The Night Cafe

by Taylor Smith

  Hannah knew aliases and suspected hideouts for a dozen of the world’s worst terrorists, the art of covert message drops, and how to dismantle and reassemble an M-16 assault rifle in sixty seconds flat. Nora invariably put others at ease. Hannah, who leapt into high alert at the snick of every opening door and scrutinized every stranger for signs of lethal intent, didn’t even know how to put herself at ease.

  As if grace, brains and beauty weren’t enough, there was also Nora’s gorgeous, castlelike home overlooking the Pacific Ocean, her doting, successful husband, Neal, and their two picture-perfect kids, Nolan and Natalie. (Nora, Neal, Nolan, Natalie—they were big on alliteration, the Quinns. Even the dogs, golden retrievers with sleek Lady Clairol coats, were called Nugget and Noodle.) Nora’s entire, flawless life was a page out of frigging Martha Stewart Living.

  Hannah, at thirty, was on her own but already on her second career, one she’d taken up after eight years as an L.A. cop. Switching from police work to the world of private security contractors was supposed to have been a lucrative career move, one she’d hoped would put her in a better financial position to regain custody of her son from her wealthy ex and his current squeeze. It hadn’t worked out that way.

  She finished her scone, then glanced down and froze. On her wrist, a red drop glistened under the glow of the pendant lights hanging over the island. Hannah could almost feel the pain of the gash, even though her rational mind said it was just a dollop of raspberry. Her memory flashed on gunfire in a dark desert night. On a young man’s bleeding head cradled in her lap. On his life slipping away before her eyes.

  “Here, use this.” Nora reached across the island.

  Startled by the sudden movement, Hannah shoved back, the legs of her bar stool screeching on the travertine floor.

  “Hannah?” Nora’s brow creased with the worried look she often took on when her baby sister was around. She indicated the blue gingham napkin in her hand. “It’s okay. I was just trying to help.”

  Hannah gave her best Alfred E. Neuman dopey grin. Bringing her wrist to her lips, she licked away the sweet drop of jam, but when Nora sighed, she relented and took the napkin, dutifully blotting her wrist dry. She might have resented the fact that Nora still treated her like the awkward child she used to be, except she knew her sister couldn’t help feeling the heavy responsibility of serving as maternal figure in Hannah’s life.

  They had an actual mother, mind you. Ida Demetrious—“Nana” to her three grandchildren—was snapping green beans over at Nora’s antique pine trestle table this very minute. Nevertheless, Nora had been overheard on more than one occasion to say she’d “raised Hannah.” Not altogether accurate. Not something you’d think she’d want to brag about, either, all things considered.

  It was true that at seventeen, Hannah had been sent from Chicago to live with the Quinns in Orange County. It was about the time that their father, Takis Demetrious, began showing signs of the Alzheimer’s that would eventually strip him of his mind, his great physical strength and finally his life. Poor Nana. A sick husband and a rebellious teenage daughter were a tough hand to be dealt, especially when she was also trying to keep their import company afloat in those early days when Takis’s intermittent confusion, intransigence and paranoia were threatening to run the family’s once-thriving company into the ground. Something had to give and, in the end, that something was Hannah.

  Nora’s kids had been four and seven at the time. Hannah could give Nora a hand, the thinking went, and maybe if she escaped Takis’s unpredictable rages, she might be less inclined to act out. But she arrived at Newport Beach High School carrying a lumber-sized chip on her shoulder. That, and shyness that came across as aloofness, pretty much guaranteed her the caption of “Most Inscrutable” in her senior yearbook photo. She hadn’t set out to be antisocial, but even the Porsches and BMWs in the student parking lot seemed to be sneering at the hopelessly uncool Midwestern import with the wild hair and the uneasy dark eyes. She stayed with Neal and Nora for two years before moving into a dorm at UCLA. By February of her freshman year, she was pregnant. She dropped out of college and went to work as an L.A. Sheriff’s Department dispatcher so that her hastily married hubby could finish law school.

  Pathetic—which only made Hannah wonder why Nora would take the rap for raising her.

  “Yee-haw!”

  Home on spring break from Stanford, Nolan galloped into the sprawling kitchen, his surfboard-scaled flip-flops slapping the floor. Close behind came ten-year-old Gabe, grinning as he aped his big cousin’s galumphing stride.

  “Last one in is a horse’s…um—” Nolan paused, glancing at his mom “—patootie!”

  Hannah raised a hand, traffic-cop style. “Hold it! Gabriel Nicks, don’t even think of going out there before I get sunscreen on you.”

  The boys’ bodies were winter-pale but spring in Southern California meant the beginning of pool season, and this particular Sunday had turned out to be a scorcher. The thermometer on the blue-and-white striped cabana outside hovered in the mid-eighties. Neal was out there in shorts and T-shirt, stretched on one of the plush chaise longues, working the Sunday crossword, while Natalie was at the beach with a friend. With the pool heated to a balmy eighty-eight degrees, even the adults might venture in, if only for a toe-dabble.

  Gabe moaned. “Ah, Mom, it’s only April. I’m not gonna burn. Besides, I’m tough like you. I can handle anything.”

