The answers, if there were any, lay behind his locked studio door.
Maybe if I were quiet for a while he would think I'd gone and come out to investigate. Of course, once he saw me he could just slam the door. I wasn't a cop or a bounty hunter. I had no idea how to extract the man from his studio, and no legal right to enter. With a decent supply of food and vodka he could hold out for days or even weeks, whereas I was likely to get bored and give up in an hour or two.
Actually, I was kind of bored already. I stood up and wandered down the hall of the uninspired 1940s building. Nothing broke up the monotony of the dull beige walls except a profusion of cracks in the plaster. The only other door led to a janitor's closet, judging by the mop that nearly beaned me when I poked my head in. A single unadorned window at the end of the hall offered a view of dilapidated docks that had once bustled with longshoremen. The huge container ships from around the Pacific Rim now unloaded their cargo at the port of Oakland, abandoning this one to a handful of dry-docked ships and flocks of noisy seagulls.
I glanced at my watch. Fifteen minutes had passed.
Rats. Patience was not my strong suit.
Remember the money
, I chided myself. That was good. Very motivating. Let's see, half of one fifty was seventy-five, which meant that in the past fifteen minutes I had already earned . . .
Math was not my strong suit, either.
I wandered back down the hall, sat on the floor again, and started sketching in the marble dust that fanned out in silky waves from beneath Pascal's door. I was putting the finishing touches on a nice rendering of Botticelli's
Birth of Venus
in the cartoonish style of Roy Lichtenstein when my cell phone trilled, startling me. I always forgot I had it with me.
“What's the deal with the Stand All thingee?” Mary demanded abruptly when I answered.
“Stand all?”
“Yeah, some kind of symptom?”
“You mean the Stendhal Syndrome?” I asked, surprised to be discussing the obscure psychological disorder for the second time in as many days. “It's a psychological condition where a person faints or loses control in the presence of great art. It was named afterâ”
“Oh, good.” Mary, familiar with my tendency to digress, cut me off. “Sherri says everybody's getting it and I was hoping it wasn't some new sexually transmitted disease. Okay, bye!”
“Wait! I'm trying to get a sculptor to talk to me but he won't answer the door. I'm afraid if I go away he'll leave for good. Got any ideas?”
“Hold on, let me ask Sherri.” Sherri and her husband, Tom, owned a process-serving business. Giving legal papers to people who did not want them had given Sherri unusual insight into human behavior. “She says to wait until he goes out for groceries or a doctor's appointment or something. She says they always leave eventually.”
“I was afraid of that,” I sighed.
“What's the matter?”
“I'm bored,” I confessed. “And hungry.” I had, as usual, skipped breakfast. A meal of coffee, sticky buns, and toxic solvents was starting to sound appealing.
“Tell you what! We'll join you! We'll bring lunch! It'll be fun!”
“Wait, Marâ”
She hung up. I started to hit redial, but paused. I was bored. And hungry. Pascal didn't seem to care what I did out here.
What the hell.
The phone rang again.
“Where the heck are you, anyway?”
I gave her directions, and while the phone was out I decided to follow up on Bryan's situation. With a little digging, I might be able to find out who had stolen the Chagall. Agnes Brock wasn't the only one who knew people.
I began with the one person at the Brock Museum who might still talk to me: Naomi Gregorian. Naomi and I had been semi-rivals in college and semi-colleagues when we were interns at the Brock, at least until I'd been outed as a former art forger. I hadn't spoken to her since the museum gala last spring, when she'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up locked in a closet with a killer. Odds were good she'd hang up on me, but what did I have to lose? I was earning $37.50 every fifteen minutes. I'd finally figured it out.
“Naomi Chadwick Gregorian,” she answered in a newly acquired and ever-so-slightly British accent.
“Naomi!” I blustered. “It's Annie Kincaid! How the heck
are
you?”
My greeting was met with silence, but since this was par for the course for Naomi and me, I forged ahead. “I heard there was a ruckus at the Brock the other day. Something about a Stendhal Syndrome faint-in and a stolen Chagall?” The silence on the phone was replaced by sputtering. “Naomi? You still there?”
