by Ritter Ames
I opened the thick drapes about an inch, allowing enough street light to aid my work. The bust was heavy, yet only about a foot tall. It could easily fit into the safe I found hidden behind a hinged painting from the school of Rembrandt. The safe was state-of-the-art, with an electronic locking mechanism, and a keypad I knew offered just three tries at the right combination before the digital lock would act like an iceberg and “freeze” me out of any further attempts. I couldn’t chance it. Hence the eleventh-hour order to my Zürich wizard for the perfect open-sesame gadget. My new gizmo wouldn’t need three attempts to gain entry.
A second later the safecracking treasure was out and ready for use.
The readout on my watch said three minutes ahead of schedule. I hoped I wouldn’t need the extra time. I thought about texting Jack with the burner phone, knowing he’d appreciate an update. But that wasn’t part of the plan, and we didn’t need any digital footprints tying phone pings from this area to him if the FSB or SVR—or whatever the KGB called themselves now—and whomever they trusted in London later investigated this break-in. The burner stayed put.
In less than a dozen seconds my mighty electronic safecracker successfully breached the defenses. Only one try needed. Encased in the wall, the safe wasn’t a walk-in, which had originally surprised me. However, it did possess an exceptionally large space inside, even with the Rodin taking a good third of the opening. Stacked metal drawers along the right-hand wall held trophy wife’s jewelry.
This bust resembled the more famous Victor Hugo bronze in size and weight. Hugo refused to pose for his bust, and Rodin had to design on the fly using a technique he’d learned and perfected from Lecoq de Boisbaudran. The gentleman who’d matched this British bust, however, was a friend and fan of Rodin, and though he’d sat for one sitting, the artist’s only available timeframe had been during the Brit’s favorite hunting season. So, again, due this time to the nobleman refusing to postpone his hunting schedule for the required number of sittings, Rodin had to utilize the same exercise of drawing from memory to quickly sketch the impressions he wanted to reproduce in the clay model. But the artist had dined exquisitely while he was there.
Once the sculpted clay received the master’s touch, it became a living work that everyone, including the busy nobleman, deemed a true likeness. Then it was sent to be cast in bronze.
I reached into the safe and pulled out the bust. The piece looked like the real thing, but I’d been fooled before. I turned it over, saw the mark and groaned softly.
This work had been placed to fool the public too. I traced a small circular mark with my gloved finger. I couldn’t read the figures in the near dark, but I knew the mark shouldn’t be on the bottom of the piece. The tiny torch clipped to the backpack gave me the light I needed to confirm my suspicions. The bust wasn’t a Rodin. It was a forgery.
So, did the Russians know they had a fake? Or did they commission a forgery to spirit the real one out of the country by showing papers that they’d purchased a duplicate? However, if they wanted to cross borders with false papers, why have a fake made? Why not just say the bust was a copy that matched the papers?
I shook my head. No, they thought this was the real thing. My team had been following copies like this for months, forgeries of all mediums of art that had one important thing in common: they carried the small, often hidden, marks of forgers along with all the normal authentication codes. I wondered how many other fake Rodin busts matching this one were out in the world and presumed real. If experience meant anything, at least four more. Was the original actually stolen in the last year from the country house of the English lord? Had it already been swapped out and this forgery taken instead? Or had the Russian gained the original work initially but someone beat us to the theft?
Sighing, I dropped the light and hefted the bust in one hand, wondering what to do. If I left it, the piece could be resold over and again. If I took it, the theft would likely set in motion actions that wouldn’t be worth the mountain of problems it could create. The Russian couldn’t go through official channels, of course, but diplomatic channels could be hurt for nothing more than a fake bronze.
As I waffled on a decision, a card of photos that laid on the floor of the safe, which had been hidden under the bronze, caught my attention. I gasped.
It couldn’t be.
I hugged the Rodin to my torso with one arm and grabbed the large postcard, then placed the bust back in the safe. I hustled over to the break in the curtains, letting the street light fall on the card.
Unbelievable.
Displayed were three paintings that disappeared after I saw them in the Miami office of a crime boss in October. Until that sighting last fall, these three masterpieces had been missing for a decade and a half. A grouping known in the art world as the Portrait of Three. In particular, the middle masterpiece was a painting Jack and I both hoped to find again. Me, because I loved it more than any other painting I’d ever seen. Him, because it was a brilliant study of his late-mother by the artist Sebastian.
The card was a business/event type mailer, used to promote special art items scheduled for auction. There was no date or auction house listed on the card, just a notation about the event being by invitation only to select members.
Members of what? A group? Consortium?
The card helped me firm up my decision. The bust stayed. The mailer went into the backpack. If I took the fake Rodin, the disappearance of the mailer would be noticed too. If I left the bronze, we had a better chance of getting on the trail of the Portrait of Three without whomever was in charge of the auction learning and possibly going underground again with the masterpieces.
