Crooked (5 page)

C h a p t e r                           5

 
I
t was one of those frigid, densely overcast mornings that forebodes snow. More than that, there was the unmistakable musk of ice in the air. In the country, this scent would have been tinged with the scent of wood fires from a cozy hearth. In Manhattan, the aroma was perfumed with burning bread from the legions of food carts that stoke their burners with stale pretzels.

Maureen McNary had decided to take a car service to Manhattan. Normally, she would have snagged the R train from Bay Ridge, but she didn’t want her confidence marred by being late or having to hoof it. Being chauffeured has a way of putting a shine on your shoes.

And she hadn’t spared the Power Suit, the one she’d always worn to court when she worked for the NYPD. Gray worsted wool with thin red pinstripes, the ensemble included a double-breasted jacket and a respectably short skirt with a conservative yet curvature-enhancing number of pleats. Maureen was not by any means stocky, but she was decidedly muscular, and she felt the Power Suit accentuated her more feminine qualities. The pinstripes were an exact match to her ruby red hair.

The address was on 42nd Street, across from Bryant Park, and well apart from the other insurance biggies down in the 20s. Probably, Maureen reasoned, because Newcastle Warranty was the biggest of the biggies. The town car pulled up to the curb and Maureen stepped gracefully out. As she strode across the sidewalk, she shot an eye up the giant white building, which had a strangely concave facade, an architectural motif that made the whole building look like it was holding its breath.

On the twenty-second floor, Maureen approached the oak-paneled receptionist’s cubicle. The prim woman sitting there eyed her expectantly.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Drummond Yager.”

“Your name?” The receptionist flipped open the appointment book.

“Maureen McNary.”

“Oh, yes. I’ll ring him. If you’ll just wait there…” She gestured toward two red leather couches.

Between the couches and above the magazine table hung a tattered Union Jack in an elaborate gold frame. A small plaque affixed to the frame simply said “TITANIC.”
What a goof,
Maureen thought.

“Miss McNary?”

Maureen half expected some gap-toothed Terry Thomas character, and was not altogether disappointed. She was confronted with the chiseled countenance of a lean Englishman in his fifties, wearing a double-breasted herringbone suit. Severe silver hair was delicately plastered to his scalp, his complexion deeply creased with the kind of wrinkles one gets from hard climates. His overbite was made dignified by a strong chin and round wire-rimmed specs.

Maureen stepped forward and extended her right hand. He extended his left, and the handshake was awkward.

“Drummond Yager.” He took his other hand from his pocket—and there wasn’t one. Just an abbreviated palm with which he gestured down a side hallway. It looked like a cat’s paw. “Shall we repair to my office?”

Maureen followed him down a short hall. Inside his office an ornate desk the size of a small boat consumed the space from the windows to just shy of the door. Behind the desk was a world map flanked by pictures of large salvage ships, submersibles, and bathyscaphes. Maureen folded into a red leather wing chair opposite the desk, crossed her legs discreetly, and produced a notepad from her bag.

“I understand you’re here to investigate the instance of Barney Swires’s unfortunate demise.” Drummond leaned forward onto the expanse of his blotter, hand and nonhand side by side.

“Yes.” She managed not to focus on his paw, looking him straight in the eye. “I need details, like where all this happened, the names of people on the scene, local police who handled the investigation…”

“Absolutely.” Drummond nodded glumly like a funeral director and slid a thin folder across the desk. “It’s all here in an internal report prepared by my department. However, there really hasn’t been any police involvement. You see, in this particular area of Costa Rica, which is sparsely populated, there is only a sort of regional manager who looks into criminal matters. If it is deemed serious enough, federal investigators from San Jose get involved. In this case, the accident was considered open and shut. There were bullet holes in the boat, meaning he was shot at, no doubt by Nicaraguan pirates. Then there was the crocodile with Mr. Swires’s boot in it. Appalling.”

