Among Thieves

by David Hosp

  He shook his head. “No. It just seems a little thin.”

  “It does,” she agreed. “But it would also fit with the Padre Pio they pulled on Murphy. Back in 1990, nothing happened in this town without Whitey Bulger’s say-so, and Murphy was working closely with him at the time. Maybe this has nothing to do with the art theft. Maybe it’s just a beef between the IRA and the boys in Southie over drugs or guns. But then why paint ‘The Storm’ in blood?”

  “Okay,” Stone said. “It’s a possibility. I’m not sold yet, but it’s someplace to start.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Thanks for sharing. It’s almost like we’re partners.”

  She was looking at him across the table. “Don’t let it go to your head. In my book, I still don’t know whether this ‘partnership’ is gonna work. I like to work alone, and I don’t trust people easily. We’ll see where this goes; that’s the best I can do.”

  He nodded. “Fair enough. I’m just looking for a chance. You may even find it’s easier to do the job if you have someone you can rely on.” He took a final sip of the coffee and put down his mug. “One question,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “How do you know so much about the robbery?”

  She frowned at him. “I may be old, but I can use the Internet, too.”

  Special Agent Hewitt paid the barista for his coffee at the Starbucks in Government Center. It was overpriced, but he’d gotten to the point where he could no longer drink the swill that dribbled from the 1950s coffeemaker at the office. There were some sacrifices he wasn’t willing to make, even in the name of justice.

  He walked out of the Starbucks and across the brick tundra that surrounded City Hall. He looked up at the building and grimaced. Boston’s City Hall had been built in the 1960s, and was the most renowned example of the Brutalist school of design popular at the time. A monumental nine-level cement inverted pyramid set on eight acres of brick and stone, it won praise from the architectural community as a notable achievement in the creation and control of modern urban space. In a poll of historians and architects, it was voted the sixth greatest building in American history. To Bostonians, though, it was an eyesore. With all the warmth of a mausoleum, it loomed over the classic architectural beauty of Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market across the street.

  The Boston field office of the FBI was housed in the John F. Kennedy Federal Building next to City Hall. It was a nondescript concrete structure in the heart of Government Center, close to the backside of Beacon Hill.

  Hewitt flashed his badge at the guard standing next to the metal detectors and walked around the line. He took the elevator up to the eighth floor, walked through the gray industrial-carpeted hallways, past a warren of cubicles inhabited by dull-eyed functionaries trying to make it through another day on the government payroll, and into his office. It was small by the standards of those he had gone to law school with years ago who now made millions representing huge corporations in the great glass towers of private practice. The furniture was faux-wood laminate over particleboard, and the cabinetry was gray-steel government issue. Nonetheless, he was comfortable there. It was where he belonged.

  As he hung up his coat on the hook behind the door he heard a voice coming from behind his desk. “Robert,” it said.

  Surprised, Hewitt spun, his hand involuntarily going to his hip, where his gun was encased in a holster.

  “No need to shoot, Robert. I’m one of the good guys.” The voice belonged to Angus Porter, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Art Theft Program.

  “Porter,” Hewitt said with a heavy sigh. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Hewitt wondered how he’d managed to enter the office and hang up the coat without noticing the man sitting in his chair. On the other hand, it was Porter. He couldn’t have been taller than five-seven, and if he weighed more than one hundred and twenty-five pounds with his shoes on, Hewitt would have been surprised. He had wispy blond hair growing out of a pale scalp that looked too small for his skull. It was pulled impossibly tight and gave off a dull shine. He had the spoiled air of someone who’d grown up without having to worry about money.

  “I told you on the phone I was coming to Boston,” Porter said with a smile. His teeth had been whitened, and were brighter than the starched collar of his tailored shirt.

  “I don’t mean here in Boston, I mean here in my office.”

  “You’re the only person here I came to see. Where else should I be?”

  “I’m sure we have an office or a cubicle here we can get for you. You can work out of that.”

