In six days the Vermeer would go on display.
Delia had offered some additional details, to whit that it was arriving from London the next day in the hold of a KLM passenger jet, guarded by both private security and Dutch cops. It would be taken from Schiphol to the Rijksmuseum.
If I lived in a movie rather than reality, the Ontario Crew would organize some elaborate heist which, despite all their planning, would inevitably devolve into a wild shoot-out in which tiny machine pistols would spray ineffectual bullets by the hundreds.
This was a possibility, I supposed, but it would be fantastically stupid. And the Ontario Crew were supposedly professionals so, no, that wasn’t going to happen. The object would be hanging on a wall in a week, why would you take on armed guards?
When Jewess at the Loom arrived at the Rijks the experts would go to work verifying, cleaning, mounting for display and all that, during which time the Vermeer would be in a basement or attic room somewhere in the bowels of the museum. If the Ontario Crew had an inside man the painting would be vulnerable during that period.
Thing was that finding and corrupting a compliant inside man wasn’t something to be done over a long weekend. The Crew had very little more lead time than I had, and while it was possible they’d quickly find and exploit a staff vulnerability, it was very unlikely. And in any case, what the hell was I going to do about it?
Delia repaired to whatever hotel had a discount deal with the US government. And I knew what I had to do: enjoy some art. Six days was not a lot of time to locate and somehow neutralize a gang of professional thieves.
Obviously Thing One would be to visit the Rijksmuseum (Rikes-moo-see-um) and get the lay of the land. Just as obviously I wasn’t going to go there looking like me. If a theft went down the cops would be looking at video from the security cameras, and I planned never to appear on those cameras. It was Captain Louis Renault who first explained basic police methodology when he said, ‘Round up the usual suspects.’ Fugitives are always ‘usual suspects.’ A fugitive who’d been a thief? Hell, that’s not a suspect, that’s your perp, case closed. So it was going to have to be fun with disguises.
‘All right, Chante, I’m giving you a free shot. Tell me: if you just saw me walking around on the street and had to describe me afterward, what would be the main things you noticed?’
That invited a stare. I believe it may have been the first time Chante actually looked at me rather than around me.
‘I would notice different things in different countries. In France you are tall, here in Holland you are only average height. Your face …’
‘What about my face?’ I said, trying not to sound vain and defensive.
‘It is symmetrical and some might say handsome …’
‘Some.’
‘But it is also average in a way. You have no outstanding features, though you have good hair.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘But what is most noticeable is not something one sees, but something one feels. You stand apart. You are at a distance from life around you.’
It was too late to stop her, now. She was circling me, examining a specimen.
‘You are at once wary and predatory. Like a cautious fish who wants the bait but senses the hook.’
Wary and predatory, OK, that sounded kind of cool. But cautious fish?
‘I prefer to see myself as a wise lion.’
Chante squinted at me. ‘No, the lion is majestic.’
‘So glad I asked.’
Chante has a face she pulls, a sort of wry, condescending, implied-eye-roll thing. ‘If you are asking how best to disguise yourself, I would say that you must conceal your hair, your eyes and your arrogance.’
The thing was, she was basically right. An effective disguise is as much about acting the part as looking it. But looking the part is the starting point so, shopping first.
If I were teaching a class – Crime 101 – I would stress the fundamental importance of evidence. A) Don’t create it, and B) If you do create it, don’t let the cops find it.
I never had a wise mentor in crime myself, I had to figure things out the hard way, but right from the start I’d known to avoid creating evidence. In my first second-story job I’d had to cut my way down through a restaurant’s roof crawlspace. To do that I needed a sheetrock knife and a small wood saw. I bought the sheetrock knife along with five other, unrelated items at a hardware store twenty miles from the scene of the crime. I bought the saw at a yard sale as part of a box of random tools. I paid cash for both. I dropped fake names and misleading details. When I was done with the job, I took the cutter apart and removed the handle from the saw and scattered the bits in random dumpsters and handy bodies of water.
The cops could deduce that I’d used a cutter and a saw and they could search for a year and never prove that I had ever owned either.
Tradecraft. If you’re going to enter the exciting world of crime, boys and girls, work on your tradecraft.
Don’t. Create. Evidence.
