Final Offer

by Eva Hudson

  There was an email from Rennie and she opened it.

  Have asked Aslan Demir, head of the art team in New York, to chip in his thoughts on using the Picasso. Speak later.

  Ingrid bristled as she read. She couldn’t believe so many of her colleagues thought it was even vaguely plausible that Vitali Shevchenko would lend them the most expensive painting in his collection. She put her bottle down and noticed she’d drunk half of it already.

  Furious at the way her concerns and her career prospects were being ignored, she googled Aslan Demir. His name cropped up in news reports about stolen paintings, almost always saying the same thing: it was impossible to sell a stolen painting for anything like its market value, art thefts were more often than not opportunistic rather than planned, and that many owners displayed fake copies while the real McCoys were safely stashed in secure vaults. Nothing she didn’t already know. An image search for Demir returned only photos of the paintings he was talking about, and not the man himself.

  Out of curiosity, and a pique of paranoia, Ingrid quickly did an image search for herself and found the profile Angela Tate had written about her for the Evening News in 2013, plus a photo of the Old Fallopians on a teammate’s Facebook page. The other images were either victims or perpetrators of cases she’d worked on, or of other women called Ingrid Skyberg. The chances of anyone searching for Natalya Vesnina coming across these images was negligible. Unless, she conceded, someone already suspected they were the same woman. She took a long swig of beer, then parked the idea before returning to her research on Demir. A few articles referred to him as a ‘fake sheik’ who’d posed as a billionaire Arab looking to buy black-market masterpieces. No wonder he made sure his photo didn’t appear anywhere.

  The Chinese food was going down well. Hunan spiced chicken with buckwheat noodles. She felt a little sauce dribble down her chin and went into the bathroom to grab what she had started to call ‘loo roll.’ Another sign she’d been in London too long. She heard the Google Hangouts warble from her laptop and dashed back into the living room. She clicked on the green call button, and David Rennie appeared on her screen. He was in his hotel room.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Evening.” He peered into the screen. “You need another couple of minutes?”

  “No, just finishing dinner.”

  “Bit late to be eating.”

  “You sound like my mother.”

  “Sorry.” He smiled. “Thanks for working late. I wanted to go through the Picasso options.”

  She didn’t like the sound of ‘options.’

  “Thought the art squad might give us a steer. You had dealings with them?”

  A steer on what? Ingrid took a sip of beer and momentarily wondered how unprofessional that made her look. “Not directly. I informed them about Natalya, but no contact.”

  “Natalya?”

  “My undercover persona. Natalya Vesnina.”

  “Ah, right, of course. I knew that.” He scratched his beard. “Anyhoo, thought it might be worth us having a quick chat before Aslan joins us. I’ve worked with him before. He can be…”

  Ingrid waited for him to finish.

  “Mercurial.”

  “Okay.”

  “His nickname is Crazy Bear.”

  “Nice.”

  “He likes the final say.”

  Well, that’s okay because this won’t come to anything.

  “I wanted to give you a heads-up. He can be pushy. Unconventional. He’s…” It was clear Rennie didn’t know how to phrase things.

  “What?”

  “Um…”

  “Come on!”

  “Look, I want to get Rybkin and I think Demir can help—in fact, I’m sure he can—but he can rub people the wrong way. And when I say ‘people’ I mean ‘women.’ He’s a darling, gorgeous, sweetie sort of guy, and I can imagine that’ll make you want to reject everything he says.”

  Ingrid took a swig of beer. “So you’ve got me figured out too?”

  Rennie grimaced. “Sorry. I just know it winds me up.”

  Ingrid didn’t want to like Agent Rennie, but he was doing a very good impression of being a nice guy.

  An icon on their screens told them Demir was joining them. Ingrid clicked to accept before pulling up a browser window and entering two search terms: ‘Rybkin’ and ‘Les Prêteurs d’Argent.’

  “Well, hello,” Demir said flamboyantly. “Greetings from New York City.”

  “Good evening.”

  “Hello again, Aslan, thanks for chipping in on this.”

