Illicit Intent, page 21
Finn kicked both booted feet up on a spare chair at the next table, winking at the woman sitting there. Her affronted look turned to poorly masked shock when she got a look at his scarred face. Before Finn could further disconcert the woman, her husband hauled her up and they quickly left. Finn downed another shot and looked up to meet Chat’s probing gaze.
“What?” Finn challenged.
“There’s nothing I can tell you that you don’t already know.”
“That so?”
“That’s so,” Chat affirmed.
The barbed comeback died on Finn’s tongue as he stared at his friend. Andrew “Chat” Dunlap had talked him through some very dark times. In a very different way than Tox had, Chat had saved Finn’s life. He banked his temper, but nothing could quell the bitterness that ran through his veins.
“This anger in your blood,” Chat continued, reading his thoughts, “it’s like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die.”
Finn shook off the comment and grabbed the tray of shots from the waitress, grateful for her timely arrival. He spoke as he passed out the glasses.“Tox has a bear in his head. I’ve got rage in my veins. Chat has a crystal ball in there somewhere, Ren, an encyclopedia, Cam, a chick magnet, and Steady’s got radar. I think God built us out of spare fucking parts.”
“Here’s to a damn good combination.” Steady held out his glass and the men joined him.
Boston, Massachusetts
April 30
Elizabeth Brewer entered her Brookline home, a massive burnished stone gothic revival, and tossed her keys into the Steuben bowl on the hall table. Her great grandfather, John Reardon, had been dead for nearly two decades, but his presence still loomed, dwarfing the cavernous space. Elizabeth dismissed her housekeeper with an approximate dinner time and strode purposefully to the back of the house.
When she was a child, the little nooks and crannies of the architecture had fascinated her. She loved finding secluded alcoves and hiding places where she could escape or spy on the adults. The best secret spot of all, though, was her great grandfather’s gallery. The space was long and narrow and could only be accessed through a hidden panel in the library—not a swiveling bookcase, although Elizabeth had toyed with the idea—and unless you studied the floor plan with an engineer’s precision, the room was undetectable.
She stopped at her desk in the library and absently flipped through the mail placed carefully at the center: invitations, birth announcements, and society rubbish. Important correspondence came to her office. Aside from her pet project, her company was the only thing that mattered. Her careful groundwork and well-disguised income streams had already begun to reestablish Brewer-Reardon in the commercial shipping industry. She was strategic, perspicacious, and meticulous. She was also ruthless.
While competitors and rivals had been criticizing her looks or questioning her qualifications, she had been gathering information and pinpointing vulnerabilities. She knew exactly where to hit her enemies where it hurt—the heart, the gut, the wallet—a veritable voodoo doll of tactics. In her world it wasn’t about bad guys and good guys; it was bad guys and worse guys.
She glanced around the oak-paneled room, absorbing its history, the greatness that was John Reardon. She would restore his legacies, and hers, no matter the cost. Her gaze landed on one panel in particular on the far wall, and the treasures it had hidden and would hide.
For all her careful patience and planning, this hiccup with Reynard was a burr under her saddle. He had admitted to her that the contents of her package, Degas’s Study for the Programme #1 and #2, had been misplaced. Despite the fact that she hadn’t received an update, she had complete faith in Reynard’s abilities. However, complacency was simply not in her repertoire.
She was aware of the players—the journalist, the SEAL, and Reynard’s man of many faces—but not the game. She would find that out soon enough and retrieve her prizes. Those drawings, and the other pieces, belonged to her, and she had every intention of bringing them home. She had seen some of the pieces with her own young eyes more than twenty years ago, and her great grandparents had told her every miraculous detail of their acquisition as if recounting a bedtime fairytale. Their story wasn’t a fairytale, though. It was the birth of a legacy.
Elizabeth’s mother Imogen’s family had run Boston for nearly a century, and like the city’s history, her family’s was deliciously sordid. In the late nineteenth century, the Reardons were low-level hitmen and muscle for the Boston mob. Six brothers fresh off the boat scratched and clawed—and shot and strangled—their way to positions of power. By the time Prohibition rolled around, Reardon sons and cousins were bootlegging their way to millions. John Reardon, Elizabeth Brewer’s great grandfather, took his ill-gotten gains and started Reardon Imports and Exports.
