existence. Tell us what our tax dollars are doing, they would say. And what excuses would we have for our epic budget and the way we have to rob art museums in order to fund ourselves in the crunch times? Please.”
He stopped, and even in the darkness Milo could see his boss’s face was as red as his hands.
“We’d be finished before we got a chance to defend ourselves. Not that we even have a defense.”
They stood in silence broken by the high grass tinkling in the wind and the dull rumble of the Lincoln. Milo felt that he should say something, but he had nothing to say. At this point Drummond seemed to just be thinking aloud, musing over the immediate and more distant future.
“I’ll contact you about Dzubenko’s other stories,” he said finally. “I’ll have you and some other Tourist check their veracity. Who knows? Maybe we’ll find out we have a Ukrainian mole, and the Ukrainians are positioning us to run up against the Chinese.”
“Or maybe there’s no mole at all.”
“Maybe,” said Drummond. “Your cover still computers?”
“Dropped that a while ago-couldn’t sustain a conversation. Expat insurance.”
“You can’t talk computers but you can talk actuarial tables?”
“If forced.”
Drummond grunted amusement but said nothing. When they reached the car, Milo unconsciously opened the door for his boss. Drummond got in and looked up at him. “We’re running things differently now. It’s not the old Tourism anymore.”
“I appreciate that, sir.”
“Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. Anyway, I don’t believe in lying to my employees. If I want something from you, I’ll tell you directly. If I don’t want you to know something, I’ll just tell you it’s above your clearance. What’s important is that you won’t have to do a lot of second-guessing with me-I’m an obvious man.”
He’d said it earnestly, so Milo said, “That means you’re either an idealist-”
“-or a fool,” Drummond finished. “Yeah. I’ve heard it all already. And this thing with the girl, the Moldovan. Not my idea of good foreign policy, but it really was necessary.”
“I’m sure it was,” said Milo.
“I doubt you are. But it’s like any new administration. Before you can move forward you have to take care of the screwups of the previous administration.”
“Maybe you want to tell me why it had to be done.”
“Sorry,” said Drummond. “That’s above your clearance.”
Milo shut the door, then came around the other side and got in beside him. The man behind the wheel began driving along the pocked field toward the main road.
“I’m glad I met you face-to-face,” Drummond told him. “Turns out you’re smarter than your file made you out to be.”
“That’s very reassuring to hear, sir.”
10
Two days later, Milo broke into a white sedan parked on a secluded street in the northern Milan suburbs, a car that was perfect in its dull inconspicuousness. Some chipped paint on the left flank, a hairline crack down the rear windshield, and just old enough to be un-threatening, but still new enough to play nicely with his magic key ring. With a full tank of gas.
Earlier that day, he had bought an aerosol can of polyurethane from a vast OBI store, and after picking up the car he drove to an address on the Crocetta side of Viale Fulvio Testi, a tall apartment block beside an Esso station. He walked around one side and squatted by the whitewashed wall. He uncapped the can and spray-painted MARIANS JAZZROOM. While wet, it was visible, though once it dried someone would have to look hard to find it.
He tossed the can into a wastebasket and drove north. It was 6:00 P.M., Tuesday.
By eight, he was in a hotel in Melide, Switzerland, just south of Lugano, to rest up before the final stage of the Buhrle job. He flipped through television channels, pausing on CNN, where the forty-third president of the United States had been cornered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In answer to a reporter’s question, Bush said, “The Kosovars are now independent.”
Drummond’s discussions had obviously gone well.
He wondered idly what Radovan thought of all of this, and suspected he and many of his friends couldn’t help but succumb to a measure of nationalism now that Kosovo, the birthplace of Serbian Orthodoxy, was at stake, but it didn’t matter now. Their fight was dead, and Milo had twenty million dollars to collect.
At one o’clock in the morning, he cleaned the room and put his few spare clothes and toiletries into the hotel’s Dumpster. Before returning the room key, he swallowed two Dexedrine.
At his rented garage in the northern Lugano suburbs, he lit his first Davidoff of the day. He considered the canvases. Degas’s Count Lepic and His Daughters, Monet’s Poppy Field at Vetheuil, van Gogh’s Blooming Chestnut Branches, and Cezanne’s Boy in the Red Waistcoat.
The decision wasn’t about which paintings Milo thought should live or die; the decision was about which paintings meant more to the museum. All four were masterpieces of similar financial value, but there was a difference. Two portrayed nature scenes, while the other two portrayed people. Museum curators and insurance adjusters know that the public’s interest lies with faces; that’s just human nature. Therefore he would give them nature, so that they would act in the hope of saving the faces.
Using gloves, he loaded the sedan with the Monet and van Gogh, then went back inside to examine the remaining two. The boy in the waistcoat looked, at a certain angle, petrified as Milo again took out his Zippo. Necessary, he told himself. Allowing the paintings to survive would only leave him open to risk, leave one more clue for the police to track down. He thought of Adriana and the risk he’d taken letting her survive, and wondered suddenly about Yevgeny’s words. For the old man, killing a girl was a practical necessity, but at the mention of stealing art he’d reached something like a moral core. It’s the social contract you’ve broken, Milo. What kind of man cared more about paintings than a girl’s life?
Nearly two hours later, a little before five, he parked around the corner from the E. G. Buhrle, in front of the Psychiatrische Universitatsklinik Zurich. He wiped down the inside of the car, then tossed the keys down by the gas pedal and shut the door. He walked west down Fluhgasse to the Tiefenbrunnen commuter train stop and on the way found a pay phone out of the reach of street cameras. Still in gloves, he pulled up the name and number Drummond had texted him, and dialed.
After seven rings, a groggy, irritated voice said, “Ja?”
“Is this Jochem Hirsch?”
“Ja, ja.”
“Wake up, Jochem. I took the paintings from the Buhrle museum.”
Silence. Then he asked, “How did you get this number?”
“Listen to me. If you go to the psychiatric clinic just down the street from the museum, you’ll find a white car with Italian plates. Inside it are the Monet and van Gogh.”
“Wait, are you-”
“This is a show of goodwill, Jochem. Two for free. You’ve had a week and a half to learn that you can’t find the paintings on your own, so you know that this is the only way. You’ll have to pay for the Degas and Cezanne. Twenty million in U.S. dollars.”
“Twenty million? I don’t-”
“It’s a deal, Jochem. They’re worth far more than that.”
Jochem Hirsch thought through his options, while in the background a woman’s voice said, “Wer ist da?”
“Shh,” was his reply.
When he spoke again, it was to state the obvious. “Twenty million is still more than you’d get for them. You know that. They’re too famous-no one would pay that much for the risk.”
“I’m not interested in selling them, Jochem. If you don’t pay the money in the next twenty-four hours, then I’ll burn the two remaining paintings. Run that by the investors and see what they think. You have a pen?”