I rotated the bust to replicate the way it sat when I’d first opened the safe, then closed the door and reset the lock. Not having to escape with the hunk of metal meant I could leave the way I came. Much easier. Shouldering the backpack, I pulled the drapes closed again and hurried across the room. My gloved hand was almost on the doorknob when I heard the distinctive scratching sound of picks in the lock.
Someone was coming in. Why hadn’t my sensors warned me? My options were down to one. I dove into the dark kneehole of the desk and curled into a black Lycra ball.
After a full minute, the door finally opened. Obviously, someone hadn’t been practicing their lock-picking techniques. The long fumbling seconds gave me almost enough time to get back my normal heartrate and breathing. Still, I kept my hands folded over my mouth and nose, as much to muffle any sound of my breathing as to further hide my face behind black gloves.
The intruder hurried across the room, offering me a glimpse of legs outfitted a lot like my own. The hurried walk was graceful, the legs thin but muscular through the tight leggings. A dancer maybe? Gymnast? Interesting.
Carefully, I uncurled my body and laid on the floor. The tiny dental mirror again helped me secretly spy around the corner of the desk to check out the scene and see what else I could learn. All black, full mask with night vision goggles resting at the eyeholes—and definitely a woman. Tiny waist, but full breasts and narrow shoulders. Couldn’t tell hair color under the hood. Using the top rim of the safe as a gauging point, I figured she was a couple of inches shorter than I, but realized my perspective was in question since I was making my guess while crouched on the floor.
She used an electronic device much like my own and opened the safe a second time. She gave a breathy little squeal, then pulled out the Rodin forgery and lowered it into a drawstring black bag. The jewelry drawers were too tempting, and she took several precious minutes pulling out and returning different pieces. Eventually, a handful of rings, several bracelets, and a heavy dark necklace followed the fake bust into the bag. I wished I hadn’t closed the drapes, so I could better see what she was absconding with. Not that it really made much difference in my case, since I’d come to recover rather than steal.
Yeah, that sounded like a circular error as I thought
about it too.
She closed the safe door, and I slid back into the kneehole’s depth. Leaving the door half open, I saw her head the opposite way down the hall from how I’d come in. She must have used the main staircase, which explained why my sensors didn’t go off. After giving her a few seconds head start, I scrambled out and moved to the door.
Suddenly, klaxon alarms blasted from the direction in which she’d disappeared. She apparently tried to exit the same way she’d come in, setting off the security system with the metal forgery. Whether she escaped or not, the system would have already sealed off the ground floor. I had no choice but to use my rope and take the sky route out one of the tiny upper windows.
The top floor was mostly open attic. She could have been hiding, and there were a couple of closets and cubbies she might have hidden inside. However, I didn’t bother checking because the attic floor was covered in a light sheen of dust, and when I used the mini flashlight to sweep the panorama, the only footprints I could spot were my own. I grabbed a fabric cover protecting a chest and used it to scatter my dusty shoe prints to the four corners.
The window was as diminutive close up as I’d figured. Since I wasn’t carrying the bust, once I removed the braided line from inside the backpack, the bag laid relatively flat to my body. I also removed an eye hook from the front pocket and quickly screwed its sharp point into the exposed frame under the window. I said a prayer as I started raising the window sash; it was stubborn but practically squeak-free. Two other windows looked out on the south and western sides of the house, but the one I employed had better escape options, even if it allowed my escape to be readily seen from one street.
With a flick of my wrist, I sent the strong line through the opening, letting it dangle until I saw it did indeed end at a spot about half a floor above the bottom of the first floor—or second floor in the U.S.
Perfect.
A quick shimmy down the line, with the grip of my leather gloves controlling the speed of descent, and I landed safely on the long carport that framed the front of the three-car garage like a dark eyebrow. I did a fast frog march toward the end of the overhang, trying to be as small and inconspicuous as possible. There were security cameras on this side of the house, but they were trained on the view below me to capture the images of thieves breaking in—not how one might escape from the top floors.
Nearing the end of the carport, I raised and sprinted toward the edge, then broad jumped across the narrow grass below, and over the wrought iron fence to do a tuck and roll. I landed on the side lawn of the property next door.
At that same moment, the bebop warning sound of Met police sirens grew in the distance. I ran from shadow to shadow as much as possible, and seconds later vaulted the much shorter fence protecting the back of this property.
Three
Fourteen and a half minutes later I was a couple of blocks away from the coffeehouse again and turning on the burner phone for the first time. I texted Jack buy milk on the way home, which was our code for him to send Cassie back to the coffeehouse. He texted with the reply need creamer too? which I answered in the negative since he was asking if I had the Rodin.
I’d already freed my nose and mouth from the collar’s masking, so the heavenly smell of ground coffee chased away my last bit of nerves when I opened the shop’s door. It wasn’t a great surprise when Jack arrived with Cassie a few minutes later. Despite the plan for him to stay behind and let me back in the side door, I’d had the feeling he wouldn’t have the patience to wait. Especially since he knew I didn’t have the bust. He would need to see that I was okay. I tossed him the backpack, saying, “Look inside and grab us each something warm to drink. Cass and I will be back in a minute.”
