During the two-hour drive from Atlantic City to Philadelphia, Kylie stared at the other cars going by and fiddled with the hem of her black dress. “Don’t you think we should at least practice what we’re going to say in there?”
Micah shrugged. “You’re the one who’s talked to Don Grande. You’re going in with him first. Why don’t you tell me more about what you’ve said to him?”
“I’ve already told you everything,” that she was going to. “I don’t know what else I could say.” She really didn’t.
Micah asked, “What have you told him about me?”
“You barely came up. You have an art authentication business. You said that if art is scientifically validated, it’ll be worth more. So, I thought Salvatore would want his art authenticated.”
He said, “Introduce me as a person you met in the casino because I’m helping validate the Borgata’s art.”
“Salvatore Grande knows the guys who run the Borgata. He’ll just ask them.” She chuckled. “Because a Mafia Boss would definitely be acquainted with any casino called the Borgata, am I right?”
Micah laughed and moved the steering wheel to maneuver the car into the other lane. “I keep wondering why people don’t talk about that. It’s saying the quiet part out loud. So, just say you overheard me talking to a high roller in your waitressing section at the Tropicana. When you heard him talking about Old Masters, you remembered Grande’s art collection. He’ll like being seen as a collector.”
“Okay, that’s good, but I’m going in first to talk about my sister or whatever.”
She clutched her bulging purse more tightly, holding the hundred and twenty-five grand against her chest.
Micah said, “You can tell him that some museums have a significant percentage of forged art, up to seventy-five percent.”
“Really?” Kylie asked.
“Certainly.” He glanced over at her and winked. “And it’s so sad that his will be among them.”
“Right. Okay, that’s good, and then I’ll beat feet out of there and let you guys talk about the art.”
“Oh, no,” Micah said, and his jaw hardened. “You will stay right there during the entire meeting. Whatever happens, you’ll be in the room.”
“I don’t think—”
“I do,” Micah said, and his jaw clenched.
Yeah, well, he couldn’t stop her from leaving if she just slipped out. If Salvatore called for some of his goons to drag her out of his office and take her to his mansion on the outskirts of Philly, she would throw herself head-first over the stairwell railing.
But, Rachele.
Salvatore going after her little sister was worse. Kylie couldn’t even off herself to get away.
So she’d do what she had to, which meant Kylie wouldn’t be leaving that office with Micah, no matter how his part of the scam went.
Kylie marched up the staircase ahead of Micah, cradling her lumpy purse against her chest. Her shoes clomped on the cement stairs, and her footfalls rang in the white-painted windowless cave.
Micah’s steps thumped behind her, and that weird leather duffel bag he’d thrown in the back of his car clanked as he carried it up the stairs. She’d asked him about it when he’d thrown it in the trunk of his car, and entirely not shockingly, he’d deflected the question.
When they reached the fourth floor, Kylie yanked open the heavy steel door from the staircase to the hallway. Micah frowned at the stairwell door and whispered to her, “This door has an electronic lock, too.”
Kylie didn’t have the energy to feel bad about missing part of Salvatore’s security system. “Yeah. Sorry, I guess I missed that.”
Micah shrugged. “It’s okay. You got what you could. It’s enough.”
At least he didn’t make her feel bad about it.
When they reached the windowless steel door at the end of the hallway, Kylie paused before she looked up at the security camera.
Here it was.
Her one last chance to bolt and escape Salvatore Grande’s threats of captivity, rape, being used as a drug mule, and probably worse.
And leaving her little sister to be abused and trafficked instead of her.
Kylie lifted her face and looked up at the black security camera aimed at her head. “I’m here for an appointment. This is Micah Shine, the art expert I told Mr. Grande about.”
A long moment passed, and icy sweat broke out on Kylie’s skin.
The door buzzed and clicked.
She pushed it open and strode into the waiting room.
Three men, large in both the vertical and horizontal orientations, sat in chairs looking at their phones.
One glanced up at Kylie when they walked in.
Another guy she hadn’t noticed closed the door behind them and stared down at her.
Micah stuck his hand out at the Mafia enforcer and said in an arch British accent, “Hullo, there! Great to meet you. I’m Micah Shine of Shine Industries, Art Authentication Services. And to whom may I have the pleasure of speaking?”
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, where had Micah’s English accent come from? He’d never talked like that before.
The enforcer guy blinked, discombobulated, and shook Micah’s hand. “Uh, Tony. Tony Fava.”
Kylie just knew that guy’s Mafia name must be Tony Fava Bean, because of course it would be.
“Absolute pleasure to meet you, Mr. Fava. I’m looking forward to meeting Mr. Grande. I’ve heard he has an extraordinary art collection, and authenticating the pieces would make them truly priceless.”