“Not for nothing, but you’d think the Costa Rican police would try to apprehend these pirates.” Maureen waved her pen incredulously.

“Allow me.” Drummond stood, pulling a retractable map of Central America down over the world map. From his breast pocket, he drew out a Mont Blanc pen, the white tip of which he used as a pointer. “You see here? This is Costa Rica. And this here? This is Nicaragua. The Rio Denada, the river where Mr. Swires was lost, opens to the ocean here in Costa Rica, but just upriver it becomes the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The Rio Denada, unlike, say, the Hudson River, is braided: it has many side channels, back bays, and swamps where the pirates can hide. To find them, one would have to chase them back into Nicaragua, and this is something the Costa Ricans will not do.” Drummond waved his paw hopelessly.

“And the Nicaraguans? They doing anything about these pirates?” Maureen adjusted her gaze.

“This region can only be accessed by boat and by float plane, or possibly trails that would take a week to traverse from the nearest town. The Nicaraguans really aren’t all that interested in policing an area so remote. They have no economic investment in the area, and the pirates don’t jeopardize their border or sovereignty. The only thing at stake are the Costa Rican fishing lodges that bring in American sportsmen.”

“And the Costa Ricans, they’re not concerned?”

“Up until now, the pirates had only been stealing boats from the lodges. Although these skiffs cost about five thousand dollars in Florida, the hefty import fees bring their cost up to twenty-six thousand a piece. The more boats stolen, the more boats have to be bought to replace them, and the more the government makes. And thus the more Newcastle Warranty loses in claims. That’s why we hired Mr. Swires.”

“These pirates…” Maureen tapped her pen on the pad. “They make a living swiping and reselling boats?”

“Drugs, mainly. They use the boats to navigate the river, move cocaine and marijuana from the highlands. Perhaps they sell a few of the boats to other fishing lodges. We really don’t know.”

“How come you called in this guy Barney? By what I’m told, his expertise was in preventing burglars from using subway tunnels and sewers to do break-ins. This seems kinda far out for him.”

“Well, Miss McNary”—Drummond returned the map to the ceiling and reseated himself—“Mr. Swires’s reputation in this business has grown rather formidably, and our LAD—”

“LAD?”

“Lost Assets Department. They recommended him to me. It was my understanding that his talents were, shall we say, very much along the lines of: it takes a thief to catch a thief. We gave him a try and, well…” Drummond’s paw deftly tucked the Mont Blanc inside his jacket, as though tucking Barney’s memory away. The folds of his face were pinched together in a mildly sad, if somewhat bemused, expression that Maureen thought odd.

“So where’s this foot now?” Maureen cocked her head.

“The foot? Oh, you mean Mr. Swires’s foot, from the…”

“The foot from the crocodile, whatever. We get that an’ we can find out whether it belongs to Swires.” Her pen was poised.

“Oh, I see, for DNA testing,” Drummond said glumly, as though he were a funeral director and she’d chosen the cheapest casket. “Isn’t that rather expensive?”

“Cheaper than a Costa Rican safari.” Maureen pulled the Ziploc from her purse, the one Nicasia had given Nicholas. “We can match a tissue sample to hair or skin samples from this brush, perhaps to his blood on this tissue.”

“A trip to Costa Rica? You mean, to search for Mr. Swires? Well, I daresay, even if that isn’t his foot, his chances of survival in that environment…”

“Hey, you never know. He could have been taken captive. He could have received medical attention.”

“My dear Miss McNary, the Rio Denada is teeming not only with crocodiles, but with alligators, not to mention half a dozen different kinds of vipers and coral snakes, including the highly temperamental and venomous snake known as the Bushmaster. The jungle is bristling with poisonous frogs, tarantulas, and banana spiders. The muddy shallows are awash with stinging catfish. During high tides, sharks move up into the river. Travel by foot through the coastal swamps and rain forest is an almost insurmountable challenge, especially if one is weak or injured. And the backwaters are populated only by thieves and murderers. What chance has a man who has lost a foot to a crocodile? And assuming, for the sake of argument, that he survived, he would be in no condition to move far from the place of the incident. Our people conducted a thorough search of the surrounding area and failed to discover his body—alive or dead. Assuming the foot is his, the chances of survival are, in my experienced estimation, nil.”

