Johnny heard a lock fall into place.
Perfect.
Not exactly nightmare material, but close- being locked inside an underground vault deep inside a mountain.
Very close, actually.
Maybe even a little closer than Johnny wanted to admit.
Dammit.
But the art was stunning, and there was a museum’s worth of it, two museums’ worth, hundreds of paintings, pieces of sculpture both large and small, decorative items, vases, jewelry, glassworks, plaques, artifacts, ceramics, and more paintings- some of them massive, upward to eight or nine feet high and nearly as wide-all of it carefully and meticulously organized on racks and in cases, filling the cavelike vault. The ceiling of the room was more than twenty feet above them, the far end of it beyond where Johnny could see. Everything that should have been hanging on the walls and displayed in the mansion upstairs was down here in Nachman’s temperature-and-humidity-controlled “closet.” He’d felt the difference in the air immediately upon entering the stone depository.
“The Nazis used the Alt Aussee to store their plunder, literally thousands of pieces of stolen art,” Nachman said, “all of it nearly destroyed toward the end of the war, when the Germans set explosives inside the salt mine. Fortunately, the plot was discovered by the resistance fighters, and the bombs were never detonated. Some of those saved paintings reside here, now, Mr. Ramos, some of them awaiting proof of provenance so that I can return them to their rightful owners, many of them here because their rightful owners wish them to remain hidden from the world and safe, and a few of them rightly mine. And yet…” Nachman turned and looked at Esme.
“And yet some of Mr. Nachman’s most cherished pieces are still missing, pieces like the Monet,” she said.
“Pieces like the Henstenburgh,” the old man added.
“Yes, the Henstenburgh,” Esme echoed.
“And the…” Nachman’s voice drifted into a soft whisper.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” Esme assured him, and from the look on the old man’s face, pained and distressed, Johnny thought Esme probably had the right of it.
“No,” Nachman insisted. “Mr. Ramos should know the depth of our loss.”
Not necessarily, Johnny thought, wondering how in the hell he’d ended up in this place, in this strange situation, with this very strange little man wearing a bathrobe, when he’d started out the night with that beer at the Blue Iguana.
“There was a Rembrandt, Mr. Ramos,” Nachman continued. “And… and another, the other. They’re both priceless, utterly priceless, and they belong here.” The old man made a sweeping gesture with his arm, including the whole vault-and Johnny couldn’t fault his opinion, not too much anyway. A Rembrandt, any Rembrandt, had to be amazing, but he wasn’t sure what the value of something was if no one ever saw it except one old man.
“Isaac,” Esme said gently, when Nachman simply continued to stand there, his arm outstretched, his gaze distant, his lips quivering.
Johnny had a grandma, and her lips quivered sometimes, especially when she was getting emotional and about to cry, which was quite often.
Please, he thought. Please spare us Nachman’s tears.
Sobbing was only going to make things worse, besides making him personally uncomfortable. Nachman was old, yes, but he was still a guy underneath that silk bathrobe, which was as far as Johnny was going to take that thought.
He looked to Esme, silently asking her to “get on with it,” whatever “it” needed getting on with.
“Isaac,” she said again. “May we continue with the authentication?”
It took the old man a moment, but in the end, he nodded and continued on to a table set up in the middle of the vault.
“My dear,” he said, picking up a handheld black light and handing her a small screwdriver from a tool kit on the table.
Esme had already reopened the case, and now she used the screwdriver to undo the wooden frame holding the protective covering in place. When the frame was disassembled, she laid the painting out on the table, and then Nachman hit a switch on the side of the table, and the lights went out.
All the lights.
In an instant, it was completely, heavily, oppressively pitch-fucking-dark in the vault, which in Johnny’s mind had just been transformed into a tomb.
Extra perfect.
Now he couldn’t breathe.
Geezus.
He’d never had any freaking phobias. He didn’t have any phobias now, he was sure. He just couldn’t breathe, because suddenly some idiot in a fucking bathrobe had turned off all the lights-off, out, extinguished-and they were God knew how far underground with the weight of the whole freaking world bearing down on them, and-
The black light came on.
It wasn’t much, a purple glow falling on the Meinhard, but without anything to reflect. There wasn’t any Day-Glo paint anywhere, which was probably a good thing in this room.
“No luminescence,” Esme said, and he could just make her out, leaning over the painting, watching Nachman slowly run the light over the piece.
“Oh, my, Miss Esme, you are oh, so right,” Nachman barely breathed the words, his attention rapt. “I believe we have the Meinhard.”
He passed the black light over the painting two more times, with excruciating slowness, and all Johnny could think was “Dear God, man, get on with it, and get it over.”
But he kept those words to himself. To anyone in the room, which he knew made for a very small audience, had they been able to see him, which he knew they could not, he would have appeared perfectly normal, perfectly stoic, not a flicker of emotion, not a twitch of a muscle.
He was contained.
But he was on a countdown in his head, and he’d seen the switch Nachman had hit to turn out the lights, and when he got to zero, he was lunging for the switch and turning on the goddamn lights. It would be embarrassing, revealing, but not as bad as passing out.
He forced another breath into his lungs.
“Then, sir, I would appreciate payment,” Esme said, in a tone of voice that was very clearly taking control of the situation, and all Johnny could think was Thank God, somebody is taking control of this very dark situation.
“As you wish,” Nachman said, and in the next instant, the lights came on.
Johnny held himself back from collapsing in relief.
He was a Ranger, for God’s sake.
He let out his breath and waited, watching Nachman shuffle over to a wooden Chinese cabinet with dozens of drawers. One by one, the old man opened drawers and pulled out stacks of cash. Bundle after bundle, stacking them in his arms, his lips moving as he quietly counted to himself.
“Five thousand, ten thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand…”
Geezus, and just when Johnny had thought the night couldn’t get any more bizarre.
He looked to Esme, to check his bearings, but for once, she didn’t catch his gaze. She was busy, damn busy, scanning the walls and the racks, looking at all the paintings, her expression one of intense focus, as if she was cataloging the hoard.
He looked back at Nachman. On, and on, and on, the man counted, until he reached eighty thousand dollars, then he broke a bundle and counted off two more thousand.
Eighty-two thousand dollars. Johnny tried to think what the most cash he’d ever seen in one place had been, and it fell far short of eighty-two thousand dollars.
God, that was a lot of money, far more than he’d anticipated. He doubted if Burt Alden would make it through another day with that kind of money on the line. He wondered if it was all going to Bleak, or if there was a hefty commission in there for Esme. A commission on eighty-two thousand would sure explain her underwear-oh, hell, yeah.