The Night Cafe (19 page)
Authors: Taylor Smith
Tags: #Politics, #USA, #Mystery, #Suspense, #Thriller, #Spy, #Contemporary
“Don?” Gladding’s voice pierced his hard-won calm. “Are you sleeping, my friend?”
“Not bloody likely,” Ackerman growled. He opened his eye. Bloody was right. The concrete floor in front of him was spattered with red. His tongue made a tentative exploration of his mouth. That’s right. Shy a few teeth now, as well.
“You were telling me about Hannah Nicks. Who is she working for?”
Ackerman shook his head, but as soon as he did, the bat came down on it. Not hard enough to do permanent damage, much less knock him unconscious again. Gladding’s boy was pulling his punches now. The old man must have reamed him out during his last nap.
“You mentioned the FBI,” Gladding reminded him.
“She had a card from some agent. I never heard of the guy, but apparently he’d told her to get in touch if she ran into problems down here.”
“And so she came to the bar.”
“S’right.” Ackerman saw the kid’s fancy Nikes in his peripheral vision. He turned his head and spit. A red clot landed square on the toe of the athletic shoe. He saw the kid wind up with the bat, but Gladding hissed and he swung wide of his mark. Ackerman felt the breeze as the wood passed a millimeter from his cheekbone.
“She came after she ran into trouble with Sergio,” Gladding said.
Ackerman nodded. “She wanted to know how to get to your place. She said she had a delivery for you.”
“And you told her how to get there?”
“Yup.”
“But I never saw her.”
Ackerman started to shrug, but that was a bad idea.
Relax, relax
…“Ships passing in the night, maybe? She said you’d had some other visitors already.”
“I see. So she told you about the gunmen?”
“She did.” He felt groggy, Ackerman realized, but he didn’t think they’d drugged him. Probably had a concussion from all those whacks from the bat. Anyway, he had no problem telling Gladding what he knew. The truth was always easier to maintain than a lie, and if he had any hope at all of getting out of this, consistency would be critical. Fact was, he didn’t really know anything critical anyway, and the Nicks woman was long gone, far as he knew.
“What did she tell you about the delivery?”
“She said it was a painting.”
“Did you see it?”
“Nope?”
“Come on, Don! She left it with you.”
“No, sh—” The bat landed on his spine and something crunched. Ackerman nearly passed out from the pain. “She didn’t leave it and I didn’t see it, dammit!” He peered over at the short, balding man who held his fate in his hands.
Gladding shook his head sadly. “I thought we were friends, Don.”
“Moises, give me a break. We’ve known each other for how long? Eight, nine years? We play chess, we drink together, and I help you out from time to time.”
“When your masters tell you to. They seem to have decided that I’m not worth helping anymore, however. Now, they would like to pretend they don’t know me.”
“I don’t know anything about that, and I don’t know anything about any goddamn painting.”
Gladding studied him for a moment, and then he looked over at the young man. “Show it to him.”
The cavernous space echoed with the sound of wood being dropped on concrete, and Ackerman saw the bat roll a little way from his chair. He winced involuntarily as the kid unrolled a poster and shoved it before his face. He squinted. He only had one good eye at the moment and even that wasn’t working so hot. He saw a copy of a painting done in mostly reds and yellows. An old café, French by the look of it, lit by the garish light of gas lamps. A green billiard table stood in the center of the room, but nobody was playing. The few patrons in the place were slumped over small tables, half passed out. It looked like The Blue Gecko at closing time.
“What’s this?” Ackerman asked.
“It’s the painting that woman was supposed to deliver. Now do you recognize it?”
Ackerman shook his head. “I told you, I didn’t see the painting she had. But this isn’t it. She said it was an abstract piece. ‘Like somebody kicked over finger paints,’ was her exact description, I think.”
Gladding nodded. “Yes, it was camouflaged. This is what was underneath. A restorer is standing by as we speak to remove the covering layer and reveal the masterpiece beneath. It’s delicate business, but not all that difficult to do, as it turns out.”
Ackerman turned back to the poster, leaning forward to read the title printed on the white mat surrounding the picture.
The Night Café by Vincent van Gogh
. And in the corner of the painting itself, one tiny scrawled signature: Vincent.
