Too Many Thieves
 
Kate Fujimori was a lustrous shadow in cat-burglar black. She crouched low on her haunches and scanned the medieval alleyway several stories beneath her. It was early morning in Venice’s Dorsoduro district, just before daybreak. A light drizzle had begun to fall.
 
Kate glided with relative ease among the thickets of chimney pots and satellite television dishes that cluttered the terra-cotta rooftops of the old quarter of San Sebastian. Leaping, she moved through the air in her sleek skin suit like a whisper. When she alighted on the peaked roof of a neighboring palazzo, it was with the self-assurance of a gymnast.
 
Poised there with the city sleeping below her, Kate was a lithe silhouette against the chalk-white dome of Santa Maria della Salute, the baroque church that stood at the mouth of Venice’s Canalazzo. The dome rose over the rooftops and canals of San Sebastian, a ghostly moon drifting up out of the waters of the San Marco Basin.
 
Kate steadied herself on the narrow ridge of tiling. Her breathing was even and controlled as she prepared to traverse the narrow path before her. She extended a single foot, placed the sole of her Boreal climbing shoe gingerly on the back of an earthen tile, and nearly toppled.
 
The terra-cotta dislodged beneath her step. It clattered away down the sheer slope of the roof and crashed noisily into a gutter. Kate’s breathing caught in her throat. Steady, she reminded herself, her pulse racing. Nearly lost it there.
 
Somewhere below, a neighborhood dog barked and barked.
 
“Kate? Kate?” The familiar voice crackled in her ear-mounted Motorola headset.
 
Kate sighed. “I’m fine, Freddy,” she said. “Lost my footing, that’s all.”
 
She paused to chalk her fingers in the climber’s pouch that hung at her hip. She would be making her descent shortly. “Heck of a view from up here,” she said. “Freddy, do you remember the last time you and I stole a fabulously expensive art treasure from romantic Venice? You wore black, I believe.” She stretched out her arm, which was slender and visibly toned under the black sheen of her skin suit. “Come to think of it,” she said, grinning, “I wore black, too—and Bellini’s Madonna was dressed in stars.”
 
“Wasn’t me.”
 
“No?”
 
“You’re thinking of Antwerp. The painter was Flemish, not Venetian. And the lady wasn’t a virgin, she was a still life. A plate of cheese and dried fruit, to be precise.”
 
“Ah,” Kate said, feigning nostalgia. “Romantic Antwerp. You did wear black, though, yes? Just like always?”
 
Freddy’s static reply made her wince. “Stick to the protocol, Kate. Our window is closing fast. As it stands, you’re a minute and twenty-three seconds behind schedule. A minute twenty-four. Twenty-five. Twenty-six—”
 
“Okay, okay. Geez.” Kate smiled into the microboom of her cellular headset. She said, “Where are you now? Quickly. I have to know.”
 
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
 
Kate pouted. “Why not? Just this once, why can’t you?” She finished Freddy’s terse reply even before it came crackling into her ear bud. “Oh, I forgot,” she said. “The protocol.”
 
In the rarified society of Western Europe’s criminal elite, Freddy Doloreux was famous for his so-called protocol, which was ironclad. It dictated, among other things, that contact among parties to a crime should be kept to an absolute minimum. Operatives entered and left the country separately, and their access to information was governed by the need to know.
 
Kate hadn’t seen the technician face-to-face since Sagaponack, last summer. Freddy was staying at a beach house belonging to one of the “male paychecks” he had a habit of picking up along the way. He specialized in the museums of southern Europe and the Mediterranean, but he adored the Hamptons and vacationed there whenever he could. The meeting was a brief but cordial one. She paid him his advance—a considerable sum even for someone of Freddy’s stellar reputation—and in turn Freddy presented her with the barest sketch of his plans for the Venice job.
 
The exchange took place in the restaurant of an old hotel off the Montauk Highway outside of town. A charming old hag owns the place now, a casualty of the Upper West Side, she recalled him saying as he sipped a vanilla ice cream float through a straw, his forearm resting on the duffel bag packed with untraceable currency that Kate had given him.
 
She hadn’t the slightest idea where Freddy was right now. Close by, to be sure, holed up somewhere in the Dorsoduro with his battery of mobile phones and laptop computers. That was the way it worked. The less the client knew, the more secure the operation was for everyone involved, most importantly himself. Freddy Doloreux was a trusting soul up to a point, Kate knew, but he never ruled out the possibility of the double cross, even by close friends like her. Friendship among thieves was provisional at best.
 