“Yeah, Mr. Shine, we’re gonna need to see what’s in the bag, what with times the way they are and all.”
Micah dropped the bag on the floor and unzipped it, stepping back to let Grande’s enforcers inspect what was inside. “Certainly, what with times the way they are and all.”
Oh, God, if Micah was trying to bring weapons into Salvatore Grande’s office, they were both going to get whacked. Kylie should have warned him but hadn’t thought he would be that dumb.
Tony poked around inside. “What d’you need a crowbar for?”
“It’s a small crowbar, as you can see. If a painting is stuck in a frame, sometimes wedging it out can require a bit of muscle to shake it loose.”
“Yeah, I guess that checks out. It is a small one.” Tony Fava’s brows furrowed. “You’re doing the art for the boss, huh?”
“Oh, yes. There’s so much forgery in the world today.”
“Yeah, fugazi is a real problem. Mr. Grande didn’t think he should take those pictures in payment because he didn’t know where they come from, and then he didn’t want to hang them in his office. I told him they were real pretty and he should hang ‘em.”
Micah beamed at Tony Fava. “That’s where we come in. Our scientific process is independent of provenance. We don’t ask how a collector came to possess a piece, and our discretion is absolute. We only authenticate the materials, but after authentication, a collector can rest easy knowing his pieces are genuine.”
“Yeah, I think the boss is gonna want to talk to you. He likes his art. I’ll go get him for ya.”
Kylie stepped forward. “I have an appointment with Mr. Grande first.”
Tony Fava looked her up and down. “You do?”
“Yes. It’s important.”
Tony shrugged. “Okay, I’ll ask the boss. Maria Pia, is the boss free?”
Kylie’s cousin Maria Pia checked her computer. “Yes, he’s free.”
Tony Fava knocked and then opened the door, leaning in. “Boss? The art authentication guy is here to talk to you, but there’s a girl here who says she has an appointment, too?” He paused and said to Kylie, “Okay, you can go in. The art guy will wait here with us for a few minutes.”
Kylie walked in the door and eased it closed behind herself.
As the door closed, she heard Tony Fava say, “So the modern art with the paint flung all over the canvas. I never really got that. Why is that good?”
Salvatore Grande was sitting behind his desk, watching her. The late afternoon sun was low in the red sky and glaring through the chicken wire-laced windowpane. “I’m not in a mood to negotiate.”
“But I have the money, and it’s in cash. I’m paying you back right now with interest, a lot of interest.” Kylie upended her purse on his desk, spilling the twelve and a half bundles of Benjamins but snatching back her wallet when it fell out. “There’s a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars right there. You only had to pay them back eighty for me, and it’s been less than two weeks. That’s fair, right? Over fifty percent interest for a loan of two weeks?”
Salvatore Grande sneered at the money and shrugged like it was something disgusting that had crawled out of the Schuylkill River and slithered up on his desk. He rolled his hand around his wrist. “And what am I going to do with this?”
“It’s a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. Buy a Lambo or something. I imagine there’s quite a bit you can do with it.”
Grande shrugged again, and his nose was still crinkled with disgust. “I will take this as a down payment on what you owe me, but it won’t change our arrangement. You still owe me a year.”
Dammit. “But this is so much more than the money you had to pay the Borgata on my behalf. It’s everything I owe you and then some. You don’t have to do this to me. You can leave my sister alone. You got all your money back and a lot more.”
Grande shook his head. “No. I’ll tell the boys out there that you’ll be traveling with us this evening.”
“But that’s not fair. It’s not even math.”
Salvatore Grande pushed a button on his computer and said, “Send the art guy in here.”
Kylie continued, “I didn’t even know that you’d had to pay them until two days ago. In two days, I managed to come up with a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to pay you back. If you give me a week, I can come up with another hundred and twenty-five or more. Just give me a chance and leave Rachele alone, huh?”
Grande raised one eyebrow at her. “Yeah, that makes me worried that perhaps your contributions to the cause weren’t as much as they could’ve been.”
Dammit, dammit. This was going wrong, and those goons were in the outer office. “Can you at least tell me where Rachele is and if she’s still with our mother? I don’t want her to be out there in the world alone at fourteen.”
The door behind Kylie banged open, and Micah said in that weird British accent, “Mr. Grande! It’s such an absolute pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
She glanced over her shoulder just in time to see Micah notice the paintings behind Salvatore Grande.
The corners of Micah’s eyes widened incrementally, but he didn’t slow down as he strode across the room and reoriented his gaze on Salvatore Grande. “Thank you so much for allowing me to discuss the art authentication process with you and offer you my services. I have so much respect for your operation. My card.”
