Killers of a Certain Age(70)
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 of Gujarati 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 played through 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.