The School of Turin

by Dale Nelson

  The bedroom door creaked open.

  Maybe Jack hadn’t bought quite as much forgiveness as he thought.

  Well, if they were going to kill him, he’d make them earn it.

  There was nothing on the nightstand that he could use as a weapon. The best he could do was try to get a drop on them. Jack leaned over the side of the bed and pulled himself toward the floor. His hands touched the cold tile floor, and he knew that he wouldn’t be able to get onto the floor silently. Jack moved anyway, pulling his legs off the bed and landing in a soft crouch with the bed between himself and the intruder.

  The door closed.

  Even in the near blackness, Jack recognized Guilia’s voluptuous outline. She moved toward his bed. Jack, staying in the crouch, crab-walked around the other side of the bed, careful to pad as lightly as he could on the floor.

  She stood over the bed for a moment, and he could see the dull silhouette of her head cock to one side.

  This was the part where he expected her to raise a silenced pistol and put three rounds into the bed.

  It was that kind of night.

  Instead, she climbed into bed.

  What in the hell was going on here? Not just in the room, but in this bizarre house where normalcy was flipped on its side like an Escher painting. Jack sprang, lunging forward. He put one hand on her mouth and the other on her shoulder to hold her down.

  Guilia didn’t cry out as he’d expected her to.

  Instead, she brought a hand up underneath his arm and pulled, with surprising strength and quickness. Jack was caught totally off guard and lost balance. With the same motion, Guilia pulled Jack down onto the bed and then flipped on top of him.

  “What are you doing,” she said with a playful lilt in her English, “sneaking up on me?”

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “That should be obvious,” she said, and Jack could tell by the cadence of her words that she was drunk. Jack felt her move on top of him, could see the faint outline of motion in the indigo dark. There was a snap of motion, and he could tell she’d pulled her negligée up and off. She was straddling him now, and Jack was thankful he didn’t sleep naked because he had about an iota of self-control remaining.

  But an iota was an impossibly small thing. It could barely be measured.

  Rusty’s warnings faded away. He no longer wanted to run.

  Enzo and Vito’s words in both the recent and distant past about this very thing faded away. He no longer heard them.

  Even the sting of betrayal which, twenty-two years later, still pained him like a fresh wound, faded away. This woman who sat naked on him in the dark gave Jack over to his mentor, his guide, Niccolò Bartolo, tried to trade Jack’s life for what? He still didn’t know. He never learned. When the bullets, intended for him, started flying, Jack didn’t wait around long enough to ask questions. He’d formed dark ideas, and in the low moments of his life since then, the long and lonely times that haunted the men like him, he’d wondered what made her turn on him. What could he have done differently to have made her make a different choice?

  Theirs was a relationship of passion and fire. She was wild and tempestuous, and Jack often felt like being with her was trying to wrap blanket around a tornado. And he’d loved her with a young man’s heart, wholly, totally, and obsessively. For someone that had grown up in a criminal life that had only the random and fleeting ghosts of normalcy, their relationship was an anchor of stability. It was also the first time he’d loved. Guilia had a power over him that no woman had since, not even Megan, whom he believed he’d loved as purely and truly as someone like him was capable of. All of that came flooding back to him now, and it was a roar in his ears, drowning out everything else.

  Her power was to make him do bad things.

  Guilia’s fingers touched his bare chest lightly, and it sent bolts of raw electricity through his body. Jack brought his hands up and placed them gently on the sides of her legs, smooth and strong. Like a dancer’s.

  What did it matter? Any of it. Why not give in? What was a night?

  Guilia drew her fingers south, drawing lines of fire down his body as she went. They came to rest on the waistband of his boxers, which she snapped playfully. It made a soft crack, and the sound and the sharp feeling brought him back to his senses. Jack shifted his weight quickly, taking her by surprise. He used his grip on her legs to flip her onto the bed, trading positions.

