A Legitimate Businessman

by Dale Nelson

  “The exhibition is at the Carlton InterContinental Hotel. All the salons are all on the ground floor, and some of them are even accessible from the street. There will most likely be additional security in the lobby and around the access points, but this is one of the exclusive hotels in Europe, and they’re not going to make it look like an occupying army is sitting there. But really, even if you were spotted, it would just be a race to see who could call the police fastest. And by then, you’re really on your way out.”

  Jack studied his friend’s face a moment, holding his response. Reginald’s face was a roadmap of hard years, a threadbare patchwork of liver spots, freckles, and lines that made his skin look like a poorly folded map

  “You’re missing a key thing, Reginald.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Most of the security is going to be hotel staff or rent-a-cops, I’m with you there. The ones in the exhibition, though? Those are going to be Hassar’s guys.”

  “So what?”

  “So, Hassar is going to have people he trusts around the actual stones. He’s Israeli. Those are probably ex-Mossad or Israeli Special Forces. Those aren’t the kind who worry about things like jurisdiction or national borders or whether the French will let them keep their guns. I’m not going to start this off with a manhunt, especially with the kind of people who aren’t likely to let go. Forget that.”

  “Come on, Jack. You don’t know that.”

  “Reginald, do you know anything about this guy?” Jack only called Reginald by his name when he really needed to make a point. Jack stopped walking and turned to face his friend.

  “Of course, I do.”

  “Hassar isn’t just ruthless by western standards. He won’t just collect his insurance check and forget this ever happened. Hassar is going to send people—his people—to recover his property. There’s a reason nobody ever steals from this guy.”

  “Jack, you’re being paranoid.”

  “You’re goddamn right I am. But, ok, let’s set the guards-who-are-probably-hit-men thing aside for a moment,” Jack said. “It’s too easy.” Reginald’s expression immediately soured from excitement to one who’d just drank curdled milk by mistake. “There’s no way a take worth that much is just sitting out in the open like it’s in a petting zoo. It’s going to be in display cases that will be alarmed, and the Cannes police, who will be armed, will be on standby and are probably being paid to be responsive. If they aren’t on site they won’t be far off it. At night, the collection isn’t going to be stored in the hotel safe. They’re going to take it to a private vault most likely, which means armored cars and a police escort.”

  This was something that Reginald should have caught immediately. All those green zeroes obscuring his vision, maybe?

  Reginald’s expression softened. He placed a hand on his protégé’s shoulder. “Don’t overthink this, Jack. Forget the armored car. This isn’t Heat. Focus on the daytime. Let’s say they’re in the display cases all day and that those cases are alarmed. Even if you don’t have an alarm guy to deactivate them and you have to just go smash and grab, that’s a couple minutes before the police are on scene. That’s a tight window, I won’t lie to you, but you can do this.”

  Could he?

  This was a job that was orders of magnitude bigger than anything he’d ever contemplated, let alone attempted. More than that, there was a tissue-thin window to execute the job and get away, unless there was some way to kill the alarm and prevent the hotel staff from contacting the police, which would be difficult—impossible—given that this had to be a daylight job.

  Jack doubted the police response would be as long as five minutes. The Europeans didn’t operate on the same level as the FBI, but they weren’t exactly the third world either.

  Working in Europe was easy for the simple reason that it was Europe—several medium-sized, first-world countries tightly packed on a single continent with open borders and a penchant for high-end consumer goods. It was a criminal paradise. But Cannes, Jewel of the Riviera, was pushed to the southeast corner of France. It couldn’t be any farther from a border—four, five hours by car. The kind of people Hassar was likely to have as his security detail, as Jack pointed out, wouldn’t be overly concerned with that border anyway.

  “Jack, I never said this would be easy, but I know you can pull it off, and when you do, we’re set. Think about that for a second. We won’t need to work anymore, either of us. We can just sit on my boat and fish all day or buy race cars or whatever the hell we want.”

