by Al Macy
He said, “I slipped the Pan Am woman two hundred bucks, and she seated me next to Viviana.”
* * *
Bolton was pissed that he had to fill in Rand Gregor, Mizrachi’s replacement from Chicago. The guy should have been briefed ahead of this. My time is too valuable for this!
He glared at Gregor. “I slipped the Pan Am woman two hundred bucks, and she seated me next to Viviana.”
Gregor looked mean. He was mean, if the stories Bolton had heard were true. Around sixty, he had scraggly salt-and-pepper hair over a large forehead and a permanent scowl. No one would be able to win a staring contest with him. He had a large mole below his receding hairline and another to the right of his nose.
Gregor seemed pissed as well. He’d just retired when Mizrachi died. When Viviana killed him. They’d pulled Gregor back into service with an offer he couldn’t refuse. Bolton was tired of that expression—everyone else seemed to love it.
“Christ, Vance, back up. He needs the whole story.” Lucy was a friend, but she seemed to be sucking up to the new boss.
Bolton scowled at her. So much for loyalty.
She denied it, but everyone knew she was hooked on amphetamines. Years ago, she’d had a normal body, a little chubby, even. Now she’s as skinny as Twiggy on a diet. Her face had been beautiful, stunning actually. Now the skin was rough, the cheeks hollowed out, the eyes two dark slits.
Bolton continued. “Okay. Mizrachi had been looking for a new lock man ever since Reggie went to prison. He wanted the best. He’d always been interested in reading about the recent jewel thefts, and he had a theory that they were the work of one man. The same man. The police usually said it was the work of a gang, but Mizrachi disagreed.
“So, I’m coming back from France, and I’m in the airport, and I’m watching a TV. They have a story about the theft of the Portensia diamond. You know about that?”
The others nodded.
“The MO matched the thefts Mizrachi and I had been following. In the Portensia diamond job, someone got a look at the thief, and they had one of those Identikit sketches up on the screen in the airport. I look down, and right across from me is a woman who matches the sketch. It wasn’t perfect, they never are, but it was very, very close. Close enough to look into it further. So, I went to the check-in counter, pointed to the woman, and asked to be seated next to her.”
“But you didn’t know her name,” Lucy said.
“Right. So I slip the airline employee two hundred bucks, and she tells me to stay in the waiting area after the boarding. Viviana was one of the first to board, and as soon as the woman got the boarding pass, she went to her computer. I guess she moved someone. But whatever, when everyone else had boarded, she waved me over and gave me a new boarding pass. I sat next to Viviana, but she was pretty aloof.”
Lucy picked at the label on her bottle of beer. “But you didn’t get her name.”
“No. And it wouldn’t have mattered. She was the thief, it turns out, so she wouldn’t have given me her real name. And she was kind of standoffish. Until I drew her picture.”
“Wait a second,” Gregor said. “Oh, right. It was your art job that got you into forgery.”
“Right. So, I was going to close the deal, share a taxi with her and find out where she lived when we landed at SFO.”
Gregor held up a hand. “It was just coincidence that you were both going to Frisco?”
“Yeah, I guess. But the bad luck was that customs gave her a thorough going over. I guess they’d seen the sketch, too. I waited but gave up after an hour, figuring she’d been taken away or left a different way.”
“Did they find anything?” Gregor asked.
“Jack Meredith says no, but he says customs was convinced that she was their girl. He works in customs, and he’s on our payroll. She must have fenced the diamond before she left for the States. Lucy, can you get me another beer? You already know this story.”
Gregor requested another beer, also. He turned to Bolton. “So, then what?”
“So then I dropped everything else and worked on finding her. It took me less than a week. I started romancing her. Mizrachi wanted her in the organization, and that was the best way to do it. I was sure she wasn’t going to voluntarily join up with us, so I didn’t push it. Mizrachi tried to blackmail her, but you know how that ended up.”
“And you married her?”
