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MANNY WAS WAITING FOR us in the hallway. His fists were resting on his hips, his lips a thin line. He glared at me while waiting until Colin closed the interview room door behind him. “Care to tell us who the hell this detective is, missy?”
“Detective Maxová is blond and never wears bandanas or leopard print.” Ivan stood next to Daniel, his frown pulling his eyebrows low over his eyes.
“I don’t know who she is.”
“Oh, you better give me more than that, Doc.”
I sighed. “I saw her while you were registering us. She came out of the restricted area and left the building.”
“But you noticed her.” Colin leaned against the wall. “Was she the reason you zoned out?”
“I thought I saw something.”
“How many times must I tell you that you must say something when you see something, Doc?” Manny’s jaw clenched, his nostrils flaring as he took a few deep breaths. “Bloody hell. Who else is involved in this mess?”
Colin looked at Ivan. “She must be on your security footage.”
Ivan nodded and turned back to the observation room. “I’ll also download the footage of the other interviews with Broz for you.”
We followed Ivan into the room. Manny mumbled his displeasure under his breath. “Frey, I assume you know who this bloody Ant is. By the gods, if you don’t know and you didn’t ask for his full—”
“Take a breath, Millard. Antonin Korn is a well-respected art dealer here in Prague.”
My eyebrows rose. I’d investigated eleven of Antonin Korn’s clients when I had been working for Phillip’s insurance company. He’d sent them to Rousseau & Rousseau to insure their newly acquired artworks. Phillip had insisted on a thorough investigation into the clients as well as the art before he’d agreed to as little as a first appointment. I had never asked Phillip why Antonin Korn’s clients had required this extra scrutiny.
“Well-respected my arse.” Manny’s buccinator muscles pulled his lips into a sneer. “No one is well-respected if he’s a criminal.”
“He’s not a convicted criminal,” Colin said. “There have been rumours for decades and he’s been investigated a few times, but no one could ever find anything on him.”
“Um, guys?” Ivan scratched his head, leaning back in the chair facing the computer console. “We have a problem.”
“What now?” Manny walked closer to the computers.
“It seems like all the footage of Broz’s interviews has been wiped.”
“How the holy blazes did that happen?”
“I’ll get our IT people on it.” Ivan’s jaw tightened. “If it’s truly gone, it means that somebody has been in our system.”
He took out his smartphone and spoke in rapid Czech to someone. For a moment he paused and held up a finger towards us. Then his eyes narrowed, his forehead creased and he leaned back. He listened quietly for eight seconds then ended the call. “Fuck.”
“That definitely doesn’t sound good.” Daniel looked pointedly at Ivan’s phone.
“It isn’t.” Ivan shook his head. “IT says they can’t see any unauthorised access to the system, but they can see that files have been deleted. Not only deleted, the person also overwrote those files. We’ve lost everything related to Tomas Broz. Even your interview.”
Manny’s shoulders slumped. “Are your people good? We’ve got people who might be able to get the footage back. I’ve been told that nothing is truly deleted.”
“We have brilliant IT specialists here. I know that if something is deleted, there is still a chance of recovering it. But if someone overwrites the file numerous times, then deletes it?” Ivan shook his head. “No, I doubt they’ll be able to recover it. I also asked about footage of the reception area when I was signing you guys in, but that has also been deleted.”
“We need to find out who the bleeding hell that woman is, what she was doing here and what her connection is to Shahab.” Manny turned towards the door. “And we need to visit this well-respected art dealer.”
“Give me a minute.” Ivan turned back to the computers. “I’ll get my team to start on this woman’s ID and get clearance for visiting Antonin Korn. I’ll meet you by the cars.”
Manny responded with a curt nod and marched down the hallway. Ten minutes later we were driving through Prague. The architecture in this city was spellbinding enough to give me a reprieve from the overload of information bombarding my mind.