Reardon hadn’t gone legitimate. He was simply tired of handing over a cut of his profits to a business where the retirement plan was, more often than not, a bullet to the brain. His older brother Seamus thought John didn’t have the stomach for the mob. The truth was John Reardon was more ruthless, more cold-blooded, and greedier than any mobster anyone had ever run across. Let those Irish flunkies run their backroom gambling halls and brothels. John Reardon had bigger fish to fry.
And what better way than through import/export. He never got his hands dirty, and his charitable efforts, an obvious but successful attempt to buy his way into Boston society, rendered him nearly above suspicion. Nevertheless, if anything, anything, needed to be moved internationally, John Reardon was the man to do it.
It took brains and a particularly brutal skill set to pull it off. Rumor had it that John gutted three different hitmen sent to dispatch him. Each time, John had sliced the man from gut to gullet and dumped his body on the front lawn of his former employer. Eventually, the Irish mob, no doubt fearing they were running low on hitmen, accepted his notice of resignation with no further incidents. John’s older brother Seamus rose to the top levels in the Winter Hill Gang. In 1931, Seamus’s wife gave birth to their only child, a son, Patrick. Wherever Patrick went, trouble followed like a shadow. No matter the con, the heist, or the scam, if Patrick had a finger in it, it was sure to go sideways. Until, one day, it didn’t.
Boston, Massachusetts
March 18, 1990
Patrick Reardon walked his assigned path through the Gardner museum. He’d been on the job for a month. It was a good job. The coffee was hot and fresh, the break room was clean and comfortable, and the other guards were friendly. He even knew a few of the former policemen from back in the day; they all just laughed about it now—crooks and cops doing the same job.
As Patrick had predicted, he was bored. In some ways, it was the worst of both worlds. He wasn’t doing anything illegal—he was barely doing anything at all—but he still felt that burn in his gut when he heard the wail of a police siren. He still checked the street before entering his apartment. This was his life now, he guessed.
He walked through a gallery that was part of his route, barely noticing the Botticelli panel he passed. What he did notice, however, was that the Gardner Museum was ripe for the picking. The electronic security was nearly nonexistent, and several of the guards already working there were retired cops, retired dirty cops. So when a guard he knew pulled him aside, he had a feeling he knew why.
“Hey, Patty, when you finish this lap, head to the breakroom. Sit at the table and have yourself a Coke. The other guys will be in there too. All you gotta do is sit your ass at the table and keep your mouth shut. It’ll be the easiest five hundred bucks you ever made.”
Just as Patrick was nodding his agreement—and wishing he was in on the heist—they both heard voices and footsteps echoing from the back gallery.
“Shit, they’re early. Those dumb fucks. They were supposed to wait until the patrol cars checking around Fenway and Evans Way Park cleared out for the night. You head to the breakroom. I’ll make sure these idiots do their job.”
Patrick didn’t head to the breakroom. This was the most excitement he had seen since before he went away. He clung to the shadows as the thieves raced haphazardly from room to room, seemingly snatching art at random, ripping paintings out of their frames. They didn’t appear to understand the floor plan they had been given and couldn’t seem to locate the paintings they had been instructed to steal. What looked like a well-planned heist had quickly devolved into a smash-and-grab.
Then all hell broke loose. A police cruiser unexpectedly drove by and the officer noticed activity—flashlights dancing, the back door ajar. The thieves panicked further and quickly gathered up their haul. When more sirens sounded in the distance, with no other option, the thieves took off, leaving their loot in a pile on the floor. The other three guards had already locked themselves in the breakroom. So there Patrick stood, in the central gallery of the Gardner museum, staring down at a stack of priceless art.
Suddenly he remembered the story his Uncle John had told him when he was a teenager. How his uncle had stolen a valuable painting during World War II. How the convoy that was supposed to be carrying it was bombed and the painting believed destroyed. How he had avoided suspicion because of pure Irish luck.
