John didn’t know anything about art, but he knew a fair bit about things that were old. He’d grown up with the vague idea that his father had a dedication to three things: root beer, real beer, and flea markets.
As Jonathan got toward adulthood, he understood there was more to it, that his father was ill, wrung in cycles of hopelessness that didn’t seem to obey any rules of cause and effect. But the truth was that John never really gave a shit about any of that. He didn’t have much of an attention span for wondering about the invisible weight that pressed his father.
His mother had always made up the practical difference anyway, sometimes with three jobs at once and always with a watchful eye on her husband’s frailties. He wouldn’t protest as she’d donate a truckload of his accumulated junk and move them on to the next town, and into the invigorating distraction of a fresh start.
It was time to go if the man of the house bloomed in enthusiasms that swelled into days-long impassioned rants. He’d quit his job at the grocery or hardware store and spend his time instead bringing in carloads, sometimes even borrowed-truck loads, of plunder as he discovered this, that, and every ridiculous other. At one point, they’d owned four washing machines and two refrigerators, a blocky white Stonehenge of appliances in the living room, all just as useful plugged in as not.
It was equally worrisome when he quit talking altogether and got to slurping sweet suds and hoppy ones as the television channels ran through their schedules in front of him and the clock wound circles on the wall.
His mother’s vigilance had a whiff of warden about it. Something truly bad might’ve happened if she didn’t mind the fences of her husband’s moods.
She slept no more than three or four hours a night until she didn’t wake up at all one morning two days before she would have turned forty-six. Jonathan knew it was a sad thing. Tragic even. But she’d brought it on herself. No one made her everyone’s keeper or made her stand sentry until it killed her.
Jonathan had spent hours—months’ worth of hours probably—trotting along on the trail of his father’s obsession with the minutiae of secondhand sales. His dad was animated by abundance, sometimes the shabbier the better, and by the suspended animation of all that stuff just sitting there in between belonging to someone.
Flea markets, swap meets, and pawnshops were his father’s favorites, but the peripheral booths at gun shows and trade fairs would do, too. He wasn’t above enjoying a yard sale either, but his wife made him promise that the lawns of their neighbors, in whatever town they were living in, were off-limits.
Jonathan Spera the Elder was warm and happy and competent and just a touch holier-than-thou when he roamed the no-expectation zones of the world with a little cash in his pocket. In tow, Junior watched the traffic on the road, fantasizing where the long-haul truckers would end up when they pulled in and unhitched their trailers.
But the knowledge of the worth of things, and specifically of how a span of years magically transformed the worth of things, soaked into Junior and became reflexive.
After his mother died, Jonathan didn’t have the patience that she had for calibrating each day against his father’s ability to cope. So he’d introduced his father to marijuana and plain cigarettes just to keep him calm.
He smothered the embers of his father’s chemical swings with blankets of nicotine, caffeine, sugar, and THC, until his dad was up to slightly better than three packs of cigarettes a day and just under an ounce of weed every two weeks. A few cases of protein drink, a few economy-size tubs of instant coffee, an assortment of junk food, and all the root beer and Pabst his father could drink was the standing order. That and a paid cable bill kept the old man effectively paralyzed. Happy enough, as far as Jonathan could tell.
The government checks and his mother’s annuity covered it until it didn’t. There was never any left over, and the last few days of some months were tense with Jonathan’s phone lighting up in spasms of his father’s anxiety, hunger, and permanent hangover.
But not until his father died after nearly nine years of the routine, alone in his chair with the TV on and a cigarette burned fully through to the skin, did Jonathan truly understand himself.
When he found his father with his tongue dried to a shriveled leaf-looking thing in his slack open mouth, he’d turned off the TV and switched on the overhead. The smoke-stained glass fixture dribbled yellow light over a room chock-full of junk, and entirely empty of life. And it was Jonathan’s own personal sunrise. In the sudden echo of release, and thirty-two years young, he knew what he was made of.
The burn on his father’s thigh was disgusting—deep and dry by the time Jonathan found him, but a howling blackish red and clean edged. His father clearly hadn’t budged while the cherry seared through the flannel and his skin. He’d never made a single move to save himself. Just as always. No struggle at all.
Jonathan had thrown a blanket into the old man’s lap, and cleared his throat to make room to wedge a sad sound into his voice and called 911 for a pointless ambulance.
Then life moved on.