With her palm Kate cleared the rainwater from her face and breathed deeply to settle herself. She sprinted across the narrow rooftop easily. No problemo. At the edge she peered down the front façade of the palazzo, an ungracious gaol-like structure with wrought-iron cages on all the windows. It was known to locals as Il Porto, the Door, from the days when the building served as a currency exchange for seafaring merchants during Venice’s zenith in the Middle Ages. Now its façade was dressed up with bright banners and tapestries that advertised the modern-art exhibit inside.
 
The palazzo stood only a few city blocks away from the Guggenheim collection housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, Peggy Guggenheim’s former home on the bank of the Grand Canal. The new owner of Il Porto was a cattle heiress from Montana, lately of San Sebastian.
 
Determined to attain status at any price, it seemed, the vulgar American had established her own modern-art collection right here in Peg’s backyard.
 
The rain was intensifying now. Kate’s hands were adequately prepped with climber’s chalk, but in this inhospitable drizzle the descent would be a dicey one at best. She swung her legs out over the precipice, followed by her supple hips. Lowering herself halfway down the side, she anchored herself to the masonry using the tips of her Boreals.
 
“I’m headed in,” Kate said into the ear-mounted gadget.
 
“Fabulous,” came the sarcastic reply.
 
Kate touched the ring on the fine gold chain that she wore around her neck beneath the high-performance fabric of her skin suit.
 
 
Paul Fujimori, her husband—on paper they were still married, anyway—had been her mentor as well as the love of her life. The ring had once belonged to a society lady from Manhasset, Long Island. It appeared on the lady’s hand in a portrait by John Singer Sargent. Paul stole the ring from the same house in which the portrait hung. He slipped it onto Kate’s finger on their wedding day.
 
How long had she been split from him now? A year?
 
She raised the ring to her lips, kissed it for luck.
 
Old habits die hard.
 
But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there? The old loves that bind. They don’t release you so easily. For her part, she wasn’t ready to be released from the past just yet. Very nearly, she told herself. But not yet. Not just yet.
 
“Kate, hon?”
 
The electronic voice testily cleared its throat in her ear. She glanced at the digital counter strapped to her forearm. The illuminated seconds and microseconds were ticking away relentlessly. Kate said, “I’m going . . . I’m going.”
 
She scaled down the masonry wall with the brilliant exhibit tapestries ballooning gently around her. She attained a ledge and sprinted its length, trying to make up lost time. She climbed out onto a flat tar paper subroof and flattened herself against the cool metal of an industrial air-conditioning unit. She sighted the skylight and made for it, gave the lid a yank, and felt a wave of relief as the rubber seal broke and the steel-enforced glass hatch lifted open on its rusted levers.
 
Freddy is good. Very good. The contact he made on the inside, whoever he is, has done his job.
 
Kate climbed into the skylight and lowered the lid back down. With a gloved hand she locked it behind her. Silently, she dropped down onto the floor of the modern-art museum’s fourth-floor administrative offices. She made for a supply closet around the corner. Freddy had told her she would find it there, conveniently left unlocked by his mystery helper on the inside—some custodian, maybe, happy enough for the extra pocket money and perfectly willing to keep his questions to himself.
 
In the closet, Kate found the leather pouch she was promised. She unzipped it. Everything was there, including the guard’s uniform that she hastily slipped on over her dampened skin suit. The outfit would buy her about a minute once she was on the gallery floor. If all went as planned, the costume would get her past the surveillance cameras. She would walk right up to the painting. Then she would have just under thirty seconds to cut it from its frame.
 
The pouch also contained everything she would need to safely exit the country. Three different passports with three different identities for as many border crossings. A change of clothes. Train tickets. Contact numbers and assorted currency. That was how it worked between Kate and the technician. She assumed the risk while he looked after the details, right down to foreign exchange rates and shifts in the weather. Provided nothing got botched in the next handful of minutes, Kate expected to be out of Venice by noon. She would be across the Pyrenees by nightfall.
 
I’m glad you’re my friend, Freddy, Kate thought to herself as she pulled the guard’s hat low over her eyes and emerged from the supply closet. I’d sure hate to have you as my enemy.
 
 
“Time: three minutes, sixteen seconds,” the voice in her ear said. “Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen seconds . . .”
 
Kate rode the elevator down to the main exhibit floor. She took the time to review the security guard situation—the legitimate guards, that is.
 
