The Collection

by Lance Charnes

  “Of course. Gudden Owend.” He literally bows out.

  The moment he’s gone, I whisper, “What did you find?”

  “One of the owners. I’m looking for a second.”

  “No time. They’re closing in three minutes.”

  “Make time. What if it’s a different guy?”

  Good point, one we’ve both been ignoring. “Hurry.”

  Do they check the file room before closing? Do they double-lock it? Are there motion sensors in there? If they catch her, what’ll they do to her?

  My fingers drum the table in time with my knee. We’d agreed on a plan if one of us gets arrested: the other one disappears immediately and calls Allyson for backup. I’m not wild about it—too many of those “nobody left behind” war movies, I guess. That, and if Carson ends up in the Luxembourgeois version of Supermax, Allyson will probably take it out on me.

  Two minutes.

  One minute. “What are you doing?”

  “Shut up! Let me think.”

  My shirt’s soaked by now. I want to jump out of the chair and do something, but the door’s open and I can see the front edge of Berdine’s desk down the hall. An older guy in a sharp charcoal suit passes by, dangling a black attaché from his left hand. He waves to Berdine, then walks out.

  Five o’clock.

  “Got it,” Carson whispers. “Another one.”

  “Same guy?”

  “Här Hoskins?” Berdine’s marching down the hall toward me. “We close now, bitte?”

  I mutter, “Time’s up,” then swivel toward the door and start panting again. “Yes. All right. Give me a moment here.”

  “Buy me a couple minutes,” Carson says.

  Right. Berdine’s at the door. Time to go for an Oscar.

  I struggle out of my chair, then lean on the table for a moment. Then I turn, take a step, and let my legs collapse. My butt clips the chair and takes it down with me. Shit, that hurts.

  Berdine screams.

  In moments, she’s rolling me on my back and feeling my throat for a pulse. Two suits rush into the room. There’s a lot of excited back-and-forth in Luxembourgish, basically German and French put through the spin cycle. They should’ve put a better pad under the carpet—my shoulder and hip feel like somebody kicked me hard.

  All I have to do is lay there and let these people fuss over me and hope Carson gets out. Maybe try to play tough. No, no, I’ll be fine, just give me a moment…

  Stoeller’s standing in the doorway. He looks worse than I’m supposed to feel. Maybe he’s seeing all those billable hours circle the drain, or maybe it’s the bonding we did over corporate paperwork. But then he darts to the phone on the conference table and says a word I don’t need to hear: ambulance.

  “No.” I force myself up on my elbows, even though Berdine and one of the lawyers try to keep me on my back. “No ambulance. No hospital. My assistant’s coming.” Unless she’s running down the street with my files… “She’ll take me to a doctor.”

  Stoeller’s hand hovers over the receiver. “But…”

  “No ambulance.” Real doctors are the last thing I need. That’d be as bad as cops. Why do you pretend to be ill, monsieur?

  My Bluetooth is dead. I must’ve cut off the link to Carson when I went down.

  Where in hell is she?

  The two random lawyers escape, leaving me with Stoeller and Berdine. The blonde’s sitting on her heels next to me, looking like she’s watching a distant uncle die. I pat the hand she has resting on my forearm. “It’s okay. I just got dizzy. Sorry for all this.”

  She gives me an almost sweet smile. She keeps that hand away from her face, though.

  Stoeller grabs the phone receiver. “Moien, Knoedler an Preiss… Ah, yes, Madame Carson. Please, Här Hoskins is taken ill… Yes, thank you.” He presses a couple buttons on the keypad, then tells me, “Madame Carson is outside.”

  Yes!

  By the time Carson comes charging into the room, Berdine and Stoeller have me propped up in a chair with the rest of the Spa water in my glass. Carson looks like she’s turned up late for her own funeral. I never knew people could blush on cue like that. “Oh, sir, I’m so sorry. You must’ve caught this when we—”

  “It’s okay.” I manage to not smile. “Just get me out of here.”

  Ten minutes later, Carson’s knifing through western Luxembourg City on the A4. I toss my tie and suit coat in the back seat. “Good job back there. I thought we were screwed when that girl came in.”

