Natalie's Art: a Frank Renzi novel

by Susan Fleet

  Now the Saab was parked on a side street in front of a one-story cottage. Along the street, other cars sat outside other houses. She had parked at the corner, close enough to see Gregor enter the white cottage. But Gregor wasn't her only worry. The Gardner heist was all over the news. She had seen Frank Renzi twice, once at the Global Interpreting office, then at the Gardner gala. He hadn't seen her, but if he was still in Boston, she was in trouble.

  Every instinct told her to leave town fast. But first she had to return the stolen paintings. Now that Gregor and Jonathan Pym no longer controlled her, for the first time in her life, she was free to do something positive. An exhilarating feeling.

  She figured Nicholas had the paintings, which meant Nicholas was in the little white cottage a half-block down the street. Why else would Gregor go there? But all this waiting around was annoying. She took out a peanut-butter power bar, tore open the foil and took a bite. Lunch. Recalling a crime novel she'd once read, she smiled. It said police work was ninety-percent boredom and ten-percent terror. But male cops had an advantage. On surveillance they could bring along a container and pee into it. Women had to be wily.

  While Gregor was in the grocery store she had bought a bottle of water at the coffee shop two doors down and used the restroom. To her relief, when she returned to the Toyota, the Saab had still been parked outside the grocery store.

  She checked her hair in the visor mirror. To hide her short dark hair, she had styled her blond wig in a ponytail, pulled on the wig and put on her Red Sox cap. The one Gregor hated. A sobering thought.

  The loaded Beretta was in the glove compartment, but if Gregor came out of the cottage with the stolen paintings, she couldn't just run up to him with the Beretta and say, “Hand them over.”

  Her breath caught in her throat as the door of the white cottage opened. Gregor hurried down the walk to the Saab. Unfortunately, he wasn't carrying the paintings. He took a satchel out of the trunk and returned to the cottage.

  She finished the peanut-butter power bar and settled down to wait.

  _____

  Gregor leaned against the workbench in the basement, waiting. The odor of heating oil for the furnace and gasoline from Burt's gas-powered lawnmower permeated the air. A 60-watt bulb above the workbench cast harsh light over Kwan's naked body on the cement floor, his wrists and ankles bound with picture wire. Another strand of wire connected them, effectively immobilizing him.

  Although short in stature, Kwan was well muscled, a flat stomach above a mound of black pubic hair, nipples erect on his hairless chest.

  Kwan groaned. His eyelids fluttered open and settled on the man he called Stefan. “Motherfucker!” Straining against the picture wire, Kwan tried to raise his arms, but failed.

  “It didn’t have to be this way, Nicholas. Where are the paintings?”

  “Fuck you!”

  Gregor planted a foot on his hairless chest. “Tell me where the paintings are.”

  “Never! You’ll never find them!”

  He took a pipe wrench out of his persuasion kit. In London, some enforcers used baseball bats to achieve their aims, but baseball bats were for amateurs. His persuasion tool weighed two pounds, eighteen inches long from the end of the cast-iron handle to the top of the wrench. A movable jaw provided additional possibilities. The maximum jaw capacity was 3 inches, more than enough for his needs.

  “Where are the paintings?”

  “Hssss! I will never tell. Your precious paintings will rot!”

  Without warning, he slammed the wrench down on Kwan's right knee, pulverizing it. Kwan screamed, an agonized shriek that seemed to go on forever, writhing in pain.

  “Tell me.”

  “Never, motherfucker.” Teeth clenched. Eyes glittering with rage.

  Brandishing the wrench, he said, “Why do you make me hurt you? Tell me where they are.”

  He saw fear in the punk’s eyes. Still, Kwan said nothing. He slammed the wrench down on Kwan's left knee and heard bone crunch.

  “Motherfucker!” Kwan screamed. His chest heaved and tears of pain oozed from his eyes.

  “Tell me where the paintings are.”

  Kwan began to scream, a wordless keening sound worse than a dentist's drill that went on and on. Fearing someone might hear, he took a roll of duct tape out of his persuasion kit, tore off two strips and knelt beside Kwan’s head. Grasping Kwan's jaw, he clamped his mouth shut and slapped duct tape over his lips.

