The Paris Caper

by Nina Bruhns

  With a grunt, the officer deserted her for the fray.

  One down, one to go. She steadied her nerves and turned to politely thank Jean-Marc and get the hell away from him. But he had disappeared.

  Uneasiness crawled through her. She swept her gaze over the crush of people crowding the artfully lit gardens, seeking him out. He was nowhere in sight.

  For a minute she stood paralyzed with indecision. Should she call it off? A minute turned into two, and then three, as she wavered between caution and necessity.

  The hum of a dozen conversations buzzed in her ears but no one said a word to her. No one even looked at her. A handsome young waiter passed by with a tray of fresh champagne flutes, another with a plate of hors de oeuvres, but neither paused to offer her anything.

  All of which served to make up her mind.

  She would not change the plan. One point three mil. There wouldn’t be another opportunity such as this. Not without weeks or months of research. Far too long. Sofie needed that money now. Jean-Marc or no, she wouldn’t put this off. She couldn’t.

  “Right,” she murmured softly. “Off to the trenches.”

  At a slow, dignified stroll, she crossed the elegant courtyard back toward the manor house, humming to an old melody that drifted in from a dance floor set up on the lawn behind the gardens. Under her sensible old lady flats, the paving stones winked up at her. They weren’t ordinary brick cobbles, but granite, or porphyry, or some other natural stone that reflected the twinkle of lanterns and the hundreds of fairy lights adorning the trees and paths, as well as the matching sparkle of diamonds, sapphires and rubies hanging from the throats, ears and wrists of every lady there.

  Jewelry worth a fortune...

  Don’t switch horses in mid-stream, Ciara.

  She’d heard that expression more than once, in the old movies that had kept her company while her mom was out working her loser job waitressing at a local dive, and whatever the hell she did after closing time. Ciara had learned a lot from those old movies.

  No, she wouldn’t switch horses, as tempting as it was. The plan was set. The arrangements made. No changes.

  She re-entered the house through a second set of mullioned double patio doors and found herself in a massive salon, also filled with partygoers dressed to the nines. Quickly she scanned the framed art crowding the walls. Valois hadn’t been able to pinpoint her target’s location, so she’d have to wander around the chateau until she spotted it. She recognized a pair of ornately framed old masters, several stunning impressionists, and a large Henri Rousseau. Gorgeous. There were a dozen others, mostly older paintings. But no Picasso.

  She slipped unnoticed through the throng to a paneled door that led toward the rear of the house. Weaving past the guests she made her way to the narrow back servant’s staircase, and up to the second level. There, the crowd thinned considerably.

  It took her just a few minutes of searching to find the Picasso.

  And less than two to make the switch.

  ♥♥♥

  Five minutes later Ciara was settling into the back seat of the Jag, which Davie had reinflated the tire on and driven to the front of the house, dressed as a chauffer.

  “Got it?” he asked.

  “Rolled up in my purse,” she affirmed, closing her eyes briefly and easing out the pent-up breath it felt like she’d been holding since she’d spotted that police car earlier. Not to mention running into her lover, le commissaire.

  She didn’t even want to think about how wrong things might have gone tonight.

  But they hadn’t. Thank God.

  Opening her eyes, she took one last look at the Michaud mansion as Davie pulled away from the front entrance.

  Her heart stalled. High in a second floor window stood a man holding back the curtain and looking down. Watching her.

  It was Jean-Marc.

  Chapter 7

  “How could you let this happen?”

  The Countess Michaud’s voice screeched like nails on a chalkboard, making Jean-Marc wince.

  Merde. As if he hadn’t asked himself that very question a hundred times already. Last night he’d been so certain he’d foiled le Revenant and nothing had been stolen.

  “What are you going to do to get it back?” the countess demanded. “That Picasso is irreplaceable!”

  “It was insured, non?”

  “Well, yes, of course, but—”

  “Voilà. There you are, then.” He didn’t want to be unfeeling, but he had a job to do.

