And while there was nothing to suggest it overtly—Liam knew his own freckled features with the slight gap in his front teeth were neither elite nor particularly stunning—he had the feeling it wasn’t because the man had found his company unpleasant.
In fact, he was pretty sure it was because he’d spoken to the thief/art restorer himself.
And after a brief, frantic consultation with the docent, who hadneverseen that Francis Bacon sketch before—this, goddammit,wasn’tthat sort of museum!—Liam was quite sure of it.
And after writing a detailed report and sending it to his local Interpol office, he had his guess confirmed and was invited to a one-on-one meeting with Detective Chief Inspector Alec Lawson.
Lawson was about fifteen years Liam’s senior, with prematurely silver hair, tired eyes—wandering eyes, as Liam would discover—and a kind, distracted smile.
And two file boxes on a thief he and half of Europe called “Lightfingers.”
“You talked to him?”Lawson asked excitedly, like a much younger man asking about a pop star.
“I suspect so,” Liam said.“He… he said the sketch was a good one when it clearly didn’t belong there.”
“What was he like?”
Liam thought carefully over the seconds-long exchange.“Sad,” he said after a moment.“That painting.It really… it meant something.”
Lawson’s face fell.“That’s too bad,” he said.“In the past he’s been… whimsical.Happy paintings, pretty families.”He brightened.“He once substituted a child’s sculpture of a cartoon character for the sculpture he stole from a private collector who had the original illegally.”
“He kept the original?”Liam asked.
Lawson shook his head.“No, no—it found its way back to the French museum where it had been stolen.”That soft expression again.“No fatalities,” he said.“No big break-ins through glass ceilings.Ninety percent of the time the thefts are to return something where it belongs.I swear to God, he’s like king of the goddamned fairies.”
Liam—who’d once been given that moniker in school and had to bloody a lot of noses before losing it—grimaced.
Alec caught the expression and misinterpreted it.“I don’t know if he’s that kind of fairy too, but so what?”That last was said challengingly, and Liam gave a startled chuckle.
“I thought that was my name,” he said, and Lawson’s sad eyes turned speculative.
“I could have sworn it was mine.”
The dalliance lasted only six months, but it was long enough for Liam to get promoted to Detective Inspector and Interpol liaison—and for Lawson to rekindle his romance with the wife he’d never told Liam about.
Disappointed and more than ready to move out of his mother’s flat, Liam took an assignment from Interpol that involved a more frightening kind of criminal.Andres Kadjic was a Jack-of-all-trades.Guns, drugs, girls—he trafficked them all, and surprisingly, he spent much of his ill-gotten gains onart.
Before Lawson retired into politics, he’d put Liam on a task force trailing Kadjic through North Africa and Eastern Europe.
Liam had been but a tiny cog in a big bureaucratic wheel at the time, but he’d gotten to travel, gotten to see Morocco and Prague, St.Petersburg and Istanbul, and everywhere he went, he’d catch a whisper, a scent, of Lightfingers, the man who sometimes stole for profit (but usually from the filthy rich) and often stole to even the scales.(He was the tinier museums’ best friend.)
The hard-core law and order folk at Interpol would loudly decry that a thief was a thief, but the younger generation would file their reports on the crimes—still with that element of whimsy—and say to themselves that they’d be very disappointed if this man was caught.
“Seriously, we’ve got the likes of Kadjic literally polluting the world with misery, and this guy swaps out the portrait of some noble’s wife for a privately commissioned one of his mistress, and we’re supposed to go after him, guns blazing?It’s ajoke,for God’s sake.”
For his part, Liam kept to himself that memory of the puckish, boozy man who had chuckled to himself about the painting being hung in the wrong place.He felt as though he’d been allowed a privileged glimpse of an endangered species in its natural habitat.The gentleman thief was, after all, a rare bird indeed.
And then Liam tracked a pair of forged passports to Morocco.The carriers of the documents were a father and his son—both artists—but Liam had noted that they seemed to be running from wherever Kadjic was.Which made him think that if he could findthembefore Kadjic did, he could make one of those arrests that young up-and-coming officers only dreamed about—and maybe earn the rank that Alec Lawson had bestowed upon him out of guilt.
He was literally wandering the streets one evening when he heard the chatter of excited children.He walked through that back alley and saw a dozen kids, each with their own set of thick crayons, all of them scribbling on the outside wall of one of the most unpleasant vendors in the square—a man who sold Khubz, and who sold it dearly and would rather feed the crusts to the pigs or chickens than to give even a scrap to the hungry children.
The children were not drawing graffiti, though; they were drawing pictures.Yes, some of them were of the baker, and none too flattering, but some of them were of hawks from the world-famous aerie nearby, and some were of horses, and some were of sparrows.
Liam approached a little girl drawing a dragonfly and offered her a dirham.“Yes?”he asked.
She nodded, her eyes fastened hungrily on the coin.
“Who gave you the crayons?”he asked in passable French.
