Dirty Fire (10 page)

“What we have in federal files is yours, as far as I can make it available,” Santori said. “And there are some sources I can call and set you up with interviews. Tell me what you need, and I’ll see what we can do.”

Gil nodded. “What’s your program, Davey?”

“Finding Sonnenberg is a priority,” I answered. “From what Lichtman says, he’s most likely to have been involved with the Levinsteins at some level. I’ve looked at his file. There’s no record of violence, but he looks awfully good for the theft. It’s up his alley. He has a couple of priors involving possession of stolen goods, including a collection of old icons he lifted from an Orthodox church a couple of years ago.”

“Know where to start looking?” Santori asked.

“We have an address for Sonnenberg that might still be good,” I said. “It’s down in the city, on Devon Avenue. We’ll have to coordinate with the Chicago PD, but that shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll use Posson and Bird for any heavy lifting we need.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Evans dryly. “As a fire chief and an acting fire marshal, you two might find it handy to have an armed police officer along.”

“Even if he or she might be working against you,” Santori added, cheerfully. I looked at him but said nothing.

The meeting was over, and we started to file out. But Santori put a hand on my arm, motioning Evans and Gil ahead. He waited until the door had closed behind them.

“Got a minute, Davey?” he asked, and pulled a small tape player from his side pocket. “There’s something I think you should hear.”

• • •

Outside, the air tasted of ozone and flashes of light danced on the far horizon. Spring was once more demonstrating its volatility, and fat drops of rain began to fall heavily from the darkness overhead. Shoulders hunched, I dashed to where I had left my car.

On the windshield, where raindrops were spotting the dust on the glass, a piece of paper folded to the size of a matchbook was tucked under the wiper blade on the driver’s side. I placed my gym bag on the hood near the windshield and made a show of patting my pockets as if looking for misplaced keys. As unobtrusively as possible, I put my other hand on the car and palmed the note.

As I drove away, I smoothed the note on my lap. In the dim glow of the lighted dashboard, I could barely make out an address, written in pencil and with a distinctive backward slant. There was no signature, but even in the near-darkness I had no trouble recognizing the penmanship.

• • •

The rains fell as they fall only in the springtime, flung from young clouds that boiled black and furious. They fired indiscriminate volleys of huge blue-white forked bolts as if to punish the earth for some imagined slight. The world was alive with the noise of it all, the thunder so close I could feel it rock the car.

The downpour beat a tattoo on the car’s roof as I waited in the far corner of the strip mall’s lot. I was at the right address, parked in the shadows cast by a tall picket-frame enclosure. I could smell the sour tang of the dumpsters behind it, even with the windows closed.

Then I jumped, startled at movement outside the glass, and suddenly Chaz Trombetta was standing beside the car. As I moved to open the door, Trombetta stopped me with an abrupt negative movement of his head. Instead, he motioned for me to roll down the window.

“You never got it from me,” Chaz said, his voice low and tight. “Hell, you never
saw
me—understand?”

He reached under his raincoat, and my heart raced for an instant. Then, instead of the pistol I had half expected, Chaz drew from under his raincoat an envelope. Its sides bulged against a thick red rubber band.

The rain pelted down, spotting the paper like a maiden’s tears.

Trombetta contemplated the envelope for a moment, a man taking a final look before touching flame to his last remaining bridge. Then he pushed it quickly through the window, as if posting a check written on a defunct account.

The envelope dropped heavily into my lap. Chaz Trombetta walked away in the dark without looking back.

I rolled the rubber band off and riffled through the papers inside the envelope. They were photocopies of computerized receipts, each detailing what appeared to be a transaction. I pulled one from the stack and studied it under the dim light.

There was a line of eight numbers, followed by a three-letter suffix. Below, another line of sans-serif type read “
27.6 GAL
,” followed by a time and date. I scanned through several more of the half-sheets in the envelope. All were similarly marked, though the numbers differed.

I had seen similar receipts before, though not for almost a quarter of a year. It had been that long since I had fueled the car assigned to me by the Lake Tower Police Department, keying the codes to activate the automated gasoline pumps behind the Municipal Center.

