From the head of the table Quindel smiled. Good-looking guy. Early forties and, just a hunch, feeling a tiny bit threatened by Proxy. Six even, trim body you’d expect of someone with a personal trainer, nice tan, and slightly curly salt-and-pepper hair that looks like it costs fifty bucks a crack to cut. Radiates confidence. Says “metrics” when “numbers” would do just fine. Has a tendency sometimes to call other people’s opinions “unmitigated bullshit,” which always makes me wonder what mitigated bullshit is like. The CEO of the company could scream at him for ninety seconds about what a moron he was and he wouldn’t bat an eye or pop a bead of sweat. He’d just wait out the tirade and then say calmly, “Let’s get some metrics.” Wouldn’t want him walking point for me on a patrol, but maybe that’s just me.
“Thank you all for taking time out of your evening for this meeting. I realize it’s an imposition. Unfortunately, we’re looking at a hard stop. As in Chinese Wall. We have until noon tomorrow to give Pitt MCM a firm quote on art-exchange insurance. The insurance premiums will be funded by an NEA grant, so the Museum is going ahead with the exchange regardless of anything we say. At stake for us are premiums totaling almost a million dollars if the exchange runs its full three-year course. Even more important, it’s likely that we’ll lose our existing account with Pitt MCM for its standard insurance package if we refuse to quote. So looking at, say, ten-year metrics, we have a five million-dollar decision to make.”
He smiled again and swept the table’s perimeter with his eyes. He lingered for an extra fraction of a second on me. I think he was daring me to compute how many years of my salary five million dollars amounted to. Then he got down to business.
“With that background, Mr. Davidovich, keeping in mind that your job is loss prevention, not sales prevention, please explain why Transoxana Insurance Company should blow five mil off its bottom line.”
“Because five is less than ten and we face at least a twenty percent risk of losing fifty million. Professional bad guys have criminal designs on Eros Rising. We’ve dodged the bullets so far but we can’t expect to keep that up forever, because they’re getting inside help from someone at Pitt MCM.”
“Which orifice did you pull that out of?”
“Nesselrode’s crack about how amazing it was that the attempted snatch at the Museum almost worked even though it shouldn’t have had a chance. The only way it had a chance was if someone at the Museum decided to add aiding and abetting to his job description.”
“Someone like Rand?”
“Maybe him, maybe someone else.” I shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter.”
“Maybe Jennifer Huggens, the executive director.” Andy Schuetz contributed that one.
“Explain.” Quindel shot laser-eyes at Schuetz.
“The Museum has something called a deaccession committee. ‘Deaccession’ is a fancy word for selling stuff. That committee has been looking at unloading some of its paintings to build up a sagging endowment and help cover budget deficits that it’s been running for several years. Donors are getting tired of chipping in to cover the gap, so you can see where fifty million or so would come in handy.”
“So what? If they sell the thing we’re off the risk. It’s their painting. They can sell it if they want to, can’t they?”
“Not that simple.” Proxy jumped in. “Museums can sell paintings to raise money to buy other paintings, but not to cover operating expenses—like Ms. Huggens’ salary—or to make their balance sheets look better. Apart from possible lawsuits by heirs of donors, Pitt MCM could go on a black list if it pulled that, meaning other museums wouldn’t engage in exchange programs with it or include it in touring exhibitions.”
“So far it sounds like their problem, not ours,” Quindel said.
“Our problem is the Museum’s possible solution to its problem.” Keeping his hands folded in front of him, Schuetz leaned forward for emphasis. “Namely, for the Museum to collect fifty million for Eros Rising from us instead of selling it.”
“Which it could do,” I said, “if the painting were switched with a world-class forgery while it was on its way to Vienna.”
“Easy.” Quindel shrugged. “We drop fifty thousand on airtight security. Ex-Blackwater guys are going for a dime-a-dozen these days.”
“Ain’t no such thing as airtight.”
“Fine.” Quindel tried to look like he was getting hot under the collar. “Let’s say Loss Prevention falls down on the job and the bad guys pull the switch. They’ve got the real painting. They can’t sell it to an honest buyer, so they sell it back to us for ten million. Or less. That’s what art thieves almost always do unless the victim doesn’t have insurance. At your twenty percent risk assessment, the discounted value of our risk is two million. Two is less than five.”
Three words into Quindel’s comment I’d noticed an eerie stillness come over Proxy. I felt a vibe of puzzle-pieces falling into place in her brain, as if she were on the verge of a Eureka! moment.
She was. She waited a couple of extra seconds after Quindel had finished speaking before she swung her eyes first toward me and then back in his direction.
“Except that they won’t sell it back to us. They won’t have to. This isn’t just a snatch, it’s a scam. We’ll be on the hook for the whole fifty million.”
Quindel looked straight at Proxy, daring her to break eye-contact. After a few too many seconds of that malarkey he spoke.
“Well, I really want to hear this. It ought to be good.”