Prague was one of the few European capital cities that had not been rebuilt during the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. All the different eras were represented in the majestic buildings. It was not the Gothic, Renaissance or Baroque eras that enchanted me. It was the magnificent buildings hailing from the Romanesque era that drew my eye each time we passed one. The thick walls, large towers, round arches and symmetrical designs appealed to my autistic mind.
Colin had given Vinnie and Francine an update on our findings. Manny sat quietly in the back, his head tilted back and his eyes closed. His scowl contrasted his relaxed posture. Francine was working on her laptop, Colin and Vinnie talking about the luxury cars on the road with us.
This time of the day, traffic allowed us to reach the gallery without delay. It was on the outskirts of the Old Town, the paved street lined with large Classicist buildings that made the street feel even narrower than it was. The cream buildings were in stark contrast to the clear blue sky. This city was truly beautiful.
The gallery sat between a boutique with tall mannequins wearing evening gowns in the shop window and a cigar salon. The window display of the art gallery was an elegant reproduction of a library, three paintings hanging on the walls between bookshelves and two sculptures on the antique side table next to a leather wingback chair. It looked exclusive. Unlike the neighbouring shops, there were no lights on inside the gallery. A large sign hung above the door, ‘Korn’s Art’ engraved in decorative letters.
Colin parked his SUV next to a police vehicle that looked like it could belong to URNA—Czech’s SWAT teams. We got out just as Ivan parked next to us. He also got out and nodded towards the URNA vehicle. “They were fast.”
Vinnie was studying the five men dressed in dark gray camouflage uniforms, their bulletproof vests similar to the ones I’d seen from Daniel’s team—laden with tools, weapons and pockets. “Why did you get an URNA team out here?”
“Precaution.” Ivan touched his neck, then smiled. I didn’t pay attention to his genuine smile. It was his first, unchecked nonverbal reaction that had caught my attention. He took a step towards the men next to the URNA vehicle. “Let me introduce you to my previous team.”
I barely paid attention to the introductions. Instead I watched Ivan. That slight gesture had brought back to my mind his quickly controlled hesitation at Jan Novotný’s crime scene, his earlier reaction in our hotel room as well as his telling micro-expressions in the police station. What was he hiding?
The URNA team came out of the gallery while I mentally recalled every non-verbal cue that had caught my attention from Ivan. I hadn’t even seen the team enter the gallery.
“All clear.” The leader looked disappointed as he shrugged and looked at Manny, then at Ivan. “Nothing here for us to do.”
Manny was glaring at the gallery door. “What do you mean it’s all clear? There’s no one inside?”
“Nobody,” the URNA leader answered. “The door is unlocked, but none of the computers are turned on, no lights are on.”
“Huh.” Manny pushed his hands in his trouser pockets. “Well, let’s go inside then.”
Ivan went in first and located the light switches. When the strategic lighting came on, the gallery transformed from a dark space to a beautiful display of artwork. Unlike many other galleries I’d been to, this one was divided into five sections—each designed to look like a room in a house. The living room section had a large fireplace, a landscape painting in a heavy frame above the mantelpiece.
Colin’s eyes widened in pleasure and he walked to the bedroom section. Above the bed were sketches of nude women. He shook his head in awe. “These are Henri Matisse drawings.”
“I don’t care.” Manny walked towards the back of the gallery. “Where’s the office?”
“In here.” Ivan pointed to the door that looked like it led to a garden from the dining room section.
I left Colin to admire the art and followed Manny and Francine into the back room. It was a well-organised space, for which I was grateful. I never understood how people could function, not to mention be productive, in a chaotic and cluttered environment.
Antonin Korn had lined his office walls with dark wooden filing cabinets and cupboards. Ivan had opened the filing cabinet behind the desk, Daniel was looking through a cupboard next to it and Manny was going through the desk drawers.
Francine stood with her hands on her hips. “Where are the computers?”
