I had so much else to think about after the party that the whole Carson-speaking-Russian thing didn’t hit me hard until my morning run.
Allyson said Carson has “useful skills.” Does she think it’s useful to have somebody around who speaks Russian instead of, say… Italian? Why? The only Russians I’ve heard about so far are the mafia types trying to take over Morrone’s turf. Do we need to talk to them?
I’d love to say no. The way things have been going, I can’t.
Who’s the dude in that silver AMG?
An email’s waiting on my burner phone when I get back to the hotel from my run. I open it and find an Italian phone number. Only one person has the burner’s address.
His phone rings twice. “Yes?”
“Burim?”
“Neutra. I have it. You want, yes?”
That was fast. He’s better than I figured. “Yeah. Where do we meet?”
“Via Raffaele Rubattino, 91. Is factory, no one is there.”
I look it up on my computer and see an abandoned industrial complex melting into the landscaping. Graffiti seems to be holding the front wall together. Nice place to get my throat cut. “No way in hell. Hold on.” I mute my burner and scroll the map around. I want someplace sort-of public but not so much that we can’t do business. A promising spot shows up after a minute of poking. “Bar Bianco, in Parco Sempione. They don’t open ‘til ten. I’ll meet you there—” I check the time: just past seven “—at eight. Got it?”
“Yes, yes.” He sounds peeved. So much for the ambush. “No police, or bad for you.”
Burim maybe wants to ambush me? Okay. This time, I’m taking Carson.
Of course, that means I have to tell her.
“Now you’re telling me?”
Because she runs faster, she’s already showered and changed into jeans and another long-sleeved tee, while I’m still in my sweats. I’ll always see her in that dress from last night even if she wears jeans for the rest of this job. She’s barefoot and her hair’s damp, which ought to soften her, but her look’s more like she just climbed out of a swamp with a bayonet between her teeth.
“It was kinda a long shot.” I edge back against her room’s front door, just in case. “I didn’t know if it would go anywhere. It looks like it will.”
“Great.” She’s pacing in a circle. It’s not a good sign. “This your buddy in the Albanian Mob?”
“Um, yeah.”
“Fucking great.” She paces some more. “What’s your plan?”
“Olivia sent me a GPS tracker chip and battery. I’ll install it in the canvas’ stretcher. Burim fences it to Belknap. If all the stars line up, Belknap adds it to Morrone’s stash and we’ll find out where it is.”
“Or Belknap sticks it in that storage room of his.”
There’s that. “Even if he does, we’ve confirmed where Morrone gets at least some of his stolen art. We’re only out the couple hundred bucks for the chip.”
Carson slows down a bit. Her mouth untwists a notch. “What do you need me for?”
“To watch my back, like last night.”
“Don’t trust this Burim, eh?”
“Not so much.”
Parco Sempione is a big swath of grass and trees reaching northwest from the Castello Sforzesco. The looming fifteenth-century brick fortress is one of the other places I’ve wanted to see, so I’m glad the gates are open when Carson and I march through on our way into the park. Too bad I don’t have the couple hours I’d like to spend here.
Bar Bianco is a two-level, open-air pavilion near the center of the park, all concrete, gray stone and royal-blue steel. A conical glass canopy covers the balcony and seating area overhanging the ground-floor terrace and service spaces. Trees crowd the back and line the path to the west.
I do a full lap around the place, checking for some sign of Burim. Up on the balcony, I claim a white vinyl sofa and stow my shopping bag full of goodies. I can look down from here on the wood-plank terrace’s outside edge, the intersection of two wide gravel paths, and the runners puffing along them. I keep my eyes moving while I worry at my go-cup of black hotel coffee.
Carson’s out there somewhere. We split up inside the castle. She brought her big purse, so I figure she also has her arsenal, not that it makes me feel a lot safer.
“Neutra?” Burim stands near the bench ringing the tree in the middle of the terrace. Today’s track suit is a vivid shade of eggplant. He has something flat and squarish in a green trash bag under his arm.
“Stay there.” I trot down the stairs and lead him to a nearby table. “Show me what you’ve got.”
He eyes a full circle around him before he edges to the table. Then he pulls an unframed canvas, twelve by sixteen or so, from the bag. It’s a still life, a glass vase of showy white roses on a wooden stand with a pile of blooms off to the right. Pretty. Then I notice “Fantin 1881” printed on the upper right and think, seriously?
“No papers,” he says. “Is old, yes? Much dust before I clean.”
“Good job.” I point to the intersection. “Go have a smoke or three. This’ll take a few minutes.”
“What you do?”
“I need to make sure this is something he’ll want. It’s part of the deal, remember?”
Burim snorts, then scuffles down the little grass slope to the edge of the path.
