From the shop I wandered upstairs into the actual art. Room by room, floor by floor, doing my best impersonation of a rube who thought he should at least put on a show of loving art.
And the embarrassing thing was that I do enjoy art. Maybe embarrassing is the wrong word. Unexpected might be more apt. I’m mostly uneducated, a (retired) criminal, and worst of all, an American – not the usual CV of an art lover. But I’m also a writer, a guy who creates what might very loosely be called art, of a sort, and I respect guys who do create art, whether with paint or chisel or words on paper.
‘You’re good at this. Don’t look at me.’
Delia. Standing to my side. Giving me a heart attack.
‘Agent D? I’m casing this place,’ I said, staring resolutely at a small self-portrait of the young Rembrandt.
‘I know. I’ve been watching you. You look very average, very much the tourist. Sometimes you almost seem to care about the art you’re looking at.’
That slighting crack didn’t bother me at all. If it had I might have said something like, ‘It’s a peek into another person’s epistemology, what they see, what they think about the things they see, how they digest what they see, how religion and ideology figure into it.’ All that first-year art student stuff.
‘Unexpected depths, David. You never cease to surprise me.’
‘And yet I managed to miss that I had a six-foot tall, African-American tail.’
I glanced at her. She winked at me. ‘FBI, baby. F and B and, also, I.’
‘Uh-huh. That and Chante told you where I’d be and what I was wearing. Why are you following me?’
‘I’m not following you. I’m seeing whether anyone else is following you.’
‘Ah. And?’
‘You’re clean.’
‘Did you happen to make any plainclothes cops cruising the area?’
‘There was one possible, but not probable.’ She made a dismissive snort. ‘Not exactly Fort Knox, is it?’
Delia drifted away, playing the art-lover, same as me. It was not a problem having her watch me, in fact, it was reassuring – on this occasion. But I did not at all like the fact that I hadn’t spotted her before she spotted me.
The Rijks has some very famous paintings – Rembrandts, Vermeers, Van Goghs – but I found myself staring for the longest time at a Lucas van Leyden, a six-foot-tall triptych altar piece of the Last Judgment. The center panel was Jesus sitting on a rainbow with his feet propped up on a cloud because recliners had not yet been invented. There were apostles and shadowy camp followers floating around with him, while below various folks freshly risen from the grave, and looking well-preserved for all that, were divided into the faithful and the sinners. The sinners were herded off to the right side panel, there to be beaten by demons and tossed into a flaming animal mouth.
The faithful were escorted to the left panel and included a statuesque blond woman with a very nice bare bottom being eyeballed by an angel in blue who was catching the full frontal denied to us viewers. But my favorite part showed a young, good-looking, very naked dude being shepherded toward heaven by an angel in red, who unabashedly grabbed the young man’s naked ass while shooting a defiant look at the viewer. The thought balloon would have read: Yeah, I’m grabbing some ass, why do you think they call it heaven? Sadly the thought balloon also had not been invented at that point in history.
Everything I was doing was performance art for the video cameras and the bored guards and the possible-not-probable plainclothes cops. I was making a movie for them, a movie about a brightly dressed, too-tan yahoo of a tourist doing his lonely best to appreciate culture, complete with eye-rolling, dismissive head shakes, admiring nods and occasional prurient leers.
One thing above all else caught my eye: they appeared mostly to have security cameras in the larger rooms. These cameras were mounted about a dozen feet up, set in the corners, aimed toward the center of the room. I did not know how wide their field of vision was, but there were certainly blind spots if only I knew where they were. It was theoretically possible that there were cameras in the smaller rooms and that they were concealed, but that would be silly: the point of cameras is to intimidate and unseen cameras don’t do that. No, the more likely explanation, the Occam’s answer, was simple: a given security guy can only really watch so many monitors at one time, and security guys have to be paid.
I assessed the guards I could see, a mix of retirees and students, all in blue blazers and neutral gray slacks. They had spiral wires behind their ears, but no guns. Not even billy clubs as far as I could tell, which made them essentially a non-factor, excluding some reckless hero leaping where he should only look.
