Six years with the army rangers had left Val confident he could handle all the muscle that could be stuffed into a luxury car. But what if they were packing? He considered calling the campus police, but Brown University security officers didn’t carry firearms. Instead, he punched in the number for the Providence cops, then hesitated, his thumb hovering over the call button.
Val was more curious than apprehensive. Who the hell was the caller, and what could he possibly want with an Ivy League assistant art history professor? He set the phone down and weighed his options, his hands absently shuffling the papers splayed across his desk—copies of scholarly articles about the dendrochronological properties of the oak panels favored by Rembrandt and many of his contemporaries. He couldn’t think of anything he’d done that would make him a target, but if he didn’t cooperate, the muscle might come charging inside, and somebody could get hurt. After a moment, he shoved his chair back from the desk, got up, and slipped into his bomber jacket.
“Where are you going?” Charles asked.
“Out.”
“The department meeting commences in fifteen, Val.”
“Perhaps Higgerson won’t notice my absence.”
“He will.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“Missing another mandatory meeting is not advisable. Not if you still aspire to a tenured position.”
Not advisable? Aspire to a tenured position?
The way Charles—never Chuck nor Charlie—talked always irritated the hell out of Val. But after three years of sharing a cramped and cluttered basement cubicle where they were never more than four feet apart, Val feared he was picking up some of the same fussy affectations.
“They’re never going to promote me anyway, Charles.”
“You don’t know that for a certainty.”
For a certainty? Val shrugged and strode out the door.
His days at Brown were numbered, and he knew it. He was never going to fit in. He didn’t even want to. He was Radiohead to their Mozart, Budweiser to their chardonnay, Levi’s and T-shirts to their elbow patches and bow ties. He enjoyed teaching undergraduates and despised the obligatory research into the few obscure and dusty corners of art history that remained partially unexplored. They despised students and lived to see their bylines on scholarly articles in impenetrable academic journals that no one ever read. Federal Hill, the Italian working-class neighborhood where he grew up and still lived, was a ten-minute drive from the campus on College Hill, but it was not a distance that could be measured in miles.
What sustained Val, besides the teaching, was the work he did over summer breaks with the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art. Last year, he’d scored a minor triumph, assisting in the recovery of two paintings by Eugene Joseph Verboeckhoven that had been stolen from the undistinguished collection of a small museum in Des Moines.
Unimpressed, Dean Higgerson had decreed that plebian detective work would have no bearing on tenure. And, he’d been quick to add, Val’s lively, sometimes hilarious blog on stolen art most emphatically could not be regarded as scholarly publication.
Val pounded up the stairs to the first floor, fleeing the specter of another soul-sucking department meeting. He dashed across the lobby, burst through the outer door, skipped down the marble steps, and saw a navy-blue suit standing beside a black Lincoln parked illegally at the curb. The suit opened the car’s rear door. Val silently nodded and climbed in, then slid over as the suit squeezed in beside him.
As the car eased into the flow of light midafternoon traffic, the suit tossed a black cotton hood at Val’s chest.
“The boss says you gotta put this on.”
Val took it as a good sign. If they didn’t want him to know where they were going, they probably intended to let him go once they were done with him.
*
They’d been cruising in silence for an hour or so, long enough to reach Boston or New Haven, when Val felt the car roll to a stop. If the drive had been a ruse to confuse him, they might still be in Providence. As he was roughly pulled from the Lincoln, he sucked in a deep breath and detected a faint hometown whiff of spilled fuel oil and sewage. Still, he couldn’t be sure. Boston and New Haven often smelled the same way.
He was led down a short walkway, up two steps, and through a door that closed behind him. Inside, he was tugged down a hallway, the tile or stone floor slick under his Converse All Stars, and then left through another door onto a thick carpet. There he was turned and nudged into a chair that felt like leather in a room that smelled of cigars.
The voice from the phone: “Good afternoon, Professor Sciarra. You can pull off the hood now.”
Val did so.
“Take a moment to let your eyes adjust to the light.”
What light? Heavy drapes had been pulled across the windows, perhaps to prevent Val from guessing their location, and the lamps had been left off. In the gloom, he took a slow look around. Gold brocade wallpaper, Tiffany-style lamps, a Hummel collection in a glass-front bookcase, and, across from him on a brown leather sofa, a fat man in tan slacks and a cardigan sweater.
“Better now?”
Val nodded.
“Sorry about the hood. Necessary precaution.”
“Who are you, and what do you want?”