“Looks like this guy did everything old-school style.” Daniel stood to the side and pointed at the open cupboard. Rows upon rows of ring binders, labels on the back of each one, the large print stating the date and content.
“No way.” Francine’s jaw was slack. “That’s just... barbaric. How am I supposed to work?”
Ivan chuckled. “Like people did for thousands of years before computers.”
“There was no life before computers.” She huffed and looked at Manny. “My system is running background on Jan Novotný, but I can help it along when I’m focused on it. Do you want me to do that or let my system run and see what dirt I can dig up on Antonin online?”
“Antonin.” Manny looked at me. “Doc?”
I thought about this. “Both are important. Since we have basic background on Doctor Novotný and you’re already searching for more, I concur with Manny.”
“Well, it’s settled then.” Francine wrinkled her nose as she looked around the office space. “I’m going to sit in that comfy-looking sofa in the gallery and work on my tablet—on something that will give me results.”
“Good afternoon, everyone.” Phillip walked into the office. He was holding his dark blue wool coat over one arm, his bespoke suit fitting in well with the elegant surroundings. He glanced around the room, then stared at me for a second. “Are you well?”
“Hi and bye.” Francine smiled at him. “I’m outta here. If you need me, I’ll be in there.” She nodded at the gallery and left.
“I’m well. Did you learn anything of use?”
“Unfortunately not.” The frustration was not only in his body language, but also in his clipped words.
Manny briefed Phillip on everything that had taken place at the police station while I took a pair of latex gloves from their designated space in my handbag and put them on before opening a cupboard across from the desk. Even though this room was spacious, I was already feeling crowded.
I turned my back on the others and narrowed my focus on the contents of the cupboard. Just like the cupboard Daniel was going through, this one also was filled with ring binders. I took the first one on the top shelf and exhaled in relief. It was not covered in dust.
“What can you tell us about Antonin?” Daniel paused his search through the cupboard briefly as he looked at Phillip.
Phillip pulled at his cuffs. “I’ve known him professionally for... hmm... I would say eleven or so years. I can’t remember the first time we met, but I remember the first time he pushed me for business. By that time I’d heard rumours that he was not always doing everything above board.”
“Colin told us about some rumours.” Manny closed one desk drawer and opened another one. “But what rumours are you talking about?”
“Well, it was whispered that Ant sometimes worked with art that didn’t have clear provenance. Some of his clients also had reputations for white-collar crime, but few of them were ever charged, much less found guilty. There have always been rumours of illegal activities around him and some of his clients, but nothing that could be proven.”
“That is why you always had the clients he referred to you so thoroughly vetted.” It all made sense now.
Phillip nodded. “Not only the clients, but the art as well. I didn’t want to be anywhere close to illegal art deals. But as you know, we never found anything.”
Daniel straightened. “The sign of a good criminal. Hide in plain sight, continue doing transparent, legal business and be loud about it.”
“Oh, he’s loud.” Phillip’s smile was not kind. “He’s arrogant and has no trouble telling anyone that he is the most successful art dealer in Europe.”
“Is that true?” I never knew whether people were being truthful or merely boasting with hyperbole.
“Hmm... I wouldn’t say he is the most successful.” Phillip tilted his head as he took a moment before he nodded. “But I would say he is the most successful dealer in Near Eastern antiquities.”
“Near Eastern antiquities?” Daniel put his hands on his hips. “Shahab dealt in that stuff. All looted artworks.”
Manny swore and Phillip’s lips thinned. He nodded. “Then Shahab might have known Antonin.”
“I’m sure of it.” Colin was leaning against the doorframe, not entering the room. He smiled at me. “Ant has a reputation for his expertise. That was how I first heard about him. I had”—he glanced at Manny, his smile widening into a smug grin—“a sculpture that needed to find its way back to its original owners. Ant met with me and I must admit, I was impressed by his exhaustive knowledge about the area, the artists, the eras as well as individual pieces. He was like an encyclopaedia.”