  Porter shook his head. “No need. I’m not here officially, and I’ll be working out of my hotel.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why, Robert. On this investigation it’s just you and me, and that’s it.”

  “I’m still not sure why,” Hewitt said. “We could have all the players blanketed with the right amount of manpower. You give the word and we could mobilize twenty agents. We could control the whole thing.”

  “It wouldn’t serve our purpose. It would be like sending an army of fishermen into a shallow river. We would scare away the fish. But one or two men with the right bait—that’s how this must work.”

  Hewitt walked around his desk and stood in front of Porter. “You’re in my seat.”

  Porter looked up at him for a moment. Then he stood up and walked around to the far side of the desk. He pulled a chair over from a small table in the corner and sat in front of Hewitt’s desk. Hewitt sat down in the chair Porter had just vacated. “Have there been any further developments?” Porter asked.

  “No,” Hewitt replied. “At least, none that have been discovered so far. How about on your end?”

  “The offer seems genuine,” Porter said. “We intercepted physical evidence—paint chips. They match. Between that and the photographs, I have a high level of confidence that this time it’s for real.”

  “Shit,” Hewitt said. “You sure we don’t want to bring in some additional help?”

  “Absolutely. You and I were both here in the eighties and nineties. We know the players better than anyone. I have all the contacts we need in the art world to guide what’s going on from Washington. Bringing in others from the Bureau would only complicate matters.”

  “What about the locals?”

  Porter gave a grunt. “The local police? You must be kidding. They’d only create problems. You know the kind of jurisdictional tug-of-war that gets into.”

  Hewitt picked up a souvenir baseball that was sitting on his desk. If it had been someone else sitting across the desk from him, he might have tossed the ball to him—physical activity helped him think. Porter didn’t seem like the kind of guy who liked to throw baseballs around, though. Hewitt tossed it in the air instead and caught it himself. “If Murphy was involved, chances are that Ballick’s involved as well. He was Whitey’s right hand back then. He was higher up than Murphy, too. Should we tail him?”

  Porter shook his head. “Keep tabs on him, but don’t get too close. He may be involved, but maybe not. Whitey could have used someone else, and I don’t want to put all our money down on one bet.”

  “Whoever was involved is in some serious danger. I haven’t seen anything like what was done to Murphy in all my time at the Bureau.”

  “Murphy got what he deserved,” Porter said. “I don’t care how many of their own these people kill, as long as we find the paintings.”

  “You really think the art is more important than lives.”

  Porter seemed to consider the question. “Not all of the art, only some of it. The Vermeer and the Rembrandts, certainly. Maybe even the Flinck and the Manet. The rest of it, though, is irrelevant. The five unfinished sketches by Degas? Certainly not worthless, but trivial compared to the other works. I can’t even begin to fathom why the bronze beaker from the Shang Dynasty was taken, and the notion that they took the finial from the top of Napoleon’s battle flag is just flat-out insane. That’s one of the great mysteries of the theft. In so many
ways it was perfectly executed, but why waste time on trivial pieces like that? Not to mention what wasn’t taken. These men were only steps away from Titian’s Rape of Europa. Arguably the greatest and most valuable Renaissance piece in the United States. If they had the knowledge necessary to identify the Vermeer and the Rembrandts as worthwhile, surely they would have known about the Titian.”

  “Maybe they just got lucky.”

  Porter laughed. “It wasn’t luck. Not with how smoothly the job went off. Not with how successful they have been in keeping the paintings hidden all this time. There are just some things about it that don’t seem to fit.”

  Hewitt folded his hands on his lap. He wished Porter would leave; he didn’t enjoy being around him. There was something bloodless about the little man that set him off. “If we do this right, maybe you’ll be able to ask these guys about all that. We just need to keep them alive.”

