Kill Me If You Can (2 page)

You might think
that finding a bag full of diamonds would be the best thing that happened in my life.

But you’d be wrong.

The best thing was finding Katherine Sanborne.

We met at the Whitney Museum.

The Whitney is one of my favorite places in New York, and I was staring at one of my favorite paintings,
Armistice Night,
by George Luks.

And then I saw her. Midtwenties, a heart-stoppingly beautiful face framed with auburn hair that fell to her shoulders in soft curls. She was escorting a group of high-school kids. As they came up beside me, she said, “George Luks was an American Realist.”

“And I’m a Puerto Rican romantic,” one kid said.

Big laugh from his teen cohorts.

Another kid jumped right in. “And I’m a Jewish pessimist,” he said.

Within seconds, half a dozen kids were vying to see who could get the biggest laugh. Katherine just grinned and didn’t try to stop them.

But I did. “None of you is as funny as George Luks,” I said, pointing at the painting on the wall.

“You think this picture is funny?” the Puerto Rican romantic said.

“No, I don’t,” I said. “But the guy who painted it, George Luks, was a stand-up comedian and a comic strip illustrator. Then he teamed up with seven other artists and they became known as the Ashcan School.”

“Cool,” the kid said.

“He
was
pretty cool,” I said. “Until one night he got the crap kicked out of him in a barroom brawl and was found dead a few hours later. Now, if you paid attention to your teacher, you could learn a lot of cool stuff like that.”

I walked away.

A half hour later Katherine found me gawking at Edward Hopper’s
Early Sunday Morning.

“Where’s your class?” I said.

“I’m not their teacher,” she said. “I just do volunteer work at the museum every Wednesday. The kids liked you. They were sorry you left.”

“I’m sure you handled them just fine,” I said.

“I did. But I was sorry you left, too. How do you know so much about art?”

I shrugged. “I just do. It’s not a very exciting story.”

“I love to hear what other people think about art,” she said. “If I bought you a cup of tea and a pumpkin muffin at Sarabeth’s Kitchen, would you tell me some of the least boring parts?” She smiled and her soft gray eyes were full of mischief and joy and promise.

“I couldn’t do that,” I said.

Her smile faded and her eyes looked at me, more than a little surprised.

“But I could buy
you
a cup of tea and a pumpkin muffin at Sarabeth’s Kitchen,” I said. “Would that work?”

The smile flashed back on. “Deal,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m Katherine Sanborne.”

“Matthew Bannon,” I said. Her hand was warm and soft and about half the size of mine. I held it for only a second, but it was long enough for me to get that jolt that goes through your body when you touch someone who has touched your heart.

We had tea.

I told her about my dream to be a painter.

“Maybe I can help,” she said. “I teach art. I’d love to see your work. Maybe you can bring some samples to my office tomorrow after my class.”

“I thought you said those kids in the museum weren’t your class.”

“They’re not. I don’t teach high school.”

“Oh, okay. That makes sense,” I said. “You’re pretty young. You probably wouldn’t want to put up with a bunch of hormonal teenage boys all day. What grade do you teach?”

She smiled. “It’s not a grade,” she said. “It’s a master’s program. I’m a professor of Fine Arts at Parsons.”

It was now official: Katherine Sanborne was beautiful and brilliant.

I was totally out of my league.

I spent half
that night trying to figure out which of my paintings I should show her. Was this one too predictable? Was that one too boring? Or worse, completely pedestrian? I was seeing my work in a whole new light. Not just was it any good, but was it good enough for Katherine?

The next day I was in Professor Sanborne’s office with fourteen photos of what I hoped was the best work I had done thus far. I doubt I’d ever felt more vulnerable and exposed in my life.

“No wonder you knew so much about the Realists,” she said after she looked at them. “Your work reminds me of Edward Hopper. In his early days.”

“I suppose you mean back when he was finger-painting in kindergarten?”

She laughed, and I decided it was gentle humor, kind humor, rather than the savage variety some professors strive to perfect.

“Not that early,” she said. “As you know, I’m sure, Hopper is legendary for his ability to capture reality. But his early works are so impersonal. That’s where you are now. In my opinion, anyway. Over time, Hopper’s paintings began to take on emotions—loneliness, despair, gloom.
Nighthawks
is probably his best work—my favorite—and he didn’t paint that till he was sixty.”