  Jack held up both his hands and squeezed his eyes shut for a second. “What do you really know about Ari Hassar?”

  Reginald shrugged. “He’s eccentric, flashy. He digs being a mogul and wants everyone to know just how big he is.”

  “The only kind of person who would put that much money on display knows that no one is stupid enough to fuck with him.”

  “Jack, if we take this job, we don’t ever have to work again.”

  “That’s certainly true, though not in the way you think, I suspect.” He held up a hand before Reginald could issue the protest Jack knew was coming. “Remember our conversation after Valencia about Ozren? How I said that after a few days everyone forgets about a jewelry store job but the insurance company. This is the same thing. I don’t want to take a job so large people are going to be talking about it for the next ten years. The police won’t just let this go and write it off. Nor will the insurance company, who will certainly continue the hunt with their own private investigators long after the police have stopped. These aren’t the type of people to just let eighty million dollars walk out the door. To say nothing of what Hassar’s people would do.”

  “Jack,” Reginald said flatly in his rocky, sonorous voice.

  Just then, a man in a suit walked past them, a little too close for Jack’s liking. He held up two fingers to pause Reginald in the midst of buttressing his argument.

  “What?” Jack said when the man passed.

  “It’s eighty-five million.”

  Jack held his hands up to cut off the conversation. “I’m passing on the job. I think it’s too risky. There are reasons that I don’t take jobs like this, and this one, Reg, is all of those reasons. We’ve got a really good formula, and it has worked out for us. We’re making good, steady money, and we’re not on anyone’s radar. Let’s keep it that way.”

  Reginald said in a low voice, “You have a lot more years to be conservative, Jack. I don’t.“

  “Reg,” Jack started, but dropped it. Jack worked constantly while Reginald was behind bars, and when he got early out thanks to a lenient parole board, Jack staked him a couple hundred thousand dollars to buy that nice house he lived in at the Venice Island Marina. Moving from San Quentin to a view of the Pacific Ocean should be a good enough trade for anyone.

  Jack turned fully around in the direction they’d come. He turned his head halfway around. “Ari Hassar is not someone I want to get in a ring with. If a guy like that doesn’t scare you, maybe you’ve been at this too long.” Jack breathed once and tried to calm himself.

  “The Jack Burdette that I know wouldn’t back away from a job like this no matter who owned the take.” LeGrande’s voice was snide and sour, baiting.

  Jack’s mouth opened as the retort formed and died in his throat, leaving a look on his face that was a poorly shaken cocktail of disbelief and incredulity. The Jack Burdette he knew? Never in the history of their relationship had Jack proposed something so reckless, and certainly not after Reginald’s stint in prison, which had been a serious wake-up call for them both. Reginald started to say something else, but Jack held up a hand and cut him off. The Jack Burdette he knew had never tried for a score this large and wouldn’t.

  “I’m leaving now, and I’m not talking about this again. It’s too risky, and I’m not willing to take the chance that I’d end up in a French prison or at the bottom of the Med. You pushing me is really starting to piss me off. I’ve got enough on my plate as it is. I cou
ldn’t focus on this even if I was interested.” Reginald’s jaw dropped to issue a protest, but Jack held up a hand and pushed the words back into LeGrande’s mouth by force of will. “I’ll talk to you when I’m ready to work again.”

  Jack left Reginald standing in the gray of the Embarcadero. The ex-thief called after him a few times. The first one, Jack dismissed with a gesture, and the rest he simply ignored. Jack left his other phone in the glove box when he met Reginald. It was easier for him to maintain separation between his two lives. He powered up the car and then his phone, quickly scanning messages to see if there was anything important. Megan and Hugh had both texted him, several times, asking where he was and why he wasn’t picking up his phone. The phone started vibrating as the voicemails registered. Ignoring them, Jack called Megan.

  “Meg, what’s going on?”

  “Where the hell have you been,” she half-shouted, her voice bordering on hysterics.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You have to get back here right now. Hugh just called. The money is gone, Frank, its all gone.”

