Among Thieves (12 page)

He shook his head. “No. It just seems a little thin.”

“It does,” she agreed. “But it would also fit with the
Padre Pio
they pulled on Murphy. Back in 1990, nothing happened in this town without Whitey Bulger’s say-so, and Murphy was working
closely with him
at the time. Maybe this has nothing to do with the art theft. Maybe it’s just a beef between the IRA and the boys in Southie
over drugs or guns. But then why paint ‘The Storm’ in blood?”

“Okay,” Stone said. “It’s a possibility. I’m not sold yet, but it’s someplace to start.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Thanks
for sharing. It’s almost like we’re partners.”

She was looking at him across the table. “Don’t let it go to your head. In my book, I still don’t know whether this ‘partnership’
is gonna work. I like to work alone, and I don’t trust people easily. We’ll see where this goes; that’s the best I can do.”

He nodded. “Fair enough. I’m just looking for a chance. You may even find it’s easier to do the job if you have someone you
can rely on.” He took a final sip of the coffee and put down his mug. “One question,” he said.

“What is it?”

“How do you know so much about the robbery?”

She frowned at him. “I may be old, but I can use the Internet, too.”

Special Agent Hewitt paid the barista for his coffee at the Starbucks in Government Center. It was overpriced, but he’d gotten
to the point where he could no longer drink the swill that dribbled from the 1950s coffeemaker at the office. There were some
sacrifices he wasn’t willing to make, even in the name of justice.

He walked out of the Starbucks and across the brick tundra that surrounded City Hall. He looked up at the building and grimaced.
Boston’s City Hall had been built in the 1960s, and was the most renowned example of the Brutalist school of design popular
at the time. A monumental nine-level cement inverted pyramid set on eight acres of brick and stone, it won praise from the
architectural community as a notable achievement in the creation and control of modern urban space. In a poll of historians
and architects, it was voted the sixth greatest building in American history. To Bostonians, though, it was an eyesore. With
all the warmth of a mausoleum, it loomed over the classic architectural beauty of Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market across the
street.

The Boston field office of the FBI was housed in the John F. Kennedy Federal Building next to City Hall. It was a nondescript
concrete structure in the heart of Government Center, close to the backside of Beacon Hill.

Hewitt flashed his badge at the guard standing next to the metal detectors and walked around the line. He took the elevator
up to the eighth floor, walked through the gray industrial-carpeted hallways, past a warren of cubicles inhabited by dull-eyed
functionaries trying to make it through another day on the government payroll, and into his office. It was small by the standards
of those he had gone to law school with years ago who now made millions representing huge corporations in the great glass
towers of private practice. The furniture was faux-wood laminate over particleboard, and the cabinetry was gray-steel government
issue. Nonetheless, he was comfortable there. It was where he belonged.

As he hung up his coat on the hook behind the door he heard a voice coming from behind his desk. “Robert,” it said.

Surprised, Hewitt spun, his hand involuntarily going to his hip, where his gun was encased in a holster.

“No need to shoot, Robert. I’m one of the good guys.” The voice belonged to Angus Porter, special agent in charge of the FBI’s
Art Theft Program.

“Porter,” Hewitt said with a heavy sigh. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Hewitt wondered how he’d managed to enter the
office and hang up the coat without noticing the man sitting in his chair. On the other hand, it was Porter. He couldn’t have
been taller than five-seven, and if he weighed more than one hundred and twenty-five pounds with his shoes on, Hewitt would
have been surprised. He had wispy blond hair growing out of a pale scalp that looked too small for his skull. It was pulled
impossibly tight and gave off a dull shine. He had the spoiled air of someone who’d grown up without having to worry about
money.

“I told you on the phone I was coming to Boston,” Porter said with a smile. His teeth had been whitened, and were brighter
than the starched collar of his tailored shirt.

“I don’t mean here in Boston, I mean here in my office.”

“You’re the only person here I came to see. Where else should I be?”

“I’m sure we have an office or a cubicle here we can get for you. You can work out of that.”

Porter shook his head. “No need. I’m not here officially, and I’ll be working out of my hotel.”

“Why?”

“You know why, Robert. On this investigation it’s just you and me, and that’s it.”

“I’m still not sure why,” Hewitt said. “We could have all the players blanketed with the right amount of manpower. You give
the word and we could mobilize twenty agents. We could control the whole thing.”

“It wouldn’t serve our purpose. It would be like sending an army of fishermen into a shallow river. We would scare away the
fish. But one or two men with the right bait—that’s how this must work.”

Hewitt walked around his desk and stood in front of Porter. “You’re in my seat.”

Porter looked up at him for a moment. Then he stood up and walked around to the far side of the desk. He pulled a chair over
from a small table in the corner and sat in front of Hewitt’s desk. Hewitt sat down in the chair Porter had just vacated.
“Have there been any further developments?” Porter asked.

“No,” Hewitt replied. “At least, none that have been discovered so far. How about on your end?”

“The offer seems genuine,” Porter said. “We intercepted physical evidence—paint chips. They match. Between that and the photographs,
I have a high level of confidence that this time it’s for real.”

“Shit,” Hewitt said. “You sure we don’t want to bring in some additional help?”

“Absolutely. You and I were both here in the eighties and nineties. We know the players better than anyone. I have all the
contacts we need in the art world to guide what’s going on from Washington. Bringing in others from the Bureau would only
complicate matters.”

“What about the locals?”

Porter gave a grunt. “The local police? You must be kidding. They’d only create problems. You know the kind of jurisdictional
tug-of-war that gets into.”

