Page 91 of The Picasso Heist
I lift up my zip-tied hands to wipe the tears from my cheeks. “What do you expect?” I’m nearly shouting. “You’ve got a gun to my head!”
“No, Malcolm has a gun to your head. All I’m doing is asking the questions,” he says. “For instance, what have you told the feds?”
“What do you mean?”
I feel the barrel of Malcolm’s gun dig into my skull. He knows his boss well.
“That’s a really bad start,” says Lugieri. “One more time and it’s game over, Halston. Now, who are you talking to at the US attorney’s office?”
Deep breath. You’ve got this.
“Elise Joyce,” I say softly.
Lugieri nods. He knew it. Of course he knew it. “The top bitch herself, huh? Man, that chick has such a hard-on for me. It’s unbelievable.”
“It has nothing to do with you.”
He steps toward me again, his face turning beet red with rage. Screw his expensive suit, he’s ready to pull the trigger himself. “What the hell did I just tell you?If you lie to me one more—”
“I’m not lying, I swear! It’s Enzio Bergamo I’m giving them. Only him.”
“Bullshit.”
“Why would it be about you? That would be suicide.” I tilt my head, reminding him there’s a gun to it. “This is about my father… what Bergamo did to him.”
Lugieri squints. “I’m listening,” he says. For the first time, I feel as if I truly have his attention.Now don’t lose it, Halston. Hold on to it… for dear life.
“My father’s an art dealer. Or he was an art dealer. He’s in jail right now because of Bergamo,” I say. “Bergamo was a client and leveraged their relationship to get my father involved in a scheme that went south, to put it mildly.”
“Wait,” says Lugieri, palms raised. “Does Bergamo know that you know all this?”
“Of course not. If he did, I wouldn’t have been able to get close to him.”
“So you’re setting him up?”
“Just like he did my father,” I say.
“What was the scheme?”
“Bergamo has two passions when it comes to art: Qing dynasty vases and cubist paintings.”
“Qing?”
“The period in China right after the Ming dynasty, mid-seventeenth century to the turn of the twentieth century.”
“Forget I asked,” he says.
“It doesn’t matter. The scheme involved only paintings. Bergamo went to my father claiming to have a connection to a French attorney handling the estate of someone who had nearly a dozen never-before-seen Fernand Léger paintings in the attic of his home near Biot, in the south of France,” I explain. “This was a huge coup for my father.”
“And he took Bergamo at his word? He trusted him that much?”
“My father didn’t trust anyone. But Bergamo put his money where his mouth was, buying one of the Léger paintings for himself, using my father as the broker for a private sale. When the French attorney saw he could offload these paintings discreetly through my father, they were in business. My father began brokering private sales for his other clients. There was just one problem.”
“The paintings were fake,” says Lugieri.
“Exactly.”
“But didn’t your father have them checked out?”
