“Porter,” Hewitt said with a heavy sigh. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Hewitt wondered how he’d managed to enter the office and hang up the coat without noticing the man sitting in his chair. On the other hand, it was Porter. He couldn’t have been taller than five-seven, and if he weighed more than one hundred and twenty-five pounds with his shoes on, Hewitt would have been surprised. He had wispy blond hair growing out of a pale scalp that looked too small for his skull. It was pulled impossibly tight and gave off a dull shine. He had the spoiled air of someone who’d grown up without having to worry about money.
“I told you on the phone I was coming to Boston,” Porter said with a smile. His teeth had been whitened, and were brighter than the starched collar of his tailored shirt.
“I don’t mean here in Boston, I mean here in my office.”
“You’re the only person here I came to see. Where else should I be?”
“I’m sure we have an office or a cubicle here we can get for you. You can work out of that.”
Porter shook his head. “No need. I’m not here officially, and I’ll be working out of my hotel.”
“Why?”
“You know why, Robert. On this investigation it’s just you and me, and that’s it.”
“I’m still not sure why,” Hewitt said. “We could have all the players blanketed with the right amount of manpower. You give the word and we could mobilize twenty agents. We could control the whole thing.”
“It wouldn’t serve our purpose. It would be like sending an army of fishermen into a shallow river. We would scare away the fish. But one or two men with the right bait-that’s how this must work.”
Hewitt walked around his desk and stood in front of Porter. “You’re in my seat.”
Porter looked up at him for a moment. Then he stood up and walked around to the far side of the desk. He pulled a chair over from a small table in the corner and sat in front of Hewitt’s desk. Hewitt sat down in the chair Porter had just vacated. “Have there been any further developments?” Porter asked.
“No,” Hewitt replied. “At least, none that have been discovered so far. How about on your end?”
“The offer seems genuine,” Porter said. “We intercepted physical evidence-paint chips. They match. Between that and the photographs, I have a high level of confidence that this time it’s for real.”
“Shit,” Hewitt said. “You sure we don’t want to bring in some additional help?”
“Absolutely. You and I were both here in the eighties and nineties. We know the players better than anyone. I have all the contacts we need in the art world to guide what’s going on from Washington. Bringing in others from the Bureau would only complicate matters.”
“What about the locals?”
Porter gave a grunt. “The local police? You must be kidding. They’d only create problems. You know the kind of jurisdictional tug-of-war that gets into.”
Hewitt picked up a souvenir baseball that was sitting on his desk. If it had been someone else sitting across the desk from him, he might have tossed the ball to him-physical activity helped him think. Porter didn’t seem like the kind of guy who liked to throw baseballs around, though. Hewitt tossed it in the air instead and caught it himself. “If Murphy was involved, chances are that Ballick’s involved as well. He was Whitey’s right hand back then. He was higher up than Murphy, too. Should we tail him?”
Porter shook his head. “Keep tabs on him, but don’t get too close. He may be involved, but maybe not. Whitey could have used someone else, and I don’t want to put all our money down on one bet.”
“Whoever was involved is in some serious danger. I haven’t seen anything like what was done to Murphy in all my time at the Bureau.”
“Murphy got what he deserved,” Porter said. “I don’t care how many of their own these people kill, as long as we find the paintings.”
“You really think the art is more important than lives.”
Porter seemed to consider the question. “Not all of the art, only some of it. The Vermeer and the Rembrandts, certainly. Maybe even the Flinck and the Manet. The rest of it, though, is irrelevant. The five unfinished sketches by Degas? Certainly not worthless, but trivial compared to the other works. I can’t even begin to fathom why the bronze beaker from the Shang Dynasty was taken, and the notion that they took the finial from the top of Napoleon’s battle flag is just flat-out insane. That’s one of the great mysteries of the theft. In so many ways it was perfectly executed, but why waste time on trivial pieces like that? Not to mention what wasn’t taken. These men were only steps away from Titian’s Rape of Europa. Arguably the greatest and most valuable Renaissance piece in the United States. If they had the knowledge necessary to identify the Vermeer and the Rembrandts as worthwhile, surely they would have known about the Titian.”
“Maybe they just got lucky.”
Porter laughed. “It wasn’t luck. Not with how smoothly the job went off. Not with how successful they have been in keeping the paintings hidden all this time. There are just some things about it that don’t seem to fit.”
Hewitt folded his hands on his lap. He wished Porter would leave; he didn’t enjoy being around him. There was something bloodless about the little man that set him off. “If we do this right, maybe you’ll be able to ask these guys about all that. We just need to keep them alive.”
“That’s hardly a priority of mine at this point,” Porter said. His expression darkened, and his eyes glassed over in anger. Even when Porter had been an agent in the Boston office, he had always seemed off to Hewitt, particularly when it came to art. It was an obsession of his, and it had led him to push for the establishment of the special unit in the FBI to focus solely on art theft. It was a small group, but they were dedicated, and they were the best in the world at locating stolen art.
“What these men did wasn’t just a crime,” Porter said. “It was a sin. They deprived the world of some of the greatest works of art ever produced. I have no sympathy for them, and I wouldn’t let a little thing like their safety jeopardize a chance to give these works back to the public.”
Chapter Eleven
Eddie Ballick loved the sea as much as he was capable of loving anything. There was something about the unforgiving nature of the deep gray waters off the northern shores of the Atlantic that made him feel as though he had a place in the world. As a young man in the 1970s, he’d worked as a hand on the swordfish boats out of Gloucester. On his tenth run his boat ran into a squall and foundered. Three of the six-man crew had gone down with the ship. He, the first mate, and one other had survived for three days in a tiny raft, riding through some of the roughest seas of the season, before they were rescued. Since that time, Eddie Ballick feared nothing.
He’d never planned to enter a life of crime. But fishing jobs could be hard to come by, particularly for a hand who had already been on one doomed ship. There was never a suggestion that he was at fault, but it didn’t really matter; sailors are a superstitious lot, and in the minds of many, Ballick was a jinx.
Jobless, and without any friends or family to speak of, Ballick drifted through his early twenties. He was a big man-not tall, but solid, with bones as thick and strong as petrified branches, held together with thick slabs of muscle. He found work as a bouncer at one of the roughest bars, where some of the city’s connected hung out. It wasn’t long before some of them recognized the potential in a strong young man without fear.
Ballick was a perfect fit for Boston ’s criminal underworld. He had a disdain for other human beings that allowed him to cross lines of cruelty even some of his colleagues found troubling. He lived to live, without any care given to how long or how well. As a result, his rise through the ranks of Boston ’s organized crime in the eighties and nineties had less to do with any active ambition, and more to do with an oddly indifferent efficiency. Within five years, he owned the bar where he’d first been hired to run the door. It was rumored that his former boss was buried under the parking lot out back.