Firebreak

'It isn't, of course.' Marino glowered out at the day as though daring it to disagree. 'It has growing pains, that's all, maybe even birth pangs. But the doomsayers keep coming on and coming on, and here and there what they create is a self-fulfilling prophecy.'

'I suppose so,' Griffith said, wondering just how deep the hole was that Marino found himself in, and what the man expected Horace Griffith to do about it.

'I am watched like a hawk,' Marino said. 'You know that, Horace. I spend my money, I enjoy my money, I don't keep a low profile.'

'No, you don't.'

'So, when I run into a cash-flow problem—'

'Ah.'

'That's all it is,' Marino insisted, turning his glower at last full on Griffith. Still standing there in all that Alpine light, he looked like a later Roman emperor, lesser and more effete, but still both powerful and dangerous. 'I have a cash-flow problem,' he said. 'It's temporary. I'm projected to be out of it in less than eighteen months, probably under a year. But the problem is, if I'm seen to cut back anywhere, it will be taken as a sign.'

'Yes, of course.'

'That's where the self-fulfilling prophecy comes in,' Marino said. 'With the hyenas. With the schadenfreude.'

'We have that always with us,' Griffith said.

'Of course we do.' Marino waved that away. 'I have a certain image. If the stockholders—if the Street generally—sees me tightening my belt, even a little bit, it could start a run. Not a logical sensible run, an irrational run that could nevertheless destroy me.'

Marino drank a third of his Pellegrino, looked at it with a frown as though wishing now he'd asked for something stronger, and at last sat down, opposite Griffith, so that when they swiveled toward each other their profiles were to the view.

'Here's the situation I'm in,' Marino said. 'I have to either slow my spending awhile or sell off some of my property. Either choice is a bad one, sending a bad message.'

'God, Pax,' Griffith said. 'You're in a hell of a situation here.'

'I know that.' Marino turned his head to look out at the view, reconsidered, faced Griffith again. 'It finally occurred to me,' he said, 'I could get out from under all this if I sold off assets nobody knows I have.'

Griffith instantly knew where Marino was going. The paintings, of course, hidden away beneath the lodge in Montana.

Griffith and Marino had been doing business together three or four years, Griffith happy with this freewheeling spender who did have a natural flair and some education as a collector, and who was flattering in his attention to Griffith's occasional advice, when this other side of their relationship first was broached. 'There are paintings I'd love to own,' Marino had said, in his hotel suite in London one evening after he and Griffith had attended a Sotheby's auction where Marino had been outbid twice but had managed three times to buy the pictures he'd wanted. 'Paintings I'd love to own but I'll never get my hands on, and it just annoys me.'

'Why won't you?' Griffith had asked.

'Because they aren't for sale. Either they're in museums, or they're in collections that will never come on the market.'

'We all have our impossible dreams,' Griffith had said, still thinking this was a theoretical conversation, not yet understanding where Marino was headed.

Which the man had next made clear: 'Sometimes, though,' he'd said, 'paintings like that get stolen, and nobody ever sees them again. Except the thief, of course, or whoever the thief sold them to.'

'I suppose so,' Griffith had agreed, thinking of the Mona Lisa, the most famous of such thefts, and even now, so many years after the recovery, the continuing doubt that the version in the Louvre was the original.

'If a thief sold me a treasure like that,' Marino had gone on, 'You can be sure I'd never say a word about it.' Laughing, he'd said, 'Not that I'd ever deal with a thief, not directly, but if you brought me something like that, I'd certainly trust you

And that was where it had started. Griffith already did have contacts in that other shady world, had made dubious sales for dubious people, had a few times acted as go-between in deals involving thieves and insurance companies, and Marino, as it turned out, really did have a wish list. In the last few years, they hadn't completely checked off every item on that list, but they'd done very well.

And Griffith himself had done very well in the process, knowing all along that in this arrangement he had taken one irrevocable step farther into the dark side than ever before. In the past, he had knowingly traded stolen property, he had knowingly represented forged property, but had never commissioned theft. On Paxton Marino's behalf, that's exactly what he'd now done. It had been risky, it had been nerve-wracking, it had cost him sleepless nights, but that's what he'd done.

And now, somehow, it was to be undone. Griffith all at once felt very weary, as though he'd been rolling some boulder up a mountain all his life, only to discover at this late date it was the wrong boulder. On the wrong mountain. He said, 'Pax, you can't just sell those paintings.'

'Oh, I know that.' Marino, always a restless man, swiveled back and forth in his chair. 'A couple months ago,' he said, 'we had a robbery at the lodge. They didn't get anything, thank God, and we got the thieves, or some of them, but they found the gallery.'

That news gave Griffith a sudden chill. He'd only agreed to go along with this mad magpie instinct in Marino because the paintings would disappear forever, would never be seen in the normal world again. He said, 'So they know? Not the law.' Meaning, or we'd both be in jail already.

'No,' Marino said, 'the thieves don't seem to know what they stumbled on. They've been questioned pretty