  He couldn’t ask her about the diamonds, not yet. The other pieces weren’t in position yet. He couldn’t trust her not to betray him, so that would have to be the last thing he did. But there were other questions that needed answering.

  “No,” he said, now from above her, “what are you doing here, with Aleksander?”

  “You always did know how to kill a party,” she said in a tone laced with broken glass.

  “Answer my question.”

  “Or what? Where I go and what I do is my business.”

  “You tried to have me killed once. Maybe I return the favor,” Jack said, surprised at the sound of his own words.

  Guilia pulled herself into a sitting position, and he got the sense that if she’d had a cigarette on her, she’d have lit it.

  “I can’t believe you’re still upset over that,” she said, and Jack had to take a moment to process the words. That was the response?

  She sighed, her breath soaked with annoyance and irritation, though he couldn’t tell how much of it was the denial of sex and how much was the forced interrogation. She reached for her negligée but didn’t put it on. “I try to lead an uncomplicated life.”

  “Well, you’ve sure picked the wrong partners for it. Let’s try a different question. Was it your idea to bring me here or his?”

  Guilia slid out of bed, and Jack could see the outline of her form in the darkness, her skin a stark contrast to the enveloping black around her. Pangs of regret flooded his body, more physical than emotional. Probably.

  It was clear she wasn’t going to answer the question.

  “How did you get in here?”

  “I’ve been around thieves my entire life, Jack. I know how to unlock doors when I need to,” Guilia said before leaving the room.

  Sixteen

  It could be Burdette.

  Then again, it could just as easily not be.

  The thieves were smart. They wore bulky jackets to break up their outlines on camera, which made it harder to identify their builds. Both men wore hats and didn’t look up. When the camera did catch them at a decent angle, both of their faces were obscured by eyeglasses. “They treated the lenses,” Danzig said.

  “Yeah,” Giovanni agreed. Something had been applied to the lenses of their glasses to make them appear opaque on the video. They looked like sunglasses on the black and white display. In and of itself, that wasn’t a big deal, but without a color monitor they couldn’t determine eye color, and it made facial identification that much more difficult.

  This was not much to go on.

  Castro called her late the night before. Someone had broken into Doge’s Palace museum in Venice and stolen several pieces from the traveling exhibit, “Treasures of the Mughals and Maharajahs.” The theft itself made little sense. Those pieces couldn’t be sold, they were unique, and they were priceless. There wasn’t a black market in the world you could move those jewels. Something about this seemed off to her. It didn’t have Burdette’s style. This was brash, brazen, out of character. Still, the Hôtel Ritz theft wasn’t like him either—a daylight hours robbery while the hotel was full of patrons, and they had him on footage.

  It didn’t make sense.

  The Ritz thing went sideways after those idiots fired their guns, and they clearly didn’t get the payday they were expecting. Burdette would know that she was on this by now, after she’d lit the wires up with APBs on him and Rusty. It didn’t add up that he’d try something so quickly.

  But there was something about this that seemed familiar to her. Watching the camera footage,
you could see that this was precisely done. The thieves were smart. They only took certain pieces, didn’t get greedy, and stayed in the back of the exhibit where they were far removed from the security guards, who clearly couldn’t be bothered with even putting half an ass into their jobs.

  Castro agreed with her that this was contradictory. It both felt like Burdette and unlike him.

  Venice was too small of a city to hide out in, especially with its insane aquatic layout that defied any and all architectural logic. With the limited number of ways to the mainland, it didn’t figure that the thieves would stay there long, because it would be difficult for them to escape in a hurry if they needed to. Once you got to the mainland, there were options. By land, you could be in any one of four countries that bordered this part of Italy in just a few hours. There was an airport, but Castro ruled that out because they couldn’t take the jewels on the plane.