  “What money?”

  “The ten million. The money Paul was supposed to buy the plot with.”

  “Well, where the fuck is Paul?”

  In a flat voice, Megan said, “He’s gone too.”

  Four

  “I understand what you’re saying,” Jack said in a flat, resolute voice, “but I don’t think you appreciate the situation.” He was fighting a losing battle against maintaining his composure and keeping his voice down. The windows were open, the warm summer air fragrant with bloom floated easily through the open windows. It was a busy afternoon, and the parking lot was fairly full of customers’ cars. The odds of someone hearing his conversation on their way into or out of the building was pretty good.

  “Mr. Fischer, I can assure you we’re doing everything we can, but you have to be patient. These things take time.”

  Jack’s temper flared and boiled over before he even had a thought to control it. “Take time,” he thundered into the phone. “Take time? Paul Sharpe found a way to steal ten million dollars from my company, and you’re lecturing me on patience.”

  “Mr. Fischer,” the state’s investigator tried to break in, but Jack was having none of it.

  “While you’re sitting on your hands, my business is hemorrhaging money. I don’t even know how I’m going to make fucking payroll this week let alone how I’m going to pay people to harvest my goddamned grapes in two months, and you want me to be patient? I’m going to lose my business.”

  “Mr. Fischer, if you’d—”

  “No, I will not calm down. I don’t care about your backlog, and I sure as shit am not interested in you telling me again that you understand why I’m angry. Someone stole from me, and you don’t seem to be the slightest bit interested in doing a goddamn thing about it.”

  “Allegedly.”

  “What?” Jack stammered, finally breaking out of his torrent of invective.

  “Allegedly stole from you.”

  The words were so incomprehensible he was actually stupefied into silence. The silence did not, however, last very long. “Allegedly. Allegedly? Ok, you’re the investigator, you tell me. My CFO somehow pulls a wire transfer for ten million dollars into an account he had set up that I knew nothing about and then disappears, and you’re actually lecturing me on the presumption of guilt? You have to be out of your f—” the word died on his lips as Jack saw Megan standing in the doorway, arms folded impatiently and looking cross. He really hoped she was just here to tell him that seal broke on the number two tank again and not that a tasting room full of people heard him screaming at a state’s investigator like a madman.

  Jack quieted and tried to calm himself, to lower his skyrocketing pulse. There was nothing but silence on the other end of the phone, not even static, and he hoped the man hadn’t hung up. After several beats, Jack said, “I’m sorry Mr.” He paused, searching for the name. “Schoenberg, was it?”

  “That’s right,” the man said, oddly without irritation. He must be used to getting yelled at.

  “I’m obviously upset, and I hope you can appreciate why.” Jack’s tone was in no way conciliatory.

  “I can, Mr. Fischer, but I need to impress upon you that these things take time. We are very sensitive to the fact that a crime has been committed, and my office will investigate it, we will find out who is responsible, and we will hold them accountable, but Mr. Fischer, you have to respect that we have a responsibility to the people who were wronged before you to close those cases out and to the system at…” the man continued talking, but Jack wasn’t listening.

  The last thing he needed right now was another lecture on what he now came to refer acidly as “the process.” Every time he’d talked to the state’s investigator’s office, it was the same thing. He was trying to impress upon them that not only had Sharpe cleaned out the winery’s coffers but also much of Jack’s personal holdings. So, not only was the winery broke, but Jack, personally, was in a lot of trouble. While the wheels of justice wound their inexorable way around, Jack was faced with the very real fear that his business wasn’t going to survive the summer. That didn’t seem to conjure up any emotion or any reinvigorated sense of purpose among the drones in the investigator’s office who were trying to caution him that it would be years before he got any of that money back. Jack recognized the irony of the situation and couldn’t help but think it was some kind of horrible, cosmic prank.

  “Mr. Fischer?”

  “Yes, sorry, what did you say?”

  “I was saying, Mr. Fischer, that we understand your situation and was trying to reassure you that we’re giving the matter our fullest attention.”