I noticed other useful things as well. There were hatches placed irregularly in the hardwood floor. They did not have handles but I imagined I could pry one up with a screwdriver and gain access to electrical conduit or switches or something not worth taking a risk for. There were also ventilation panels set in the walls at an accessible height, plenty big enough for a man to hide in, but I didn’t like those at all. Nope. Definitely not. I don’t trust things that look too easy, too conveniently Mission: Impossible. The panels could be alarmed, or they could have motion sensors inside and the Rijksmuseum might not be quite Fort Knox, but surely they weren’t that stupid.
Was the Ontario Crew careless enough to want to look into those vents? I suspected not, not if they really were professionals.
I managed in my wandering to get a good sense of how the paintings were hung. The larger ones like the massive Night Watch, cantilevered out from the wall, hung by wire. The smaller ones mostly rested on brackets.
The museum also featured bits of ornate furniture, carved wooden chests and desks and cabinets, some of them quite tall, a detail that interested me.
There was loot taken from the Dutch East Indies, modern Java, including some excellent spears. And as a national brag they’d mounted the bulky, carved stern transom of the English flagship, Royal Charles. The Dutch had captured it in 1667 right in British home waters, then towed the Royal Charles to Amsterdam where the ship was broken up. They held onto the stern, the nautical equivalent of antlers.
The question I faced was simple: how would the Ontario Crew steal Jewess at the Loom the museum? But, as I’d suspected, the answers were mundane. They could do a simple snatch ’n’ run, grab the painting and beat feet for the most useful exit. Or they could do a basic B&E. Bash in a window at night, grab what they wanted and run before the cops could get there.
Then there were the usual subterfuges: enlist a guard or security person as an inside man. Or hide in some dark corner (say a too-convenient vent) until everyone had gone home.
I supposed if the Ontario Crew were flush with funds and wanted to seem cool rather than merely effective, they could climb the roof, cut through a skylight and drop down using a motorized winch like every dumb heist movie ever, but why? Why would anyone go to that trouble when all you had to do was grab the painting and run? The challenge was almost never stealing the art, it was always in fencing the damned stuff once you had it, but because the Ontario Gang were working under contract they had made that issue irrelevant. They could buy tickets, walk right up to the Vermeer, yank it off the wall, run for the exit and almost certainly make it out before security could call a lockdown. Risky, maybe, but for the money they’d been promised?
I mean, damn, were people in the art theft business making that kind of money nowadays? No. No, surely not. I supposed it was nothing to a war-profiteering billionaire sociopath like Isaac maybe, but still … Good God. Maybe I’d retired too early.
Take the Jewess off the wall, run away, hide from the inevitable manhunt, then get the Vermeer to Dan-o ‘The Chipman’ Isaac and get paid. That was the Ontario Crew’s remit, and for that kind of payday I’d take a shot at the British crown jewels.
The problem with me stopping the Ontario Crew was obvious: unless I knew the ‘when’, the ‘how’ didn’t much matter. The museum had unarmed guards. T
hey probably had plainclothes floaters. They clearly had remote lockable doors between many of the rooms, blank gray and as out of place aesthetically as a Lego brick in a Tiffany egg. And they had cameras.
What was I supposed to do, buy a blue blazer and become a guard? And anyway, then what? I yell, ‘Stop, thief?’ And, somehow they’re stopped but with no impolitic police involvement?
Delia had said it takes a thief, but that was nonsense. What it took was cops, LEOs – Law Enforcement Officers. Cops to lay on added security, cops to squeeze informants for information, cops to search hotel registries for the Ontario Crew. I was one guy, one guy who couldn’t stay half an hour in any one spot in the museum without being asked to state my business.
