Heist Society (4 page)

An odd thing tends to happen on the cusp of winter. Ask any better-than-average thief and he’ll tell you that the best time to pull a con is when the weather should be changing—but isn’t. People feel lucky. Marks get careless. They look at the sky and know the snow is up there somewhere, and so they think about how they’ve already cheated Mother Nature. Perhaps they could get away with much, much more.

If Kat had any doubt about this theory, all she had to do was glance around Madison Square Park as she and Hale strolled down Fifth Avenue. The sun was warm but the wind was cool, and children played without their hats and scarves. Nannies chatted beside expensive strollers, while businesspeople took the long way home. And that was when she saw him.

Kat would not have described him as handsome. She’d been raised by Bobby Bishop, after all, and had spent entirely too much time around Hale.
Handsome
isn’t a synonym for attractive; and while the man walking through the square wasn’t the former, he certainly was the latter.

His hair, for example, was slick and gelled. His suit was the kind of expensive that would be out of style far too soon, and his watch was the only thing about him that was as shiny as his teeth. And yet, for the purposes of Kat’s world, he was—put simply—perfect.

“Oh boy,” Kat heard herself mutter as the man traipsed forward, his gaze glued to his cell phone, and ran right into a bumbling old man in a long trench coat and mismatched socks.

“Oh boy,” Hale echoed.

“Are you okay?” Kat overheard the slick man ask. The old man nodded but gripped the lapels of the other man’s expensive suit, steadying himself.

As the two men parted ways, one stopped after only a single step. But the perfect man—the perfect mark—kept walking. He was well out of earshot by the time Kat waved at the rumpled vagrant and said, “Hello, Uncle Eddie.”

If Kat had stayed at Colgan long enough, a teacher might have eventually told her what her family had been saying for generations: It’s okay to break the rules, but only sometimes, and only if you know them very, very well. So maybe that was why, among the world’s great thieves, Uncle Eddie and Uncle Eddie alone was allowed the luxury of a permanent address.

Stepping inside the old Brooklyn brownstone, Kat felt the sun disappear behind a heavy wooden door, blocking out a neighborhood that had spent the last sixty years morphing from trendy to shady and back again. But inside, nothing ever changed. The hallway was always dim. The air always smelled like the Old Country, or what she’d been told the Old Country smelled like: cabbage and carrots and things simmering for long hours over slow heat in cast-iron pots that would outlive them all.

It was, in a word, home, and yet Kat didn’t dare say so.

Uncle Eddie shuffled down the narrow hallway, stopping only long enough to pull the slick man’s wallet from his pocket and toss it onto a pile of nearly identical loot that sat unopened. Forgotten.

“You’ve been keeping busy.” Kat chose one of the wallets and thumbed through the contents: one I.D., four credit cards, and nine hundred dollars in cash that hadn’t been touched. “Uncle Eddie, there’s a lot of money in—”

“Take off your shoes if you’re coming in,” her great-uncle barked as he continued down the narrow hall. Hale kicked off his Italian loafers, but Kat was already hurrying behind her uncle, trailing him into the heart of the house.

“You’re picking pockets?” Kat asked once they reached the kitchen.

Her uncle stood quietly at the ancient stove that dominated the far wall.

“Tell me you’re being careful,” Kat went on. “It’s not like the old days, Uncle Eddie. Now every street corner has an ATM, and every ATM has a camera, and—”

But she might as well have been speaking to a deaf man. Uncle Eddie pulled two porcelain bowls from the shelf above the stove and began ladling soup. He handed one bowl to Hale and one to Kat and pointed them toward a long wooden table surrounded by mismatched chairs. Hale sat and ate as if he hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks, but Kat stayed standing.

“It’s a different world, Uncle Eddie. I just don’t want you to get into trouble.”

Just then, Hale’s spoon scraped the bottom of his bowl. There was no hiding the dismay in his voice as he asked, “Uncle Eddie, why is the seal of the British Royal Family on your dishes?”

Her uncle’s voice was gruff, impatient. “Because that’s who I was with when I stole them.”

