by Ann Hood
On the short par-three fourteenth, Don and Victor were both on with makeable putts. Bobby’s shot sailed over the pin, spun back, hit a ball mark, and veered right. Victor and Bobby both made their putts.
At the fifteenth tee box, Victor came up to Bobby as he got ready to tee his ball up. “The way I see it, this is a big-decision hole for you, my young friend. After this are three par fours. This is the scoring hole. Do you unleash it and show us how good you really are, how that five handicap is bullshit, or do you hold back and keep it at even which gives us the front and cumulative, and leaves you with a bill for a grand, which I’m not positive you have. It’s a real interesting decision. Glad it’s not mine.” He patted Bobby on the back.
Bobby was still unsure how serious these guys were. Were they just bullshitting him, getting into his head by playing tough guy? He knew he couldn’t pay the bet if he didn’t win the side by at least two. And if he couldn’t pay the bet, it was going to go hard on him if these guys were for real. If they weren’t for real, they were doing a good job of pretending.
He let it go. He had no real choice. He needed to get up by a point in order to make any kind of decision about what he was going to do. The ball stayed on the right side of the fairway. It was easily three ten or three twenty.
“Jesus Christ,” Don said. “You been keeping that in your bag, haven’t you?”
“It’s a good drive,” Bobby agreed.
“And I’m guessing that’s not even close to your best,” Victor said.
“It’s close,” Bobby said.
“You’re full of shit,” Victor said.
“Victor, hit the ball,” Don said.
Bobby missed the eagle putt, got his birdie, and watched Don miss a birdie putt and Victor scramble to save par from the right-side bunker. Back up by one.
He was in control now. They had a short par four and two longer par fours to go.
“Boy, you can hear the wheels in his head spinning, can’t you, Victor?”
“They better spin the right way. I’m thinking this little monkey is running out of tricks.”
With the stroke-shot lead and three holes to go, he didn’t really have a decision to make yet. If he needed to, he could even drop a stroke. He took a five iron out of his bag and put it into the turn of the dogleg with less than sixty yards to the pin. He birdied the hole, and Victor parred it. Don got tangled up in the trash on the right side of the fairway and got away with a bogey.
Bobby went to the seventeenth tee ahead by two strokes. Don sidled up to him. “A kid like you cheated us awhile back. Quite awhile. Vic tuned him up in the lower parking lot. But you don’t have to worry unless we think you’re cheating us. We’ll discuss it later.”
His drive on the seventeenth didn’t draw as much as he wanted it to, and he came close to the water at the right side of the fairway. Still, he chipped on and made an easy par that kept him two strokes up.
“This is it, ducky. This hole decides everything that hasn’t already been decided. And things have been decided. Try not to let that influence your play here.”
Bobby wasn’t going to lose and have to welch on a bet. He stepped up to the tee with that in mind. He let it loose, and his stomach churned when he blocked it right. He watched as the ball cleared the trees on the right and ended up on the ninth fairway. Don and Victor both hit good drives that left a hundred and fifty and less to the hole.
Bobby drove over to the trees, through them onto the ninth fairway. He had seen it clear the trees, but it wasn’t on the fairway. He drove across the fairway to the rough on the right of nine, then through another line of trees. Nothing, and there was no one on the first tee.
He headed back to the ninth fairway. There was a threesome just getting on the green. He drove up. “Any of you see my ball? Titleist black three. Two blue dots?”
One guy shook his head, but the other two looked at him.
“You find my ball?” Bobby shouted. “There’s a match going on. You find my ball?”
The guy shook his head.
Bobby got out of the cart and walked to the green. “This is serious, man. Did you find my ball? I need that ball. I’m not joking. This is very serious. If you took my ball, there’s going to be trouble.”
“Stan,” one of the guys said.
“I didn’t take his ball,” Stan said.
“Stan.” Victor had come up behind Bobby. “I’m going to ask you one time. Nice. You have his ball? Not going to ask again. Think very seriously about this.”
The old guy dug into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out a Titleist black three, two blue dots.
“Now, Stan, you take that ball and put it back where you found it. Exactly where you found it. Come on. I’m going with you. You put it exactly where you found it. Exactly.”
Bobby got back in his cart and followed Victor and Stan as they walked back up the ninth fairway.
“You see,” Victor said, “golf is a game for gentlemen. It’s about honor and courtesy and good sportsmanship. You don’t steal in golf, you don’t lie, you don’t cheat. You understand? ’Cause if you don’t, you shouldn’t be playing. Now, is this right? This is exactly where you found it? Place it down where it was. Thank you.”
Then Victor hit the old guy hard, an openhanded slap that they must have heard in the clubhouse. The man went down hard and stayed there until Victor told him to get up. The old guy was crying now.
“Bobby,” Victor said, “take him back to his buddies, would you? Then you can play your shot. I’ll watch your ball.”
After he had delivered the guy to the ninth green, Bobby stood over his ball, lining up a shot with a sand wedge. His hands were shaking a little. He stepped back, took a practice swing, then another. He moved up to the ball and hit a high arching shot that put it over the trees and four feet from the cup.