When Jonathan sold his father’s house, he hired out for all the hot, boring, dirty, splintery work of making the place look as if it had been even a little bit cared for. Out of the crew that came to pressure-wash and repair the deck, Roy was the only one who didn’t look like a criminal. Roy looked like a mess, no mistaking, but not as if he was eyeing up everything that wasn’t nailed down, or as if he was ready to carve a few extra holes into anyone just for the sport of it.
Roy Dorring was a mule—dull, plodding, and reliable in a narrow beast-of-burden kind of way. But the shiniest facet of Roy, as far as Jonathan could care about, was his stubborn insistence on being pathetic. It was a rustle in the grass, a whiff of prey on the breeze. And Jonathan had a stinger, a restless vestigial tail on his personality.
That’s what he’d realized once his parents were gone. He was free, but he couldn’t sink his disapproval into a memory. It didn’t satisfy. It was distracting. He’d been too long without a target, and the venom was backed up in him. Roy drew the barb as if it were his one true calling.
After the deck, for the rest of the grunt work, Jonathan flipped a coin between the two broke-ass fools who most needed a job, cheating the spin to let Roy win the jumping chance to ask How high? Out of the two likely candidates, Roy was the weakest, and therefore the best.
Jonathan set him on various errands and projects and exorcised his irritation on Roy’s cringing back at every fumble and misstep.
The leaching worked. Jonathan felt better. He acted more friendly with other people. He slept more deeply. He got things done. When diagrammed out, it was the upstanding thing to do. Everyone whom Jonathan encountered benefited from his heaping a little extra shit on a guy who didn’t notice the difference.
Roy, like John’s father, also had a weakness for junk. His truck was full to blackout at the windows with it. Jonathan had called him over for the sneezy, gritty chore of clearing out the old man’s garage. The endless heaps of everything had Roy as distracted as a toddler in a toy store.
Jonathan was hot and exasperated until the discovery of a box bowing at the sides with old magazines, loose art prints in plastic sleeves, and a painting sticking up from the rest—a mill with a waterwheel next to a river, a bridge, a tall tower off on its own in the middle distance. Boring.
When Jonathan pulled the panel out and saw the faint inscription, R. 16, something illegible, then an 8, brushed in at the right corner, the painting just sitting there in a box in his father’s garage, propped up among the ridiculous crap and the marginally useful crap, he doubted it at first. But he’d seen enough old junk to recognize time. And that looked like an awful lot of time.
He’d sharpened his sneer to shoo away Roy, who was peering over Jonathan’s shoulder, cooing over the stack of papers and art prints as if it were sweet.
Do you need something to read, Roy? Can you even read? Take this shit if it interests you so much.
Jonathan had topped off the box with a pair of dry-rotted snowshoes that Roy had been eyeing, and shoved him out the door to be alone with this possible treasure.
It had been overcast and the daylight hadn’t gained much of a reach through the rolled-up metal door. Jonathan squinted to make the most of the weak, gray glow as he studied his find. Then he believed what he saw: that the first two digits of that number would be worth a lot. But to whom?
Jonathan had dared hope that the painting could be worth five figures. It turned out to be worth millions. But how to unload it? It was the best worst problem he’d ever had. No regular person knows how to do that. All of a sudden he had this thing he suspected was valuable, but then what?
He had to find someone who did know what to do with it. Nothing in his education in special trash had ever offered a suggestion of how to get the most out of a nearly four-hundred-year-old painting.
Yellowed newspapers, bubbled glass, vintage advertising signs with their logos rusting off, buffalo nickels, toys they had wisely stopped making once better fun had come along, obsolete electronics—if it was quaint and old, or just quaint or just old, Jonathan would have had an idea of where to start. But as it was . . .
Lots of experts were available online, but his instinct had been to go in person, with only a photo of the painting on his phone. He’d strolled through a huge auction house and two high-end galleries, sizing up the people there, comparing their treasures as best he could against what he’d hidden away at home. But he hadn’t been inspired to talk to any of them before he met Marcelline.
She was beautiful, both warm and cool at the same time, and that never hurt anything. But watching her work through two phone calls and one in-the-flesh transaction had convinced Jonathan he’d find an angle, a set of dials he could control in the exchange. She was interested in her work, but passionless about it.
That assessment of her burned to the ground when they’d realized, together, what he had wrapped in a blanket in his closet at home. Marcelline had sparked up, so glittering and intense with excitement that Jonathan couldn’t even look at her without feeling it in his balls. It wasn’t just the money for her. It was the story of the painting, the history, the old Boston museum heist.
They talked each other into selling it themselves without involving the gallery or the FBI. She made calls. Took a promising meeting. Then they talked each other through two bottles of wine and, ultimately, into bed.
