The Icon Thief (3 page)

Maddy dutifully counted off three seconds, but knew that they were almost done. She was about to nod one last time, raising the bid to the final price, when the Russian at the rear of the room, who had been seated in silence since the auction began, raised his paddle into the air.

There was a murmur of excitement. The auctioneer was momentarily thrown off his rhythm, but quickly recomposed himself. “On my right at four million four hundred,” the auctioneer said, moving slightly away from the rostrum. He glanced between Maddy and the phone clerk, extending his hands like a symphony conductor. “Do I have four million five?”

Maddy, flustered in spite of herself, whispered: “The Russian just made a bid.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Reynard said, although he sounded surprised as well. “Take it to five million. We’ll regroup from there.”

“Okay,” Maddy said, nodding at the auctioneer. Four million five hundred thousand.

Without hesitation, the Russian waved his paddle. Four million six hundred thousand.

The auctioneer, along with the rest of the room, was waiting for her response. Maddy counted to three. Before she could nod, however, the phone clerk raised her hand. Four million seven hundred thousand.

The Russian bid again. Four million eight hundred thousand. By now, the attendees were craning their necks to get a better look at the bidder, who was waving his paddle as if trying to swat a fly, his phone nowhere in sight.

“This guy won’t stop at five million,” Maddy whispered, watching as the phone bidder took it up to four million nine hundred thousand, only to have the Russian bid again. “What do you say?”

When Reynard failed to respond at once, Maddy knew that he was updating the pricing model with the latest information. At last, the fund manager said, “Okay. We can go up to seven million.”

As soon as she heard this, Maddy caught the auctioneer’s eye. The auctioneer gave her a smile, as if she had paid him a personal compliment. “Five million one hundred thousand,” the auctioneer said, drawing out the syllables. “With the lady at five million one hundred. Do I have five million two hundred?”

The Russian, implacable, bid again. As Maddy studied his face, it seemed to her that he was bored, as if he felt that they were drawing out a process that had only one possible conclusion. Before she knew it, the price had blown past six million five hundred, more than twice the presale estimate. For the first time, she began to consider the possibility that she might lose.

She watched as the Russian bid seven million. As the auction babe conferred with her client, the room fell silent. Maddy sat still, heart thumping, waiting for Reynard to update the model.

Finally, after a long pause, Reynard sighed into the earpiece. “Too high. Let it go.”

Maddy found herself blushing with shame, keenly aware of the news crews clustered in the far corner. She wondered if coverage of the auction would mention her by name. “All right.”

“Don’t let it get to you,” Reynard said. “He doesn’t understand the winner’s curse.”

But the lot wasn’t over yet. As the auctioneer continued to play for time, repeating the current bid, drawing out the words for as long as possible, the clerk finally nodded. Seven million one hundred thousand.

Without a pause, the Russian raised his paddle in the air. Seven million two hundred.

Maddy, reduced to the status of a spectator, watched as the Russian and the clerk took the price even higher. As the bidding passed ten million and headed for eleven, the Russian raised his paddle and held it there, a lighthouse bid, signaling that he was willing to buy the painting at any price. It was a strange gesture, since the rival it was designed to intimidate wasn’t even in the room, but it seemed to work. With the bid at eleven million, the clerk spoke into the phone, listened, and spoke again. The silence deepened, the room watching and waiting.

Finally, after a hush that seemed endless, although it could have lasted no more than a few seconds, the clerk shook her head.

“Eleven million dollars with the gentleman on my
right,” the auctioneer said, relishing the moment. “At eleven million, are we all through? Fair warning at eleven million. Last chance, fair warning—”

The auctioneer rapped his gavel against its block. “Yours, sir, at eleven million. And your paddle number is?”

Before the Russian could read off his number, his voice was drowned out by a burst of applause. Maddy watched, drained, as the Russian was surrounded by members of the Sotheby’s staff, who formed a protective circle as the news crews charged forward for a picture.

There was a camera in her purse, a piece of paper taped across the bulb to soften the flash. Switching it on, she took a picture of the Russian, who was handing his paddle to a representative of the auction house. It caught him with his face turned toward hers, arm extended, revealing a length of sleeve. When the flash went off, he glanced briefly in her direction. Their eyes locked. Then he looked away.

