The phone rang the next morning just after seven o’clock, and Theo opened his eyes to a brilliantly sunny day. He’d been hoping to sleep in that morning, but now that he was running the restaurant, and had been for nearly a month, the staff called him with every detail and every question. He never understood how his mother managed all of it without going crazy. It was like running a school for badly behaved children, who argued about everything, couldn’t get along, and couldn’t make a decision on their own. He could see that the call was from the restaurant, and not from his mother in Florence, when he answered his cellphone. He was not pleased to have been woken up so early. He hadn’t left the restaurant until nearly two A.M., after his brief confrontation with Vladimir, which had delayed him, and ended the night on an unpleasant note. And the kitchen staff had been slow cleaning up. He had promised his mother that he wouldn’t leave before everyone else did, and he never had. He had kept his word. She wanted him to set the alarm.
The call was from one of the sous-chefs who had come in early. The chef had gone to the fish market at six A.M., and they’d been cleaning fish for half an hour, and had waited to call him at a slightly more reasonable time. The sous-chef sounded nervous as Theo made an effort to wake up and sound alert.
“What is it?” It was usually something ridiculous like they had noticed two chairs were broken and what should they do about it? Or one of the dishwashers wasn’t coming in.
“Fatima says there’s a problem,” the sous-chef said cautiously.
“What kind of problem?” Theo frowned as he listened. The only thing he worried about seriously was leaks in the old house that could damage the paintings. They were heavily insured, but a damaged painting could not be replaced.
“She says you have to come in.”
“Why? What happened?” Fatima was their cleaning woman. She was Portuguese, spoke very little French, and her two sons worked with her, and spoke none at all. “Can you at least tell me what’s wrong?” If it was trivial, he wasn’t moving.
The sous-chef nearly cried when he told him. “There are twelve paintings off the walls.” He sounded strangled as he said it. “Fatima wants to know if you took them down.”
“No, I didn’t, and what do you mean ‘off the walls’? Did they fall down? Are they damaged?” It sounded odd to him since they were bolted to the walls. Theo threw back the covers, and put his feet on the floor. It was obvious he had to go in. And what the sous-chef had told him made no sense.
“Not damaged. Gone. Someone undid all the bolts. The alarm was off when I came in, which I thought was strange, unless you forgot to set it last night, but you never have before.” And Theo knew he didn’t forget it. He was meticulous about it and remembered turning it on as he always did. “They’re gone. Missing. Someone took them. I thought the lock on the door had been played with, but everything was in order. Just the twelve paintings.”
“Oh my God.” Theo felt dizzy as he stood up. Nothing like it had ever happened before. “Call the police. I’ll be there in ten minutes.” He didn’t waste time asking which ones were gone. It wasn’t possible. How could anyone rob them? They had a state-of-the-art alarm system, beams, video cameras, surveillance, and a direct line to the police. They had nearly three hundred million dollars’ worth of art in the house, their alarm was infallible, or so they’d been told.
He pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, slipped his feet into sandals, brushed his teeth and not his hair, and ran out the door with his cellphone and car keys and forgot his wallet on the kitchen table. He stopped at the house where his mother lived on the way, his father’s old studio, where the bulk of her collection was, to see if she had been robbed too, but everything was intact there, the alarm was on, and nothing had been disturbed.
He jumped back in his car then and raced to the restaurant. He ran through the front door when he got there, and stood looking at the empty spaces that had been left. There had been no damage to the walls. The bolts hadn’t been opened with force—they had been professionally disabled and the paintings removed. Theo thought to warn everyone not to touch anything, in case there were fingerprints the police could use. But there was no question in Theo’s mind. They had been struck by highly trained art thieves who knew what they were doing. All the paintings his mother had recently put up, including the one Vladimir had tried to buy the night before, were gone. But this wasn’t the work of thugs, it was entirely the work of pros.
He went into the office while waiting for the police to look at the security tapes from the night before, and all he saw was static. They had been able to cripple the cameras and disable them, so that they had recorded nothing of the robbery. The tapes were blank. They had stopped functioning an hour after he left, and were blank for nearly two hours. It had apparently taken them that long to remove all twelve paintings. He felt like he was in shock as two inspectors walked in, and he spoke to them in the office after they surveyed the scene. Theo was badly shaken. He hadn’t called his mother yet, and didn’t know what to say or how to tell her. And he wanted more information from the police before he said anything. Maybe there were known art thieves in the area, and they would have an idea who had done it.
The two inspectors had been dispatched from Nice, and were part of a high-end robbery detail that patrolled the entire coast where there were homes that were robbed most frequently, and jewels, art, and large amounts of money were stolen, and sometimes hostages were taken. One of the inspectors was older with gray hair, the other was in his late thirties, and both appeared to be experienced. They asked for the approximate value of what was missing, and if the paintings were by varied artists.