The Everett McKinley Dirkson Building is part of Chicago’s Federal Plaza, located in the heart of the south Loop. Designed by Mies van der Rohe to be an imposing structure, the steel and glass edifice is a fitting tribute to the longtime Republican senator from Illinois who is remembered for his oft-quoted comment on government fiscal policy: ”A billion here, a billion there…and pretty soon it adds up to
real
money.”

The early morning crowd of federal employees had already entered by the time Gil Cieloczki, Mel Bird and I walked across the open-air expanse past
Flamingo
, Alexander Calder’s storklike welded-steel sculpture. It is painted a hideous red-orange, only a shade or two away from the color used to warn sailors of hazards and obstructions. Some find that too an apt metaphor, remembering another adage often used to define ‘oxymoron’: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Among the alphabet soup of helpful federal bureaucracies that call Federal Plaza home is the Chicago Field Office of the FBI.

As befits a major metropolis, the Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains a substantial presence in the City of Chicago. In the Dirkson Building, the FBI occupies all of the ninth and tenth floors, only grudgingly sharing the eleventh with the Federal Communications Commission.

The Special Agent in Charge—SAC, in Bureau jargon pronounced “sack”—is an august personage. Currently, she presides over more than four hundred agents, technicians and other specialists here and in satellite offices scattered throughout the metropolitan area.

Of the fifty-six FBI field offices across the country, Chicago is considered one of the more active areas for the FBI and the Justice Department attorneys with whom they work. Everything from political corruption cases to bank robberies—the Windy City is a perennial national leader in both categories—can be found among the active case files here.

As a result, the Chicago office tends to take pains to maintain good relationships with local law enforcement departments, also recognizing that local officials usually have direct lines of communication to their congressperson—who in turn usually has the home telephone number of the attorney general on his or her speed-dialer.

We were met at the eighth floor reception area by a neatly dressed, clean-shaven man who introduced himself as Special Agent Santori. A badge clipped to his suit lapel identified the agent as a COP—Community Outreach Program—liaison officer. If Bird noticed the badge looked a little too new, or that Santori looked a little too senior for a liaison assignment, he was too awed by his surroundings to mention it.

For other, more informed, reasons, neither did Gil nor I.

“Chief Cieloczki, I’m glad you could make it in today. Hello, Mr. Davey.” The FBI officer turned to Bird. “You must be Detective Bird.”

“I’m plainclothes, not a detective,” Bird corrected. “Good to meet you.”

Santori seemed not to hear the comment. “Chief, we do a lot of work with fire departments, but it’s mainly consulting and providing lab backup on arsons,” he smiled. “This is the first time I’ve had a firefighter ask to speak to an FBI art expert.”

Cieloczki smiled back. “I’ll be honest with you,” Gil said. “I was more than a little surprised to find out you guys had one.”

We walked down a hallway chaotic with activity, Santori leading past closed office doors marked only with room numbers.

“Hey, Uncle Sammy has everything,” Santori said. “You’ve seen
The X-Files
.”

He turned a corner, dodging a mail cart being pushed by a woman in dark pants and a blazer that did not quite conceal her holstered Glock. “But not only do we have
an
art expert, we have
the
art expert.

“Gentlemen—you’re going to meet with Charlie Herndon, and there’s
nobody
who knows more about the criminal side of the art world. He lectures to police departments around the country, and places like the Art Institute here in Chicago ask
him
to consult with their experts. I heard Charlie talk at Quantico a few years back. He had a standing-room-only crowd—a lot of them were senior agents, and it takes a lot to impress those people.”

Santori stopped outside a door and lowered his voice. “A word of advice, okay? The man is a genius when it comes to his specialty. He’s been with the Bureau since the Hoover days, and he’s like an encyclopedia. But”—the agent gave us a significant look—“one thing he is
not
, and that’s a politician. Okay?”

Santori knocked on the door without waiting for a response and ushered us through.

The room looked smaller than it probably was, which I initially attributed to the bookshelves that lined every available inch of wall space. Then I realized I was mistaken. What made the room feel cramped was the man sitting behind the polished wooden desk of a senior civil servant. It only looked undersized because Charles Herndon was a big man.

