a notebook of his. I saw references to Rome but couldn’t make out much else. None of the translate apps I used were that effective in deciphering his handwriting. But the mention of Rome supports the theory that he’s planning something there.”
They finally exited the bridge to the mainland and then headed east toward the airport. Venice Marco Polo Airport was located in the city of Tessera, on the shores of Laguna Veneta. It was a small, J-shaped airport, but it was modern and fairly efficient for Italy. Once the car was returned, Jack and Enzo went to their respective counters and got flights changed. There wasn’t a direct flight to Alicante from there, but he could fly to Madrid and then catch a commuter hop. Once they were through security, they headed for the Marco Polo Lounge in the departure terminal. They ordered drinks and found a pair of high-backed leather chairs in a faraway corner of the lounge, beneath a small forest of potted plants.
Enzo lifted his beer and toasted Jack. “Well, there’s nothing that says ‘retired thief’ quite like casing an exhibition of priceless jewels and then not stealing them.” He took a drink and then said, “So, what’s your next move?”
Jack wanted to return to California, but he knew he couldn’t. Not yet. Aleksander would not let this go. Maybe there was a secret backer for the Venice job, someone who really did want the Qatari royal family to lose face and paid Aleksander to make that happen. Even if there wasn’t, this job fit into his broader plan, and he’d be furious that it didn’t unfold the way he wanted. He would come after Jack, either physically or by leaking his name to French authorities.
“I’ll answer that question by changing subjects slightly. I spoke to Vito,” Jack said.
Enzo didn’t say anything for a few moments. “I hope you aren’t mad at me for giving him your number.”
“No. I mean, it was good to talk to him after all those years. I wish it didn’t take this long.” Jack smiled, genuinely, for the first time in what felt like a while. It had been good to reconnect, but also very strange. Especially when Jack considered Guilia on the other side of that scale.
“He blamed you for what happened for a long time,” Enzo said. “It took some convincing, but I eventually got him to realize that nothing that happened in Turin was your fault.”
“You think he believed you?”
“I think so. Why do you ask?”
“The real reason he called me is that he thinks he knows where the diamonds are.”
Enzo’s beer glass slipped out of his hands, and he grabbed it just in time, but some of the gold liquid spilled over the side. “Holy shit. Has he known this whole time?”
“He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. I’ve only spoken with him a few times. But yeah, he says he knows where it is.”
“And he called you because he thinks you can help him get it out?”
“That’s right,” Jack said. “And that’s what I think Aleksander’s end game is too.”
“Okay,” Enzo said, smiling. “I’ll bite. Why?”
“Guilia Montalto.” Jack went on to explain that she was in Aleksander’s house but that he couldn’t figure out why. How he’d tried to probe into what she was doing there, and Castillo, the lawyer, had been cagey, saying only that Guilia and Aleksander had known each other for some time. “I think Guilia knows where it is too.”
“But Aleksander would have to know that there is no way in hell you’d ever let her get to you again. Not after what she did to you.”
“But she doesn’t. Think about it. She’s had her way with men her whole life. I’ll be she told him she can get me to do it.”
“So, why now?”
“Well, Aleksander needs money. He said he needs something ‘bold’ to show the other Pink Panther groups that he’s still a player. If he doesn’t, he’s afraid they’re going to swoop in and take what he’s got. That much I do believe. Now, remember that Bartolo’s original sentence wasn’t that long. They didn’t catch him with any diamonds, and the police still haven’t found them. Initially, he only got five or six years. He got out in 2011 but violated his parole, so they put him back in. A few years after that, they extended it another couple of years for contempt because the court said he was lying when they questioned him about where the diamonds were and how much he stole.”
“The magazine interview probably didn’t help him much.”
“Christ, no. He was bragging about it.”
When he was arrested, Bartolo claimed they stole a hundred million dollars of
diamonds. The diamond house first said it was half that, but they later adjusted down to twenty million. The thinking by those who understand the diamond trade was that it was all the house was willing to claim. Meaning, some amount of those stones had probably been purchased on the gray market, or worse, and they were just going to write those off. At one point after his sentencing, Bartolo claimed that it was an elaborate insurance scam and that they’d actually paid him to do it.
