The Collection

by Lance Charnes

  I drag one of the side chairs next to the easel—the Camoin’s looking better now—climb up and worry the case off the detector. A little black lollipop droops away from the battery at the ends of two thin wire leads. A microphone.

  Will Belknap recognize my voice? I’d rather not find out. I snap one of the wires, then replace the case and put the chair away.

  How long do I keep this charade going? Gianna’s no dummy; she’s probably already seeing through me. But what else can I do? Short of knocking her over the head—which I’m not going to do—there’s no other way into storage. And if Belknap is using this place the way he did his L.A. gallery, Gianna must’ve seen or heard something that’d be useful, a name or face or delivery.

  Sometime very soon, I’m going to have to think up a good story to tell her.

  My phone says she’s been gone for over ten minutes. That’s a long time to let a customer sit. I check the cypher-lock door again—still locked. What’s she up to? Calling Belknap? Calling the Mob? Letting me stew with the Camoin until I beg to buy it? The lighting that was soft and intimate a few minutes ago is now just murky, and the room’s gone from warm and cozy to oppressive. I don’t do small spaces well anymore, not since Pensacola. The voice-over from Disney’s Haunted Mansion starts to loop in my head: “This chamber has no windows and no doors, which offers you this chilling challenge: to find a way out!”

  I’ve been pacing for a couple minutes that seem like a couple hours when Gianna slips through the door. She closes it carefully and silently, then scurries to me on tiptoes. Her eyes are wide and her lips are thin red lines. Oh, shit. She braces herself with a hand on my chest and stretches up to whisper in my ear.

  “Lorenzoni is here.”

  Chapter 25

  Once I scrape my heart off the roof of my mouth, I whisper, “What? Why?”

  I get a you dummy look. “This is his work. Do you want to see him?”

  Not now. I’ll have to face him eventually. I can’t explain why to Gianna, not yet, but I can appeal to her greed. “You give me to him, he gets the commissions, not you. I don’t want that.”

  Gianna makes a gack sound and glares at me. She glances to the door, then to me, then back to the door. Do the right thing, girl, I keep thinking, hoping it’ll get through. You want me to owe you. Just do it before he comes in…

  Gianna clamps on my elbow and yanks. “Come!” she growls. She thumbs in the combination, hauls open the door, and drags me into the storeroom.

  Quick impressions: a workbench and framing table to my right, framed art storage to my left, concrete slab, strip lights, small, frosted, wire-reinforced clerestories, everything very clean. Gianna leads me to a door on the other side of the workbench, flings it open and shoves me inside. “Say nothing,” she stage-whispers. “Stay here. I come back when he is gone.”

  “Gianna—”

  “Say nothing! Quiet!”

  Her face was half-peeved in the viewing room, but that’s turning to fear now. Her eyes are bigger than ever. She shuts the door. Her footsteps end with the click of the viewing-room door closing.

  When my eyes adjust, the under-door stripe of filtered daylight looks like neon. The people across the street can hear my heart thumping. I try to slow my breathing. I’ve almost got it down when I do something stupid—I put my work phone into flashlight mode.

  I’m in a closet, facing the door. There’s a telephone punch block and a stack of boxes to my right. Meter-wide rolls of unbleached muslin, kraft paper, shrink wrap and bubble wrap hang from pipe racks behind me. The whole place is maybe eight by four, unfinished drywall all around. It’s smaller than my hobbit hole at PEN. Too. Damn. Small.

  Dark is better. The walls can’t close in if I can’t see them. The problem is, I can still see them in my head, and it’s like the trash compactor in Star Wars. I swear I can hear them grinding closer. There’s no room to pace—the way I burn off my nervous energy—and I run into something every time I move. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to think of calming things. Beer, kittens, beaches, art, Allyson. Shit no, not Allyson. Chloe. Yeah. I imagine her hugging my arm, whispering, “It’s okay, you’re gonna be okay.” She’s so great. Why isn’t she straight?

  The lights buzz on outside. Gianna?

  Footsteps. Solid, heavy, not the click-click of Gianna’s pumps. Belknap. Coming closer.