  “Mmmmmmmm!!” Kwan made guttural sounds.

  He adjusted the jaw of the wrench, grabbed Kwan's right hand and inserted his ring and little finger into the jaw. He had to have the paintings. Unfortunately, violence was the only thing Kwan understood.

  Kwan tried to pull his hand away, but his attempt was laughable. Gregor used the Iron-Man gripper every day to insure that his hands remained strong and powerful. He tightened the jaw of the wrench, clamping Kwan's fingers inside it.

  Kwan's eyes bugged out of his head.

  He grasped Kwan's wrist with his left hand. His right hand tightened on the wrench. With a sudden jerk, he bent Kwan’s fingers back toward his wrist, snapping them like sticks.

  The guttural sounds rose to a high-pitched shriek, a sound so terrible it raised the hackles on Gregor's neck.

  Tears ran down Kwan's cheeks and mucus dribbled from his nose.

  “Six more fingers and two thumbs,” he said in a quiet voice. “This can go on forever. Why suffer more pain?”

  Kwan's chest heaved as he struggled to breathe, sucking air past the snot in his nose.

  He ripped the duct tape off the punk’s mouth. “Where are the paintings?”

  “Not . . . here.” A raspy whisper.

  “Locker. ”

  “Where?”

  “What locker? Where?”

  “Bus . . . station.”

  “A luggage locker?”

  Kwan nodded.

  Now they were getting somewhere. “Where is the key?”

  “If I tell,” Kwan moaned, “you will take the paintings and kill me.”

  He gripped Kwan’s shoulder. His skin was clammy with sweat. “Tell me where the key is, Nicholas, or you will die a long, slow, painful death. I guarantee it.”

  Kwan closed his eyes, his chest heaving.

  “You are testing my patience, Nicholas.” The understatement of all time. He wanted to crush the bastard’s skull and watch his brains spill onto the cement floor.

  “The key is ... ”

  He thought his heart would stop.

  “Garage … cat litter.”

  Gregor raced upstairs. Burst into the kitchen. Flung open the door to the garage. Two bright-red Kitty Litter bags stood in the corner. Five-pound bags, one unopened, the other half full. Feverish with excitement, he grabbed the open bag and poured white pellets on the floor, dribbling out small batches and spreading them over the floor with his fingers to make sure he didn’t miss the key.

  When the bag was almost empty, a small brass key tumbled onto the floor. Stamped on the key was the number 227.

  He returned to the cellar, sealed Kwan's lips with duct tape and made sure the bindings were secure.

  “I found the key. If the paintings are there, I will let you go. You will get no money, of course. You have caused me far too much trouble for that. But you will escape with your life.” He gestured at the pipe wrench. “If the paintings are not in the locker, I will kill you and take my time doing it.”

  Five minutes later he stopped at a traffic light at the bottom of College Hill, his heart thrumming his chest. Soon he would have his paintings. Three of them, at least. Thanks to his idiot underling, the Manet was ruined.

  He glanced out the window. Sunlight dappled the red-brick sidewalks and the ivy-covered walls that surrounded a stately Victorian mansion. Two students in Rhode Island School of Design T-shirts rode by on bicycles. This didn't surprise him—the school was a block away—but the coincidence amused him.

  Stefan Haas had attended RISD. Or so he'd said
when Gregor struck up a conversation with him at a London club. Dark-haired, dark-eyed and handsome, Stefan was a rich American playboy. Their looks were similar and Gregor needed an alternate identity. Given Stefan’s drug habit, coke being his drug of choice, it was easy. Stefan wanted a fix, so Gregor took him to a dark alley, strangled him, and stole his wallet and the keys to his flat. A cursory search had yielded Stefan’s driver’s license, passport and two snapshots to facilitate his disguise.

  Posing as Stefan had been useful but according to Marta, some cop was onto him. Another problem to solve.

  The light turned green and he floored the accelerator. Following the GPS instructions, he reached the bus station ten minutes later. He found a metered space in the lot across the street, fed the meter and hurried to the station, a one-story cement-block building with Trailways and Bonanza buses lined up along one side.

