Collar Robber (18 page)

Chapter Forty-two

Jay Davidovich

“No actual switch will happen.” Proxy spoke with the casual certainty of Vin Scully explaining that you could expect a fast ball on a three-two pitch with the bases loaded. “That's the elegance of the plan. The bad guys don't have to sell it to anyone. A few weeks will pass—no more than three months. Then one of the heirs of the original seller will hold a press conference in Jerusalem.”

“And say what?” Quindel asked.

“Some variation of what Nesselrode told us. When the original owner saw the forced sale coming, he had someone gin up a copy and sold that, hiding the real painting and then inconveniently dying before the war was over without telling anyone where he'd hidden it. The heir will then say that the original painting has now been found. He and his co-heirs are donating it to a museum in Jerusalem.”

“But if people buy that, it means the Museum had a forgery all along. A little celebrity value, maybe, but nothing with six or seven zeroes after it.”

“That's just the point.” Proxy's voice suggested infinite patience with a slow learner. “A lot of people
won't
buy the story. All the high profile cops-and-robbers stuff has been window dressing all along. It's intended to make it look like the bad guys must have found a clever way to switch the paintings, à la some caper flick, even though they didn't.”

Quindel nodded a couple of times—
I get it, but that doesn't mean I buy it
.

“What if we put some microscopic chip on the painting before the Museum sends it over? Then we can prove that whether the painting that comes back is real or fake, it's the painting the Museum sent—which is the one we will have insured.”

“If the mastermind behind this is really a Museum insider,” Schuetz said, “the Museum won't let us do that. They'll say it would impair the integrity of the painting. They might even be right.”

“The Museum will make a claim under the policy.” Proxy gave Quindel's nod right back to him. “Also a claim against the museum in Vienna and its insurer. Maybe against the heirs and the Jerusalem museum as well, just for good luck. All this time, of course, Pitt MCM will have been using the exchange arrangement and the hands-across-the-sea stuff as a fund-raising hook, and the painting lent by the Vienna museum as an attendance-booster. When we deny the claim, the Museum will sue everyone and his twin brother—starting with us.”

“Cluster fuck,” the gray-hairs from Legal muttered.

“You say that as if it were a bad thing.” Quindel smiled modestly at his
mot
.

“Not a bad thing for me. I get to ship a three-million dollar retainer to someone I went to law school with. The department that has to come up with the three million dollars might take a different view.”

“Still simple.” Quindel raised his eyebrows in what I guess was supposed to be a meaningful way. “Win the lawsuit and we're still ahead.”

“As a rule, insurance companies don't win lawsuits, they settle them.” The lawyer shook his jurisprudential head. “Experts disputing each other, all the sympathy with the Museum, and no way to know which expert is right except to ask a jury of laypeople who couldn't tell Giotto from Jasper Johns the best day they ever had. Which we can't risk doing. So we'll settle.”

“What good
are
you people, anyway?” The exasperation coloring Quindel's voice seemed genuine, for once.

“We're good at transferring wealth from other people to lawyers. We really shine at that.”

“Pitt MCM keeps
Eros Rising.
” Proxy said that in a back-to-the-point tone. “The forgery claim remains ultimately unresolved. That generates continuing curiosity and publicity for the Museum. And Pitt MCM uses our settlement payment to jack up its endowment and cover its budget deficit.”

Damnation! She nailed it! She's absolutely right!
I'll bet everyone in the room thought exactly the same thing. Everyone except Quindel.

“Great plot for a made-for-TV movie. But here in the real world, exactly what do the bad guys get out of all this?”

“A piece of the settlement, probably.” Schuetz threw that in. “Plus a chunk of change from whoever gets the tax deduction for the Israeli museum donation.”

Quindel sat still for maybe fifteen seconds, face raised but eyes hooded. Then his eyes snapped open.

“Not buying it. Too many moving parts.
Way
too complicated,
way
too many contingencies. If this theory is right, these guys are running around committing felonies totally on spec.”

