Full Circle (22 page)

“And what about us?” Tate looked at Bernhardt, then at Paula. “What’ll we be carrying?”

“I’ll carry my three-fifty-seven,” Bernhardt said.

“And I’ll have my gun.” As she said it, Paula shot Bernhardt another meaningful look.

“I’ll have my two Browning nine-millimeters,” Tate said. “What about a shotgun?” he asked, addressing Bernhardt. “There’s nothing like a shotgun, up to fifty feet. Why don’t I buy one tomorrow, and a hacksaw?”

“Fine. I’ll give you some money. Don’t forget to buy a ruler, too. Sixteen inches, breech to muzzle. No less. Otherwise, it’s a sawed-off.”

“Speaking of guns …” Tate rose, went to the closet, opened the foam-filled case that held the two automatics and the two revolvers, holstered, plus ammunition. He handed Bernhardt the .357 Ruger, handed Paula the .38 Chief’s Special. They each verified that their weapon was unloaded, then tossed them on Tate’s queen-size bed, along with two boxes of ammunition.

“So,” Tate said, picking up the thread, “you’ve got the paintings as far as the garage. I’m inside the garage, probably with James the bodyguard, who’s keeping his eye on me. So what then?”

“Then,” Bernhardt said, “I imagine we’ll load up the pictures. When everything is ready, James and I’ll get into the van, and back out of the garage. James’ll be driving. I’ll be sitting beside him, with my hand on the butt of the three-fifty-seven. You’ll follow us, C.B. James will open the front gate with an opener, and we’ll drive out onto Benedict Canyon road. We’ll drive to the house we rent, where Graham and Paula will be.” He looked at her, smiled. “That’s the answer to your first question. You’ll be guarding the money—you and Graham. You’ll also be keeping an eye on each other.”

“My God,” Tate said, “Paula’s the one should have the goddam shotgun. For every crook wants to hijack a few paintings, there’re a hundred ready to steal a few million in cash. Matter of fact, when you think about it, figuring that, let’s face it: I’ve had more experience shooting people than Paula has”—he shot her a wide, friendly grin—“so I should stay with the money, let Paula go with you.”

“Are you serious?” Bernhardt asked.

“I’m absolutely serious. Think about it.”

As Bernhardt looked from one to the other, he felt the hollowness of indecision begin, a suddenly overwhelming awareness that he was in beyond his depth, foundering. How could he have committed them—committed Paula—to mortal danger without any real plan? How could—

“I’ve got an idea.” Paula’s eyes were alight as she spoke. Bernhardt knew that mannerism, knew it could compound his problem. Paula was petite. And Paula spoke softly. But Paula was determined. Very determined. And, yes, very stubborn.

“My parents,” she said. “They live in Pasadena. They’ve got a couple of German Shepherds. And they’re
very
intimidating. The dogs, I mean.”

“Ah.” Tate smiled, nodded deeply. “That could be the edge.”

“
Wait
a minute.” Exasperated, Bernhardt raised both hands, turned to Tate. “First you halfway convince me that Paula should go with me. And now you—”

“Remember what I said about rottweilers and drug deals,” Tate retorted. “Okay, a shepherd isn’t as heavy-duty as a rottweiler. But
two
shepherds—” Once more, sagely, he nodded. “Two shepherds, one goes for the legs, one goes for the throat. That’s very big medicine.”

“He’s right, Alan. I’ll call my folks first thing tomorrow.” As if the matter were settled, Paula consulted her watch with an air of finality.

“Oh, Jesus.” Bernhardt shook his head, drank the last of his wine, rose to his feet. “Come on.” He clipped his revolver to his belt, left his shirttail out, to conceal the gun. “Come on, let’s go to bed. I’ve got to leave here at seven-thirty in the morning.”

Exchanging a knowing smile with Tate, Paula retrieved her own revolver, put it in her shoulder bag. Now the smile changed intimately as she grasped Bernhardt’s shirttail and tugged him toward the door of Tate’s room.

“N
OW BERNHARDT’S GOT A
couple of people with him,” Harry said. “A big black guy wearing a loud shirt, looks like he can really take care of himself. And a woman. Small, brunette, early thirties, I’d say. Great little body, looks like class. Bernhardt picked them up at the airport, and the black guy checked in. When I got that far, I decided to split, quit while I was winning. Midnight, one o’clock, hanging around a hotel lobby—” He shook his head. “Next thing you know, there’s a security guy leaning on you.”

