Til heist do us part, p.12
'Til Heist Do Us Part, page 12
By way of answer, Milan threw ten knives in quick succession, forming a frame around Gage’s head in the thick wooden pillar behind him.
“Yeah, I remember the knives.” He absently touched his shoulder. “You got any other tricks?”
Milan shrugged off her jacket and posed beside the wall. She was wearing a pair of tight black shorts over fishnet tights and a midriff-baring tank cut deep to reveal her substantial cleavage. With a flip of her long, dark hair and a pout of her lips, she earned herself the role of our Distraction.
Gage coughed lightly after I explained that Milan’s role would be to distract people from what we were doing and then use her knives if anyone got in the way. When I looked in his direction, he drew a line across his throat. I wasn’t oblivious to the threat. Gage wasn’t the kind of man who made statements like, “They’re gonna slit our throats at the end,” without good reason. But Clare needed us alive to do the heist, so I tucked that worry away for later.
I could see the crew getting antsy, so I decided to wrap things up. “We’ll meet back here tomorrow. Emma, you drive around Vera’s house and check out escape routes. Jack, you can take another look at those tunnel doors. Vito, you can start putting together an explosive to blast the tunnel door if Jack can’t find a way to get it open from the outside. Chloe will work on cameras and hacking the security system. Simone is going to find out when they’re leaving for their cruise and whether there is any chance Vera would be interested in hosting an event. Clare can buy the list of supplies I’ve posted on the server—”
“What about Anil?” Chloe asked.
“Anil…” I trailed off when I saw he’d moved to sit beside Clare and was now whispering in her ear. “Anil.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me that. It makes me feel old.”
“You are old,” he said. “Approximately four dog years.”
“We’ll need a fake Florentine Diamond,” I said, ignoring his insult. “There are pictures online of the replica in the museum in Vienna and Chloe has pulled up some additional pictures from the Internet. Do you still have access to the 3D jewelry printers at your work?”
“I run the department now,” Anil said proudly. “I can make whatever illicit jewels I want, when I want, how I want.”
“I’ll help Anil get the specs for the diamond,” Clare said, “and if I have free time, I can help Jack.”
I didn’t want her to help Jack, but I could hardly play the jealous girlfriend when I’d broken things off. I also didn’t want Clare to know I cared. It was better to let her think her ploy to destroy our relationship had worked, rather than to let her know that every time I looked at Jack, I wanted to believe every story he’d told me about being detained in submarines, thrown out windows, and left in ditches. I wanted to believe that he was indeed part of a secret covert organization and not just a professional thief with a conscience. I wanted to believe that maybe there was a chance for us to work through our issues, rebuild our trust, and find our way back to each other. But deep down, doubts still lingered. Deep down, I was still afraid.
Thirteen
Simone called me at seven the next morning. She hadn’t mastered the art of messaging, so I was jolted awake by the unfamiliar jangling of my phone.
“Good news,” Simone said. “Someone died.”
“Uh…okay…?”
“It’s Vera’s husband’s nephew. He was a bad sort. He got involved with a Mexican drug cartel and killed a few innocent people during an armed robbery. He’d been in Sing Sing prison for the last five years, and last night, someone shanked him in the shower. Isn’t that wonderful? I already sent a message to Vera offering your event services to do a circus celebration of life at her house. She loves a good party.”
I didn’t know whether I was more surprised that Simone knew the word shanked or that she had quickly turned what was a suspiciously convenient death into a criminal opportunity. “Well…um…let us know what she says.”
“She says yes.”
“That was fast.”
“They don’t want the funeral to interfere with their upcoming cruise, so she was happy not to have to plan it all herself.” She crowed in delight. “It’s perfect. Peter’s family will all be there for the first time since the new house was built, and no doubt he’ll want to show off his new museum. Vera says most of them have never seen a piece of art. Can you meet us at her place at nine?”
I wasn’t one to look a shanked-drug-dealer gift horse in the mouth, so I arrived at the Hearst mansion at nine a.m. on the dot. I immediately felt underdressed in my work-casual black pants and patterned shirt when a coiffed and heavily made-up Vera swanned into the vast marble foyer of her mansion in a swath of chiffon and beige cashmere with diamonds dripping from both wrists.
Vera was tall and thin, with long, sharp features and botoxed lips. Her hair was dyed platinum blond and she had a way of looking at me that didn’t involve our eyes meeting as people’s eyes usually did when they conversed.
Vera didn’t just want a circus-themed celebration of life. She said, “It’s been done, darling. It must be a circus on steroids, bigger and better than anything you’ve ever done before. Peter’s brother Raoul is married to Caroline Wilmington of the Rhode Island Wilmingtons, so everybody who is anybody will be there. Raoul was also very successful in tech, although if I’d known about the criminal element in the family, I would never have introduced them. We’re telling people Peter’s nephew was mugged…” She gave me an expectant look and I nodded, happy not to have to share the sordid details of his demise.
“Does Thursday afternoon around four work?” she continued. “We’ve booked the funeral home for a private cremation earlier that afternoon. After that’s over, we’ll have the party.”