Bolton shrugged. “What can I say? We were good together. It seemed like a good idea.”
“What about this kid?”
“Right,” Bolton said. “I was sitting on a goldmine and didn’t know it. He’s Viviana’s nephew. He’s retarded or something, but he can open safes. He opened my safe at home, and that’s a top-of-the-line model.”
“You saw him do it?”
Lucy brought some more beers out to the patio.
“Yeah, he did it right in front of me. It was fast. I’ve talked with Sam Didado, but he doesn’t believe me.”
“There’s no way he knew the combination?”
“None,” Bolton said. “I changed it myself just a few minutes beforehand. It’s just … I don’t get it, but I saw it with my own eyes.”
“We don’t know if he can open other safes, do we?” Lucy asked.
“Well … no.”
Gregor took a long pull on his beer, put it down. “Tell me about the job.”
“The Chabot family will be in France, and they have lousy security at their Napa estate. Even better, we have an inside man. They—”
“Chabot? Remind me.”
“Yuri Chabot inherited his family’s wine fortune and increased it substantially with profits from his vineyards here in California. He’s the richest American in the alcohol business. But most important, he’s a collector. Art, rare objects, that kind of thing. He has—”
Gregor held up his hand. “Hold on. Let’s go inside. It’s freezing out here, even with these heaters.”
They headed downstairs and settled into a room on the ground floor. It was a standard man cave with a TV, some chairs, a desk, and dark walls.
Gregor leaned back against the desk and crossed his arms. “Okay, keep going. The Chabot job.”
“Right. Chabot has a big safe in his basement, and we know that inside is the Messiah violin.”
Gregor looked to Lucy then back to Bolton. “A violin?”
“It’s a Stradivarius that was made in 1716. It’s valued at twenty million dollars.”
“Do we have—?”
“Yes. We already have a buyer who’ll give us fourteen for it. Even without that, the job—”
“So, we planned this job before we knew about the nephew?”
“Yeah,” Bolton said. “We were going to try to blow the safe, but that might have destroyed the violin. Didado gave us only a fifty-fifty chance of getting it open that way and a twenty percent chance of recovering the instrument.”
Bolton laid out the plans. “We wanted to recruit Viviana, but that’s pretty much out of the question now. She hasn’t said anything to me about the mob, of course, but I’m sure she hates them—us—now. We’ve found a new lock man, so she’s less important now. The prize is the kid. But she controls him. So, we’re going to take another shot at blackmail, and if that—”
“Hold on,” Gregor said. “Didn’t we already try that?”
“Don and I followed her to a storage place in the East Bay. He went in, pretended he was interested, asked for a tour. He figured out which compartment was hers. We sent a crew there, and they took it apart. She had a trove of jewels like you wouldn’t believe. Worth millions. We have them now. We’re going to fence some, but the others can be used to trade for her services.”
“What if she doesn’t want them back?”
Bolton squinted. “Seriously?”
“You said she hates the mob. She can always get more, using the mental nephew. She’s already rich.”
“Well, we could threaten to give the jewels to the police. Maybe they could tie her to the heis
ts.”
Gregor leaned back on the couch and looked at the ceiling. Kept looking for a full minute. Then he sat up. “When’s the heist? The one with the safe.”
Bolton answered, “The twenty-sixth.”
Lucy said, “At, like, one a.m.”
Gregor looked at his watch. “Okay. About a week and a half.” He took a few breaths then seemed to come to a decision. “Look. Fuck it. We’ll just kill her and kidnap the kid.”
“No!” Bolton spit the word out. “Without her, we won’t be able to control the kid. Trust me, he’s not a normal kid, and we won’t be able to reason with him. Once, Viviana left me alone with him in the condo for a few minutes. I was going to try to get him to show me how he opened the safe, but the kid just freaked. You had to see it to believe it.”
“Bullshit. There are always ways to get someone to do what you want them to.”