  “I know, eh?” Carson’s actually sort-of smiling. “There’s this line of file cabinets down the middle of the room. Had to keep it between her and me. She wouldn’t stand still.” She glances toward me. “Heard that show you put on. You did okay.”

  Wow, she’s almost gushing. “Thanks. I’m happy to drive, you know.”

  “I’m a bad passenger.”

  No surprise. I pull out my work phone and bring up an email from Carson. It has two attachments. “This email’s the passport shots?”

  “Yeah. Sent ‘em to Olivia, too. She’ll pass them to someone Allyson owns. Maybe we get a name in a couple days.”

  The first picture takes a while to download. When it comes up, it’s like the phone sucker-punches me. I can’t take my eyes off the mug shot. No. Way.

  My stomach’s on “puree.” After my brain starts working again, I say, “I can give you a name right now.”

  Carson stares at me. “What?”

  Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…

  “I know this guy.”

  Chapter 11

  The people who say “crime doesn’t pay” are wrong—it pays in cash, which is a pain in the ass. You can’t just take suitcases of bills to the bank anymore; they send forms to the Treasury about that. You can shrink-wrap it and try to fly it or ship it out of the country, but bricks of hundreds are pretty easy to spot on X-rays, and seriously… if TSA swipes Swatches out of your luggage, what do you think they’ll do with a cinder block of currency?

  What you need to do is convert that cash to something the law doesn’t look at too hard or can’t deal with, and push the greenback-disposal problem on somebody else. You could buy gold or bearer bonds. Or you could go with one of the most liquid international money surrogates out there: art.

  The art market’s the only one where a tangible asset’s ownership history can look like “Sold by private collector to private collector” and nobody asks for receipts or names. Prices for art are completely irrational; there’s no MSRP for a Rembrandt. Need to move your money into an overseas bank that won’t rat you out to the IRS? Want to bring your foreign money into the U.S. without alerting the feds? Box up your artwork, put “Reproduction - $100 value” on the shipping label, and Customs won’t charge you duties or even inspect your shipment. Send it to or from the free port at Geneva or Singapore or Luxembourg City, convert it to cash, and buy something nice for the missus, like a small South Pacific island.

  All you need is somebody who knows how to do this. Back in the day, you might go to Gar. But even Gar had scruples. Who needs that noise?

  In L.A., you used to go to Geoff Belknap. He’d work with anybody—mobsters, drug dealers, embezzlers, child pornographers, bank executives, movie agents, congressmen, lawyers. He had no standards, just a price list.

  Until I shopped him to the feds. He was Number One on my list. And now I’ll bet I’m Number One on his.

  “Know him from where?” Carson finally says. Her expression is halfway between bad smell and sewer overflow.

  “He was the scumbag who handled art deals for people who were too dirty for the rest of us. Like when some Mexican dude came into our gallery—silver suit? $5000 cowboy boots? last year’s Miss Sinaloa tagging along?—and wanted to buy the most expensive canvas on our wall for cash. Gar didn’t want our heads to end up on some narco’s YouTube channel, so he sent the dude to Belknap. And because Belknap’s a complete asshol
e, he came in a couple weeks later to ‘thank’ us for sending three mil in business his way.” We’d kept waiting for Belknap’s head to star in its own snuff film, but there really isn’t any justice in the world. “After I got busted, I handed him to the feds. The idiots let him out on bail. He skipped.”

  “Like your boss.”

  “Yeah, like Gar, except Belknap scammed his way into Venezuela. I guess he’d worked deals for some Chavistas and they owed him. Then he disappeared. Until now.”

  I sneak another peek at the picture on my phone. My guts wad themselves up into a tennis ball. If only half the rumors were true, Belknap knew enough hardcore scary people to field a pro football team. Every time I met him, I felt like a meerkat saying “hi” to a hyena. Still do.

  By now we’re on the A5 westbound, just crossing the Belgian line. Carson’s as quiet as usual until we pass the royal-blue IKEA south of the highway. “Big fucking coincidence.”

