“Newspaper friends and very nice officers are useful in your line of work, I’d imagine. And coffee is a standard bribe?”
Her smile seemed genuine. “Coffee, whiskey, donuts … it’s not too hard to figure out the little ways to grease the wheels.”
I rubbed the back of my neck to get rid of the prickle of unease the words inspired. I had always been uncomfortable with the culture of favors because I’d grown up hearing about all the ways it could be abused.
Anna’s head canted to the side. “That bothers you.” She nodded as if it fit some version of me she’d decided on.
“I’ve seen the worst sides of small favors.”
“In the security business, or someplace else?” We’d sat down on a bench to drink our coffee, and I considered her question for a long moment before answering.
“My parents were journalists in Iran. They and some of their friends belonged to the Iranian Writer’s Association, which was openly critical of the Iranian authorities. Because of the IWA’s fight against censorship, it was banned shortly after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, but members managed to get around the ban by meeting for dinner at each other’s homes. Our home was always full of writers, poets, and journalists, and it seemed as though every conversation involved discussions of exposing the rampant practice in Iranian society of offering favors and bribes to government officials who had one hand out and the other on their gun. In 1996, a bus of IWA writers was nearly driven off a cliff – twice – and two years later, a series of brutal murders of IWA members became known as the Chain Murders. An investigation revealed there were similar deaths stretching back ten years, and all the deaths appeared to be linked directly to ministers inside the government.”
I finally looked up from the paper cup in my hands to see Anna’s eyes, wide with shock, watching me.
“So, my parents left Iran when I was seven and my brother was three. They left because they could no longer tell the truth and expect to survive it.”
I finished my coffee and stood to throw the cup away. Anna had huddled herself on the bench with her feet up and both arms wrapped around her knees. She looked up at me with still-wide eyes.
“I’m sorry for what they experienced,” she said quietly.
I shrugged in an attempt to appear unaffected by the fact that I had just told a virtual stranger more about my family than I’d shared with anyone in years.
“I’m sorry that they had to leave their home to keep you safe.”
“Me too,” I said. “Not that I remember much about living in Iran, but I do realize how much they gave up. Intellectuals, no matter how privileged their former lives were, are just immigrants in another country.”
Those were exactly the conversations I didn’t have out loud, which was why my voice sounded too bright in my ears when I said, “Not a comfortable subject, in my experience. Let’s go inside, shall we?” I held a hand out to her to help her rise from the bench. It was unnecessary and overkill, but it made me feel better to touch her for a moment as she stood.
“To the Blue Room?” she asked as she dropped her coffee cup into the bin.
“It’s either that or we have to talk our way onto the fourth floor,” I said, less jokingly than I was comfortable with.
She waved her hand airily. “I have a plan for that.”
“I don’t want to know,” I said with genuine feeling.
Her smile was wide, and I enjoyed seeing it far too much. “Good. Because I’m not going to tell you.”
We were walking down the West Cloister toward the Blue Room when Anna suddenly stopped in front of a planter full of daffodils. “Do you think any of the worms are left over from the dead guy who used to sleep in this?”
I stared at her for a shocked moment. “Well, that’s a remarkably disturbing thought,” I said when I realized that the planter was in fact a repurposed sarcophagus.
“I think it would be exceptionally cool to meet a worm descended from one who had eaten Socrates.” There was a glint in her eyes that didn’t bode well for decorum.
“Don’t say it,” I warned as we passed a man whose expression was the picture of pomposity.
She grinned mischievously. “Who else could reasonably say they’d gotten inside his head?”
I couldn’t help the laughter, and the ridiculousness of it made me feel lighter. But Anna wasn’t done. She added, “Which begs all the questions about zombie worms, and whether we are who and what we eat, and if so, shouldn’t there be hemlock growing in there?”
“Hemlock?” I asked, helpless against the laughter.
“It’s how they killed Socrates.”
“Why do you know that?”
She smirked. “Why don’t you?”
“What else do you know that I don’t?” I demanded, trying and failing to control the smirk on my own face. She seemed to accept my challenge though, because she stopped and considered me for a moment before answering.
“Three percent of the ice in Antarctic glaciers is made up of penguin pee.”
She delivered the fact with a completely straight face, and I bit the inside of my cheek to keep the smile at bay. “I didn’t know that.”
“The reason Queen Elizabeth I had such elaborate scrollwork under her signature was to fill the page so no one could add anything else to the document she signed.”
This time my eyebrows arched in surprise. “Seriously?”
She grinned. “One more and you buy me an ice cream?”
“Sure, if you think you can stump me.” In fact, it fascinated me that she knew such random and obscure bits of information, and I found myself revising my expectations about Anna Collins.
“Okay, who is the biggest tire manufacturer in the world?” Anna bounced on the balls of her feet, and her excitement lifted something heavy from my chest.
“Hmm, Goodyear? They have the blimp after all.”
“Nope.” Her grin was huge, and I couldn’t help the answering smile. “It’s LEGO. They make fifty percent more tires than Bridgestone or Goodyear.” She held out her hand to shake mine. “I like really good gelato, or anything chocolate, just so you know.”