“Yes, Ann,” she choked, calling me, as always, by the wrong name because she was just that petty. “I am here. What could you
possibly
have to say to
me
?”
“Well hey, old friends and all that. And after all, I did save
The Magi
, remember?”
The Brock Museum's Caravaggio masterpiece was actually an exquisite fake painted by my grandfather, Georges LeFleur. But if Agnes Brock was happy with it, who was I to enlighten her?
“You ruined the gala, is what you did!” Naomi screeched, and I winced. “The Diamond Circle gala! The most important, most exclusive event of the year!”
“Be fair, Naomi,” I coaxed. “
I
didn't ruin the gala; the
bad guys
ruined the gala.”
“You locked me in a closet!”
“Colin Brooks locked you in that closet because he was trying to protect you. You know how crazy he was about you. He told me so.”
I lied. Colin Brooks, also known as Michael X. Johnson, sexy art thief extraordinaire, had locked Naomi in the closet to keep her out of our hair.
“Colin said that?” Naomi asked, more subdued.
“Yes indeed. He also said that it was too hard to be with you when he knew he couldn't have you.”
I should take up creative writing,
I thought.
“Why couldn't he have me?”
Oops. Cancel the career change. “Well, because . . . because he's already married.”
“What?”
“Six kids, too.”
“Six?”
“You did the right thing by letting him go,” I continued. “You know what they say, if you love something you have to, um, get rid of it.”
“That's true . . .”
“Trust me. Anyhoo, about that Stendhal situation . . .”
“I can't talk about the museum's internal affairs,” she said primly.
“I appreciate that, Naomi, I truly do,” I said. “But you
know
how much I rely on you to keep me abreast of what's going on in the art world.” Naomi could never resist juicy gossip, especially if it meant reminding me that she was a professional art restorer and I was a lowly faux finisher.
“Well . . .” Her voice lowered and she forgot the British accent. “There was a group here. Adult Education types, so I guess we shouldn't be too surprised.”
I bit my tongue to keep from reminding Naomi that her father, a gifted auto mechanic in Modesto, had gotten his GED at adult night school.
“They'd been touring the galleries when suddenly they got all worked up and fainted in a heap on the floor. It was just
awful
, so
tacky
. Afterwards, Carlos in Security noticed a Chagall was missing. But you would know all this if you read the newspaper, Ann.”
In college Naomi had fancied herself a policy wonk and hung out in cafés ostentatiously reading the
New York Times
. Just to annoy her I had started hanging out at the next table, reading
Le Monde
. Naomi had a tin ear for languages, and it drove her nuts that I could outsnob her. Too bad I always stopped reading as soon as she stomped out.
“Why do the police think the faintings and the theft were related?” I asked. “Maybe someone noticed that Security was preoccupied, grabbed the Chagall, and took off?”
“It wasn't that simple. The Brock installed an electronic sensor system last year, which should have triggered the alarm when the Chagall was removed from the gallery. But the system had been disabled. Whoever committed the theft knew what he was doing.”
“What do the surveillance tapes show?”
Silence.
“Naomi?”
“The, uh, the cameras weren't exactly hooked up.”
“Not hooked up?” For an art museum to disable its video monitoring system was an appalling breach of security that, unfortunately, was only too common. “What moron decided that?”
“Mrs. Brock thought, and the curators concurred, that the video system cost too much to maintain. It just didn't seem necessary. The cameras themselves should have been enough of a deterrence.”
“So the museum has cameras but no videotape?”
“The gift shop and entry cameras are still monitored. And an eyewitness reported a man wearing a brown leather bomber jacket, a hat, and glasses coming out of the gallery about that time. But the painting was small enough not to be obvious in all the confusion.”
“Surely the Brocks don't think the people who fainted were in on the theft? They're a bunch of folks taking an Adult Ed class, for heaven's sake.”