“I hope it doesn’t take me that long,” I said, “to do something half as good.”

“It won’t,” she said. “Not if you study at the right school.”

“Like where?” I asked. “Any suggestion you have would be so helpful. Honest.”

“Like
here,
” she said.

I shook my head a couple of times. “I don’t think I have the talent to be accepted at Parsons.”

“I’ll bet you do,” she said. “Loser buys the winner…I don’t know—dinner at Peter Luger. I love Luger’s.”

Six months later, Professor Katherine Sanborne and I were having the porterhouse medium rare at Peter Luger in Brooklyn.

I paid for dinner.

We started seeing each other regularly after our celebratory dinner, and six months after that, I was in her Group Critique class at Parsons. We did a pretty good job of keeping our relationship a secret from the other students, I thought.

The best part of Group Critique was being able to be near her three times a week. The worst part was enduring the critiques by my so-called peers.

The morning before I found the diamonds, my latest painting was being thoroughly trashed by Leonard Karns. Karns was short, round, pretentious, and bitterly, unnecessarily nasty. He waddled over to my canvas and explained to the rest of the group why it sucked and, by proxy, why I sucked.

“So it’s a bunch of nobodies in line at an unemployment office,” he said. “But do we really care about any of them? I could take the same picture with my cell phone camera. It’s like the German playwright Bertolt Brecht said, ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.’”

“And you don’t think Mr. Bannon has shaped this piece?” Katherine said.

“No,” Karns said. “But I think he should take a hammer to it.”

If he was hoping for a laugh from the rest of the class, he didn’t get it. Most of my fellow students sat in silence and winced. It was the last day of the semester, and by now Karns had managed to systematically piss off every one of them with his condescending elitist bullshit.

He would have pontificated longer, but Katherine cut him off. When class ended, she gave us back our term papers. The assignment had been to write a five-thousand-word critique of public art in New York City. It counted as a third of our grade, so I’d spent a lot of time on it. I’d hoped for an A.

But I didn’t get it. There was a yellow sticky on the front page. It said,
C+. Matthew, see me after class.

I sat in a depressed funk while everyone else filed out of the room. Katherine Sanborne finally came around her desk and walked toward me.

“C-plus?” I said. “I thought the paper was a little better than that.”

“If you’re willing to put in the time, I can give you a chance to improve your grade,” she said.

“What do I have to do? I’m not afraid of hard work.”

And then Katherine’s mischievous gray eyes lit up, and she clicked the lock on the classroom door.

“Take off your pants,” she said.

I’d been had.

She stepped out of her skirt. Very graceful. Nice to watch. “If those pants don’t come off in five seconds, Mr. Bannon, I’m going to have to give you an incomplete,” she said. “By the way, that paper of yours was damn good, but I’ve come to expect even more from you.”

The classroom had a chaise longue that was used for the figure-painting courses, and within seconds Katherine pulled me to it and began caressing, kissing, exploring. Then I was inside her. This was some kind of teacher-student counseling session.

Finally, Katherine put her lips to my ear, taunting me with kisses and little flicks of her tongue.

“Matthew,” she whispered.

“What?”

“A-plus-plus.”

Okay, let me
get back to my story about the unexpected treasure trove that I found in locker #925. It was a night I’ll never forget, of course. And for the other people in Grand Central Terminal, it was probably their worst nightmare.

I wasn’t in New York City on September 11, 2001, but I’ve lived here long enough to understand the citywide paranoia.
It could happen again.

New York is, was, and always will be Ground Zero. Code orange is as lax as we get here. I’ve seen tanks parked on Wall Street, bomb-sniffing dogs in public buildings, and convoys of cop cars barreling into neighborhoods as part of the NYPD’s daily anti-terrorism drills.

So, when the post–rush hour lull at Grand Central is shattered by gunshots and followed by two loud explosions, only one thing comes to mind.

Terrorist attack.

In an instant, the collective paranoia was justified. Mass panic ensued.

The screams echoed off the walls of the marble cavern. The first thing I saw was that nobody ducked for cover. Everybody ran—with visions of the crumbling towers replaying in their heads, I’m sure.

And then I couldn’t see a thing. Red smoke filled the building.

I’ve spent a lot of time in war zones, but this was not my responsibility. I wasn’t a first responder.

I ran like the rest of them.

And then I saw it in the smoky haze.

A trail of blood.

