Olivia sounds perfectly awake when she answers my call. “How may I help you?”
“We need to talk to Allyson.”
There’s a pause. “I see. Give me your message and I’ll pass it to her.”
“No. We need to talk to her. Face-to-face.”
A longer pause. “I… see. Please send to me the location and time. I’ll notify her. This is… important, I trust?”
“Very.”
Grünecker Strasse passes through a belt of trees flanking the Isar River a mile shy of Munich’s airport. A track runs south into the trees. It’s too scrubby to be a forest, but there’s enough cover to screen us from the road.
It took four straight hours of driving to get here, including the hour backup at the German border from the temporary immigration controls trying to screen out Syrian refugees. It feels good to step into the cold night air, stretch out my back and blast the cobwebs out of my skull.
The sky north of us glows from the airport lights, but where we are is middle-of-the-night black. My phone says we’re an hour early for our meet with Allyson. I guess Germany’s in a different time zone from Austria.
Carson crunches through the frost toward me, a dark shape in a dark place. She’s rolling out her neck and shoulders. “Know what you’re gonna say?”
More or less. “Want to hear it?”
“Nope. This is your show.”
“Wrong. It’s our show. You’re in this too. Ben Franklin said something about hanging together or hanging separately.”
She sighs. “Wonderful. Talk.”
I do. After a few minutes, we move back into the car. Carson makes some changes. When I’m done, she sits quietly, strangling the steering wheel.
She says, “This was a good job. I’m gonna miss it.”
Allyson arrives right on time. I don’t know how she always does that. When she rolls up behind us, her car’s ultra-bright bluish headlights make the Citroen’s insides look like a supernova just went off behind the back seats. Carson grumbles; it takes me a minute to get my night vision back.
It’s an Audi, of course, and Allyson’s driving. She marches to meet me at the Citroen’s back hatch, which Carson popped for me. I’d been wondering what Allyson would wear in the middle of winter, in the middle of a forest, in the middle of the night. The dome light in the Citroen’s cargo area shows me a dark hip-length Moncler Anastasia down parka, cut close to her body with a bright silver zipper slashing diagonally across her chest. Her black slacks and turtleneck fade into the night.
“I trust there’s a very good reason for us to be out here at this hour, Mr. Friedrich.” Her voice is colder than the air.
“There is. Remember why you briefed us personally at the start of the project? Same reason I’m briefing you personally at the end.”
Her lips purse. Even in the semi-dark, they look good that way. Her eyes flick to my right. “Ms. Carson.”
“Allyson.” Carson stands about two feet away from me at the edge of the light pool. I guess she wants to be a bad target.
I pull the fake Dorotea out of the Citroen and hold it out to Allyson. “This is Tovorovsky’s copy of the Sargent. You can give it to Bowen. Tell him to keep it under wraps until you say it’s clear.”
She scans the black rectangle for a few moments before she lifts it out of my hands. “This is the original?”
“It’s Tovorovsky’s copy. Tovorovsky’s minions swiped the copy Boutelle made for me.”
Allyson’s watching me very closely. “Is there a reason you keep using the word ‘copy’?”
I let the question hang. Timing is everything. “I want to confirm something. The contract you signed with Bowen—does it specify you have to deliver the actual, original Dorotea DeVillardi, or the one Tovorovsky owns?”
“Actually, neither. It’s our standard services contract. He gave me his instructions verbally so there’d be no paper trail. He mentioned Mr. Tovorovsky rather often.”
“Seriously? You work that way?”
“It’s not uncommon. Also, ‘no paper’ doesn’t mean no video or audio.” She rests the faux-Dorotea on the toes of her boots. “Where exactly is the actual, original Dorotea DeVillardi?”
I glance toward Carson. She says, “Farmhouse. Thirty clicks south of Salzburg. With a bunch of other pictures.”
I give Allyson a short recap of our night, what we found in Ute’s house, and Geisler. She listens hard and nods now and then, but doesn’t interrupt.
At the end, she pats the top edge of the canvas she’s holding. “So this one—Mr. Tovorovsky’s painting—is also a forgery?”
“Yeah.”
“And you propose that I give a known forgery to the client?” Her voice isn’t happy.
“I propose you give him what he asked for.”
Allyson’s eyebrows say impolite things to me. “Ms. Carson, do you agree with this?”
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”
“I see.” Allyson turns back to me. “I’ll assume I shouldn’t tell the client where the original portrait is.”
“No. When the lawyer springs it from the farmhouse, Julie’ll put in a claim for it. Her grandmother and mother gave it to her, and she’s got the paperwork to prove it. She won’t have to get it away from Bowen because it was never his.”
“He won’t be happy with us.”
“He’s not happy with anybody. You already said he’s not going to hire us again.”
“Besides,” Carson says, “how’d we know there’s another one?”
Allyson smooths an eyebrow with the tip of her right middle finger. I think it’s her version of a cry of pain. “What do you propose I do with my other client?”
My turn. “Tovorovsky? Tell him he has sixty days to cough up your money.”
“Or?”
“Or you’ll give the insurance company documented proof that the stolen piece is a contemporary fake. The value of his claim goes to zero.”
“Do you have this proof?”
“I do. I took pictures every time I went to Boutelle’s studio.”
Allyson nods. “And the lawyer?”
I’d distracted myself from thinking about Julie leaving by trying to figure out how to put some steel in Geisman’s spine. “There’s this group called the Austrian Committee for Social Justice. They put up money to defend lawyers and journalists who get in sideways with the far right. Once you give that thing—” I wave at the faux-Dorotea “—to Bowen, you should talk him into donating six figures or so to the group to give Geisman some top cover. That is, if he ever wants to get the portrait out of his basement.” Personally, I love the idea of muscling Bowen into giving a chunk of change to a bunch of civil-society warriors. It smells like karma.
Allyson stares into the middle distance with her lips pursed. She strokes the part of her throat that the turtleneck doesn’t cover. Finally, she comes back to Earth. “Just so I understand, Mr. Friedrich: you propose to defraud our clients and lie to them. Is that correct?”
Well, when you put it that way… “Yeah. For the greater good.”
She bores holes into my forehead for a few seconds. I’ll start smelling burnt flesh soon.
Then a flicker of a smile breaks out. “You may have more aptitude for this business than I credit you with. Ms. Carson? Anything to add?”
“Nope. Just wanna go home.”
“Olivia can see to that.” Allyson hefts the faux-Dorotea. “As usual, this has been informative and educational. Of course, this conversation never occurred.”
I ask, “Not even on audio or video?”
Allyson smiles—oh, the shark has/pretty teeth, dear—then turns and leaves.