The Looters

by Harold Robbins

  “Hey! We can rent an office and have her bring it to us,” Coby said.

  I shook my head. “No way. The best way—the only way—would be a shoot at the museum.”

  “How would we set up a shoot?” Coby asked.

  “By telephone. Follow up with fax confirmation. We’d have to call our company something. We probably won’t be able to set the deal up with one phone call, so we’ll have to get a telephone number that we can answer as if we’re a photography company. Make it sound legit. I don’t think there’d be a hitch. One of the assistants at the museum handles PR and basically acts as Angela’s social secretary. She fields calls for publicity shots for the museum and the actress. And Angela is too desperate to refuse. She’s got the ball rolling on this past-life thing and she’d jump at the chance for more publicity.”

  Silence.

  I squirmed inside as they stared at me, but I kept up a brave front.

  “How did you plan to get them to turn off the security system?” Coby asked.

  “Not the entire system, just on the mask. It’s done all the time. We’re constantly moving, rearranging, cleaning, or even loaning out pieces. Magazines and commercials pay to send around a crew to photograph a piece that will go with something they’re creating. They come in after hours and so would we. They’ll turn off the security from the front door to where the mask is displayed.”

  “All the security?”

  “No, they’d leave on the cameras that monitor the area we’ll be working in and passing through. The important thing is that there’s an RFID transmitter attached to the mask that sets off an alarm if the mask is moved. They’ll have to turn it off.”

  “That’s it? Camera, radio frequency tag?”

  “Another couple of human security people to watch the camera crew as it passes by exhibits. You can bet that the guard in the security room will be watching the monitors like a hawk to make sure no one sticks something in their pocket.”

  “But how do we get the mask from Angela? Short of grabbing it and running?” Coby asked.

  “The mask is on the mannequin. We say we need shots on the mannequin first. Then when the mask gets handed to Angela—”

  Gwyn jumped up from her chair, clapping her hands. “We make a switch of masks!”

  “Exactly. We take the mask off the display and hand it to Angela—”

  “That’s when I make the switch!”

  “You make the switch?” Coby asked Gwyn.

  “I make the switch. Look around you. There is so much smoke and mirrors in this place, I could make an elephant disappear. I was raised by magicians and cut my teeth on a magic wand. I can do it. It’s a piece of cake to make a switch.”

  “This is downright fuckin’ insane,” Coby said. “But I like it.”

  “You can thank me later.” I grinned. Not too shabby a plan for robbing a museum… if I have to say so myself.

  Chapter 62

  Neal Nathan sat up in bed and sipped a twenty year-old Oenotheque Champagne from Dom Perignon. The only time he felt more miserable than he did right now was the moment of excruciating terror when one of his testicles was cut off.

  He relived the feeling over and over… the feel of the cold knife against the warm skin of his sac. The horror as the scrotum was cut open. Unbearable pain as the testicle was removed.

  A vital piece of his body was taken.

  Fuckers. They would pay and pay and pay….

  His hand shook as he took another sip. The expensive champagne, bought at a wine auction and charged to Rutgers as an office expense, helped him wash down the pain medication and tranquilizer the doctor had prescribed for him. Neal had added a snort of cocaine to the concoction, but that was a mistake because it revved him up when he needed to sleep.

  He perked up to listen as he heard a sound from another part of the house but stayed in bed. He was expecting his maid. “I’m in the bedroom,” he yelled.

  He leaned back down, groaning, not from physical pain but because he felt shitty. A single question kept roiling around his head. Why had he been so stupid to get involved in the Iraqi museum loot deal?

  The whole mess belonged at the doorstep of that pompous bastard Lipton. May he rot in hell.

  Before the Iraqi museum was looted, Neal had dealt with Lipton on a number of pieces that had dirt on them. The first several had been auctioned through Rutgers. But then Neal had wised up. Why should Rutgers get the fees? The Rutgers family knew what was going on but simply turned their heads the other way. If the police came sniffing around, the Rutgerses would throw him to the wolves.