There was a coffee shop (a real coffee shop) tucked into what amounted to a wide stairway landing on the north side of the Rijks. It was illuminated by a big, clear, pedestrian-height window looking out onto Stadhouderskade, the busy avenue separating the Rijks from the old city. That window was one way out if the lockdown had been instituted too quickly for exit by front door. Grab the painting, bash the window out, and you had street, tram and canal, all right there. Of course it was double-pane glass, which meant a nice, heavy sledgehammer, which would not be subtle because, as every good burglar knows, breaking double-pane glass makes an unholy noise.
I sat in the little coffee shop beneath graceful, echoing arches and focused with great seriousness on the problem of stopping the Ontario Crew. I really did. But there was a tingling in the back of my head and a sly voice whispering, you know how to do this. That sly voice was not referring to stopping the Ontario Crew. Sly voice had a whole different idea in mind.
No, David. No.
I shook my head, dismissing that seductive satanic voice, and refocused. There were exactly three sensible ways to stop the Ontario Crew from stealing the Vermeer.
1. Call in the cops.
2. Locate the crew before they struck, and dissuade and/or kill them.
3. Wait until the theft was complete and try to grab them as they exited, or when they reached a hideout.
Delia vetoed option Number One. Option Number Two? Setting aside dumb luck I was not going to be able to find the crew before they struck. That would require police resources, see Number One. Number Three had the same problem.
Funny how useful cops are in catching criminals.
There’s another way …
My mind sang that phrase, turned way into way-ay. There’s another way-ay, David. Martin knows there’s another way-ay …
As a criminal I’d been a competent craftsman. I was good. But I had never been an artist. That’s what Hangwoman was trying to do, I had decided: turn murder into art, which was probably giving her too much credit, she was most likely just an idiot, but I preferred to think I was being targeted by a clever bunny who I would outfox, rather than a cretin I could only hope would accidentally hang herself with her own rope or poison herself with her own roofies.
I had always been too results-driven to dabble in art. I was a master criminal – a judge during a bail hearing once called me that – but I had never seen crime as a creative outlet; rather, I had used, improved upon, even perfected, tricks that had been around since the days of whoever Paul Newman and Robert Redford were supposed to represent in The Sting. I knew what I was, and I respected who I was, but I had never been the crime world’s Picasso or Van Gogh. I didn’t revolutionize anything.
Which is why the taunting voice in my head was so hard to ignore. It wasn’t just that I’d figured out a clever way to do a job for Delia, thus ensuring my continued freedom from FBI attentions. That part I’d already worked out: simple, efficient, probably safe and I knew how to make it safer. That was all just craft and experience. But what I had just begun to conceptualize would be art. Criminal art.
It would be brilliant if I could make it work. If. Huge if. Without even having gotten into the weeds of detailed planning yet I sensed layers of complication and risk. But if … If, if, if … I would revolutionize art theft. I would singlehandedly redefine the genre, like Le Carré with spy novels, or Ferran Adrià with haute cuisine. The world of art theft would be divided into pre-Mitre and post-Mitre. Though, hopefully, my name(s) would not be attached.
What also occurred to me, along with visions of a place in the criminal pantheon was the dollar sign, as well as the euro sign and that squiggly L-looking thing that denotes a British pound. All those lovely symbols danced in my head. Because if, if, if … I would revolutionize art theft, while doing a mitzvah for the FBI and simultaneously take down the biggest score of my life.
The word irony did occur. Also the word hubris.
But I wouldn’t do it if it was hubristic. I would only do it if I knew I could. If I had worked through every detail. If I had minimized every possible risk.
If I could do this …
I sat there sipping an Americano in the Rijksmuseum coffee shop and I had chills. Because I knew now exactly how I could stop the Ontario Gang: Option number 4.
I was going to steal the Vermeer myself.
SEVEN
Once I’d thought a bit more I walked back through the Rijks, this time with an eye not to stopping the Ontario Crew but with my own plans in mind. I was looking for something specific and I found a couple of possibilities.
First was a massive, very ornate dresser that stood a good seven feet tall and was outside camera view but not far from the spot where they’d be hanging the Jewess at the Loom.
