Page 65 of The Picasso Heist
“Where is it?” Bergamo asks even before buckling his seat belt.
“Where else would it be? It’s in the trunk,” I say.
The idea of an original Picasso that just sold at auction for one hundred and forty-nine million dollars being stashed in the back of a dinged-up Toyota Camry from Avis clearly doesn’t sit well with Bergamo. If his body language—mostly squirming—isn’t enough of a giveaway, the tortured noise he lets out after we drive over a pothole leaves no doubt. He sounds like a wounded animal. This is killing him.
“We really couldn’t take my car?” he asks.
“No. We really couldn’t,” I say. “The painting’s fine, nice and snug in its case.”
The drive out to the Brooklyn Shipyard takes about twenty minutes. We pass the main entrance with its brick gatehouse and go along the fenced-in container lot to another lot that is neither fenced in nor patrolled by any guards. It’s basically a junkyard with a bunch of rusted-out forty-foot-high cube containers that made their last transatlantic voyage decades ago.
“This is perfect,” says Bergamo, looking around as we pull in. “Creepy as shit, but perfect.”
I cut the lights on the Camry and use the nearly full moon to slowly drive toward the water’s edge. I stop next to a container flipped on its side and covered in graffiti, and when I shift into park, Bergamo reaches for the door handle.
“What are you doing?”I ask.
“I was getting out.”
“What’d I tell you?”
“You didn’t tell me anything.”
“Exactly. So why would you think you should get out?” I hit the door locks, if only for effect. “Don’t do anything unless I tell you to.”
Bergamo nods, although he’s clearly not happy about taking lip from me. Pissed is more like it. He mumbles something, nothing Hallmark would ever use in a card, but I’m not really listening to him. I’m not even looking at him. My eyes are trained about a hundred feet away on the water’s edge.
A week of planning for a three-minute window.
Any minute now…
CHAPTER57
BERGAMO CAN’T BEARthe silence. I can tell from his body language again—he can hardly sit still. “So what the hell are we doing?” he asks finally.
“We’re waiting,” I answer.
“For what?”
“The window.”
This isn’t Shen Wan’s first rodeo at the Brooklyn Shipyard. Money and power can get you a lot of things, and in this case, it’s three minutes of privacy. That’s how long it takes for the surveillance cameras on the perimeter of the shipyard to reset after uploading the previous twenty-four hours of footage to the main server. It’s a glitch in the matrix, something the outside security firm neglected to mention to shipyard management. But for the right price, one of the firm’s technicians—supporting his family back in Gansu Province— was all too willing to share this intel with Shen Wan. Shen hasutilized the loophole on a handful of occasions for his “special imports.” The kind that don’t show up on any manifest.
Like a couple of very rare artifacts from the Qing dynasty.
“Here he comes,” I say.
Bergamo’s looking for a car. “Where?” he asks.
I point out at the water. “There.”
One if by land, two if by sea. The two vases. They were stashed on a dock in the shipyard upon their arrival from China yesterday and are being brought to us by boat within the three-minute window starting exactly at three in the morning, which is when the cameras aren’t recording. I explain all this quickly to Bergamo.
“Well done,” he says.
“It’s not done yet.” I pop the trunk. “Let’s go.”
Bergamo carries the case with the Picasso, hanging back a few steps behind me as we walk. “I’m going to need to see the vases first,” he whispers.