  “My absolute and total pleasure.”

  Ingrid tore herself away from the search results to gawp at the video of Demir. He looked like a ’70s porn star. Handlebar mustache, unbuttoned silk shirt revealing a tuft of chest hair and a fist full of dealer-bling. She half expected a toothpaste ad star to twinkle when he smiled.

  While David Rennie asked Demir about Rybkin’s art collection, Ingrid’s screen was taken up with reports of the one painting that didn’t make it onto the billionaire’s walls. Most of the search results came from the days after his humiliation at the Christie’s auction. Virtually all the reports used the same photo of him leaving the auction house in a white suit, shielding his face from photographers with a catalogue that bore an image of the painting he had just missed out on. She clicked through the diary columns of the Evening News, the Daily Mail, Vanity Fair and a few others; they all gloated at his downfall.

  Demir was very knowledgeable about Rybkin’s taste in art. He’d seen him in auction rooms and galleries in various capitals over the years. The man hadn’t done what so many newly rich people do and buy whatever they think they ought to in order to impress. Rybkin had focused his collection on a handful of artists working in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s and was genuinely passionate about Picasso.

  “Let me tell you something, gorgeous, Igor Rybkin was on his way to owning the largest private collection of Picassos anywhere on Earth.”

  “Is that me you’re calling gorgeous?” Rennie asked.

  “Sure is, baby.” The guy needed a cigar as a prop. “His plan was to control the market. If he owned the big pieces, the pieces the museums couldn’t justify buying, then he could set his own prices. He was real strategic about it, you know. That Prêteurs piece, man, he needed it.” Demir still had the traces of the accent of wherever he had grown up, and every now and then his vowels expanded theatrically.

  Ingrid’s phone flashed with a notification. She picked it up. Tinder wanted to let her know there were men in London who were looking for love. She checked the time. Ten thirty. Prime time for lonely hearts to be susceptible to an app-based nudge. She dismissed it and returned her attention to the search results. A report from Russia in 2015, quoting an unnamed source, claimed Rybkin was already planning his revenge by writing a tell-all book about the art world.

  “So, my pretty boy and my prettier girl, I think your hunch is right. From everything I heard about Igor Rybkin, he could not, no, he would not resist the chance to buy Les Prêteurs d’Argent.”

  Ingrid blinked hard. “It’s not for sale.” She was losing patience with this call. She wanted to arrest whoever was hacking American democracy as much as the next agent, but there had to be a better way of luring Rybkin from his hole, or raising him from his grave.

  “And, of course, when he finds out his old rival is the one selling it, he won’t be able to resist turning the screw,” Demir said.

  Ingrid’s head fell into her hands. She looked up into the webcam. “How many times, fellas, it’s not for sale.”

  “Not yet.” Demir stroked his mustache.

  Ingrid took another slug from her bottle and watched Demir’s reaction to her unprofessionalism. He seemed to smile: maybe he wasn’t so bad either. “And how the hell do you propose getting Vitali Shevchenko to put it up for sale without blowing my entire undercover operation?” She was getting ready to slam her laptop shut. Their plan had about the same odds of success as Richard Pr
yce did of winning the election, and the latest forecast Ingrid had seen put that at around twenty percent.

  Neither of them spoke, and Ingrid wondered if something had happened to the connection.

  “I have a question,” Demir said after a protracted silence. A cat walked across his desk. An actual cat. In the FBI’s New York office. He reached out and stroked it. Could you look any more like a Bond villain?

  “Go ahead,” Ingrid said.

  “Does Rybkin know Shevchenko bought the Picasso?”

  “Um, I’m not sure.” She was beyond the point of reminding them there was a very good chance Rybkin was dead and therefore didn’t know very much of anything. “I would imagine Shevchenko would want Rybkin to know, and so would have made efforts through back channels and mutual acquaintances to ensure Rybkin got the message. That would be part of the humiliation—”

  “Yup, well, then we have a problem,” Demir said, popping a tab of chewing gum in his mouth. “If there’s a risk of leakage, if there are people who connect them socially, my plan won’t work.”