“Well,” I said, “they're sure as hell running around committing felonies, so they must at least think this way-too-complicated plan could work.”

“Thank you for your insights and input.” Quindel handed his legal pad to the briefcase-carrier and recapped his lapis-lazuli pen. “They have been very helpful. At the end of the day, though, this is my decision.”

“Yes it is.” Proxy said this in full ice-queen mode as she glanced at the senior secretary furiously taking shorthand. “Please note that if your decision is to bid on the policy, you will have made it against the recommendations of Risk Management and Loss Prevention.”

I could tell that Quindel was about to offer Proxy whatever suit-speak for
fuck you
is when the door opened after a polite knock. A woman with a telephone-earpiece and associated wiring parked on her head leaned in.

“Excuse me. A detective from New York City is trying to reach Mr. Davidovich. He says it's urgent.”

“Put him through to the conference room phone,” Quindel snapped. “Put that phone on speaker.”

Thirty seconds later I heard a white-noise hum from a speaker inlaid in the table's center. I spoke in its general direction.

“Davidovich.”

“Sir, are you Jay Davidovich?”

“Yes.”

“Sir, this is Detective-Lieutenant Stornmonth with the NYPD. Do you know Moshe Hillel?”

“Name doesn't ring a bell.”

“Well that's very interesting, sir, because someone with your cell-phone number has called his cell-phone several times in the last week.”

“Description?” I sipped coffee to warm up the cold spot suddenly spreading through my gut.

“Five-ten, one-seventy, dark olive complexion, hair—”

“Yeah, yeah.” I rolled my eyes at the ceiling. “Hair black, eyes dark brown, all that stuff. How about distinctive body markings?”

“Tattoo of a wristwatch on his left wrist.”

Gut punch. Hit me right across the seams. Did
not
see that one coming.

“He sounds like someone I know under the name Dany Nesselrode. What's happened to him?”

“Victim of a hit-and-run about two o'clock this morning in the Bronx. He's taking a nap in intensive care. We're calling it attempted murder.”

“Lieutenant, you and I need to talk.”

“Yes we do, sir. Now would be convenient.”

“Now won't do. Give me a number where I can reach you in fifteen minutes.”

He rattled off ten digits as I checked my watch. Then he said, “Fifteen minutes. Not sixteen.”

After the dial tone had sounded, Quindel cocked his head at the note-taker.

“Only ‘attempted' murder. You got that part, right?”

Chapter Forty-three

Jay Davidovich

Apparently Proxy wasn't sure that last crack was just Quindel's idea of humor.

“There's something on Jay's computer that you should see,” she told him.

“Have you been sandbagging me, Ms. Shifcos?” Quindel's eyebrows arced toward his scalp as he headed toward us.

“Came in just before the meeting.” I wouldn't exactly call that answer
No
.

I had enough sense to pull up the email string that included Proxy's forwarding message to Tech Support as well as the original email. It took Quindel about two-point-three seconds to absorb the words and grasp their significance.

“Why are you telling them to report to you and not to me?”

“Because we have to assume that your email address has been compromised—and we don't want them to know that we know.”

“Right. We know, but they don't know we know. Very good. Absolutely right.”

Translation: “Greetings, Jay Davidovich. Your draft status has just been changed to BAIT
.” Quindel looked down at me.

“Remind me of why the bad guys care so much about this von Leuthen dame.”

“Because they think she has inside information on where the real painting or the really-good fake painting can be found.”

“But she doesn't have any such information?”

“Can't be sure, but I don't think so.”

“If you're right, then she must have some other connection with this circus, or the people involved in it.”

“I agree.”

“Namely—what?” Quindel put a challenging little nuance into the question.

“Don't have the faintest idea. All I know is that without realizing it I somehow got them all hot and bothered when I dropped the seminary-hacking case and jumped feet-first into this one. And a long time ago she apparently had a little romp with a seminarian.”

“How can you possibly imagine putting those pieces together?”