Maybe this was his luck.
Patrick glanced down at the painting on the top of the pile, a man sitting at a cafe table. The man seemed to stare at him with an expectant look as if to say, “Well?”
As the sirens grew closer, Patrick hauled eleven paintings, a Chinese gu, and an eagle finial to a basement storage room where he hid them above rows of exposed pipes in the drop ceiling behind the furnace. Then he located the other corrupt guards in the locked break room, joined them, and threw his keys through the transom as if the robbers had locked them in and simply dropped the keys in their hurry to flee.
The FBI stepped in almost immediately, and when Patrick’s identity came to light, he was questioned and watched for weeks. But the Feds had nothing. He had served his time, reported to his parole officer like clockwork, and had a legitimate means of income. Patrick simply had to wait them out.
After the heist, he worked a minimum wage construction job he had obtained through the parole board. He went straight home every night and straight back to work every morning. Both suspected thieves and the guard who had been working the inside had been killed under suspicious circumstances. Patrick didn’t really know the other guards who were there that night, and they didn’t know him. Everyone had scattered. Patrick was alone.
For six months those paintings sat in the basement of the very museum where they belonged.
Then his opportunity came. The museum was finally upgrading a sorely inadequate security system. Walls were being knocked out, the wiring was being upgraded; the work was being done after hours. It was ridiculously easy for Patrick to borrow one of his company’s construction trucks, blend in with the evening crew that was hauling out debris, stuff the loot into trash bags, and throw it in the back of his truck. From there he drove to the one person he had left in the world, the one person on earth he could trust no matter his transgression: his uncle, John Reardon.
Patrick parked the large pickup at an angle in the broad driveway, grabbed one of the construction waste bags and hurried to the door, checking over his shoulder again and again as he knocked. John Reardon pulled open the door and stood silent, the same what-did-you-do-this-time expression on his face he used to wear when Patrick was a boy.
Without saying a word, Patrick set the bag down and blindly grabbed one of the paintings. It was the same portrait Patrick had seen on top of the stack that night six months ago, the man sitting at the cafe table. He turned it so his uncle could see.
All the color drained from John Reardon’s face.
“Get in the house.”
Patrick replaced the painting in the trash bag and followed his uncle inside.
“Where in the name of the Blessed Virgin did you get that?” John pulled the Manet out of the bag and examined it more closely.
“I have them all, Uncle John.”
“What?” John’s expression conveyed both excitement and impending doom.
Patrick sat with his uncle in a cozy den in the middle of the night with a trash bag filled with priceless art at his feet and recounted the events of the Gardner Museum heist six months earlier.
“So they were there the whole time? Hidden in the basement?”
Patrick shrugged. “I was just looking at them there in a pile. I didn’t even think any of ‘em were worth much. Hell, one of them is the size of a postage stamp. So I just figured why not? If the cops find ‘em down there, they’ll just assume the robbers hid ‘em when they needed to make a quick getaway.” Patrick paused for a second. “I remembered your story. About the painting in the war and the convoy getting bombed and I thought this was kind of like that.”
John stared at the trash bags they had retrieved from the truck, then he looked at his nephew and did something Patrick had only seen John Reardon do a handful of times in his life. He laughed.
“Patrick, after all the shite, all the trouble, all the heartache, you go and do this.” There was a pregnant pause when Patrick wasn’t convinced his uncle wasn’t going to pull out a gun and shoot him. “Lad, you just pulled off the crime of the century. No one can ever know about this, but you’ll know. Even a whisper over a pint at the pub and it’s over. You take it to your grave, but you did it. They’ll be talking about this heist for decades.”
And just like that John Reardon had somehow, scot-free, gotten his hands on the most highly publicized, mysterious, and valuable art heist in half a century. And he was as far from a suspect as the Pope. That night in September, six months after the heist, after Patrick had left, John laughed and howled so loud, his wife, Bridget, came barreling into the living room to see about the commotion. When he showed her the loot, she simply stared, slack-jawed. Tears rolled down her cheeks. When she finally looked up she simply said, “I want the Vermeer. The Concert. Do what you want with the rest.”
