by Ritter Ames
The guys moved to the farthest corner, to allow Jack to fill Danny in on what Nico had told us without anyone overhearing.
I happily forgot for the moment everything that happened the previous evening and took in Van Gogh’s genius. Nothing like sunny art for a drizzly day.
He painted this series in early fall, 1888. Originally, the artist planned a full dozen panels to decorate Gauguin’s room in the Yellow House in Arles, but ultimately just four were completed in his goal. Gauguin and Van Gogh parted company after only nine tumultuous weeks of trying to form their artistic community, the “Studio of the South.” A fifth painting, a replication of this London work, was completed in January 1889 at Gauguin’s request, about six months before Van Gogh’s death. That fifth painting, experts believe, is the copy hanging in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The two men were ill-suited in this artistic partnership and living situation, but Gauguin knew the sunflowers were Van Gogh’s seminal work and continued to say so. When he returned to Paris, leaving Arles only a few months after he’d arrived, he asked Van Gogh to send the copy for him to keep.
The sunny yellow painting I gazed upon, with its bright blue “Vincent” painted on the vase, was purchased for the National Gallery in 1924 through proceeds from the Courtauld Fund. This was why I did what I did. From finding lost art, to helping museums raise money to fund the acquisition of great works to offer free to the public, it made me continually count my lucky stars I could play even a small role in this type of good work.
I remembered seeing the painting as a child with Grandmamma and having to keep my hands behind my back so I wouldn’t risk touching any of the exquisite works in the gallery. Even to this day, my fingers itched to touch the dying flowers, created on the canvas with Van Gogh’s thick brushstrokes and heavy layers of paint, a process known as impasto, building up the texture of the seed heads. In August 1888, when he was in the middle of this painting, he wrote to his brother Theo, “I am hard at it, painting with the enthusiasm of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse.” I totally got that.
My fellow patrons moved on to another gallery. I continued my studies but could hear the low murmur of my guys in the background, a cue to continue losing myself in the art. It didn’t matter how many times I studied a master work like this one, I always found new points to marvel over.
Suddenly, I was grabbed at the waist and lifted off my feet. I started to fight and scream, but my captor shoved something into my mouth and pinned my arms against my body. I heard Jack and Danny holler as we moved toward the side galleries. I struggled, but this guy was big. I couldn’t turn my head enough to get a good look at him, but my peripheral vision showed he’d brought a couple of buddies along to entertain Jack and Danny.
Ten
The sound of fighting came from behind us, and I wondered who was landing the better blows. I tried attacking my captor’s legs with my heels, but he pinned me tighter against him with one arm and raised the other to put my head in a modified chokehold. This wasn’t the most unusual way anyone had ever tried to kidnap me, but it was close.
“Stop or I’ll snap your neck.” His voice was low and gravelly, his accent Slavic. I did as he said but wracked my brain for any other options. Another shock came as we exited into the hall, and I noticed uniformed feet sticking out of a door. I hoped the guard was just unconscious.
I’d been in the museum countless times, but never in a life or death situation. People screamed when they saw us on the stairs. As everyone pointed and yelled from below, he raised me effortlessly over his head and bellowed, “I will throw her, and she will die. Everyone, out of my way.”
Halfway down the stairs, my stomach did flip-flops with each step he took, but being above his head meant I had a view back upstairs and could see Jack and Danny round the corner and start down. Both looked like they’d just gone three rounds in the ring. I shook my head in warning. Part of me wanted to smile in relief at seeing them, but I felt hot, angry tears instead.
Mentally measuring distance, I wondered if I could tuck and roll on the marble floor and not break my skull or back if I found a way to escape his vice hold and jumped to freedom. My mental exercises didn’t matter, however, because when my captor reached the last step he looped me back around to my original pinned position. This time, the hold on my neck was tighter.
Police cars pulled up on the street, and officers bailed out, running across the long square. He watched through the doors, and repeated, “Back, out of my way. Don’t try to stop me. Tell the police to let me go or she dies.”
One of the guards headed out the door to intercept the cops.
I could see Jack peripherally. He was nearly down the stairs but stopped when he realized the new danger I was in. He signaled to someone, Danny, I assumed, and I tried to figure what he had planned. I was carried toward the front door. Everyone stood back while the police remained outside. I wondered if there were sharpshooters on the neighboring roofs.
Then from around the staircase, a guard raced toward us, wielding a taser. Would it even work on a guy this size? Thinking optimistically, I ran my hands between my neck and shoulder and his arm, hoping to be able to push away his thick lower arm if the charge affected him enough.
What I didn’t figure on was getting caught in the charge myself. His body probably got most of the juice, but I suddenly wasn’t sure where I was, who I was, or what my body was doing.
I kind of came out of it a few seconds later, realizing Jack’s arms were around me, cradling me on the floor. But I still couldn’t move, and my eyes wouldn’t stay open. Between those long blinks, I saw the giant try to get up, but the guard zapped him again.