“Still working on that. Something I can't put my finger on is nagging at me, but I haven't come up with it yet.”

Quindel strolled back to the head of the table, as if he were in his den at home, going to get an interesting book to show us. I didn't pay a lot of attention to watching him think. In nine minutes I had to call a detective in New York, and if I ever got off the phone with him I had to call what's-her-name, Jakubek, the shysterette in Pittsburgh.

Finally, Quindel came out of his private little thought world and looked at the rest of us.

“Okay, here's how we're going to play it. First thing tomorrow morning we'll bid eight hundred-fifty thousand for the first year of exchange insurance, four-hundred for the second, and six hundred-fifty for the third. Because the risk is higher when the painting is in transit. If that scares them off, so be it. More likely, though, they'll shop around a little and then come back to us to try to bargain us down. That buys us some time to see if we can smoke out the malefactors. If we do, we can bring our price down and maybe save the business.”

I glanced at my watch. Quindel noticed.

“Loss Prevention has to call a cop, so if there's nothing else we'll adjourn.”

“One other thing,” the lawyer said. “Do we share our suspicions about inside collaboration with the Museum?”

Quindel looked at the secretary, who stopped writing.

“No. Fuck 'em.”

The Fourth Sunday in April

Chapter Forty-four

Jay Davidovich

“Holy shit!” I exploded.

“What happened after the Last Supper, Alex?”Rachel did an eyes-right to get a look at me as she swung the Suburban onto our street. “Although I guess Jews shouldn't make jokes like that.”

“Doesn't sound like especially promising material for Christians, either.”

“You're right. From now on I'll limit myself to jokes about serial killers. They don't have an anti-defamation league. Yet. Why did you almost drop our bag of bagels just as I started the turn?”

“I realized something. All of a sudden. It's been gnawing at my brain for days, and then
bam!
It just hit me.”

Rachel pulled into our driveway and navigated smoothly to the back of the house and then into the farther stall in our garage.

“So what was it that nailed you like that?”

“
Katholische Theologische
something.”

“Is that some outfit you're going to report my blasphemous joke to?” Rachel did a nice job of flashing
faux
alarm as she asked the question.

“No. That's a place that the priest running the seminary in New Mexico that had a hacking problem mentioned. He said his seminary sometimes sent students there for a term to pick up some kind of world-class scriptural study.”

We were out of the car now and exiting the garage to start walking toward the back door. Rachel hungrily eyed the bagel bag as she got her key ready to open the door.

“Okay, I'll bite,” she said. “So what?”

“I'll have to check the briefing packet on my hacking case to be sure.” I set the bagels on the counter and opened my computer. “But I'm right at ninety-nine percent already. The name sounded familiar when the priest said it, and I couldn't figure out why.”

“I'll die of suspense, but not until after I've had a bagel. You want one?”

“No, thanks,” I murmured.
We finished breakfast less than twenty minutes ago, for crying out loud!

I clicked on the icon on my computer for the hacking case file and scrolled through the beginning part of it—the part that I'd just skimmed on my flight to Albuquerque. Most of it was the kind of inessential background detail that gets translated into pixels when a loss-prevention support assistant empties her notebook into a computer. But not all of it.

Bingo. There it was. I unholstered my phone and speed-dialed the shysterette's number. Voice-mail. Sunday morning, figures. I started to talk before the beep was over.

“This is Davidovich, otherwise known as muscle. Before I got called into the Pitt MCM thing, I was working on a computer-hacking matter at a seminary in New Mexico. It was the second insured computer-hacking loss at a Church-related university in the last two months, so Transoxana put Loss Prevention on it. Last week I was talking with the rector of the seminary in New Mexico, and he mentioned that for decades they've been sending students to an Austrian university called
Katholische Theologische Privatuniversitad
. Probably butchered the pronunciation, but you get the idea. This morning I finally realized why the name rang a bell: KTP was where the
first
hacking-loss claim came from. Thought you should know.”