If you absolutely can’t avoid creating evidence, and if you suspect the cops are going to get their hands on it (and you should definitely suspect that), make sure your evidence trail is as confused and contradictory as you can make it. Never forget that juries are made up of people who lacked the imagination to get out of jury duty. Salt-of-the-earth folks, or, as we learned from Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles, morons. Presented with any explanation requiring more than one step a moron will dismiss it out of hand. This fact also explains most of politics.
With all that in mind, I went to the mall – but not the Gelderlandplein, the big mall south of the city center. Instead I walked to the train station and bought a ticket – cash, from a machine – to Rotterdam, about a one-hour ride with trains leaving every half hour. Once at Rotterdam Station I walked a few blocks to a Hilton and caught a cab. I directed the cab to an Asian restaurant I’d googled which was a few blocks from the Alexandrium Mall. Then I walked to the mall.
I’m aware that my fellow criminals might find my tradecraft a bit extreme, overly imaginative, bordering on obsessive-compulsive and well into advanced paranoia, but I’m aware of something else as well: most of the guys who’d call me obsessive have done serious time, and I have not. I have an arrest record (well, several under various names), but zero convictions.
Zero.
My clothing choices usually run from Ralph Lauren to Boss and Canali with a side of Tommy Bahama. I dress like a guy with some money because people with money are much happier giving money to a guy who looks like he already has some. And I follow the David Mitchell Sartorial Dictum: that my appearance should be in no way noteworthy, but not so un-noteworthy as to be in itself, noteworthy.
But that was not the look I wanted now. I needed to look not like me, distinctly not like me. So I spent some money which was perhaps not technically mine since the credit card wasn’t technically mine, either, and came away with enough gear to look like a guy who probably fixes air conditioners and is taking a vacation in Amsterdam so he can get high and go to a hooker.
On the way out of the mall I spotted a rucksack and bought two in different colors, then, with my shopping complete I reversed direction, returned to Amsterdam, and walked from the station to my apartment.
‘You have shopped,’ Chante said, making it sound like an accusation.
‘I have indeed. I looked for a flying broom for you, but they didn’t have any.’
It was still just early afternoon, plenty of time for a preliminary run at the Rijks. But first I went to my annoyingly narrow bathroom where I applied instant tan – at least I hoped that’s what it was, the label was in Dutch – going for a ‘probably lives-in-Arizona’ tan and used my fingernail scissors to cut half an inch of hair from the nape of my neck. Crouching to peer into the articulated make-up mirror I applied spirit gum to my upper lip, then spent a very long, very boring time carefully seating hairs to form the kind of mustache Tom Selleck probably had by age ten.
I stepped back to admire my work, using my scissors to trim the ends. It would work so long as no one stared too closely or I started sweating.
I added body weight – a towel over a small throw pillow, secured around my waist. I added some more weight by stuffing the back of my underpants with toilet paper, like an insecure high school girl stuffing her bra before prom. The effect was lumpy though, so I slipped on a second pair of underpants to compress and smooth my padding, and decided the net effect worked well enough.
I took a small temporary tattoo of a cannabis leaf and applied it to my neck, just below my right ear, and emerged at last from the bedroom as a corpulent, granola-crunching, carbon-neutral, blue collar, hiking type of creature with a neck tattoo, a sleazy mustache, a well-tanned complexion and cotton balls in my cheeks both to distort my face and the sound of my speech.
‘You like the new look?’ I asked Chante, serving up a slow one for her.
‘Have you changed something?’
I walked to the Museumplein to soak up some art. It was raining – not a downpour, more of a sullen drizzle – and I had to use an umbrella to keep rain off my mustache. As I walked, the extra clothing and padding added to the humidity made me sweat, and rain and sweat together are not good for fake facial hair. So I slowed my usual New-Yorker-with-a-twenty-minute-lunch-break pace, willing myself to be cool.
What the Red Light District is for guys who’ve never learned to masturbate, the Museumplein (moo-say-um-plane) is for parents and couples and, I suppose, a few genuine art lovers. It’s moo-say-ums and green spaces, a fabulous concert hall and a couple of nice outdoor cafés.