Micah placed his business card on Salvatore Grande’s desk.
Salvatore stood and buttoned his suit jacket as he extended his hand across his desk for Micah to shake. “Pleasure to meet you. Chiarina said you’re the guy to talk to about making sure these paintings of mine are what the guys said they were. How do you two know each other again?”
Dammit, Grande had called Kylie by her old name. Well, it wasn’t like she would have to answer questions because she wasn’t going anywhere with Micah.
Before Micah could say anything, she blurted, “He was in my section when I was waitressing in the high roller room at the Tropicana. He was with some guy talking about all the art he had and how Mr. Shine here had helped him prove that it was worth millions instead of the ten thou he’d bought it for. I thought of you and the paintings that you weren’t sure if Carrau Abategiovanni was telling you the truth about or not.”
Salvatore unbuttoned his suit jacket again and sat down in his chair, opening his hand toward a chair in front of the desk and indicating that Micah should sit. He squinted at Micah. “Do I know you?”
Kylie retreated to stand against the wall with the door, where she could see both the men. Her body wanted to flee, even if she couldn’t.
Micah sat in the chair and beamed at Grande again. “Do you get over to London often? Perhaps Oxford or Eton?”
“Not so much,” Salvatore said, drawling it from the corner of his mouth.
Micah grinned at Grande. “Well then, it would be the generations of inbreeding on the British Isles. All of us Englishmen appear as similar as clones.”
Salvatore smiled with one side of his mouth. “Yeah, that must be it. Chiarina, you vet this guy you bring before me?”
Kylie kept her voice as steady as Micah’s. “Yes, sir, Mr. Grande. He has a passport with his name, and the Ocean Resort verified that his room was also reserved under the name Micah Shine.”
“Good. But what do you know about him?”
“I know that the high roller at the Tropicana was positively giddy with the analysis results and was spending money like he’d won the lottery.”
“You do an analysis for him?” Grande asked Micah.
“Privileged information.”
“And the scientific tests came back good?”
Micah winked at him. “Very privileged information. We use the utmost discretion when people ask us to identify our clientele or results.”
“And the cops? Whaddya gonna do if the cops ask you about me?”
“Our records are stored on computers maintained offshore in a country that does not recognize American or European legal authority.”
“Huh. I might want to talk to you about how you do that. But I’m interested, Mr. Shine, in why you’re pitching your services to me instead of some museum? Wouldn’t museums be more interested in whether or not they got the real thing?”
Micah leaned on Grande’s desk. A flicker of amusement played in his striking opalescent eyes. “Museums have spent millions of the taxpayers’ dollars on acquiring their collections. As far as they are concerned, all their works are authentic and they have the provenance to prove it, whether they actually are or not.”
Salvatore’s half-smile spread into something resembling a ghoulish grin, and he pushed the keyboard to his computer aside to lean on his mammoth desk and talk to Micah. “That’s quite a racket.”
“Indeed, one of the recourses for a collector who might have some private information that their art piece might have a scientific irregularity is to donate it to a museum, thus encouraging no further scrutiny and yet taking a hefty tax deduction.”
Salvatore nodded sagely. “So what’s in it for you? I don’t trust anybody who says they’re doing something just because they respect me.”
Micah grinned larger, and Kylie realized she was watching a consummate con artist in action. His British accent remained perfectly intact as he said with a dry wit, “As I said, our clients are all private individuals who prefer discreet information. I’m sure you have many high-income friends, such as yourself, with art collections. Perhaps next time one of them laments that they are unsure of the authenticity of one of their pieces, you might tell them that you ‘know a guy.’”
Salvatore Grande burst out laughing, a terrifying bray of bleached-white teeth and sallow skin. “I like you. I like you, Micah Shine. You remind me of somebody. I don’t know who, maybe some English guy. Fine, you want to tell me if my paintings here are real or not, I’ll listen. What you gotta do to ‘em?”
“It’s a relatively simple process. The most difficult part is prying the art out of the frames. I expect you want both of these looked into?” He waggled a finger at the art on the wall behind Grande’s desk.
“Yeah, I was told these were real. I’d like to know if Carrau Abategiovanni screwed me over. If he did, he’s about to have a serious headache.”
“And did the seller tell you who the artists of these pieces might be?” Micah asked him.
“Why don’t you tell me, wise guy?”
“Oh, I’m no art expert. I don’t have to be. Science tells us whether or not these materials are consistent with the era in which they were supposed to have been used, and of course, we use carbon-14 dating as well. I form no opinions because opinions are irrelevant. Only facts remain. It does help if we have an idea of when the paintings were supposed to have been produced, but we can also do that with a bit of research. It’s all included in the service. Then we can say whether the materials are consistent with that era or not. But nevertheless, the first thing we need to do is get these paintings off the wall. Let’s break open those frames and see what we’ve got, shall we?”