Chapter Forty-two
Jay Davidovich
“No actual switch will happen.” Proxy spoke with the casual certainty of Vin Scully explaining that you could expect a fast ball on a three-two pitch with the bases loaded. “That’s the elegance of the plan. The bad guys don’t have to sell it to anyone. A few weeks will pass—no more than three months. Then one of the heirs of the original seller will hold a press conference in Jerusalem.”
“And say what?” Quindel asked.
“Some variation of what Nesselrode told us. When the original owner saw the forced sale coming, he had someone gin up a copy and sold that, hiding the real painting and then inconveniently dying before the war was over without telling anyone where he’d hidden it. The heir will then say that the original painting has now been found. He and his co-heirs are donating it to a museum in Jerusalem.”
“But if people buy that, it means the Museum had a forgery all along. A little celebrity value, maybe, but nothing with six or seven zeroes after it.”
“That’s just the point.” Proxy’s voice suggested infinite patience with a slow learner. “A lot of people won’t buy the story. All the high profile cops-and-robbers stuff has been window dressing all along. It’s intended to make it look like the bad guys must have found a clever way to switch the paintings, à la some caper flick, even though they didn’t.”
Quindel nodded a couple of times—I get it, but that doesn’t mean I buy it.
“What if we put some microscopic chip on the painting before the Museum sends it over? Then we can prove that whether the painting that comes back is real or fake, it’s the painting the Museum sent—which is the one we will have insured.”
“If the mastermind behind this is really a Museum insider,” Schuetz said, “the Museum won’t let us do that. They’ll say it would impair the integrity of the painting. They might even be right.”
“The Museum will make a claim under the policy.” Proxy gave Quindel’s nod right back to him. “Also a claim against the museum in Vienna and its insurer. Maybe against the heirs and the Jerusalem museum as well, just for good luck. All this time, of course, Pitt MCM will have been using the exchange arrangement and the hands-across-the-sea stuff as a fund-raising hook, and the painting lent by the Vienna museum as an attendance-booster. When we deny the claim, the Museum will sue everyone and his twin brother—starting with us.”
�
��Cluster fuck,” the gray-hairs from Legal muttered.
“You say that as if it were a bad thing.” Quindel smiled modestly at his mot.
“Not a bad thing for me. I get to ship a three-million dollar retainer to someone I went to law school with. The department that has to come up with the three million dollars might take a different view.”
“Still simple.” Quindel raised his eyebrows in what I guess was supposed to be a meaningful way. “Win the lawsuit and we’re still ahead.”
“As a rule, insurance companies don’t win lawsuits, they settle them.” The lawyer shook his jurisprudential head. “Experts disputing each other, all the sympathy with the Museum, and no way to know which expert is right except to ask a jury of laypeople who couldn’t tell Giotto from Jasper Johns the best day they ever had. Which we can’t risk doing. So we’ll settle.”
“What good are you people, anyway?” The exasperation coloring Quindel’s voice seemed genuine, for once.
“We’re good at transferring wealth from other people to lawyers. We really shine at that.”
“Pitt MCM keeps Eros Rising.” Proxy said that in a back-to-the-point tone. “The forgery claim remains ultimately unresolved. That generates continuing curiosity and publicity for the Museum. And Pitt MCM uses our settlement payment to jack up its endowment and cover its budget deficit.”
Damnation! She nailed it! She’s absolutely right! I’ll bet everyone in the room thought exactly the same thing. Everyone except Quindel.
“Great plot for a made-for-TV movie. But here in the real world, exactly what do the bad guys get out of all this?”
“A piece of the settlement, probably.” Schuetz threw that in. “Plus a chunk of change from whoever gets the tax deduction for the Israeli museum donation.”
Quindel sat still for maybe fifteen seconds, face raised but eyes hooded. Then his eyes snapped open.
“Not buying it. Too many moving parts. Way too complicated, way too many contingencies. If this theory is right, these guys are running around committing felonies totally on spec.”
“Well,” I said, “they’re sure as hell running around committing felonies, so they must at least think this way-too-complicated plan could work.”
“Thank you for your insights and input.” Quindel handed his legal pad to the briefcase-carrier and recapped his lapis-lazuli pen. “They have been very helpful. At the end of the day, though, this is my decision.”
“Yes it is.” Proxy said this in full ice-queen mode as she glanced at the senior secretary furiously taking shorthand. “Please note that if your decision is to bid on the policy, you will have made it against the recommendations of Risk Management and Loss Prevention.”
I could tell that Quindel was about to offer Proxy whatever suit-speak for fuck you is when the door opened after a polite knock. A woman with a telephone-earpiece and associated wiring parked on her head leaned in.
“Excuse me. A detective from New York City is trying to reach Mr. Davidovich. He says it’s urgent.”
“Put him through to the conference room phone,” Quindel snapped. “Put that phone on speaker.”
Thirty seconds later I heard a white-noise hum from a speaker inlaid in the table’s center. I spoke in its general direction.
“Davidovich.”
“Sir, are you Jay Davidovich?”
“Yes.”
“Sir, this is Detective-Lieutenant Stornmonth with the NYPD. Do you know Moshe Hillel?”
“Name doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Well that’s very interesting, sir, because someone with your cell-phone number has called his cell-phone several times in the last week.”
