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Ever been to a museum and see a little sign where a famous painting used to be saying it’s on loan to some other museum? Or that the masterpiece is being cleaned? Yeah, right. That sign usually means me or someone else is working on getting it back from a goofball.

Art and antiquities theft is a routine for the insurance companies, like if you own a car you have to fill it with gas. Like with the price of gas going up, you don’t sell your car. You live with it. It’s part of doing business and passing along the expense. The museums pay the higher premiums because they have wealthy patrons, some that probably own the insurance company.

Everybody who pays health insurance, or runs an eye along Manhattan’s skyline, knows insurance companies have big buildings and deep, deep pockets. Anywhere there are deep pockets, people will come looking to slide a hand in and ease out loot for themselves. Not every thief is up to jacking art, mainly because most crooks are stupid and can’t plan much beyond holding up a liquor store or jarring the back door of a bodega after hours. This is why they became crooked to begin with, by default, because they’re not bright.

If you’re a little bit smart, and a little ambitious, it’s no stretch to steal art. Turning it into cash, on the other hand, can be a problem.

Three things you can do with a stolen Monet: swag it, shop it, or settle it. The three S’s.

Swag
means you have to find a fence to sell the goodies. This is messy. The fence will try to rip you off, maybe forcibly take the art from you at the payoff. And if you don’t like it, what, you’ll call the cops? Even if the fence does pay you, it will only be five percent of the value. The value that the fence decides it’s worth.

Shopping
accounts for more than a few unsolved art thefts. A sponsor interested in growing his personal collection instructs a crook to bring him, say, a handful of specific Impressionists from the walls of a museum. It’s like the thief is shopping for his boss.

Settling
a Renoir would be to sell it back to the insurance company for a percentage of its value. To accomplish this, the insurers need me, a CR, to network and find the thieves and cut a deal for the return of the masterpiece. I have one foot in the corporate world, with the insurers, and one in the underworld world, with the thieves. I have to know a little about art and antiquities, too, that’s helpful. Got a degree in art history from Brooklyn College.

So as I said I had four cats I didn’t want, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. It was a way to get what I wanted, which was a particular woman.
For love
. Vegas showgirl. Figure like the mud flap girl. There are killer bodies, but Yvette’s was death itself. She was in a financial jam, so I let her move in with her cats. In my defense, no guy with a pulse would have thought twice about this. Then one day she’s gone with my checkbook. The cats were still there destroying my apartment.

Likewise, it seemed a good idea for me to both shop and settle at the same time.
For money
. I saw easy to steal, then lined up the boys to steal it, ones I knew who’d successfully boosted something else. Then the plan was to broker the goodies back to the insurance company. I was carrying some of Yvette’s debt and needed to whammy major cash in a hurry. It seemed like the thing to do at the time.

How good was that?

About as good as the four-cat idea.

I WAS WALKING DOWN SMITH
Street, down a canyon of cutesy brick shops and cafés, away from Huey’s bistro. My thumb hovered over the speed dial for Blaise Jones, the guy who could put tails on Huey’s crew.

My phone rang before I could place the call. I recognized the incoming number. It was Max, one of my best clients, from United Southern Assurance. USA for short.

I didn’t have to guess what the call was about.

“Tommy. Max.” The voice was nasal and taciturn, like those guys who call the horse races. Taciturn is like when someone says things without emotion. Flat.

“Max. What can I do for you?”

The taciturn voice says, “Whitbread Museum. Last night. Three guys.”

“Yeah?”

“Three guys, three paintings.”

“Which artists?”

“Hoffman, Le Marr, Ramirez.”

At least I knew Huey wasn’t lying about scoring the paintings.

“How’d it go down?”

“Duct-taped the kitchen staff. Pried open a door from the cafeteria to a hallway.”

“Museum call the cops?”

“No. They had instructions. Some they followed.”

“Interview them?”

“Yeah. Their shift is 7:00 p.m.”

“If I can find the goofballs who swiped them, what’s your range?”

“Fifty.”

“Whoa. That all? The Hoffman alone is worth—”

“Fifty, that’s it.”

“On it.”

“Call me tonight.” Max and his taciturn voice were gone.