“I’m sorry,” Jack whispered in my ear. “I tried to grab you quicker, but the charge was already going.”
I think I said something like “my hero” but I wasn’t sure. It was a good bet though since my first language in situations like that was sarcasm. Though I’d never been tased before, so who knew. What brain cells I did have working made me want to grab that taser and shoot the guard while someone had him in a half-Nelson hold. Except I probably needed to thank him instead. So many dueling emotions.
Jack helped me up, and I leaned on him, trying to walk. But he was having some problems too. I assumed he’d received a little taste of the taser when he pulled me away or suffered from the repercussions of the fight he’d had with the giant’s cohorts. We were ushered into the small office to wait for the police. I was offered a water bottle, but all I really wanted was the nice soft chair. Danny came in a few minutes later. I focused on not falling out of the chair.
“They’re hauling the guys away,” Danny told me. I think I nodded. To Jack, he asked, “You recognized them?”
Jack nodded. “They’re muscle for Ermo Colle.”
“That’s what I thought too,” Danny replied.
“Call Whatley,” I whispered, not yet able to get my voice to register correctly. I coughed and took another sip of water.
“On it already,” Jack said, and I saw he was finishing a text on his phone.
“Your inspector at Scotland Yard?” Danny asked.
We nodded.
Danny pulled out his own cell and started flipping screens. “Amazing video of you and King Kong, Laurel.” He punched his screen with a finger. “Hey, you’re trending big time on Twitter.”
“What?” I tried to grab his phone, but I knocked it out of his hand instead. Danny picked it up and set it on the desktop beside me.
“See? You’ve already been shared over three thousand times. You’ve eclipsed your mentions about having lived in the hotel room where the murder happened.” He pointed to the RT icon, then flipped to Facebook and added, “Someone ran it live on FB, and here they’re still rolling while the arseholes are getting thrown into the Met’s cars.”
“Why? How?” My phone started ringing in my purse. I looked at Jack. “That’s Linc—”
“I’ll take care of it,” he replied. He called Linc and told him in no uncertain terms that I had no comment, and to not call me again today. Then he asked Danny, “Can you go and get Cassie? Bring her here for safety concerns.”
“No,” I shook my head, but that felt weird so I stopped and repeated, “No. She’s safer where she is. If you bring her here, someone could start videoing her too. Leave her alone.”
As I finished talking, I folded my arms on the desktop and rested my head. The last thing I heard before I passed out again was Danny saying, “She’s right. Someone could connect them both being here and working for the foundation, and Cassie will follow Laurel to internet stardom. I’ll go back and wait outside the door until her meeting is over. Then I’ll get someone to show us out of here by way of an employee exit.”
Eleven
The benefit of experiencing secondhand tasing is no one wants to wait for you to get your brain back up to speed, so all the tedious questions with the cops were handled for me by Jack and Danny. Plus, they knew the names of two of the bad guys already. All I could have told them was that a giant grabbed me and offered a very high chance of my death.
Of course, there were downsides, like still having no sense of taste or smell an hour later.
When I felt like I was functionally alert again, Danny was gone and there were a couple of new suits in the room with Jack and me. They made their introductions but didn’t offer which government services they reported to. However, I quickly figured out the new guys were MI-5 and MI-6, and they were there to pick Jack’s brain. While their conversation was probably half over already, I gathered from what I was privy to that Jack pretended to be accommodating, but wasn’t telling them anything about the more important personal stuff we knew about Colle. Namely, that he was the man I’d grown up believing was my father—though recent facts that had come to light left my true parenthood in question. Also, he was likely the initiator of a forgery operation which put a substantial amount of high-end fakes into the market the past few years, affecting all of Europe and possibly the four corners of the globe.
“We learned from a source in early February that Colle did have additional plastic surgery, and most likely has a completely new name and persona,” Jack said. “All the intel is hearsay of course, but I reported all of this information to my Home Office superior at the time, and I’m assuming it hit the radar in each of your departments as well.”
What he didn’t say was one of the reasons Colle had to refurbish his look and background was because I not only recognized him as my presumed dead father, but I escaped from his capture just after the first of the year by bashing him in the head with a baton much like the one that killed Melanie.
The new suits offered little in the line of quid pro quo, so I had to assume Jack had good reason for what he was doing. He usually did though. I’d learned firsthand that running the odds of any con was something he did naturally, and the little he let slip told me part of what he provided was to cover his ass. Like he’d said, information regarding the new identity was shared when Rollie was arrested in February. Because that information was used by Rollie to give me a jab when he thought he was leading me to the slaughter, we had to assume it was true.
Yet none of this explained why Colle’s goons tried to kidnap me without any escape procedure beyond sheer muscle and nerve. It couldn’t have been a sanctioned grab. Colle was too smart for anything so mundane.
That was something for us to discuss later. I didn’t feel the need yet to share with my new acquaintances.
DI Timms knocked on the door, then stuck his head in. “Mind if I join you?”
“Hi, Inspector,” I said, propping my head on one hand. “Welcome to the party. I feel like I already have a hangover.”
