Portsmouth has only a handful of buildings taller than half-a-dozen stories, including the Spinnaker, the city’s answer to Seattle’s Space Needle. Most everything is low-rise red brick. As we chug through endless streets of two-story townhouses, it’s hard to remember that Portsmouth is the most densely populated city in the U.K. and that downtown is only a few minutes behind us. At night, on empty roads with mist halos around the spotty lighting, it seems like we’re passing through an endless village on our way to stake out the lab.
“Why aren’t we going the same way we did last time?” I ask after the umpty-eleventh turn down another side street. For once, I’m driving. Carson’s navigating. Bad passenger or not, she’s behaved herself so far.
“Avoiding cameras.”
“How do you know where the cameras are?”
“Found a map online.” So that’s why she’s squinting at her phone. “Turn left up there.”
I turn more carefully than I need to—everything’s backwards, so I can’t drive on autopilot like I’m back home. “Did you find out anything else today?”
“Left again at the end. Yeah. City’s got this thing online, you can look up planning docs for permitted projects. Museum reno’d the warehouse in ’07. Lab’s where you called it.”
“Office building, ground floor, south end?”
“Yeah. No electrical plan, though. Figures.”
“Good work.” Carson finds the damnedest things online.
“Better slow down,” Carson says. “Might get there tonight.”
“Gimme a break.” I leave out the fuck you I’m thinking. “I’m driving a too-big car on the wrong side of a too-small road, at night.”
“Wimp.” She snickers a little. “What do you think the Princess’ll do?”
“Hard telling. She’s got a good reason to go all-in.”
Carson sits up straight and drops her hands into her lap. “I’m so glad to meet you. I’m so excited you’re here. What can I do to get in your way?” The voice isn’t quite Julie’s, but she nails the cadence, her posture and gestures.
“Cute. Just saying. She might surprise us.”
“Doubt she’s got the stones. Right at the roundabout.”
I’m still not used to these. “I have to go left to go right, right?”
We survive the traffic circle, several more turns, an overpass and roads the size of goat paths. Then I see tilt-ups and light industrial development. We’re not out in the country.
Carson tosses her gray hoodie into the back seat. She’s wearing a black turtleneck to go with her black jeans and black gym shoes. I’ll bet she’s got one of her black hoods in that black backpack under her legs. I avoid making a ninja joke.
She screws a Bluetooth into her ear. “Right at the end, then a quick left.”
Tilt-ups aren’t any prettier here than they are back home; they just have more trees and grass around them. After I make that quick left, I start to recognize where we are from Google StreetView—we’re at the north end of Dundas Lane.
The next time I look toward Carson, she’s got her black hood on. All I can see is a couple shiny spots where her eyes are. “Slow way down when you get to the blue fence.” She throws off her seat belt and hauls her backpack into her lap.
“Then what?”
“Keep driving. Right at the intersection, park someplace close.”
A royal-blue fence appears in the headlights at the end of a long brick wall to my right. There’s a blue warehouse just ahead; the museum building’s on the other side, surrounded by a pool of light. I slow to walking speed. “Tell me when to stop—”
The passenger door clunks open, then shut. Carson disappears into the dark.
“Okay then.” I cruise past the museum complex, turn right on Quatremaine and park in front of the white cube of a Greggs bakery. My phone rings before I shut off the engine. “Yeah?”
“Keep the line open.” Carson, whispering.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine.” There’s rustling on her end. “Good view of the warehouse.”
“Okay.” I have no idea where she’s hiding—there’s a twelve-foot-fence across the road from the museum property—and she won’t tell me if I ask. “How long are we staying?”
“Long as it takes.”
Before I turned off the car, the screen in the middle of the dash said it’s 5o C outside. That’s 42o F, cold even for Carson. “You need some coffee? Something warm? I can go—”
“No. Got a Thermos.” She pauses. “Thanks for asking.” There’s a funny something in her voice, like she’s surprised I’d think about it.
For the next half-hour, we sit there with the line open between us, not saying much. Every car that passes on Quatremaine makes me jump. I hear leaves rattling on her end, the wind blowing, the odd engine going by. Now she’s sipping coffee. It’s weirdly intimate, like we’re sitting in the car in the dark, only she’s not here.
“Guard’s on his rounds,” she whispers. “Her rounds. A woman.”
I check my phone: 1:04 a.m. “Hourly?”
“We’ll see at two.”
Another hour of this? Gack. Then I remind myself that I’m in a nice, warm car, and Carson’s out there under a bush in the cold. She’s got the experience and skills to be out there and I don’t, but I shouldn’t complain. At least the jet lag’s working for me for once.
After a stretch of silence, I pull my personal phone and bring up a website I’ve been following for a few weeks. A new video dropped in the blog yesterday that I haven’t had a chance to watch. I mute my work phone and punch the “play” icon on the embedded viewer.
“Buon giorno—good morning—I am Gianna Comici, and today I show to you the building of my gallery…”
She’s practically bouncing past the stud walls and bundles of electrical cable dripping from the ceiling. Her sleeveless, fire engine-red ‘60s-style minidress matches her lipstick. Bright white stripes cut down her sides and around her hips. She’s a swirl of color when she spins around a corner.
Gianna was the assistant at a Milanese gallery I was nosing around to find a cache of stolen artworks. She’s beautiful and smart and ambitious and if I could’ve figured out how to tell her I wasn’t a millionaire, I’d have brought her home with me. But I couldn’t. Now all I can do is watch her weekly videos and think about what could’ve happened if I hadn’t grown a conscience. And hope the world changes.
