Collar Robber: A Crime Story Featuring Jay Davidovich and Cynthia Jakubek

by Hillary Bell Locke

  “Interesting.”

  “Someone has this theory that it helps overcome the urge to smoke if you go through the gestures and body movements, because they’re comforting in themselves.”

  Rachel smokes maybe a pack of cigarettes a year. Not exactly hard core. But I figured that, whatever head-game she was playing with me, letting logic crash the party would probably spoil it.

  “How’s it working?” I asked.

  “As far as I can tell, the theory is total bullshit.”

  “Oh.”

  My mobile phone chirped. I ignored it.

  “You’d better get that,” Rachel said on the second ring. “Might be your boss.”

  I shrugged and checked the number. Proxy. Proxy is not my boss. Proxy is the one who tells my boss that she wants me instead of some other loss-prevention specialist for a particular job. That makes her a lot more important than my boss. I answered.

  “Do you have a current passport?”

  “Yes,” was about all I contributed to our conversation, which ended roughly seventy seconds later. I re-holstered the phone and looked at Rachel.

  “Well, I’m not going to Albuquerque the day after tomorrow.”

  “Great!”

  “I’m going to Vienna.”

  “The one in Austria or the one in Pennsylvania?”

  “Must be the one in Austria. I don’t think you can fly to Pennsylvania from Dulles International.”

  “Mm,” Rachel said, nodding. “By the way, I’m pregnant.”

  The First Wednesday in April

  Chapter Eleven

  Jay Davidovich

  I’m not sure the chocolate-brown Mercedes Benz qualified as a limo, but the part behind the front seat easily accommodated Franz Meininger, Proxy, and me, with Meininger on a jump seat facing us. While we sped—and I mean sped—from Vienna International Airport toward the Hotel am Stephansplatz, Meininger spent seventy-five seconds welcoming us to Vienna and thanking us for coming. Then he got down to business.

  “We are playing this on spec. No documentation. No way to verify the pitch. Two reasons I asked that you come. One: Dany Nesselrode has proven credible on a couple of big matters in the past. Two: he wants to deal directly with line-personnel responsible for the matter—not glorified messenger-boys like me.”

  “What’s Nesselrode’s resumé?” Proxy got ready to make notes on the iPad in her lap as she asked the question. “Short form.”

  “Thirty-eight. Three languages, including English. Degree from the LSE.”

  “London School of Economics.” Proxy muttered this for my benefit.

  “Six years with the Cultural Preservation Foundation—one of the many international NGOs that make their home in Vienna.”

  He paused in case Proxy wanted to tell me that “NGO” meant “non-governmental organization.” She didn’t. Either I already knew, or I didn’t need to.

  I liked Meininger. He’d gone to the trouble to find out that Proxy favored Evian bottled water and had brought some along for us. He hadn’t asked if it would be okay if he smoked because he knew that Proxy would have said sure and she wouldn’t have meant it. The deep blue of the stones in his cuff-links precisely matched the diagonal stripes in his silk tie and complimented the paler blue of his shirt. I liked all that. Liked his breezy use of American suit-speak that somehow seemed more elegant when spoken with a German accent. Liked not seeing any condescension in his alert brown eyes when he looked at me.

  “Is the Cultural Preservation Foundation a cover for something else?” Proxy asked.

  “Don’t know. A lot of NGOs in Vienna are, but no hard data on CPF.” He pulled two pages from an envelope-style briefcase that he’d parked on the floor beside him and handed them to Proxy. “This is the rundown we have so far.”

  “Thanks.”

  Proxy began speed-reading the pages. Meininger looked over at me.

  “Do you travel overseas much on business, Jay?”

  “Not since I left the Army.”

  That got me a quick take and a wry smile. Proxy glanced up from the second page.

  “So CPF’s funding comes mostly from New York and Israel.”

  “Yes.” Meininger nodded again. “Dany is a diaspora Jew. Never lived in Israel, but he’ll play the Holocaust card in negotiations without blinking.”

