Of course,I think to myself. That’s how you live when you steal millions in art pieces.
We ride all the way up in silence. I am quite curious where she lives, and most of all, how. One day, I will write a paper about her, and this is as close as I can get to a criminal's mind of her caliber.
We arrive and step outside into a dark corridor with a single door and a spiral staircase leading to a roof window labeled EXIT.
I register and store it because she has several exits with it.
“Just a reminder,” she says, “Whatever you see in here, you will have to forget. The clause in the contract leaves me with everything I own; however, I acquired them.”
“I am aware,” I say, an eyebrow drawn up. So she has been hiding in plain sight, in front of all our noses, the entire time.
The guts she has.
She opens the door by holding her hand up to a spot on the door, and it opens with a soft, hydraulic sound.
“How do you open everything?” I ask her because she has nothing in her hand.
“Magic,” she says as if I am stupid.
Breathe,I tell myself, and follow her inside.
What appears in front of my eyes is everything and nothing of what I have expected at the same time.
This is not the penthouse I expected. And yet it fits her in ways I always believed she was like.
The penthouse, more like an at least 6000 square feet big room, and probably a 30-foot-high ceiling with full window fronts on both sides of the building.
White walls, white floor, and dozens of Greek-style columns. I feel like somewhere between the Acropolis and psychopathic cleanliness. The latter is a word Rachel has invented when we searched a villa while back that was so clean there could’ve been a mass murder that happened and no one would know.
And this here is the same.
It’s like a clean art gallery, with a Japanese bed and a bathtub and?—
My eyes fall onto a glass casing with Napoleon’s Imperial Crown in it.
“You took it,” I shout out as I walk up to it. “And you—you don’t even try to hide it!”
I glance at her and around the entire Studio.
There is art everywhere.
I identify a stolen Cezanne. Lost statues, a golden chandelier—I recognize it as the one lost from the Castle of Versailles.
I blow my cheeks.
“Impressed?” she asks while she undresses in front of me.
I turn away, because I don’t feel comfortable seeing my consultant naked. It’s unprofessional and against every rule.
Rules, she gives a fuck about.
“The moment you violate your contract, I’ll seize all of this,” I tell her as my eyes fall onto a golden egg.
“Is that Soray’s egg?” I ask and walk up to where it sits on a white display with a glass casing around it.
“Uh-huh,” she says and follows me. “I won it in a bet.”
She stands next to me, completely naked.