  Hannah couldn’t miss the exchange of another of those “what are we going to do about Hannah?” looks between Nora and their mother. Hers wasn’t the sort of family where fearlessness in dark alleys was considered a desirable trait.

  “Ultraviolet rays don’t read calendars,” she said, restraining her wriggling son with one hand while she snagged the sunscreen off the kitchen counter with her other.

  “Yeah, that’s a fact, bro,” Nolan said, turning back.

  Gabe immediately stopped squirming. His mother might be a worrywart, but if Nolan, bless his heart, said something was so, then it was gospel.

  “You slather up, too,” Nora said over her shoulder.

  The two boys exchanged eye-rolling grins, but Nolan took the plastic squeeze bottle from Hannah and went to work on himself.

  At the granite island, Nora went back to spreading phyllo dough for the baklava she was preparing for dessert. Sunday dinners were a big deal at the Quinns’. Today, they would be eight—Nora and her gang; Hannah and Gabe; Nana Demetrious, who’d moved out to Orange County after Takis died; plus Nora’s former college roommate. That wasn’t many. Nora often fed what seemed like half the lonely hearts in Southern California, including single guys invited for the express purpose of meeting her unattached sister—and didn’t Hannah just love being set up like that without her knowledge? Would there ever come a day when she would no longer be the official family fix-it project?

  Prague, the Czech Republic

  The straight razor gleamed in the morning sun as it passed it back and forth, back and forth over the brown leather strop hooked to a towel ring embedded in one of the blue-and-white ceramic wall tiles. Former Detective Superintendent William Teagarden of Scotland Yard always fell into a reverie as he went about his morning toilette. What he liked about the straight razor was that its handling couldn’t be rushed. The slow rhythm of the archaic shaving routine—blade on strop, brush in bowl, steel on whiskers—forced him to slow his pace, order his mind and think.

  He was deep in thought now. Setting the razor on the lip of the white porcelain hotel room sink, he took up the soap bowl and swirled his shaving brush round and round, each circuit of the bristles whispering the same refrain: Where, where, where was the bloody van Gogh?

  The straight razor and boar bristle brush were old-fashioned things, but they were appropriate accessories for a man with such tall military bearing and a handle-bar mustache straight out of the days of Empire. Teagarden had spent thirty years as an officer of London’s Metropolitan Police, the last six and a half as head of the Ya
rd’s Arts and Antiquities Unit. He’d been raised in Manchester, the only child of a decent but rough-about-the-edges mill worker father and a beautiful, cultured mother whose family had withdrawn after she married down. She had been stoic about her reduced circumstances, living on a drab council estate, never an extra shilling for travel or pretty things, but she had engendered in her son a love of music and art, taking him to every free gallery, concert and museum she could, exposing him to library books that described the wonders of the world. Little surprise, then, that given the opportunity to help recover some of the multimillions of pounds’ worth of art stolen annually, Teagarden had jumped at the chance.

  As he soaped his cheeks, chin and neck, his memory skimmed the lists of stolen art documented in the British Art Loss Register and the New York–based IFAR, the International Foundation for Art Research. The number of masters alone sickened him—nearly three hundred Picassos, a couple of hundred Miros and Chagalls. Several Rembrandts. Manet, Munch, Vermeer, da Vinci, Goya—the list went on and on. And of course, there was the van Gogh.

  Heading up the Arts Unit had not only capped his career at the Met, it had been his crowning achievement and the job of his dreams. He could happily have labored at it until his dying day, had he not been forced into retirement by bureaucrats. “Medically unfit for duty” after his second heart attack, they said, but that was bunk. The commander to whom he reported had been looking for a pretext to get rid of him. A diminutive micromanager with delusions of brilliance, the commander had transferred in from borough operations with a chip on his shoulder and lofty ambitions, and God help anyone he perceived as a threat to his aspirations. It had been annoying enough that Teagarden was impervious to his bullying management style, but the last straw had been a splashy Daily Mirror spread on the work of the Arts Unit, complete with of full color photos of Teagarden and some of the works he’d recovered—da Vinci’s priceless Virgin of the Rocks, a Brancusi sculpture, one of Degas’s ballerinas. “Unseemly,” the commander had sniffed. Of course, he never objected to any press piece that included a quote from him or a picture of his ugly mug, even in a rag like the Mirror.

  Teagarden took up the razor and set to work on his face. He hadn’t given a damn about the press, but every time one of those puff pieces appeared, hits on the unit’s Web site had skyrocketed, as did tips from the public. No matter. Not long after the Mirror piece, the commander had ordered Teagarden to submit to a medical, then seized on the results to quote departmental policy at him and hustle him out the door. Within three months, the unit was downsized and swallowed whole by another section—a “redeployment of resources to higher priority tasks.”

