A Beautiful Crime

by Christopher Bollen

  “I can’t help but think how proud I am of you,” West answered warmly. “Look, we had some ups and downs. But I’m a believer in not looking back with hard eyes. I’d prefer to be impressed by the man in front of me now.” West lifted his hand off the counter, and it hung there briefly between them before he waved it around like a conductor. “Here you are, right where you want to be, as smart as you are, and still with so much time to enjoy it. I’ve always seen something special in you. I hope you don’t mind my saying that.”

  “Thank you,” Clay said coldly, avoiding West’s eyes as he downed the rest of the yellow liquid. “Now what was this proposal you mentioned in your letter?”

  West drifted from the counter, digging his hand into his pant pocket to fumble with some loose change. He seemed to want to gaze out of a window, but there wasn’t one in the shabby kitchen. In its absence, there was only the Blue Madonna of 1698, and West’s eyes shot upward as if for divine consultation.

  “Dealing with Freddy’s affairs must be difficult. We both know what a great big wonderful mess he was in life.”

  “Yeah,” Clay agreed. “It’s been challenging. I’ve really just started to sort through it all.”

  “I’m sure it’s been tough.” West made a slow-paced figure eight across the linoleum before standing still. “Let me tell you my idea. As you well know, I’ve always had an interest in certain artifacts that belonged to Freddy’s family.” He paused to ensure that Clay was following. “Particularly their antique silver collection.” Another pause. “Word has it that Freddy still possessed a number of top-quality pieces. And I assume they’ve been passed on to you.”

  West paused again. Clay wasn’t going to meet him halfway on this appeal. He wanted to watch West squirm as he tacked back and forth between his own greed and a veneer of civility. West finally let out an exasperated laugh. “Clay, you’re so young. I can’t imagine you want a bunch of eighteenth-century antiques clogging up your life. Those are decorations for us old guys.” He stared down at his shoes. “So my thinking is, well, why not take them off your hands? We could avoid the whole drawn-out process of auction houses and private dealers, who always take a huge cut of the profit before you’d ever see a cent.” West’s focus remained on the floor, a rich man speaking shyly about money. “I’d pay cash up front and get some nice van der Haar pieces to display in one of their ancestral homes. You’d have money in your pocket to ease some of the difficulties in settling Freddy’s estate.”

  West lifted his head to read the response. Clay performed a dramatic widening of his eyes. “I see,” he stammered. “Huh! I wasn’t expecting—” He quickly spun around, unable to contain the smile that shot across his face. He gave himself a full second to enjoy it before turning back around.

  West leaned on the counter as he topped off his glass of limoncello. “I hope I’m not overstepping,” he added. “If this sounds inappropriate, please say so. I’m happy to shut up about it. Maybe you want to keep those pieces for yourself. Maybe the rumors are nonsense and there’s no van der Haar silver left. Maybe you’d prefer to risk your chances on the volatile, unpredictable open market, and if so, I wish you luck. All I’m suggesting is that you allow me to take a look at what’s left and make a very handsome, discreet cash offer. You won’t find a sweeter deal, I promise. All I ask is that you let me know right now. Next week I might feel differently. It’s your decision.”

  West had waited most of his adult life for a chance at van der Haar spoils, but next week he might wake up a changed man. Clay had to hand it to him, his salesmanship was smooth. It helped Clay cut entire minutes out of the charade: a less convincing West would have required Clay to enact a series of uncertain heart-versus-bank-account mood swings.

  “There isn’t as much left as you think,” Clay said flatly. “Freddy sold or donated most of the notable pieces. He only held on to four or five items, the ones that mattered to him the most.”

  Clay wasn’t the only man in the kitchen battling a smile. West was beaming so hard it looked like his face might burst, his lips pierced like the knot of an overinflated balloon.

  “And Freddy never bothered to have them appraised?”

  “No,” Clay replied with an idiotic shrug. “It didn’t matter to Freddy what they were worth. He wasn’t hoarding them for the money.”

  “Of course,” West whispered respectfully. “And you haven’t shown them to anyone? Like an antiquities expert?”