John embraced his wife and smiled. “Where would you like me to hang it?”
“The library, just for us to see. It’s too coincidental for a ‘reproduction’ to show up in our living room.” She paused for a moment in thought. “Maybe in a few years.”
“Of course, darling. I’ll move it in there now. I’ll hang it myself. Maybe I’ll even build a private room, just for us and our treasures.”
“Thank you, John.”
“Anything for you, my love.”
“John?”
“Yes.”
“You know what’s funny?”
“Hmm?”
“The robbery? The day those paintings were stolen? It was the same day our first great-grandchild was born. Our Elizabeth was born on March 18.”
“You know I always joke about luck, but this really takes the cake.”
Bridget Reardon hugged her husband from behind as he plucked the painting she had selected from the stack.
“Yes, my dear, sweet man, it truly does.”
Patrick Reardon never saw the paintings again; he never really looked at them when he stole them. He saw pictures in the paper though. Saw the dollar signs. John had told him that first night to leave the loot and never speak of the heist to anyone ever. John set Patrick up with a small house and a job selling cars at a local dealership. Patrick was bored to tears, but he knew when his luck had run out.
So he sold cars, and tended his small garden, and went for a pint at the neighborhood pub. He died of prostate cancer in 2002, at the age of 71. He never spoke of the Gardner Museum Heist, but he died with a smile, knowing he was the slick bastard who had pulled it off.
The crime of the century.
Boston, Massachusetts
April 30, present day
The panel in the library swung inward, and Elizabeth entered the gallery. As was her routine, she went straight to her Vermeer. She stood for a moment, admiring its beauty and complexity, imagining herself as the young woman at the harpsichord and relishing the fact that she was the only person on earth permitted to see this treasure. It was the most valuable missing piece of art in the world, and it was hers.
She moved over to her most recent acquisition, Rembrandt’s A Lady and Gentleman in Black. She hadn’t yet mustered the same appreciation for it as the Vermeer, but it was part of her collection and deserved her reverence. Next, she turned to the empty frames on the opposite wall. Like the Gardner Museum, where the pieces had originally been displayed, Elizabeth too, hung empty frames waiting to be filled, waiting for her wayward exhibition—the collection that had come into her family’s possession on the day she was born—to return to its rightful home.
Elizabeth turned in a slow circle in the long narrow gallery. John Reardon had, with the greatest care and caution, negotiated the sale of nine paintings, the eagle finial, and the Chinese gu. Elizabeth had never actually laid eyes on most of her collection. He kept the Vermeer for his wife, and the Degas entitled Three Mounted Jockeys for himself. He also acquired several other works of dubious provenance over the years including some priceless pieces thought destroyed during World War II. He’d constructed the hidden gallery, a place no one but John and Bridget knew existed... until their prized great-grandchild turned five. Elizabeth smiled at the memory.
On March 18, 1995, the fifth anniversary of the Gardner Museum Heist and little Elizabeth Brewer’s fifth birthday, John and Bridget Reardon had given Elizabeth the best birthday present she would ever receive. She had held each of their hands as they brought her into the secret room. There, John had explained the miracle of how the paintings had ended up with their family. Young Elizabeth didn’t know the definition of the word he had used, but she instinctively understood its meaning; it was destiny.
As time passed and Elizabeth found human relationships tedious and unrewarding, she grew more and more attached to the small collection of paintings in John and Bridget’s gallery. Her own parents were shocked when Elizabeth was bequeathed the Reardon estate after John died in 2004 at the age of 93, just three months after his wife. When Elizabeth reached adulthood in 2011, she moved into the home without preamble, despite her parents’ protests that the place was too big for one single woman. Finally, Elizabeth was where she wanted to be, alone with her prized art. In the ensuing years, she determined the hole in her soul was due to the absence of the other pieces from the Gardner heist—completing the collection would complete her.
