“Van Gogh. The Woman in the Wood. Caravaggio. The Gorgon Tisiphone. Bruegel. The Plague Doctor.”
To ship the paintings, they have purchased a set of Gujarati doors, heavily carved but not particularly valuable. Each door comprises a front and back panel, held together with strips nailed around the circumference. Their evenings have been spent carefully removing the nails securing the bottom strips, the section the Customs inspectors are least likely to scrutinize. The same small prybars are used to remove each heavy frame from the paintings and unpick the tacks securing the canvases to their stretchers. Freed, the canvases are slipped inside the opening in the doors. The doors will be crated up and shipped to an import furniture company in Milan that is owned by the Museum. From there, the paintings will be cleaned and remounted and quietly restored to the families from whom they were looted. The Provenance department prides itself on finding the lost owners, searching immigration records and gallery catalogs until they can piece together the rightful claims. Any art they cannot restore to its owners is held in a climate-controlled Swiss warehouse in the hopes they will someday be able to place it.
The last to go in is the painting that has been nicked by the baroness’s bullet.
“Sofonisba Anguissola. The Queen of Sheba Arising,” Vance says. He does not mention the bullet hole in the corner, and neither does Billie, but she watches as the painted face disappears into its hiding place.
It will be almost forty years before she will see it again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Two down, one to go, I repeated to myself as I made tea. It drummed in my head, relentless as the rain that pounded down day after day. We’d only been back for three days, but England was getting on my nerves. To begin with, I was feeling every last second of my sixty years after the hit on Carapaz. Muscles I had forgotten about were stiff and sore, and my knuckles and knees were bruised to hell and back. Mary Alice had stitched up my shoulder—neatly, with tiny, precise stitches. But it itched like fire, and the more it itched, the crankier I got.
The fact that days were passing with no plan on how to find Vance Gilchrist was also a solid nuisance. We started to snipe at each other, but that didn’t help. Soon the house was filled with the sound of slamming doors and everybody’s spite music turned up to drown out the others. Natalie was blasting Lizzo from her phone over the Babymetal Minka played through her laptop. Helen unearthed a portable record player from the attic which still worked, and she even found a half-warped Carole King album to play on it. It couldn’t compete with Mary Alice’s Baroque opera on BBC Radio in the kitchen. Dido was just screeching her last when I tapped out, taking a pack of cigarettes and a notebook to the garden shed along with the folder we had lifted from Carapaz’s house. I stacked a few moldy bags of mulch to make a sort of sofa and sat, listening to CCR and smoking with my fingers going numb. If it had been summer, a curious rabbit or a friendly mouse might have kept me company, but there was nothing Beatrix Potter about that shed. It was drafty and damp, and the tip of my nose burned with the cold.
Whenever a hit was ordered, a packet would come with the preliminary information put together by Provenance. The packet always looked like something your great-aunt would send, a chatty letter on personalized stationery and a selection of newspaper and magazine clippings, recipe cards, knitting patterns. Every squad of Museum recruits had their own theme devised during training. All communication with us came on notepaper headed with an illustration of a young girl looking over a flock of sheep. It was a play on Constance’s code name of Shepherdess, and the letters were always signed “Aunt Constance” although the actual writing was done by some grunt in Provenance. We ignored the text of the letter and paid attention to the picture at the top. It varied subtly depending on the information it was supposed to convey. The number of sheep told us how many weeks until the hit needed to happen; the direction the shepherdess was facing, the color of the ribbon on her crook—all of them gave us another piece of the puzzle. And every page in the packet added more detail until we knew exactly who we were supposed to kill, complete with suggestions on locations, the subject’s patterns of behavior, personal interests, and obvious vulnerabilities.
Once the packet was decoded, it was up to us to devise the actual plan. We coordinated with Acquisitions for supplies and logistics of carrying it out, and a team from that department was always tasked with getting whatever we needed as well as monitoring for further developments. Initially, our plans had to be approved by the head of the Exhibitions department, but once we’d proven ourselves, we were left on our own to develop our plans, and I had a routine for mine.
The day a packet came, I cleared my schedule. I canceled appointments, rescheduled deadlines for my freelance translating work. Then I settled in with a pack of Eves and the silver lighter my mother had accidentally left behind the day she walked out. Next to the lighter and cigarettes, I would arrange a fresh notebook and a new Ticonderoga, sharpened to a needle point. Then I would pour a glass bottle of Big Red over ice and settle in. The ideas didn’t come until I had sat for a while, smoking and listening to the ice crack, the air smelling of burnt tobacco and the cotton candy tang of the soda. I turned the lighter over in my hand as I thought, wearing down the chunks of turquoise like worry beads.
After the first glass was half-drunk and a couple of butts had been ground into the Bakelite saucer I used for an ashtray, I’d start jotting ideas. Random words at first, questions, possibilities. I didn’t censor this part, just wrote whatever came to me. I would keep at it, smoking and writing and drinking until I had a headache from the Eves and a stomachache from the soda. And the plan would be there, rough, but with all the major parts working. It usually took several more days to finish it off, smoothing out the ragged ends and tucking them in until I had a neat little scheme. It had been my method for forty years and it had never failed me.