Chapter 12

Myron stood in Feitler’s storage room surveying the art his assistants had rescued from the van.

“That’s quite a haul,” he finally said. “A Monet, a Manet, a Holcomb, a Harrill, a Rubens, a Pollock, a Warhol, and a Rousseau. Pretty eclectic. I notice they’re all relatively small.” He turned to me. “So, am I seeing the tip of the iceberg?”

“Yes. Pieces small enough to carry by myself and that would fit in the van.”

He sighed.

“What are we looking at here?” Fenton asked. We all turned to him, and he said, “I mean, the value.”

“Each of these paintings is insured for between five hundred thousand and forty million,” Myron said. “In total, a lot of money.”

Fenton whistled.

“Assuming they’re all genuine,” Wil said.

I turned to him. “And why would you think otherwise?”

“After we’re through here, we’ll go over to the museum,” Myron said. “The audit is turning up some very interesting things.”

The light dawned. “No. Please tell me that Boyle wasn’t substituting fakes and selling the originals.”

“If you like,” Myron said. “I’ll tell you Santa Claus is real if it will make you happy.”

“Crap. Good fakes?” I asked.

“Damned good.” He gave me a strange look. “You look like someone kicked your puppy.”

I did feel slightly sick to my stomach. “I can understand stealing a painting. I can even understand someone wanting to hang it on their wall, so they could look at it every morning. I’ve felt that way about an artwork a few times, and if I can’t afford it, I buy a print. But painting a copy and taking the real one away from the world…” I shook my head, not able to put my feelings into words. “It just doesn’t sit right.”

I thought about the implications of forgeries hanging in a major museum. The art world would be turned upside down for a while. Curators and collectors would have to go through their inventories to verify the paintings they had, and top appraisers would be raking in the money.

“What does that mean for business?” Wil asked.

Myron rubbed the top of his head. “Nothing good. It will depress the value of every painting in the world until things shake out. Everyone will be afraid to buy anything.”

Adrian Martel, Director of Compliance for the North American Museum Alliance, was a totally imposing individual, immaculately attired in a suit that cost a small fortune. He stood four or five inches taller than Wil’s six-four, and weighed at least three hundred pounds. I guessed him to be in his fifties, with skin the color of black coffee, a hawks-beak nose, and curly salt-and-pepper hair.

He led us to a large room with two guards stationed at both doors. Sweeping his hand toward a number of paintings leaning against the left-hand wall, he said, “Those twenty are stolen. We found most of them in the storerooms, but two were actually hanging on the damned walls.”

Turning to a couple of tables on the other side of the room that held seven paintings, he said, “Those are forgeries we found in the storerooms.”

“How much of the inventory have you gone through?” I asked.

“Maybe ten percent. The inventory is a mess. Nothing is where it should be, we can’t find pieces that should be here, and we’re finding pieces that aren’t catalogued.” He glared at us. “It’s as if things are screwed up on purpose so no one can figure out what’s going on. Hell, I found a damned Matisse hanging in the Director’s office that isn’t catalogued.”

The longer he talked the more agitated he became, pacing and gesticulating, his voice growing louder.

“Wonderful,” I said. “Myron told us the forgeries are well done.”

“Of the seven, four would pass almost anywhere. The others would pass anyone but an expert.” He pounded the table with his fist for emphasis, and the paintings all jumped and did a dance.

He was so angry that I didn’t risk asking how he knew they were fakes. I figured it was safer to take his word for it. I recognized three of the paintings from seeing pictures of them. That meant they were fairly famous.

“How long do you think it’s going to take you to get it all straight?” Myron asked in a calm, quiet voice.

“Until fucking doomsday!” Martel shouted.

“I don’t think we can shut the museum down that long,” Wil said.

Martel visibly struggled to calm himself. “No, you’re probably right,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’ll call in more resources.”

On our way outside, Myron leaned over and asked me in a low voice, “Do you think you could inquire about the forger? I can provide information that might be identifying.”

“I can ask, of course.”

Myron, Wil and I stood alone on the sidewalk outside the museum. “What I’m interested in,” I said, “is who knew I was taking those paintings to you this afternoon? You told me where to take them, and I asked Wil to help me. I didn’t talk to anyone else. Who’s the leak?”

“I’ve been rather curious about that myself,” Wil said.

Myron looked as unhappy as I felt. “I told Fenton,” he said.

“Only Fenton?”

“He had one of his detectives with him.”

“What about your people?” Wil asked.

“Well, of course my people knew.”

“And the people at the gallery where I took them,” I said.

“Yes.”

I glanced at Wil. “So, we have a dozen people, plus whoever they told. Too damned many to figure out who tried to get us killed.”

Myron rented me another van and took us to pick it up. On our way to Wil’s hotel, I said, “My bets are on a paid informant at Feitler’s, and at least one paid informant with the police. And I’ll bet that the two informants aren’t being paid by the same people.”

“You have a fairly low opinion of the police,” Wil said. His face and tone were sour.

“Experience. If you want honest cops, you need to pay them, and no one ever wants to do that. Society wants the police to be adequate but not truly competent. Too many of us have our little secrets. If you had enough cops, and they were good, smart cops, they’d probably bust a bunch of the wrong people. You know, for things like art forgery and trading in stolen goods.”

He chuckled. “Yeah, you’re probably right. So, who do you think is paying all of these informants?”

