The Black Sun (4 page)

“Slow down and you might start making sense.” Viggiano caught his reflection in a glass door as he spoke and adjusted his tie so it was centered precisely under his chin.

“You ever heard of the Sons of American Liberty?”

“Who?”

“The Sons of American Liberty.”

“Nope.”

“They’re a fringe group of white supremacists. Our mystery caller fingered them as the people behind the theft.”

“Did you get a trace?”

“No. The call was made right here in Salt Lake, but that’s all we know. Whoever he was, he had the sense to hang up before we could get a fix on his location.”

“Any intel on the caller’s ID from the tape?”

“Forensics are still working on it. They don’t think they’ll get much. Only thing they’re saying at the moment is that he doesn’t sound like he’s from these parts.”

29 the black sun

“That’s it?” Viggiano sighed heavily. “Jesus, it hardly narrows it down.”

“No, sir,” Bailey agreed.

“Where are these jokers based?”

“Malta, Idaho.”

“Malta, Idaho!” Viggiano exclaimed in mock celebration. “Just when I think I’ve run out of two-bit shithole towns to visit, another one shoves its head right up my ass.”

“If it’s any consolation, sir, Carter said that he wanted you to head up the investigation at our end.”

“Regional Director Carter?” A flicker of interest in Vig-giano’s voice now.

“That’s right. Apparently you dealt with a similar situation a couple of years back. He said that you were the only one available with the right level of experience for this. He suggested I help you out too, if that’s okay, sir.”

Viggiano clipped his gun back into its holster. “Well, for once Carter’s right,” he said, running a hand through his hair to check that the part was still right. “Saddle up, Bailey. You’re coming along for the ride. Paul Viggiano’s gonna show you a shortcut to the big time.”

BOROUGH MARKET, SOUTHWARK, LONDON

January 5—12:34 p.m.

The market stalls were tightly packed under the rusting cast-iron railway arches, their shelves groaning with freshly imported produce: Camemberts from Normandy as big as cartwheels, pink Guijelo hams, and bottles of olive oil from Apuglia that glowed like small suns.

Shoals of eager shoppers, wrapped up against the cold, battled their way along the aisles, their movements seemingly governed by whatever enticing smell, be it fried ostrich burger or warm bread, the wind happened to bring their way. Overhead, trains screeched and scraped their way along the elevated track, an intermittent rolling thunder that grew and faded as quickly as a summer storm.

“What are we doing here?” Archie snapped irritably as he dodged between two strollers and then squeezed past a long queue in front of one of the many flower stalls. In his midforties and only of average height, Archie had the stocky no-nonsense build of a bare-knuckle boxing champion, his cauliflower ears and slightly crumpled unshaven face reinforcing the image. So there was a certain incongruity about his choice of a tailored beige overcoat over an elegant dark blue pinstripe suit, and his neatly clipped hair.

31 the black sun

It was a contradiction reinforced by an accent that Tom had never quite been able to place, although he was the first to admit that his own—a transatlantic hodgepodge of American and British pronunciation and idioms—was hardly easy to nail down. In Archie’s case, the street-speak of the market stall where he had first learned his trade mingled with the rounded vowels and clipped
T
s of a more middle-class background. Tom suspected that Archie, ever the opportunist, had developed his own unique patois to enable him to move unchallenged between two worlds. It was a neat trick, but one that left him, like Tom, fully accepted by neither.

“You’re meant to be coming to dinner tonight, remember? I thought I’d splash out.”

“Oh shit.” Archie slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “I’m sorry, mate, but I’d completely forgotten.”

“Archie!” Tom remonstrated. What made Archie’s unreliability especially annoying was its very predictability. “We spoke about it last week. You promised.”

“I know, I know,” Archie said sheepishly. “I just plain forgot and now . . . well, Apples has got a game round at his place tonight. Big money. Invitation only. I can’t get out of it.”

“More like you don’t want to get out of it.” Tom’s voice was laced with disappointment. “This whole gambling thing’s getting a bit out of control, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s just a laugh.” Archie spoke a little too emphatically, as if it wasn’t just Tom he was trying to convince.