Hewitt picked up a souvenir baseball that was sitting on his desk. If it had been someone else sitting across the desk from
him, he might have tossed the ball to him—physical activity helped him think. Porter didn’t seem like the kind of guy who
liked to throw baseballs around, though. Hewitt tossed it in the air instead and caught it himself. “If Murphy was involved,
chances are that Ballick’s involved as well. He was Whitey’s right hand back then. He was higher up than Murphy, too. Should
we tail him?”

Porter shook his head. “Keep tabs on him, but don’t get too close. He may be involved, but maybe not. Whitey could have used
someone else, and I don’t want to put all our money down on one bet.”

“Whoever was involved is in some serious danger. I haven’t seen anything like what was done to Murphy in all my time at the
Bureau.”

“Murphy got what he deserved,” Porter said. “I don’t care how many of their own these people kill, as long as we find the
paintings.”

“You really think the art is more important than lives.”

Porter seemed to consider the question. “Not all of the art, only some of it. The Vermeer and the Rembrandts, certainly. Maybe
even the Flinck and the Manet. The rest of it, though, is irrelevant. The five unfinished sketches by Degas? Certainly not
worthless, but trivial compared to the other works. I can’t even begin to fathom why the bronze beaker from the Shang Dynasty
was taken, and the notion that they took the finial from the top of Napoleon’s battle flag is just flat-out insane. That’s
one of the great mysteries of the theft. In so many ways it was perfectly executed, but why waste time on trivial pieces like
that? Not to mention what wasn’t taken. These men were only steps away from Titian’s
Rape of Europa
. Arguably the greatest and most valuable Renaissance piece in the United States. If they had the knowledge necessary to identify
the Vermeer and the Rembrandts as worthwhile, surely they would have known about the Titian.”

“Maybe they just got lucky.”

Porter laughed. “It wasn’t luck. Not with how smoothly the job went off. Not with how successful they have been in keeping
the paintings hidden all this time. There are just some things about it that don’t seem to fit.”

Hewitt folded his hands on his lap. He wished Porter would leave; he didn’t enjoy being around him. There was something bloodless
about the little man that set him off. “If we do this right, maybe you’ll be able to ask these guys about all that. We just
need to keep them alive.”

“That’s hardly a priority of mine at this point,” Porter said. His expression darkened, and his eyes glassed over in anger.
Even when Porter had been an agent in the Boston office, he had always seemed off to Hewitt, particularly when it came to
art. It was an obsession of his, and it had led him to push for the establishment of the special unit in the FBI to focus
solely on art theft. It was a small group, but they were dedicated, and they were the best in the world at locating stolen
art.

“What these men did wasn’t just a crime,” Porter said. “It was a sin. They deprived the world of some of the greatest works
of art ever produced. I have no sympathy for them, and I wouldn’t let a little thing like their safety jeopardize a chance
to give these works back to the public.”

Eddie Ballick loved the sea as much as he was capable of loving anything. There was something about the unforgiving nature
of the deep gray waters off the northern shores of the Atlantic that made him feel as though he had a place in the world.
As a young man in the 1970s, he’d worked as a hand on the swordfish boats out of Gloucester. On his tenth run his boat ran
into a squall and foundered. Three of the six-man crew had gone down with the ship. He, the first mate, and one other had
survived for three days in a tiny raft, riding through some of the roughest seas of the season, before they were rescued.
Since that time, Eddie Ballick feared nothing.

He’d never planned to enter a life of crime. But fishing jobs could be hard to come by, particularly for a hand who had already
been on one doomed ship. There was never a suggestion that he was at fault, but it didn’t really matter; sailors are a superstitious
lot, and in the minds of many, Ballick was a jinx.

Jobless, and without any friends or family to speak of, Ballick drifted through his early twenties. He was a big man—not tall,
but solid, with bones as thick and strong as petrified branches, held together with thick slabs of muscle. He found work as
a bouncer at one of the roughest bars, where some of the city’s connected hung out. It wasn’t long before some of them recognized
the potential in a strong young man without fear.

Ballick was a perfect fit for Boston’s criminal underworld. He had a disdain for other human beings that allowed him to cross
lines of cruelty even some of his colleagues found troubling. He lived to live, without any care given to how long or how
well. As a result, his rise through the ranks of Boston’s organized crime in the eighties and nineties had less to do with
any active ambition, and more to do with an oddly indifferent efficiency. Within five years, he owned the bar where he’d first
been hired to run the door. It was rumored that his former boss was buried under the parking lot out back.

The bar was only one of Ballick’s quasi-legitimate businesses. For him, the crown jewel in his mini-empire was a run-down
fishing shack at the edge of the water at the southern tip of Boston, just north of Quincy. It was the only place he cared
about, and it was where he spent most of his time. It wasn’t much to look at: a small, rickety two-story building ready to
slide into the edge of Quincy Harbor.

Ballick was sitting in a cheap aluminum folding chair at the corner of the building, watching the activity on the pier closely,
when Finn and Kozlowski arrived. He looked as if he fit in there, and as if he would have a hard time fitting in anyplace
else. He was in his late fifties, with a large round head fringed with matted white hair. A fisherman’s beard traced a smooth
oval from ear to ear under his chin, and the only parts of him that seemed to move at all were his eyes. Boats were pulled
up along a nearby pier, some of them already unloading their catches in the mid-afternoon sun. A few of Ballick’s buyers from
the shack moved along the pier, watching over the unloading process, calculating their needs and the respective purchase prices
in their heads.

“Eddie Ballick,” Finn said as he approached. He’d called earlier to tell Ballick he was coming; Ballick was known to be a
man who abhorred surprises.