“Sorry you had to get tased,” he said. “Your first time, I take it?”
I nodded. “Hopefully my last too.”
Jack made introductions, and all the men exchanged cards. Then MI-5 and MI-6 looked at their respective watches, decided they had other brains to pick and took their leave. Timms sat beside me in the office’s other available visitor’s chair, and Jack leaned against the wall.
“I realize you’re not feeling top form at present,” Timms said to me. “But a piece of evidence has come available that I felt needed to be followed up on immediately.”
“Shoot.” I waved the hand I wasn’t leaning on.
“It’s…uh…”
“Personal?”
“Possibly.” Timms shrugged. “The crime scene unit found a strand of hair we think may be that of the killer. Since you, the victim, and your assistant all have blonde hair, I wondered if any of you naturally have…had…another hair color.”
“The hair is from a woman?”
“Well, it’s a long blonde hair, but it’s been bleached, and the hotel assures me all their maids are brunettes.”
“That’s true, brown and black-haired maids are all I’ve seen. In answer to your question, Cassie and I are both natural blondes, but hers is much shorter than mine and has pink tones, and I do add highlights, so part of our hair has been bleached lighter than the natural color. I only knew Melanie as a blonde, and I’m positive she highlighted hers as well. To be sure, however, you might check with her family. We ran in the same circles in college and from what I remember she came from Hartford, Connecticut in the U.S.”
“You never saw her as a redhead?”
I jerked up in my chair and looked at Jack. He circled the desk and took the chair behind it.
“Are you saying the hair you found was from a bleached redhead?” Jack asked.
“Or, the hair was one highlighted to keep the auburn color from looking flat?” I suggested.
“Affirmative,” Timms said. “The hair shows a very small bit of auburn root.”
I pulled out my phone and found the two JPEG files Roberto drew of the Amazon, based on the description of the police officer who saw her immediately before and after she killed Tony B in Rome. The colored drawings which showed her auburn hair and the highlights I suggested the artist add because that was how she wore it when I first saw her. I passed Timms my phone. “There’s a high probability this is your suspect.”
All evidence pointed to the Amazon working for Rollie and possibly Moran as well—but particularly toward the grandson. Besides killing Tony B, she was believed to have killed one of Colle’s forgers in Germany and did the final wet work after an Italian military police officer and I were chased by three gunmen across rooftops in Barcelona in early February. We had another longer list of crimes we attributed to her with less proof, but firm belief. I’d tangled with her a couple of different times, never sustaining a debilitating injury, however, which always made me wonder if Moran had more control over her than we’d first thought. But she had nerve and skill as an assassin. While I had no idea how or why she killed Melanie in my room, I totally believed she was capable of getting in and out without leaving a trace. Only one other time—that of the murder of the German forger—had we learned evidence was found to possibly point to her, and it was again a strand of hair.
Jack picked up the explanation at that point, and I stayed quiet. I didn’t trust my brain enough yet to not let something slip accidentally. He detailed what was already in the Italian police database and gave Timms contact names and numbers of both the detective we’d worked with in the polizia, as well as his friend in the military police, the carabinieri, who had also been onsite when the Amazon killed Tony B in the Rome hospital.
Timms made extensive notes and had me email him the drawings. When he closed his notebook, he said, “I will contact the Italian police and circulate these drawings as a possible suspect.”
“Customs should already have the drawings in their system,” Jack said. “But since I was supposed to be notified if she arrived in the country, we could be jumping to conclusions. Or she could have fou
nd…an irregular…route into the country.”
“I’ve noted all of this.” Timms slipped his pen and notebook into an inside coat pocket. “I’ll be in touch.”
We all stood, and I added, “We would appreciate any additional information, Inspector. We’ve had a few close calls with this woman and finding her is a priority of ours too. We won’t impede your investigation in any way, but we prefer to stay a step or two ahead of her. Also, I would be particularly interested in the three men’s motives for the incident today if that comes out in the interviews and you’re able to share the reason why. Just counting on brute force seems a little illogical to me.”
“I understand,” he said, shaking our hands as he prepared to leave. “And I will definitely let you know if I gain any sharable information in either case. I never realized a job in the art field could involve interacting with such dangerous people. You truly have a risky occupation.”
“Most often, it’s pretty boring,” I said, crossing my fingers behind my back.
“Anytime something is worth a great deal, and desired by unscrupulous people, risk and danger can go hand in hand,” Jack said. “Art is no different than any other field in that regard. I once heard someone say, where there’s a sea, there are always pirates.”
He winked at me, and I felt my face warm. I’d said exactly that phrase late one night when we were sharing wine and reminiscing about recent jobs in Miami and Barcelona.
“Very good.” Timms nodded and opened the door.
I cleared my throat and spoke up, “One other thing, Inspector. My job does require a lot of travel, and while I can put some things off, I never know when I really do have to leave London quickly. Have you gathered enough evidence to give me any idea when my travel restrictions will be lifted?”