  Proxy has a pretty good poker face, but no one could have missed her whoa! expression at that lapse into political incorrectitude. I didn’t know what protocol Transoxana’s employee manual prescribed for reactions to Ethnically Insensitive Remarks, but I suspected Proxy had it down cold. I figured a chat about Diversity and Inclusiveness wouldn’t move the ball much, so I jumped in.

  “I know what you mean. This guy I know, Jewish fella, when he was maybe thirteen years old, tells his mom it was too bad the Germans surrendered in World War II before we got a chance to drop the big one on them. Some crack he’d heard from one of his buddies. After he laid this on his mom, he thought for the third time in his life that she was going to hit him—and the first two times he’d been right.”

  “Yes,” Meininger said with a knowing grin. “And by now I’ll bet this boy is a congressman from Connecticut and sitting on the Foreign Affairs Committee.”

  “Actually, he’s a loss-prevention specialist with Transoxana.”

  Meininger spent a couple of seconds putting the pieces together as oh shit slipped over his face and red flushed his pale Teutonic ears. He licked his lips a couple of times and leaned forward earnestly.

  “I’m terribly sorry. I certainly hope that I didn’t offend you.”

  “No sweat. Don’t give it another thought.”

  I said that because you didn’t “offend” me, you pissed me off would sidetrack us—something I really wanted to avoid. I’d spent nine hours flying four-and-a-half thousand miles to accomplish something, and I wasn’t going to accomplish a damn thing if our Vienna company liaison spent the rest of our stay looking for bureaucratic cover.

  Looking relieved, Meininger glanced at his watch.

  “We are meeting Nesselrode in not quite two hours. So you’ll have a little time at the hotel to freshen up before I bring him by.”

  Proxy’s ears pricked up at that.

  “We’re meeting him at the hotel instead of Transoxana’s offices?”

  “Yes. He wants to do it that way.”

  This better be good. Proxy didn’t say that, but her shrug did.

  “I’d tell you more if I knew more.” Meininger glanced from Proxy to me and back. “But whatever it is, he said he wants you to hear it from his lips.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Jay Davidovich

  “What if the painting is fake? A forgery?”

  That’s what we’d come to hear from Dany Nesselrode’s own lips. We heard it nestled in a cozy booth in the hotel’s Kaisereine Café—a marvel of intricately carved walnut and subdued lighting that managed to suggest a midnight tryst even at one-thirty in the afternoon.

  Nesselrode had hair the color of India ink, reminding me of the blue-tinged black you see on gun barrels. I made him at five-ten, maybe one-sixty-five. He didn’t have an ounce of fat that I could see so he must have watched his diet like a hawk, but enlarged veins around his nose and under his eyes suggested other indulgences. He was smoking a fat cigar and Proxy was taking it like a big girl, maybe because it smelled like a really good cigar. Just breathing the air gave me a flashback to beer call and after-action parties in Iraq.

  “If it’s a forgery,” Proxy said, “then a number of highly credentialed experts have been badly fooled over a period of decades.”

  “Art experts get fooled all the time.” Nesselrode waved the cigar dismissively. “Few will say it out loud, but most people who know what they’re talking about estimate an error rate of ten to twenty percent—and that’s on seven-to-nine-
figure art, where the very best experts are being paid top dollar. And don’t get me started on the ‘experts’ who get bribed to come up with the right answer. If doctors were wrong as often as art experts, half of us would be dead.”

  “Dany has an admirably high level of self-esteem.” Meininger said this in between bites of a glazed cherry torte the size of a discus. “Even when he’s in error, he’s not in doubt.”

  Proxy kept her eyes on Nesselrode.

  “If someone proves the Museum’s painting is fake, the Museum still has a loss, and Transoxana still has a claim to deal with.”

  “What loss? The Museum will have the painting it has always had. It paid nothing for the thing, so even if it’s worthless the Museum is out of pocket zero. It doesn’t have the painting it thought it had, but who cares? I’m assuming Transoxana doesn’t insure blissful fantasies.”

  “Besides,” Meininger said, “the Museum will have to deny the forgery assertion. And if Dany is right, it will find an expert to back it up. It couldn’t make a claim against Transoxana without undermining its own position.”