He raised a dark eyebrow but didn’t argue.
Cassie tried to pump me for information as soon as we were in the bathroom.
“I don’t want to tell the story twice,” I said. “Let’s just get changed and out of here before Jack becomes antsier.” Though I was fairly certain the auction card would hold his attention nicely.
We left the bathroom, once more in swapped outfits. He was at a table in the far corner. His back was to the wall and he sat in the perfect observation seat to view people coming in from any direction, but his attention remained riveted on the card in his right hand. As we approached, he gave me an expression of amazement and held up the mailer as I pulled out my chair. “Where did you get this?” he asked.
Leaning into the center of the table so he and Cassie could both hear me, I whispered, “Under the Rodin forgery.”
“The what?” Jack asked, as Cassie added, “Forgery?”
I nodded. “It even had the faked mark of the Florentine forger that we found on the snuffbox copy.”
“What happened to the original?” Cassie asked.
Answering with a shrug, I turned to Jack and asked, “Could the Rodin have been switched before it disappeared from the original owner?”
“Something I can ask, but obviously not something considered by my superiors,” he said. “Why didn’t you take it anyway? We might have been able to trace more from the copy. And we don’t need additional known forgeries out there.”
“I almost did.” I tapped the card. “But since my bigger desire became a quest to not give them the heads up that I was taking the mailer, leaving the bogus bust sounded like a better idea. I was hoping they’d just think the mailer was misplaced. In the end, however, I had no choice.”
“Why no choice? Were you spotted?” he asked.
“No.”
The barista arrived with a tray of our drinks. We all stopped talking, except to give our thanks as she passed around our orders with her floral tattooed arms. I couldn’t help but be mesmerized by the quality of the body art. Coupled with her chartreuse hair, I wondered if she was happier behind a garden trowel than a scone-filled counter. She left with her empty tray. Jack had tea, and Cassie and I pulled our coffees closer. I took a sip. Yes, heaven.
Again, I lowered my voice and leaned toward them. “Another thief came while I was still in the office.”
At their collective gasp, I quickly detailed what happened after I slipped the auction card into my backpack. When I got to the alarms and how I slipped out by going up instead of down and how I saw cop cars but didn’t know if the thief was caught, Jack pulled out his phone and started thumbing his screen. Eventually, he shook his head. “Nothing yet regarding a capture. I’ll follow up on it later.”
“Carefully.”
“Of course.”
“Who do you think the thief worked for?” Cassie whispered. “Moran, Ermo Colle, or someone else?”
I shrugged. Given Melanie’s surprise appearance at the party, and since before tonight she’d been last seen entering an establishment where Colle tried to kidnap me, it was natural for him to be on all of our minds. When we started this quest to stop the forgery ring, we’d thought Moran was our only real nemesis but soon learned there was a second player in the current art heist scheme and finally unearthed Ermo Colle. Only then to realize Colle was the man I’d known as my late father, despite the talents of an excellent plastic surgeon. Someone else died in the avalanche that Daddy Dearest let me and everyone else believe took his life. He disappeared again soon after I identified him—with Melanie two steps behind. She’d also dropped off customs’ radar the same night. When we learned she’d resigned abruptly from her position as director at The Browning in Miami, and we’d already put her together with a mobster wannabe, Tony B, who worked under Colle, another puzzle piece fell into place.
“All I know is the thief was a woman, moved like someone who was young, possibly with a ballet background, extremely graceful movements. Based on what little I could see of her in comparison to points in the room, I’d guess she was about five foot six. Possibly inexperienced or cocky too, since she set off the alarms on her way out. She was definitely small enough to use
the window I escaped from, but I saw no trace of her when I went up. She either hadn’t done enough homework about the alarms or found another avenue of departure if it was a con for the cops.”
“Could that have been planned?” Jack asked. “To double back and actually escape later?”
“Possibly, but I wouldn’t try it,” I mused. “Beyond the fact the zoned alarm system kicked on once the sirens blared, and the servants got sent to their rooms, extra security guards and an increased police presence are both likely from that point forward. Even harder to leave without being pursued.”
“But you escaped without incident from the top floor.” His gaze was intent on mine. I knew he wasn’t just in discovery mode.
“Yes, by the barest of margins. Since I didn’t have the bust there wasn’t a need to lower the backpack first,” I said. “I squeezed through the window and used the line I’d carried to lower myself to the side portico and carport. Then used the height to more easily jump over the fence and land in the next yard. I ran the diversion routes we previously plotted until I felt safe enough to pull down my hood and put my jacket back on in one of the CCTV dead spots to look more normal. I texted you when I knew I was a few minutes from the coffeehouse.”
“You would have seen her enter the top floor?”
I nodded. “It’s just storage up there, so all open. Mine were the only footprints in the dust on the floor, and I swept them away before I slid out the window.”