“You have a lot of experience in being stranded in the jungle without a foot?” Maureen arched an eyebrow.

“Absolutely.” Drummond held up his cat’s paw and smiled back. “When I worked in our Port Moresby office, I was investigating something quite similar, actually, in Indonesia. Pirates took away our craft, forced us into the river, then attempted to run us over with our own boat. They made quite a sport of it. Propeller mangled my hand, or nearly so. My partner swam for help, but I never heard from him again. Some local fishermen found me onshore right where the ambush took place, two days later. By that time, I’d had to remove what remained of my hand because it had begun to rot.” His smile disappeared. “Unpleasant in the extreme.”

Maureen paled only slightly from the gruesome details. Ten years on the police force gave you an iron gut and a morbid sense of humor.

“I see.” She snuck a side glance out the picture window, at the snow falling over Bryant Park. “So, Mr. Yager, when do I get the foot?”

His smile was forced, as though the bereaved had chosen cremation. “I’ll inquire.”

C h a p t e r                           6

 
S
now materialized in a hush out of an opaque sky, a brace of silent gulls dissolving into the gray. Barney put his hand out the window of the car, caught some of the flakes, and put his palm to his tongue. It was the taste of childhood, of sledding, of hot chocolate, of wet mittens on the radiator.

He parked his rental sedan in a small lot under the Triborough Bridge, under massive concrete arches supporting the bridge above. The lot was next to Icahn Stadium on Randall’s Island, a sister to Ward’s Island. They were two little river-bound satellites to Manhattan Island and the Bronx, stacked at the crotch of the East River where it split into the Harlem River and Hell Gate Channel. There was once a channel between the two islands, but it had since been filled. The islands’ primary tenants were the Sanitation Department Training Grounds, a Department of Environmental Protection water treatment plant, and the Manhattan State Mental Hospital. There were some ball fields on the north and south ends of the island, as well as Parks Department buildings. But mostly it was just a place where the piers supporting gigantic bridges and viaducts marched across the landscape like alien destroyers oblivious to what lay underfoot.

A backwater for secondary government facilities, the islands were a geographical afterthought—most New Yorkers couldn’t even tell you where they were. Pedestrian traffic was nonexistent, and there were no sidewalks, no bars, no homes, no delis. Cars: infrequent. It was the kind of place where bad things could happen out in the open, but didn’t.

Streamlined and turquoise, Icahn Stadium looked like a huge old 1950s diner from the front. Barney blinked up at the snowy structure, then lowered his gaze to a pay phone next to the stadium’s sleek ticket booth. A cold breeze whispered in his ear. He considered the phone for almost a full minute.

“I shouldn’t,” he said aloud. “But I will.” With long slow strides he started toward the phone.

There was a time when all that mattered to Barney was his collection. He’d always been more or less the quiet, thoughtful type, not subject to snap decisions or the feeling that he had to prove anything. But while a person may sometimes seem as unchanging as a dust-blown desert, there’s always water moving underground somewhere.

Back in the day, his expertise in locating abandoned tunnels and vaults around the city was almost legendary. It was rumored that he was psychic, or had X-ray vision. After carefully researching and studying plans and historical records, he would go out to the street and just stare at an intersection, noting the location of every manhole, every pavement seam, every surface irregularity. Then he’d stroll the area, scanning the ground like he’d dropped a dime. When asked what he was looking for, he’d say: “History.”

