by Robert Ward
Hadn’t he, of all the old gang at Hopkins, been the only one who lived out their dreams of being downtown shrinks for life, living among the people who really needed both therapy and a radical perspective on their lives?
So hadn’t he accrued points, thousands upon thousands of points, like a kind of moral good cholesterol that could be charged off against this one bad act?
Besides, if he had that much money (millions!) he could use some of it to help the poor, but really help them. Not just give them his useless pep talk, but a grant. The Bob Wells Grant to Deserving People. People Bob singled out as worthy of his help. A single mother who was trying to put her kids through school. A struggling artist who couldn’t paint because of poverty. A handicapped man who wanted to start a clinic for other handicapped people. Yes, why the hell not? He could be a kind of modern Robin Hood!
All he needed was a plan, and some help. What did second-story men call their gang? A crew. That was it. He needed a crew of guys….
And he knew right where to start. Ray Wade. His old friend, Ray Wade, he of the six-inch sideburns and the fifties DA. Ray Wade, whom he’d have to watch like a hawk, but who wasn’t all that bad of a guy. Slick Ray would help him put together the right crew.
But before contacting Ray he had to do some work on his own. He had to find this Colin Edwards and see if he really did want the mask. That was the first piece of business. Bob threw his head back and laughed.
It was terrible what he was going to do. It went against everything he’d ever learned, everything he stood for. By all rights he should be sick to his stomach for even thinking about betraying his patient, becoming a criminal.
So how come it felt so right? How come he was standing here by the pier, freezing from the cold winds, and laughing his ass off?
Because he was, for the first time in more years than he cared to think about, standing up for himself. Fighting back. And nothing felt better than that. Besides, Emile Bardan was a rich man. In the end, he’d probably be better off without the damn mask in his life. He’d move on, forget the whole thing. And hell, he must have insurance on the goddamned thing. So really, the only loser was some crooked insurance company, people who, if you really thought about it, probably deserved to get ripped off.
Really, it was a win-win situation.
One little move. One little crime and he and Jesse would be set for life.
This was good, Bob thought, as he walked toward Jesse’s. This was the best idea he’d ever had and the truth was, moral qualms aside, he couldn’t wait to get started.
PART II
RAIN OF STONE
CHAPTER NINE
Practicing psychology was such an ambiguous profession. He was never sure how much he’d really helped any of his patients or, to be honest, if, even after years of therapy, he’d helped them at all. In fact, he was pretty sure that there were at least a few patients who’d gotten worse under his care. But crime … crime was like … well, business. You stole something, you sold it to another guy, and you reaped the rewards. It was straightforward, American. You didn’t have to justify your profession by saying that somewhere along the line maybe you’d done some good. You had your reward sitting there in front of you. Cash! And plenty of it! And in the end, Bob told himself, wasn’t this what people really valued? Power? Money? No matter what else they gave lip service to.
So he would do it at last. Lay his absolutist morals aside—okay, temporarily aside—and make some real money. But that led him directly into his first problem.
What was the mask actually worth? Somewhere in his patients’ notes, Bob found that Emile had said it was “priceless.” But what the hell did that mean? For the next three days, Bob traveled to various public libraries to use their computers, so no one could trace the searches back to his home.
What he found out was a little disheartening.
Utu was known in ancient Babylon as the ruler of heaven and earth, a god who “lived to render justice” and “who dealt out swift punishment to those who broke the law.” From his shoulders he “issued bands of light,” the “light of justice,” and in his hands he carried a “many-toothed saw,” presumably to hack the limbs off criminal offenders.
Jesus, Bob thought, just his luck. He finally has a shot to cash in big but he’s got to offend the god of justice himself. He shut his eyes and envisioned Utu coming for him like … like … Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a screaming power saw aimed at his neck. The very thought of it made him break out in a sweat.
Of course, he told himself seconds later, the whole idea of Utu was absurd. Just some primitive way of keeping the citizenry in check. It wasn’t like he was really up there in the sky watching Bob, getting his new Skarie Skill saw ready to hack him to bits. Bob only felt nervous, he was sure, because the whole thing—betraying the trust of his patient, stealing a valuable work of art—well, all of that would be enough to make any honest man nervous. And especially Bob, who had always been so intent on doing the right thing, the moral thing, as though God were watching him, keeping tabs on his efforts. That was it. He’d always had this feeling he was being watched, graded by the Big Teacher in the Sky, so now he was simply transferring his feelings of the Big Moralistic Sky Daddy from Jesus and Karl Marx to Utu.
Of course, that’s all it was.
What he had to do was literally say, Fuck all that. Fuck Jesus in the sky, and fuck old Big Daddy Karl, and fuck Utu, too. Yeah, that was it. Fuck Utu and the whole nervous-making “god of justice” bit.
After all, where was the justice in his wife leaving him for Rudy fucking Runyon, the old fraud? Where was the justice in a guy like George Bush becoming president of the United States? No, wait, stealing the presidency from AI Gore? Where was the justice for the millions of Negroes who had been slaves?
But the hell with all that. Forget justifying what he was going to do. He had to be practical, find out what the fucking mask was worth. Like any real criminal would.