“Description?” I sipped coffee to warm up the cold spot suddenly spreading through my gut.
“Five-ten, one-seventy, dark olive complexion, hair—”
“Yeah, yeah.” I rolled my eyes at the ceiling. “Hair black, eyes dark brown, all that stuff. How about distinctive body markings?”
“Tattoo of a wristwatch on his left wrist.”
Gut punch. Hit me right across the seams. Did not see that one coming.
“He sounds like someone I know under the name Dany Nesselrode. What’s happened to him?”
“Victim of a hit-and-run about two o’clock this morning in the Bronx. He’s taking a nap in intensive care. We’re calling it attempted murder.”
“Lieutenant, you and I need to talk.”
“Yes we do, sir. Now would be convenient.”
“Now won’t do. Give me a number where I can reach you in fifteen minutes.”
He rattled off ten digits as I checked my watch. Then he said, “Fifteen minutes. Not sixteen.”
After the dial tone had sounded, Quindel cocked his head at the note-taker.
“Only ‘attempted’ murder. You got that part, right?”
Chapter Forty-three
Jay Davidovich
Apparently Proxy wasn’t sure that last crack was just Quindel’s idea of humor.
“There’s something on Jay’s computer that you should see,” she told him.
“Have you been sandbagging me, Ms. Shifcos?” Quindel’s eyebrows arced toward his scalp as he headed toward us.
“Came in just before the meeting.” I wouldn’t exactly call that answer No.
I had enough sense to pull up the email string that included Proxy’s forwarding message to Tech Support as well as the original email. It took Quindel about two-point-three seconds to absorb the words and grasp their significance.
“Why are you telling them to report to you and not to me?”
“Because we have to assume that your email address has been compromised—and we don’t want them to know that we know.”
“Right. We know, but they don’t know we know. Very good. Absolutely right.”
Translation: “Greetings, Jay Davidovich. Your draft status has just been changed to BAIT.” Quindel looked down at me.
“Remind me of why the bad guys care so much about this von Leuthen dame.”
“Because they think she has inside information on where the real painting or the really-good fake painting can be found.”
“But she doesn’t have any such information?”
“Can’t be sure, but I don’t think so.”
“If you’re right, then she must have some other connection with this circus, or the people involved in it.”
“I agree.”
“Namely—what?” Quindel put a challenging little nuance into the question.
“Don’t have the faintest idea. All I know is that without realizing it I somehow got them all hot and bothered when I dropped the seminary-hacking case and jumped feet-first into this one. And a long time ago she apparently had a little romp with a seminarian.”
“How can you possibly imagine putting those pieces together?”
“Still working on that. Something I can’t put my finger on is nagging at me, but I haven’t come up with it yet.”
Quindel strolled back to the head of the table, as if he were in his den at home, going to get an interesting book to show us. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to watching him think. In nine minutes I had to call a detective in New York, and if I ever got off the phone with him I had to call what’s-her-name, Jakubek, the shysterette in Pittsburgh.
Finally, Quindel came out of his private little thought world and looked at the rest of us.
“Okay, here’s how we’re going to play it. First thing tomorrow morning we’ll bid eight hundred-fifty thousand for the first year of exchange insurance, four-hundred for the second, and six hundred-fifty for the third. Because the risk is higher when the painting is in transit. If that scares them off, so be it. More likely, though, they’ll shop around a little and then come back to us to try to bargain us down. That buys us some time to see if we can smoke out the malefactors. If we do, w
e can bring our price down and maybe save the business.”
I glanced at my watch. Quindel noticed.
“Loss Prevention has to call a cop, so if there’s nothing else we’ll adjourn.”
“One other thing,” the lawyer said. “Do we share our suspicions about inside collaboration with the Museum?”
Quindel looked at the secretary, who stopped writing.
“No. Fuck ’em.”
The Fourth Sunday in April
Chapter Forty-four
Jay Davidovich
“Holy shit!” I exploded.
“What happened after the Last Supper, Alex?”Rachel did an eyes-right to get a look at me as she swung the Suburban onto our street. “Although I guess Jews shouldn’t make jokes like that.”
“Doesn’t sound like especially promising material for Christians, either.”
“You’re right. From now on I’ll limit myself to jokes about serial killers. They don’t have an anti-defamation league. Yet. Why did you almost drop our bag of bagels just as I started the turn?”
“I realized something. All of a sudden. It’s been gnawing at my brain for days, and then bam! It just hit me.”
Rachel pulled into our driveway and navigated smoothly to the back of the house and then into the farther stall in our garage.
“So what was it that nailed you like that?”
“Katholische Theologische something.”
“Is that some outfit you’re going to report my blasphemous joke to?” Rachel did a nice job of flashing faux alarm as she asked the question.
“No. That’s a place that the priest running the seminary in New Mexico that had a hacking problem mentioned. He said his seminary sometimes sent students there for a term to pick up some kind of world-class scriptural study.”
Collar Robber: A Crime Story Featuring Jay Davidovich and Cynthia Jakubek Page 17