AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He almost finishes the last word before the baroness fires, clipping his collar. “I’ll be damned,” he mutters, clapping his hand to where the bullet has skimmed his skin, burning it before burying itself in a painting on the wall behind.
Before she can pull the trigger again, Billie puts her hand over the baroness’s. It feels like a collection of bird bones in Billie’s palm, the skin cold and lifeless, the spare flesh winnowed away until only the brittle framework remains.
She looks up at Billie with eyes that are black and bright with hatred. She says something that Billie barely hears, her ears still ringing from the sound of the shot in the small room. In the time it has taken Billie to reach the baroness’s side, she has swept the night table and seen the basket of knitting, balls of wool impaled by a pair of long steel needles.
Billie raises her hand and the baroness feels nothing, only a small punch angling down behind her collarbone. Then Billie removes her fist and the warmth comes, gushing wetly. The subclavian artery, nicknamed “the well” for how much liquid it pumps, is severed cleanly. A young and healthyperson will bleed out in as little as two minutes from such an injury, but the baroness is already sinking. Her mouth opens several times but she says nothing else. She does not close her eyes but watches Billie as the life drains out of her, and the last thing she sees is a blond girl smiling in satisfaction at a job well done.
Vance’s hand is clapped to his neck, red seeping between his fingers; his face is a mask of fury and Billie realizes too late what she’s done. It has been more than a decade since the Museum has found a Nazi to execute and it should have been Vance’s kill.
“She was mine,” he says hoarsely.
“She shot you—”
Vance looms over her, putting his face so close to hers she can see her reflection in his pupils, upside down and very, very small.
“She. Was. Mine.”
For an instant Billie thinks he means to hit her, and her fingers tighten on the knitting needle still in her hand. She won’t strike first, but if he touches her, she won’t go down without a fight.
He glances down at the knitting needle and his grin is humorless and cold. “Little girl, if I wanted to punish you for this, you’d be dead before you ever saw me coming. You are not my equal, and don’t you ever make the mistake of thinking you are. I’ve forgotten more about how to kill people than you will ever learn, so finish the job and stay out of my way,” he orders. He points to the painting on the wall. “Get it down. It’s on the manifest.”
She grabs the painting off the wall and hurries out to the dining room, where Natalie is wrapping the last of the paintings. They form a chain, hauling the artworks into the cellar under cover of darkness until the house is stripped. They shift the paintings down the tunnel, barricading the cellar behind them as they go with piles of debris. They stack the art carefully and build another pile of debris to shield it from the excavation side.
Filthy and tired, they move to the stand of banana trees and wait. Carapaz has timed it perfectly, and just as they settle in beneath the wide green leaves, the gas tank explodes. He has left a trail of fuel through the house and it catches quickly, climbing the walls and lighting the roof. There is a muffled whoosh when the fire reaches the baroness’s room. The windows blow out from the heat and the warmth of it touches their faces as they watch.
“Holy shit,” Natalie breathes.
The walls of the house seem to inhale, puffing outwards as smoke billows into the night sky. Billie edges forward, but the roof suddenly collapses in a shower of sparks. The beams crash down with a roar and the night itself erupts.
But the plantation is isolated, the nearest neighbor several miles away, and no one comes. When the fire settles to smoldering ash, they turn to the paintings. Vance Gilchrist has the manifest, and as they identify each of the recovered pieces of art, he marks them off.
“Van Gogh.The Woman in the Wood.Caravaggio.The Gorgon Tisiphone.Bruegel.The Plague Doctor.”
To ship the paintings, they have purchased a set ofGujarati 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 playedthrough 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 colorof 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 whatevercame 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.
But now I didn’t have a Ticonderoga or a pack of Eves, and I sure as hell didn’t have any Big Red. I had a notebook from the pound store with a picture of a basket of puppies on it and a marker that smelled like bubble gum. And I had my lighter. I pulled it out of my pocket and lit one of the god-awful cigarettes left from the brew we’d made for Günther. It was cheap and rough and I coughed until my eyes streamed before stubbing it out on the sole of my boot. I rubbed my thumb over the lighter, noting every lump of turquoise, rubbed smooth from years of handling. It was heavy and not particularly pretty, and I was sure my mother had stolen it from one of the men she referred to as her “boyfriends.” There had been so many of them, all vaguely the same, with flashy cars and unsuspecting wives. She would take up with them for a weekend or a year, however long they managed to convince her that this time she’d met a good man who would really take care of her. She never saw the clues, or maybe she just didn’t want to. She would shake out her blond hair and put on another coat of frosted lipstick and get into yet another Camaro, thinking this time it would be different.
But it never was. She got older but never any smarter, and with age came desperation. She just wanted so badly to beloved, but the love of a child wasn’t enough, wasn’t the right kind of love. So I learned to keep it back, not to burden her with it. She loved me best when I didn’t ask anything of her, so I carried that love alone until the day she up and walked away for good. She left with a man, of course, this one heading for California. He had a paunch and a shirt open to his navel, but he drove a Cadillac and had a plan to make money. The fact that a kid was a dealbreaker didn’t stop her; it probably didn’t even slow her down. She took whatever she could carry that would pawn easily, which is how I know she forgot the lighter. It would have gotten her a few bucks for gas money or a Stuckey’s pecan log.