They sat in the living room of the apartment Andrea had rented. The April night was soft and warm; drapes drawn over open windows billowed gently. Waiting for Harry to return, Andrea had taken a long, hot shower. Now, wearing a white terry-cloth robe, her hair in a matching towel, she sipped Glenfiddich over ice, watched Harry drink Jim Beam and water. It had been a successful night; Harry had done his job, no questions asked. He’d followed Graham and a young, dark-haired woman as they’d driven to a four-star restaurant. At eleven o’clock they’d returned to the Beverly Hilton, and gone upstairs. Later, when Harry had called on her car phone, reporting in, she’d ordered him to break off the surveillance at the Hilton and take over from her at the Prado.

“So what’s next?” he asked, sipping more whiskey.

“I’m wondering whether we could use two more people, for what I’m thinking now.”

“What’s that mean?” he demanded. “What is it you’re thinking now?”

Her smile was gently patronizing. “Don’t worry, Harry. What I’m thinking, it’ll be a lot bigger pie, more in it for both of us. But …” She let it go unfinished. Tomorrow morning, Sunday, could she make some calls, find two reliable hands, fly them out from New York the same day, time enough to brief them, get the job done by Tuesday? It was, she knew, a doubtful prospect. And yet…

“If this was New York,” Harry was saying, “I know a dozen guys’d take a thousand each to shoot their way in, at Benedict Canyon, wherever. And they’d supply their own guns, too. But here, this place, Christ, we don’t know anyone.” Moodily now, he drank more bourbon, then said, “You should’ve planned ahead better, Andrea. What’ve we got? A couple of handguns?” He shook his head grimly, finished his drink with another long, noisy gulp.

“You’re overlooking something, Harry.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

“I never intended that we shoot our way in.”

He poured more bourbon, went to the kitchen for water and ice, returned to sit slumped in the threadbare chair, picked fretfully at the frayed fabric of the arm. He’d wanted to rent a place in a good neighborhood, one the police didn’t have on their list. But Andrea had decided on a small furnished apartment in a run-down neighborhood, not too tough but not too fancy.

“I suppose,” he said acidly, “that you’re eventually going to give me a hint what it is we’re going to do, this new idea, whatever.”

“DuBois is a virtual invalid. We go shooting our way in, and he’ll probably die right in his wheelchair.”

“So? What’s wrong with that?”

“I’m almost certain that he’s got the paintings locked up somewhere in his house. And certainly he’d be the only one with the key, or the combination, whatever. So all we’ve got to do is get inside the house and find him. We make him take us to the paintings, all very quiet, no fuss. He’ll be a hostage. One of us keeps an eye on DuBois while the other loads a panel truck. If we have to cope with some of his people—James, for instance, his security man—we’ll disarm them, and handcuff them, whatever works. If they don’t go along, we’ll tell them the old man’s going to suffer. We’ll disable their cars, disable their communications. We’ll throw roofing nails behind us when we leave. When everything’s done, no problems, we’ll leave DuBois somewhere. Anywhere. Then, once we’re back here, with the van in the garage, everything safe, we’ll call the police, tell them where to find DuBois.”

Harry sat slumped in the lumpy chair, drinking steadily, eyeing her over the rim of his highball glass. After she’d finished, as if he were depressed, utterly baffled by what he’d just heard, he began to slowly, solemnly, shake his head. Now, more in sadness than in rancor, an aspect of his persona that Andrea had never seen revealed, he said, “Before we got into all this—before we made our deal—I checked you out, Andrea, in New York. And the word I got was that you were one of the smartest operators around. You had it all, everyone said—looks, brains, plenty of nerve. You were even rich. Not rich because of what you stole, the deals you put together, but rich all your life. The word was that the life turned you on—living on the edge, the guns, everything. And, Jesus, I saw your face after I pulled the trigger on Ned Frazer. I saw your face, and I figured you wanted to pull the trigger yourself, that’s the way it looked to me. But most of all, I figured you for smart. And I figured you for tough, too, making a deal. ‘Andrea gets the last dollar,’ that’s the word in New York. But now, Jesus, here we are—” He gulped the bourbon, waved an exasperated hand around the small, dingy, dimly lit living room as they faced each other across a cheap, badly chipped white Formica coffee table. “Here we are, and you’re sitting there telling me how the two of us are going to pull off the biggest art heist ever. We’ve got—what—three guns between us?
Three?
And you’re telling me we’re going to get into that goddam place of his that looks like—” He searched for the word, finally said, “It looks like the fucking Pentagon, the way it goes on, all those levels. And once we’re in, we’re going to tap DuBois on the shoulder, and tell him, hey, he’s got to get us into the place where he’s got this art, wherever that is, and we’re going to tell him he’s got to let us take all these priceless paintings, and load them in a goddam truck and drive away. And we’re going to do all this, plan everything, the most complicated job I ever heard about, in just a couple of days. Plus, Christ, we can’t even raise our voices to the guy we’re robbing, for fear he might die on us. And furthermore, after we get the paintings, then what? Are we going to—”