Salvatore Grande stood. “You aren’t going to damage them, right?”
“Absolutely not. I’ll take minuscule samples with a needle from the wood panel and small scratches of paint from the sides of the panel, not the front. I assure you, no one will be able to see the sampling areas at all, and it will not damage the value of the painting.”
“All right, then. I guess yous guys got this down to a science.”
Micah Shine and Salvatore Grande pointed at each other and laughed.
Grande said, “Chiarina, come steady these while we take ‘em off the wall. We wouldn’t want to drop them if they’re going to be worth something.”
Kylie crept over and steadied the paintings while Micah held their weight. Salvatore reached behind them to unlock the frames from the wall, which was interesting considering how he’d complained to anyone who’d listen that they were obviously fakes.
When the three of them had wrestled the heavy art down from the wall and laid them on the floor, Salvatore unlocked his desk drawer with his fingerprint and then took a ring of keys that he sorted through to find two small ones, which he then used to unlock the frames and all four corners.
While he was doing that, Kylie rested back on her heels and checked out the view from behind Grande’s desk.
His computer monitor had a security dashboard open on it, some squares green, some dark red. The dashboard looked like the inside of an airplane cockpit, mystifying dials and buttons and gauges. The square that read Office Door flashed red and white, probably indicating that it was not just unlocked but standing open.
When Micah walked away from them to pick something out of his leather bag, Salvatore asked Kylie in a low voice, “You think this guy’s the real deal?”
“The guy he was with at the Tropicana sure thought so, and I haven’t been able to find anything that tells me otherwise, Mr. Grande. He had a business meeting at five o’clock in the morning our time, which is ten o’clock in the morning in London. They were talking about art and paints and colors and chemical names. I was supposed to be asleep, so it would be weird if he’d staged it for when I was supposed to be asleep.”
“Huh. I’m going to ask around, too.”
“Well, of course.”
“Uh-huh, yeah. He tell you anything about his other clients?”
“No, sir. He takes that confidentiality stuff seriously.”
Salvatore Grande nodded, his thin lips bowing upward pensively.
Micah came back with the small crowbar. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Grande, I can have those out in a jiffy. An excellent decision to protect them with Arbitrage brand security frames, if you don’t mind me saying so. They are an excellent company that many of our most particular clients prefer.”
Grande backed off while Micah delicately inserted the chrome crowbar in a notch in the frame. “While we’re taking samples, Mr. Grande, I noticed that you had a very interesting bronze in your waiting room. Is that known to be a replica?”
“It was payment for a shipment when the buyer couldn’t pay otherwise,” Salvatore Grande said.
“Is it purported to be a Giacometti, pre-war period?”
“The guy said it was from Switzerland, nineteen-thirties.”
The picture Micah was working on popped out of its frame, and he moved over to the other one. “If it is a Giacometti bronze, it would, of course, not be as valuable as his post-war period when he produced the gigantic statues of The Walking Man and The Pointing Man, but it would be an exquisite find. The Pointing Man sold at auction at Christie’s in 2015 for eighty-one million pounds, which is one hundred and twenty-six million dollars or so.”
That got Salvatore Grande’s attention. “Yeah?”
Micah vaguely gestured to the door with the crowbar without looking up and then went right back to work as he said, “Based on the size, the bronze would be from his pre-war period, of course, and perhaps worth only a tenth of what The Pointing Man sold for.”
Grande was leaning forward where he kneeled, listening intently.
Micah continued, “However, there have been no Giacometti bronzes offered on the market since 2015, so it might command a premium based on its rarity. It might go for quite a bit more than the twenty-five million I would estimate. I can take a small scraping from the base to see if it’s a match for the alloy Giacometti used during his prewar period. Why don’t you have one of those gentlemen bring it in here?”
Salvatore Grande jittered with excitement, and he grabbed onto his desk for leverage as he got to his feet and walked out to the waiting room, his hand already extended to pick up the small bronze statue from its perch on the end table on the other side of the room.
As Grande reached the door, Micah jumped to his feet, bounded to the door, and shoved Salvatore Grande out, locking it behind him.
Kylie lunged for the desk, grabbing the mouse and clicking the Office Door button so that it turned solid green. She clicked all the other red buttons while she was at it, locking every door in the office and probably the building.
The door whirred around its edges, locking like a bank vault.
Gunshots clanged and rattled the door and wall.
Kylie dropped to her knees behind the desk, hoping the heavy wood would stop the bullets.