“I’m guessing one or more wealthy collectors have one or more informants at Feitler’s Gallery. If I knew about certain rare items ahead of everyone else, I might be able to enhance my collection at the expense of my neighbor. Right?”

Wil chuckled again, but winced when he did it.

“As for the police, I’ll bet money that the majority of the top families in the city own a cop. At least one. Hell, if I was a cop, I’d certainly want to get on as many payrolls as I could.”

He gave me another sour look.

It became clear at the hotel just how much Wil was hurting. He could barely get out of the car without help, and by the time we reached his room and I stripped him and poured him into a bathtub, the entire right side of his body was black and blue. I started to nag him about not going to the hospital, then thought about how much I hated hospitals. Instead, I gave him a large splash of brandy and a couple of painkillers.

Room service must have thought I was weird when I ordered thirty pounds of crushed ice and asked for a fresh pot of hot coffee to be delivered every hour. The ice went into the bath water, and the coffee, liberally laced with brandy, went into Wil to keep his core temperature up.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked me.

“Am I a bruise expert? Do as I say, or I send you to the hospital and let them put up with you while I get a good night’s sleep.”

I didn’t live a genteel life. When we first started sleeping together, he made a few comments about my bruises. After a while, he stopped. Might as well comment on the sun coming up.

He shut up and let me torture him. I checked on him regularly to make sure he didn’t pass out and drown. When I finally hauled him out of the ice bath and put him to bed, he was shivering and slightly blue, so I held him tight against me to warm him up. I told myself that it was part of being in love, but in the back of my mind, something kept whispering that I’d gone insane. As I drifted off to sleep, I wondered if there was a difference.

I had always been ambidextrous. Some things I normally did with either my left or my right hand, but I could change without much trouble if I needed to. So, I thought it was pretty funny watching Wil try to feed himself breakfast with his left hand. He didn’t see the humor.

After making sure he had everything he needed, especially communications, I drove out to my safe house. Firing up my computer and connecting through a pirate server in Belarus, I entered the Chamber of Commerce’s network through a backdoor, and hacked into the Vancouver Gallery. I had a legitimate login to the Art Loss Database.

It took about three hours to write a program that would download the data I needed from all three sources into a database on my server in Toronto, and then integrate and analyze it. I set it running, then sat back and realized I was starving. It was the middle of the afternoon, and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

I took a shower and called my dad.

“Hi, hotshot. What’s going on?” his voice was cheery when he answered.

“This isn’t public knowledge yet, but the Director and Assistant Director at the Vancouver Art Gallery were dirty.”

“You mean the museum?”

“Yeah. The main museum here. They were dealing stolen art, and we’ve found some forgeries.”

“Oh, boy. I knew that town had a hot market for hot art, but I hadn’t heard anything about forgeries.”

“Martel says the forger is very good.”

“Adrian Martel?”

“Yes, do you know him? Anyway, Myron Chung asked if I could try to find a lead to the forger.”

“Adrian Martel is the best there is at detecting a forgery. What artists?”

“Mostly impressionists. Cezanne, Renoir, Pissarro, and Degas were the ones I recognized. There was also something more modern, but I didn’t know the artist. They’ve found seven so far.”

“I’ll check around,” he said in a voice that seemed to tail away.

“You have a suspicion.”

“Maybe.” He hung up.

A call to Kieran reached her voicemail, but I didn’t leave a message. I took a shower and stopped by a take-out Japanese café on my way to Wil’s hotel.

The remains of multiple room-service meals on multiple trays sat in the hall next to his door. So much for being nice and getting him eel sushi. I never would have bought the stuff for myself. I found him stretched out on a couch, lying on his left side, watching cartoons on the screen. To be fair, he was only half-awake.

I unloaded the carry-out onto the table. “How are you feeling?”

“Sore.” It seemed to take an effort for him to talk. A little bit worried, I walked over and studied him. He seemed rather out of it.

“Did you take a painkiller?”

“Doctor came by. Gave me a couple of shots.”

“What kind of doctor? Doctor from where?” I looked frantically around, half expecting an assassin to step out of the bathroom or something.

“Chamber. Did you send out an email from my account?”

“Yeah. I told people not to bother you for a couple of days. Said you had an important project to work on.”

His eyes opened a little more. “That’s a confidential account. How did you get into it?”

I rolled my eyes. “Would you like each of the steps in sequence?”

“You hacked into my private account.” It almost sounded as if he was offended.

“The only thing that ever keeps me out of your accounts is respect for your privacy. I didn’t read anything while I was there, if that’s what you’re worried about. Wil, I’ve had an administrative account on the Chamber’s system for years. Hell, their lousy security bothered me so much that I wrote them a new security manual and cleaned a lot of it up. And I did it for free!”

I wandered back to the table and my tempura, grumbling to myself about some people’s lack of gratitude. “Do you want any eel sushi? I bought it just for you. Cause if you don’t, I’m gonna toss it.”

He sat up enough to eat, and I sat beside him, helping him watch cartoons. It was actually kind of romantic, as long as I sat by his left side. The ice bags on his other side didn’t invite much closeness.

“Next time,” he said, “turn to the right.”

“Huh? Look, I’m really sorry that you got banged up, but that doesn’t make any sense. If I was disabled, or the collision involved the steering wheel, they’d have had us.”

He sighed.