* * *
La naiba! I slipped the gun, the one with the suppressor that I’d taken from the safe, back into my pack. It wasn’t like me to be indecisive, but the best course of action wasn’t clear. From the sound of their voices, the three of them were—what?—a few meters away. I could have leaned over the edge of the roof and shot all three in the tops of their heads before they knew what was happening. My conscience wouldn’t bother me a bit. I decided I had a conscience, but my conscience responded well to reasoning. They were in the mob. They’d tried to blackmail me. They deserved to die.
And my scum-sucking, sociopath husband! God, did he ever deserve to die. I had no desire to confront him before I killed him. Cezar had drilled those notions out of my head. “Is for TV,” he’d said. “Just shoot.” If I’d acted, he’d have died not knowing I was on to him, but that didn’t bother me.
How had I missed this side of Bolton? I’m usually a good judge of character.
I hadn’t shot them because I didn’t know who else was in the house. Maybe the three thuds would have brought a goon with a Tommy gun up onto the deck. And maybe neighbor would see. The houses up the hill had a good view of the roof.
When they went inside, I had a moment of regret that I hadn’t killed them all. But only a moment. I’ve learned not to regret the past.
I lay there, putting things together. Bolton wasn’t cheating on me with another woman, but his whole life with me was a lie. What an idiot I’d been. I would never have guessed that our meeting on the plane wasn’t random. Ah, that was why the FBI contacted me soon after the plane trip and right after Bolton found me. They were following Bolton, and Bolton led them to me. Is what I get for trying to have normal life.
Bad luck that they’d gone inside just when they were going to lay out their plan. It didn’t matter. I’d be ready for them.
I waited until 3:00 a.m., set my grappling hook, and rappelled down to the ground. Faithful Samuel was waiting in the car, and he wasn’t sleeping. Did I tell you I loved him?
CHAPTER TWENTY
Bolton spent the night at the safe house and drove to SFO in the early morning. He was supervising a job scheduled for that evening. Nothing tricky, just a minor interception of some drug money destined for the competition. Most of his work now had little to do with forgery.
Bolton grew up in a rough area in Brooklyn, on Long Island. The other side of the ditch, people called it. His parents had a hard enough time supervising their own lives, so he got his street smarts at an early age.
Every year, the family went on a short vacation in upstate New York. There, Bolton discovered an activity that relieved his almost-constant boredom. He captured bullfrogs, stabbed them in their bellies with a kitchen knife, and then flipped them over and watched the life drain from their eyes. He’d fling their bodies out into the pond, yelling, “Too bad for you, you stupid-ass froggy!” Before long, he was stuffing frogs with firecrackers and watching them explode. His parents became aware of his game, but because Bolton was so difficult to control, they ignored it. They had to choose their battles.
He thought his natural talent at art would be his ticket out of the slums, and he was right but not in the way he expected. Generally, his friends saw art as something only sissies would be interested in, but all were impressed with his ability to draw things from memory.
His life changed in the late fall of 1963, soon after Kennedy was assassinated. At a party, someone asked him to show a new girl how he could draw a squiggle from memory. He was getting tired of performing this trick but went along. The girl was cute.
Skeptical, she scribbled something on a page of a spiral notebook and only let him look at it for a few seconds. “Got it?” she said.
“Yeah, I got it.” He figured he could impress her with his bored tone.
“Really?”
“No problem.”
She ripped the sheet out and handed him the notebook. He reproduced it so well that no one could tell the original from the copy. It was just like a Xerox.
That’s when Ricky Puccinelli said the words that would change Bolton’s life: “Hey, can you do that with a signature?”
Everyone stopped and looked at him. Someone handed Ricky the pad. “No way, Jose. I don’t want him to copy my signature!”
Someone else said, “Well, dickwad, make up a fake signature.”
Ricky signed the name of their school’s principal. Bolton glanced at it and copied it. As with the squiggle, no one could distinguish the copy from the original. The ramifications were clear, but Bolton ignored them. What was he going to do, forge signatures on checks? The immorality of that idea didn’t bother him, but he calculated that the risk simply wasn’t worth it.