  Before she could screech any more, he glanced at a uniformed officer and jerked his head at her. Peace thankfully descended on the room as she was led away, the echoes of her unhappiness bouncing off the walls.

  Jean-Marc squinted at the neatly framed Picasso—alors, neatly forged Picasso—hanging on the wall. It was a decent likeness, actually. The artist was talented and captured the essence of the original without trying for a precise duplicate. It was more like an interpretation than a copy, really.

  “It reminds me of something,” murmured Pierre. “Something I’ve seen fairly recently.”

  Jean-Marc had had the same feeling when he’d first looked at the painting. But at the moment he couldn’t focus on figuring out what it reminded him of. He could barely keep his anger in check. He was furious. Absolutely furious. At himself.

  While he’d been busy watching over the guests’ jewels, the hosts had been robbed of a Picasso valued at over a million euros. And he’d even known le Revenant sometimes targeted paintings. There was no excuse.

  “This can’t be the work of the Ghost,” Pierre said, seeming to read his mind. “Sure, he takes the occasional painting. But nothing else fits our profile—the value of the stolen piece, leaving a copy in its place, no train nearby. All of that’s wrong.”

  Jean-Marc contemplated the ersatz Picasso. “And yet...” Something niggled at the back of his mind. Something he couldn’t put a finger on. “It feels exactly like him.”

  “How so?”

  “The timing’s right—last week of the month. And the painting is small, cut from the frame like he always does. Stolen in the midst of a crowd.”

  “But this Picasso is worth a thousand times the other paintings combined! Why such a jump?”

  Jean-Marc shrugged. “Maybe he wants out. Or maybe he just wants a fancy new yacht.”

  “I still don’t think it’s him. Look at this thing! Our Ghost is a thief, not a goddamn painter.”

  “He may have found an accomplice. Or you may be right and it’s not him at all,” he conceded. “But whoever it is, he made a colossal mistake leaving that fake for us to analyze. With any luck forensics will be able to nail who painted it. And with the cameras the Michaud’s have everywhere, we’ve definitely got the thief’s picture. All we have to do is connect a face to the evidence.”

  If Belfort gave them the chance.

  Pierre was right, the Picasso was in a whole different ball park than the modest jobs Le Revenant had pulled before. With the higher-ups breathing down Belfort’s neck about the jewel thief, his boss might just take the easy way out and send jurisdiction of the Picasso investigation away from 36 Quai des Orfèvres and up the ladder, to a juge d'instruction.

  Jean-Marc wasn’t about to let that happen. He had a huge personal stake in solving both cases.

  “Any fingerprints?” he asked the tech who was still nearby dusting.

  “Two dozen or more in this room alone. The forgery will be processed by the chief at the lab, of course. But don’t get your hopes up. Doesn’t look promising.”

  “Hairs? Fibers? Anything?”

  The tech chuckled. “You’re kidding, right? This place is four centuries old. We’ll probably find hairs and fibers belonging to Louis XV himself. There are bags of stuff to be gone through by the lab.”

  Jean-Marc turned back to the painting. “Dieu, there had to be three hundred people at this party. How did he manage the switch without being seen by a single one?” He rubbed his temples, fightin
g off the beginnings of a headache. “Merde,” he muttered. “First the Ghost. Now the Invisible Man.”

  The corner of Pierre’s lip rose. “Or Invisible Woman.”

  Pierre was always busting his balls about his tendency to assume the criminals they chased were male. Could he help it if they usually were?

  “A woman? You think?”

  “To Catch A Thief,” Pierre said.

  “Quoi?”

  “Nineteen fifty-five, Cary Grant, Grace Kelly. The thief turned out to be a girl.”

  “Pierre. That was a film.”

  “Art imitates life. And the whole end of the month thing could just be PMS.”

  After rolling his eyes, Jean-Marc waved an impatient hand. PMS. Yeah, right. “Okay. Une femme, c’est une possibilité,” he granted. Though not too likely, in his opinion. “Hollywood aside, women don’t usually go in for this kind of elaborate, carefully planned scheme. They tend to do crimes of opportunity. Based on need rather than as a vocation. The Picasso thief was a pro. He came prepared with a fake painting, a utility knife and staple-pull to remove the real one, and fast-drying glue to attach the forgery to the back of the frame so the theft would not be discovered until well after he was gone.”