There were two of them on duty on the graveyard shift, which ran from midnight to 8 a.m. Freddy had learned through his insider that one of the guards walked the floor while the other spent the night in a room watching the camera monitors. It was the second guard who had the potential to shut down the operation. While the walker’s habits of patrol had been factored in, the same couldn’t be said for the attentiveness of the guard seated in front of the TVs. With any luck the guard at the monitors would mistake her for his colleague on patrol if he saw her at all. She and Freddy were banking on the poor quality of surveillance footage in general. But if the second guard was the vigilant sort, he might register that there were in fact two uniformed individuals in the museum at two different locations as the grainy images on the monitors flicked quickly from view to view. If the alarm was sounded, Kate would have to abort and try to get out however she could.
 
Kate strode out of the elevator with her face directed at the floor, swinging her nightstick (also compliments of her good friend Freddy) by its leather thong on her wrist. She could sense the cameras on her. She imagined that she could hear the imperceptible whine of clockwork gears as the surveillance pod tracked her across the mosaic floor. Breathe, she told herself. Inhale. Exhale. Calm, keep calm . . .
 
The first image to catch her eye was a familiar one by Picasso. The Old Guitar Player was in excellent company. Kate’s eyes flitted from masterpiece to masterpiece as, hurrying now, she crossed the main room.
 
The paintings were counterfeits, mere reflections in this hall of mirrors. Fakes, every one of them. Some of the most infamous forgeries of all time were gathered together in these temperature- and light-controlled galleries for a show conceived expressly to ruffle feathers in the art world. Whether the critics loved it or hated it, the Forge exhibit, as the banners outside advertised the show, was sure to grab headlines. So, too, she imagined, would the criminal act she was about forty seconds away from pulling off.
 
“The target is in sight,” Kate whispered as she neared the back wall. She could swear she heard those cameras following her on their aluminum spindles.
 
“Wait for my mark,” advised the voice in her Motorola headset.
 
“Standing by.”
 
As the digital numerals counted down the microseconds on the device on her forearm, Kate beheld the framed image before her. The lady was the show’s headliner, this Florentine lady with the famously enigmatic smile. Her image graced the banners that adorned the façade outside: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, a big joke on the Italians and their precious artistic heritage. The authentic painting, of course, hung in the Louvre, in France. The fake on exhibit here in Venice was a copy by a crook named Giovanno Lotti.
 
The painting was indeed infamous. Even the art history books made mention of it, usually in the same breath as Vincenzo Perugia, the Italian craftsman who, out of love of country, stole the real painting in 1911 and tried to sell it to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. As for Lotti’s handiwork, it was so convincing that back in the 1970s the fake was rumored to have hung in the Louvre for nearly eight months before French officials realized the original had been switched out, and this despite a glaring error on the forger’s part. Leonardo painted with oils on wooden panels; the real Mona Lisa was painted on a thin sheet of poplar wood. But Lotti, making a not uncommon mistake, thought the artist had worked on canvas, and he drafted his forgery accordingly. But even with this mistake, Lotti’s Mona Lisa on canvas managed to fool French officials. The audacity of the fake increased its value to collectors exponentially.
 
The lady hanging in this gallery was worth about three million on the European black market. Not bad for an imposture. And Kate expected to have no problem earning her fee. Her crooked auctioneer in Stockholm had several buyers lined up for the faked masterpiece already.
 
Freddy was back online.
 
“You may proceed,” he said. “You have twenty-seven seconds.”
 
Actually, the convenient digital “burp” in the laser sensors that the technician had discovered was estimated to last about twice that amount. It was a burst of fiber-optic “white noise,” a temporary blank space that Kate would capitalize upon to cut the canvas from its frame without setting off the alarms. But because the operation had to be precisely orchestrated to coincide with the narrow window of time that the surveillance cameras weren’t on her, she had just under half a minute in which to work. By the time the lenses tracked back across an empty picture frame, the “security guard” as well as the canvas that had been there seconds before would be gone.
 
On Freddy’s cue, Kate swung into action, her movements swift but methodical. First things first, she thought as she pulled three items from her hip pouch: a box of unsharpened number-two pencils, a chalkboard eraser, and an annotated edition of Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo. She placed these objects on the tiles at the foot of the Lotti forgery. notorious “professor” strikes again! the headlines would read in the evening papers, Kate thought to herself, grinning a wide and mischievous grin. Freddy had tried to talk her out of this part, of course. As the levelheaded planner, he recognized the potential for danger in what she was doing. But Kate was insistent. It was one small, very personal gesture that she refused to yield to his protocol.
 
The notorious Professor was an art thief sought by international police in the toniest capital cities of Europe who always left a little something behind to let authorities know he’d been there. “The Professor” was the moniker her husband, Paul, used to work under. Just doing my part to keep the legend alive, Kate thought. With no time to spare, she pulled a knife from the sheath strapped to her calf and gently pressed the razor-sharp point to the canvas where it met the frame.
 