Sometimes he’d stop and feel the ground with the flat of his palm. Likely as not, there would be a troop of hard-hatted engineers in his wake, the ones who hadn’t previously witnessed his talents muttering skeptically. He might circle the site five or six times like this, his audience growing impatient. Then he’d eventually come to a slow stop and say: “Paint.”

Someone would hand him a can of spray paint, white, the kind that sprays upside down.

Then someone would invariably ask: “Here?”

He wouldn’t say anything, just flash them his quick, patented secret grin. It was his characteristic sly smile that could have been bashful or boastful. Crouching, he would start to paint a crisp white line on the pavement.

When he was done outlining the vault or tunnel below, someone would usually ask: “Are you sure?” The art of dowsing is invariably suspect. They didn’t know that he’d done exhaustive research in advance.

He’d give them that secret grin again, squint, and say: “Pretty sure.” It was at once facetious and conclusive. When he said
pretty sure
, there was no mistaking that he was absolutely positive.

He was always right. Always.

And that became a problem. Not for his job, but for Barney. It’s fine to be good at something, even great. Even expert. But when you come to be characterized as genius at what you do, that’s different. Often as not, genius is discovery without art. For said genius, it’s as if you’re doing a magic trick over and over. It’s just a trick, but no sleight of hand. Just pure aptitude and instinct. But it can amount to the same thing.

Barney didn’t realize the extent of his own malaise until the day he located an abandoned tunnel on Madison Avenue. It had once connected the basements of two mansions across the street from each other, one of which had become a private museum. He was with the construction crew when they cut a hole in the wall of a subway emergency exit tunnel and broke through the vaulted brick roof of the tunnel. They lowered a ladder, and Barney went down with his miner’s helmet to take dimensions and photos. The tunnel was bulkheaded in either direction at the basement walls, though one protruded beyond the building line of the museum. When he came out of the tunnel, the crew was having lunch. Barney was curious about exactly where this tunnel extended into the museum and studied the lawn in front of it for some time before going in.

He paid the entrance fee and walked along the Victorian marble hallways until he came into a room of antiquarian books. He stopped in front of a glass case. On display inside was Edgar Allan Poe’s
Tamerlane and Other Poems.
He’d never had any particular interest in collecting books, didn’t read anything but books on New York history. A placard noted that
Tamerlane
was one of twelve known copies, valued around $200,000. He studied the floor for a moment, crouched, and put a hand on the cool stone. He stood and looked about the room. Then he looked again at the book. With his toe, he tapped lightly on the wood front of the display case. Hollow. He pursed his lips.

The display case, of course, was directly above the tunnel.

The skies didn’t open in a gush of sunshine and seraphim choruses. Barney’s revelation was just as calm, considered, and measured as was his ascribed genius.

Two days later, a story came out in the paper about the tunnel.

Two nights after that, in the wee hours, Barney slipped into the emergency exit hatch with a bag of tools and came back up four hours later, covered in dust, with the little brown book wrapped in a towel.

Back at his apartment, his kitchen glowing with the beams of sunrise, he unwrapped the towel and gazed for an hour at the book in his hand. Just holding it, his blue eyes alight.

He was apprehensive when a coworker ran into his little office around noon that day to report the theft, that burglars had used the tunnel he found to steal an old book. But as the days passed, it became apparent the police figured the crooks had read about the tunnel in the papers. Barney was never even questioned.

In future criminal endeavors, Barney didn’t use his work projects. Rather, he researched and located tunnels adjacent to small museums or private collections on his own time. Vacant subway equipment rooms. Amtrak tunnels. Sewer chambers. Sealed building vaults. Abandoned aqueducts. Even heat-exchange culverts that led from downtown skyscrapers to the river. Most of these underground spaces were known to numerous people in and out of government: they weren’t lost or abandoned, so he was never singled out.

He was careful to obscure any patterns that might be detected in his crimes. They were widely disparate geographically, anywhere within the five boroughs but as far away as Albany, which made it more difficult for various police agencies to compare notes. He stole a wide variety of mediums and genres. He used different tools. He left conflicting evidence of the size of the “gang” at work, from two to five, based on discarded work gloves, coffee cups, cigarette butts, gum wrappers, what have you.