  Inside, a dozen people queued up at two ticket windows. Passengers with suitcases or knapsacks waited on benches. Two little boys squealed with laughter as they raced past him. A dumpy woman in a blue dress—the mother, he presumed—yelled at them but they ignored her, darting around the benches.

  Gregor scanned the room and spotted a sign: LUGGAGE LOCKERS. His pulse quickened as he pushed through a swinging door into a room with rows of gray-steel lockers. He took out the key and walked along the first row, scanning the numbered metal plates. The numbers ended at 200. Gripping the key, he rounded the corner and continued down a narrow aisle with lockers on both sides.

  At last he came to locker 227. His heartbeat accelerated, pounding a drumbeat inside his chest. Were the paintings inside?

  He inserted the key and opened the door. Inside was a gray-fabric suitcase. Suppressing the shout of joy that threatened to burst from his mouth, he pulled out the suitcase and returned to the waiting room. On the wall to the right of the ticket windows a sign pointed to the restrooms.

  Yellowed porcelain urinals lined the right-hand wall of the men’s restroom, which smelled of urine and disinfectant. A bald man in a baggy brown suit stood at one urinal. Six green-enamel stalls lined the opposite wall.

  Gregor strode past the bald man, entered the stall in the far corner and bolted the door. He placed the suitcase flat on the toilet seat and tried the metal clasps. They were locked. “Fuck!” he shouted.

  A voice called: “You okay in there?”

  He clenched his teeth. “I’m fine,” he said.

  But he wasn’t fine. The fucking case was locked!

  He could force the clasps, but not without tools. He counted to thirty and cautiously opened the stall door. The bald man was gone.

  Carrying the suitcase, he rushed out of the station, hurried to the Saab and opened the trunk. A road-repair kit lay beside the spare-tire well. He checked the nearby cars. Seeing no one, he took out the tool kit, shut the trunk, got in the Saab and laid the suitcase on the passenger seat. He could hardly breathe, his heart churning in a jagged rhythm. Control. He had to control himself.

  To maintain discipline, he counted to fifty. Only then did he remove a screwdriver from the repair kit and pry at one clasp. It didn’t budge.

  He wanted to scream.

  Again he forced himself to remain calm. He removed a wooden mallet from the tool kit, set the screwdriver blade against the clasp and smacked the screwdriver handle with the mallet. The clasp sprang open. Exhilarated, he shouted, “Yes!”

  He repeated the procedure with the other clasp and sat very still, feeling his heart thump his chest. The moment of truth.

  He opened the suitcase, raised a lime-green hand towel and saw The Lacemaker. Kwan had removed the frame, but the canvas backing was intact and the painting was in fine condition. He placed the Vermeer in the passenger foot-well and examined the next one. The Milkmaid, also in good condition. Reassured, he checked the Rembrandt Self-Portrait.

  Aghast, he stared at it. The bottom right-hand corner of the canvas was ripped off! His priceless Rembrandt, damaged!

  Damn Kwan to hell! Rigid with fury, he clenched his fists. He had taken no pleasure in killing the insider guards in Europe. Or Ursula, for that matter. Only when she refused to satisfy his sexual appetites had he strangled her. As for Stefan, he had merely done what was necessary to obtain a legitimate alternate identity. But Kwan was different. Nicholas Kwan had damaged two of his paintings.

  For this Kwan would die a slow and painful death.

  _____

  Nicholas gnawed through the last strand of duct tape that covered his mouth and sucked in gulps of air. Straining against the wire, grimacing as it cut into his wrists, he tried to raise his hands to his mouth. Impossible, and even if he could, he couldn’t chew through the wire that bound his hands together. Stefan had hog-tied him, like a pig in a slaughterhouse.

  The cellar was damp and chilly, but his body temperature had risen from the isometric exercises he had performed, hoping to diminish the pain. It didn't. Stefan had broken two of his fingers, and the pain in his shattered kneecaps was excruciating.

  He pressed his cheek against the cool cement and focused his mind. He could not escape. He knew Stefan would kill him, but he would not beg for mercy. He would die with honor.

  If only the motherfucker didn’t hit him with the wrench again.

  He shut his eyes and concentrated. Many times in the course of his twenty-seven years he had willed things to happen. He had not always succeeded, but this one thing he wanted badly.

  He concentrated hard, visualizing Stefan’s face.