USA had put me in charge of finding the paintings I’d had Huey steal but didn’t have. You have to love irony, only it’s better when it happens to someone else.

I rang Blaise Jones.

“Whatsup, Tomsy?”

“Blaise, I need tails on three local guys. Can you cover?”

“Heh.” That was Blaise’s little bluster, his way of saying there wasn’t anything he couldn’t cover. He had a lot of operatives for this kind of work, mainly teenage badasses from the projects. They could hang around on a street corner doing nothing and would look completely natural. Blaise knew that because he was from the projects himself and was only just a little older than the punks he hired. To look at Blaise and his gold teeth, you’d think he was a rapper or a drug dealer. Perhaps he was those, too. All I knew was that I could count on him to cover this kind of thing.

I gave him the addresses, all in the neighborhood, names, and descriptions.

Frank Buckley was a sous chef at Traviata and looked like a human hyena. Eyes that bugged out, black hair that grows only on one side of his head, no chin, long neck—one ugly hondo.

Kootie Roberts was a Monday chef at Caribe and bartender at Hank’s. That’s a dive bar on Atlantic way down near Flatbush. A lifter, Kootie isn’t as big as me, but he could roll a house uphill. Huge jaw, all scalp, only wears T-shirts, rarely a jacket. His muscles generate so much heat he doesn’t need a coat. I kid you not.

Then there was Huey, and we know what he was like.

“Duration?” Blaise says.

“In twenty-four I need a list of everywhere they been and the times. May need another twenty-four after that if nothing budges.”

“Any special treatment?”

That was Blaise wanting to know if I wanted any of the guys rolled, their apartments searched, blinded with Liquid-Plumr, like that. I’d never asked for any of the extras, but he always asked anyway. To tell the truth, I found some comfort in the thought that I had that nasty card in my deck, that I could play really dirty if I had to. Like I said, though, I had four cats.

“Not this time. Incriminating pictures would be nice. You on it?”

“Heh.”

I HAD TO SEE JOHNNY
One-Ball. Johnny is a fence. Someone tried to rip him off, shot him between the legs. So now he has only one.

He lived on Smith Street, the restaurant row in Brooklyn not far from Ariel’s Bistro. It’s in a brownstone neighborhood called Carroll Gardens, which is next to Cobble Hill. The only way you can tell one neighborhood from the other is by a slight difference in elevation and real estate price tags. Cobble Hill is higher in both.

The populace was basically comprised of the “neighborhood” people and the hipsters. A “neighborhood guy” was born in Brooklyn and probably went to PS 58. The older ones were once longshoremen, the younger ones in the trades, cops, or firemen. They ate pasta with red sauce that they called gravy, and only went to the traditional Italian restaurants and bakeries in the neighborhood. Many hadn’t been to Manhattan—called “the City”—in years. They are proud to be called neighborhood guys.

Hipsters were the newcomers, gentrifiers, the ones who commuted to Manhattan and drove up the real estate prices. They patronized a booming business of new restaurants on Smith Street where they drank PBR and hand-rolled their cigarettes. Hipsters were easy to spot. The male versions wore porkpie hats, too-small sweaters, black plastic glasses, and old-school Chuck Taylor sneakers. The female version sported funky two-tone glasses, star tattoos, ’70s ski vests, and old-school Pumas. The hipsters had cornered the market in what was hip, as the name suggests, but disliked being called hipsters.

Neighborhood guys and hipsters pretend the other group doesn’t exist. Like two groups of ghosts that can’t see each other.

There was a third part of the population few knew existed. Like most of the trades in New York, art theft has its neighborhoods, and this was one of them. Many professional thieves—and by that I don’t mean stickup guys and sneak thieves feeling up glove boxes—keep gainful employment in the restaurant business. Like almost anybody else, they need a regular job, if nothing else to explain to curious police and the Internal Revenue where they derive their income. Waiting tables or cheffing also makes for a nice alibi. Most restaurants in New York close late. If you’re a waiter or chef, you may not leave your place of employment until real late. Or you could be prying open the bathroom window at a check-cashing place. Restaurant workers cover for each other.

