The Chase (27 page)

La Guerre wasn’t just one of New York’s priciest and trendiest restaurants, it was also considered by the city’s cognoscenti to be a work of bold, politically incorrect performance art. So naturally the wealthiest members of the arts community flocked to La Guerre to be part of the experience, which was why Julian Starke was there. He didn’t like the food, and he thought the décor was insipid, but like a shark drawn to blood in the water he was attracted to fools with money.

Starke was a fifty-year-old art blogger and dealer who generated a dependable cash flow selling forged Jackson Pollocks and Willem de Koonings to actors, athletes, rap singers, and all the other idiots who patronized La Guerre. He’d even sold chef Olden a Robert Motherwell abstract masterpiece for seven million dollars that was actually painted for forty-five hundred dollars by a Korean forger living in Queens.

But where Starke really made his money was selling big-ticket stolen masterworks to the megarich for megabucks. He just never knew when those paydays were coming. So there he was, sitting at a power booth in the back, stroking his impeccable goatee,
dressed in his trademark black Versace turtleneck, slim-fit Maison Martin Margiela black twill jeans, and Krisvanassche black pebbled sneakers. He was trolling for clients who wouldn’t know a Klimt from a Warhol when a new face walked into the room.

The stranger was dressed to kill in a perfectly tailored Tom Ford tuxedo with silk-trimmed lapels and Italian-cut trousers, his bow tie unbowed at the open collar of his white Turnbull & Asser shirt. He was accompanied by two drop-dead gorgeous women in their early twenties who looked like porn stars filling time between sex scenes.

He walked directly to Starke’s booth and dismissed the women. “Go warm up our table, ladies. I’ll be right there.”

“Shall we order champagne?” one of the women asked, with a vaguely Russian accent.

“Order whatever you like,” the stranger said. The women went off, and the man slid into the booth beside Starke and smiled at him. “What do you think of this place, Julian?”

Starke did a quick appraisal of the man beside him. The tuxedo. The Rolex Oyster Perpetual Datejust timepiece. The S. T. Dupont palladium cufflinks. The white moiré silk Albert Thurston suspenders with gold fittings. This man had spent more on what he was wearing than most people earned in a year. He had money and he liked to display it. He was just the kind of guy who’d spend seven figures on an abstract expressionist forgery and never know the difference. So whatever this man’s game was, Starke was willing to play along.

“The cuisine is inventive, the wine list is adequate, but he’s trying way too hard to be provocative with the atmosphere,” Starke said. “I’m betting there will be a California Pizza Kitchen here a year from now.”

“You’re probably right. But I like it.” The stranger smiled, ran
his finger around the edge of a plate, and let it rest on the Iraqi seal. “Reminds me of how I made my first million. I was boots-on-the-ground for the invasion. Everyone else was fighting for apple pie, cheap gasoline, and a future without tyranny. Me? I’d heard that Saddam had crates of U.S. cash buried all over Baghdad. It was like an Easter egg hunt in a minefield. Those were good times.”

Kate groaned. “My God, does he always have to improvise? Why doesn’t he just stick with the script?”

She and Nick were sitting in a rented Escalade parked across Fifth Avenue from La Guerre. They were listening on their earbuds to the conversation between Boyd and Starke. Nick pressed a button on a tiny remote control he held in his hand. It muted their voices so Boyd couldn’t hear them.

“He’s incorporating the setting emotionally into his backstory,” Nick said. “It grounds the character in Starke’s world and creates a stronger visceral connection to him. It’s brilliant and it comes instinctively to him. You should be taking notes.”

“I took plenty of them in my undercover training course at Quantico. We were taught that the more you talk, the greater the risk you’ll say something that will get you burned. He’s riffing, giving Starke way too much information. It’s dangerous.”

