“Do you mean Oksana?” I asked.
“Well, come on Terrell,” Dean said. “If we talk to the cops, and they talk to Vasily, and then you read about how Oksana jumped off a bridge, how are you going to feel?”
He had a point.
“Still,” Tom said. “I don’t know how much more evidence you’re going to dig up, now that Ha is dead.”
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Dean said. “We all know Vasily likes to wheel and deal. He makes a lot of money but he spends it as fast as he gets it and he’s always broke. That means that he’s always on the lookout for a scam. What if I drop a hint about some lawyer wanting some comic books?”
“What?” I said.
Tom leaned back in his chair and tapped his pen thoughtfully on his desk.
“Subtly,” Dean continued. “I just say, I know this guy, he’s looking for these issues of Batman, or whatever, I found them but they were in poor condition. And then see what he does.”
“Can you get me his phone?” Tom said.
“This is fucked up,” I announced. No one listened.
“His phone?” Dean asked.
“Sure. You get me his phone and I can make sure we’re in on all of his calls. Then you drop your line about the comics, and we see who he calls and who he texts.”
“We can even buy the fake comics off him,” Dean said. “Then when we go to the police this isn’t just speculation. They bust Vasily, he rolls on Boris, boom! No one gets away this time.”
“What do you think, Mr. Delacroix?” Tom said. “You going to give us another week?”
“Do I have any choice?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “We can’t stop you from marching down to the police station right now and spilling your guts.”
“Don’t you think we could get them in on it now?” I asked. “Maybe the cops could help us out.”
Tom didn’t like that all. To give him credit, Dean considered it.
“The thing is,” he said finally, “is that right now, you’re their suspect. They don’t trust you. We’d have to sell them on it. If we go in there and lay this all on the table, with no evidence, are they really going to team up with us to run a sting? And can we trust them? Are we totally sure that Boris doesn’t have any little birds in the TPS? Plus, Aston. I mean, on a certain level, I respect his dedication. But if he pulls the same shit on Boris, or even Vasily, that he did with you, we’re fucked. I’m not saying he would do it, mind you. Boris has this big Interpol file and maybe he’d be really careful. But maybe not.”
“All right,” I said. “We’ll try this. But I’m going to the cops after and making a full statement, whether it works or not.”
“Nice,” Dean said. “I already know Vasily’s playing poker this Saturday. We’ll do the switch then. Let’s do this thing.”
41
On Saturday night Tom, Dean and I drove down to Dundas and Spadina in the surveillance van. We parked on a little side street just to the north of Alex Furs. Dean went out to play poker. Tom went into the back of the van to get ready. He had a black briefcase filled with tiny screwdrivers and electronic components neatly organized into little Tupperware containers, and he unpacked it onto a folding table.
My responsibility was to go on a food run to the Vietnamese restaurant next door, a real garish place with neon lighting and clear plastic tables. I ordered us two large servings of pho, one of them with extra tripe and liberal squirtings of Sriracha sauce. That one went to Tom.
“Hoo,” Tom said. “Spicy.”
“Yeah, it’s Vietnamese,” I said.
“What’s this stuff?” he said, lifting up a tangle of tripe with his fork (he did not use chopsticks). “It looks like a plastic spider web.”
“I think it’s a kind of noodle,” I said.
But the guy was a fucking garburator, and down it all went. I didn’t know whether to be disappointed, envious or impressed. Then he leaned back, relaxed and confident, and folded his hands across his stomach, and waited as patiently as a statue.
We only had to wait about thirty minutes before the knock came. I stood up and opened the back door of the van and found myself staring at Oksana’s lovely cleavage.
“Hello,” she said.
“Uh,” I replied.
She held up the Blackberry.
“I hope it won’t take long,” she said. “He will notice it’s gone.”
I grabbed it and handed it to Tom, who spared one hard glance for the Russian girl huddling against the cold. Then he got to work. He cracked open the Blackberry in about fifteen seconds and actually soldered a bit of electronics inside it. My mind was blown at how quickly his fingers worked. Then, with a snap, he put it back together and handed it to me.
“The tricky part is he can’t turn it on for at least five minutes,” he said.
“I will put it back in his jacket,” Oksana said, “and he’ll turn it on when he turns it on.”
She gave me one last glance with those big eyes and then swished away, leaving a little cloud of some dainty fragrance behind her. I closed the door and sat down. Part of me was expecting Tom to make some sort of crack, but he never did, just opened his laptop and started fiddling with it. Having taken care of my two responsibilities (driving and getting dinner) there was nothing for me to do but play some Angry Birds.
About fifteen minutes later Tom said: “He turned it on.”
I sat up. A grey, functional software program was running on Tom’s nondescript Dell laptop. It looked like a music player crossed with Excel. Tom put on a pair of earphones.
“He’s making a call,” he said.
“Put it on speaker,” I said.
Tom ignored me, so I pranced from one foot to the other like a little kid that needed to go to the bathroom. Finally Tom took the headphones off and turned to me.
“It was all in Russian,” he said. “Want me to play it for you?”
“Did you hear any words you recognized?”