“We have to keep in mind that Ant didn’t only sell Near Eastern antiquities.” Phillip looked at me. “How many of the pieces we insured are Near Eastern antiquities?”
“Two.” I remembered the detail of each case I’d investigated. “The others are masterpieces from different eras, all of them European in origin though.”
“So what are we thinking now?” Manny closed a desk drawer and leaned back in the chair. “That Antonin Korn deals in legit art from Europe, but is also the middleman for looted art from the Middle East?”
“Some of the Near Eastern pieces he sold were one hundred percent legal, but I wouldn’t put it past him to deal in looted art. Not at all.” Phillip shook his head. “I always had a bad feeling about him.”
“Then why did you take on his clients?” Ivan asked.
I thought about this. “Those eleven clients had other works insured by you.”
Phillip looked at me, his smile slight. “And they begged me to insure those pieces. It was only because I had done business with them before and I knew their integrity that I accepted them. Ant must have sent maybe fifty more clients my way, but I rejected them without any further consideration.”
Colin and Phillip started talking about the many artefacts Ant had sold and ventured further off topic, discussing Near Eastern art. Ivan, Daniel and Manny returned to searching through the office. I turned my attention back to the binders in front of me.
An hour later, Phillip and Colin had left and I was looking through the last binder. I was doing a simple scan through each one, hoping to get an overall sense of Antonin Korn’s filing system.
All the binders in this cupboard held paper copies of receipts for transactions dating back as far as 1995. But it was the binder I was currently paging through that held the most interesting information so far. I took another five minutes before I was satisfied that my conclusions were as near to accurate as possible. And that was when I saw something that sent a rush of adrenaline through my body. I reached for Mozart’s Symphony in F major, closed my eyes and focused on mentally writing the first three lines of the Allegro.
Only when I felt calmer did I look up. Ivan and Daniel were paging through what looked like an accounting ledger. Manny was sitting on the leather chair behind the desk looking through an open briefcase on his lap.
“I think I have a list of Antonin Korn’s clients.” I blinked when everyone’s heads jerked towards me. I looked down to the binder in front of me. “I also think there’s a list of his suppliers in here.”
“Well, let’s have a look at it.” Manny put the briefcase on the desk and walked towards me.
I shrank back. A quick look around confirmed that the office had remained the same size as before. Yet it felt smaller. I swallowed and looked towards the door. “Can we meet with the others out there?”
“Oh, bloody hell, Doc.” Manny sighed. “Of course. I could take a break from getting killed by papercut.”
“It would have to become severely infected to kil...” I sighed and picked up the binder. Once again I’d taken someone’s words literally.
Daniel and Ivan chuckled as they followed Manny out of the office. I held the binder away from my body in the likely case of it containing germs. The yellowed pages with the darker sections on the edges were proof of a lot of contact with hands that had not been gloved and very likely not been clean.
“What’s cookin’, good-lookin’?” Francine looked up from her tablet and smiled at Manny as he sat down on the large leather sofa next to her. This was the living area, the first display when entering the gallery. Two uniformed officers were standing in front of the shop window, watching the street. Their postures appeared relaxed, but I saw the tightness in their shoulders as they took note of everyone passing them on both sides of the street.
“Doc found something.” Manny lifted his chin towards me.
“Ooh!” Francine looked at the binder in my hands and frowned. “Paper? Really? Man, I hate this old-school system.”
“What did you find, love?” Colin left the large landscape painting he’d been looking at and joined us. He pulled two beautifully carved wooden dining room chairs closer and put one down next to me. “Sit and tell us.”
I inspected the tapestry-covered seat and decided it looked clean enough, so I sat down. “There seem to be two lists in this binder. One I assume is a list of clients. I came to that conclusion because I saw the names of the eleven clients Antonin had referred to Phillip. A lot of the names on the other list appear to be Arabic, which leads me to believe they might be his suppliers of Near Eastern antiquities.”