  Clay again performed his idiot’s shrug. “To be honest, I never thought about it. I haven’t really had the time since Freddy’s death to bother with those kinds of things. I lost my closest friend. I wasn’t thinking about putting price stickers on his favorite possessions.”

  “I’m sorry,” West said with a blush so genuine that Clay briefly felt bad about inducing it. “Excuse the questions. The market value doesn’t matter to me either. Just so you know, that’s not why I’m interested. My intention is to preserve them in a house that once belonged to the family. And I’d like to think that might also be what Freddy would have wanted. I’m not trying to flip them for a profit. It’s about respecting the van der Haar legacy.”

  Freddy would have gone into cardiac arrest. All Clay had to do was resist rolling his eyes.

  “You don’t happen to have any pictures, do you?” West asked.

  “Pictures?” Clay repeated as if trying to translate a foreign word. “Freddy took lots of pictures. He was an art photographer. Did you want those as well?”

  “No, no,” West sputtered. “I’m talking about pictures of the silver. Any documentation of the estate. I’d need to see what’s there before I could make a reasonable bid. I’m sure they’re legitimate, but even my untrained eye would have to take a look.”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Clay said, allowing his smile its first moment in the open. “Most of the pieces are here.”

  “Here?” West repeated. “You mean, right here in this house?” Either West had caught on to the incredulity of the scam or he was basking in his endless streak of luck. He had a greedy young man right in front of him, a treasure in his reach, and a secret silver appraiser on call.

  “Freddy brought them over from New York a few years ago,” Clay lied. “He always intended to kick out the interns and retire here. But with how sick he got so fast, he never had the chance . . .” Clay didn’t wait for another dose of sympathy from West. It hurt too much to lean on his friend’s death to buffer his own advantages. He slipped from the kitchenette and opened the door into Freddy’s quarters. He made sure to fling the door wide, so his movements could be tracked from the outer room. “Maybe that’s why I never considered showing them to a dealer,” Clay yelled. “They’ve been here collecting dust this whole time.”

  He glanced back to ensure that West was watching. He moved swiftly around the velvet-flocked room, grabbing an ornamental punch bowl from the secretariat, a lopsided tankard from the bookshelf, and a large plate from the nightstand. After gathering a sauceboat and a porringer stashed behind the door, he strutted into the common area with a plunder of counterfeit silver in his arms.

  In truth, Freddy had once possessed a venerable collection of authentic antiques, and his healthy drug habit from the 1970s to the mid-’90s had been kept flush by the sale of them. Freddy couldn’t recall how many antiques there had initially been or when exactly they’d left his hands (“You might as well ask me who stole my color television in the personal blackout of 1990!”). Keeping up appearances by avoiding the hard truths of official documentation had long been a family practice. Even after his family money ran out, Freddy still had the golden ticket of his name. America didn’t waste time with honorary titles; it had last names. The world trusted van der Haar out of habit, the way it trusted Rockefeller, Roosevelt, Astor, Schuyler, or Vanderbilt—and the way it didn’t trust a Guillory or a Brink. Freddy’s counterfeit operation predated Clay, but he’d talk about his forgeries as if they were something to be proud of, like illicit works of art. And he was ca
reful never to let them stray too far from old family inventories that did exist. Ultimately, they’d yielded Freddy nearly two million dollars over the course of his last two decades. Unfortunately, with his spending compulsion, he owed far more than that.

  Freddy’s phonies weren’t entirely fake. Like the best lies, each one contained a small nugget of truth. The tankard’s lid and handle did derive from the family’s illustrious collection, floating without a base for a few disembodied centuries before Freddy had his shady New Jersey silversmith hinge the lid and handle to a generic antique vessel bought off eBay for two thousand dollars. The punch bowl, meanwhile, had started its life as an inconsequential sugar dish. Freddy had preserved its decorative base, which was punched with a verifiable eighteenth-century maker’s mark, before having it welded to a massive bowl of no distinction; thus, a minor antique collectible worth ten thousand became a rare treasure worth twenty times that amount. In Freddy’s fantasy world, an ordinary spoon could dream itself into being a banquet dish. “Is there anything more American than that?” Freddy asked in joyous defense. The final step in his personal forgery factory had been a dip in liver of sulfur to speed up the aging process, then a few hundred shakes in a bag of nuts and bolts to deliver the necessary scratches and nicks.

