Firebreak

by Richard Stark

  Still, the art market was always changeable and fraught with potential disaster, so it was good to have a cash cow the size of Paxton Marino still on the string. Because of that, Griffith did no more than sigh just the once before replying with the name and number of the Geneva hotel.

  It was seven minutes later that the phone rang; Marino must have been more anxious to spend than

  usual. It was 9:30 in the morning here; Griffith wondered where Marino was phoning from.

  "I'm in New York," Marino said, by way of hello. "If you're in Geneva, I'll fly over today, we can have dinner at my place in Courmayeur."

  "Sounds urgent," Griffith said. He didn't mention that Marino also sounded nervous, rattled, something Griffith had never experienced with the man before.

  "No no," Marino said, "not urgent," belying the words with the manner in which they were said. "Just a chat, that's all, a little chat over dinner."

  I can drive down after lunch, get there before dark, Griffith thought, and said, "It will be wonderful to see you again, Pax."

  "You, too," Marino said, in a hurry, and hung up.

  Weird, Griffith thought. To sound upset like that, to make a phone call at what had to be three-thirty in the morning his time, not to take ten minutes to describe all his latest acquisitions, to rush across the Atlantic merely for dinner and a "chat"?

  And Marino would have to open the house in Courmayeur, too, because this was far too early for the season there. It wasn't till December that the rich Milanese would come up to open their winter chalets high in the Italian Alps. Paxton Marino would never be caught dead at any of his residences in the offseason; what was going on?

  The three-hour drive would have been a little shorter for a European, but Griffith, being an American, had to show his passport twice after getting onto the Route Blanche outside Geneva; first when crossing into France to reach the northern end of the Mont Blanc Tunnel at Chamonix, the second when emerging from the seven-and-a-quarter-mile tunnel into Italy near Courmayeur.

  The tunnel itself, repaired now after the grim 1999 fire that had incinerated thirty-nine people, seemed brighter than before, larger, even cleaner, and much more free of the big trucks, that always used to give a sense of menace to this tube through the mountain, but Griffith couldn't escape a faint sense of ghosts hovering just beneath the rounded roof, a trembling memory of all those screams, the awareness of just how dark this burrow inside the Alps would be without electric lights.

  Griffith didn't actually believe in ghosts, and yet he was always among them. He traded mostly in European paintings and sculpture, from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and most of the creators of those works had firmly believed in an unseen world, in spirits, in an often vengeful and occasionally merciful God. They'd painted saints and sinners, martyrs and miracles, and Griffith had steeped himself in their work.

  He had also, in the darker side of his profession, showed himself to be at one with the world those artists had described. He, too, was merely human, full of error. He didn't really believe in all that cosmic moral accounting, but he couldn't help some faint awareness in the back of his mind that, if retribution ever did fall on him, he'd damn well deserve it.

  Every dealer in valuable art, at a certain upper level of market worth, is offered the temptation now and again. To deal, in almost absolute safety, with stolen work, or forged work. Griffith at times envied those who had never fallen, but he also knew he could not possibly live as well, as comfortably, if he had been one of the virtuous ones. If virtue truly is its own reward, then Griffith regretfully had to go where the rewards were more palpable.

  And if he'd remained a good boy, he'd never have known Paxton Marino, would he? Never have filled the amazingly lucrative position of being Marino's exclusive art agent, both in the legitimate deals ... and in the others.

  After the Italian checkpoint at the southern terminus of the tunnel, Griffith turned his rented Audi toward the town. All around, the chalets scattered along the slopes of the Val d'Aosta like spilled Monopoly houses looked bare and solitary against the scruffy treeless ground, without their usual luxury coats of snow. A little farther up, the snow never left the rocky land completely, not even with the warming of the globe, and up there was where Griffith was now headed.

  Marino's ski chalet, built by him four years ago, lay north of the main resort, on the upslope fringe of Dolonne. From its main living room, on the west side of the house, the cable cars could be watched, floating upward like tiny toys toward Checruit.