  “And may I ask where a man would hide all those things? A woman would have a purse,” his friend said triumphantly.

  Jean-Marc gave up. He did have a point. “Okay, okay. I’ll keep an open mind.” He sighed. “Merveilleux. You just doubled our number of suspects from half the world to everyone on the whole damn planet.”

  Pierre laughed and slapped him on the back. “We should probably start with the big cities. He’s got to fence this baby somewhere.”

  OCBC officers had already been to every pawn shop and purveyor of previously-owned jewelry, as well as suspected fences, in Paris and beyond, asking about le Revenant’s stolen jewels. Now they could do it all over again, adding art galleries, antique stores and Picassos to the list.

  “Swell.”

  “Guess this bumps our friendly Ghost down the priority ladder,” Pierre said. “Pity. Just when we were getting somewhere.”

  “This changes nothing. The cases are similar enough we can work them together. We may even come out ahead.”

  When they got back to his office at 36 Quai des Orfèvres, Jean-Marc called the Laboratoire de Police Scientifique and talked to Dr. Terrance, chief of forensics. “I want you to run every conceivable test on that forgery,” he said. “And I need the results yesterday.”

  Then he called the police video lab. “Do you have photos isolated of all the soiree guests from the Michaud’s surveillance cameras yet?” he asked Renard, who was in charge of that department.

  “Yes, sir. I’m just sending you a set.”

  “I want you to run them through the facial recognition software, compare them to the arrest and prison databases. All of them.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” Renard said.

  “And run the photos from the disco robbery last week through it, too.” He was about to hang up when a thought suddenly occurred to him. “And while you’re at it, run the disco photos against the Michaud guests. See if anyone pops.”

  He replaced the receiver and ran an excited hand over his mouth. Holy shit. If it was the same perp, they had him! What were the odds of anyone being at both crime scenes if he wasn’t the thief?

  For the first time since walking out of Ciara’s empty apartment five days ago, he actually smiled.

  It was too early to celebrate, he knew that. They could be dealing with two different perps and no one would pop.

  But he didn’t think so. Usually his cop instincts were pretty good. And right now they were doing the Snoopy dance all over his gut.

  ♥♥♥

  “The Picasso is a fake.”

  Ciara’s jaw dropped and she stared at Valois in disbelief. “A fake? But how is that possible?”

  The old man looked nearly as upset as she felt. “I’m sorry. I wish I knew, ma cocotte. Viens.” He beckoned.

  She’d pulled off the Michaud job two days ago, and had hoped for a speedy turnover of the painting, since the buyer was already in place. Obviously there was not going to be a turnover. A fake? Jesus. Beck was already rattling his chains at the delay in getting his blackmail money and it had only been four days. This was nothing short of a disaster.

  Ciara went with Valois into the back of the antique store, then through a narrow corridor to a storage room. He scooted aside a large trunk, under which was a trap door in the floor. She helped him grab the ring and lift it, revealing a crude brick stairway that descended into blackness.

  Even as distracted as she was, it always gave her a thrill and a tingle up her spine when she followed Valois down into his little piece of the ancient Parisian sewer system. This was not from the modern, post eighteen-hundreds sewers, but part of the much older Medieval or even Roman works. There was a sense of history, and mystery, unlike anywhere else she’d ever been in the world. Something like she imagined she’d feel in the chambers of an ancient Egyptian pyramid, or an old Roman catacomb.

  Valois’s father had discovered the tunnel under his shop quite by accident while digging out a hollow under the floorboards to hide a Jewish friend in during World War II. They’d ended up hiding a whole lot more than one friend, as well as most of the shop’s valuable pieces. Now it served as a secure repository for Valois’s illegal fencing activities.