“Give the lists to Francine.” Manny ignored Francine’s melodramatic mumbling about having to copy everything from paper. “She’ll check them all out.”
I pulled the binder a bit closer to my body, but still made sure it didn’t touch me. “Shahab is on the second list.”
“Motherfucker.” Vinnie’s nostrils flared as he crossed his arms over his chest.
“Bloody hellfire, Doc! Why didn’t you say so earlier?”
Because it would’ve led to a shutdown. “I...”
I didn’t know whether it was the movement on the street that caught my attention or the one officer’s shoulders tensing even more. The shock of seeing Shahab’s name and now this? I froze.
“Jenny?” Colin put his hand on my forearm. “Love?”
I focused on my breathing. Thirteen slow breaths later, I raised a shaking hand and point at the street. “Her.”
“Who do you see, Jen-girl?” Vinnie walked to the shop window and looked up and down the street. His whole body jerked. “Fuck!”
“The hell?” Manny jumped up, but Vinnie was already out the door, running down the street. Manny swung around, stared at me, then looked at Colin. “Get her to talk.”
“Millard.” The reprimand was clear in Colin’s tone.
I mentally wrote next two lines of the Symphony’s Allegro. “I saw the woman from the police station.”
“Bloody hellfire.” Manny walked to the gallery door and looked out. He shook his head. “I don’t think the big guy found her.”
“How did she know to come here?” Colin took my hand between both his and rubbed it as if I was cold. “Tomas told us he’d revealed nothing to her when she’d questioned him.”
“He’s a bloody thief, Frey. He lied.”
“He didn’t.” I was sure of it. “But I don’t think he told us everything.”
I thought about this some more. The woman from the police station had been leaning against the building across the street, eating a cupcake. She hadn’t looked worried or expecting danger. “There are other possibilities. She could’ve followed us, she could’ve found out about Antonin Korn’s reputation and decided to question him or...” I looked at Francine. “If she was the one who hacked the police system and deleted the footage of Tomas Broz’s interviews and her presence, she could also have listened in on our interview with him.”
“Holy mother of all the saints.” Manny rubbed his hand hard over his face and stepped away from the door. I frowned. Manny looked pale.
Vinnie opened the door, the scar running down the left side of his face white. “She’s gone.”
“What do you mean she’s gone?” Manny tried to push his hands in his trouser pockets, but missed. Then he swayed on his feet. His usual scowl changed to a confused frown. “I don’t fee...”
His eyes rolled in his head and his legs crumpled under him.
Vinnie moved faster than I’d thought possible in time to catch Manny and gently lowered him to the ground. “Old man?”
“Manny!” Francine jumped up and ran to them.
Colin was already on his knees next to Vinnie, his fingers pressed against Manny’s neck. “He has a pulse, but it feels very weak.”
I couldn’t move. It felt like my body had locked itself into this position. The only voluntary movement I could manage was blinking. And no amount of blinking forced Manny to stand up, scowl at me and demand illogical answers from me.
“We need to get him to a hospital.” Daniel pushed Vinnie and Colin out the way.
“I’ll drive. It will be faster than waiting for an ambulance.” Ivan was already out the door, keys in his hand.
“I’ll carry him.” Vinnie elbowed Daniel out the way when the latter lifted Manny’s arm. With the same tender care he showed towards Eric, Vinnie lifted Manny from the floor and rushed out the door. Francine ran behind him, swearing at Manny, using language I hadn’t known she would utilise on a loved one.
I wanted to go with them. I wanted to shake Manny and demand he wake up. I wanted to make sure only the best doctors took care of him. I couldn’t. My brain held my body hostage while it reeled from being overloaded with strong emotions.
My breathing was shallow and I had nothing grounding me. I blinked non-stop and looked around me. Everyone had left the gallery. Francine’s laptop and tablet were abandoned on the sofa, Manny’s coat carelessly thrown over the sofa’s armrest. I was alone.
Everything went black.