  “It is, but it isn’t. The art world’s really small, and the crooked art world’s even smaller. People do what they’re good at. Belknap was never gonna be driving a taxi. For all we know, he’s done hundreds of deals like the ones we’re chasing—these are just the ones that turned up on the client’s radar.” Which reminds me… “Why is that? How’d the client pick up on these?”

  Carson doesn’t answer. Either she doesn’t know, or she’s not in a sharing mood. “Okay, you know this guy. He know you?”

  I watch the freakishly neat fields slide past my window. “Yeah. I ran into him all the time in L.A. He knows me.”

  A day and a half has leaked away since Luxembourg. It’s midday Friday, and I’m on the second-floor landing of the main stairwell in Brussels’ Horta Museum. It’s the home and studio of Victor Horta, the father of Art Nouveau architecture and one of my personal favorites. I’ve been standing here for almost fifteen minutes drooling over the gorgeous gold-and-white art-glass skylight and delicate organic ironwork. It’s the most emblematic view in one of the most significant private homes built in the past hundred fifty years.

  That’s not why I’m waiting.

  Down below, somebody’s working out a grudge against every stair tread. I peek over the edge of the balustrade and see a guy built like an oil drum plodding across the first-floor landing. His hair’s so short the lights shine off his scalp. I recall the picture Olivia sent of van Breek, the cop I’m meeting: a jaw like a bridge, a nose that’s been busted several times. Not exactly the movie version of an INTERPOL agent, or whatever they’re called.

  He glances up at me with that same two-degree head-swivel that Carson uses and finishes his climb up to my level. He’s half a head taller than me and the same proportion wider. There’s nothing about meeting a cop that makes me feel good, and one like this makes my sweat faucets open up. I step back from the railing in case he gets the bright idea to toss me over.

  He flips through the half-mangled museum brochure in his paw, scans the skylight, and says in a Germanic accent (probably Dutch), “This place must be hell to heat in winter.” The sign, more or less.

  I give him the countersign, just like in a spy movie: “I understand it’s very comfortable.”

  He looks me up and down like I’m a seriously ugly dog. “Rietveld?” A Dutch modernist architect.

  “Yeah. Van Breek?”

  The cop steps forward and extends his right hand like he’s going to shake. But when I approach him, he sweeps his arm around, grabs my neck and slams me face-first into the wall. The plaster’s old, but it’s hard enough to water my eye when it hits my cheekbone. He pins me in place and searches me roughly, then passes a little black box with an antenna all over me. I don’t dare move or make a sound and give him a reason to tase me or shoot me. When he’s done, he shoves me away from the wall and from him.

  “Show me,” he growls.

  I straighten my shirt and try not to let my hands shake too visibly. After making him wait longer than I probably should, I pull from my back pocket the folded envelope Olivia couriered, gap it and thumb through a grand’s worth of euros, all used fifties. “Your turn.” I manage to put on more confidence than I feel.

  Both of van Breek’s hands disappear behind him. I flinch; is he drawing down on me? Instead of a gun, he brings out a crinkled envelope, opens it, pulls out a sheet of copier paper, and shakes it open in front of my face.

  It’s a color print of an ID form, “Repubblica Italiana” at the top, a photo of Belknap on the upper left. The name’s Geofredo Lorenzoni, an address in Milan.

  “Italian?” I say. It fits; Belknap’s mom was Italian, and he spoke the language fluently. Van Breek doesn’t answer. “How’d you find him?”

  “We use the face match on the photograph.” He refolds the paper and jams it back into his envelope, then pushes it halfway between us with his left hand. His right palm comes out.

  It seems like I should get more than one sheet of A4 for a grand. “Criminal record?”

  “No.” The cop wiggles the fingers of his right hand. Come on, pay up.

  “You know where he works?”

  “No. His home only.”

  Footsteps echo up from the bottom of the stairwell. Van Breek glances over the railing, then glares at me like he thinks I’d look better smeared across the wall. Time to go.

  I sigh and slap his palm with the money. It disappears into his coat pocket.

  He shoves the report in my hand, then turns toward the stairs.