As the murmur of the crowd rose to a roar, Reynard shouted into her earpiece. “We need to fix our pricing model. And we need this guy’s name.” The fund manager’s voice, normally so controlled, was cracking with emotion: “Find out who the buyer is. If he’s as big as he looks, he’s going to move the entire market, and we need to be ready for it. You understand?”

Maddy nodded, knees weak. She slid the camera back into her purse, then raised her eyes to the balcony. Behind the glass of the skybox, outlined against the light, a darkened figure was looking down at the salesroom. Before she could make out his face, he turned aside, drawing the curtain, and was gone.

E
ven before the patrolman said a word, Alan Powell knew what was coming. The officer, a swell of belly spilling over the belt of his uniform, studied Powell’s badge with an air of amusement, then handed it back. “Who are you supposed to be?” the patrolman asked. “One of the Thundercats?”

Powell smiled at this quip, which had been popular among the Americans he had met so far. Not for the first time, he quietly cursed the man who had designed this badge, with its emblem of a snarling panther leaping across the globe. “No. Serious Organised Crime Agency. You know it?”

At the sound of his accent, which was incontestably out of place in Brighton Beach, the patrolman grinned broadly. Looking at himself through the officer’s eyes, Powell saw himself for precisely what he was, an Englishman, nearing forty, with thick glasses and an alarmingly high forehead, who seemed stranded on the wrong side of the ocean, if not on the wrong planet altogether.

He was steeling himself for a second try when he saw Rachel Wolfe coming his way. Wolfe held up her own
badge, which hung from a fine chain around her neck. “It’s okay. He’s with me.”

The grin lingering on his face, the patrolman stood aside, allowing Powell to ascend the ramp to the boardwalk. As they approached the section that had been cordoned off, he turned to Wolfe. “Thanks. But this had better be important. I’m being deposed tomorrow, and I’m knackered enough as it is—”

“It takes a day to adjust for every hour of time change,” Wolfe said. “You still have a day or two to go. Or is it nerves?”

“Something like that.” Powell did not mention that when the phone at the hotel rang, he had been standing before his bathroom mirror, rehearsing the deposition that he was scheduled to give the following morning.

“Trust me, you’ll be glad you came,” Wolfe said. She was young, cute, and Mormon, a recent Quantico graduate, so new to the job that her pistol and package of bullets were still locked in a safe in her supervisor’s office. In the days since his arrival, Powell had come to know her well, and she struck him as competent and tough, if exhaustingly straitlaced.

He looked down the boardwalk, which extended for two miles along the beach. It was an hour before dusk. From where he stood, he could see into the covered pavilions where old Russian men were playing backgammon in the dying light. To his left stretched a row of restaurants and clubs, their outdoor tables facing the ocean. Without surprise, he recognized the patio of the Club Marat.

A few steps ahead, yellow barrier tape had been strung on sawhorses, blocking off an area of the boardwalk
twenty feet square. A crowd of onlookers had gathered around the uniforms who were guarding the scene. The golf carts used by boardwalk police were parked nearby.

Powell followed Wolfe to the sawhorses. “Any sign of our man from overseas?”

“Not yet. I’ve been watching the club all day. I haven’t seen anyone we don’t know.” She lifted the tape, allowing Powell to duck inside. “Kandinsky and I were parked across the street when we noticed the crowd. When we saw what was going on, I figured you ought to see it.”

Powell nodded absently as they neared the heart of the scene. A section of the boardwalk had been torn up, leaving a hole the size of a coffin lid. Standing around the opening were more uniforms and a hefty figure in plain clothes. Judging from his blue nitrate gloves and territorial air, Powell guessed that he was the detective who had caught the case.

Kneeling by the opening, Powell looked with detachment at what had been revealed. With the planks gone, the boardwalk’s concrete supports had been exposed, along with the sand that came up nearly to the rim of the hole. As he regarded what was underneath, he understood why Wolfe had wanted him to see it, although he sensed that it would be nothing but a distraction.