  It was a travesty, sidelining a specialist at the peak of his operational effectiveness, but Teagarden’s dismay had been short-lived. There were plenty of deep-pocketed private patrons who would pay extremely well, thank you very much, for the same investigative work that had netted him nothing more than a civil servant’s meager pension and a flipping here’s your hat, what’s your hurry shove out the door from the Met. He’d solved hard-to-crack cases during his tenure there and that reputation had served him in good stead, oiling hinges and opening doors at Interpol, the FBI and other international police agencies. They even referred clients to him when their own investigative resources were constrained. That was how Yale University, owners of The Night Café, had made contact. Teagarden had been on the trail of the painting since forty-eight hours after its New Year’s Day theft from the Arlen Hunter Museum.

  These thefts were almost never carried out for the love of art. Faced with the possibility of discovery or arrest, thieves were more likely to destroy a painting than let it survive as evidence. With every day that passed, the risk grew exponentially that the fragile old canvas would be gravely damaged or lost forever.

  The police in Los Angeles had been rather less welcoming, focused as they were on the murders that had accompanied the burglary. Teagarden, too, was appalled at the human tragedy, but as he tried to point out to the homicide detectives, the only way to find the killers was to learn who might have sought one masterpiece alone among the dozens that had been on view during the Madness & the Masterpiece exhibit.

  Previous cases had taught him that the culprits often turned out to be petty thieves. Occasio facit furem—opportunity makes the thief, like a vagabond stealing laundry off a garden line. That was why so much stolen art was never recovered. As soon as the clothesliners felt the law breathing down their necks, they got rid of it. One thief’s mother, hoping to keep her precious boy out of prison, had actually taken her kitchen shears to dozens of the priceless masterworks her little bastard had nicked, and chucked several others into a nearby canal. It turned his stomach to remember the torn, water-damaged, charred and vermin-gnawed masterworks he’d seen.

  The business of art theft had changed, however. In the past, a thief might hope to turn a quick profit through a ransom demand, but that was fraught with risk of capture. Finding a buyer these days was no easy matter, either. Recognizable works were impossible to sell to reputable collectors or dealers, even for pennies on the pound. In the old days, even if a buyer suspected a shaky provenance, he need only claim ignorance and wait out the clock. Once the legal statute of limitations had run out—five, seven, ten years, depending on the jurisdiction—thief and buyer alike were home free, and a lucrative payday might be worth the wait.

  But these days, there was no pleading ignorance—not in an Internet age when the alarm was sounded far and wide for art gone walkabout. Many nations had also imposed stark penalties on trafficking in stolen work, and the publicity surrounding colonial plundering of antiquities and theft from Holocaust victims put intense pressure on buyers to err on the side of caution. When a California Getty Museum director went on trial in Italy for purchasing stolen antiquities, her ordeal did more than anything else to put the fear of the gods into buyers around the world.

  So, Teagarden mused, if not for resale to some reclusive billionaire aficionado or corrupt broker, who else would be in the market for a sixty-million-dollar van Gogh? There was only one other likely scenario—someone wanted to use it as collateral for another business transaction. The drug trade, gunrunning, human smuggling and fraud were all interrelated, and a painting like The Night Café, more compact than a comparable amount of cash, could serve as useful security until funds could actually change hands on a shipment. The masterpiece as currency.

  He scrutinized his face in the mirror, looking for spots he might have missed, but his mind was on the security tapes he’d studied at the Arlen Hunter. There was nothing opportunistic about that burglary. It had taken just under twelve minutes from start to finish. A review of the museum’s security setup had left no doubt in his mind that the theft had been carefully planned, possibly with inside help.

  How could a world-class gallery have made so many blunders with hundreds of millions in borrowed art at risk? The curator of the exhibit had assured the paintings’ owners that the security system was top-notch. Closed-circuit cameras. Multiple vibration sensors behind each painting. Saturation motion detection. Environmental sensors to pick up minute temperature changes, such as those that might accompany fire, smoke or the touch of a human hand.

  The ugly truth was that some of the systems weren’t yet fully functional on the night of the theft. Everything was supposed to have been in place before Madness & the Masterpiece opened, but what Teagarden learned was that the Arlen Hunter’s budget for security was so bled dry by other demands that equipment orders constantly lagged. Delivery delays had meant that some crucial pieces of the system hadn’t yet arrived. Overhead bubble covers should have concealed brand-new, 360-degree observation lenses, but the digital cameras and recording equipment were still on a dock in the port of Long Beach the night of the theft. There was an older existing closed-circuit camera system in use, connected via the Internet to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department robbery unit, but that link proved to be a major vulnerability. The thieves had hacke
d the feed weeks earlier, downloading and recording the video. While the theft was going on, both the internal recording equipment and the external feed were being fed recycled footage. When it was analyzed later, it would be obvious that three of the four security guards seen patrolling on the tape were nowhere near the place on January first. Equally frustrating was that the thieves had managed to erase at least two other sections of the surveillance video, periods that would no doubt have shown them inside the museum, casing the security arrangements.

  What a cock-up, Teagarden thought disgustedly, rinsing the razor under hot water and patting his face dry. He took up a small comb and smoothed down his dark mustache, then passed the comb over his thinning steel-gray hair. His eyes, coal-black under heavy eyebrows, flashed annoyance and energy; the former for the botched security that had allowed the painting to be taken, the latter for the thrill of the hunt.