Three years into his sentence, Bartolo gave an interview to an American magazine under the headline, “The Heist of the Century: Inside the Biggest Diamond Theft in History.” In that interview, Bartolo inexplicably detailed how they’d done it—how he’d cased the Antwerp Diamond Center, broken into the vault, and escaped without any detection. He detailed his crew, identifying them only by their nicknames, mentioning only that they were all members of the School of Turin. He told how one of the team members got scared and how, ultimately, the job was undone because someone on his crew got scared and sloppy during the escape. Bartolo still maintained that he was paid to do the job by a diamond dealer. Eventually and inexplicably, Bartolo claimed that he only made off with twenty million.
Jack knew the man.
He knew that he’d hide a hundred million and do six years. It was a small price to pay for knowing that he’d be in luxury for the rest of his life and buried in a gold coffin. Because Niccolò Bartolo was the kind to take it with him. He was sentenced to ten and served six, but what he hadn’t counted on was the additional eight he’d get for lying to the judge and changing his story. And more tacked on after that.
“Vito and Aleksander both know that time is running out,” Jack said. “Bartolo is going to get out of prison very soon, and when he does, the first thing he’s going to do is get those diamonds and make up for lost time.”
“And Guilia is going to side with Aleksander over him?”
“She was Bartolo’s mistress,” Jack said, “not his wife. I think she’s pissed. She got a little roughed up for her association with Bartolo when the School broke up, and I know for a fact that she’s not on her own two feet now, Aleksander is putting her up. I don’t know the exact arrangement, just that he’s her benefactor. She knows where they are, but not how to get them, which is why she brought it to Aleksander.”
“Where are they?”
“The Commerce Bank of Rome in a safety deposit box.” Jack had very little time to himself when he returned to California, but one of the few things he did do was to call Vito and have a very detailed discussion on exactly what the old thief was proposing. Jack was never comfortable having that conversation while he was at Aleksander’s. There was nowhere that he could be sure there weren’t ears listening in and after his act of defiance, Jack wasn’t sure he was ever going to be let out of the house again. So, he called Vito, and Vito told Jack what he knew.
It took him several years, but Vito eventually came to the conclusion that the Commerce Bank was the only place that Bartolo could have hid the diamonds. Bartolo had opened a safe deposit box there in the late nineties under an alias and possibly while in disguise. Jack initially told him that felt like a lot of conjecture, a leap of faith Jack wasn’t willing to take. Then Vito told him how he knew.
Enzo was silent again, and Jack could see the wheels turning in his head. “That name is familiar to me, but I can’t remember why.”
“Because it’s a mafia bank that Bartolo’s uncle controls. You and I went there once to make a drop. February 1997.”
Enzo snapped his fingers. “Holy shit, that’s right!”
The story was that Bartolo’s uncle was a capo in the Sicilian mafia, the original La Cosa Nostra. That family, the Cannizzaros, moved into Rome in the late nineties to fill a power vacuum after Italian anti-mafia police smashed the Banda della Magliana, Rome’s main organized crime outfit. This was a big move and nearly unheard of. Organized crime gangs in Italy were highly regionalized. La Cosa Nostra had Sicily and, by extension, the United States. The Comorra had Naples, ‘Ndrangheta had Calabria, Sacra Corona Unita owned Puglia, to name a few. They guarded their territories fiercely and violently. Wars between the mafia groups were so terrible and bloody during the 1980s, it actually became known as Il Mattanza, or simply, “The Slaughter.” Thousands died. It created an entire class of mafiosi who openly collaborated with anti-mafia police because they were tired of the bloodshed.
So, the Cannizzaro family establishing a presence in Rome, so far from their territorial home of Sicily, was an unprecedented act of illicit power projection.
They established a controlling interest in the Commerce Bank of Rome, which they used for any number of illicit activities, but mostly to launder money. “You know Bartolo’s cousin is the capo di tutti capo now,” Enzo said. “The boss of all bosses.” He paused. “Hold on,” he continued. “This doesn’t make sense to me. If Bartolo stashed the diamonds in his uncle’s bank, there’s no way they’re still there. As soon as he got arrested, wouldn’t they think to look there?”