A woman’s headless body lay beneath the boardwalk, partly buried by drifts of sand. She was mummified. Dry heat had hardened her skin into something with the consistency of dehydrated beef, the flesh shriveled into a leathery toughness. Except for her panties and bra, once white but now a dirty yellow, she was naked. Her limbs, shrunken to the bone, seemed as fragile as a bat’s folded wings.

Lowering his eyes, Powell felt another flicker of
interest. The woman’s hands were missing as well. Her arms were crossed over her chest, a pair of bloodless stumps where the hands should have been. The head had been removed at the jawline, leaving only the truncated cylinder of her neck, like a stout branch that had been pruned away. “Who found her?”

“A maintenance crew,” Wolfe said. “One of the long boards was warping. When they pulled it up, this is what they saw.” Turning aside, she led Powell to a spot several steps away. “Now do you see why I called?”

“I do,” Powell said. He took a moment to clarify the situation in his own mind. Removal of the head and hands, while far from conclusive, was typical of
mafiya
killings. “You think that Sharkovsky was involved?”

“We know that he sometimes runs prostitutes,” Wolfe said, glancing at the club behind them. “A lot of girls come through here. If one of them died, it wouldn’t surprise me if he hid her under the boards.”

“Maybe.” Removing his glasses, Powell took out his handkerchief and polished the lenses one at a time. “We need to tread carefully. If the police go after Sharkovsky, he’ll change his routine.”

“If you’re worried about this, you should talk to Barlow. He’s the only one who can put a homicide investigation on hold.”

Powell, putting his glasses back on, was about to reply when it occurred to him that there was another point that deserved further examination. Ducking beneath the tape, he headed for the officer who had met him on his arrival. The patrolman did not seem particularly receptive to his approach, but his manner thawed slightly at the sight of Wolfe. “Something I can do for you?”

“The sand,” Powell said. “It comes up to the boards. Is it the same everywhere?”

“Under the boards?” In the patrolman’s mouth, the word
boards
sounded like
bawds
. “Depends. On this stretch, sure, the sand comes all the way up. Eight foot deep, in some cases.”

“So you can’t walk under the boards,” Wolfe said, understanding the problem at once. If the sand went all the way to the top, it would have been impossible to carry the body to where it had been found.

“Nope, no room,” the patrolman said. “Of course, there used to be. When I first got on this beat, you could walk under the boards for miles. That was before the Army Corps of Engineers extended the beach. To keep out the homeless, we fenced off the rear of the boardwalk. And then the sand took it back.” He paused. “But if you’ve got an open fence, like a chain link, the sand on the wind just blows through, instead of piling up under the boards. So in those places—”

Before the officer had finished, Powell was heading down the ramp to the parking lot, which gave him a view of the space beneath the boards. The boardwalk here was eight feet off the ground, sealed off by a wire fence that would allow blown sand to escape. As the others followed, he observed that the ground under the boards was clear, with a good seven feet of headspace.

To his right, there was a newer section of fence, with dense green mesh hung across the wire links. Beyond it, a concrete wall formed one edge of the parking lot. Here, where the fence and the wall created a solid barrier, the sand had accumulated in increasingly larger drifts. A few yards later, it was up to the boards. And it was there,
Powell saw, that the body had been found. “Can you open this gate?”

The patrolman glanced nervously at Wolfe, clearly thinking of the homicide detective standing above their heads. As a matter of professional courtesy, a detective owned his crime scene. “Normally, I’d say fine, but—”

“It’s all right,” Wolfe said, touching her badge. “Just a quick look, and we’ll be out of your hair.” Her tone was polite but persuasive, and Powell wondered, in passing, if she had learned it as a missionary.

“Well, okay,” the patrolman said doubtfully. Taking out his key ring, he unlocked the gate, which keened on rusted hinges. As they went under the boards, Powell could barely make out the concrete supports, where drifts of sand, no higher than a few inches, had gathered against the pillars. Through the gaps between the planks, regular lines of light fell against the uneven ground.

Pulling the flashlight from his belt, the patrolman handed it to Wolfe, who switched it on, casting its beam against the wall of sand to their right. Examining it, Powell saw that a considerable problem remained. “It’s impossible. We’re ten feet from where the girl was found, but the sand is already above our heads. So how did our guy bring the body as far as he did?”