As Kat held the bowl in her hands, she couldn’t help but realize it was hot—in a lot of ways. She couldn’t help but see Uncle Eddie as Hale saw him—not as an old man, but as
the
old man.

“We practice a very old art, Katarina.” Her uncle paused long enough to toss Hale’s wallet toward him. “It is kept alive not by blood”—another pause as Uncle Eddie dropped Kat’s passport onto the counter next to a loaf of day-old bread— “but by practice.”

The old man turned away from his speechless niece and the boy she had brought home. “I suppose you were absent the day they taught that at the Colgan School.”

Kat’s coat suddenly felt too heavy as she stood there, remembering that she couldn’t take the heat and
that
was why she’d gotten out of the kitchen. She sat down at the table, knowing that now she was back in.

There were a lot of things that could have happened next. Uncle Eddie might have commented that the boy Kat had brought home dressed far better than the stray her mother had chosen. Hale might have worked up the courage to finally ask Uncle Eddie the story behind the fake Rembrandt that hung above the hearth. Kat might have admitted that the food services department at Colgan had nothing on her uncle’s cooking. But when the back door slammed open, everyone’s attention was on the two boys who hurried in, struggling to restrain the largest, shaggiest dog that Kat had ever seen.

“Uncle Eddie, we’re back!” The smaller boy tightened his grip on the dog’s collar. “They were out of Dalmatians, but we got a . . .” He looked up. “Hey, Kat’s here! With Hale!” Hamish Bagshaw was slightly shorter and stockier than his older brother, but otherwise, the ruddy English boys could have passed for twins. The dog lurched, and Hamish hardly noticed. “Hey, Kat, I thought you were at . . .”

When he trailed off, Kat told herself it was the heat from the stove that was making her face red. She focused on breathing in the fresh air from the open door, and swore she didn’t care what anyone thought. Still, she was relieved to hear Hale ask, “So, Angus, how’s the bum?”

Her relief quickly faded when Angus started unbuttoning his pants. “Good as new. German docs fixed me right up. You wanna see the scar?”

“No!” Kat said, but what she thought was: They were in Germany?

They did a job in Germany.

They did a job without me.

She looked at Hale, watched the way he licked his spoon and helped himself to a second bowl of soup, at home in her uncle’s kitchen. She looked at her uncle, who hadn’t even smiled at her. And when she turned to the Bagshaw boys, Kat couldn’t meet their gaze. Instead she focused on the mangy mutt between them and whispered, “Dog in a bar.”

“Hey, you guys want in?” Angus asked, beaming.

“Boys,” Uncle Eddie warned, as if saving Kat from the shame of admitting that even classic cons were beyond her now.

“Sorry, Uncle Eddie,” the brothers mumbled in unison. They eased quietly out of the kitchen, taking the mutt back into the night without another word. Then Uncle Eddie took his place at the head of the table.

“You have to ask the question, Katarina, in order for this old man to answer.”

The last time Kat had been in this room, it had been August. The air outside had felt like the air in the kitchen was then—sticky and thick. At the time, Kat had thought she would never again be so uncomfortable at her uncle’s table. Sure, this was where her father had planned the De Beers diamond heist when she was three. It was the very room where her uncle had orchestrated the hijacking of eighty percent of the world’s caviar when she was seven. But nothing had ever felt as criminal as sitting there, announcing to her uncle that her greatest con had worked and she was walking away from her family’s kitchen in order to steal an education from one of the best schools in the world.

Turns out, that was nothing compared to walking back in and saying, “Uncle Eddie, we need your help.” She lowered her eyes, studied a century’s worth of scuffs and scars in the wood beneath her hands. “
I
need your help.”

Uncle Eddie walked over to the oven and pulled out a loaf of fresh bread. Kat closed her eyes and thought of warm croissants and cobblestone streets. “He didn’t do it, Uncle Eddie. I flew to Paris and talked to Dad. He has an alibi, but . . .”

“Arturo Taccone paid Kat a visit,” Hale finished for her.

Kat could count on one hand the number of times she’d seen her great-uncle genuinely surprised; this was
not
one of them. She knew it the moment he turned from the stove and looked at Hale with knowing eyes. “Your job was to deliver a message.”