“To play a role, and be convincing at it, you have to lose yourself in the character and get caught up in the flow of the action. You need to be relaxed for that to happen, so you make it a game. The moment you approach the performance as a job, it stops being fun. You get anxious and start second-guessing every word you say and every move you make. You start thinking of all the things that could go wrong. And then they do.”

• • •

Starke didn’t understand the point of the stranger’s long, colorful story about his glory days smuggling Saddam’s cash out of Iraq. What did he want? Was he here to buy or to sell?

“That’s a terrific story,” he said. “What’s it got to do with me?”

“Finding you here is a good omen. Iraq was my first big payday, and now you’re going to help me score an even bigger one.”

So he was selling. But Starke was immediately wary. He didn’t like getting into business with anyone who didn’t come with a recommendation.

“Do you have a collection to sell?”

“I do.” Boyd reached into his pocket and tossed a paper onto the table. It was a ticket for the Musée de Florentiny. “Interested?”

Starke knew about the theft, of course. The entire art world was buzzing about it. But the last thing he expected was to be contacted the day after the crime by someone claiming to be involved, or at least representing the thieves. If this man really had the three Rembrandts, then Starke stood to make millions in commission.

“Maybe,” Starke said. “Who are you?”

“Names are for tombstones. But you can call me Al Mundy, if that makes you feel better.” He took a disposable cell phone out of his pocket and set it in front of Starke. “I’ll be in touch tomorrow. Be prepared to buy.”

Boyd slid out of the booth and strolled over to the table where his two escorts were waiting, having already polished off a bottle of Cristal together.

Starke stuck around, working the room for the next hour or so, as Boyd and his women gorged themselves on food and drink, racking up a bill that Starke pegged conservatively at
three thousand dollars. When they were done, Boyd put his arms around the girls, who were giggly drunk, and led them to the door, winking at Starke as he passed.

Starke went outside just as Boyd climbed into a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and headed toward Fifth Avenue. The odds were, Starke thought, that this Mundy was a flashy con man, trying to swindle him or a rich client out of millions. But on the small chance that Mundy could actually deliver the Rembrandts, it was a once-in-a-lifetime deal and Starke would need instant access to an enormous amount of money to clinch it.

He put his phone to his ear and called Mr. Wayne.

Willie drove Boyd and his two five-hundred-dollar-an-hour escorts to the Four Seasons Hotel on East Fifty-seventh Street. Boyd led the women through the marbled lobby and up to his forty-ninth-floor suite.

Kate and Nick were watching from the lobby lounge.

“I still don’t see the point of hiring two high-priced hookers,” Kate said.

“They’re escorts, and we needed them because beautiful women are naturally attracted to successful world-class thieves who know how to have fun and enjoy the very best of everything.”

“Is that what your life was like before I came along?”

“You were always there.”

“One step behind,” she said. “Did you ever hire hookers?”

“Escorts,” he said. “Sure, if I needed eye candy for a con and didn’t have time to find the right woman. Escorts are expedient. They arrive on short notice and play their role.”

This wasn’t sitting well with Kate. Prostitution was illegal. She
didn’t like Nick’s cavalier attitude toward it. She didn’t like that a woman would have to turn to prostitution. And bottom line was that her role in all this made her feel … icky.

“The con was at the restaurant,” Kate said. “Not in his suite.”

“You never know who might be watching. There could be members of the hotel staff on Starke’s payroll. It would be odd if he didn’t bring the women back to his place to continue the party.”

“There are
two
of them.”

“And?”

“For crying out loud, isn’t one woman enough? What
is
it with you men and the threesome?”

“No need to get emotional,” Nick said. “It’s business.”

She checked her watch. “Boyd had better send them back down in an hour or I’m going up there and kicking them out.”

“No, you’re not,” Nick said.

“We’re paying for them.”

“Technically, the Vibora cartel is paying for them thanks to the two million dollars in drug money they gave me for the Malibu house.”

Kate nibbled on the cookie that had come with her cappuccino. “So I’m using Mexican drug money to hire hookers to entertain a con man selling stolen Rembrandts?”