“I'm just an art restorer, Ann. It's not up to me,” she pointed out. “And speaking of which, if we're done with our little chat I need to get back to work.”
“One more thing. Who was the Adult Ed tour guide?”
“That sort of thing is handled by Community Outreach. Art restorers are far too busy in the workrooms to attend to all that.”
I gritted my teeth, thanked her, and hung up. I wouldn't trade places with Naomi for all the art in Florence, but the constant references to her flourishing career at the Brock rankled nonetheless. Naomi had a respected role in the fine-art world, as well as health insurance and a pension plan. I had squat. Every once in a while I was tempted to cave in to my grandfather's pleas to join him in creating brilliant forgeries and making fools of the establishment.
Too bad I hated prison so much.
According to Naomi, someone had disabled the Brock's security system and taken the Chagall in the confusion surrounding the Stendhal faintings. I had once been told by a highly impeachable but thoroughly knowledgeable source that many electronic sensor systems could be turned off remotely by someone with the technical know-how. But to stroll out of a museum in broad daylight with a painting tucked inside one's bomber jacket took a cool head and an abundance of self-confidence.
The very qualities possessed by a certain art thief I knew only too well. An art thief who once told me that a criminal's cardinal rule was to keep things simple. An art thief who habitually wore a brown leather bomber jacket.
Along with half the men in San Francisco,
I chided myself. Besides, the missing Chagall was small potatoes. Michael X. Johnson hunted bigger game.
Not that he needed to worry about money after the Caravaggio heist last spring. Most likely Michael was lounging by the sea in Saint-Tropez, tanning himself in an indecent swimsuit. Or gambling his ill-gotten gains at the craps table in Monte Carlo. Or ensconced in a Prague penthouse, rolling around naked on satin sheets with a Czech chorus girl.
Not that I cared.
Still not a peep from Pascal's studio.
My stomach growled.
I gazed in vain at the elevator, hoping Mary and Sherri were on their way up. I banged on Pascal's door. Nothing.
Stretching my arms over my head, I tried some isometric exercises that a ridiculously fit friend had shown me. I closed my eyes, took a deep cleansing breath, found my center, started flexing, felt something pull, and quit.
One thing was clear: I would not be applying to the Police Academy anytime soon. I was not cut out for the stakeout kind of life.
Might as well delve into the Chagall theft a little more. I flipped open my cell phone and dialed Anton Woznikowicz, an aging art forger and my grandfather's protégé. Anton had a studio in the City and knew Michael X. Johnson. I would feel better if I could cross Michael off my list of suspects.
“Why, Annie! How nice to hear from you!” Anton answered. “How is your dear old grandpapa these days?”
“Last I heard, he's enjoying his book tour.” My grandfather, Georges LeFleur, had recently published a book detailing his long and illustrious career as an art forgerâand naming names. Interpol salivated and the art world was furious, forcing the old reprobate farther underground than usual. He was having a high old time being interviewed for the BBC while in silhouette and using a voice-altering machine like a Mafia don, wearing elaborate disguises for impromptu book readings in Berlin, and granting interviews to Reuters reporters, Deep Throat style, from behind the Doric columns of the Parthenon. Part of me admired his panache, while another part wondered if it was possible to disown one's grandfather.
“Oh, such a time we had in Chicago!” Anton said. Last spring, he and my grandfather had renewed their friendship and swept first place at the “Fabulous Fakes” art show with what turned out to be a genuine Caravaggio. Immediately afterward Michael had absconded with the masterpiece.
“The reason I'm calling is sort of related to that. You know that guy, Michael Johnson?”
“I don't know a Michael Johnson, Annie. Let me think . . .”
“How about David? Or Patrick? Colin Brooks? Bruno, maybe?” These were but a few of Michael's aliases.
“Colin Brooks! Well, of course! A fine fellow, fine fellow indeed. Oh! The meals we had, the tales we told,” he chuckled. “A randy young man, that one. Reminded me of myself at his age. Excellent businessman, too. We shared the proceeds from the sale of . . . Well, you know.”