“Nope,” Tom said. “I don’t speak Russian.”
So I went back to Angry Birds. I was at this one level that was totally brutal, and the way those pigs snickered at me every time I came up short really pissed me off. I started hitting the replay button really quickly so I didn’t need to see it.
Finally there was another tap at the back door. This time it was Dean.
“I think he made the call,” Dean said. “Did you get it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it was in Russian.”
“I heard,” Dean said. “He jumped on the comic thing like nobody’s business. Seemed really eager. After the call he said he would have to work on it but he thought he could help me out.”
“Why’d you send the girl?” Tom asked.
“Well, I took the phone, but I didn’t have any way to get it to you guys.”
“It seems risky,” I said.
“Hey,” Dean said. “The minute she saw me, she could have thrown me under the bus. Okay? She didn’t do it. It was the only way to get the phone out, so I did it.”
“Whatever,” I said.
“Can you trace that number?” Dean asked.
“I already have,” Tom replied. “He called a landline. Looks like a rural address in someplace called Keswick.”
“Great,” Dean said. “We’ll need to get that call translated.”
“Already did that too,” Tom said. “I e-mailed the audio file to a friend of mine on standby. It was a short call and he sent me back a transcript.”
Tom opened up his Gmail and showed it to us. Dean leaned over Tom’s shoulder and read it out loud:
“Voice one: Good evening Vanya! How’s your health? Voice two: What is this about? Voice one: Nothing, just calling to see how you are doing my friend. Also, I have a little bit of work for you. More comics. Voice two: I don’t know what you are talking about. I think you have the wrong number.”
Dean straightened back up and shook his head. “Wrong number, holy shit.”
“What does that
mean?” I asked.
“This fellow Vanya runs a tight ship, is what it means,” Dean replied. “No talking on the phone.”
“You all want to go out there now?” Tom said, turning around from the computer to look at us.
“You mean right now?” I asked.
Tom raised his eyebrows.
“You don’t want to think about it a bit first?” Dean said.
“Well,” Tom said. “We know he’s at home now. We don’t know for how long. I know your boy’s anxious to get this over with.”
“Don’t call me boy,” I said.
“No offence intended,” he said. “But don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do it. Get this son of a bitch out of bed at midnight. Rattle his cage a bit.”
“Okay,” Dean said. “If that’s how you guys want to do it.”
42
It took about an hour to get to Keswick. The house was old-fashioned, narrow by modern standards. The lights on the ground floor were all blazing. A long hedge ran around the edge of the property, neat and well maintained, not raggedy at all. Gravel crunched under our wheels as we turned up the driveway.
Dean turned around in his seat to talk to Tom in the back. “So how do we play this?” he asked.
“Well, you should stay here,” Tom said. “If he gives your description to Vasily it could blow your cover.”
“Yeah,” Dean said. “But I’ve got an idea. Let’s all go.”
“Okay,” Tom said.
Before we knocked on the front door, Tom had us circle around the house, carefully stepping over the plants in the gardens. At one window, around the back, Tom froze in place and Dean started to laugh.
“Bingo,” Dean said.
“What?” I whispered.
The room was a recent addition, a solarium, with big windows. The sofas looked very old and broken in, and there was a little coffee table and a small bookshelf. A large oil painting dominated the rear wall. It was of soldiers sitting and standing in a circle during the winter, many of them wearing fur hats and long coats.
“A little ballsy isn’t it?” Dean said.
“That’s why he’s got it in the back,” Tom said. “And anyway, who’s going to recognize it?”
“What is it?” I said.
“It’s called ‘Rest After the Battle’,” Dean said, “and it’s one of the most famous paintings to come out of Stalinist Russia.”
We walked back to the front of the house and Tom knocked on the door. Footsteps approached from the other side.
“Who is it?” a voice called in accented English.
“Police,” Tom said. “Open up.”
“Do you have a warrant?” the voice said. “Put the warrant through the mail slot.”
Unperturbed, Tom took a piece of paper out of his jacket, folded it twice and slid it through the mail slot. Then he waited a moment before suddenly and viciously kicking the front door, right beneath the knob. It had been chained and bolted, but the door itself was old and thin, like the walls of the little farmhouse, and the wood snapped and splintered. The old man Vanya, who had been crouching to retrieve the ‘warrant’, was bowled over.
“Holy shit!” I said.
Tom stormed inside like a Marine in Basra. “Gun!” he cried, and a moment later a small metal object flew out the door and skittled to a stop at my feet. It was a Glock.
“Augh!” Vanya shouted. “Don’t! Don’t!”
Tom hauled the old man to his feet and twisted his arm behind his back.
“Easy,” Dean said.
“Got any more surprises for us?” Tom said. “Got anything else?”
“You’re breaking it! You’re breaking my arm!”
“Answer the question.”
“No, no!”
Tom frog-marched Vanya back into the house.
“Jesus,” Dean muttered, and followed, carefully stepping around the gun. I followed.
When I came into the solarium, Vanya was sitting in a leather Lay-Z-Boy cradling his arm. He had a scraggly white beard and big, soulful eyes, like a little kid. Tom was looming over him. Dean had gone off somewhere.