“Do you have a better plan, Harry?” She spoke softly, dreamily. Her gaze was fixed on the half-full bottle of Glenfiddich on the coffee table. An hour ago, the bottle had been almost full. It was, she realized, a mistake to be matching Harry drink for drink, a no-win contest, winner take nothing, loser could die.

“You’re goddam right I got a better plan—
your
plan, for Christ’s sake. I say, first of all, we buy an Uzi, or a Mac Ten, whatever. Christ, in this town you can buy a goddam bazooka for a few hundred bucks. And then we go after the goddam money, just like you said first. Forget about the paintings. You got DuBois’s place bugged, I’m not so dumb I can’t figure that out. So we find out when the buy’s going to come down, and we scoop up the money, however many millions it is, and we split. DuBois loves his paintings so much, let him keep them. Let—”

“Anyone can steal money, Harry.” She spoke quietly, even delicately, as if she were instructing him in some intricate rite of initiation. “But to steal paintings worth a fortune, that requires talent. Imagination and talent. It requires—”

“Oh. So you want to be famous, is that it? You want every one to know how clever you are. Ego, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? You—”

“Have you any idea how much that art is worth, Harry? Fourteen paintings, by some of the world’s greatest masters—do you know what they’d bring at auction?”

“No, I don’t. But I know you’re going to tell me, Andrea.”

“One painting alone—Renoir’s
The Three Sisters
—would bring at least twenty million at Christie’s. Add that to a couple of Van Goghs, and at least one major Picasso, well…” She poured some Glenfiddich, went to the kitchen for ice. Was the bottle really that empty? Was she, therefore, talking too much? She returned to the rump-sprung couch, placed the drink untasted on the Formica coffee table. It was time to let Harry talk.

“How d’you know so much about the stuff DuBois’s got?” His voice was slightly slurred, his eyes slightly blurred.

“I know because of Ned. He knew about every stolen painting in the world. He knew where it was, and he knew how much it’d bring at auction.”

As she said it she saw a faint, knowing gleam kindle in his clear blue eyes. “After Ned went down,” he said, “you went to his place. I stayed in the car, and you went upstairs. You were wearing surgical gloves.”

She let him see the calculation in her eyes. How much did Harry know—really know? How dangerous could he be?

“There was a list.” He nodded deeply, a drunk’s bleary omniscience. “A goddam list of those paintings. And that’s what you killed him for. You and him, you were living together once. But you killed him for the list.”

Surrendering to the pure pleasure of complete contempt, she began to smile. What would she do without Harry to bait, to manipulate—to eventually discard?

“I’ll tell you a secret, Harry. You won’t tell, will you? You wouldn’t do that.”

In the distorted twist of his answering smile, she could see her own contempt reflected. At one level, then—the most elemental, one-syllable level—they understood each other.

“Ned died because he did something very stupid a couple of years ago.” Casually, patronizingly, she smiled at him. “Would you like to hear about it, Harry? You might find the story enlightening.”

He shrugged, waved for her to go on, drank more bourbon.

“It was in Mazatlan. Ned was dealing a set of jeweled Cellini goblets to a Kuwaiti sheikh, one of the royal family. We were all staying in the same hotel, the Coronado. The sheikh didn’t drink, but he was a goddam cokehead, and he decided to give a party for Ned, to celebrate their deal. It was the most lavish spread I’ve ever seen. There were even dancing girls—thirty dancing girls, especially flown in for the party on the sheikh’s seven-twenty-seven. There was a Hungarian woman, a countess, she said, and after a few drinks and a snort of coke, Ned started staring down her dress. I said something to him, but he still kept staring—and smiling. It was a new experience for me, a first.” Reflectively, she sipped the Glenfiddich. “I decided to leave the party, go to our room. I gave Harry exactly an hour, then I called a friend in the
policίa.
I told the friend where to find the goblets—and where to find Ned. The goblets eventually disappeared, of course—and so did Ned.”