Midnight Angels (14 page)

He started small-time but didn’t play on that turf for long. His string of well-planned and even better executed break-ins caught the attention of the criminal assembly line, and by the time the young thief had made his way to Chicago, his name was front and center on the mind of Arthuro Mastopiedi, the underboss to Anthony Accardo and owner of one of the finest art collections in the United States. Mastopiedi had made it a point always to get the up-and-comers to sign on with his crew, and he went all out to recruit Cat Johnson. They met for the first time in a downtown Chicago barbershop with blackened windows and large ceiling fans slicing away at the heat and the flies. It took less than twenty minutes for the two ambitious men to reach an agreeable arrangement, and out of that initial meeting a thirty-year friendship bloomed.

Cat Johnson specialized in home museum invasions and he always worked alone. He never did more than five jobs in any given year, devoting an average of three hours of research for every three seconds he spent inside a targeted home. He would move the lifted works that same night, transferring them to waiting vans in an area known only to Mastopiedi, who would then take control and navigate the hot art through the various alleys of the black market. In return for his work, Cat received an up-front fee of $25,000 plus a six percent commission on the final sales total of the stolen goods. In his entire career he never earned less than $200,000 on any one job, working under what he felt was a foolproof system. “I know I could have taken down bigger paydays,” he once told his daughter, in the last months of his life, when the cancer had spread from his lungs to the rest of his body. “But there’s a price for that kind of hunger and greed, and I wasn’t willing to pay. Besides, I was all about the score. The money was a bonus, and not going to prison and being sent away from you? Well, what the hell kind of a price can you lay on something that sweet?”

He never hid how he earned his income from either his wife or his only child. They lived a simple life and pulled up stakes often, using Cat’s cover as a Mutual of Omaha insurance salesman as the reasons for the frequent transfers. The family moved not out of any concern that the authorities were closing in on them, but rather as yet another part of Cat Johnson’s approach to the criminal way of life—never get too close to people or places. There can be no room for friendship outside of business, or for nostalgia not tied into a theft. It was a cold way to live, but to Cat, keeping his personal circle tight was the best route to a prison-free existence.

He did, however, allow himself one personal luxury—he doted on his daughter Clare. She was his one steady companion in life. While he never strayed from his marriage to Cynthia, the union was one built on loyalty rather than love. But to Cat, his Clare was as lovely as any painting he had ever seen and as smart as any artist whose life story he had set to memory, and he did his all to fuel her education as he prepared her to lead an honest life in what he viewed as a corrupt world.

“Don’t ever believe it when someone tries to tell you there’s only two kinds of people in this world,” he said to her when she was twelve, as the two toured the halls of a home museum in Houston, Cat making mental notes on each piece of work they passed. “There are all kinds of people in
this world, and if you are going to do much more than survive, you will need to read each of them as if he were an open book laying flat across your lap.”

“Is that what you do?” Clare asked.

“Every day, in every way,” Cat said.

“How?”

“The same way you can read that picture hanging there,” he said, pointing out what he knew to be an early drawing by Pablo Picasso. “You learn all you can about the painter, how old he was at the time he started and then finished the work, where he lived, who he lived with, what he did for money and what he did when he wasn’t at work. You store all that and then look at the work. I mean
really
look at the work, as if it were alive and you could see it move, take it past the paint and come away with what the artist was looking to tell you. You take it far enough, it will feel as if you painted the work yourself. The same lessons apply to people, and trust me on this, little one, people are much easier to read than any painting that’s hanging in any of the museums we’ve been in.”

“Will that help me be like you?” Clare asked.

“That shouldn’t even be in your thinking,” Cat said. “You will be better than me, you and me together, we’ll both see to that. One thief in the family is more than enough. There are higher steps out there for you to climb.”

“Like what?”

“There will be plenty of time to work all that out,” Cat said, resting one thin arm across her small frame. “You’ll find it when you come to it. But for now, let’s keep our focus on the lessons that sit before us waiting to be absorbed. The career call—in my experience, anyway—is one of those things that floats down and just lands on you, sometimes coming at you from out of nowhere or from a place you never even gave a second’s thought. But you will for certain recognize it when it does. And you will be as good at whatever that career ends up being as I am at being a thief. And if I stick around long enough and teach you as much as you need to know, then you might—just might—end up being even better.”

Cat Johnson did his job, and through the combination of the best schools stolen money could buy and the lessons he was able to impart, he lived long enough to see his daughter become the premier insurance investigator in her field. Specializing in art retrieval, she had an eye-popping
sixty-five percent success rate in a field where forty percent success was considered the gold standard. She knew how to run down leads, gathering information from both cops and art dealers while giving up very little of what she had already learned about the case. In so many ways, Clare was very much her father’s daughter—she preferred to work her cases alone, and her bosses gave her full rein in that area once they caught a glimpse of the end results. She trusted no one, and while friendly and at ease on the few occasions she was off the trail and in the home office, she shunned the habit of socializing with any of her coworkers. She did, however, make it her business to learn their tastes and habits, strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes. She loved logging the long hours the work required, the travel to faraway cities she had only read about in academic books and novels, the private tours inside many of the world’s museums, places her father had devoted so much of his time telling her about.

What she loved most of all was breaking down a theft, and it was in this arena that Cat’s lessons proved most priceless. She would be called in on a case within twelve hours of a theft, more often than not in the form of a late-night phone call from her direct supervisor, Edward Langley. He was a frail man in his late sixties who helped start the firm with the now long-deceased Shamus McBain, and he was always direct in his conversations and sharp in his commands, never stopping for idle chatter or wasted words. “A Monet was lifted out of a home museum in San Francisco,” would be his typical opening remark on the telephone, in lieu of a hello. “The start and finish details will be downloaded onto your BlackBerry. The job was professional—alarm codes jumbled, rear access to the home contaminated, exit most likely through the front of the house in the middle of a quiet day, so they knew going in it would be empty.”