When he woke up in her apartment, he’d still been convinced of the wisdom of the private sale, but perhaps not of the rest of it. He shouldn’t have slept with her. Maybe he shouldn’t even have shown interest in her idea. He should have left and said that he would think about it and be in touch.
He was angry with himself. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t telegraphed with her sleek look and liquid grace, climbing atop him, smooth legs parting over his lap on her sofa, mouth tasting of wine, that she was fast, decisive, aerodynamic even.
The sale was set up, bird in the hand as it were, before he knew anything about feathered friends and birds of prey. Too fast. He’d have to split it with her, whatever she could negotiate. Jonathan was an only child to the last cell in his body, unaccustomed to sharing.
So he’d quick-plotted, using the simplest tool he’d had. He could control Roy with a minimum of explanation to rattle the buyer, some rich prick named Anninger. Easy. Hell, if it went wrong the right way, it would have been fine with Jonathan if they’d killed Roy or beaten him into a coma. Either way, it would have been the excuse Jonathan needed to duck out and reschedule—without Marcelline. After her indiscretion, with her career in the balance, she’d hardly be able to complain.
They all had guns, and Roy managed to ruin everything by spazzing at the trigger finger when one of buyer’s guys pulled his hands from his pockets. Both the small- and medium-size thugs fell, but the big guy, the absolute hardest-to-miss target outside the buildings themselves, had nothing but the noise to slow him down. Roy also killed Marcelline.
The double cross had closed off the legitimate route forever. Jonathan’s new enemies were possibly worse than jail. So four years on, instead of millions, he still had a little cash and the painting. And he still didn’t know how to get rid of it.
He could look for another Marcelline. Someone else out there would be as knowledgeable. Other people would be bold and greedy enough to slide this painting off to its next owner without involving the law.
Or . . .
Jonathan had to admit that he did know more now than he had back then. He knew at least one person who was willing and able to pay for the painting. He knew the name Anninger, and their guy, Marcelline’s contact . . . Oscar? Oliver? Owen, Oren, definitely an O name.
John pushed back from his desk where he’d been staring out the window until his eyes had gone dry. Donna was out of the house with her to-do list. Carly and Ada had packed up the art supplies right after school and run off again. They’d been living at the library over the last few days.
He’d been going in late to the office and coming home early. Everyone was so understanding of his need to be with his family at a time like this. And that worked great for John, who more needed to be with his painting at a time like this, even hidden away as it was.
The stillness of the house was gnawing at his nerves. He checked the drawer where he kept a little slush fund, but found only four twenties left.
He pulled down the attic ladder and craned to listen for the garage door. The sound of nothing spurred him on to full speed. The quiet wouldn’t last.
Up the ladder in three pulls, he moved a box from in front, and one from on top of a locked trunk, and took the key from the gap between a pair of raw two-by-fours.
Hiding the satchel and the painting was tricky, but the money wouldn’t be worth less after aging in the heat and the cold of the attic, or after a plumbing mishap in the basement. Money, dry or damp, would still spend.
At first he’d put the painting, wrapped against humidity, down in the skeletal unfinished basement, behind the open, raw-wood stairs with the boxes and cobwebs and mousetraps where no one ever wanted to go. Then he decided he didn’t trust it.
If anything good was about the Flinck’s being on the wall in the foyer, it was the air-conditioning in the summer and the soft gas heat in the winter. Even the sunlight didn’t get to it where it had landed.
He drew a short stack of bills from the dwindling green bricks. It had been four years of pocket money and expensive indulgences, but not the life he wanted, not the life that was so tantalizingly close.
He’d found a way to bide time before selling the Flinck, to buffer his trickery and accessory-after-the-fact vulnerability with a thick sheaf of calendar pages. It meant being a different person again, and that was kind of fun.
Donna was gorgeous, the sex was great, and a courtship and a wedding kept the schedule full of something other than waiting. She and Carly both had been so much better than what he’d needed to pass the days.
In his attic, their attic, above the rooms where he’d been part of a happy, laughing routine he dropped his hands to his sides, struck suddenly heavy and unsure by how fast the time with them had flown. It wouldn’t have if they’d been less than they were.
An ache swelled into his throat, but he shook his head against it. It didn’t matter. Anyway, he didn’t have to decide right now what this meant for them as a situation. He wouldn’t call it a family. Family felt too inevitable, something you didn’t choose. He chose this. He could choose to cut it loose. Or he could choose to find something in between.
