The Collection

by Lance Charnes

  She’s closer to the truth than she knows. I very much don’t want her thinking I’ve been using her—even if I have—because I really do like her and I don’t want to hurt her. She doesn’t deserve it. Gianna’s the nearest thing we’ve got to an innocent in this story.

  “No.” For once I know exactly what to say. “I want you to succeed and be happy with the way you did it. I want you to be out from under Lorenzoni and Angelo and his dad and everybody like them. I want you to be your own person. I want something good to come of all this… mess. That’s what I want. How about you?”

  She watches me for a few moments, her head cocked a bit, maybe wondering if I’m feeding her a line. For once in my life, I don’t have to fake sincerity. Maybe she sees it, because she breaks her laser-lock on me and looks down at her espadrilles, which are the same color as her top. “I want that too,” she whispers.

  “I’m glad.” Now’s the time to download the rest. “Something else you should know. Lorenzoni fell out with Salvatore Morrone, right?” She nods. “Well, Lucca’s even more pissed at him. I’m afraid… he might do something to you, too.” She doesn’t need to know why. It won’t change anything.

  That startles her. She glances toward the back again with eyes twice as big as a few seconds ago. Then her hand drifts to her mouth. For a moment I think she’s broken up about Belknap, but then I read confusion and fear in her eyes, not grief.

  I stand and take a step toward her. “Let me protect you.” I have no idea how to do that. If she says yes, I’ll have promised her something else I can’t deliver. I’m useless to her now. But I have to make the offer. I have to try.

  She laughs. “Protect me? From them? No one can protect me. If they want me, they will find me.” She turns a little circle, like she started to do something and forgot why. “Only one person can help me. Angelo.”

  “No, no no. Wait.” I put up both hands. “Number one, you don’t know whose side he’s on. Number two, remember what I said about not wanting to owe him? You go to him for protection, you’re his. Is that what you want?”

  Her eyes flash. “I want to live. It is my life. I do what I must.”

  Shit. This just gets worse and worse. Maybe Carson should’ve drowned me in the bathtub. “Just… think real hard before you do that. I can stash you someplace. Nobody’ll know you’re—”

  “They will find me.” She charges me, stops just before we’re nose-to-nose. “They pay people, someone will tell. Then Lucca finds you in front of me, and—” She snaps a backhand flick, like brushing away a fly. “Then he has me.”

  Wow. She has so much confidence in me. She really is smart. Fighting with her isn’t going to fix this, but I can help her limit the number of people who want to kill her. “Please be careful. Don’t sleep at home. Look, Lorenzoni left you with a mess you need to clean up. Is there a Dima Belaiev on your client list? In St. Petersburg?”

  Gianna gives me a seriously? look, then marches to her desk. After a minute of typing and clicking, she says, “Yes, he is here. He is on the phone only. Why?”

  “There should be an Henri Fantin-Latour still life in the storage room. Lorenzoni sold it to Belaiev. You need to send it to him discreetly. You don’t want him coming to get it.”

  I get back arched eyebrows and pursed lips. “How do you know this?”

  “I just do.” The eyebrows get higher. I don’t want to lie to her more, but I have to sprinkle some sugar on this. “Lucca’s not the only one who can pay people for information. You know about Lorenzoni’s storage space at the Geneva Free Port?” Gianna nods. “Write up a sales receipt for €100 and call the Fantin a reproduction. It’ll keep the Customs guys happy. Get it to Geneva, then have the Free Port send it to Belaiev using their return address. Got all that?”

  A shade of bewilderment creeps into her eyes. “Why must I do these things?”

  “Just take my word for it—you don’t want to make Belaiev mad. Did you keep a copy of Lorenzoni’s computer files?”

  “Of course I do.” The confusion is starting to melt away. Her business mind’s taking over her face, making it calmer and stronger.

  “Take a good look at the accounts. The gallery owes money to a bunch of people. There’s one debt that’s not on the books, though. A few days from now, a guy’ll come to the gallery and say Lorenzoni owes him money. He’ll be either an Italian lawyer or a Russian.” Carson gave me the download on how the Russian Mob will try to collect its debt. I close in on Gianna’s desk. “Ask him to confirm the amount. Half a million U.S. dollars.”

