New York City
April 29
The following morning, Tox and Calliope met Ren and Cam in the soaring lobby of Knightsgrove-Bishop. Ren escorted them through a security gauntlet and they made their way to the conference room off of Nathan Bishop’s office. Twitch was already seated, poised at her laptop.
“Let’s see what you’ve got.” Ren gestured to the open table. Tox withdrew the sketches from the cylinder and spread them out, weighting the corners with empty water glasses. Ren choked on an inhale.
“Mother of God.”
“Should I scan them?” Twitch asked without looking up.
“No. I know what these are.”
“Are they valuable?” Calliope asked from Tox’s side.
“Invaluable,” Ren replied, not taking his eyes from the artwork.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, hermano, spill it,” Cam demanded.
“In 1990, March I think, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was robbed. Thieves got away with thirteen works of art, most famously a Vermeer painting called The Concert. It was the crime of the century. Law enforcement turned Boston upside down. There were suspicions of guards on the take, corrupt police, mob involvement, but nothing produced any leads. They stole hundreds of millions in irreplaceable art: Manet, Rembrandt. None of the works have been recovered. Until today.”
“I know shit about art, but these aren’t Rembrandt.” Tox quipped.
“No,” Ren concurred, “these are Degas.”
“What?” Calliope gasped.
“We’ll need an expert to confirm it, but I’m quite sure these are two works of five by Degas that were stolen that night.”
Cam looked at Ren expectantly. “So, this is big?”
“On their own, it’s huge,” began Ren, “but the possibility that they could lead law enforcement to more of the missing art…it could be a massive step toward solving one of the biggest art heists in history.”
Twitch looked over at the drawings and wrinkled her nose. “So what’s the next step?”
“I have a colleague at Columbia, a Ph.D. candidate,” Ren said. “This period is her specialty. She can definitely authenticate these.”
“Who’s this colleague?” Twitch asked, her eyes dancing.
“She’s just a friend, Twitch. Lock it down.”
“Fine,” she grumbled.
Ren already had the phone to his ear. When the receptionist for the Columbia University art history department answered, he requested to be connected.
“Clara Gautreau, please.”
Caleb Cain sat at a wobbly table outside the coffee shop across Sixth Avenue from the Knightsgrove-Bishop offices. He sipped surprisingly decent black coffee as he perused the Times. Print editions of newspapers were still good for something, he mused. When the four men emerged with Calliope—Miller Buchanan carrying the cylinder he sought—his tremendous relief was only slightly subdued by the phalanx of men that surrounded it. Clearly, they had discovered the contents. That was both good and bad. Good because at least the sketches wouldn’t unintentionally end up in some landfill. Bad for obvious reasons.
The group climbed into an SUV with military precision and drove uptown. Caleb left more than enough cash to cover his coffee. He hailed a taxi and followed them. Once he saw where they were going, he had the cabbie drop him at a bustling discount department store in Harlem. He didn’t have an alias that suited his needs, so he would have to wing it. Some quick research on his phone and he had the information he needed. He entered the store as Caleb Cain, polished investor; he left the store as Ambrose Teller, disheveled and distinguished professor of art history, emeritus, Oxford University.