The neighborhood had a lot of restaurants where the tips were good and apartments rented out a little lower. Carroll Gardens was farther from most of the Manhattan places where the art or other goodies were stolen from but not too far. That the area was a haven for goofballs wasn’t common knowledge, and it wasn’t like every other person on the street was a goofball. Only those in the business knew.

Jo-Ball was a maître d’ at Dominic’s, an Italian place farther down Smith Street. It was an old-school place, not hip. Italians from all over Brooklyn would come there for their Sunday pasta and red sauce. Jo-Ball was the man with the toupee and the suit who greeted everybody, flirted with the old fat broads from Bay Ridge, and made sure the customers felt special.

His talents didn’t stop there. Johnny also moved goodies, liquidated them into cash. You might say we were competitors. He brokered a thief’s goods onto the art market, and I brokered a thief’s goods back to the insurance companies. There was no bad blood between us, just a little spirited competition now and again. We also used each other to keep a finger on the pulse of what was what, who had done what. Shop talk, key to any business, even between competitors. Maybe whoever took my goodies was trying to broker them to him, or someone else. Would this be a way of putting the goodies into my hands? Jo-Ball and I had an understanding that we wouldn’t undercut each other. If the paintings were mine first, I was pretty sure he’d hand them over, for a finder’s fee.

Dominic’s was still shuttered at that hour, but I knew Johnny got coffee and breakfast up on Court Street at Donut House. It’s a diner. White flecked counter with matching stools on the left wall, tables along the right wall, bathrooms rearward. I found Jo-Ball in a baby blue track suit, at the far back corner table facing out. He always sat that way, facing out, in back. He only had one ball left and meant to keep it.

“Tommy!” One of his fat hairy hands waved me over to his table. “Siddown. You want something?” He gestured to Garrison, a thin black guy behind the counter. “Garry, sweetheart, can we get Tommy a cup? It’s good to see you, Tommy, siddown.”

Ten minutes ago I’d been at a café table across from a nervous Frenchman with eyelashes. Now I was squeezed in at a Formica diner table across from a baby blue Italian in a wig.

Jo-Ball pointed a wedge of bagel at me. “Tommy, why you wear a pinstripe suit all the time? The insurance guys make you do that? Is that scarf silk? You hear about last night?”

I loosened my scarf as Garrison poured coffee into a cup next to me. “My pop used to say, why not look your best all the time? Thanks, Garrison.”

Garrison says, “You having breakfast, Tommy?”

So I says, “Nice of you to ask, but I’m good.”

He nodded and went back behind the counter to serve someone else who’d just come in. I turned my attention to Jo-Ball.

I dumped four sugars in my coffee. “So what happened last night?”

Jo-Ball’s eyes were laughing at me. “Maybe, Tommy, you wear the tie ’cause no matter what you done you look like you ain’t done nothin’.” He didn’t know I was into anything more than brokering art back to the insurers. He shouldn’t have, anyway. So he says, “You’re serious, you telling me you didn’t hear about last night?”

I shrugged, only it was small, not French.

“So you didn’t hear?” His eyes were both laughing and searching. “The Whitbread Museum. Three guys. Three pips from the wall.”

Now I caught myself overstirring
my
coffee—
tink, tink, tink
—so I took a sip. “No kidding?”

“Kid you not,” he says. “That’s why you’re here, am I right? You wanna know did I pick up on it already or not.”

“Did you?”

“Why should I say?”

“Nobody called me yet. If the three pips are already yours, then they’re yours. I don’t grudge you anything, Johnny, you know that. And if I spook the goofballs who took them, then they’ll just come to you all the faster.”

I saw Johnny’s eyes focus beyond me, over my shoulder. Slowly, he settled his coffee cup into its saucer. His hand slid under the table. “Don’t turn around, Tommy.”

“Johnny, you do this every time anybody comes into the diner. You’re a paranoid. Just see you don’t shoot me under the table by accident.” I knew he carried a little automatic in his waistband. “So, about the goodies?”

Jo-Ball still looked over my shoulder, nervous. “I got a line on it, but indirectly, you might say.”

I leaned across the table, my voice lowered, and I says, “Indirectly?”

Jo-Ball nodded, his eyes finally meeting mine, the eyebrows wiggling. “A certain party came to see me here
yesterday
for breakfast.”

“Sunday morning? Anybody I know?”