Looking back, Tom sometimes found it hard to remember that throughout the ten years Archie had been his fence, he had known him only as a voice at the end of a phone line. Archie had always insisted it was safer that way. For both of them. Tom still remembered his anger when Archie had broken his own rule the previous year, back when they were both still in the game, tracking him down to convince him to follow through on a job. And yet from that first difficult meeting, a friendship had developed. A friendship that was still finding its way, perhaps, as they both struggled to overcome a life built around suspicion and fear, but a friendship nonetheless, and one that Tom

increasingly

valued.

32 james twining

“Besides, I need a bit of excitement now and then,” Archie continued. “The art recovery game, well, it’s not exactly got the buzz of the old days, has it?”

“I thought you got out because you’d had enough of the old days.”

“I did, I did,” Archie conceded. “It’s just, well, you know . . . sometimes I miss it.”

“I know what you mean,” Tom mused. “Sometimes, I miss it too.”

“Dom told me about those ads in the paper, by the way.”

Tom nodded grimly. “Seems the FBI aren’t the only people looking for Renwick.”

“You all right with that?”

“Why wouldn’t I be? He deserves everything that’s coming to him.”

They had left the market now and were making their way down Park Street toward Archie’s car. Although the pub on the corner was busy, the crowds soon thinned out away from the main market, and Tom was relieved that it was easier to make himself heard now. They walked past a succession of small warehouses, the faded names of earlier, now forgotten enterprises still just about visible under the accumulated grime. Archie reached for his packet of cigarettes and lit one. Smoking was a relatively new vice of his. Tom put it down to his missing the buzz of the underworld. Archie put it down to the stress of being honest.

“Did you find what you were after in the States?”

“More or less,” Archie replied. From the way his eyes flashed to the ground, Tom sensed that he didn’t really want to talk about it. “How was Prague? Worth following up?”

“Maybe. You ever heard of a painter called Bellak?”

“Bellak? Karel Bellak?”

“That’s him.” Tom had long since ceased to be amazed by Archie’s encyclopedic knowledge of the art market, painting especially.

“Yeah, course I’ve heard of him. What do you want to know?”

“Is

this

one

of

his?”

33 the black sun

Tom reached into his pocket and withdrew the photograph the rabbi had given him. Archie studied it for a few seconds.

“Could be.” He handed it back. “Bleak palette, heavy brushstrokes, slightly dodgy perspective. Of course, I’ve never actually seen one in the flesh. As far as I’m aware, they were all destroyed.”

“That’s what I told the rabbi,” Tom said, “that the Nazis are said to have burnt them all. I just couldn’t remember why.”

Archie took a long drag before answering.

“Bellak was a journeyman artist. Competent but, as you can see, no great talent. A portrait here, a landscape there, basically whatever paid that month’s bar bill. Then in 1937 an ambitious SS officer commissioned him to paint Him-mler’s daughter Gudrun as a gift for his master.”

“But wasn’t Bellak Jewish?”

“As it turned out, yes. But by then a grateful Himmler had hung the portrait in his office on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in Berlin and even commissioned a second painting. When he discovered the truth, he had the SS officer shot and Bellak arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Then he ordered that every last one of Bellak’s works was to be tracked down and disposed of.”

“Clearly, some survived,” Tom said. “This one was stolen a few days ago.”

“Why bother pinching that? The frame they had it in was probably worth more than the painting.”

“I don’t know. Maybe because he was Jewish,” Tom said.

“What do you mean?”

“You should have seen the place.” Tom was surprised at the instinctive anger in his voice. “Someone had done a real number on it. Swastikas and graffiti sprayed all over the walls. Children’s drawings from a local death camp torn to shreds, as if they were trying to make confetti.”

“Bastards,” Archie muttered, flicking his cigarette butt into the gutter. “And the painting?”

“Sliced out of its frame and taken with them.”

“But what would they want with it?”