“Oh, shit,” Ackerman breathed. No wonder Gladding was so obsessed with getting the thing back. The van Gogh would be priceless, or near to, but Gladding wouldn’t keep it. It was collateral for some big deal. The trade would be big—big and ugly.
“I don’t know what she did with it, Moises. I told her she should leave it and I’d get it to you, but she didn’t trust me. She just needed me to be her chauffeur so she could get back to the airport and beat it out of town. She left me stuffed in the trunk of my goddamn car, for Pete’s sake!”
“I see. Well, I’m very sorry to hear that, Don. Clearly, you’ve had a difficult day.”
No kidding, Ackerman thought. And something told him it was about to get much, much worse.
Los Angeles
Thursday, April 20
H
annah awoke to the bright light of morning. She’d slept later than she meant to. Gee, could it be the stress of the last couple of days? Now she’d have to fight morning traffic to get up to Malibu.
She’d tried repeatedly to call Rebecca since getting in yesterday, but without success. She could have tried calling again this morning, but as she lay awake last night, wrestling with her hyper-stimulated brain, she realized that was the coward’s way. News like hers deserved to be delivered in person.
In record time, she hit the shower, dressed and grabbed a banana on her way out the door. The Prius streaked from the garage and down the hill toward the freeway—where she came to an abrupt halt. Sighing, she flicked on the radio, peeled her banana and settled in for a slow drive.
She merged into westbound traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway while she ate the banana. Then, inching along, she pulled her cell phone out of her messenger bag and scanned the missed-call list. Cal had called, but his was the last voice she needed to hear right now. If there had been a problem with Gabe, he wouldn’t have given up at one call. Maybe he was taking Mrs. Jennings’s advice and calling to bury the hatchet, she thought. Yeah, right. That was about as likely as her taking up knitting. She’d call him back later.
Nora had called three times, and that was more worrying. Visions of her mother taking a fall flashed through her mind. Her mom would be seventy-three on her next birthday, prime time for broken hips, and from there, it could only be downhill. But when she tried to get Nora back, she got voice mail on both the house line and on her cell. She called her mother’s line, but it just rang and rang. Nothing could convince their mother to get an answering machine.
“Why do I need that? I hate those things. Anyway, I’m always home, and if I’m not, I’m with one of you, so you don’t need to phone to talk to me, right?”
You couldn’t argue with the woman’s logic.
A call from an unfamiliar number interested her. Could it be from Special Agent Towle, wondering if she’d planted their toys? Boy, did she have a story for him, but first, she would tell the person most affected by Moises Gladding’s troubles.
Traffic sped up, but it was one of those cruel jokes L.A. freeways liked to play, because five hundred yards later, it slowed to a crawl once more. Another thought occurred to her about the unfamiliar number. Could it be Gladding calling, looking for his painting? It was a 310 area code, though, one of the dozen or so Southern California codes. In fact, she realized, Rebecca’s gallery in Malibu had a 310 number. The traffic stalled completely and she peered at the number again, then pulled up her phone’s number list. Nope, different number.
A horn blared behind her, and she looked up to see that the car in front of her was fifty yards gone and picking up speed. She waved in the rearview mirror. “Sorry.” She tossed the phone aside. She refused to be one of those people who drove like idiots because they were too busy yammering on their cell phones. It was such a cliché.
She’d talk to Rebecca and see what she wanted to do about their little problem. After that, she’d go home, return all those calls, check in with Special Agent Towle and tell him she’d salted his electronic devices at Gladding’s, for all the good it would do him. Then, she’d open a bottle of wine and settle in to watch HBO.
She allowed herself a smile. Or maybe invite Russo over to share that bottle of wine? Better idea.
She was turning onto Pacific Coast Highway, only about a mile from the gallery, when the phone on the seat beside started to vibrate. She caught it just as it was about to skip itself off the seat and she glanced at the screen. Speak of the devil. But as much as she wanted to talk to Russo, she was steeling herself for Rebecca’s inevitable dismay when she found out Hannah had blown the job that was supposed to save her butt. Russo would have to wait.