Carson startles me out of the swamp I’m diving down. “Cop.”
What? I un-mute. “After you?”
“Shh.” I hear engine noise and tires pass by on asphalt. After a moment, Carson says, “Patrol.”
I note the time: 1:16. It’s now I realize that my parking spot next to Gregg’s doesn’t let me see very far down the road. I slide down in the seat until I can just see out the windshield, and stow my phone in the center console so there’s no light. A couple minutes later, a white Ford five-door hatchback rolls by, taking its time. It has blue and yellow color blocks along the side and a blue light bar on top. I don’t dare move until it disappears from my rear-view mirror. “It’s gone.”
“For now.”
More silence. Thirty minutes crawl by. My heart settles down.
“Matt?”
“Yeah?”
“Talk to me.”
“About what?”
“Anything. Just talk.” Her voice is getting shaky.
“Are you okay?”
“Tired. Wet. Dead out here. Need something to focus on.”
“Okay.” The mist has turned to fog. It must be bad out there for her to admit it’s bad. “What were you going to do on your time off?”
“Home. Toronto.”
“Not a beach somewhere?”
“Can’t afford a holiday.”
She’s paid twice what I am and she works a lot. But she owes four times as much as I do to someone who’s worse than any bank. “What do you do at home?”
“Sleep. Wash clothes. Work out, play some hockey. Watch movies.”
“Visit friends?” No answer. “Got anybody?”
“None of—” She stops. I can hear her think. “How? I’m gone all the time. You?”
“I’ve got a roommate. She’s also my best friend. Nobody else special.”
“You live with a woman?”
“It’s not what you think—she likes girls. We don’t sleep together.”
That kills that subject. After a couple minutes, she says, “Keep talking.”
“About what?”
She sighs. “Princess tell you anything?”
“She gave me a draft of her book.”
“Email?” That comes out pretty sharp.
“No, thumb drive. Don’t worry, the NSA didn’t get a shot at it. Anyway, I looked over what she wrote about what happened to the canvas during the war.”
“And?”
“You want to hear it?”
“Talk.”
“Okay. What do you know about Germany before the war?”
“Headline stuff. Nazis, Kristallnacht, Munich.”
“Okay. Germany swallowed Austria in March ’38. First thing the Nazis did was throw all the Jewish community leaders in Dachau. People started just taking stuff from the Jews. It was a feeding frenzy. Ever hear of Adolf Eichmann?”
“Israelis got him, right?”
“Yeah, twenty years later. He was a father of the Holocaust. He was a young SS captain in ’38. They sent him to Vienna and he got the bright idea to let the Jews leave, but tax them for the privilege. ‘Tax’ meant take everything they owned. He set up an agency with one of those twenty-syllable German names? Julie can pronounce it, I can’t. VVSt, the Property Registration Office. Jews had to register all their stuff, and the VVSt took what it wanted and sold it to ‘good Germans.’”
“They took Bowen’s picture.”
“They took twelve canvases from the Meckelsohn family—Julie’s grandparents—in July, all Moderns. The Nazis called Modern art ‘degenerate,’ so the VVSt consigned them to one of its pet art dealers, Otto—”
“Wait. Nazis had art dealers?”
“Yeah. Just because you sell art doesn’t mean you have a conscience. Look at me.”
She makes a choking sound. “You got too much conscience for your own good.”
She may be right. “Thanks. Where was I?”
“Otto something.”
“Right. Otto Scheunebrunner. Nine of the Meckelsohn pieces show up in his inventory in November ‘38, including the Sargent. The thing is, Scheunebrunner never sells it. It’s still in the last inventory Julie has, May ’43. She thinks the rest of his papers burned. The Red Army got him in April ’45 and he disappears after that. Nobody knows what happened to him.”
“Knowing the Soviets, probably went in the Danube. No loss.”
If I’d been alive in Vienna back then, I might’ve ended up like Scheunebrunner. “You know, he could’ve just burned the portrait. He didn’t have to hold onto it.”
“Fucking leech. Maybe he sold it before then.”
“Maybe. There’s no—”
“Shh!” I hear a crunch. “Security.”
“Police again?”
“Private. Silver minivan.”
That wakes me up. “Are they—”
“Shh.”
I strain to hear any background sounds. There’s a wimpy beep, a distant low hum, rattling metal. An engine revs. It’s 1:57. Is this routine, or did the security guard spot Carson?
“Going inside,” Carson whispers. “Gate opens by remote.”
“Why are they there? Does it look like an alarm?” Why am I whispering?
“Can’t tell.” After a few moments: “They stopped. Guy getting out. Armed, pistol holstered. Carrying a bag. Doesn’t look like a response.” Pause. “Guard from inside opened the door.” Another pause. “Fuck.”
“What? What happened?” I start the car in case I have to rescue Carson.
“They’re kissing. They got practice.”
“Seriously?”
“Both going in.”
Just our luck. Even if this is a booty call, now there’s two guards to deal with—one of them armed.
The security guy leaves at 2:43. His girlfriend does another circuit of the property starting at 3:02. The cop car doesn’t come back. At 3:20, Carson says, “Come get me. Dundas at Quatremaine.”
A flashlight blinks twice at me from behind a hedge at the intersection of the two streets. I stop only long enough for Carson to tumble in. I’ve already got the heater blasting. “Thanks,” she says. “Hang a U, go up Quatremaine.”
“Get what you need?”
She loses the hood, pulls off her black gloves with her teeth, then holds her hands in front of the heater vents. “Close enough. Should watch all night, but we can’t.” She lets out a heavy sigh. “Someone else was watching.”