  “I didn’t know you had a plan,” Ingrid said, already fearing what it was.

  “I always have a plan, sweetie, and now I got another one. See, just like that. Here a plan, there a plan, everywhere a plan plan.”

  “What’s the new plan?” Rennie asked.

  Demir leaned in. “Simple. We steal it.”

  “How about another plan plan?” Ingrid said, clenching her jaw in frustration.

  “Nope, you gotta steal it, baby.”

  “You’re crazy.” Ingrid’s finger moved the cursor over the disconnect button. She’d heard enough.

  “That’s what they call me. Crazy Bear.”

  Rennie pulled an embarrassed smirk.

  Ingrid took a deep breath. “I’ve been in his house. He has CCTV. He has alarms. He’s got security guards, and I bet you a year’s salary they’re armed. And—” she ran her fingers through her hair, grabbing her skull in frustration “—we’re cops. We’re the good guys. We don’t steal things. We return stolen property. Or am I missing something?”

  Rennie didn’t know what to say.

  “Well, see, I understand where you’re coming from little lady, but hear me out.”

  Ingrid almost couldn’t bear it and turned her attention back to the search results.

  “Ya see, here’s the thing. Frank Usher wants you to deliver Rybkin, right?” Demir said.

  “Yes,” Rennie said.

  “And you don’t know if Rybkin knows Shevchenko owns those conniving Prêteurs, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “But if it gets stolen, Shevchenko has to report it to collect on the insurance, right?”

  “I guess.”

  Ingrid was only half listening to their exchange.

  “So then when word goes out that those bad boys are up for sale at a special knockdown price because they’re hotter than hot, baby, Rybkin’s got two reasons for coming out of hiding. He gets to complete his collection at a bargain price, and he gets one over on Shevvy boy. You see where I’m coming from?”

  There was a lull as Demir waited for applause.

  “And you know the really cool thing about doing it this way?”

  Neither of them answered.

  “There ain’t no leakage. No intermediary who can blow nothing. No mutual contact who might let something slip.” Demir looked very pleased with himself.

  Ingrid eye-rolled. His plan could be the plot for a new Will Ferrell movie. “And how,” she said, reaching her threshold of patience, “are you going to get the world’s most expensive painting out of one of the planet’s most secure residences?”

  Demir grinned. “I know just the man to do it, baby.”

  14

  Natalya Vesnina was early, so Ingrid went for a walk around the block. One of the things she prided herself on, as Natalya, was punctuality. It was part of the brand.

  Vitali Shevchenko lived in an area of Chelsea known as The Boltons. The cheapest house in the neighborhood wouldn’t cost less than £20 million. Land Registry records showed Shevchenko had paid £160 million for his place, which meant—given runaway London house price inflation—the Picasso was one of the few by the artist to be inside a property worth less than the work itself.

  Shevchenko’s mansion was one of a pair facing onto Bolton Square, with each house taking up half the block. Eight stories high and painted the color of vanilla ice cream, the residences had to have at least twenty bedrooms, plus entire floors for reception rooms, games rooms, home cinemas and swimming pools. She could picture the original owners, in tweeds and mustaches, playing billiards over a cigar, but she couldn’t fathom why anyone, even someone with a private army of servants in the 1800s, would ever have needed such a large property. It was almost as big as her entire apartment building. And that was only what was visible above ground. Beneath would be an ‘iceberg basement’ containing a parking lot, a bowling alley, an indoor garden and a pottery studio in case someone’s spouse or offspring had the desire to take up a hobby.

  Ingrid checked her watch. Or, more accurately, Natalya’s Patek Philippe eight-thousand-dollar watch, and judged it was time to start walking back to the house. She turned the corner onto Bolton Square and found a film crew setting up a shot. The other side of the square was lined with broadcast trucks, and a lighting rig stretched across the road gave the buildings opposite an unreal glow. She’d researched the series the BBC were filming, and Londongrad was rumored to have the biggest budget of any UK television production in history. Centered around the abduction of an oligarch’s mistress, the drama was being shot on three continents in some of the most exclusive properties in the world.