  The hell with them. He was taking the risks… he should get the rewards.

  He had started doing treaty sales in which he brought buyer and seller together and kept Rutgers out of the loop. Quiet transactions, no publicity. A very nice profit. His Manhattan brownstone came from those dirty pieces.

  Then the museum heist occurred and Lipton suddenly had an incredible inventory. No one ever had anything like it. But these had to be sold with even less conspicuity, and over a period of years, because the looting of the Baghdad museum received worldwide publicity.

  A few of those deals and Neal had been able to purchase the Fire Island beach house.

  He had no guilt about his secret dealings. The first Mr. Rutgers associated with the auction house started the business shortly after the Civil War when the defeated Southern plantation aristocracy was selling off their prize possessions. The last Rutgers family member to contribute to the bottom line at the firm died half a century ago on a trip to Saigon buying up prized possessions of French-Indochinese plantation aristocracy following France’s military defeat at Dien Bien Phu.

  When Neal joined the firm as an assistant appraiser fifteen years ago, the company was on its last leg… and even that was infested with powderpost beetles.

  He had revitalized that arthritic old firm. His reward had been chump change compared to what he got from his secret side deals with Lipton.

  Now those secret deals came back like a freight train running wild.

  Neal had made plenty of money. Why couldn’t he stop? Stupid greed, pure and simple. The temptation of acquiring more wealth was always there. He should have quit when he was way ahead. He knew it then—and now. He blamed himself for squeezing more money out.

  But he also blamed Madison. She should have just rolled over and played dead when her world came crashing down. Instead she fought back and caused nothing but trouble. She cost him his left nut, the fuckin’ bitch. If he had a chance, he’d cut off her goddamn head. He didn’t have to worry, though. That homicidal nutcase Stocker would kill her if he got his hands on her.

  Neal washed down another tranquilizer as he thought about Stocker. What a fucking piece of work! Stocker was the one who had sent Neal’s perfect world spinning out of control. A loose cannon—big-time. Scared both Neal and Lipton so bad, they had to put the Semiramis on sale. And got the police on their heels.

  Deal with it, Neal told himself.

  Neal knew exactly how he would handle the authorities. He was a gifted negotiator. He’d make a deal with the police. He would give them Stocker, Madison, too, though he’d have to make her more culpable than she actually had been. They could have Piedmont and his museum director, too. They all knew the pieces were dirty and turned their heads.

  He had enough headline-grabbing details and people to get the police off his own back. It wouldn’t be hard for him. He was a professional deal maker, and this would be the biggest deal of his life.

  “Anna? Where the hell are you?” He needed another bottle of champagne and didn’t want to get out of bed.

  He wasn’t supposed to be feeling any pain, but what the hell did doctors know? They told him he’d be able to lead a normal life… if nothing went wrong with his other testicle.

  He thought again about the butchers who did this to him. Fuckin’ animals. The police would have to guarantee him that they made no deals with his torturers. What he really wanted was
them dead. He wondered if he could arrange that. Hell, he knew a hit man: Stocker would do the job just for the pleasure of seeing someone suffer and die. He’d have him take care of those thugs before he had the police remove Stocker from his life.

  “Anna! Get in here; I need you.”

  “Anna can’t make it,” Stocker told him from the doorway.

  ***

  The beach house was on fire when Stocker launched his boat into the surf. Like the other ex-SEALs, he still thought in terms of movement on water. That worked out well for getting around some areas of the city. As the SEALs had done, he made his way to Fire Island in an inflatable rubber boat that was easily beached.

  He had killed Neal and the maid without hesitation. It didn’t bother Stocker. Never gave it a second thought. He was a mean bastard. He had been that way as a kid. He had a simple philosophy about violence: He beat up those he could and avoided conflict with those he couldn’t. Like Mafia bosses and totalitarian dictators, he believed violence was just another way of doing business.