She was about to proceed cutting when a dull crash in the adjacent gallery caused her to freeze.
 
Oh, shit, thought Kate. The guard.
 
The din was followed by harsh whispering and curses. But wait, how could that be? Were there more than one? Had Freddy somehow made an error? Kate’s digital counter was showing nineteen seconds remaining before the laser sensors reactivated themselves. She didn’t have time to reclaim the telltales from under the painting. She dashed behind a nearby cluster of large decorative Etruscan pots and waited.
 
From her hiding place, the thief watched the two security guards enter the main gallery and fan out among the paintings. They were looking for something.
 
Or someone.
 
Kate grit her teeth as her thoughts turned murderous. Was this a mistake—or, knowing Freddy’s gift for details, was it something a bit more premeditated? Had the technician set her up? And if so, why?
 
“Kate? Kate!” It was Freddy on the Motorola. “What’s going on down there?”
 
One of the guards gave a signal with his hand. Over here. They were headed straight for the cluster of pots Kate was using as cover. One was an older man with the face of a banker or a blue-blooded politician, an establishment face that looked out of place beneath the brim of a guard’s hat. The second was a woman, almost a girl, really. She had an on-the-fence kind of beauty, the sort of passable attractiveness that turned into ugliness under closer scrutiny.
 
Kate’s grip on the knife haft instinctively tightened. The girl gets to go first. Maybe I’ll talk terms with the one that’s left, the Blueblood . . . maybe.
 
The guards didn’t see her. They strode right past her, less than a foot from where she was hiding. They were arguing between themselves as they came to a halt before the object they had come for.
 
Then Kate realized who—or more to the point, what—they were, and she had to stifle a laugh.
 
The two weren’t security guards at all. Like her, they had come to steal the Mona Lisa. And they had had the same bright idea of breaking into Il Porto disguised as security guards.
 
They were thieves—and inexpert thieves at that. Presently, Blueblood was trying to figure out how to remove the picture frame from the wall as the girl, who spoke English with a French accent, appeared to be trying to tell him the right way to do it. The two of them seemed completely oblivious to the fact that the entire room was rigged with alarms.
 
This didn’t let Freddy off the hook, though. How could he not have anticipated the intrusion? He knew the underworld of trafficked art like nobody’s business. He always had his ear to the ground. If another gang was planning to pinch the Lotti forgery—on the same exact morning!—word would have found its way to the technician, as it always had in the past.
 
“What kind of game are you playing, Freddy?” Kate whispered harshly into her cell. Her digital was showing eleven seconds and counting down. Fools, she observed as she watched the thieves arguing. By the time Blueblood there lifts the frame, time will have run out. He’ll set off the alarm. Kate sniffed dismissively, her professional pride getting the better of her. Amateurs.
 
The girl was staring at the box of pencils and other stuff Kate had deposited at the foot of the painting. “What’s this?” she said.
 
Kate had to intervene right now. Freddy’s voice was squawking in her ear. “Kate? Have you been compromised? Get out of there! Get out of there!”
 
She sheathed her knife and adjusted her guard hat. “I’ll deal with you shortly,” she said, then stepped out from behind the Etruscan pots swinging her nightstick on its strap in the casually threatening manner of rent-a-cops the world over.
 
“What do you think you’re doing?” she said as she approached the two thieves. She tried to fill out her uniform as officiously as she could. The man, in mock surprise, pursed his lips in an aristocratic and poncey moue. The girl glowered at her from beneath the brim of her crooked and ill-fitting guard’s cap.
 
“We?” asked Blueblood in surprise. “I’d have thought it was obvious.” He favored Kate with a flash of pearly whites. “We’re stealing this painting. Now kindly fuck off, hmm?”
 
The French girl made bedroom eyes at her. “Ain’t you pretty,” she said. Kate thought the English she spoke was self-consciously Americanized, leavened as it was with a profuse French accent.
 
“Don’t court the lady police officer, Danielle,” said Blueblood. “Just kill her, please.”
 
The girl drew a .45-caliber pistol. Kate hefted her nightstick. She resolved to break her collarbone before she had a chance to use the weapon.
 
“Nice outfits, by the way,” she said as she slipped into a killer’s pose.
 
Blueblood was flapping his hand dismissively. “No firearms,” he was saying. “Good lord. No, no, no, no. . . . Danielle, please do try and cooperate.”
 
The girl said, “As you wish.” She holstered the gun, pulled out a garrote of piano wire, and held it menacingly between her outstretched arms. She flew at Kate.
 