  All my effort getting calm is down the toilet. My heart claws up my throat again.

  The footsteps slide to a stop. A drawer rumbles open, things clink, then it closes. The footsteps get really loud. If Belknap needs bubble wrap, I’m fucked.

  His steps echo off all the concrete and cinder block.

  They’re fading. He’s going away.

  I lock my knees to keep my legs from making like overcooked spaghetti. I sag against the wall, brace my hands on my thighs, and concentrate on one deep breath after another.

  The footsteps stop.

  The lights are on, so he’s still out there. Now that I can almost breathe again, I wonder what he’s doing. Getting a painting? Why not have Gianna fetch it? That’s what she’s for.

  I need to see this. I manage to scrunch up on my side without bashing into anything, then press my ear against the slab, close one eye and squint through the inch-or-so gap under the door.

  Belknap’s lower legs stand facing a white metal-mesh panel that he’s pulled from the rack at the far end of the room. The legs shuffle side-to-side. Then his hand leans something against the end of the next panel: a medium-sized canvas… wrapped in muslin. When he rattles his panel back into the rack, I see the bottom edge of another canvas covered with taupe fabric.

  They’re hung wrapped? I’ve seen that only once before, in a really sketchy joint in London. This place is cleaner than my Starbucks.

  Maybe he doesn’t want anybody to see the art. Aha.

  Belknap hefts the canvas, then crosses to the rank of black portfolio cases leaning against the opposite wall. The painting slides into the second one he tries. Then he strides toward the door in the far wall, sidesteps through, clacks off the lights, and pulls the door closed.

  Quiet. I hoist myself off the floor and shake out my legs. I’ve been trying to be here since Saturday—the storage room, not the closet—and this is my best shot at checking it out without adult supervision. But there’s nowhere to hide out there.

  If Belknap comes back, it’s over.

  If I don’t go now, I may never get another chance.

  Carson would say, “Fuck yeah, let’s roll.” That’s how we ended up in that warehouse last night. Maybe Carson’s not the best role model.

  My phone shows two bars. I turn off the ringtone and bring up StolenArt.net, the project that’s burning off my 2500 hours of community service. At the same time, I listen for an opening door or footsteps. After a couple quiet minutes, I say to hell with it and ease open the door. Compared to the closet, it’s noontime-in-the-desert bright in the storeroom. I blink fast until I can see without squinting.

  The room’s maybe twenty-five feet long by fifteen wide. The wall to my left (shared with the viewing room) has a jumble of stuff: black Gaylord storage boxes on metal shelves, tan-cardboard Airfloat shipping boxes, the portfolio cases, flyer-sized cartons, yadda yadda. The right wall’s what I’m interested in. It has two eight-foot-wide Montel ModulArt rack systems—white, square-tube framework cages holding eight vertical, sliding metal-mesh panels each. A great way to store a lot of pieces in a small area, but it’s not cheap.

  As I prowl to the far end on the balls of my feet, I scope out the sliding panels. The first five hold unwrapped pieces, probably the gallery’s own stock. The sixth through fourteenth panels are empty (an expensive lot of spare capacity). Everything’s in muslin on the last two. Why? If it’s not the gallery’s, then who owns it, and why’s it here?

  I carefully pull out the very last panel, the one Belknap lightened by one canvas. The hanging pieces clatter against the wire mesh way
more than I like. I listen a moment for a reaction from outside. Nothing. Deep breath.

  The wrapping on the mid-sized canvas at my knee level is pretty simple—down the back, up and over from the bottom, then a flap draped over the top. I pull the lower half down and find nymphs and satyrs grab-assing in a forest clearing. There’s an “AB” monogram in the lower right corner. I bring up “advanced search” on StolenArt, punch in “AB” in the “signature” field, and get Arnold Bocklin. A search on Bocklin’s name turns up nothing; the piece is legit as far as StolenArt’s databases are concerned. I shoot a picture just in case.

  Rewrap, rinse, repeat. I work my way through both sides of the panel. Every creak, squeak or pop I hear sends my heart screaming around my chest. When some guy-footsteps tromp by the door, I freeze in mid-reach, like putting down my arms will set off alarms.