  Gianna’s eyes get huge. She sags into her chair. “Who are these people? Why does Lorenzoni owe so much money to them? Where is the money?”

  “You don’t need to know who they are. They’re people you don’t want to get involved with. The money will be in some offshore account. The number may be in his office. You should go look.”

  She sits there shocked, staring into her laptop screen. After a long, deep breath, she trots to Belknap’s office.

  I give Gianna a couple minutes, then pace down the hall to Belknap’s door and watch her ransack his desk. “Nothing?”

  She straightens and turns up her palms. “What do I look for?”

  I shrug. “It might have the name of a bank. A couple numbers, one maybe eight to twelve digits, the other four to six.” She shakes her head. “Keep looking.”

  She gives me the skeptical eyebrow, then starts tearing through the drawers. I palm out of my pocket the card Belknap gave Carson a century ago. I look under the telephone and a black enameled sorter, then lift his heavy Streamline Moderne desk lamp after I slip the card underneath. “What’s that?”

  Gianna scoops up the card, frowns, then shows me its back.

  I’d spent the whole auction reading that dope sheet on the bidders. It wasn’t hard to duplicate Belknap’s handwriting. “That’s it. Straits Commercial Bank in Singapore. This is the account number, that’s the PIN.” My anti-conscience’s kicking me for not keeping it. It’d wipe out most of what I owe. “Check the balance online. If it’s right, tell the guy that Lorenzoni left you instructions to hand this over, but you don’t know anything else about it. Can you do that?”

  Her focus flicks from my face to the card and back. There’s a lot to absorb here. After a few moments of studying the card, she slides it into her pants pocket. “Maybe I keep the money,” she says like she’s talking to herself.

  If she keeps this up, she’ll end up like me. That’s no good. “Do that and they’ll take you out like Lorenzoni.”

  Gianna makes a face at me. “I make the joke.” But she wasn’t. “Have you more things for me to do?” The tone in her voice is this weird combination of gratitude and resentment.

  “Not for now.” I miss the playful Gianna. At least now she’ll be square with the Russians, though she’s still in Lucca’s crosshairs. Where you put her. “What’ll you do with this place if Lorenzoni’s really gone?”

  She squares her chin and shoulders. “I make it open for as long as I can. Until my gallery is open, if I can.”

  “Good plan. Give yourself a raise.” She snorts, but a little smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. “If Angelo wants you to pick up what Lorenzoni was doing, tell him the truth—you don’t have the contacts and you don’t know how to do it. He’ll push back, but don’t let him win.”

  Gianna doesn’t nod or shake her head; she just watches me with caution in her eyes. She may not hate Hoskins anymore, but she doesn’t trust him either. “What do you do now?”

  Good question. “Try to finish what I’ve started. I might need your help later on. Can I count on you?”

  Her lips flatten out again. Then she nods.

  Chapter 48

  It’s a gray, heavy Tuesday morning. Four days left before we hit Lucca’s—and Allyson’s—deadline. Carson spent most of yesterday afternoon building a list of all of Morrone’s properties that are big enough to hide a semi. That’s where we are no
w: chasing around western metro Milan after the world’s largest pea in a shell game.

  After the fifth strikeout, Carson thumps into the driver’s seat of our red Alfa Giulietta hatchback and strangles the steering wheel. “Thought of something. They’re moving this thing, right? Maybe they put it someplace we’ve checked. We’ll never find it.”

  I sigh. The fatal flaw in this plan. “You had to think of that, huh?”

  “Too much time in traffic.” She leans back against the headrest. “You get a picture of that truck? Mine’s blurred.”

  “I took a couple. Let me check.” I bring up my phone’s picture gallery and shuffle through Friday’s photos of the semi. When I enlarge the first one, I can just read the license plate in the murk. “Got it. You need the tag number?”

  “Hope so. Asked Olivia for someone on the pad in Milan. She’ll call back.”