  “That’s hardly a priority of mine at this point,” Porter said. His expression darkened, and his eyes glassed over in anger. Even when Porter had been an agent in the Boston office, he had always seemed off to Hewitt, particularly when it came to art. It was an obsession of his, and it had led him to push for the establishment of the special unit in the FBI to focus solely on art theft. It was a small group, but they were dedicated, and they were the best in the world at locating stolen art.

  “What these men did wasn’t just a crime,” Porter said. “It was a sin. They deprived the world of some of the greatest works of art ever produced. I have no sympathy for them, and I wouldn’t let a little thing like their safety jeopardize a chance to give these works back to the public.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Eddie Ballick loved the sea as much as he was capable of loving anything. There was something about the unforgiving nature of the deep gray waters off the northern shores of the Atlantic that made him feel as though he had a place in the world. As a young man in the 1970s, he’d worked as a hand on the swordfish boats out of Gloucester. On his tenth run his boat ran into a squall and foundered. Three of the six-man crew had gone down with the ship. He, the first mate, and one other had survived for three days in a tiny raft, riding through some of the roughest seas of the season, before they were rescued. Since that time, Eddie Ballick feared nothing.

  He’d never planned to enter a life of crime. But fishing jobs could be hard to come by, particularly for a hand who had already been on one doomed ship. There was never a suggestion that he was at fault, but it didn’t really matter; sailors are a superstitious lot, and in the minds of many, Ballick was a jinx.

  Jobless, and without any friends or family to speak of, Ballick drifted through his early twenties. He was a big man—not tall, but solid, with bones as thick and strong as petrified branches, held together with thick slabs of muscle. He found work as a bouncer at one of the roughest bars, where some of the city’s connected hung out. It wasn’t long before some of them recognized the potential in a strong young man without fear.

  Ballick was a perfect fit for Boston’s criminal underworld. He had a disdain for other human beings that allowed him to cross lines of cruelty even some of his colleagues found troubling. He lived to live, without any care given to how long or how well. As a result, his rise through the ranks of Boston’s organized crime in the eighties and nineties had less to do with any active ambition, and more to do with an oddly indifferent efficiency. Within five years, he owned the bar where he’d first been hired to run the door. It was rumored that his former boss was buried under the parking lot out back.

  The bar was only one of Ballick’s quasi-legitimate businesses. For him, the crown jewel in his mini-empire was a run-down fishing shack at the edge of the water at the southern tip of Boston, just north of Quincy. It was the only place he cared about, and it was where he spent most of his time. It wasn’t much to look at: a small, rickety two-story building ready to slide into the edge of Quincy Harbor.

  Ballick was sitting in a cheap aluminum folding chair at the corner of the building, watching the activity on the pier closely, when Finn and Kozlowski arrived. He looked as if he fit in there, and as if he would have a hard time fitting in anyplace else. He was in his late fifties, with a large round head fringed with matted white hair. A fisherman’s beard traced a smooth oval from ear to ear under his chin, and the only parts of him that seemed to move at all were his eyes. Boats were pulled up along a nearby pier, some of them already unloading their catches in the mid-afternoon sun. A few of Ballick’s buyers from the shack moved along the pier, watching over the unloading process, calculating their needs and the respective purchase prices in their heads.

  “Eddie Ballick,” Finn said as he approached. He’d called earlier to tell Ballick he was coming; Ballick was known to be a man who abhorred surprises.

  Ballick turned his head; the rest of his body remained still. He said nothing.

  “I’m Scott Finn. Devon Malley’s lawyer. We spoke earlier.”

  Ballick looked past Finn toward Kozlowski. “You didn’t say you were bringing someone with you.”

  “Sorry,” Finn said. “This is Tom Kozlowski. He and I—”

  “I know who he is,” Ballick said. “He’s a cop.”

  “He’s no longer with the department,” Finn said. “He’s a private detective now.”

  “He’s still a cop,” Ballick said. “Now he’s just a cop without a badge.”

  Ballick’s head turned back toward the pier. “I only got a few minutes. I’m busy.” He shifted in his seat and brought his hands together on his lap. Finn had never seen thicker fingers. “Scott Finn,” he said. “I remember you.”