“Nice painting,” Tom said. “Where’d you get it?”
Vanya didn’t say anything. In the silence I could hear Dean moving around the house.
“I asked you a question,” Tom said. “Where’d you get this painting?”
“Who are you?” Vanya asked. “You are not police.”
Tom leaned forward and looked right into Vanya’s eyes and said: “You’re right. I’m not police. I’m here on behalf of someone you ripped off. Do you understand that?”
Vanya looked like he understood, all right. He swallowed and shrank back from Tom.
“Hey,” Dean called from somewhere. “Found his studio.”
“Come on,” Tom said. “Come with me.”
We walked through the kitchen and then trooped down the stairs to the basement. The ceiling was low and the floor was bare but it was clean, and extremely well lit by fluorescent lighting.
Unfinished paintings hung on the walls. Most, but not all, were very abstract. One even I recognized.
“Is that Marilyn Monroe?” I asked.
“Andy Warhol’s very hot these days,” Dean said. “Not exactly the trickiest thing to forge either. Are these supposed to be Damien Hirst dot paintings?”
Vanya was staring at the floor.
“Interesting hobby, you’ve got here,” Dean said.
“Who is your client?” Vanya asked.
“Who is yours?” Dean replied.
Vanya laughed.
Dean kept walking around the room until he came to a desk in the corner. “Now this is what we’re really interested in.”
A big fancy case of pencil crayons stood on the desk, with every color of the rainbow, and every one in between. Next to it were rolls of tape, different boxes of staples, liquids in plastic squeeze bottles, a small metal press and what looked like a little specialized iron. Box-cutters hung from hooks on the back wall.
And in the drawers Dean found a bunch of old comics that had clearly been worked on. They were missing pages, or they’d been trimmed, or parts of them had been colored or drawn on.
When Dean held them in his hands, I do have to admit that I felt a little thrill of satisfaction. There it was. Proof. Vasily had been involved in restoring comic books.
“Looks like you’ve got a sweet little set up here,” Dean said.
“You came for comics?” Vanya said. He sounded disgusted.
“Not much of a fan, are you?” Dean asked.
“I cannot believe you break in my door and threaten me in my home over comics.”
“You defrauded people of tens of thousands of dollars. Maybe hundreds.”
“Bah,” Vanya said. “The forger is not like the plagiarist. A plagiarist, he takes credit for the work of someone else. This is a great crime. The forger does the reverse. He makes something and he gives credit for it to someone else. This is a crime that only harms fools with too much money. What does it matter who makes the thing if the buyer cannot tell the difference? Did he not get what he paid for? He wanted a picture of dots, now he has picture of dots. You know the hardest part of forging the works of Hirst is not the paintings, but the certificate of authenticity. It has a hologram. Painting dots is easy.”
Dean smiled.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” he said.
“And the comics?” Vanya said. “This is not even forgery. It is restoration. Before I came to this country, I worked in cathedrals that had been destroyed by the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War, and stood neglected for years under the godless communists. Who are these idiot Americans to say I cannot do for a cheap children’s book why I did for great works of art?”
“Well,” Dean said, “you knew what the market was and you lied to people. When the fraud comes out, hundreds of thousands of dollars will be wiped out. And if you trace those dollars back to see where they went, it’s ultimately
in your pockets.”
“Why must the fraud come out?” Vanya said. “Where is the crime if the comics stay in their little boxes? We are like alchemists. We turn lead into gold. It is you who are changing it back. And for what? Keep the boxes closed. Everyone will be happy.”
“Right. If no one actually examines the underlying value of the item in question, its value will never go down. You should have worked for a bond-rating agency. You’d have made more money and you’d only have to worry about the OSC, not the police.”
Vanya didn’t have anything to say to that.
“Think about your situation,” Dean said. “We have a good idea who you work for. And he’s pretty hardcore. No doubt about it. So keeping that in mind, what’s he going to do if you pick up the phone and call him and tell him about this? Is he going to show up at my nice house on Bloor West and kill me? Me? A fancy downtown lawyer with a family, who has been keeping detailed notes on my investigation? Or is he going to come over here and throw you off your roof? You tell me what’s going to make him safer.”
Vanya didn’t have anything to say to that either.
“Let’s not kid ourselves here,” Dean said. “You’re in trouble. So why don’t you just tell me the story. You don’t have to mention any names for now, if it makes you feel better.”
For a long time, Vanya didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure he would crack. But eventually, he started to speak.
“There are two men. One is old and dangerous. The other is young and a fool. Eight years ago the old one hears of the money in comics. It seems almost too easy. Hundreds of thousands of dollars for tiny restorations. But to sell the comics they must be put in a box by men in Florida. And to get the comics to the men in Florida, they must be sent by a store. And how do we explain to the store where we found so many comics in such good condition? This is where the young fool comes in. He has a friend with a store that helps us. Many comics go into the boxes, we make much money, but eventually the men in Florida start to catch my work. The friend with the store becomes nervous. We lose leverage over him. It’s all over. Until this summer.”
The Black Box: A novel Page 16