Herndon remained seated. From the corner of my eye, I could see Gil—whose firefighter’s eye still measured people in terms of carry-weight and rescue difficulty—studying the oversized agent.

I estimated Herndon as only two or three inches shy of seven feet tall. His hands, poised over the keyboard of a desktop computer, were the size of catcher’s mitts. He was dressed in a navy blue suit jacket, a white shirt and a striped blue-over-green silk tie. His silver hair was trimmed unfashionably short; the eyes of a drill instructor broadcast a confident challenge from behind black-framed glasses.

“Oh, yeah,” the man muttered in a voice so deep it rattled windows, “the fireman.” An index finger like a broomstick pointed to three visitors’ chairs, arrayed in plumb before the desk. “Sit.” To Santori: “Ronnie, why don’t you leave these people with me for a few minutes?”

Santori left—a little too willingly, I thought. My own bottom was still an inch from the seat of the chair when Herndon began.

“Okay—I’ll talk, you listen. You can ask questions later,” Herndon said. He held up a thin sheaf of papers that I recognized as the fax Gil had sent the afternoon before.

“Chief Cieloczki, I appreciate you sending me your case notes. When you called yesterday, you told my SAC that you wanted the
Reader’s Digest
version of art crimes. From what you told her, you’re assuming your case may involve the theft of valuable, possibly museum-quality, artwork. Maybe, maybe not. Let’s look at that.”

“First off, I’m going to oversimplify. While there’s a lot of art and cultural artifacts being stolen these days, stealing art is not exactly the easiest way to make an illegal living. It happens because it’s been my experience people will steal damn near
anything
. But with artwork, you buy into a hell of a lot of headaches. I’ll get to some of them in a minute, but right now you should just know that it’s a pretty specialized crime. Most thieves avoid it. Fact one for you: there aren’t that many places you can go to with a really valuable painting and sell it.”

The FBI agent leaned back in his chair and locked his fingers behind his head. The movement pulled his suit jacket apart. I could see the big .40 caliber Glock riding high on Herndon’s belt, butt angled forward in the approved FBI position.

Herndon held his fingers up in a
V
for Victory.

“Fact two,” Herndon continued, “the value of this stuff is its authenticity. Say you have a painting you’re convinced is by one of the Old Dutch Masters. Or something by Mattise, or a Pissarro, whatever. You’ve got to be able to prove it’s the real McCoy. The key word is ‘prove.’ I’m talking authentication by reputable authorities as well as an ironclad, documented chain of ownership.”

“But people still get burned, right?” Bird asked, his tone carrying a hint of challenge.

“Oh, sure,” Herndon said. “Fake documentation and fake art go hand in hand. And believe me, there are enough fraudulent pieces out there—damn good fakes, the kind that even the experts get into arguments over—to fill up every museum in Europe. And there’d still be enough left over for a new wing on every museum east of the Mississippi. You ever hear of Elmyr de Hory?”

“Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s,” I said. “He pumped out hundreds, maybe thousands of fake Impressionists.”

Herndon eyed me closely, as if seeing me for the first time.

“I was starting to wonder if you spoke English,” he said, not smiling. “Elmyr did ‘em all—Gauguins, Chagalls, Cézannes, you name it. A lot of them are still hanging in museums, and the curators swear they’re genuine. Don’t get me wrong; what I’m saying is that in art, it’s a ‘buyer beware’ world.”

Herndon smiled wickedly.

“And that brings us to fact number three. It’s also ‘seller beware’ because there are people like
me
under every other bush,” he said. “You remember, back a few years, some guys climbed a ladder into a museum in Norway and left with a painting called
The Scream
? Every schoolkid in the world knows that painting. Sure, maybe they think the idea came from that
Home Alone
movie, when the kid puts on aftershave lotion. But they know what the painting looks like, right?”

He seemed to expect a response and waited until Gil nodded.

“So one day it up and disappears,” Herndon said. “Well, just about right away stories started going around about how it was being shopped to rich Arabs and software billionaires and even Colombian drug lords.”