“Nice shot,” Victor said. “All you got to do is drop it and you’ve won a thousand. Not bad for a few hours of work. Miss it, and it’s going to be ugly.”
There was no choice, really. No choice. He lined the putt up and dropped it.
“Victor, it’s over,” Don said. “He did it. Back side and gross total.” Don walked up to Bobby and shook his hand. Victor came up on the other side of him and shook Bobby’s hand as well. “Victor,” Don continued, “let’s get this young man paid.”
“Money’s in the car,” Victor said.
“Then we go to the car.” Don took Bobby’s left arm and stepped off toward the parking lot. Victor, not actually touching Bobby, marched along at his right.
They got to the bottom parking lot. Bobby considered calling for help, but figured he wouldn’t get it, and would only end up making things worse. As they crossed the lot, they veered left toward the dumpster. Bobby tried to bolt, but Victor had him firmly by the right arm.
“Let me ask you something. You didn’t have the money, did you?”
Bobby looked at Don, then over at Vic. He shook his head.
The first blow caught him in the solar plexus and he went down to his knees hard. “That’s for the lie. This is for winning the back.” Bobby tried to cover up, but Victor’s hand came across his body and pushed something under the collar of his shirt. “It’s also for being a great player. And this, this is for being a dirty sandbagger.” Something exploded behind his right ear and Bobby went all the way to the ground, out cold.
* * *
When he came to, and after he brushed the dirt from his mouth, he reached into his shirt and took out the little roll of hundred-dollar bills Victor had left for him. All in all, it was a decent day’s work. He was back in business.
PART III
GOD’S MERCIFUL PROVIDENCE
ALL IN THE FAMILY
BY BRUCE DESILVA
Federal Hill
In the pause between Bruno Mars’s “Grenade” and Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger,” Val caught a few yaps of his barking-dog ringtone. He plucked out his earbuds, glanced at his cell phone, and saw an unfamiliar number o
n the screen.
“Hey, Charles?” he said before thumbing the answer button. “Would you mind turning your music down, please?” His office mate’s desktop speaker was still belching Bach, which is why Val had sought refuge in his own tunes.
“History of Art and Architecture. Sciarra speaking.”
“Valerio Sciarra?” The voice rumbled like distant thunder.
“That would be me, yes.”
“Rudy Sciarra’s grandnephew?”
Val hesitated. His grandfather’s deceased older brother, an enforcer for Raymond L.S. Patriarca back in the ’60s, was not a relative he liked to acknowledge. “Well . . . I’ve been told that we were related, but I never actually met the man. What is this about?”
“There’s a car waiting for you outside. New Lincoln MKS. Black with tinted windows.”
“There must be some mistake. I didn’t call for a car.”
“Just come outside and get in it, professor. Don’t make me send the muscle in there for you.”
Before Val could protest, the caller was gone.
Six years with the army rangers had left Val confident he could handle all the muscle that could be stuffed into a luxury car. But what if they were packing? He considered calling the campus police, but Brown University security officers didn’t carry firearms. Instead, he punched in the number for the Providence cops, then hesitated, his thumb hovering over the call button.
Val was more curious than apprehensive. Who the hell was the caller, and what could he possibly want with an Ivy League assistant art history professor? He set the phone down and weighed his options, his hands absently shuffling the papers splayed across his desk—copies of scholarly articles about the dendrochronological properties of the oak panels favored by Rembrandt and many of his contemporaries. He couldn’t think of anything he’d done that would make him a target, but if he didn’t cooperate, the muscle might come charging inside, and somebody could get hurt. After a moment, he shoved his chair back from the desk, got up, and slipped into his bomber jacket.
“Where are you going?” Charles asked.
“Out.”
“The department meeting commences in fifteen, Val.”
“Perhaps Higgerson won’t notice my absence.”
“He will.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“Missing another mandatory meeting is not advisable. Not if you still aspire to a tenured position.”
Not advisable? Aspire to a tenured position?
The way Charles—never Chuck nor Charlie—talked always irritated the hell out of Val. But after three years of sharing a cramped and cluttered basement cubicle where they were never more than four feet apart, Val feared he was picking up some of the same fussy affectations.
“They’re never going to promote me anyway, Charles.”
“You don’t know that for a certainty.”
For a certainty? Val shrugged and strode out the door.
His days at Brown were numbered, and he knew it. He was never going to fit in. He didn’t even want to. He was Radiohead to their Mozart, Budweiser to their chardonnay, Levi’s and T-shirts to their elbow patches and bow ties. He enjoyed teaching undergraduates and despised the obligatory research into the few obscure and dusty corners of art history that remained partially unexplored. They despised students and lived to see their bylines on scholarly articles in impenetrable academic journals that no one ever read. Federal Hill, the Italian working-class neighborhood where he grew up and still lived, was a ten-minute drive from the campus on College Hill, but it was not a distance that could be measured in miles.
What sustained Val, besides the teaching, was the work he did over summer breaks with the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art. Last year, he’d scored a minor triumph, assisting in the recovery of two paintings by Eugene Joseph Verboeckhoven that had been stolen from the undistinguished collection of a small museum in Des Moines.