I gestured for her to precede me into the Blue Room as I asked, “Internet or books?”
“Both,” she smiled happily. “I especially love everything in Atlas Obscura. I plan my trips around the random stuff they write about.”
“You like to travel?”
“I love to travel. I’ve never actually lived any place longer than six months because I get itchy and want to explore.” She stopped suddenly and stared at the wall where Madame Auguste now hung. “Oh!”
My gaze followed hers as I tried to ignore the hollowness her words had provoked. How long had she lived in Chicago? And how soon would it be time for her to move on?
I followed her to the painting Manet had made of his mother and studied Anna for a few stolen moments while she studied the painting.
She looked free, as though she were only slightly domesticated. Her hair was riotous, her skin was bare of make-up except for some smudges of old mascara that served to make her eyes look smoky rather than unwashed, and her uniform of jeans, boots, a T-shirt, and a man’s jacket was perversely feminine.
“So, do you have any other cases to do here?” I asked, so that I didn’t ask about when she planned to leave Chicago.
She shook her head as she studied Madame Auguste. “Nothing on the books. I’ll put the word out that I’m on the East Coast and find out if any of my regulars have work for me here. Are you seeing this?” Her voice had a breathless quality that finally turned my attention to the painting in front of us.
Madame Auguste Manet was hung high on the wall in an ornate gold frame, which made the painting all the more imposing. It was difficult to discern the details in her face, but the skin of her hands and the details of the cuffs of her dress seemed identical to the painting that Anna carried in the portfolio on her shoulder.
“It’s beautiful,” she breathed as she studied th
e delicate black lace peeking out from beneath an inky sleeve. The long strokes just visible in the black on black paint blended with enough white to mimic the sheen of silk.
She turned to me with wide eyes and whispered, “We have to see them side by side.”
My eyes darted around the Blue Room, empty now but for a bored docent near the door. Anna’s gaze followed mine, and she thought for a moment, then handed me the portfolio and strode off toward the man. “Excuse me,” she called, in an apologetic tone. Her voice dropped to something conspiratorial, and when they bent their heads together to speak, I quickly removed Anna’s painting from its case.
I held it up to compare the two paintings. Anna’s had clearly been cut from its frame, but the image was the same size as the Manet on the wall above me.
“There, the brush strokes are the same,” Anna whispered at my shoulder. Her return to the Manet corner of the Blue Room had been completely silent, and I looked over my shoulder, expecting the docent to be glaring at us.
“He’s gone to get maintenance to plunge the toilet. We have about three minutes. Hold it close and I’ll photograph what I can.” Her voice was quiet and yet totally confident, and her phone was already in her hand aimed at the Manet on the wall.
Two minutes later, we strolled out of the Blue Room and ducked behind a pillar as the confused docent hurried back into the now empty room.
I knew there were cameras in the Blue Room, but I also knew they weren’t manned, and therefore, unless something went missing, the recordings wouldn’t be reviewed by human eyes. With Anna’s painting stowed safely back in the portfolio that hung over my shoulder, we strolled back out to the museum café and grabbed a table in the corner of the big, wide-open room.
Anna sat down and pulled out her phone to scroll through the photos she’d taken of the two paintings. She enlarged each one and studied them for several minutes before she handed the phone to me.
“They’re identical,” she said.
“There are lots of ways they could be different.” I wasn’t exactly sure what I was arguing for, because the certainty about my purpose here had begun to slip since I’d seen Anna again.
“You’re right. Canvas, types of pigment, age, x-rays to show progression …”
She reacted to the surprise that must have been on my face. “My mom’s an artist, remember? She actually restores paintings for a living. That kind of stuff tends to seep into dinner conversations, you know?”
This woman continued to surprise me. I felt as though I wore a perpetually startled look whenever I was with her. “Your mother restores art? Would she be able to tell when your Manet was painted?”
Anna scowled. “It’s not my Manet. I told you, I found it.”
I stood up before I said something I’d regret. “I know it’s not gelato, but will ice cream from a café do?”
She gave me a side-eyed glance. “If you want bites of ice cream sandwich, you get your own, because I’m not sharing.”
I shrugged, barely suppressing the grin her petulant-five-year-old expression inspired. “I’m getting a 50/50 bar. I don’t want your ice cream sandwich anyway.”
Her side-eye turned speculative. “What’s that?”
“Really? You mean there’s something I know that you don’t?”
She rolled her eyes and pulled out her phone. “Not for long.”
“Okay fine. It’s a vanilla ice cream bar with an orange popsicle coating outside. You can get the same effect, only better, if you mix frozen concentrate orange juice into a bowl of vanilla ice cream.”
Anna wrinkled her nose, then seemed to reconsider. “Sweet and sour. Yeah, I get it. Kind of like you.” She flashed me a giant grin and I chuckled all the way through the line to buy our ice cream.
23
Anna
“Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.”