It was often ridiculously easy to steal valuables once a wall or floor was breached. As even the most cursory study of art theft substantiates, most such burglaries are more the product of initiative than daring and intricacy. Smaller museums and private collections often have rudimentary alarm systems and no guards after hours. No matter that they have millions of dollars in art and collectibles on hand. Just alarms on the doors and windows at night, so that if you don’t come in that way, there’s little chance of detection. For many successful thieves, alarms aren’t even an issue: they walk in during the day and when no one is in the room use a box cutter to remove a painting in less than thirty seconds, roll it up, tuck it in their trench coat, and walk out.

And inasmuch as Barney didn’t try to sell any of his acquisitions, the chance of getting caught after the fact was practically nil. That’s where the garden-variety art thief almost always got pinched.

Like any worthwhile endeavor, the rewards of collecting this way proved complex but cumulative, and at times hard to peg. Mostly it had to do with
what it was
and
what it wasn’t
.

What it was
was tangible proof of his conquest, not just a notch in his belt. As he stole a Gauguin here, an Incan idol there, an extinct stuffed ivory-billed woodpecker over there, his collection grew. So did the stakes—it was dangerous, which, combined with his cunning, made it a thrill. It was about being a collector, which is something only a fellow die-hard collector can truly appreciate. Collecting is about the coveting, the obsession, the hunt, the acquisition, the accomplishment, the possession. But more than that, each piece had a life of its own, each one fueling his soul as though he were absorbing its life force. His collection was a kaleidoscope of history.

What it wasn’t
was stealing. Barney wasn’t delusional—he knew that he would be seen as a crook if discovered, but he didn’t see himself that way. The wealthy families and institutions he relieved of their possessions were not seriously deprived, especially as long as the insurance companies compensated the victims. It wasn’t about money, since he didn’t sell the pieces. It wasn’t about notoriety, about reading of his exploits in the paper, though he did have to keep up with what the police were thinking, so far as he could.

Yet, it also wasn’t entirely rewarding. Possessions make poor companions. Not many women would appreciate Barney’s penchant for stealing rare works. To have a woman live with him, to know where he went, to find out about the storage locker with his tools and research, to find out about the other locker with the collection, was untenable. And of course, he could never be entirely honest with a woman. Truth was a barrier.

Then Nicholas Palihnic had hunted him down, taken it all away in exchange for half a million dollars and no prosecution. Nobody knew except the insurance companies and Nicholas. Barney was even able to keep his job with the city. He tried to compensate for the loss of his treasure by buying rare items, but by comparison, there was so little challenge. The job with Trident Mutual? Just like his genius at finding lost tunnels and vaults, his innate knack for gaining access to museums ably pitted him against would-be thieves. At the same time, his world began to fade. Malaise followed. In the morning, he couldn’t think of a reason to get out of bed.

Nicasia had reversed that. With his collection gone, Barney could afford to let a woman get close, and in turn discover the rewards of opening his life, his heart, his trust, to another. They met at Trident Mutual, and their attraction was instantaneous, their bond deep, their love palpable and kinetic. He came to realize that the love of a woman was one of the most precious things he could ever have collected. It was like owning a rare work, in a way, and you only needed one to be happy. Love had a life of its own the way art had provenance, history. And like his collecting, it required Barney to give a lot of himself. The more he put in, the more he got. But love also filled a different void in him, one not only of the soul but of the heart. Keeping it filled—the way he’d kept his storage locker full of rare collectibles—grew to define him in a way that
objets d’art
never had. Never could have. Being with, even talking with, Nicasia kept that void filled.

But she didn’t know the truth about his past. And she didn’t know about his current enterprise. The truth barrier remained. If all went according to plan, Barney aimed to break down that wall once and for all.