  “Good idea.” If we can get another crooked cop, he can put out an APB or whatever they’re called here. It’d be nice to have a few thousand extra sets of eyes looking out. “Should we split up? Give me a car and half the list? We could cover more ground faster.”

  Carson throttles the steering wheel while she stares out the windshield. “You pick locks?”

  “No.”

  “How’re you gonna check inside?”

  Aw, hell. “Let’s get on the road, then.”

  Carson’s list has fifty-eight entries. We got to nine this morning. We hit another eight before the sun disappears. I’m eating Tylenol like M&Ms and I still hurt.

  Still no truck.

  Part of the holdup is the traffic. Part of it is we have to try to see or go inside these places, which usually means a lot of waiting and skulking around. Another time-suck is checking inside any semi-trailers we find, whether or not they’re attached to the Scania; nothing says the semi has to stick around. One of the places—in Cusano Milanino north of Milan—is actually four warehouses and takes us almost an hour to check out, twenty minutes of that hiding behind racks of crates while no-neck guys load a semi we’re not looking for.

  It’s past seven and Carson’s trying to follow the GPS to a pizzeria we found on Google Maps when 2Pac starts rapping “Dear Mama” out of Carson’s phone. She thumbs in her password, then shoves the phone in front of me.

  “Hello?”

  “You’re not One-Two-Six.” Olivia’s voice.

  “You know, I said that to myself this morning. It’s very disappointing.”

  “Cheeky monkey. Is she there?”

  “She’s trying to run us into a city bus right now. Is this about her question?”

  Carson grabs the phone. “It’s okay, tell him.” She slaps it back into my hand.

  “You heard her,” I said.

  “Indeed. We can provide the assistance she requested. However, there’s to be no direct contact between you and our contractor. Can you send the particulars about what you’re looking for?”

  I’m already sending the truck photos to her from my phone. “It’ll be in your inbox in a minute. How will we know if anything turns up?”

  “I’ll notify One-Two-Six. Or are you her messaging service now?”

  “Either way, we’ll get it. Thanks.”

  “Of course. Please tell her not to smash this car the way she did the one last month. Good evening.”

  I resist the temptation to root around on Carson’s phone. I’m totally ready to find the Harlequin app in there, or maybe something about Hello Kitty. My smarter side tells me she’d react badly, so I shut off the phone and slide it into the cup holder. “Mom says, don’t wreck the car and get home before curfew.”

  She glances at me, then rolls her eyes. “We get the cop?”

  “We got somebody we can’t talk to. All messages go through Olivia. At least we’re not in this alone anymore.”

  Not that it helps. We try another three places after dinner. Two near-scrapes with onsite security tell us it’s time to hang it up; it’s just too hard to see who’s out there.

  Back at the hotel, I beg Carson for another of those special Tylenol. She takes pity on me and gives me two. One knocks me between the eyes like a rubber mallet and I fall hard into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  When I crawl awake at what the clock says is 3:52, I can’t tell if the pounding I hear is in my head or outside the room. I stagger to the door and see Carson in the peephole. There’s still enough codeine in me to make me wonder if I’m hallucinating. I crack open the door and squint against the hallway lights. “What?”

  She’s real, fully dressed, and more awake than anybody should be at this hour. “Found the truck.”

  Chapter 49

  We swoop off the A4 into the Lambro Sud truck stop’s parking lot. The first thing we see is a big red-brick shoebox with an Autogrill sign on top. The sky’s still more dark than light and the sign’s white neon glows against the orange-tinged overcast. A dozen cars huddle together near the building. None of them are the truck.

  Carson follows the access road along the south edge of the complex to a second parking lot between the Autogrill and the Esso gas station. This one has five semis side-by-side. Four have trailers. Angelo’s is just the tractor.

  “Fuck.” Carson backs into a spot behind the Autogrill. The Scania is maybe twenty yards ahead of us. There’s condensation on the windows; it’s been here overnight. “Where’s the trailer?”

  “The real question is, how long will Angelo leave the truck here?”

