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It’s a subtle challenge. “I’ll need to prep more, some additional measures,” I tell him calmly. “I’d like to get out of the hotel before anyone notices something’s amiss.”
“I can help you there,” JP says, disappearing inside the warehouse. He comes out a minute later with a sort of half bag, half case similar to ones I’ve used before for framed pieces. The outside is fairly nondescript, but the inside is made of a silky material that will protect the art. “Here’s the replacement.”
I take the bag from him, whistling when I open it up and see what’s inside. The Black Rose isn’t the most famous picture in the world, of course. That’d be the Mona Lisa, probably. And even I wouldn’t take a shot at lifting that chick.
But The Black Rose is definitely up there, especially over the past few years ever since the dinner’s speaker, J.A. Fox, picked it up at an auction and started gushing over it regularly. It’s definitely valuable, but it’s the fact that it’s an easily recognizable collector’s piece that really drives its value.
And this fake looks remarkably good. “My compliments to your forger,” I murmur, even as my trained eye starts to see the minute flaws. At first glance, it’s hard to tell, but they’re there. Tiny discrepancies in color tone, imperfections in the artificial aging process, but most importantly, it doesn’t quite have the ‘soul’ that the original has.
Not that I give a damn. Art is my work, not my passion, and I generally find the idea of people paying millions of dollars for globs of color on canvas when others are starving or dying from lack of medicine the most callous of diversions.
But regardless, I can see the technical skills and the beauty of the work. It’ll do, if I do my job right.
“How the hell did you guys manage this?” I ask casually, almost like a backhanded compliment to JP and the organization he belongs to. But I really want to know. Who can produce work this good, this fast in this area? That’d be a resource I wouldn’t mind having in my back pocket.
JP shrugs. “I don’t know, I’m just an errand boy like you. Mr. Big has a network of errand boys, all of us doing whatever he needs.”
He wiggles his fingers in the air like a puppet master pulling strings while inwardly, I scoff. JP is no mere errand boy. He’s Mr. Big’s right-hand man, handling jobs like this regularly. But he likes to seem small so people underestimate him.
I won’t make that mistake, and I definitely don’t underestimate his boss. Mr. Big is a mystery wrapped in a comic book-style enigma, a man who is whispered about by everybody and known to almost nobody. But like an invisible octopus, his tentacles wind through and around every kind of criminal activity in our area. There isn’t a bookie in town who’ll sneeze without asking Mr. Big for a tissue.
But he’s especially known for art theft. Forgery, stealing, smuggling . . . if it’s art or art related in the United States, you know he’s involved.
And though I don’t take well to being called an errand boy, this isn’t the time or place to argue semantics.
“It’ll work?” JP, who’s not half the expert in art that I am, asks after another moment. “No one will know?”
I take another look at the piece, humming to myself. I know it’s fake, obviously, but I can count on my fingers the number of people in this state who might be able to reach the same conclusion. The head curator at the museum might, one of the professors of the Art Department at the university, and maybe a few others. But even they’d need to be looking carefully.
“It’ll do,” I tell him, standing back up and putting JP’s papers back in their envelope. “Someone’ll figure it out eventually, but not before I’m long gone and Mr. Big has his greedy hands on the original.”
“Don’t think you’re in a position to say what’s greedy and what’s not,” JP warns, his eyes narrowed. “This is a notable job for you. Do this, and Mr. Big will be pleased and he’ll make it worth your time. But not if you’re insulting him.”
The threat of consequences is crystal clear. Whoever Mr. Big is, he’s a man with eyes and ears in all sorts of places. And people who talk bad about him quickly find themselves, at the very least, frozen out of the criminal underworld and exposed to law enforcement.
Nobody talks about those who really piss him off. Mainly because so few facts are known about people who disappear the way they do. But I know if I fail this mission, it might be my bodily fluids used as pigment in someone’s forgery. That’s Mr. Big’s touch of melodrama.