  Nothing I check raises any red flags. It’s all nineteenth- and early twentieth-century work, but it’s all over the place: religious subjects, still lifes, landscapes, portraits, every school and style from the period. This looks like buying for investment, not love.

  Guy-footsteps clump down the hallway again and I make like one of those living-statue dudes. This time, the steps stop with a door slamming shut.

  Did Belknap just leave?

  If so, now I have to worry about Gianna coming in. She’ll probably wait a few minutes—I would—so I have time for maybe two more searches. I unwrap the next piece, a harbor scene with derelict sailing ships and an overcast sky, hit “search” for Eugene Boudin, and—

  “What do you do?” Gianna shrieks behind me. “That is not for you!”

  I almost jump through the canvas. Gianna bears down on me with a mix of horror and anger on her face. Even her footsteps’ echoes are mad. Shit. I didn’t hear her come in. And I’ve totally blown it. “Gianna, wait a minute—”

  “I tell you to stay there!” She throws a finger toward the closet. “I tell you to wait! You risk yourself! You risk my work! That—” she aims the finger at me “—belongs to a client!”

  My brain races to figure out that story I owe her… but then it stops. Something on my phone’s screen catches my eye. I put up a hand, palm out, and throw all the steel I can into my voice. “Gianna, stop.”

  She almost leaves skid marks on the slab.

  “He may own it, but it doesn’t belong to him.” I step forward and hold up my phone so she can see the screen and the FBI National Stolen Art File page for what the Bureau calls Harbor Scene. “It’s stolen.”

  Chapter 26

  She could cry. She could scream. She could call the cops, or Belknap, or the Mob. Gianna doesn’t do any of that.

  Instead, she grabs my phone and stares at the screen, then the canvas, then back to the phone. Her face turns bright pink. Then Italian starts geysering out of her. I don’t know exactly what she’s saying, but if she was swearing in English, it would sound like this. Lots of arm movement makes me think my phone’s going through a wall next. “Lorenzoni” comes up a lot. She spins in a circle and drags her fingers back through her hair.

  “Um, Gianna—”

  The Slashing Finger of Death nearly impales my nose. I let her vent until most of her steam’s gone. She finally stops and heaves out a huge sigh. “Bastardo.”

  “Lorenzoni or me?”

  “Both!” She throws my phone at me. I just manage to trap it against my chest. “Who are you? Polizia?”

  Why does everybody think I’m a cop?

  “Who are you?” Now she’s pleading. “What do you want? Why do you do this?”

  If she was going to rat me out, she’d be on her phone by now. I can still fix this, get her on my side. But first I need to figure out if she’s steamed because there’s a stolen painting in her gallery, or because somebody found out. I step toward her; she backs away. “You didn’t know about this?”

  “No!” Her eyes go big again. “You think I do this? You think I want this?” She’d throw something else at me if she had anything, but she doesn’t, so she just flings up her hands.

  “I hoped not, but I had to ask.” I’m using my calming-the-pit-bull voice, low and soothing and careful. Then, like a cartoon light bulb going off over my head, the story pops into my brain. “Look. I came here to buy art. But… well, I’ve been interested in art crime for a long time. When you have a lot of money, you can turn your hobbies into businesses. The market on the enforcement side isn’t in services, it’s in tools, because there aren’t any. Here.” I return to the StolenArt home page on my phone. “I’ve been working on this for the past year.”

  She jerks the phone out of my hand, then steps back in case I try to throw a net over her. She jabs at the screen. That’s fine; neither my name nor Evan’s—the programmer—is anywhere on the site. It’s going to be hard enough to get acceptance without having a couple ex-cons splashed across the “contact us” page. “What is this?” she grumbles.

  “Do you research provenance for new pieces?”

  “Yes, for the gallery’s art, not for what we keep for the clients.”