  Carson shrugs. “We’ll find out.”

  We have three full days left.

  We settle in for a long wait. Carson goes foraging for survival rations and brings back a Burger King bag and two ginormous paper cups of black coffee. It tastes like melted axle grease but burns off the last of the codeine in my system. Do Italian cops drink this swill, or do they get cappuccinos from a real café? The bag smells like All-American hot grease. “Burger King? Seriously? We’re in Italy.”

  “So are they.”

  The sky turns a lumpy gray. Drizzle comes and goes. Traffic picks up on the A4 fifty yards to our left. Carson cracks the windows, a good thing since our VW Passat smells like fried things and overcooked coffee. One by one, the semis rumble awake and pull out. Finally we’re left with a green Mercedes cabover hooked to a Pirelli trailer, and Angelo’s Scania.

  The box truck next to us growls away. There’s a black Alfa four-door sedan backed in three places over with a film of rain on its roof. It’s hard to see past the tinted windows, but I sort-of make out a couple guy-shapes inside. My first thought: Lucca? I nudge Carson. “Over there.”

  She checks them out for a few seconds, then leans back into her seat and stretches. “Huh. Probably the cops who found the truck.”

  “Why are they still here?”

  “Watching it, in case it moves.”

  “So I shouldn’t worry?” She shrugs. I’m not reassured. “What do we do now?”

  “Wait for Angelo and follow him, or leave now and see if they follow us.”

  I peek past her toward the black Alfa. There’s nothing new to see, which doesn’t make me feel any better. “You know, if we follow Angelo, they’ll maybe follow us and we’ll lead them to where the art is. That’s not good.”

  She pulls her phone off the dash—the coffee’s hogging the cupholders—and picks somebody out of her contact list. “One-Two-Six… ask our contractor if he has people watching the package… Yeah… okay.” She thumbs off the phone. “Olivia’s on it.”

  What if it’s not our “contractor”? Who’s over there? What do they want? I try to ignore them, which means I look their way only once every fifteen seconds or so.

  Every minute that ticks by reminds me of the deadline. By six, I’ve got a bad case of fidgets. When the dashboard clock passes 8:00, I ask, “Why’d he leave the truck here?”

  “Not enough room? Needed gas? Oil change?”

  I’d thought of all that, too. “Okay, but why leave it here? I’d th
ink he’d want the truck close to the trailer in case he needs to move it fast.” I check out the black Alfa. “Unless…”

  “They changed trucks?”

  “Yeah. Maybe somebody told him we’re looking for this one.”

  Now Carson glances at our shadow. “You thinking our cop belongs to someone else?”

  “What do you think?”

  Just then, the Alfa’s doors open and two suits climb out. The driver circles the nose. They pull out pistols and walk our way. I squeak, “Oh, shit!”

  Carson does a double-take, then fires up the engine. “Fuck! Now you can worry.”

  We squeal out of our parking space. The suits just stand there, their guns halfway up, looking surprised. I manage to glimpse the Alfa’s license plate before an incoming semi blocks my view.

  We’re eastbound on the A4, passing tall trees on one side and industry on the other. I text Olivia: Run IT license LD391BP.

  “We may have company.” Carson starts using all three lanes, changing in front of bigger cars and trucks to mask what we’re doing.

  I look behind us and catch sight of a black Alfa Romeo a few cars back. A green exit sign flashes by overhead: Cinisello B. Sesto S.G. I had no idea we’re so close to these places we’ve been in and out of for the past few days. “See the exit?” I say.

  She nods once, then slides into the far left lane and slows down. Seriously? Cars bomb past us to the right, some complete with hand gestures.

  I peer back through the traffic. The Alfa’s creeping closer. My phone camera’s zoom makes the plate just big enough to read. “It’s them,” I tell Carson.

  The final exit sign quickly grows bigger up ahead. The Alfa’s only three-ish car lengths behind us. It’s like they don’t care we can see them. A big red-brick apartment complex looms over us like a cliff. The next-exit sign swoops by. “Uh, Carson?”