  “I didn’t know whether you would,” Finn said.

  “Looks like the other side is working out for you.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Fuckin’ shame.”

  Finn was noncommittal. “In some ways, maybe.”

  “And now you want to talk to me about Devon Malley.”

  “It would be helpful.”

  Ballick frowned. Then he got to his feet slowly. “We’ll talk inside,” he said. “Cop stays out here.”

  Finn followed him around the corner of the building and through an undersized door that looked as though the hinges might fail soon. One room took up the entire first floor. It was concrete from wall to wall, and along the back there was a long sink where men in bloodstained sweatshirts and aprons worked steadily with long, thin gutting knives, slicing into the bellies of fish carcasses stacked in holding bins. With each casual flick of their wrists, innards spilled into the sinks and were washed down through an open drain that emptied into a trough in the cement along the wall, and were carried out through a chute in the corner of the building that led into the harbor. The sights and smells brought a rush of bile into Finn’s throat, but he managed to suppress the gag reflex.

  “Upstairs,” Ballick said, nodding toward a rickety plywood staircase in the corner. “Mikey,” he called to one of the men bent over the bloody sink. The man stood and looked over his shoulder. Finn could see the muscles rippling under a thin T-shirt. “Keep an eye on the guy outside.” Ballick walked to the stairs and the entire building seemed to list to one side as the heavy man headed up.

  The upstairs was only marginally less retch-inducing. The walls were open to the studs, and Finn could see patches of mold along the walls and on the ceiling. The stench from below seemed just as powerful. There was a small desk in the center of the room—painfully small for a man of Ballick’s girth—and a few rusted folding chairs placed haphazardly around. Stacks of newspapers and filing cabinets stood along one wall.

  “Nice office,” Finn commented.

  “Not what you’re used to, Counselor?”

  “Actually, my office isn’t much bigger. Better ventilated, maybe.”

  “With all the money you must be making these days?”

  “I make a lot less than you do. Appearances notwithstanding.”

  Ballick sat down behind the desk and slid open one of the bottom
drawers, pulling out a thermos. He took the cup-shaped top off and turned it upside down on the desktop, then unscrewed the cap and poured out some of the contents. A thin wisp of steam wafted up. “I’ve never given much of a fuck about appearances,” Ballick said as he lifted the cup to his lips.

  Finn nodded and pulled a chair over, sitting in front of the desk. “Me neither.”

  “So?” Ballick said. “You said you wanted to talk. Talk.”

  Kozlowski was leaning against the side of the building, close to the doorway so that he might hear it if things got loud upstairs. He’d have felt much better if he could have seen Finn and heard exactly what was going on. It was unlikely that Ballick would do anything. There were too many people around, and it wouldn’t be worth his effort. Still, Kozlowski felt uneasy.

  The door opened and a man stepped outside. He was in his late twenties, a little taller than Kozlowski, with a shaved head and a goatee. An apron hung from his shoulders, covered in blood and fish guts, and his T-shirt, presumably once white, was splotched with yellow and gray. The arms that protruded from the sleeves were covered in green-black prison tattoos; cables of muscle and treads of veins shifted as he moved.

  He paused as he adjusted to the light, his hand to his eyes, looking for something. Then he turned in Kozlowski’s direction. It took a moment for the recognition to flash in the man’s eyes, but once it did, it morphed instantly to hatred.

  “Muthafucka,” he said. He was only a few feet from Kozlowski.

  “Mikey Sullivan,” Kozlowski said. He nodded to the man. “How you been?”

  “Fuck you care, Kozlowski?” the man said.

  “C’mon, Mikey. I care. It makes me feel good when I know that the people I put away have been rehabilitated. Nice to see you got yourself a real job. Can’t say too much for your employer, but hell, I guess you gotta take what you can get. You just gut fish for Ballick, or you gut other things, too?”