  I noticed just a hint of impatience in the clack that sounded when Proxy set her tumbler of bubbly water with a lime twist back on the table.

  “So what’s the theory?” she asked. “That the heirs will threaten to expose the painting as a forgery unless the Museum gives it back to them? That would mean they’d gone to a lot of trouble to try to get a fake painting back.”

  “Perhaps the heirs have a slightly more sophisticated ploy in mind.”

  “Namely?”

  “‘That’s a nice reputation you have there—what a shame if something happened to it.’”Nesselrode smiled wickedly.

  “So the Museum is going to give away the crown jewel of its collection in order to keep extortionists from making what the extortionists themselves presumably believe is a false claim that the painting is worthless?” This would be Proxy getting intense. “Not gonna happen. The Museum will dispute the claim and hire some culture-whore to support its position. It would rather have a questioned masterpiece than an empty space on its main gallery wall.”

  “She’s right, Dany,” Meininger told him. “You must have cards you haven’t shown us yet.”

  “I do.”

  “This would be an excellent time to turn them over.” Meininger made that suggestion before Proxy could—which was a shame, because her version would probably have been more colorful.

  “I am thinking about an amicable resolution. Win-win.” Nesselrode paused, milking the suspense while he took a moment to pollute his lungs. “Five-part deal. One: the Museum recognizes that the heirs are making their claim in good faith and blah-blah-blah. Two: the heirs stipulate that the Museum’s position that the painting was legitimately acquired in an arm’s-length transaction is defensible. Three: the heirs ‘donate’ their claim to the Museum because art should be seen by the people and all that crap—and make that the basis for an obscene tax deduction, which the Museum will back up. Four: the Museum throws the heirs a bone—names a gallery after gramps and nana or something. Five: In further recognition of the heirs’ magnanimity, the Museum lends the painting for, say, three years to, say, the Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere here in gramps’ native country where, don’t forget, Klimt actually painted the damn thing, in exchange for a loaned work of comparable renown from the Galerie.”

  And six, I thought, Willy Szulz gets screwed and C. Talbot Rand gets a pat on the back and maybe a little bonus at the end of the year.

  Proxy nodded, not in agreement but in recognition of the sheer neatness of the idea. Meininger’s eyes glistened with interest as he turned them toward her. I would have bet you anything that I knew what both of them were thinking, because I was thinking the same thing: If it works it solves the problem at zero cost to Transoxana—and even if it doesn’t, it motivates the Museum to chip in a LOT more toward the price of that piece of paper Szulz is peddling.

  “This has possibilities.” Proxy settled back in her seat, relaxing a little. “But we need to get a handle on the evidence for the forgery allegation. What documentation do you have for it?”

  “The best kind: the real painting.”

  If that line impressed Proxy, she didn’t show it.

  “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know.” Nesselrode shrugged at this technicality. “But I can take you to someone who does.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Proxy started to scoot toward me as a hint that we should both get out of the booth. Nesselrode checked the time on his mobile phone.

  “Not now. I have to do a little trailblazing first.”

  “Then when?”

  “Vienna is lovely late at night. Ten o’clcock?”

  We were only a few hours off of a plane after a nine-hour-plus red-eye. Even so, Proxy took just five seconds to run through every logistical option that might make Nesselrode’s clinically insane proposal feasible. She came up with one.

  “One of us will see you then.” She finished climbing out of the booth behind me. “Franz, I wonder if it would be convenient for you to take Mr. Nesselrode wherever he needs to go next, and then perhaps give me a call?”

  “Certainly.” The glint in Meininger’s eyes told me he’d gotten the message: wherever you take him and whatever you notice there should come up in the phone call.

  Next thing I knew, Proxy and I were standing at the front desk, with Proxy saying stuff in German and the desk clerk replying in English. I’d seen this movie before, when we’d reached the hotel a little over two hours ago, so I knew what to expect. They’d checked us in then but they’d had the usual hotel excuses for not letting us into our rooms right away. That figured to be the subject of Proxy’s discussion now. Proxy would continue speaking German until either the clerk started answering in German or Proxy got what she wanted, or both. Since this could go on for awhile, I decided to pass the time by thinking about why Meininger’s “Holocaust card” remark had pissed me off.