“How much do we stand to lose?” Clare might ask.

“We’re on the line for twenty-five million,” Langley would tell her, or some other sum. “Do whatever you need to do to make sure we don’t have to pay it out.”

There would be no good-byes, no good lucks, just a silent second and then a dial tone, signaling both an end to the conversation and the start of her new assignment.

Clare always kept a bag packed and ready in order to make maximum use of her time, and would usually travel to the hit site by private plane, a
rented car waiting for her within a hundred feet of the runway. Once at the crime scene, she would touch base with the local police to pick up whatever loose shreds of information they were willing to share, and then secure permission to scour the area on her own. She brought to her work the skills of an insurance investigator and the instincts of a thief, and this lethal combination enabled her to climb swiftly up toward the top rungs of her profession.

Clare Johnson was, hands down, the most feared and respected insurance investigator in the business.

THE RAVEN STOOD
several feet behind Clare, on her Excelsior balcony, his eyes slowly scanning the shape and contours of her body, a warm cup of coffee cradled in his hands. “What a beautiful sight,” he said. “It’s enough to make a man’s heart skip several beats.”

“Save the sweet,” Clare said without bothering to turn around. “I’ve heard better lines from street corner peddlers.”

“I was referring to the river,” the Raven said, managing a slight smile. “But now that you’ve brought it to my attention, you still look great.”

“Lots of coffee and little of anything else,” Clare said. “It keeps the heart pumping and the body trim.”

The Raven stepped out onto the terrace, the sun warming his face, the hard pull of the river water reflected in his dark wraparound shades. “I don’t suppose it would do me any good to ask what brings you to Florence?” he said, resting his coffee cup atop the black railing.

“I had some vacation time coming,” Clare said, “and when those rare occasions occur, this is the best place to find me. But I suppose you already knew that before you talked the cleaning lady down the hall into letting you in here.”

“Bribed
the cleaning lady,” the Raven said. “And yes, I was aware this is your favorite city and also that you are owed two weeks paid leave by your firm. Still, the doubts linger.”

“And you?” Clare asked. “Craving a Sostanza steak? Or is there a new exhibit in town I should check out?”

“Neither,” he said. “Though I must confess to having developed a fondness for the brusque manner of Sostanza’s waiters.”

“Well, now that we’ve covered that territory,” Clare said, “why don’t we cut to the quick? You tell me as much as you’re willing to share, I’ll do the same, and maybe we can both come out of this with some answers.”

“I will do my best to be honest with you,” the Raven said.

“We’re not going to get very far if you start off our conversation with a lie,” she said.

“We both know there are three professional heists in advanced stages of planning,” the Raven said. “One is at the Uffizi. I’m still trying to weed out the location of the other two.”

“A second is at a private home somewhere in the historic district,” Clare said. “Top-tier team from France led by an old hand named Duvalier.”

“He was once one of our best safe crackers, prior to falling into some bad luck,” the Raven said. “It was during his rather long recuperative period that he developed a taste for the finest in Renaissance art.”

“Neither of the two jobs will fetch anything worth your time,” she said. “On top of which, you have more than enough members in your troupe to serve as scouts. Which means either the third job is the one that promises to net a notable score or there is something else brewing in this city that’s caught your evil eye.”

“And the same will be true for you as well,” the Raven said. “You usually only enter into the frame after the dust has settled, yet here you are, on vacation, within walking distance of three major jobs about to go off. And your firm not represented in any of those thus far discussed. If I could lay a wager, I’d put it all on the bet that you have as much interest in these potential lifts as I do. Which is to say none.”

“In this city, there’s always more to appreciate than the potential for a heist,” Clare said, leaning her elbows on the black railing, gazing down at a young couple embracing under a streetlight across the square. “We both make a move if we sniff something like that. We’ve done so most of our lives, so why stop now?”

“Then you know she is in town,” the Raven said.

“I know she’s here to continue her studies,” Clare said, “and that might well be the long and the short of it. She may be here for the same reason hundreds of others come each year—academia is, after all, very much a key part of her world.”

“If either one of us believed that, neither one of us would be here,” the Raven said.

“Not even for those brusque waiters?” Clare said, turning her head slightly, sliding a smile in his direction.

“I don’t need to travel to find a good restaurant,” he said. “But I would go to the ends of the earth to lay my hands on a rare find. Especially one from the master.”

“And why are we both so sure she will be the one to find it?”

“It’s what they raised her to do.”

“Maybe,” Clare said. “Or maybe she’s just come along at the right time and might luck into finding herself in the right place. Maybe we’re all expecting her to follow in her parents’ footsteps when all she is is just a regular girl.”

“We’re both too smart for that,” the Raven said with a dismissive wave. “The key ingredients of our profession are preparation, patience, and timing. She’s been in preparation since she was a child. The work she does, blended with what she’s learned as the ward to the distinguished professor, taught her the value of patience. As for the time, it might not be now, but my instincts tell me there will be no better moment than the one we currently find ourselves in. And if I needed any further proof, well, your presence here supplies that.”

“How many of your crew do you have on her tail?” Clare asked.

“Now, Clare, how would I measure up as a worthy nemesis if I gave a direct answer to such a question?” he said. “Suffice it to say I have more than I need to cover her every movement, regardless of how uneventful her forays have so far turned out to be.”

“Then you know where she was yesterday?” Clare asked.

“Sneaking into the sealed-off section of the Vasari Corridor is a rite of passage for any art history student worthy of an advanced degree,” the Raven said with a nod. “It is as true today as it was back when we were young enough to call such endeavors an adventure.”