Ruben made himself a cup of coffee, knowing full well that Travis would stop at Starbucks on his way into work, probably giving in to the lure of one of those calorie-laden pastries while he was at it. The healthy breakfasts he tried to make were wasted on his partner during the week. He pulled a stool up to the breakfast bar and opened the
Los Angeles Times
. Mellie was still sleeping and Trav’s shower had just shut off. Ruben glanced at his watch. In five minutes, Travis would race into the kitchen, plant a kiss on his cheek and fly out the door.
He had finished the front page and turned to the sports section when Travis came running through, briefcase in hand. As the garage door opened and the Jeep roared to life, Ruben glanced at his watch and smiled. Five minutes on the dot. The man was so wonderfully predictable.
He poured himself another cup of coffee and checked out the scores from last night’s Dodgers game. With luck, he might have half an hour before Melanie woke up. Then, it was breakfast, physio, a little play-time, and then maybe a trip to the garden center to buy some flowers for the patio.
He was just finishing the paper when he heard the hum of Hannah’s garage door opening. By the time he made it to the window, her blue Prius was already on its way down the hill. He reached for the phone to call Travis and let him know that the rabbit was back in her hole.
Los Angeles energized William Teagarden. He knew many people found the place crass and uninteresting, dozens of suburbs in search of a city, but he wasn’t one of the naysayers. He liked the sunshine, the palm trees, the optimistic architecture, even the traffic, especially now that car rental companies offered the option of GPS devices to keep him on track. Remembering to keep to the right side of the road was nothing compared to the challenge of negotiating freeways and canyon roads. Now, with satellite navigation aids, he could drop the top on the convertible he always ordered and pretend he was Frankie Avalon on his way to a date with Annette Funicello.
When he’d arrived from Puerto Vallarta the previous afternoon, he’d gotten a red Sebring convertible at the car rental agency and a room at the Mondrian Hotel on the Sunset Strip. This morning, he was scheduled to meet with a local FBI contact referred by the Washington-based head of the Bureau’s Art Theft unit. Teagarden and Special Agent Lou Eppley had worked dozens of cases together, sharing information, coordinating recovery efforts, arranging arrests and putting together prosecution evidence.
Eppley had also introduced him to the game of baseball, and Teagarden tried to attend at least one Major League game whenever he was in the States. The game was reminiscent of the cricket he’d played as a boy, but faster. He’d talked to the concierge at the hotel last night about the current schedule. There were three teams within easy driving distance, so he had high hopes of catching a game before he left town.
First, however, he needed to track down the gallery he strongly suspected had arranged the shipment of Yale University’s van Gogh, and the courier who, knowingly or not, had been hired for the job. Eppley had done some digging and come up with some key information. A joint FBI-CIA task force had already been looking at Moises Gladding when they caught a break and found out about the transport of the painting. As a matter of courtesy, the Los Angeles field office would be happy to meet with the former Scotland Yard Detective Superintendent and brief him on what they knew about the shipment.
“In one mile, turn right, then arrive at destination on right.”
“Thank you, Pamela,” Teagarden said to the GPS. He liked to stay on the good side of his little traffic helpmates with their lovely, reassuring voices. That included christening each one with a pretty name.
By the time Travis Spielman got his partner’s call about Hannah’s return, his mind was already on the day ahead. Installation of the new software was running well over schedule because of the system lockouts of the last couple of days. Half a dozen sister agencies had already called in complaints about the delays.
This kind of problem only fed the parochialism rampant in the intelligence community, where each department jealously guarded its turf and resisted all efforts to coordinate and share information with the others. If Homeland Security couldn’t prove that it was capable of providing efficient service, they would soon lose the cooperation that had been won only through the knocking together of heads, and the system would start to break apart into little fiefdoms once more.
Of course, if the spooks would give warning when an operation was in play and the system was going to be frozen, at least the Homeland data wonks could answer the complaints and tell their clients how long the problem would last. As it was, they just came off looking incompetent—and Travis Spielman hated to be thought of as incompetent.
So when Ruben called, he was pleased to know that Hannah was safely back home, and he felt a little foolish about the paranoia he’d been feeling, worrying whether he personally was in some kind of trouble. Right now, she was the least of his problems. He had angry bureaucrats to wrangle. Compared to those battles, Hannah’s line of work sounded easy.
