There was the roof. Most of this block was nineteenth-century row houses, built all together, with the same ( flat roof. Originally they'd all been single-family residences, like Brock's, but some of the houses were now split up into apartments, with public stairwells. Parker could get into any of those buildings with no problem, make his way to the roof, walk from there over to this roof, and come down through the trapdoor at the top of the stairwell.
When Brock had bought the house, there had been a fire escape down the front of it, but he'd gotten approval from the Landmarks Commission and had it removed. So that meant there were only the two possibilities: the front door and the roof.
Before she'd left, Pam had stocked the place with non-perishable food. There was no reason for Brock to leave the house for the next few days, so no reason to keep that front door functional. He kept a few tools in a kitchen drawer, including a hammer. In the cluttered basement, he found a three-foot length of two-by-four, and an old coffee can that held a mix of screws and nails and drill bits and Allen wrenches. Carrying these upstairs, he nailed the two-by-four to
the floor against the inner front door, which opened inward. It wouldn't open now. Let Parker have the small vestibule out there; he wouldn't get through this door.
The trapdoor was more difficult. The way it worked, there was a square hole in the roof, two and a half feet across, with a thick six-inch-high rim on all four sides. A square heavy cover fit over that, not hinged. The way you got out to the roof was to lift the cover straight up, slide it leftward, and set it on the roof.
The sides of the cover came down outside the rim. Two hasp locks opposite each other hung down from the cover just inside the rim, to hook over swivel eyes screwed to the rim. The cover itself was thick wood sheathed in a layer of roofing material, to keep it waterproof.
For the normal run of burglar, the hasps were deterrent enough, giving no sign of weakness to an exploratory tug. But Parker would be more determined, and Brock had known for a long time that the hundred-and-fifty-year-old wood of the rim, as old as the house, had become soft with time, and the screws set into it to hold the swivel eyes were short, to be within the thickness of the rim. A tenacious man with a crowbar could eventually drag those screws out of there, and the lid would lift right off.
He stood at the top landing of the house, next to his bedroom, for a long while, looking up at the trapdoor, one hand holding a rung of the iron ladder bolted to the wall here. Finally, he went back down to the kitchen tool drawer, found the tape measure, carried it upstairs, climbed the ladder, and measured the distance between the hasps, just above the swivels. Twenty-eight and a half inches. He went back down to the kitchen, got out the small saw, and sacrificed a broom, holding it braced above the sink as he cut off the handle at twenty-nine inches. He carried that and the hammer upstairs, and wedged the stick into position, pressed tight against both hasps. Now, upward pressure wouldn't cause the screws to move sideways out of the wood.
Later, he went downstairs and made a simple and not very good dinner for himself and Matt. There was almost no conversation between them at the table, except when Matt said, 'What are you doing about it?'
'I've blocked things so he can't get in,' Brock told him.
Matt didn't like that. 'For how long? A year? Ten years? The thing to do is
'We can't do that, Matt.'
'I'm keeping him out,' Brock said, and wouldn't talk about it any more.
He couldn't sleep. He lay in the dark in his bedroom on the top floor, two stories up from Matt, with faint illumination from the city outside painting the room a dark pinkish gray. His room was at the back, to keep away from street noise, so it was usually quiet up here. It was quiet tonight, but he couldn't sleep.
He was still awake at 2:37 in the morning, by the bedside clock, when he heard the footsteps on the roof. Moving, then stopping. Moving again, stopping again. Silent a long time, as Brock stared at the ceiling, listening to his own heart. Then moving again, moving away.
He's here, Brock thought.
5
If Bert Hayes hadn't instinctively and immediately taken such a strong dislike to Paxton Marino, he probably wouldn't have dug any deeper into the failed Montana burglary, probably would have just taken it at face value. But Hayes couldn't help it, Marino made him wince like a fingernail scraping along a blackboard.
The solid gold toilets themselves, objects of the thieves' intentions, would have been enough to turn Bert Hayes off, but they were nothing compared to the personality of Paxton Marino himself. A jumped-up johnny-come- lately, Marino acted with such smug arrogance it made Hayes want to punch him in the mouth. Marino strolled through life with the self-satisfaction of someone who comes from a long line of rulers of the universe, and goddamn it, he did
Bert Hayes, a sandy-haired short pugnacious man of forty-three, came from a long line of detectives. His father and uncle and great-uncle had all been with the New York Police Department, and all had made plainclothes. Hayes himself had started with the NYPD, but his first wife, Marie, had been a high school art teacher when there was still such a thing, and he'd unexpectedly found in himself a great passion for the plastic arts. Not as a painter or a sculptor, but as an appreciator and student.
Around the time the marriage with Marie was being called for lack of interest, Hayes had heard of a job opening for an art cop at the federal level. He'd applied, ready for a change of scene, and had been on that job ever since; nine years now, and counting. He was with the Art Identification Bureau, a minor underfunded subset of the Secret Service, which was itself an element of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the mission of the bureau primarily was to identify stolen artworks imported into the United States. A lot of the bureau's time and effort went into Holocaust-related work, trying to connect orphaned art with the descendants of its former owners. More than half a century later, and Hitler's mess was still being cleaned up.
The Holocaust wasn't all of it, though. A lot of European art was very haphazardly protected from theft—in many Italian churches, for instance, and in private country estates in Great Britain—so Old Masters did crop up from time to time, strayed several thousand miles from home. That's why Hayes was given a heads-up any time the work