  It wasn't the season yet for the cable cars. Empty, the black lines angled upward, off to his left, against a powder blue sky as cold as space. The Audi growled upward along the narrow road, happy with the challenge. Other traffic was sparse, mostly workers getting the chalets ready for the season.

  Marino's house was, for him, modest, a gleaming white concrete structure cantilevered westward over a steep slope, its western and southern faces banks of plate glass edged in chrome. The drive curved upward beneath the house, so that swimmers in the glass-bottomed indoor pool could watch arrivals down through the heated water and the greenish glass.

  The entry drive curled around the blank white north side of the house, facing the mountain, and ended at the east face, where the house met the land. Two staffmen were waiting outside the elaborate antique door, once part of a Landsruhe church, the only touch of wood on the facade of the house, one to take his luggage, the other to drive the Audi away to the garage.

  Griffith followed the staffman into the house, enjoying again the icy luxury, the sense of imperious control, that characterized all of Marino's houses. He was led to the guest room where he'd stayed the other three times he'd been here; the staff would have records of things like that.

  Putting his small suitcase on the bed, the staffman said, "Mr. Marino will see you at seven. He has not yet arrived."

  'Thank you."

  "If you wish to swim—"

  "Thank you, I know where it is. And I brought my suit."

  In the pool, Griffith saw the white Daimler arrive, tiny and toylike far below through the water and glass. (The pool was always disconcerting, but always a kick, too.) He was alone in the echoing and always faintly steamy swimming pool room, and he dove down to watch the Daimler disappear around the corner of the house, then surfaced again. -

  Because Griffith traveled among people who wined and dined very well indeed, he worked hard to keep himself in shape, with a small gym and lap pool at home in Dallas. Whenever while traveling he had an opportunity to swim laps he took it, staying in his lane even when the pool was as large and broad and empty as this one.

  Now, he sliced through the water for just three more laps—sixty—then climbed out, dried himself, put on the sandals he'd found in the guest room closet, and rode the small elevator up one floor, then walked the wide hall to his room. The clock on the bedside table read 6:43. He dressed, took his evening pills—high blood pressure, high cholesterol—and walked back along the hall to the broad living room, with its wonderful views west and south over the town of Courmayeur and all the other villas and villages nestled in the folds of the mountain's skirt.

  Marino wasn't here yet. Griffith accepted a Glenfiddich neat from the hovering staffwoman, and was standing in front of the view, swirling the drink in his mouth and the glass, when Marino arrived.

  "Horace!"

  Griffith turned, seeing his host cross toward him, hand outstretched: "Pax," he said, and accepted the firm handshake.

  And knew at once that something wasn't right. The urbane and calmly arrogant Paxton Marino he was used to wasn't here; in his place was an uncertain man, trying to hide his vulnerability. "Glad you could come, Horace," he said. "I had them fly up steaks from Rome, so we won't starve."

  "Good."

  Marino looked around for the staffwoman, saying,

  "Do you have a— Oh, you have a drink."

  "Yes." In negotiation, Griffith was known to be direct, sometimes unsettlingly so
, and he sensed he was in negotiation right now. "Pax," he said, making face and voice only concerned as a friend would be, "what's wrong?"

  Marino flashed something like his normal smile. "Wrong? Why should anything—" He broke off, with a different smile, and a headshake. "Why do I waste time trying to snow you? Sit down, sit down." Turning away, he said to the staffwoman, "A Pellegrino, Helga, and then we'll be fine." Meaning she should go away.

  Griffith took one of the low soft swivel chairs near the windows, as instructed, but once Marino got his glass of Italian water and Helga had padded away he remained on his feet, standing near Griffith but not looking at him, gazing at the valley out there instead.

  Griffith watched and waited. Marino was thought of as a handsome man, but really was not, as Griffith now noticed for the first time. What was seen as handsomeness was merely self-assurance, a cockiness of stance, a smiling confidence that the world belonged to him. Take away that assurance—which something had done, that much was clear—and what was left was a tall but pudgy man in his mid-thirties. With his puffy cheeks like a squirrel, and slack body, and contact lenses that flashed the light more than he knew, Marino at last looked like what he actually was: a bright but uncharismatic science major out of the California state university system, a Fresno boy whose past was pizza and skateboards, not the Alps.