He ran a Google search and found that the mask was sold by one Lawrence Stapleton to an “undisclosed buyer” in 2003, and that it was, indeed, “considered priceless.”
An “undisclosed buyer.” That must be Emile.
But there it was again. “Considered priceless?” Christ, how many times in movies and novels had he seen the word “priceless” used? Usually by some ascot-wearing, crooked art dealer in forties movies, Clifton Webb maybe, a golden cigarette holder in his trim hand. “Yes, my good man, that etching is priceless.” But in those movies guys like Webb always knew exactly how much money “priceless” really meant.
Bob, on the other hand, had no idea. “Priceless” might mean one million, it might mean twenty. How the hell did he know what to ask?
He ran another Google search, looking up “Utu,” and after an exhaustive effort found that the mask had been purchased for between nine and ten million dollars in 1956.
Bob felt his heart start racing. Nine and ten million dollars? The thought was too much for him. He couldn’t imagine walking up to Colin Edwards and demanding that much. The guy would laugh at him or maybe just shoot him in the head.
No, what he had to do was to find Edwards and convince him that he could deliver the mask at a price. So the question then wasn’t really how much was the mask worth, but how much did Bob and Jesse need? Bob was much more comfortable when he thought of the heist in that way. Why, it was almost a Marxist solution to the problem. “To each man according to his needs.” So how much did they need, then?
How about two million?
Two million dollars.
Strange, but only yesterday, two million dollars sounded like a tremendous amount of money. Back in the sixties and seventies, two million dollars was all the money in the world. But now, with a fabulous-looking woman like Jesse, and a third of his life left, two million suddenly seemed like, well, chicken feed. Especially, when you considered that this was it, the big shot, his only shot.
Okay then, how about three? Three was b
etter. “Three” had a solid sound about it. Much better than “two.” But what about relocation? Christ, moving to wherever it was they decided on. Say, Mexico, for example. For years he had thought about leaving America to live in San Miguel de Allende, but after a few looks on Google at the housing market in old San Miguel, it was obvious the place wasn’t the artists’ paradise it once had been. Christ, some of the whitewashed bungalows, with the rose trellis walls, were now going for five or six hundred thousand dollars. The days when a starving painter or poet (or retired shrink) could move down there, get himself a groovy little bungalow, and hang out at the Instituto de San Miguel attending free openings and guzzling the free chardonnay were gone forever. No, three million dollars wouldn’t last that long there, especially since it might be hard to find any kind of decent work. And what if he and Jesse moved to Mexico and hated it there? They very well might despise the rich, retired squares who hung in such a place, trying, at sixty-five, to become the painters and poets they didn’t have the guts to be when they were young. God, if that happened they’d have to move again. Which would mean an even greater expense.
To hell with it, Bob thought. Three million wasn’t going to work in Mexico.
And if Mexico was out, so was Costa Rica. Of course, Costa Rica was much cheaper, but it was also much less developed. He was used to a certain amount of action and where would he find it down there? Who the hell would his playmates be? Machete-toting guys named Juan who hung at the jungle bodega? And what would Jesse do all day, hang out with the sloths in the trees? Become a nature nut who went out with tourists to see the coatimundi or the howler monkeys? Face it, he was too old now to start over on some beach with a bunch of moronic peasants and parrots jabbering at him. They’d be worse than his patients.
No, three million wasn’t going to make it and there was no way he was being selfish or greedy here. The truth was just a lot more complex than he’d ever considered. He had a younger woman now, one who thought she was moving up the food chain by latching onto a big-time shrink as a boyfriend. She wasn’t going to dig some place where the chief social activity was taking a canoe trip down a river to find the Sacred Caiman.
That meant that the very third world countries he had always fantasized about retiring to were totally out of the picture.
Face it, he was an urban guy and he needed an urban environment. Well, most of the year anyway. What they really needed were two homes. A city home and a little hideaway, a shack by the sea.
And the price of houses being what they were in any place that anybody who was anybody would want to live was going to be exorbitant.
Three wasn’t going to make it. Hell, you buy the two houses and boom, you’re broke. It was going to take four, at least four.
But then there was the car problem. For years he’d driven a piece-of-shit, ancient Volvo, like the good, nonmaterialistic lefty he was, but he couldn’t expect a young girl like Jesse to share this sentiment. She wanted to have a fashionable car, one she’d be proud to drive around in, and hell, to be perfectly honest, he wanted her to have a cool car, too. As an older man with a younger woman he had to keep her happy. She wasn’t going to be into making sacrifices for “the people.” Hell, she was the people. She was from funky Beckley, West Virginia, and she’d done all the “sacrificing” she was ever going to do with Dwight. She loved Bob, he was sure of it, but he was a meal ticket, too, and that was cool. It made him kind of a patriarch, okay, a patriarch without kids, but a great older man nonetheless. A man with a mysterious past, a man with a swell-looking blonde babe, a man with two houses and cool cars. Maybe a two- or three-year-old Jaguar would do. For her. But he also had to have a car. Maybe a slightly battered but still great-looking Porsche.
So four wasn’t quite right, either. Nah, it would have to be five. Five million was the price and the truth was, he wasn’t really sure if they could get by on that.