Bolton graduated from high school with below average grades in all subjects except art. College was out of the question, financially. Even if his parents had had enough money, they wouldn’t shell out for anything as impractical as “arts and crafts,” as they called it. They wanted him to learn a trade.
Through the friend of a cousin, Bolton got a job at a design shop working for minimum wage. The boss was tough but fair and recognized his talent. Slowly but surely they gave him more complex jobs, and he executed them promptly and competently. The speed with which he came up with concept drawings was impressive, but there was no corner-cutting when it came to quality. When an intern reported that Bolton had forcibly kissed her and made her sit on his lap, the bosses let her go. Bolton was too valuable.
One day Bolton was taking his lunch at a nearby park. There was no grass, just cement, but the trees were leafy, and the rustling of the wind made itself heard despite the traffic noise. An overdressed man who was concentration-camp thin sat down across the picnic table from Bolton.
“How you doing?” he said.
Bolton shrugged and took another bite of his American cheese sandwich.
“You’re Bolton Vance, right. The art guy?”
Bolton looked at him more closely.
The guy had a pencil mustache and garlic breath. “Hey, don’t be scared, kid. I ain’t gonna bite you.” He put a yellow legal pad and a pen on the table next to Bolton’s Coke.
“You want me to copy a doodle,” Bolton said. “Who told you about me?”
The man ignored him. “This’ll only take a second, kid, then you can go back to your boring, dead-end job.” He took a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. “This here is a letter that someone wrote. I don’t even know what it’s about. But I want to see if you can write something on this yellow pad here using the same handwriting. You know what I mean?”
Bolton took a swig of his drink and weighed his options. He wanted to tell him to fuck off, but the guy seemed connected. Not someone you want to mess with.
“What’s in it for me?” Bolton asked.
The man laughed. “All right. Smart kid.” He pulled a roll of money from a pocket inside his pin-striped jacket and peeled off four twenties. “You do this for me, and this eighty bucks is yours. Okay?”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“What do you mean?” He slid the money over to B
olton’s side of the table. “I’m giving it to you. You don’t understand English?”
“No. What I write. What are you going to do with that?”
“Okay, I get it.” The guy laughed. “I ain’t gonna do nothing with it. You can keep it for Christ sakes. I just want to see if you can do it.”
Bolton put the money in his pocket and while chewing the last of his cheese sandwich, looked over the letter. He took his time, getting a feel for the style of each character. Then he picked up the pen and wrote a stupid, once-upon-a-time story that made little sense. Although he’d never tried it before, it was easy. He slid the sheet and the pad across the table.
The guy looked from one to the other a few times. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” He looked up at Bolton. His expression said, Holy shit. How did he do that?
Bolton started to object when the man kept the story he’d written then stopped. He didn’t care.
“Look, kid, there’s lots more money where that eighty bucks came from.” He pointed to the pocket Bolton had slipped the money into. “You interested?”
“Yeah,” Bolton said. “Yeah, I’m interested.”
“Smart kid. We’ll be in touch.” The overdressed man shot Bolton with a finger pistol and headed off down the street, whistling.
A week later a black car pulled up in front of Bolton’s apartment building. Three guys came to his cramped room. Two of them smoked cigars. One was the skinny guy he’d performed for. He let them in. He’d just finished eating a Swanson’s potpie, and the aluminum pie tin was still on his Formica table. He’d been doodling some ideas for a project at work and watching the baseball game at the same time.
The skinny guy stepped over and turned the volume down on the TV then sat at the table. “Hey, kid. How you doing? It’s good to see you again. I forgot to introduce myself. I’m Danny, and these two guys over here aren’t.” He chuckled at the joke, but the other two didn’t react.
“No reason to be scared, kid,” he said. “You implied that you wanted some work, and voilà, here we are. We have a really, really simple job for you. You ready?”