  They were camped out in a conference room in the Guardia di Finanzia’s regional command headquarters in Venice, with a patrol boat to take them back and forth to Piazza San Marco whenever they needed. Danzig had been there for five hours and already she felt like she was running out of time. Randall Heidegger gave her five days to prove that Burdette was involved in the Hôtel Ritz. If she could link him to the Doge’s Palace or cut some kind of deal with the LEGAT in Rome, she could extend her time here.

  Danzig’s thoughts circled back to this job and how off it felt. Before the Carlton, Burdette had always taken small scores. There were many thefts that she thought she could attribute to him, but just as many of them could have been locals. That was, she knew, the point. While the Doge’s Palace certainly spoke to a thief of his skill and audacity, it also didn’t “feel” like Burdette. The Ritz was a stretch for him, so why go after something so many orders of magnitude bigger? And right on the heels of the Ritz? Not to mention risking the fallout with the collection’s owners.

  Going outside his usual patterns could mean that Burdette was desperate or scared. He failed in Paris, so he immediately did another job, which could mean he needed fast money and didn’t want to liquidate his winery or whatever other assets he had. Or couldn’t do it fast enough.

  Like he needed to run.

  Or someone was making him do it.

  Now, that was an interesting angle. Could someone blackmail Jack Burdette into stealing for them? If so, what was to say he was stopping at this? Would they push him into another, larger score? A man like him would certainly have made enemies. Maybe one of them had come back.

  Danzig needed more help. She now wanted to run down leads at Burdette’s winery to see what that got her, but she immediately ruled that out. There would still be people at the San Francisco Field Office who remembered her last run at Burdette.

  Danzig made a note to call the FBI’s LEGAT in Doha to see if the Qatari government had reached out to them yet. Maybe she could get some help from LEGAT Rome as well. Jack wouldn’t want to carry these jewels far, and he couldn’t fly them, so it stood that if he was going to move them, he’d want to do it in a large city with a vibrant underground, and that meant Rome.

  But if Burdette was planning another job—or being forced to do one—she thought the likelihood of it being in Rome would be low. Burdette wouldn’t want to operate twice in the same country, not when national police forces were engaged. No, he’d move somewhere else. If he was going to Rome, they’d have to move quickly.

  Unless …

  There was another thread there, something she hadn’t considered previously, though it seemed a little far-fetched, even as she tumbled the idea in her mind.

  Castro hung up his phone and walked over to where Danzig was sitting. All of the reports from the Venice police and the statements from the security guards were in Italian, which she couldn’t speak, so she had to rely on Castro to translate. Which meant she had a lot of idle time. That did little to calm her nerves.

  “I just got off the phone with my colonel,” he said. “He’s like a—how you say—division boss.”

  “Okay,” she said long, not sure where this was going.

  “We believe this is Burdette, yes?”

  Danzig, frustrated, extended a hand at the computer screen with the surveillance camera footage. “I mean, the video is next to worthless. But there are very few people in the world skilled enough to pull this off in that amount of time.”

  “Right, so I just convinced the colonel to give me four squads.”

  “Four squads? For squads of what?”

  “Of police. Detectives, officers. This theft is an embarrassment for my government, and we’re committing a lot of resources to see it solved. And we’ve got a good lead. Paris. You said this yourself. We know one of the few people who has the skill to pull this off is working in Europe right now.”

  Allegedly, she thought but didn’t say.

  “So, I convinced him to take up the investigation. I said our ‘national honor’ was at stake.” Castro was grinning like a cat, but as he looked away, Danzig saw his expression change. It was fast, gone quickly like a shadow at twilight. She couldn’t quite place it, but it wasn’t happiness. “We’ll run this from our headquarters in Rome. We know Burdette isn’t staying in Venice anyway. I just need to set up the liaison with the commander here, so he knows we’re the lead on the investigation. I’ll have some of my men sent up.”

  Danzig stood and grabbed her things. “What are we waiting for? Let’s get to Rome.”

  Seventeen

  Jack barely slept after Guilia left his room.