And I found a second, more desperate answer in one of the back stairwells. There was a little hatch in the wall concealing a water main shut-off. The hatch was not locked. I spread my hand in front of the hatch for scale and took a picture. It would mean doing a bit of damage to the paintings frame, and I didn’t want that, but in an emergency it’d do.
My scouting expedition to the Rijks had convinced me of something I didn’t want to accept: I was going to need help, human help. Whenever possible I fly solo in my criminal enterprises and avoid crime partners like the plague, because there’s a synonym for crime partner: witness for the prosecution. But just the shopping, let alone the operating of various devices and a bit of DIY construction, would mean many days if I tried to do it all, and if I was going to do this it had to be done very soon after the Vermeer went on display in just six days. Any more time and the Ontario Crew might make off with my painting.
That’s right, my painting.
There was a guy I knew, and he was probably not far away, unless he was in stir, which, in his case, was a distinct possibility. His name was Ian McSweeney. He was an Irishman, a lousy thief, a mediocre grifter and rather more violent than I am comfortable with. But he owed me and he was almost certainly broke and best of all, when he worked – which was seldom – it was in construction, so he was good with his hands. Presumably. Anyway, better than me.
I searched my memory for the name he knew me by. I keep useful contacts I don’t want anyone to find in my One Password file, all nicely encrypted and hidden behind a computer-generated, sixteen-character password I dare the NSA or GCHQ to crack.
I opened the latest, updated end-to-end encryption app and texted:
Me: It’s Jimmy C. I have profitable work for you.
I didn’t expect an immediate response, but unless Ian had changed his number he’d get the message and he would respond. Ian could no more ignore me than I’d been able to ignore Azevedo, because I knew things about Ian.
The rain stopped in late afternoon, and by nine that night, when I again ventured out, I could spot occasional stars through breaks in the overcast sky.
Twan Van Geel turned out to be a thin dude with long, stringy blond hair – rather like what I’d been told to expect of Milan Smit. Twan was a decent thrash metal axe man backed by an excellent drummer, with Cookie Monster lyrics growled by a front man who sounded as if he dined on raw flesh.
Headbangers do love the dramatic.
My bartender Ella wasn’t on duty, so I wormed my wa
y to the bar, hand on wallet the whole way – crowds and pickpockets go together like bacon and eggs – and ordered a Johnnie Black which I carried around but did not drink.
My immediate problem was finding Smit, if he was there. The crowd was thick, on its feet and obscured by the band’s smoke machine. It was a sea of bobbing heads lit by strobes punctuated by frequent air-punching. I pushed my way around the room, beset on all sides by jumping, thrusting, heaving bodies, largely male given that the music was metal. The crowd was different from Tim Armstrong’s crowd on my initial visit – no gaggle of giggling Japanese girls, more dudes who looked like trouble, some of whom did not like the look of me: I was a well-dressed guy lacking interesting hair, extravagant beard or other visible evidence of rebelliousness. Also, I looked like I probably had some cash in my wallet. When I left I was going to want to make sure no one was following me.
Two hours I stood and occasionally sat and milked that one Scotch. I was offered sex three times, twice straight, once gay; I was offered drugs once, and sex plus drugs once. Two different junkies thought I’d be an easy touch and started to regale me with their life stories, so I gave them each a tenner and they disappeared.
All through the band’s first set, a break, then the start of their second set I endured, and finally, there he was. Possibly. Anyway, he was tall, blond and looked like trouble. When I managed to get closer I confirmed the presence of a Hell’s Angels Antwerp jacket. Bingo. I had my guy and I was pretty pleased with myself.
And … now what?
I could try to cozy up to him but a 42-year-old, conservatively dressed, expensively coiffed guy vs. a metalhead in an Angels jacket was not the basis of friendship, it was grounds for suspicion. He’d make me for a narc or a perv.
Which left following Smit when he left, and that was not going to be soon.
An Artful Assassin in Amsterdam Page 7