  Stocker killed Lipton and Neal because he knew that they couldn’t be trusted anymore. They shared a trait he saw in himself: the willingness to sacrifice anyone else to save himself. The police were on their tails. They would have rolled over on him. He would have done the same thing to avoid prison.

  He wasn’t through with the cleanup necessary in New York. He still had to kill Coby and the other SEALs. And the Dupre woman. He would especially take his time to make sure she died a particularly horrible death.

  Like a pit bull, once he got his teeth into an idea he didn’t let go until someone kicked him off. Killing the SEALs and killing the woman were concepts he had locked on and loaded. But he would make sure he got the biggest prize of all before he killed them.

  When he was a mile from Fire Island, he used his cell phone to make a call.

  “Hello, baby.”

  “Hi, lover boy.”

  Gwyn’s voice came across the open waters clear and clean, not with the usual bad reception he got using his cell phone on city streets shouldered by skyscrapers.

  With her help, he had almost killed the Dupre woman and Coby. After Gwyn called to tell him that Dupre had taken the SEALs’ car and that she thought the woman might try to check out the warehouse, he had managed to take Dupre prisoner, intending to use her as bait to kill the SEALs. That plan had gone to hell, but the biggest prize of all was now almost in his reach.

  “How are the plans for getting back the Semiramis?” he asked.

  As a predator, he knew to wait and watch until it was time to leap and kill.

  Chapter 63

  “I know where to get a mask for the switch,” I told Gwyn.

  Coby and the other SEALs had taken on the task of obtaining the necessary business address, cameras, and other equipment necessary for the appearance and front of a film crew.

  Gwyn and I were in charge of costumes, including obtaining a mask that we could use for the switch.

  We decided on dressing two members of the group in the robes, long curly beards, and helmets that were symbolic of the Babylonians. Naturally, since this was to be a shoot with a cinematic high-fashion look, the two ancient kings would be women—Gwyn and myself.

  “That works out nicely, because you have to make the switch,” I told Gwyn. “We’ll stand behind Angela and you can turn around and take the mask off the display and hand it to her. You make the switch at that moment.”

  While she made the switch, I, in turn, would stand beside her and hope to God I wasn’t recognized under the beard and robes. But being there in disguise was necessary: I had to stay center stage to keep an eye on the mask. I planned to make my own switch at some point, because I had no illusions about my fellow thieves honoring our bargain to return the mask to Iraq.

  “We’ll need to get you colored contact lenses,” she said. “When Angela St. John and other people at the museum stare into your eyes, we want them to see the soul of a stranger.”

  Good point. But before we headed for a shopping mall optometrist, my cell phone went off.

  Nunes ordered me to report immediately to the federal corrections building.

  “He wants me to report to my personal interrogation cell,” I told Gwyn.

  I was scared as hell. When I got there, he informed me that Neal and his maid had been murdered.

  “Both of them had their throats slit before the place was torched,” Nunes said.

  I sat down and the tears started. I wasn’t even sure why I was crying. Certainly for poor Anna, the maid. She was innocent. I guess for Neal, too. The ugly mess that began with the looting of the national treasures of a poor country had turned into a bloody nightmare.

  “We’re certain it was your friend Stocker,” Nunes said. “He likes to torch his crime scenes.”

  He claimed they had no leads on finding Stocker. Which meant I had to keep an eye on my back.

  “We’re on a terrorist attack alert for the subway system, and it takes the priority over art in the police world,” Nunes had told me. “We don’t think he’ll try to kill you, because you’ve already talked to the police. Not unless you’re hiding something he wants.”

  Of course, Nunes’s tone inferred that I was hiding plenty.

  “I’m hiding nothing but my fear.”

  And loathing, I wanted to add but didn’t, for a justice system that lets people like Stocker come after people like me.

  I took a series of taxis and subways for an hour to get back to the house. I was still confident that Nunes wasn’t wasting his “assets” on a 24/7 surveillance of me, but I wanted to make sure.