I had a feeling she’d forgotten that the point of the event was to remember someone who had died, but she was the client, so I tried not to judge.
“It will be tight, but I can get it done,” I said. “We could put a miniature circus ring here in the yard with different acts happening over the course of the afternoon.” I’d never seen anything like Vera’s house. Three Queen Anne Victorian mansions from the 1880s sitting on a triple lot in the Gold Coast had been renovated into one grand mansion with one lot used as an extensive, impeccably landscaped outdoor space, something almost unheard of in Chicago. Usually, city lots were twenty-five feet wide, but this one was fifty feet, giving it the estate-like feel you usually only find in the suburbs. Behind it, a large mudroom connected the house to the original rear stable / coach house, which had been turned into a five-car garage with a second-floor apartment for staff.
“I want an elephant,” Vera said. “I heard you can get elephants.”
“Unfortunately, since the only way to your yard is through your house, I don’t think an elephant is feasible. I’ll see what else I can come up with.”
“I’ve always loved the circus.” Vera smiled. “Tell the caterers I want popcorn and cotton candy and a flying trapeze.”
“Will people be allowed indoors, or do you want to restrict the event to the garden?” I asked, wondering if my insurance would cover death by trapeze.
“I’m happy for people to come inside on the main floor. We have so much space and it doesn’t get used with just the two of us. The upper level will be off-limits, but Peter will likely be taking his family and some friends downstairs to see his museum.”
“We should probably check it out.” I tried to sound casual, although my heart was thudding in my chest. “I have a security team for all my events, and I’ll want to brief them about where people can and can’t go.”
“Of course.” Vera led us down a carpeted flight of stairs to the lower level. We walked past a fitness room, theater, yoga studio, sauna, underground pool, and then into a large, fully outfitted games room. She pressed her finger to a biometric pad on the wall and a door slid open to reveal a small sitting room, ornately decorated with wood-paneled walls and striped wallpaper. Two luxurious full-length mirrors flanked a small minibar on one end, and a giant TV screen faced an opulent cream couch on the other.
“This is our panic room,” she said. “It’s entirely secure, with bulletproof walls and doors. And if someone does get through”—she pressed her finger on a small indentation beside one of the mirrors, and it swung open to reveal a wide passageway—“we can escape into the bunker. Peter is convinced an apocalypse is imminent. He designed this space so we could survive for years without having to go outside, although I don’t think I’d last a week locked up with him in only ten thousand square feet of space.”
“Is this the only way out?” I studied the thick metal security door with the biometric panel beside it. “What if it gets stuck? Or you lose electricity?”
“It has its own power source,” she said. “But Peter also designed an escape tunnel that leads under the garden to a back alley. I bought a painting to cover the door because it was so hideous, but aside from that, I don’t know much about it. To be honest, I was more interested in making the house comfortable than preparing for a doomsday that is never going to happen.”
Vera led me through the door and gave me a tour of the bunker. It was bigger than my parents’ entire home and included LED panels to simulate windows, a designer kitchen, den, wine room, four bedrooms, a plunge pool and sauna, gym, movie room, two lounges, a games room, a huge vault with a round steel door and spinning lock, and more.
“The museum is through there.” She pointed to an ornate wooden double door. “I rarely go in because it’s not really to my taste.”
“Oh, let’s see it, darling,” Simone said. “You’ve made me curious.”
With a sigh, Vera pressed her finger against the biometric panel and the ornate wooden double doors opened, revealing at their edges a core of steel.
Peter’s museum was about one thousand square feet of rich wood paneling, sophisticated spotlights, plush red carpet, and velvet benches. Paintings of all shapes and styles hung on the walls in thick frames. Pillars with glass cases containing jewelry and statues were interspersed with large sculptures in the center of the room, and at one end there was a row of glass cases filled with an assortment of curious objects. It took me a moment to take it all in, and then it hit me.
“You can see why I never come in here and would never allow his art, if you can even call it that, upstairs,” Vera said. “It just so…tasteless.”
I didn’t need to know anything about art to understand her concerns. Peter’s collection included some of the most erotic artwork I’d ever seen—everything from paintings of couples in highly sexual poses to ancient stone fertility statues. I spotted a hardwood chest carved with scenes from the Kama Sutra, some Chinese pillow books, and the Marquis de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine, but more disturbing was the collection of ancient and not-so-ancient intimacy objects in a glass case.
“Erotic art is easier to get on the black market,” Vera said. “If not for his fetish, I don’t think he would have gotten involved with the kind of people who convinced him that he was some kind of Indiana Jones–type character and encouraged him to become a treasure hunter.” She pointed to a worn yellow-and-white skull. “He thinks this is one of the Peking man skulls that disappeared from Beijing during the Japanese invasion of China, and that”—she pointed to a book in a glass case—“is supposedly a first-century surviving copy of the canonical Christian gospels.” She gestured to an ornate green egg on an enameled stand. “He is convinced that this is one of the missing imperial Fabergé eggs, and over here”—she gave a bitter laugh as she pointed to another glass case—“are supposedly the lost crown jewels of Ireland.”
“Do you think they’re all fake?” The artifacts certainly looked genuine to my untrained eye, if old, cracked, and worn were any indicator.