  Denying her had taken more willpower and resolve than he thought it should. That alone tore at him for the rest of the night, kept his mind spinning instead of resting. Then there was the guilt that it made him feel somehow unfaithful to Megan, even though they weren’t even together.

  He believed he saw through Guilia’s motives.

  She was making her own play.

  Jack eventually fell asleep in the low hours but woke with the sun.

  But he did wake, which meant that Aleksander was going along with his plan.

  So far.

  They spent the morning in Aleksander’s office discussing their strategy for robbing the Commerce Bank of Rome. In reality, it was less a discussion and more an argument on methods. Jack wanted time to properly surveil the bank, establish patterns, and understand their internal security. Especially without someone on the inside who could supply that information, similar to their lack of inside knowledge in Venice, they’d need to source it themselves, and that took time.

  Jack told him that he’d sometimes spend weeks casing a jewelry store, and that was a target orders of magnitude simpler than a bank in daytime. It would also be done by someone who wouldn’t be involved in the actual heist, a face that law enforcement couldn’t trace back to the crew.

  Before Ozren Stolar murdered his crew, Gabrielle Ebersbach would have done this work. Gabrielle, a former model, was charming, wry, and could command attention like the shrewdest carnival barker. She was charismatic and beautiful, and though men were drawn to her, it was a pull unlike Guilia’s, who would seemingly get a man to charge through traffic to be next to her. But Gabrielle knew the sway she held, and it made her a very effective face.

  She found her way into the criminal life by way of a series of bad decisions she made modeling, most of which involved drugs and her being cut out of the family fortune by her estranged father, a German industrialist. Jack had actually made her promise him that she was going to give it up the following year when she’d saved enough. That was probably the appeal of the Carlton job.

  Jack tried, once, to push the timeline back so that he could conduct proper surveillance, but Aleksander told him that the timeline was set. He knew it wouldn’t work, but Aleksander would become suspicious if Jack didn’t. The Serb insisted they do the job within the next few days. Jack told him the risks of doing this without a face to first reconnoiter, but his host was uninterested. “You want a map of the bank lobby?” he said sar
castically. “I can get that on the Internet.”

  Jack pulled his objections, a man resigned to his fate.

  Jack told him that he’d like to get to Rome as quickly as possible so that he could start preparing. If he needed to do the inside work himself, he would at least want a little time between when he did the first surveillance and when he pulled the job. Aleksander demanded to know the plan.

  “Well, since it’s just me and I have barely any time,” Jack said, laying it on, “I’ll go in and ask to speak with the bank manager. He’s going to be on the mafia payroll and will be far less likely to involve the authorities. He’ll know that his bosses would want a crack at whomever robbed the place first. At gunpoint, I will tell him that I need access to a particular box. I’ll be out of there in five minutes.” Jack spread his hand. “I assume you can provide me with a pistol.”

  His mind went to the Beretta that was still hidden under the seat in Aleksander’s Ferrari. He could end this right now if he could just get it.

  But Jack knew that as desperate as he was to get out of this, he was no murderer. He wouldn’t shoot someone in cold blood. Not even Aleksander Andelić.

  “What do you do if he tells you no?”

  “He won’t. You’re going to have some of your men, two or three, in the bank lobby. They’ll be armed. This guy is paid to keep things quiet. I’ll make sure he understands the situation. He’ll want me to be fast and then be gone.”

  Aleksander studied him for a long moment, his expression unreadable. It was as though his eyes sank into dark pits in that mastiff head of his. A knock on the office door broke Aleksander’s train of thought. He barked an affirmative in his native language, and the door opened, revealing the hulking presence of the heavy Jack knew as Mijo. Mijo had a dark complexion, brown eyes, and closely cropped brown hair. He wore a black T-shirt and tan pants. The man looked like he’d been chiseled from a block of solid granite. Everything was straight angles and sharp lines. He said something to Aleksander in Serbian and wore an expression that was a mixture of worry and confusion.