  Using flashlights, they quickly made their way through a crumbling, deserted section to what looked like a solid brick wall. After Valois pulled a hidden latch it swung away to reveal a much larger slice of the tunnel. Clean and neat, the area had a wooden floor and electric lights installed by Valois Senior. They switched off their flashlights and swung the wall closed behind them.

  The Picasso was set up on an easel in the center of the room. A large nearby desk was covered with a scatter of photos.

  “The buyer’s appraiser was here this morning,” Valois said, wiping his moist brow with a delicate hankie from his pocket. “A professor from Canada. He was able to obtain these authenticating photos from Dufour Auction House, where the Michauds bought the Picasso.” He handed her a magnifying glass from the desk. “It’s not the same painting. The strokes are similar but not identical. A very clever copy. But a copy nonetheless.”

  She roused herself long enough to focus the glass on a section of painting, comparing the brush work with a close-up photo from the same spot. Her eye wasn’t as well-trained as Valois’s, but even she could see a subtle difference. “Oh, my God. It is a forgery!” Her heart sank. “I can’t believe I stole a fake.”

  “How could you know? The Michauds bought an authenticated Picasso from the most renowned auction house in France less than three years ago. God alone knows what happened to the real one.”

  “God and the Michauds, I’ll bet,” she muttered. “The lying cheats! They’re probably ecstatic about it being stolen. They undoubtedly sold the original under the table, and now they can collect insurance, too. And they have me to blame its disappearance on! If I’m caught—”

  “You won’t be. You and Sofie were very careful, non?”

  They had worked out the switch together, Valois suggesting Sofie paint a substitute so the robbery wouldn’t be discovered until after Ciara was long gone. It had been a good plan. They’d both worn gloves at all times and taken every possible precaution against leaving any kind of traceable evidence. They’d bought their original materials from an art supply store that was part of a large European chain, using cash. Ciara had made sure to remind Sofie not to sign the copy with her usual Hand of Fatima signature. And she had gotten rid of her old lady disguise immediately after the job, as always.

  There was no way anything could be traced to them.

  So why was she so damned nervous?

  One word.

  Jean-Marc.

  He was in charge of her case now, and he’d been there at the Michaud’s. Why had he been standing in the window as sh
e left? Had he recognized her?

  She squeezed her eyes shut. “I hope you’re right, Valois. I hope to hell you’re right.”

  ♥♥♥

  For the next several days Jean-Marc and Pierre interviewed the Michaud’s soiree guests who lived in Paris, and dispatched officers from the various regional police departments to speak with the out-of-towners, of which there were quite a few. A team was assigned the task of identifying and locating those people the countess couldn’t put names to. Other officers re-canvassed the major art galleries around the country, carrying photos of the forgery so they could ask about artists who might have painted it.

  Unfortunately, no one turned up anything new. Nor did a re-interview of the discothèque patrons and le Revenant’s more recent victims.

  In frustration, Jean-Marc put out the word with his informants among the demi-monde that it was now Commissaire Lacroix who was looking for le Revenant and the Picasso thief. He still had some street cred from his youth—he may have been a math whiz, but he’d also been very good with his knife—so the effort might actually pay off. Some of his best friends growing up were now deep in the criminal element of Paris. You never knew what kicking over a few old stones might turn up.

  One afternoon a few days later, the phone on Jean-Marc’s desk rang. Ever hopeful of a break, he snatched it up. “Lacroix.”

  “It’s Renard, down in the video lab. I’ve got something you should see.”

  Excitement buzzed over Jean-Marc’s scalp. “Tell me you’ve got a match.”

  Renard coughed. “Well. Sort of. Better get down here and see for yourself.”

  Jean-Marc leapt from his chair and grabbed his jacket, stopping only to call Pierre. “Facial recognition software has turned up something. Let’s check it out.”

  They met at the elevator. On the way down to the video lab, one of the forensics techs got in and rode with them for a couple of floors. “Still haven’t unearthed anything useful on your Michaud case,” he told them. “No fingerprints or any other physical evidence. Sorry about that.”