John resecured the trunk and its camouflage, stowed the key, and eased the attic access door closed. He listened for the garage door. Still nothing. He swiped the grit and insulation dust from the floor with a static mop and smiled at the small success. Anything that went well in these last few days felt like getting away with skipping school.
He replenished the petty cash in his desk drawer, then went out and bought a prepaid phone with some of the rest of it. He sat in the car, setting it up and trying to remember all he could of the Anningers’ man who worked with Marcelline. John replayed the conversations he’d heard, what she’d told the guy in setting up the sale, listening to her play up the notoriety of the painting because she’d said the Anningers liked a side dish of darkness with whatever they were buying.
He tried to imagine what that night had looked like from that other guy’s vantage point, across the alley from Roy’s poor performance. Was any of this still an option?
A little cybersearching turned up a number for an Anninger-held business back near his old life, not far from the gallery where John had met Marcelline. He set his tone for harried, but friendly, ready to plead his case to the clipped, professional drone at the other end of the call.
“Hi. I’m wondering if you can help me. My phone died and I’ve lost all my contacts. I’m screwed. Everything’s gone. I was working on setting up a sale with one of Mr. Anninger’s associates, a big guy named—”
“Let me put you through to sales.”
“No, no wait. I just—”
Click. Hold music.
Call after call. Calls transferred. New numbers suggested. Exasperated verbal shrugs.
“I’m trying to locate one of their associates. He’s a real big guy. His name is Oscar or Otis or something. . . . I’m almost sure his name started with an O. I’m terrible with names.”
The man laughed through his nose, but John heard promise in it. The car had gone stifling with heat and with the boredom of too many dead ends. Goose bumps on John’s scalp was almost as good as a cool breeze.
“I think you mean Owen Haig.”
“Yeah.” There was tapping on the line, a keyboard in the background. “Except now all I’m going to be able to think is Otis next time I see him, and that’ll get me killed for laughing at him. So, thanks for that.” The guy chuckled again. “Otis. Fan-friggin’-tastic. Here’s a number for their call service. Just tell them to put you through to Owen Haig’s voice mail. Got a pen?”
John Cooper looked at the number now typed onto the screen of the throwaway phone in his hand. His pulse throbbed in his head. He watched it banging into his eyes, hypnotizing him. His mind wanted to run away to anything, even into the strobe of his own heartbeat.
He was worried about pinging the Anningers. He was worried about getting this wrong. And he almost couldn’t take any more worry on top of everything else. But just doing nothing was a constant needling itch in his skin.
No one might ever notice the painting. The video could have its flare of fame with the internet generation absolutely oblivious to the sliver of waterwheel and bridge. The best thing might be exactly that—stalling and waiting and letting this whole fiasco glide right over him so that he could move the painting when he felt good and ready to do it. That’s what all of this had been for.
But if he was wrong and the fuse was hissing up behind him, it had all been for nothing anyway.
He dragged his hands over his face, his wedding ring pressing a track against his left brow and cheek.
The phone could go under the tire of his car in the next ten minutes if he needed it to, if this didn’t go well. Owen Haig didn’t know anything about him. Which meant the guy didn’t know anything good, but he couldn’t know anything all that bad either.
Their one meeting had been a disaster. John had seen the way Owen looked at Marcelline; saw a big man with his heart in his throat who didn’t know how to chew and swallow a simple crush. John had felt the unlikely urge to put his hand on her ass and wink at Owen just to see what color he’d turn.
But the guy was huge and serious in a way that discouraged any jokes. No hint of a gentle giant there, just one so stone-faced that it wasn’t worth finding out if he could take a little ribbing or not.
Jonathan had taken the money. And the painting. That’s all Owen Haig knew about him. But Haig didn’t know why any of it had happened. There could be a scenario sketched out that would explain it all in a better light. In a show of good faith, the whole debacle could be worked in as a discount, a concession in the new asking price if that helped make it feel more right to Owen and the Anningers.
Jonathan cocked his head, deciding what he should sound like in this call, figuring out which John he needed to be to get things moving again.
If Roy had gotten it right that night, John would always have had to make a call like this to renegotiate with the Anningers. He was always going to have to make Marcelline look bad to justify it. In a way, this was easier. She was hardly in a position to argue her side of it. The original plan, more or less, was possibly salvageable.
That was the answer: act as if nothing had gone irreversibly wrong four years ago. Handle it ice-cold. Nothing more than the unfortunate hazards of doing business in the big leagues. That was the extralarge goon’s shtick. That’s what he would understand.
John cleared his throat to make room for calm confidence in his voice and dialed Owen Haig.