You arrive at Museumplein via the Rijksmuseum’s central arcade, a tall passageway as wide as three cars abreast, that cuts through the middle of the building. The Rijks is about as grand a structure as the Dutch will allow, a late-nineteenth-century, dark-brick behemoth built around two courtyards. It’s a bit like a squared-off number eight, with the cavernous arcade as the crosspiece, and the courtyards as the holes. There is almost always a classical group playing in the arcade, often Eastern Europeans, doing rather good renditions of classical bits and bobs. On this day it was Vivaldi’s ‘Summer’ from The Four Seasons, and the ensemble included two violins, an accordion, a tuba and a balalaika the size of a surfboard, which I don’t think was quite how Vivaldi would have arranged it, but it worked with the accordion and tuba coming together to sound surprisingly like a pipe organ.
I walked through the arcade energized by the frantic violin, squeezed around the bulge of music lovers which inevitably spilled off the walkway onto the center lanes meant for bikes and the rare official vehicle, and passed out of shadow into the damp overcast of the Museumplein.
The first thing one notices is a very large red and white sign/sculpture forming the words ‘I Amsterdam,’ with the ‘I’ and the ‘Am’ in red, the remaining letters in white. This is irresistible for tourists who climb all over it like clumsy monkeys and strike poses for the benefit of their Instagram followers, who would, I assume, see the photo and think, douche, which I suppose makes people happy. It was both wet and chilly and there were nevertheless seven people in or on the sign, including a terrified toddler propped in the hole of the lower-case ‘d’.
Beyond the sign/sculpture was a fan-shaped open space with the efficient name of Art Square. Art Square featured at the northern, Rijksmuseum end a long, ovoid pool, which in winter became an ice-skating rink. There was a large and usually busy outdoor café, not so busy on this day, and just a bit further on kiosks selling hot dogs. Beyond that point (the hot dog latitudes) the plein becomes a vast lawn extending to the concrete lozenge of the Van Gogh (Fon-CHGHKOKGH) museum ahead and to the west, and the Concertgebouw (con-SERT-gay-bow), a great pile of limestone and red brick with classical Greek pretensions. Inside the Concertgebouw is where they keep the giant pipe organ the breezeway accordion wanted to be when it grew up.
The plein is too large ever to be called crowded, it manages to swallow even the largest tourist horde, and on this day, with gray clouds not a hundred feet off the ground, and with peak tourist season fading, there were only a few dozen people, families with kids mostly, wandering around the pool, tossing coins, trailing fingers, yelling at children who believed the word ‘pool’ implied ‘wading’. Individuals or small pods of people walked the gravel pathways heading to and from cultural touchstones. They walked beneath umbrellas, many emblazoned with a hotel’s logo, some with Van Gogh’s sunflowers or irises, booty of the souvenir shops.
I kept an eye open for the Hangwoman, but I was in disguise and in the open and not drinking spike-able beer or motoring down a canal, so not very concerned. I kept an eye open for Madalena and Smit as well, but given what I knew of them they didn’t strike me as museum people. I also kept an eye out for Willy Pete whose interest in art would be quite as avid as my own.
I stood there by the pool for a while with my phone open and my umbrella sort of resting on my head to free my hands, and compared the overhead satellite view with my horizontal real-world perspective. Mise en place is the useful French phrase, a culinary term which translates as putting in place referring to the chef’s arrangement of foods and garnishes, spices, herbs, pans, spoons, ladles, strainers and knives required to prepare an evening’s meals.
This was my mise en place. Where were the major buildings? Where were the walkways and streets and canals? Where did people cluster? And the always important: where are bathrooms, trash cans and places where one might duck out of view or dump something incriminating?
With the essential pieces of the exterior setting clear in my head, I walked back to the musicians who were now at work on one of the Brandenburgs, shook my umbrella and entered the Rijksmuseum, following the stairs down into one of the museum’s two great courtyards. It’s a covered courtyard, all lovely light gray marble, with red brick rising as the backdrop and blanked side windows looking down. Tasteful, restrained, but also a bit generic.
Ahead and down more steps was the gift shop. I went there first because that was what a not-very-artsy tourist might do. Also the various printed museum guides were a good way to get a preview of the building itself. I studied maps, struggling to make sense of the long corridors and the exhibit rooms, which ranged in size from suburban master bedroom, up to great echoing hangars housing the larger and gloomier works.
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. They 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.