But he didn’t want to price himself out of the market.
No, five was really rock bottom. He had to get five or he’d have to find another guy to buy the damn mask. Whoever that might be. And he had to think about that, too. Jesus, there was a lot to consider when you became a criminal. It wasn’t an easy gig. Not at all.
Emile had already let it slip that his office was in his house. That was good. And that the mask was in a safe within the office. Probably behind a painting or something, or perhaps on the floor. In any case it shouldn’t be too hard to find it. But before you could get to the safe you had to get by the guards. Two guards. And then there was the alarm. Somehow you had to detach it, something he knew nothing about. But even assuming you could get rid of the alarm, sneak by the guards, and find the safe, how the hell would you ever crack it? In movies guys listened to the tumblers on some kind of microphone and they just knew. Well, Bob could stand there listening for twenty years and have no idea what he’d heard. And then there was the little problem of finding this Colin Edwards person. And making the deal with him. Not to mention somehow actually collecting the money. After all, what was going to stop Colin Edwards from taking the mask and giving Bob a suitcase full of newspapers? Or for that matter, giving Bob counterfeit money? How the fuck would he know the difference?
Wait, he was moving too fast again. The first thing he had to do was find Edwards and make the deal.
How to do that? On the off chance that all this would be resolved in an easy fashion, Bob tried calling information in the Baltimore-Washington area, but there was, of course, no listing for the man.
Okay, forget it. Don’t beat up on yourself. How best to proceed?
Ask Emile about Edwards? Pry a little. And how would he do that?
“Excuse me, Emile I was just wondering where this Edwards fellow lives? I’m thinking about stealing the mask and …”
No, that wouldn’t do. Emile must never think that he had contacted his enemy.
Okay, then what did he know? Only what Emile had told him. That Edwards drove a silver BMW, that he sometimes parked near Emile’s house in order to mock or unnerve him. That was it. He’d set up a post, like a spy on reconnaissance until he saw the silver BMW, and then …
He’d have to improvise.
First, he had to lie to Jesse again. He’d tell her that there was more financial work that needed to be done. He’d have to meet with his accountant tonight. Maybe for a few nights. He hated lying to her, but he reminded himself that the ends surely justified the means.
Because if he was going to keep her around he had to have the money.
That was the simple truth of it all. Lie now. Make love later. Everything else was just idle conversation.
CHAPTER TEN
The only problem with Bob’s plan was that after two weeks of casing Emile Bardan’s house, he still hadn’t seen Colin Edwards or any of his so-called crew. He had tried watching the house from a stoop down the street, from the back alley, and from the roof of a burned-out row house directly across the street from Bardan’s place, but he hadn’t seen one suspicious character the entire time.
Bob’s middle-aged back hurt and his stomach rumbled from eating junk food. His fallen arches were radiating little circles of pain. Plus, he was tired, really tired, and discouraged. He thought of a line of one of his patients, a black kid who’d gotten involved in gangs. When he didn’t like somebody, he said, “Dissed and dismissed,” and that was how Bob felt now. Shut down before he’d even begun.
But he had to fight through that. Get positive again.
He told himself that the stakeout wasn’t a total loss. He’d found out quite a bit about Emile’s habits. Every Friday night Emile made the rounds of the local art shows, and ended up at the Havana Club, an illegal gambling casino out on the Ritchie Highway. From there, Emile went home with a Cuban woman named Laura Santiago. She lived on the opposite side of town, way out in the county, so Emile didn’t get back until the next morning. During that time, he left two guards at his place, one downstairs and one up on the third floor. Obviously this was where
the safe was. But how he was going to get past two armed guards was anybody’s guess.
By the end of the third week, Bob became depressed. Obviously his stakeout was a flop. He’d have to find the guy some other way. But how? He’d already tried looking up Edwards on the Internet and found nothing. Maybe Edwards had lost interest. Gone off to steal some other work of art? Then what? Bob stayed up late, working on the computer, trying to find another buyer. There were a few names that kept coming up in all the stories about the missing mask. One was a man named Tommy Asahina, a Japanese collector.
The guy had served time for swindling investors in a securities and exchange scam. Maybe he would want to buy the mask. But calling him was to make himself vulnerable. Bob didn’t really want to start a bidding war. He just wanted to do this not-so-simple transaction and then disappear from the world.
By the last day of the fourth week, Bob had nearly given up hope. Sighing unhappily, he shoved his binoculars into his jacket pocket and headed on home. All his plans were on the rocks and he had no clear image of where he might go from here. He had to come up with some other plan, maybe push Emile to tell him where Edwards was now. That was risky as hell, but it was all he could think of.
Weary and aching in every joint in his body, Bob shuffled along down the street, heading back to his own neighborhood. Some damn crook he’d turned out to be. He couldn’t even find the buyer, much less grab the prize.
He turned down Aliceanna Street, trying to keep all the negative thoughts out of his mind. Every rookie criminal must go through times like this, he told himself. It was how you responded to a crisis that determined if you were going to be a great villain or just another cheap little punk. What he had to do was keep his hopes up … stay positive. What he had to do was …