  Clay placed the pieces on the countertop. These were the last of the fakes, the ones that Freddy’s dealer, Dulles Hawkes, said wouldn’t pass the most gullible of professional assessments. They might fool an amateur, but they’d never withstand expert examination. Even a dying, destitute neurasthenic had given up the hope of selling them. But now, thanks to Nick, they had returned as deceivers from the dead. In the kitchenette’s lamplit dimness, with the nude Madonna swimming overhead, they seemed to glow with self-importance. They looked particularly real under the excited blue eyes of Richard West.

  “Oh, man!” West moaned. “And no one has seen these outside the family for centuries?” He dared to lift the tankard by its handle.

  “I guess not,” Clay muttered, uncertain whether to scare up some make-believe knowledge or keep to the idiot routine.

  “Wow.”

  “There’s an old photo where you can see a few of these pieces in the background of an old van der Haar sitting room. I’d have to look for it.”

  West nodded along to that information without interest. He had a better resource than a photograph. “Clay, can I ask a favor? Would you mind if I brought these pieces over to my side of the palazzo for a night? I know that sounds silly. I just want to see them on the cupboard and think about what a fair price might be to offer you. I can’t fall in love with them properly in a few minutes at your kitchen counter. You’ve got terrible light in here, my friend!” On the face of it, it was an absurd request, but Clay couldn’t debate its flaws. West’s borrowing the pieces was essential to their plan.

  “I guess that wouldn’t be a problem. I mean, I’d—”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.” West gestured toward the trove. “Tell me. What do you think a fair price would be? What would you want for the lot?” Clay scrunched his shoulders in bafflement. His stomach was starting to protest the fermented lemon juice. “I have no idea,” he managed through the pain.

  West laughed as he drummed his fingers on his sternum. “Me neither!” he replied. “I’m no expert. I couldn’t begin to assess their value. But since we’ve agreed to keep this deal out of the usual channels, I guess I’ll just have to follow my gut. I have a very bad feeling that whatever I end up offering you will be horribly overpriced!”

  He gazed fondly at Clay, so accustomed to winning he seemed to have forgotten he could lose. For once, Clay could reply with a genuine smile. He was thankful West had just lied to his face about having no way of evaluating their worth. The lie cured Clay of the guilt he’d promised himself he wouldn’t feel but did anyway. West planned to acquire the pieces for a steal, and the whole time make it seem like he was doing Clay a favor.

  The downstairs door squeaked open and feet pounded up the steps. Clay and West both turned to watch a young man with a long Teutonic nose and wavy, chlorine-copper hair slink into the room. He wore a Yale sweatshirt and a pair of wrinkled chinos. “I’m very sorry,” he pleaded. “I’ll be out of your way. I just forgot my laptop.” The intern had been trained by the Peggy Guggenheim supervisor to be frightened of any adult who loomed within the aura of the Madonna fresco.

  “It’s okay,” Clay told him.

  The young man scurried down the hall with strides as gawky as Clay’s must have been when he’d first arrived. He returned a second later with his laptop and made another round of apologies. Clay noticed West studying the kid as he disappeared down the steps. He felt protective over the renting interns.

  “You aren’t hunting for a new assistant, are you?” Clay asked defiantly, almost like a dare.

  “Hardly!” West responded. “I have a great one right now, a full-blooded Venetian. It’s a huge help for the projects we have in development. And he’s a rare Venetian because he’s trustworthy.”

  “Congratulations,” Clay said bitterly.

  West gave an unpleasant laugh of slowly fading snorts. In the quiet that followed, he tapped his wedding ring against the countertop. “You know,” he said on the final tap of his ring, “I never really forgave Freddy for stealing you from me. Or you, for that matter, for running off with him and abandoning me just as everything was getting started.”