  And not Horace Griffith. Like Marino, Griffith gazed out at the magnificent view. He wondered if Marino, too, might be thinking this was the last time either of them would see it.

  At last Marino spoke: "You know, Horace, they keep saying the new economy's going bust."

  "Yes, they do."

  "It isn't, of course." Marino glowered out at the day as though daring it to disagree. "It has growing pains, that's all, maybe even birth pangs. But the doomsayers keep coming on and coming on, and here and there what they create is a self-fulfilling prophecy."

  "I suppose so," Griffith said, wondering just how deep the hole was that Marino found himself in, and what the man expected Horace Griffith to do about it.

  "I am watched like a hawk," Marino said. "You know that, Horace. I spend my money, I enjoy my money, I don't keep a low profile."

  "No, you don't."

  "So, when I run into a cash-flow problem—"

  "Ah."

  'That's all it is," Marino insisted, turning his glower at last full on Griffith. Still standing there in all that Alpine light, he looked like a later Roman emperor, lesser and more effete, but still both powerful and dangerous. "I have a cash-flow problem," he said. "It's temporary. I'm projected to be out of it in less than eighteen months, probably under a year. But the problem is, if I'm seen to cut back anywhere, it will be taken as a sign."

  "Yes, of course."

  'That's where the self-fulfilling prophecy comes in," Marino said. "With the hyenas. With the schadenfreude."

  "We have that always with us," Griffith said.

  "Of course we do." Marino waved that away. "I have a certain image. If the stockholders—if the Street generally—sees me tightening my belt, even a little bit, it could start a run. Not a logical sensible run, an irrational run that could nevertheless destroy me."

  Marino drank a third of his Pellegrino, looked at it with a frown as though wishing now he'd asked for something stronger, and at last sat down, opposite Griffith, so that when they swiveled toward each other their profiles were to the view.

  "Here's the situation I'm in," Marino said. "I have to either slow my spending awhile or sell off some of my property. Either choice is a bad one, sending a bad message."

  "God, Pax," Griffith said. "You're in a hell of a situation here."

  "I know that." Marino turned his head to look out at the view, reconsidered, faced Griffith again. "It finally occurred to me," he said, "I could get out from under all this if I sold off assets nobody knows I have."

  Griffith instantly knew where Marino was going. The paintings, of course, hidden away beneath the lodge in Montana.

  Griffith and Marino had been doing business together three or four years, Griffith happy with this freewheeling spender who did have a natural flair and some education as a collector, and who was flattering in his attention to Griffith's occasional advice, when this other side of their relationship first was broached. 'There are paintings I'd love to own," Marino had said, in his hotel suite in London one evening after he and Griffith had attended a Sotheby's auction where Marino had been outbid twice but had managed three times to buy the pictures he'd wanted. "Paintings I'd love to own but I'll never get my hands on, and it just annoys me."

  "Why won't you?" Griffith had asked.

  "Because they aren't for sale. Either they're in museums, or they're in collections that will never come on the market."

  "We all have our impossible dreams," Griffith had said, still thinking this was a theoretical conversation, not yet understanding where Marino was headed.

  Which the man had next made clear: "Sometimes, though," he'd said, "paintings like that get stolen, and nobody ever sees them again. Except the thief, of course, or whoever the thief sold them to."

  "I suppose so," Griffith had agreed, thinking of the Mona Lisa, the most famous of such thefts, and even now, so many years after the recovery, the continuing doubt that the version in the Louvre was the original.

  "If a thief sold me a treasure like that," Marino had gone on, 'You can be sure I'd never say a word about it." Laughing, he'd said, "Not that I'd ever deal with a thief, not directly, but if you brought me something like that, I'd certainly trust you

  And that was where it had started. Griffith already did have contacts in that other shady world, had made dubious sales for dubious people, had a few times acted as go-between in deals involving thieves and insurance companies, and Marino, as it turned out, really did have a wish list. In the last few years, they hadn't completely checked off every item on that list, but they'd done very well.