“Exactly. Which is why Bartolo wouldn’t have put them there himself.”
A smile broke across Enzo’s face. “He’d use someone he trusted. Someone he could control. Someone like … a mistress.”
“Yep,” Jack said, voice grim. “Bartolo opened the box under an alias and could easily have faked a power of attorney that would let her access it to hide the diamonds. Promised her a cut when he sold them. Eventually, she got tired of waiting—pissed her meal ticket took too long to cash. My guess is, she got into some kind of trouble and Aleksander bailed her out. In exchange, she told him she knew about the stones. And I’ll bet that she’s more afraid of Aleksander than she is of Bartolo.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
Everything Jack said up to this point about Aleksander’s intentions was speculation. He knew Vito wanted him to get the diamonds, but he’d only assumed that’s what Aleksander’s game was. But he had to know that Jack had no experience with banks. Why would he want someone implicated in two high-profile thefts to rob a bank?
Not unless Aleksander wanted people to know Jack was doing it.
“Well, first I have to convince Andelić not to kill me.”
Jack picked up his phone and dialed.
Fourteen
It was an act of monumental restraint that kept Danzig from throwing her half-full coffee cup out into traffic. She’d just learned that Alonso Villareal and the other three had been released and the charges against them dropped. Apparently, the French criminal judicial system had determined that the government’s case was not very strong. Despite the eyewitness accounts, video surveillance and the fact that three of them had been arrested on the spot.
Two of them had already been let go. The third was expected to be free in a few days. After all, they hadn’t actually touched any of the stolen pieces. Oh, one of them would be charged with firing a weapon in a public place, and that might carry a few months but would most likely just be a fine.
Villareal was apprehended driving the wrong way on a one-way street and had a bag of jewelry on him. The judge determined that he could only be charged with receiving stolen property and a moving violation. He’d possibly serve six months, perhaps a year. Because he was a Spanish citizen, his lawyer was already working an extradition case for him to serve his time in his home country.
But the one thing that each of the men swore to was that the fifth man was a German named Hans Müller and this was the first time they’d worked with him. No one knew where he was now.
Hans Müller.
A German.
Villareal, who contended that he was only a getaway driver, went so far as to say that the man’s nickname was “Hans the Hand.” He planned the entire thing, recruited them, and had all of the details.
To their credit, the Paris Police were suitably pissed and equally bewildered.
Something stank.
Unfortunately, it didn’t seem like they had the resources to pull on that thread.
/> Heidegger and his staff were underwater as it was, and they had their own fresh crises to manage.
When she arrived, Heidegger gave Danzig an orientation to the office and the embassy and a rundown of the update cadence that the ambassador’s staff had asked for. He told her that she’d likely not be briefing the ambassador personally from this point on, instead updating the ambassador’s chief of staff, Amanda Hendricks. Heidegger also told her to give Hendricks a wide berth, and when she did have to brief her to assume it was going to be like a hostile press conference.
Then Heidegger had all but disappeared. Danzig saw him occasionally, and he’d check in once every other day to see if she needed anything, but it was clear that he was wading through some substantial issues of his own. Most of the office’s focus was on counterterrorism. The French already had a multilateral cultural crisis on their hands before Syria collapsed, and now that more and more refugees were coming into the country, the French authorities were overwhelmed and were looking to the US for help. The French loved the idea of being egalitarian and welcoming to all, but their citizens didn’t seem to embrace the logistics of it. Worse, they were learning that many of the people they were attempting to welcome wanted to maintain their own cultural identity rather than becoming French.
Heidegger had told her over a late dinner at the embassy commissary that first night, his belief was that the French had this long national memory of exporting their culture, deeply rooted in French colonialism, and they just assumed that when they welcomed someone into their country, that person wanted to become French and were grateful for the privilege.
The majority of refugees lived in enclaves of self-isolation, at best slums and at worst clapboard shantytowns. As with any transient population, it was easy for bad actors to hide out among the populace. Thus, most of what the bureau’s current efforts were focused on was helping the DGSI, France’s internal security service, in rooting out potential threats. To further complicate matters, and this is why at least two of the TDY agents were here, was that in less than two months, Paris would be hosting the soccer Women’s World Cup.