  That admission struck Clay with such force he had to will his throat into taking in air again. West had delivered those lines in a tone of absolute sincerity, as if he really did believe Freddy was the reason for their falling-out. Had he never realized that Clay had learned the truth? Or did he think sabotaging a low-level museum job was too trivial a matter to dignify with a spot in his memory? Clay opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. All these years he’d carried around his anger, presuming West felt remorse whenever they crossed paths on his visits to Venice. But West hadn’t felt an ounce of guilt. Worse, West had revised the entire incident so that he was the one who’d been wronged. Clay stared into his face, searching for any trace of sarcasm. West was glumly looking down at the counter, as if waiting for an apology. It was too unreal. But Clay wouldn’t be provoked into anger. He wouldn’t let West sabotage the plan to cheat him out of a small fortune.

  “Freddy didn’t steal me,” Clay said instead. “I’m not something that can be stolen, Dick.”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “I wasn’t Freddy’s assistant. I was his friend.”

  “Let’s forgive and forget. It’s over. I don’t judge what you’ve done.”

  Clay wondered whether the rumors infesting Manhattan had found their way over to Venice. Those rumors were inescapable now. Why do you think that kid murdered our dear, delusional Freddy? For the van der Haar inheritance, of course.

  He gazed at the counterfeits on the Formica countertop. The tears straining his eyes gave their matte-gray finish a starry glimmer. He turned toward the sink and bent down to search a cabinet. He could feel his heart beating heavily, and he wiped his eyes on his knees.

  “Take it all,” he said to the man at the counter. “I’ll find you a box.”

  He hoped Nick was enjoying the spring weather.

  Chapter 10

  Nick was promised a day of surprises. Richard West had woken him early that morning with a text: Hello, handsome! Eva and I miss you terribly and we’ve decided to wreck your afternoon with a few surprises. Are you free?

  They picked him up at the foot of the Accademia Bridge. Nick wasn’t sure whether they’d come by land or by sea, but finally he caught sight of West and his niece descending the bridge’s steps. Battista drifted behind them with a black cardboard tube telescoping out of his backpack. As they neared the bottom of the bridge, Eva whisked a piece of fabric from a glossy shopping bag. The fabric was a grid of thin yellow and gray stripes, and it grew arms and a collar and lapels as she flapped it loose. Eva ran toward Nick and covered hi
s chest with the sports coat, hooking it the wrong way over his shoulders like a barber’s cape.

  “What is this?” he asked as he pinched the expensive silk.

  “We felt guilty for ripping your old one,” Eva explained.

  “Do you like it?” West asked with a grin that seemed sure of the answer. “There’s only one decent men’s shop in Venice, right above the Rialto. We guessed your size.”

  “I love it,” Nick swore even before he slipped it on. It fit perfectly, right down to the extra-long sleeves. “You didn’t have to. Seriously. It wasn’t a big—”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Eva snorted as she shot a disappointed look at her uncle. “I knew we couldn’t count on him to skip the American humility routine. Now we’re going to have to spend the entire day convincing him to keep it.”

  “Okay, okay,” Nick said in capitulation. “I won’t even say thank you.”

  West let out an approving laugh. “None required between friends.” Nick had trouble syncing this warm, generous man with the malicious double-crosser of Clay’s stories. As he stood there wearing his new present, he started to wonder whether Clay’s beef with Richard had all been a simple misunderstanding. Maybe West had even misguidedly thought he’d been helping Clay by squashing his chances at the museum. West saw more promise in his own endeavors, and anyway, wasn’t the cutthroat poaching of assistants the norm in most industries? If it had happened to Nick, he might have taken West’s scheming as a compliment—he really wants me that much! Nick would give his boyfriend the benefit of any doubt. But for all of Clay’s street smarts, he seemed too easily thrown by the ordinary ugly dealings that spun the world. “More surprises this way,” West promised. Nick followed Clay’s nemesis across the cobblestones.