  And Griffith himself had done very well in the process, knowing all along that in this arrangement he had taken one irrevocable step farther into the dark side than ever before. In the past, he had knowingly traded stolen property, he had knowingly represented forged property, but had never commissioned theft. On Paxton Marino's behalf, that's exactly what he'd now done. It had been risky, it had been nerve-wracking, it had cost him sleepless nights, but that's what he'd done.

  And now, somehow, it was to be undone. Griffith all at once felt very weary, as though he'd been rolling some boulder up a mountain all his life, only to discover at this late date it was the wrong boulder. On the wrong mountain. He said, "Pax, you can't just sell those paintings."

  "Oh, I know that." Marino, always a restless man, swiveled back and forth in his chair. "A couple months ago," he said, "we had a robbery at the lodge. They didn't get anything, thank God, and we got the thieves, or some of them, but they found the gallery."

  That news gave Griffith a sudden chill. He'd only agreed to go along with this mad magpie instinct in Marino because the paintings would disappear forever, would never be seen in the normal world again. He said, "So they know? Not the law." Meaning, or we'd both be in jail already.

  "No," Marino said, "the thieves don't seem to know what they stumbled on. They've been questioned pretty thoroughly, and they're the kinds of people who wouldn't know a Rembrandt from an Elvis on velvet. But the point is, after we got the mess cleaned up, the mess they made going in, and after we added more security measures, expensive I might say security measures, this other thing came up, the realization I shouldn't be spending more than usual, I should be spending less than usual. Or liquidating a few assets, to tide me over. And I thought, there are crooks out there, they know there's something in that place, in the lodge, and a couple of them got away. I don't expect them to come back, but who knows, they could spread the story, go to prison for some other crime, tell their friends on the inside. So I was thinking I should move them anyway, sooner or later, and then it came to me, why not sell off some of them? Solve this temporary
problem that way, at the same time I'm protecting myself against the crooks."

  Griffith's glass was empty, but he felt he shouldn't ask for more. He said, "What do you want me to do, Pax?"

  "You must have a list of them," Marino said. 'The things I've got stashed out there."

  "In code," Griffith said.

  "Well, sure, in code. The thing is, choose three or four of them, your choice, whichever ones you think would be easiest to move. Go to the insurance companies, the museums, wherever. Say the thieves have been in touch with you." Then Marino stopped, sat back, gave a surprised laugh. "Which they have been, in a way, haven't they?" he said.

  "You want me to negotiate on your behalf," Griffith said, "as though you're the thieves who took the paintings in the first place."

  'That's right. In the meantime, I want you to go to the lodge, pack them all up—I can't trust that to anyone else—get them ready to go. Because this is the other part of it."

  When Marino leaned closer to him like that, eyes intense, Griffith understood there was more to come, and that what was to come would be even worse.

  Marino said, "What I'd like to do, Horace, is ship them all to you in Dallas as though they were just minor paintings, no importance at all, and you can store them in a normal way. Then, when the time comes to turn a few over to an insurance company or a museum, you've already got them."

  Griffith swallowed. "And the rest?"

  "Eventually," Marino said, as though it were all simple and casual, "you'll ship them to wherever I set up a new gallery."

  "In the meantime, I hold on to them."

  "Sure."

  Millions of dollars of stolen artwork, in my vaults, Griffith thought. Famous paintings that any professional would recognize at once, stored in the safe rooms under my display space. I am suddenly deeper into this darkness than I've ever been before. But what can I do? I can't refuse. I got here by easy stages. Very easy stages.

  Marino gave him a keen look, and then smiled, feeling better because Griffith was feeling worse. "I know," Horace," he said. "Life is gonna get tricky for both of us for a while. But it's going to come out okay. We've got the touch, you and me. This is a little patch of rough road, and then it's smooth again."