Marvelous, Kate thought as she blackjacked the girl clean across the temple. Just what I need right now. A chick fight. And here I’ve completely forgotten to wear my bikini.
 
Danielle went sprawling across the mosaic floor.
 
Kate sniffed. Amateurs.
 
Blueblood arched an eyebrow. He did not look pleased. Kate didn’t have the chance to move on him because the girl was on her feet again. Impressive. Smiling sweetly, she cursed like a longshoreman—a French longshoreman. Kate clipped her again, this time on the solar plexus.
 
But her young attacker was not only resilient, she was a breathtakingly fast study. By the time Kate followed through with her blow, she found the girl had captured her striking arm in piano wire.
 
She returned Danielle’s smile. Let’s see how sweetly you’re smiling with a shank between two of your ribs.
 
Kate’s other hand stole down her calf to the knife hidden there beneath her uniform. The tempered steel of her blade gleamed. She said to the girl, “Mind if I ask you a personal question?”
 
“By all means,” Danielle replied. “I relish a good heart-to-heart.”
 
“How’s your karma these days? Because I have to tell you, your prospects of walking out of here in one piece just went from slim to none. If you ask me, karma—the Eastern notion of payback—goes a long way to solving the age-old mystery of why bad things happen to bad people.”
 
Her arm flashed straight outward from the hip. Danielle sprang back, releasing her hold on the garrote and recoiling in midair. She landed in a ready crouch several feet away.
 
Kate bore down on her opponent with weapons drawn, nightstick in one hand, knife in the other. “I’m something of a spiritual tourist myself,” she continued. “I once knew this guy who taught yogic flying at the Nairopa Institute. He ate nothing but grilled locusts and honey, called it the John the Baptist diet. The guy was a wreck, but he knew bad karma when he saw it.”
 
“Fascinating,” Danielle said. “Do people ever tell you that you talk too much?”
 
“All the time. Haven’t you ever heard of the talking cure? I’m a deeply committed self-help junky. Past-life regression therapy did wonders for me. I recommend you try it—you know, to get to the bottom of why you’re so unpleasant to be around.”
 
Kate feinted with the knife, following through with the nightstick, but neither strike found their mark. Danielle was corkscrewing into the air, her legs whipsawing beneath her. She delivered a pair of roundhouse kicks that blindsided Kate and then laid her out flat on her back. The wooden nightstick went clattering off across the floor.
 
“I can tell you what makes me so unpleasant,” Danielle said. “Kickboxing.”
 
“I see your point,” Kate replied as she grappled with the girl over the knife.
 
From the corner of her eye, she saw Blueblood preparing to lift the forged Mona Lisa, frame and all, off the gallery wall. She could hear Freddy’s voice shouting in her ear. “Get out of there! Kate! For God’s sake!” Kate sighted the digital counter on her arm. The illuminated numerals were blinking double-zero.
 
Time had run out. The alarm sensors were active again.
 
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she called out to Blueblood.
 
But his hands were already on the picture frame. Too late. The gallery’s emergency lights erupted in full glare all around them. The alarm was sounding, and for an instant, Kate saw, Blueblood’s studied composure failed him completely.
 
He abandoned the painting and fled. “Au revoir,” Danielle called to Kate as she departed with her accomplice. “Until next time.”
 
The girl’s piano wire was still entwined around Kate’s forearm. Kate tore the weapon off and cast it away. She, too, was on her feet and running now. She had no idea how she would get out of here. She was yelling into her Motorola amid the shrilling alarms, “My two unexpected guests, Freddy—who were they?”
 
“I swear to you, Kate. I had no idea—”
 
“You’re lying,” she said. “We have to meet. Now. Where are you?”
 
Silence on the other end.
 
“Freddy!”
 
“The protocol, Kate—”
 
“To hell with your protocol!” Kate shouted. “Where? Tell me now!”
 
Hesitation, and then: “The hotel off the piazza facing the museum. Fourth floor. Room forty-two. But hurry. I’m leaving Venice within the hour.”
 
“You’re not going anywhere,” Kate said. “Not until we’ve had our little talk. If I were you, Freddy, I’d think up something quick. I’m in a very bad mood right now. Your story better be a good one.”
 
Kate ducked into a ground-floor restroom and pried open a window over the sinks. She heard the sound of polizia arriving outside the museum. In her panic, she didn’t realize that she had left something behind.
 
In the melee with the French girl, Kate’s wedding ring had been broken from its chain. It lay just visible on the gallery floor beneath a rim of burnished Etruscan pottery.
 
Copyright © 2006 by David Campbell