  Saw a round black hole appear in Stefan's forehead.

  Saw Stefan's lips draw back and his tongue protrude.

  Best of all, a torrent of blood streamed down Stefan's face.

  CHAPTER 35

  11:15 AM

  Two days after the robbery Frank finally got to see the crime scene. The Gardner was closed until further notice and two police officers stood outside the entrance, but Georgette, the ASAC of the Boston FBI office wasn't there, nor were any FBI agents. Hank Flynn took him to the Blue Room on the first floor where the Manet had been stolen, then the Special Exhibit. On the walls were empty spaces where The Milkmaid and The Lacemaker had been displayed. Although the museum was closed, four armed police officers guarded the eight remaining paintings.

  Then they went to the Dutch Room on the second floor. In 1990 thieves had stolen The Concert and The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Rembrandt's only seascape, from this room. Frank wasn’t involved in the investigation, but he had visited the Gardner after it reopened, eager to see the precise location of the stolen art. He stopped at a table by a window. Brocade fabric filled the frame that had once held The Concert by Johannes Vermeer.

  “Take a look at this,” Flynn said, indicating a section of the room roped off by yellow crime scene tape. Dark stains marred the wood floor and more stains were visible on a faded carpet. “We figure one of the guards was killed here.”

  “A lot of blood,” Frank said. “Looks like someone slit his throat.”

  “Before they stole the Rembrandt.” Flynn took him to the wall adjacent to the interior courtyard. An antique chair stood below the space where the Rembrandt Self-Portrait had been. Bloodstains were visible on the upholstered seat, one of them a clear shoe print.

  “Looks like the thief stood on the chair to get the painting off the wall,” Frank said.

  “The CSI techs took photos,” Flynn said, “but I'm not convinced they'll help ID the thief. Even if we get the type and make of shoe, there could be thousands of them.” He yawned and rubbed his eyes.

  The first forty-eight hours after a crime of this magnitude, no one got any sleep, but his former boss looked exhausted, bags under his eyes, hollow cheeks, sallow skin. “You need a break, Hank. Let's go grab some lunch.”

  “No can do. I need to get back to the office. I've got work—”

  “No. I'm taking you out for lunch.” Frank took his arm and pulled him toward the door. “My treat. You've done me a bunch of favors since I got here. I owe yo
u one.”

  Ten minutes later they were seated in a booth at a 24-hour diner near the station, sipping beers. Concerned, Frank studied his former boss. Something was wrong. During the years he'd worked for him, Hank Flynn had been a hands-on boss, a vigorous presence in his homicide investigations, tall, ruggedly built, muscular and fit. Now he looked thin and tired.

  “What's up, Hank? You look exhausted. Are you okay?”

  Flynn's Irish-blue eyes regarded him for several seconds. With a faint smile, he said, “Very observant, Frank. You always were a great detective.”

  While the compliment pleased him, it also made him uneasy.

  “I got a surprise a couple of months ago.” Flynn picked up his beer mug and took a swallow. “I'd been feeling tired, no appetite, losing weight. Meredith made me see my doctor. Bottom line, I've got cholangiocarcinoma. Better known as bile cancer.”

  Stunned, Frank puffed his cheeks and blew a stream of air. “Damn. That's a kick in the ass. I don't know much about bile cancer. What's the treatment?”

  “There isn't one. Not in my case anyway.” Flynn shrugged. “We all die sooner or later, but I've got a better idea than most about how soon it will be. That's why I'm retiring. Meredith and I are moving to California to be with my daughter and her kids.”

  Frank fought the surge of emotion that threatened to overwhelm him, searching for words, not finding them. Finally, he reached over and squeezed Hank's forearm. “Anything you need, name it and I'll be there. You were there for me when I needed you.”

  “Thanks, Frank. I appreciate it. Best thing you can do right now is help me solve the Gardner heist.”

  “You got it. I want to solve it as bad as you do.”

  “No one in the department knows about the diagnosis,” Flynn said. “I'd appreciate it if you didn't say anything to anyone.”

  “I won't,” Frank said. All of a sudden he wasn't hungry. Now he had more reason than ever to solve the Gardner case. And make sure Hank Flynn got the credit for it.

  _____