  “Then you know how hard it is to do due diligence. How many places do you go to before you say a piece is clean? Five? Ten? There’s dozens of them. Some of them are useless, like INTERPOL’s if you don’t have an account. You pay Art Loss Register a fee for each search if you don’t have a subscription with them.” I point to my phone. “StolenArt’s like art-crime Google. We have hooks to thirty-seven databases and registries including ALR and ArtClaim. One-stop shopping. Think that might make your job easier?”

  Gianna fiddles with my phone some more. Her face has gone from furious to skeptical to doubtful-but-intrigued. She suddenly shoves my phone back at me, then pulls hers from a side pocket and stabs the screen. “How does it work?”

  “Put an artist’s name in the search box. You’ll get everything by that artist that’s on a watch list. If you want to narrow it down, go to ‘advanced search’ and start checking boxes. You can’t use the title yet—we’re still trying to sort out translations, and not all the databases list titles.”

  She stalks to the nearest storage panel holding the gallery’s stock, yanks it out, then starts finger-pounding her phone. After three tries, she glares over her shoulder at me. “It finds nothing, only advertising from the Art Loss Register.” It’s an accusation.

  “About certificates? That’s good. If the piece shows up, it’s listed someplace. You hit the link and it’ll bring up the page it found. Except on ALR—you have to pay for those.”

  Gianna’s eyes slowly thaw. She looks off to the side, thinking. It’s like seeing the profile on a Roman coin come to life. Cheerleader noses are highly overrated.

  “Why are you here?” she finally asks. “Why do you do… this?” Most of the heat’s gone from her voice. She sounds bewildered.

  “Did Lorenzoni tell you why he wraps the clients’ art?”

  “He says it is for the dust.”

  “There’s no dust.”

  She nods. “I know.” It’s almost a whisper.

  I step next to her. She doesn’t try to run away this time. “You figured he was up to something, didn’t you?” She nods. “What?”

  Gianna sighs, then shakes her head. “I do not know. He has meetings, who knows where, who knows with who. Things come here and they go, and he says nothing. I do not see the…” she taps her breastbone “…um, the inventory for that—” she waves toward the wrapped art “—I cannot find it. At university, I study the business, but Lorenzoni, he does not let me see the accounts. I look anyway, they make no sense. But…” She spreads her hands, palms up. “I cannot ask. I cannot lose the work. It is very hard for young people to get the work in Italy.”

  “I get it.” I want to be gentle, but I have to push her over the line she’s wavering on. “It could be bad for you if this gets to the police.” She winces. “But everything you do to help me figure this out will show them you’re not part of it. Will you help?”<
br />
  There’s still skepticism in her eyes, but fear is crowding it out. She can’t stop frowning at the Boudin. Then she swallows and flaps her hand at the gallery’s five panels. “I start here.”

  Great decision. “Is Lorenzoni coming back?”

  She shrugs her face. “I do not know where he goes, or why.”

  For the next half-hour we tap away at our phones while we work through the art. Gianna hums a tune I don’t recognize. We don’t talk much, but we both freeze every time there’s a noise outside. She’s smart and works fast. I know she’s found her first stolen canvas when her humming suddenly cuts off. I’d get my part done faster if I didn’t keep noticing when she bends and stretches.

  Our hands collide when we both reach to roll the last panel back home. Gianna holds her hand out toward the frame as an invitation. “Prego.”

  I slide the panel into place. “How many did you find?”

  “Two. Here and here.” She points to two panels. She looks gloomy as a bloodhound.

  “I got four, all in those far panels. How many clients store their holdings here?”

  “Only one now, I think. There were many more paintings here before.”

  I catch Gianna watching me out of the corner of her eye. The clouds on her face tell me she’s got a lot going on inside. She should. I’ve just proved to her that her boss is storing stolen property, and if I do anything about it, I’ll kill her job. I’m still just some stranger to her—a rich stranger maybe, but still some dude she doesn’t know. Until I can figure out the next step, I need to make nice with her.

  She stands staring at the first rack’s frames, hugging herself. The soft light from the clerestories does some really lovely things with her skin. Yeah, make nice with Gianna. It’ll be a huge sacrifice, but that’s the kind of guy I am… or want to be.