“Of course they’re fake,” she said. “The people who organize these treasure hunts for him are dubious characters at best. They got him hooked on the thrill of the chase. I’m certain they make fake objects and arrange fake meetings with pretend princes so they can pocket the millions of dollars he pays for these supposedly lost treasures. He’s got a trip planned after Christmas to go to France to find the legendary Scepter of Dagobert.”
“An expert could easily determine their authenticity,” Simone said. “Don’t you have a curator for your collection? Surely they could give you a quick assessment. Or does Peter not get someone to look at them before he transfers the funds?”
“Peter won’t let anyone except his closest friends near them,” Vera said. “He’s afraid that a foreign government might make a claim for repatriation, or that a descendant might claim ownership. He’ll be upset that I was even in here, and I’m sure I’ll pay a price. When he does bring people in to show off his collection, he won’t even take the pieces out of the cases. Everything is alarmed and temperature controlled. He truly believes these are the real deal.”
“At least they’re down here,” Simone said. “You don’t have to look at them.”
“They won’t be here for much longer.” Vera pointed to a stack of cardboard boxes and large wooden crates in the corner. For the first time since we’d entered the bunker, a smile tugged at Vera’s lips. “Peter bought a private art island in the Mediterranean and we’re taking his entire collection with us when we leave on the yacht next weekend. I insisted we also bring the artwork from the vault. We don’t have enough space here to do it justice, and the pieces are truly priceless. I had him build a special wing in the new museum just to display it. The special art shippers came last week to assess everything, and they dropped off the packing materials yesterday afternoon. Peter even hired a special curator to travel with us and set up the new museum when we arrive on the island.”
“Richard has been toying with the idea of buying an art island, too,” Simone said. “We went to see a twenty-six-acre property off the Florida coast, but he thought it was too small. I told him we should just buy a super-yacht like yours, and then we’re not tied to one place, but sales are currently so buoyant there’s a three-year waiting list. We could just buy an island next month.”
Just buy an island. It was an almost unbelievable conversation. Simone and Vera lived in an entirely different world.
“It sounds like a difficult decision,” I said, nodding in feigned sympathy while Simone and Vera had a conversation about which pieces she wanted to keep in the city—the Picasso, definitely, but not the Gauguin, and heavens, she couldn’t part with her Renoir—and which would go to the island.
I was about to turn away from the salubrious display of erotic toys when a sparkle of yellow caught my eye. There, nestled in a sea of blue velvet, was a sparkling yellow diamond with an elegant handwritten card beside it that read, Florentine Diamond. On a rough guess it was just over one inch long and less than an inch wide. I was surprised at how something so small could be worth so much, and it stood out because of its relative normalcy compared to everything else.
“That’s his newest acquisition,” Vera said, following my gaze. “He says it’s the real Florentine Diamond. He ‘found’ ”—she emphasized the word with finger quotes—“it in the private collection of an Ottoman prince whose family were exiled from Turkey in the early 1920s and came to America to live in Pensacola. They had fallen into bad times and he had his people broker a deal to buy it. Foreign princes in Pensacola. Can you imagine? He was so adamant it was real that I actually checked the history of the diamond with De Beers. They said it had to be a fake. They support the theory that the real diamond was last seen intact in 1918 and was subsequently recut into something much smaller. The whole thing is utterly ridiculous, and I told him so.” She unconsciously touched her left eye. “But it’s his money and if he wants to throw it all away…”
“Darling.” Simone gave her hand a squeeze. “I know.”
“Be careful of men who are too charming,” Vera said. “Peter swept me off my feet and made me laugh. He won over my parents when he offered them a substantial interest-free loan to save them from bankruptcy. I thought he did it because he loved me, but I was just a means to an end. If someone had told me he had criminals in the family…” She shook her head. “He made me sign a prenup. I’ll get next to nothing if I walk away, and the loan to my family will come due immediately. They’ll be ruined. I just thank God that he was never interested in having children.”
“I’ll put one of my security guys on the stairwell and have him periodically check downstairs to make sure no one has slipped through,” I assured her, putting her warning about charming men on the back burner. “Hopefully the guests will be happy to stay out in the garden.”
Wary of the 24/7 cameras recording our every movement in the museum, I made notes on my phone with the details of the camera positions, access panels, size and placement of the display cases, and the possible trajectory of the floor lasers that I assumed were the purpose of the black outlets near the floor. As a recon mission it was a total success.
“It’s a shame about the elephant,” Vera said, leading me up the stairs. “Now, that would have been a celebration of life to die for.”
Fourteen
We reconvened the next day in the warehouse. Vito, embracing his demolitions role, demonstrated his newest explosive by blowing up one of Jack’s practice safes. Emma was entranced.
Simone was the last to arrive, rushing in just after I’d spread the blueprints over the large wooden table, her silk scarf fluttering behind her.
“Am I missing something here?” Chloe whispered after Simone excitedly told everyone about the shanked nephew and her role in securing my event company for his celebration of life. “I mean, the dude is barely dead and they’re organizing a party. And why? He was a murderer.”