As soon as I’m back upstairs, I bring up StolenArt on my phone and plug in “Henri Fantin-Latour.” The FBI lists Still Life with Grapes—no grapes in this one—and both INTERPOL and ALR have Bouquet de Roses Dans un Verre, stolen in Milan in 1992. Bingo. I check Blouin to see if Fantin’s floral still-lifes are popular now.
Are they ever.
Two similar works sold last year through Christie’s and Sotheby’s for $787,000 and $695,000, respectively. Good job, Burim. The sad part is, he probably doesn’t know or care. To him it’s just a dusty old painting worth a few grand.
I’ve fiddled with canvases before, but never did anything like this to potentially three-quarters of a million dollars’ worth of painting. No pressure.
I fish a hotel bath towel out of my shopping bag, cover the nearest table, and flip the piece on its face. The canvas is unlined—one less layer of material to deal with—and the tacking margin’s in pretty good shape considering it’s a hundred thirty years old. I lay out the tools I bought at an art supply store earlier in the week, crack my knuckles, then pry the tacks out of three inches of one edge of the canvas.
Burim check: he’s leaning on the open-rail fence, looking up at me over his shoulder with a cig dangling from his lower lip. I point toward the intersection. He snorts out a plume of smoke and turns around.
Cutting the slot for the chip is the part that gives me hives—if I break the stretcher, I could damage the canvas. I take a deep breath. A pin vise with a drill bit removes most of the wood; an X-acto knife with a thin chisel-like blade finishes it. The sawdust goes onto a scrap of tinfoil.
Rustling in the trees off to my right makes me look up. It’s not the breeze; there isn’t any. All I see is leaves. Burim’s fiddling with his phone. The joggers and moms pushing strollers pay zero attention to him. They can’t see me, but I feel somebody’s eyes on me.
The chip’s about half an inch square and five millimeters thick, with two battery leads soldered to one edge. Olivia said this is Israeli tech, based on the GPS chips in cell phones. The battery’s about half its size, also flat, with wires sprouting from one end. It’ll power the GPS chip for about four days with the chip reporting every fifteen minutes.
A minute after I connect the leads, a little red dot appears in more-or-less the right place on the tracking app’s map on my business phone. I pinch on a couple patches of electrical tape to keep the wires joined, then ease the chip into the slot I cut in the stretcher.
A thud to my right startles me so bad I almost snap off the chip. Burim and I both swivel toward the noise. I peer down into the trees until my eyes threaten to bleed, but I can’t see anything that isn’t green. Burim climbs the fence and trots up the path toward the sound. He loses headway fast and ends up standing between me and the noise, his head whipping back and forth between it and me.
“You come alone, yes?” he barks.
“Did you come alone?”
He turns away, takes another step toward the sound, then falls back to the fence. “Finish.”
“Chill.”
I snug the chip home, then nestle the battery beside it. I tell the app to interrogate the chip. A few seconds later, the red dot disappears, then pops up again in the same place.
I fill the slot with two-part epoxy, then tamp in sawdust. Sixty seconds later, I run the corner of a small sheet of very fine sandpaper over the now-closed wound. It feels smooth under my fingertip, but it’s clearly lighter than the rest of the aged wood around it.
A dash of coffee goes into the upturned lid of my cup. I wet a small paintbrush and stroke it over the scar. A little light; I give it a second coat, then a third. Coffee makes a great natural dye. I’ve aged provenance documents with it.
There’s a strangled yap behind the bar building, like a dog with laryngitis. Burim glares at me. I hold up my palms in the universal no-clue gesture. I’m thinking these aren’t just the natural sounds of the park, though.
Finally, I carefully stretch the loose canvas back to its original location and replace the tacks. My surgery’s now invisible.
Then I start breathing again.
I take the Fantin down to the terrace. “All right, Burim, it’s yours.”
Burim mutters something in what’s probably Albanian and crushes his cigarette on the sole of his gym shoe. The butt goes into his jacket pocket while he stalks my way. He picks up the Fantin the way he would an empty pizza box and rolls it around. “What you do?”
“Made sure it’s authentic. Are you taking it to Lorenzoni today?”
“Why?” He’s looking around like he’s lost his dog.
“So I know when to start looking for it. Remember why I’m doing this?”
“Yes, yes.” His head’s on a swivel. He’s getting edgier by the minute.
His squirrel act plus the mystery noises equals Carson. I’m getting to appreciate that woman. “One more thing. Don’t tell Lorenzoni about me. He’ll find out when it’s time. Understand?”
Burim squints at me. “Maybe I do. Maybe I get more money, yes? How much you pay?”
What a surprise. “How about this: what just happened to your guys, the ones who came with you? I don’t make it happen to you.”
Threatening a gangster should make me melt into my shoes, but the look on his face is worth the potential near-death experience. It’s like I just turned into a T-rex in front of him.
I give him a little salute. “Have a good day, Burim.”