  If I had Nesselrode pegged right he was a slick hustler typecast for Oppenheim the Goldsmith. I sure wouldn’t put it past him to use the Holocaust to try to guilt-trip goyim in negotiations—especially if the goyim in question spoke German. In tipping us off to that, Meininger was just doing his job, although I suppose he could have phrased it a little more tactfully.

  As a rule, I don’t walk around with a Jewish chip on my shoulder. When I’d shown up at my high school gym to try out for the freshman basketball team, the coach had said, “Son, you do understand that med schools don’t offer athletic scholarships, right?” Hadn’t fazed me. Double-stereotype from an authority figure, and I’d taken it as standard issue jock-josh, not some kind of high-caliber ethnic slur. But I’d had to work to keep from jumping down Meininger’s throat.

  I guess I’m an okay Jew. Not “good,” necessarily. Rache and I try to eat kosher, although we probably miss a nuance here and there. Temple on high holy days, plus two or three other times during the year—and we write a decent check. Go to bar and bat mitzvahs for friends’ children. Don’t observe Christmas. If the kid in Rachel’s tummy is a boy, he’ll be circumcised.

  On the other hand, the average baby-boomer who watched sitcoms during the fifties and sixties probably knows more Yiddish than I do. I never really connected with the American-Jewish cultural thing. Mom and Dad hit Connecticut from the Ukraine when they were twelve and thirteen. When they got old enough to make babies, they focused a lot more on the “American” part of things than the Jewish part. They’d signed my birth certificate “Davidson.” I’d changed it back to Davidovich myself.

  So here was Jay Davidovich—full name Judas Maccabeus Davidovich—helping a multi-national insurance company keep a masterpiece that had maybe been extorted from an honest Austrian Jew out of the hands of his heirs. I hadn’t given it a second thought until Meininger’s crack. Now, suddenly, I wasn’t so su
re how I felt about the whole thing.

  Proxy turned and handed me a key-card envelope. Knowing German is exactly the kind of thing Proxy would do. Not Spanish, which she could use every day on either coast in the U.S. Not French, which would stamp her in the U.S. as a cultural high-flier with an elite education. German. And give her credit: she’d gotten us into our rooms a full hour before they were supposed to be ready.

  “I hate to screw up your biological clock even worse than it already is after a trans-Atlantic flight, but can you handle the Nesselrode thing with seven hours of sleep?”

  “Two hits of Red Bull and I could handle it on five.”

  “Good. Go up and crash so you can meet him at ten tonight. I’ll go to Transoxana’s Vienna office and see if Meininger and I can figure out how to find another copy of the comparable sale documentation Szulz is peddling.”

  “Got it.” I hoisted the duffel bag that’s as close as I get to luggage if I can help it. “While Willy Szulz sits innocently in Pittsburgh, we’re moving on two separate fronts in Vienna to cut him out of the action.”

  “Yep,” Proxy said, in a rare lapse from Standard English. “Good thing he’s there and not here.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Cynthia Jakubek

  “So I’m getting up from my desk to go to lunch and the phone rings. Zack’s number on the caller ID. Guy I was seeing at the time. Zack calling means I can spend the noon hour either eating salad or having sex. I picked salad. In the elevator I realized it wasn’t really a close question. I met Sean on my way back from lunch that day. Ten months ago. Fate. Or providence. I’ll go with either one.”

  Abbey Northanger speaks in paragraphs. Entertaining paragraphs, but big blocks of words all the same that draw a little extra verve from her animated face and the gently curling auburn hair above it. She either has violet eyes or the best set of contact lenses I’ve ever seen in my life. She makes her living as a professional event planner. Judging from the Versace and Armani stuff that tastefully drapes her in public, she must be pretty good at it. We were meeting in my office around ten o’clock in the morning—early evening, of course, in Vienna, where Shifos was, even though I didn’t know it at the time.