  Jack’s train of thought started going afield again at the introduction of more drone-speak, so he simply cut the conversation off. He’d gotten what he wanted, which was confirmation that the State of California was, at present, doing jack shit.

  He ended the call and cast his eyes down, his head suddenly feeling like it weighed just too much to keep up.

  Jack exhaled hard, the perfect expression of a long and terrible day. It had been almost a month since Sharpe stole the Sine Metu funds, and Jack felt that none of the law enforcement or governmental agencies involved were any closer to finding him than when he’d first reported the crime. Jack had even hired a private investigator when he’d gotten impatient with the seeming lack of progress by law enforcement. The detective had yet to turn up anything tangible, and some part of him believed it was probably a waste of money, but Jack believed it was important that the staff saw him take action. He walked over to one of the two Manhattan chairs he kept in his office and sat, first grabbing a pair of plastic water bottles out of the small fridge inset in his bookshelf. He handed one to Megan, who accepted it silently. He cracked the top and drank deep. Megan unscrewed the cap off her bottle but instead of sitting, leaned against the bookcase, extending one of her long legs out in front of her to stretch it. As she bent over, two long strands of curly, reddish-blonde hair on either side of her head broke free from the half-assed ponytail and fell, bouncing in midair.

  “Sorry,” he said after he’d collapsed into the chair.

  “What good does yelling at them do?”

  “Makes me feel better,” he said, though it didn’t and they both knew it. Jack whispered another soft curse for his own benefit but said nothing else.

  “I heard you in the tasting room,” she said ruefully. A wry smile cracked the stern countenance, and Jack knew she wasn’t entirely angry with him.

  Though Megan was certainly attractive by any measure, she was still south of what most would call “beautiful” in the classic sense. Jack always thought secretly that she would peak late. The “best is yet to come,” as Sinatra might’ve said. Megan was one of those rare women who’d grown into her looks, if not come into her own entirely, in her late thirties. It was the kind of self-awareness one only got by having earned it and not giving a solid shit
about what people thought of her. It created some emotional distance that immediately got men’s attention as much as the well-crafted lines in her face and body.

  Also, some women just looked a hell of a lot sexier when they got older.

  “Well, thanks for cheering me up,” Jack said sardonically.

  “Luckily,” she said smirking, “no one else heard you. The tasting room is full.”

  Jack couldn’t see how it would matter.

  Embezzlement was surprisingly common in the wine industry, but rarely in amounts like this. Usually, it was a mid-level employee with access to the books. Wine making was one of the few businesses in the world where operations were dealing in large sums of money but typically lacked the rigorous accounting practices one might expect. There was also a tendency, because of the nature of the industry, to believe that everyone in it was good hearted. Wine makers were farmers and artists, they were collegial and friendly, and generally, their businesses reflected that. Jack had found most of them to be too trusting by half, and it was one of the things about the industry that he loved the most.

  But he should have seen this coming.

  They filed charges with the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office as soon as they’d realized what Sharpe had done. The sheriff redirected them to the California Highway Patrol. CHP had absorbed the California State Police in the nineties and had assumed their responsibility with it, which included investigating financial crimes against local businesses. Coughlin had calls in to the FBI, but he wasn’t optimistic and told Jack not to get his hopes up about them getting involved. Secretly, Jack was relieved. The last thing he wanted was the FBI digging into the life and times of Frank Fischer.

  Jack studied Megan’s profile. Afternoon sun lit her from the side. She stretched the other leg, and Jack knew she was stalling. Reading people was an invaluable skill for a thief, perhaps even more important than being good at stealing things. You needed to be able to read a potential crew member and guess whether they’d crack, whether they were nervous because they were nervous or because they were hiding something. You needed to be able to guess who was going to sell you out because they were a double-dealing asshole or because they were police. You also needed to be able to guess whether or not the Hungarian gangster you were selling your loot to was just going to shoot you and save himself the three hundred thousand he was supposed to shell out.