“That’s

what

I’ve

been

wondering.”

34 james twining

“Unless . . .”

“Unless what?”

Overhead, a train crashed its way toward London Bridge, and Archie waited until the raucous clanking had subsided before answering.

“Unless the painting was what this was all about. Unless they were trying to be clever by disguising an old-fashioned robbery as some sort of anti-Semitic attack.”

“Exactly,” Tom said, reassured that Archie had come to the same conclusion as him.

“So I made some calls. And from what I can work out, it seems that over the last year or so there have been six thefts of alleged Bellak paintings from various private homes and collections across Europe.”

“Six? I’d no idea that many had survived.”

“Well, they’re not exactly the sort of thing anyone would bother cataloging, are they?

Even now, no one’s managed to join the dots. The cases have just stuck with the local police in each area. The insurance companies haven’t got involved because the pictures aren’t worth anything. I only found out because I knew who to ask.”

“Someone’s going to a hell of a lot of trouble to steal a bunch of supposedly worthless paintings.” A pause. “Tom? You listening?” Archie looked up at him questioningly.

“Don’t turn round,” Tom said in a low voice, “but I think we’re being followed.”

BLACK PINE MOUNTAINS, NEAR MALTA, IDAHO

January 5—5:34 a.m.

What’s the latest from inside the compound?” Special Agent Paul Viggiano spoke over the background noise of technicians and ringing telephones, a trim, muscular figure in his blue windbreaker,
FBI
stamped in large yellow letters across the back. Bailey, sitting at the kitchen table of the cabin they had commandeered the previous evening as their operational HQ, was the first to speak.

“No movement, nothing. Not a single phone call. Even the generator shut down this morning. I figure it ran out of gas. No one’s come out to fix it.”

“What about the dogs?” Silvio Vasquez this time, the leader of the fourteen-man FBI Hostage Rescue Team that had been assigned to the investigation, sitting to Bailey’s right.

“What?” Viggiano frowned. “What the hell’s that got to do with anything?”

“Didn’t someone say they had dogs? Have you seen them?”

“No.” Bailey shook his head. “Nothing.”

“So that’s weird, right?” Vasquez concluded. “A dog’s gotta take a leak.”

“When

did

it

last

snow?”

Viggiano

asked.

Bailey

noticed

36 james twining

that he had found some loose matches and was arranging

them into neat parallel lines as he spoke.

“Two days ago,” Vasquez answered.

“And there are no footprints? You’re seriously saying no one has stepped outside that farmhouse for two days?” Peering over, Bailey could see that he had rearranged the matches into a square.

“Not unless they can fly,” Bailey confirmed. “And that includes the dogs.”

“I still say you boys have screwed up big-time.”

It was the local sheriff ’s turn to speak. A tubby man with ginger hair and a closely trimmed mustache, Sheriff Hennessy seemed to be in a permanent sweat, the perspiration beading on his pink forehead and cheeks like condensation on glass.

“I know these people,” he continued, the top of his clip-on tie losing itself in the fleshy folds of his neck. “They’re law-abiding, God-fearing folk. Patriots.”

“So you say,” Bailey began, a small knot of resentment forming in his chest. “But they also happen to be on a federal blacklist for suspected links to the Aryan Nations and the Klan.”

Bailey saw Viggiano give a slight shake of the head, warning him to back off. “Now, Sheriff, it’s true we don’t know for sure that these people have done anything wrong,”

Viggiano resumed in a conciliatory tone, “but we do know that three days ago an exhibit was stolen from the National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland. We know that whoever took it left no physical evidence that we’ve been able to find.”

“Apart from the security guard they strung up like a hunk of meat in cold storage,”

Bailey couldn’t help himself from adding.

“We also know,” Viggiano continued as if he hadn’t heard him, “that our Salt Lake office got a call yesterday suggesting these law-abiding patriots of yours were involved.”

“I know all that,” Hennessy said, dabbing his brow with a paper napkin taken from the dispenser at the side of the table. “But any crackhead could have made that call. It don’t prove