Sensing their hesitation, I put them on the defensive. “Look,” I said aggressively, my hands under the table, inches from the hidden guns, “it’s obvious someone in France gave your guy up and now we’re all in trouble because of this. Your problem is in France.”
Chocolate said, “The FBI is involved in this. That’s not in France.”
I shot back, “Don’t you think I know the FBI is involved? They came to my house, woke me up, scared my wife to hell, asking us questions about Picasso and this guy and that guy in Paris. This is not good for business, having FBI agents showing up at my home. I’ve got a reputation.”
Chocolate wanted to know why my name had surfaced in Paris. How did the undercover French policeman know to use it to lure the Paris thieves?
I smiled and sat back in my chair. “A damn good question,” I said. “I’ve been wondering the same thing. I wish I knew.” I pointed to Sunny. “Maybe they’re tapping his phone. You know Sunny and I are working on all kinds of things.”
Chocolate asked about his arrested friends’ legal expenses for the Picasso charges. Would Laurenz help pay them?
Laurenz loved playing tough guy, but he knew there was but one correct answer if he wanted to stay alive. “Oui,” he said sharply. He looked away.
Problem solved, I moved my hands away from my pockets and changed the subject, introducing Sean. He stuck out his hand in greeting, but Chocolate and Vanilla just stared back.
Sean spoke gruffly, like a tough guy in a ’40s movie. “OK, here’s the deal. From now on,” he said, “you deal with me. You don’t talk to Bob. I’m the one you contact for business. As far as you are concerned, I am the business. You go through me.”
Sunny and his French friends looked confused, as if to say, what the hell is this? Laurenz translated for them. Chocolate spoke rapidly in French to Sunny, and then turned to Sean. “Non, we deal with Bob, Sunny, and Laurenz—only.”
Sean shook his head. “You call me from now on or we’re done.”
Chocolate sputtered a small laugh. He said to Sean, “Who are you again?”
Fred’s lame game plan was falling apart. I cut in. “Call Sean. It’s good. Tell you what: Let’s cool off for thirty days and then we get back in touch, OK?”
Chocolate didn’t commit either way. He began talking with Sunny again in French. The waitress came by and Sean clumsily jumped to get the check. He shoved a credit card at her. What was his hurry?
Sunny and his friends stood and walked off, headed toward the beach. Laurenz, Sean, and I went the other way, toward the lobby and the valet stand. Laurenz remained uncharacteristically quiet until he and I were alone, back inside the Rolls. He started to open his mouth, but his cell phone rang. It was Sunny. They spoke in French and Laurenz began laughing.
Laurenz hung up, shook his head. “They say of your friend Sean, they say, ‘Who is this fucking guy?’ They say they wish to stuff him in the trunk of their car but they cannot because it is a rental and he is too big to fit.’ Sunny says they think he’s an idiot and they won’t deal with him.”
“What do you think?”
“He is a joke,” Laurenz said. “And I think he might be a cop.”
“What do you mean?”
“He is no wiseguy. This I know.”
“Why do say that?”
“He is a pussycat. He say, ‘Oh, you don’t deal with me, I walk away.’ Oh, I am so scared. A real wiseguy, he look you in the eye and say very quietly, very calmly, ‘Fuck me? Fuck you. You tell me why I should not kill you today. Tell me now or you are dead before the day is over. Thank you. Good-bye.’ This is what the real wiseguy say.”
“Well—”
Laurenz floored the Rolls, rocketing away from the valet stand. “This guy Sean, he use green American Express card to pay the bill! A real wiseguy doesn’t use a credit card. He uses cash. Always, always! And he never takes a receipt! Never! Never!”
I didn’t know what to say. He was right.
Laurenz turned toward the causeway and downtown Miami.
After a few moments, he said, “I drop you at your hotel and then maybe I not see you again. Because if we had not done the deal on the boat, I would be thinking for sure you are a cop. But now”—Laurenz took his eyes off the road for a moment and squinted at me—“I don’t know if you are a cop and I don’t care. I am in fucking bad shape, OK? We are through.”
Laurenz stepped on the accelerator and cranked the radio.
He was out.
WITH LAURENZ GONE, the Boston FBI office shut down Operation Masterpiece.
Wonderful, I thought. Bureaucracies and turf fighting on both sides of the Atlantic had destroyed the best chance in a decade to rescue the Gardner paintings. We’d also blown an opportunity to infiltrate a major art crime ring in France, a loose network of mobsters holding as many as seventy stolen masterpieces.
Our failure convinced me that the FBI was no longer the can-do force it was when I’d joined in 1988. The bureau was becoming a risk-averse bureaucracy like any other government agency, filled with mediocrity and people more concerned about their career than the mission.
The Art Crime Team, launched with such promise, seemed headed for that fate too, roiled by constant turnover. We’d not only lost Eric Ives as unit chief, but our best prosecutor as well, Bob Goldman. Petty and insecure bosses in Philadelphia had given my best friend an ultimatum: Drop art crime and return to garden-variety drug and bank robbery cases or find another job. Goldman had called their bluff and quit, abruptly ending a twenty-four-year career in law enforcement. Perhaps worse, half of the original street agents assigned to the Art Crime Team had now moved on, looking to advance their careers. It was disheartening.
As I began my final twelve months as an FBI agent in the fall of 2007, I planned to finish up a few lingering cases, train an undercover replacement, and start thinking about my retirement party. I’d travel with Donna, visit my sons in college, attend my daughter’s high school recitals.
Then one afternoon that fall, my undercover cell phone buzzed.
It was Sunny.
Chapter 25
ENDGAME
Barcelona. January 2008.
FOUR MONTHS AFTER SUNNY’S PHONE CALL, I FOUND myself in a frayed Barcelona hotel room, negotiating with his boss, Patrick.
Six of us crammed around a flimsy table and two single beds. Patrick and I sat on opposite sides of the table by an open window. Sunny and an undercover Spanish police officer perched on the edge of one bed. My muscle, the two FBI agents from Miami, still posing as Colombian drug dealers, lounged on the other bed.
A hidden camera in the ceiling fan recorded everything. A Spanish SWAT team waited next door.
Patrick, a lithe and cocksure Frenchman of Armenian descent, perhaps six foot three, sat a foot from my face, chain-smoking Marlboro reds. He was sixty years old, with close-cropped gray hair and a day’s white stubble on his chin. He kept his brown eyes locked on mine, patient and as focused as a sniper. His words came deliberately and in short sentences.
“We are older men, you and I,” Patrick said in French. “Money is nice, but liberty is very important.”
I’d hoped to bring along a French-speaking undercover FBI agent to translate, but the bureau hadn’t been able to find anyone qualified. So the Spanish officer did the job. He moved from French to English and English to French with speed and gusto, but also with an unsettling lisp and effeminate voice that belied the tense negotiation. I could imagine the macho FBI agents watching on video in the next room, snickering at the incongruity.