  Something caught her eye as she approached the Shevchenko residence and looked up. Laundry. Clothes strung up in the window of the house next door. Like it was a housing project in the Bronx. Then she noticed the mattress in the light well beneath the imposing front door. And then she saw the sign: This Property Is Protected By Live-In Guardians.

  A tale of two cities. An owner so rich he can afford not to live in a £100-million-plus property, and occupants so poor they rent somewhere without proper laundry facilities or secure tenure.

  She rang Shevchenko’s bell. A sign read ‘Monitored by Cobra Security.’ Plus the armed guards in the basement, Ingrid thought.

  Almost immediately a uniformed housekeeper opened the door.

  “Natalya Vesnina.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Ingrid wasn’t sure if the woman recognized her from a previous visit, or if an entry system had logged her face and pulled up her ID. The housekeeper showed her into a grand marble entrance hall with a checkerboard floor and a sweeping staircase curling up to a balcony above. It looked like the ballroom on a 1930s cruise liner.

  Ingrid was steered away from the grandeur and down a small staircase that led to Shevchenko’s office on the floor below. She had hoped to have been taken to the drawing room, off the balcony overlooking the entrance hall, where she had previously seen the Picasso during a drinks reception.

  The housekeeper knocked on the office door, and while she waited for permission to open it, Ingrid heard laughing and cheering coming from down a corridor. It sounded like a group of men watching a hockey game on TV. Boozy and loud and boorish at eleven in the morning. The security detail, no doubt. After a deep, resonant ‘come in,’ the housekeeper pushed the door open.

  The office was long and narrow. Immediately in front of her was an L-shaped arrangement of couches around a coffee table covered in Russian and English-language magazines, several of which featured Shevchenko on the cover, and at the far end was a large steel desk in front of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The walls and windowsills were crammed with certificates and endorsements, and on a bank of file cabinets was a battalion of framed photographs of Shevchenko shaking hands with presidents, popes and titans of industry. In one of them, he was standing next to a Texan oil man who had disappeared in mysterious circums
tances during the Yeltsin years, which she thought odd. The largest photograph was a decades-old image of him and his wife sitting in sun loungers, sharing a private joke. They had looked like movie stars in their youth. A trio of TV screens showed CNN, Al Jazeera and Russia-24.

  Vitali Shevchenko motioned for Ingrid to take the seat in front of him at his desk.

  “Yes, yes,” he said into his phone, “my way, or not at all.”

  He put the phone down and smiled. “Natalya Vesnina, lovely to see you again. Did you enjoy the Shostakovich?”

  “I hope you will not think any less of me if I tell you that I was not there for the music.”

  A glint appeared in his eye. “Coffee? Tea? Something a little stronger?”

  Ingrid didn’t want to drink vodka this early. “Whatever you are having.”

  He picked up the phone and asked the kitchen to bring them tea and pastries.

  “What do you have for me?” As always, Vitali Shevchenko got straight to the point.

  Ingrid opened her Burberry briefcase and pulled out photos of two paintings by Kazimir Malevich, together with a report she had commissioned on the paintings’ authenticity. “These were found in a dacha outside Nizhny. I’ll come onto the authenticity report in a moment, but I presume you would like to know how these have come onto the market?”

  Malevich, one of the pioneers of Russian modernism, had become increasingly collectable in recent years. People talked about London property being a spectacular investment, but anyone who had bought a Malevich a decade ago had seen their money quintuple.

  Malevich wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but he was to Ingrid’s, which explained why Natalya had been so good at finding buyers for his work. Geometric, austere and bold, she found his art thrilling. Natalya Vesnina had placed five Maleviches with wealthy collectors, single-handedly inflating the price for his work. The demand for new paintings was such that art hunters throughout the Russian Federation were digging up pieces by him in minor museums and country houses, leading to a decent trade in fakes and forgeries.