  “It was a good thing I cried,” I told Gwyn later. “The fact that I didn’t know they had been killed proved to Nunes that I wasn’t involved.”

  Getting masks for the switches wasn’t difficult. The Piedmont Museum bookstore sold good reproductions of the Semiramis.

  Wearing a head scarf and dark glasses and looking like someone in the Witness Protection Program trying to disguise herself, I waited in a taxi two blocks from the museum as Gwyn went in to buy masks.

  I needed my own mask for the switch that I would be making, so I had her get several and gave her a good reason. “That way we can practice your switch without worrying about damaging a mask.”

  When we got back, Coby examined one of the reproductions. I assured him that it looked really good. “I was the one who had the reproductions made for sale. I insisted they look real. There’s not much detail on the original, so it wasn’t hard to do.”

  “But what about the weight?” he said. “She’s probably handled the Semiramis. So have you. How does it compare in weight?”

  “Close enough.” The Semiramis was thin gold. The bookstore mask was stamped out of a lighter metal but a bit thicker. All in all, the outfit I commissioned, a group of artists who did repair and reproduction work for museums and galleries, had done a super job on the masks.

  We bought a mannequin similar to the one at the museum display so Gwyn could practice making a switch as she took the mask off the display queen and handed it to Angela.

  When the day of reckoning came, I had horrible stage fright. I stared at the blue-eyed Babylonian king in the mirror and wondered if colored contacts were how movie stars all got their blue eyes.

  Besides my shocking blue eyes, I wore a tall, cone-shaped hat that resembled a beehive and covered half my head, a long, curly black Babylonian beard that came up to the hat and covered most of my face, and a floor-length robe big enough for two people. The only identifiable part of my body left uncovered was my nose. And I had never been accused of having a unique snout.

  To make the disguise bulletproof, all I had to do was keep my mouth shut.

  Gwyn was dressed the same but used her own eye color.

  The arrangements with the PR assistant at the museum had been made, the “camera crew” had their equipment and manners down pat, and Gwyn and I were decked out like we-three-kings-of-Orient.

  “It’s
a go, Houston,” I told the assembly. I smiled bravely and prayed no one saw how scared I was.

  I secretly made one alteration to my costume.

  I stuck the spare Semiramis mock-up mask in an inside pouch of my robe. I hadn’t figured out how I would get the mask from Gwyn to make the switch. I would have to play it by ear, probably tell her I wanted to examine it.

  I knew what I would do with the mask once I had it in my hand: take a taxi to the Jamaica Plains apartment of Abdullah’s daughter and give it to her. Because of the sacrifices her father and grandfather made, she should have the honor of returning it.

  Then I would run like hell, because there would be some awfully angry SEALs looking for me.

  ***

  I think I was the only nervous person when we arrived at the Piedmont after closing time to film Angela with the mask. Gwyn and the SEALs talked and joked like they were on their way to a party. God, what nerves of steel. My nerves were stretched rubber bands ready to snap. How they could be calm was beyond my understanding. I imagined Angela taking one look at me and screaming that it was Dupre in disguise.

  Was I just plain whacked-out from stress to imagine I could really fool anyone at the museum? And that we could switch the Semiramis? I knew that almost every major museum art theft was low-tech. But could Gwyn really make a switch with Eric standing by and a security guard watching the monitor of an overhead camera?

  I had to be the only one with any common sense if the others didn’t realize how crazy the plan was… and the only one with enough common sense to be scared, too. They say psychopaths don’t have human feelings like fear and pity. If you have to be sane to be scared, I was the only one who wasn’t crazy.

  Coby read my fears. “No guts, no glory.”

  “You can have the glory. Just drop me off at the nearest airport so I can get a ticket to someplace where no one wants to kill me or arrest me.”

  Approaching the building in a van with the others, I was certain that I saw police helicopters and unmarked police cars. I half-expected Agent Nunes to be at the museum to greet me with a pair of handcuffs as I entered.