“That was a load of bullshit, and we knew it,” he said. “The same kind of stories made the rounds thirty years ago when some goofs walked out of the Louvre with the
Mona Lisa
. Both times, the thieves didn’t even try to sell the paintings to anybody. They’d have been arrested in a minute, and they knew it.

“All in all, there’s almost nothing trickier to sell than a stolen work of art. And I don’t mean just the famous ones, either. We live in the Information Age. Just about every piece of art you’d want to steal has been photographed and catalogued and cross-indexed. Hell’s bells, that’s the basis for the National Stolen Art File. If anything substantial goes on the market, the art newsgroups on the Internet go crazy. People talk about it; if it’s a piece that’s gone missing from somewhere, a lot of people know about it. It’s a thief’s nightmare!” He didn’t sound displeased at the thought.

“What about private collectors?” Bird asked.

“What about ‘em?” Herndon retorted. “Most of the stolen art that’s missing isn’t in a private collection—it’s at the bottom of some damn trunk or storage locker the thief’s hiding ‘em in. Look, there really aren’t all that many buyers out there. You need a customer who is rich enough to have a private art collection. He also has to be bent, and stupid enough to buy something hot.
Really
hot. So hot that anytime they show it to somebody, they run the risk of having a cop with a warrant knock on the front door.

“But okay—let’s say you could find somebody crooked enough
and
dumb enough to buy on that basis,” he conceded. “You can bet what they’re being offered are fakes. Pretty good fakes, maybe, but almost never the real article. See, it’s a better setup for a swindle than a sale. Who does the buyer get to authenticate the piece? Where can he go to get a second opinion? All the usual safeguards are off, which makes it all pretty dicey.”

“The chances of getting burned or busted are just too high for most of the low-lifes,” he smiled. “Particularly when, as you seem to be saying in your notes, there’s a number of art pieces involved.”

He held his hands palm up and moved them up and down as if weighing small trucks. “On one hand, only an idiot would buy stolen items in bulk; on the other, the more people you contact with a proposition, the better your chances somebody talks and you get caught.

“What I’m trying to tell you is that an art theft is a complicated thing to pull off successfully. It’s not like knocking off a convenience store or stealing a car. Even a really good car.”

Gil frowned. “But it happens,” he persisted.

Herndon nodded, in what for him must have been a magnanimous show of patience.

“Sure,” he said. “A few years back, a couple of goofs dressed like cops bluffed their way into a Boston museum and walked out with maybe three hundred million in Rembrandts, Degas and Vermeers. Disappeared without a trace. But you can’t sell stuff like this out of the back of a truck. Okay, there are crooked dealers out there who broker stolen art—but the vast majority of it was stolen a long time ago. Long enough for the dealer to put together a convincing chain of ownership.

“If you put together a decent provenance—one that is at least plausible—maybe you have a chance at some money. There
are
ways—a year ago, we caught a guy who was doctoring old museum catalogues and archival files. He was trying to establish fakes as ‘rediscovered’ authentics, but the concept is the same. Compile a really convincing provenance, and even places like Christie’s and Sotheby’s will give you a pedigree that can translate into big money.”

“Both those places have been stung with a tricked-up history on a painting,” I added. “Once in a blue moon, that is.”

“Yeah, but your case is different,” Herndon countered. “It’s more like somebody walking into the Treasury Building with a whole sack of counterfeit bills and asking for each one of them to be certified as genuine. That could happen, in theory. But I doubt it.”

Bird had been sitting deep in his chair, his legs crossed widely and his foot twitching like the tail of an irritated cat. Now he slapped his ankle and interrupted the agent.

“C’mon,” Bird said. “You keep telling us how hard it is. Are we just wasting everybody’s time here?”

Herndon looked at Bird with the expression of a man who suffered fools only occasionally, and never gladly.

“No, friend,” he said, after a long moment of studying the plainclothes policeman. “I’m saying there’s only one real market for this kind of stolen artwork. Here’s the fourth and final fact about stolen artwork in the
real
world. You try to sell it back to the owner or the insurance company, which usually comes to about the same thing.”