Anna Quindlen
Questioning the museum docents about the Manet seemed pointless in light of the fact that nothing with Madame Auguste was amiss, and they definitely didn’t want to talk about the heist. They all just seemed to answer with rehearsed phrases about focusing on all the amazing art still in the building, even though the empty frames on the walls practically begged for heist questions. I wanted to talk to Crystal, the lovely young MassArt student, but she wouldn’t be in until after two p.m., so I checked the portfolio into the museum coat check, then returned a call to my D&D friend Taylor’s contact at The Boston Globe. That was how Darius and I came to be seated across from a guy nicknamed Double D, whose byline was Dave DeAngelis, and who had been writing for The Globe since 1988.
We were at a small table in the back of a bar that could have been the set of any mob movie from any period of American history in the past hundred years. D, which is how he’d introduced himself, had a pint of some very dark beer in front of him. Darius had ordered a lager, and I had a glass of some Italian red wine that didn’t look like it would leave me with a purple tongue. We sat in the nearly empty bar listening to D lay out the timeline of the Gardner Museum heist.
“First, you should know that Isabella Stewart Gardner left an endowment for the museum when she died, the terms of which stipulated that nothing could be changed. The board of directors took that to heart and didn’t install the upgraded security that other museums were doing at the time. They also couldn’t afford to insure any of the artwork in the museum. Besides infrared motion detectors and four cameras outside around the perimeter of the building, the only security at night was provided by a twenty-three-year-old guard named Rick and a twenty-five-year-old guard named Randy who were paid just slightly more than minimum wage.”
D had a great voice, and I wondered if he had ever done any radio news. I didn’t think he’d done TV because he didn’t have that news anchor face. His face was more guy-in-a-dark-bar-talking-about-thieves. I looked over at Darius and was oddly pleased to realize he was as intrigued by D’s story as I was.
D took a big swallow of beer and gave us equal attention as he continued his tale. “The thieves – two men dressed in Boston P.D. uniforms – were witnessed by some St. Patrick’s Day drunks at about 12:30 a.m. parked in a hatchback about a hundred yards from the entrance to the museum. At 1:20 a.m., the thieves pulled up outside the side entrance, parked, walked to the door, and rang the buzzer, which connected them to Rick, the twenty-three-year-old guard. Rick let them into the side entrance where he was told to call Randy down from his rounds. When Randy arrived, both guards were restrained with handcuffs, at which time the thieves indicated they were there to rob the place. The guards were then marched down to the basement and cuffed to a steam pipe and work bench.”
“Were the guards investigated for collusion?” Darius asked.
“Absolutely. And it’s generally assumed that Rick’s movements during his shift just prior to the thieves’ arrival may have had something to do with preparation for the robbery. I’ve read a blog post with FBI photos that indict Rick as an accomplice, but no conclusive proof was ever found, and at the time the FBI believed the two guards were too incompetent to have pulled off the crime.”
“The motion detectors must have left a record of movements through the museum, correct?” Darius continued. He was listening as a security systems expert, and the reminder of our relative positions on the subject of art theft made me squirm a bit in my seat.
D nodded. “It took eleven minutes to subdue the guards, but the first movement in the Dutch Room wasn’t recorded until thirteen minutes after that. There, they smashed the glass on two Rembrandts, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee and A Lady and Gentleman in Black, by throwing them on the marble floor, then cut the canvases off their stretchers.”
If D noticed the look Darius shot me, it didn’t halt his story. I noticed it though, and the look sent a slithery feeling down through my stomach which subdued any butterfly that dared take flight at how close we sat to each other.
D continued. “Three minutes later, one of the thieves left
the Dutch Room and went down the hall to the Short Gallery where he tried to steal the Napoleonic flag, but he couldn’t manage the screws, so he just took the finial from the top of the flagpole. The other thief joined him there, and they also took five Degas sketches from that room. From the Dutch Room they took Vermeer’s The Concert, Flinck’s Landscape with an Obelisk, a small Rembrandt self-portrait, and a Chinese vase. The final painting that was stolen, and the one most confounding, was a Manet from the Blue Room.”
The slithery feeling wound around my spine when Darius didn’t look at me and instead leaned forward intently. “Which Manet, and why was it confounding?”
D sat back and finished his beer in a long gulp. Darius raised his hand to the bartender for another and avoided my eyes as he focused his attention on the craggy-faced reporter in front of us.
“You’ve seen the small empty frame under the larger Manet in the Blue Room?” he asked us. We both nodded. “That used to hold a painting called Chez Tortoni. The entire painting, frame and all, was removed from the wall the night of the theft, but the frame was left on the museum director’s chair, and the motion detectors recorded no footsteps in the Blue Room while the thieves were in the museum.”
The bartender set another dark beer on the table in front of D, who raised it in a toast to both of us. “Eighty-one minutes the thieves spent in the Gardner Museum that night. Eighty-one minutes with no police, no security cameras, and no guards to interfere. The side door was finally opened at 2:40a.m. and again at 2:45a.m., after the thieves took time to remove the cassette tapes from the perimeter camera feeds and data printouts from the motion detectors.”
“The hard drives were still in place though, I assume?” Darius said.
Code of Honor Page 14