Instinctively I followed it. And then I saw him.

He was a big bear of a man, slumped against a bank of lockers in a pool of his own blood—from a gaping wound in his neck.

In all the madness, nobody was paying any attention to him. I knelt at his side.

My knee hit something hard. A gun.

“Get doctor. Stop blood.” He gurgled out the words in a thick Russian accent.

But there was no time for a doctor. No time for anything.

Before I could say a word, his eyes rolled back in his head and he exhaled a strained breath. He was dead.

His dark blue suit and the floor around him glistened with blood. It coated the door of the bottom locker closest to him. As I looked up, I saw a wide swath of red where he had leaned against the upper locker and slid to the ground.

Locker #925 was covered in bloody handprints.

And it was open.

Wide open.

I could think
of only one reason that a reasonably sane man who was hemorrhaging blood would open a train station locker instead of wildly seeking help. Whatever was inside that locker had to be too valuable to leave behind.

I looked down at the dead Russian.
Was it worth it, Comrade?

But then, who was I to judge this poor man for choosing locker #925 over calling 911? If I had half a brain, I’d be running out of Grand Central with all my fellow bomb-scared travelers.

But I wanted to know what was inside that locker. No—I
had
to know.

I stood up. By now the red smoke was starting to dissipate and I could take in the pandemonium.

People were stampeding toward the exits, fighting and clawing their way out of the station. Some cops were trying to keep them from getting trampled in the doorways.

Other cops were trying to evacuate the people who refused to leave.

A woman with three suitcases was holding her ground in the middle of the station, insisting that she wasn’t going anywhere without her bags.

“Damn it, lady,” a ruddy-faced cop screamed, “you can’t get a redcap during a terrorist attack.”

He grabbed all three bags, and she followed him as he struggled toward an exit.

And then a body came flying through the air and hit the marble floor.

It was a young man, Asian, wearing a busboy’s uniform.

Michael Jordan’s Steak House is a popular restaurant on the balconies overlooking the main concourse. People were pouring out, shoving their way toward the wide marble staircase at the west side of the station. The busboy must have been caught at the far end of the restaurant and opted for the quick way out. It was about a twenty-foot drop. He stood up on his right leg and started hopping toward the exit.

I thought I’d just experienced the most insane day of my life. What I didn’t know then was that after I reached inside that locker, the insanity would only get worse.

I put my hand on the open door and peered in. There was a bag inside. But not just any bag. It was one of those old-timey medical bags that you see in black-and-white movies from back in the days when doctors made house calls.

Maybe the Russian wasn’t so dumb after all. Doctor bags are usually crammed with gauze and tape and about twelve hundred cotton balls.

I opened it carefully and looked inside.

My first thought was
Holy shit.

My second thought was
This is a bag worth dying for.

I’d seen diamonds
before. My mother had one in her engagement ring. My aunt had two in her ears. But my recently shot-up acquaintance, now cooling on the floor of Grand Central, had them all beat. Did you ever enter one of those contests where you have to guess how many jelly beans are in the jar, and there are so many of them, you know you won’t even come close? That’s how many diamonds were in the Russian’s medical bag.

Correction—
my
medical bag. At least for the time being.

When I was growing up, my mom used to tell my sister and me about a leprechaun with a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. But she never mentioned a Russian Neanderthal with a bag of diamonds at the end of a bloody trail in a train station. Mom also said something about never taking what doesn’t belong to you. But to whom did the diamonds actually belong? The dead guy with the gun? I definitely suspected he had taken them from somebody else. My mom meant well, but at a time like this, I had to seriously consider my dad’s worldview. Finders keepers.

I could almost hear my dad listing my options.
What are you going to do, Matthew? Leave the diamonds with the dead body and walk away? Or maybe you want to get on the PA system and say, “If anyone at Grand Central lost a bag of diamonds, please meet me on the main concourse
”
?

I made a decision, a temporary one, anyway. The diamonds were up for grabs and I was the one who would grab them.

I closed the black bag and snapped the brass latch. My mind started racing. These diamonds could completely change my life.

Little did I know how soon, and how much.

The voice behind me was deep, resonant, and authoritative. “Police. Turn around real slow. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

I turned. The voice belonged to a young, very large African-American cop. And just in case his size didn’t intimidate me, he was pointing his service revolver at my chest.

Hmm,
I thought.
Looks like my life is changing already.