  This is dumb, but I can’t let the opportunity go by. “Van Breek?” He scowls over his shoulder. “Look up this name when you get back to the office: Geoffrey Deangelo Belknap.” I spell it. “American. You’ll know why when you do it.”

  He waves me off and begins stomping down the stairs.

  I pull out the report and stare at Belknap’s face—moustache, goatee and all. I’m coming for you, asshole. I had to do time… so do you.

  Chapter 12

  After van Breek disappears with his money, I spend another couple hours at the museum. Yes, I’m memorizing Horta’s house (it’s off-the-hook gorgeous), but half my brain is trying to figure out what to do next.

  Along with being a total prick, Belknap’s really smart—it’s what kept him out of jail for so long. This gives me Inconvenient Fact One: if there’s a cache of hot art, he might know where it is, but he doesn’t have it. He’s not that dumb. He’ll keep any stolen goods only long enough to crate them and ship them.

  Unless they’re his, my brain reminds me. Socked away for a rainy day.

  Belknap’s not a forgive-and-forget kind of guy. When he skipped, he apparently had enough of a jones for me that I got stuck in isolation for almost two weeks until he surfaced in Caracas. I doubt he’s moved on. Inconvenient Fact Two: if we see each other, it’s mutually assured destruction. I can put him in a cell for years, but he can get me popped for violating my probation. This time, I’ll go in with real criminals. No thanks.

  A quick Google search on my phone gets me exactly three hits on “Geofredo Lorenzoni”: one for a gallery and two in puff pieces about art collecting on Italian lifestyle sites.

  According to its website, Galleria Diciannove handles “an exclusive selection of the finest international art from the early 19th Century to the early 20th Century.” In other words, from Napoleon to Hitler, Belknap’s gig back in L.A. Belknap/Lorenzoni’s “inspired to bring the beauty of the Romantics and the dynamism of the early Moderns to Milan’s connoisseurs of fine art.”

  Excuse me while I gag.

  Belknap has a gallery again. The one he ran back home wasn’t his main moneymaker, but it gave him cover—a way to launder money, a reason to go to auctions and shows, an excuse to get import and export licenses (when he bothered to). This new one’s probably the same setup.

  If Belknap’s got the stolen paintings, we’ve got two ways to find them. Allyson set me up to do the first: be a rich customer, gain his confidence, let him lead us to the stash. That’s out. I
can’t let him see me, and he’s not going to bond with a voice on the phone.

  Second plan: we feed him a stolen canvas. It ought to go wherever he’s keeping the rest of the hot art. This approach is faster, but it’s got its problems, too. If I’m caught with stolen goods—such as, Carson rats me out—I’ll spend the next few years fighting the Italian legal system from inside a cell. Ask Amanda Knox how that worked for her.

  Depending on who Belknap’s friends are—and what Allyson’s reaction to failure is—bombing out on either of these plays could mean anything from deportation to becoming part of a concrete pour.

  So either we do something, or we go home. I can’t afford to go home.

  All this thinking about Allyson stirs up something that’s been running around my skull since Luxembourg. Did she know about my history with Belknap? Is that why she hired me? It wouldn’t make any sense to hide this from me if she knew, but I have no idea how her mind works.

  I shake my head to stop the really unhelpful lines of thought doing the kudzu thing in my brain. There’s time for this later. Now’s the time to get things rolling.

  Our biggest hurdle is coming up with our own stolen art for Option Two. I still know people who can do that pretty easy, but none of them are in Italy. There’s somebody back home (nine time zones away) who might know somebody here who can cough up a hot canvas. He won’t be too happy to hear from me, especially at five a.m. his time… but he owes me.

  I should talk this over with my so-called partner, but I’d have to know where she is first. True, Carson did great in Luxembourg. But the less she knows about how all this goes together, the less likely she is to hang me out to dry.

  My attitude sucks. But maybe if I’d thought this way about Gar, I wouldn’t be here now.

  Olivia books us on tomorrow morning’s 9:45 Brussels Air flight to Linate—“Milan’s slightly less horrid airport,” she informs me. She also cops to setting me up with that farmer’s market I took Carson to: “Of course I knew about the Wednesday market. I’d not have mentioned it otherwise.”