Boston, Massachusetts
March 18, 1990
Patrick Reardon walked his assigned path through the Gardner museum. He’d been on the job for a month. It was a good job. The coffee was hot and fresh, the break room was clean and comfortable, and the other guards were friendly. He even knew a few of the former policemen from back in the day; they all just laughed about it now—crooks and cops doing the same job.
As Patrick had predicted, he was bored. In some ways, it was the worst of both worlds. He wasn’t doing anything illegal—he was barely doing anything at all—but he still felt that burn in his gut when he heard the wail of a police siren. He still checked the street before entering his apartment. This was his life now, he guessed.
He walked through a gallery that was part of his route, barely noticing the Botticelli panel he passed. What he did notice, however, was that the Gardner Museum was ripe for the picking. The electronic security was nearly nonexistent, and several of the guards already working there were retired cops, retired dirty cops. So when a guard he knew pulled him aside, he had a feeling he knew why.
“Hey, Patty, when you finish this lap, head to the breakroom. Sit at the table and have yourself a Coke. The other guys will be in there too. All you gotta do is sit your ass at the table and keep your mouth shut. It’ll be the easiest five hundred bucks you ever made.”
Just as Patrick was nodding his agreement—and wishing he was in on the heist—they both heard voices and footsteps echoing from the back gallery.
“Shit, they’re early. Those dumb fucks. They were supposed to wait until the patrol cars checking around Fenway and Evans Way Park cleared out for the night. You head to the breakroom. I’ll make sure these idiots do their job.”
Patrick didn’t head to the breakroom. This was the most excitement he had seen since before he went away. He clung to the shadows as the thieves raced haphazardly from room to room, seemingly snatching art at random, ripping paintings out of their frames. They didn’t appear to understand the floor plan they had been given and couldn’t seem to locate the paintings they had been instructed to steal. What looked like a well-planned heist had quickly devolved into a smash-and-grab.
Then all hell broke loose. A police cruiser unexpectedly drove by and the officer noticed activity—flashlights dancing, the back door ajar. The thieves panicked further and quickly gathered up their haul. When more sirens sounded in the distance, with no other option, the thieves took off, leaving their loot in a pile on the floor. The other three guards had already locked themselves in the breakroom. So there Patrick stood, in the central gallery of the Gardner museum, staring down at a stack of priceless art.
Suddenly he remembered the story his Uncle John had told him when he was a teenager. How his uncle had stolen a valuable painting during World War II. How the convoy that was supposed to be carrying it was bombed and the painting believed destroyed. How he had avoided suspicion because of pure Irish luck.
Maybe this was his luck.
Patrick glanced down at the painting on the top of the pile, a man sitting at a cafe table. The man seemed to stare at him with an expectant look as if to say, “Well?”
As the sirens grew closer, Patrick hauled eleven paintings, a Chinese gu, and an eagle finial to a basement storage room where he hid them above rows of exposed pipes in the drop ceiling behind the furnace. Then he located the other corrupt guards in the locked break room, joined them, and threw his keys through the transom as if the robbers had locked them in and simply dropped the keys in their hurry to flee.
The FBI stepped in almost immediately, and when Patrick’s identity came to light, he was questioned and watched for weeks. But the Feds had nothing. He had served his time, reported to his parole officer like clockwork, and had a legitimate means of income. Patrick simply had to wait them out.
After the heist, he worked a minimum wage construction job he had obtained through the parole board. He went straight home every night and straight back to work every morning. Both suspected thieves and the guard who had been working the inside had been killed under suspicious circumstances. Patrick didn’t really know the other guards who were there that night, and they didn’t know him. Everyone had scattered. Patrick was alone.
For six months those paintings sat in the basement of the very museum where they belonged.
Then his opportunity came. The museum was finally upgrading a sorely inadequate security system. Walls were being knocked out, the wiring was being upgraded; the work was being done after hours. It was ridiculously easy for Patrick to borrow one of his company’s construction trucks, blend in with the evening crew that was hauling out debris, stuff the loot into trash bags, and throw it in the back of his truck. From there he drove to the one person he had left in the world, the one person on earth he could trust no matter his transgression: his uncle, John Reardon.
Patrick parked the large pickup at an angle in the broad driveway, grabbed one of the construction waste bags and hurried to the door, checking over his shoulder again and again as he knocked. John Reardon pulled open the door and stood silent, the same what-did-you-do-this-time expression on his face he used to wear when Patrick was a boy.
Without saying a word, Patrick set the bag down and blindly grabbed one of the paintings. It was the same portrait Patrick had seen on top of the stack that night six months ago, the man sitting at the cafe table. He turned it so his uncle could see.
All the color drained from John Reardon’s face.
“Get in the house.”
Patrick replaced the painting in the trash bag and followed his uncle inside.
“Where in the name of the Blessed Virgin did you get that?” John pulled the Manet out of the bag and examined it more closely.
“I have them all, Uncle John.”
“What?” John’s expression conveyed both excitement and impending doom.
Patrick sat with his uncle in a cozy den in the middle of the night with a trash bag filled with priceless art at his feet and recounted the events of the Gardner Museum heist six months earlier.
“So they were there the whole time? Hidden in the basement?”
Patrick shrugged. “I was just looking at them there in a pile. I didn’t even think any of ‘em were worth much. Hell, one of them is the size of a postage stamp. So I just figured why not? If the cops find ‘em down there, they’ll just assume the robbers hid ‘em when they needed to make a quick getaway.” Patrick paused for a second. “I remembered your story. About the painting in the war and the convoy getting bombed and I thought this was kind of like that.”
John stared at the trash bags they had retrieved from the truck, then he looked at his nephew and did something Patrick had only seen John Reardon do a handful of times in his life. He laughed.