“Yes, sir,” Hale told him. “I did that.”

“Nineteen fifty-eight was a good year for cars, young man.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Arturo Taccone is not the sort of man I would like visiting my great-niece.”

“She left in the middle of the night. She does that.” Hale glanced away then added a quick, “Sir.”

It felt, in that moment, as if her going to school was all the excuse anyone had ever needed to start treating Kat like a child. “
She
is sitting right here!” Kat didn’t realize she was yelling until her uncle looked at her in the manner of a man who has not been yelled at in a very long time.

“I’m
here
,” Kat said in a softer voice.

She didn’t say,
I can hear you
.

She didn’t tell him,
I came home
.

She didn’t promise,
I’m not going anywhere
.

There were at least a dozen things that she might have said to reclaim her place at the table, but there was only one that really mattered. “Taccone wants his paintings back.”

Uncle Eddie studied her. “Of course he does.”

“But Dad doesn’t have them.”

“Your father isn’t one to ask for help, Katarina, especially not from me.”

“Uncle Eddie,
I
need your help.”

She watched her uncle take a long serrated knife from a block by the stove and slice three pieces of warm bread. “What can I do?” Uncle Eddie asked in his
I’m just an old man
tone.

“I need to know who did the Taccone job,” Kat told him.

He rolled back to the table, handed her a piece of bread and a plate of butter. “And why would you need to know that?” he asked. But it wasn’t a question—it was a test. Of knowledge. Of loyalty. Of how far Kat was willing to crawl to get back to where she’d been last summer.

“Because whoever did the Taccone job has Taccone’s paintings.”

“
And
. . .”

Kat and Hale looked at each other. “And we’re going to steal them.” Kat felt a surge of strength as she said the words. Like confession, it was good for the soul.

“Eat your bread, Katarina,” Uncle Eddie told her, and Kat obeyed. It was the first meal she’d had since Paris.

“This is a serious thing you’re trying to do,” Uncle Eddie said. “Who, may I ask, is this
we
of which you speak?”

Hale looked at her. He opened his mouth to answer, but Kat cut him off. “Hale and I can do it.”

“Then this is a
very
serious thing. I’m afraid it might be difficult to accomplish from the Colgan School. . . .”

If the stories were to be believed, Uncle Eddie had once won a million dollars in one weekend playing cards in Monte Carlo. Without cheating. For the first time in her life, Kat believed in the power of her uncle’s poker face.

She lowered her gaze and told her uncle what he already knew: “It turns out the Colgan School and I have had a parting of ways.”

“I see.” Her uncle nodded but didn’t gloat. He didn’t have to.

“We need a name, Uncle Eddie,” Hale said.

“People genuinely like your father, Katarina.” Uncle Eddie thumbed his nose and muttered, “Although
why
, I do not understand. But he has friends.” He placed a rough hand on top of hers. “Let me make some calls. It might take a day or—”

“We don’t have a day or two.” Kat felt herself growing angry. “We know you can find out who did the Taccone job, Uncle Eddie.” She stood up, towering over her uncle for the first—and probably last—time in her life. “If you can’t or won’t tell us, we’ll find someone who will. But it has to be done.” She drew a deep breath. “
I
have to do it.”

“Finish your soup, Katarina,” Uncle Eddie said, but Kat didn’t sit; she didn’t eat. She watched her uncle stand and walk to the pantry; but instead of some rich dessert, he pulled out a thick roll of long paper.

Hale glanced at her, his eyes wide as her uncle pushed their meals away and laid the roll on the end of the table.

“The man who did the Taccone job . . .” Uncle Eddie began slowly. Maybe it was fatigue or habit, but his accent seemed thicker than normal as he leaned over the scroll. “We don’t know
who
he is. We don’t know
where
he is.” Kat’s heart beat faster while her spirits fell. Then, Uncle Eddie gave a flick of his wrist and, in a flash, the scroll unfurled on the long table, and Kat’s eyes settled on the most elaborate blueprints she’d ever seen.