“Brilliant, right?”

She didn’t bother to squelch the grimace.

“Boyd has earned some fun tonight,” Nick said. “He could be killed tomorrow.”

Kate didn’t understand that kind of fun. And in her present mood she thought Boyd was more likely to be killed by her than by Carter Grove.

“You could be killed, too,” Nick said.

She studied him over the rim of her coffee cup. “Running with that line of thought, do you think I should get myself a gigolo tonight?”

“I’m available,” he said.

“I can’t afford you.”

“I’ll give you the FBI discount.”

“You aren’t my type,” she said.

“What is your type?”

“For starters, a man who isn’t on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.”

Nick gave her the cookie that had come with his coffee. “If you keep being so picky, you’ll die an old maid.”

Julian Starke’s gallery on the Upper East Side resembled the drawing room of Lord Grantham’s house in
Downton Abbey
. It was full of antique furniture, Oriental rugs, paintings of the English countryside, and bookshelves lined with leather-bound first editions.

It was 10
A.M.
and Starke was in the gallery, sitting at his Biedermeier desk, doing the Daily Jumble, when Boyd called on the disposable cell phone.

“Meet me in my suite at the Four Seasons in a half hour,” he said.

Starke got to the forty-ninth-floor suite at 10:30 sharp and rang the buzzer. He was dressed in elegant black, as usual.

Boyd opened the door in a bathrobe, his hair wet and smelling of Bulgari shower gel. He seemed happy, relaxed, and refreshed. “Come on in and make yourself comfortable,” he said.

Starke stepped into the spacious, luxuriously furnished living
room, which had silk padded walls and a commanding view of the city. There were plates of scrambled eggs, toast, caviar, fresh fruit, and bacon on the dining room table. It all looked as if it had been attacked by a flock of birds.

The door to the bedroom opened and the two women Starke had seen the night before came out like models hitting the runway. Boyd kissed them and handed each a thick packet of crisp hundred-dollar bills from his bathrobe pocket.

“It was a pleasure,” he said, leading them to the front door.

“Be sure to call us next time you’re in town,” one of them said. “And we’ll party again.”

“I’ll start training in earnest today, Natasha.”

“I’m Natalia,” she said, putting her arm around the other girl. “She’s Natasha.”

“Of course,” Boyd said, ushering them out the door and closing it behind them, then turning back to Starke with a smile. “Would you like some coffee? Some caviar and eggs?”

“What I’d like is to know why I’m here.”

“You already know.” Boyd narrowed his eyes at him. “Sounds to me like you’re trying to get me to incriminate myself.”

“I can assure you I am not working for the feds,” Starke said. “Nobody’s listening but me.”

“You’ll have to do better than that,” Boyd said to Starke. “Strip.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I need to be sure you aren’t wearing a wire. Take off all your clothes or walk out that door right now. There are other dealers I can find to do business with.”

Starke’s immediate reaction was to tell Mundy to screw himself. But if Mundy had really just pulled off the biggest theft in Canadian history, Starke couldn’t blame him for wanting to
take every precaution. He also wasn’t ready to walk away from the millions he could potentially earn from Mr. Wayne on this deal. It could be his biggest payday yet. So Starke stripped down to his Calvin Klein bikini briefs, which were black, of course.

“Satisfied?” Starke asked.

“Can’t be too careful.” Boyd spread some caviar on a piece of toast and took a bite. “I want you to sell the three Rembrandts I stole from the Musée de Florentiny. They’re worth three hundred seventy-five million dollars, but I’ll settle for three hundred million. That’s a no-dicker sticker. The price is a reasonable compromise between the rarity of the paintings and the restricted market for them. Add whatever markup you think is fair for your commission. That’s between you and your buyer, anyway.”

“All I’ve got from you so far is talk, humiliation, and a lot of flash,” Starke said. “When are you going to back it up?”