Unimpressed, Dean Higgerson had decreed that plebian detective work would have no bearing on tenure. And, he’d been quick to add, Val’s lively, sometimes hilarious blog on stolen art most emphatically could not be regarded as scholarly publication.
Val pounded up the stairs to the first floor, fleeing the specter of another soul-sucking department meeting. He dashed across the lobby, burst through the outer door, skipped down the marble steps, and saw a navy-blue suit standing beside a black Lincoln parked illegally at the curb. The suit opened the car’s rear door. Val silently nodded and climbed in, then slid over as the suit squeezed in beside him.
As the car eased into the flow of light midafternoon traffic, the suit tossed a black cotton hood at Val’s chest.
“The boss says you gotta put this on.”
Val took it as a good sign. If they didn’t want him to know where they were going, they probably intended to let him go once they were done with him.
* * *
They’d been cruising in silence for an hour or so, long enough to reach Boston or New Haven, when Val felt the car roll to a stop. If the drive had been a ruse to confuse him, they might still be in Providence. As he was roughly pulled from the Lincoln, he sucked in a deep breath and detected a faint hometown whiff of spilled fuel oil and sewage. Still, he couldn’t be sure. Boston and New Haven often smelled the same way.
He was led down a short walkway, up two steps, and through a door that closed behind him. Inside, he was tugged down a hallway, the tile or stone floor slick under his Converse All Stars, and then left through another door onto a thick carpet. There he was turned and nudged into a chair that felt like leather in a room that smelled of cigars.
The voice from the phone: “Good afternoon, Professor Sciarra. You can pull off the hood now.”
Val did so.
“Take a moment to let your eyes adjust to the light.”
What light? Heavy drapes had been pulled across the windows, perhaps to prevent Val from guessing their location, and the lamps had been left off. In the gloom, he took a slow look around. Gold brocade wallpaper, Tiffany-style lamps, a Hummel collection in a glass-front bookcase, and, across from him on a brown leather sofa, a fat man in tan slacks and a cardigan sweater.
“Better now?”
Val nodded.
“Sorry about the hood. Necessary precaution.”
“Who are you, and what do you want?”
“You don’t recognize me?”
“No,” Val said, although those jowls and hooded eyes seemed vaguely familiar. He had a feeling he’d seen the face in the newspaper once or twice, but he couldn’t put a name to it.
“We met when you were a child. I was a friend of your uncle’s.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Probably for the best. Can I offer you something? Marco has brought us an excellent bottle of French wine.”
Val looked at him then, the suit from the car, standing in shadow by the room’s open pocket doors, hands clasped in front and a telltale bulge under his left arm. Val felt the urge to rush him, snap his wrist, and take the gun away, just to show that he could; but he figured it was best if they underestimated him.
“Fine wine would be wasted on me,” Val said. “I’m a Bud-from-the-can kind of guy.”
“Budweiser? I don’t have any of that camel piss. How about a Wychwood?”
Val had never heard of it, but he nodded.
“Marco?” the fat man said.
The suit disappeared into the hallway and returned moments later with an uncorked bottle of wine in one hand and an open bottle of beer in the other. With his hands full, Val mused, snatching his piece would be even easier.
A crystal goblet, already holding a quarter-inch of white wine, stood on a piecrust table beside the fat man. The suit refilled it and set the bottle down. Then he went to the glass-front bookcase, bent to open the bottom shelf, and removed an odd-looking vessel. It was shaped like a distended hourglass and looked to be about ten inches tall. The suit handed it to Val and tipped the beer bottle as if to fill it.
“It’s bronze,” the fat man said. “Beer won’t do it any harm. Let Marco fill it for you, professor.”
Val did as he’d been told, then raised the vessel to his lips and felt a thrill that had nothing to do with the contents.
“Tell me what you know about this object,” the fat man said.
“It’s a Chinese ku.”
“And?”
“I’m not an expert on Chinese antiques, but it resembles ritual vessels that have been excavated from ancient tombs in the Yellow River Valley. If it’s genuine, it could be Qin, or perhaps even Shang Dynasty, which would make it exceedingly rare and valuable.”
“It’s Shang,” the fat man said. “You’re probably the first person to drink from it in three thousand years.”
Val shook his head in amazement. He took another sip and asked, “How did you come to own it?”
“I don’t. I’m holding it for some associates. I understand the FBI has been searching for a ku just like this one for quite some time.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Val said.
“For twenty-three years, to be precise.”
“The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum robbery,” Val said.
“What do you know about that?”
“I only know what’s been in the newspapers.”
“Even so.”
Val took a moment to gather his thoughts. “In 1990, the museum’s security was a joke. Two poorly trained, unarmed guards. An alarm system that was not connected to the Boston PD. Even back then, a lot of home owners had better security for their Beanie Babies collections. Late one night, two men dressed in Boston Police uniforms knocked on the front door and said they were there to investigate a report of an intruder. The guards let them in and ended up spending the rest of the night handcuffed to pipes in the basement. The thieves spent nearly an hour and a half traipsing about the building, taking what they wanted. They got away with more than half a billion dollars in rare art. It was the largest art heist in history.”
