Heist Society

Page 4

She set off in the direction he’d been going, and was about to call his name, when, on instinct, she stopped and turned around. There, in the center of the square, she saw him standing amid a large group of tourists, listening to a guide who was lecturing at the fountain’s edge.
Her father didn’t seem to notice her weaving through the hordes of tourists and scavenging pigeons. There were no hugs or cries of hello when she stepped up beside him.
“I hope that’s for me,” her father said, but his gaze never left the man who was speaking to the group in rapid Russian.
Kat didn’t know whether to feel annoyed or impressed by his casual tone—as if this were a standing date, and he’d been expecting her all along.
She handed him his coffee, watched him wrap cold hands around the warm cup. “No gloves?” she asked.
He smiled and sipped. “Not on my day off.”
Thieves aren’t supposed to want too much—which is ironic, but true. Never live anyplace you can’t walk away from. Never own anything you can’t leave behind. These were the laws of Kat’s life—of Kat’s world. As she watched her father sip hot coffee and sneak smiles at her over the top of the cup, she knew that, strictly speaking, no thief is ever supposed to love anything as much as she loved him.
“Hi, Daddy.”
Nearby, church bells started to ring. Pigeons scattered. And her father glanced at her from the corner of his eye and said, “I know the Colgan School is good, honey, but Paris seems an awfully long way to come for a field trip.”
“Yeah, I know, but it’s fall break.” Kat didn’t want to know why lying to her father was far easier than telling her headmaster the truth. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”
Another sip. Another smile. But this time he didn’t meet her eyes. “You wanted to see if the rumors were true,” he said, and Kat felt her face burn in the cold wind. “So, who told?” her father asked. “Uncle Eddie? Hale?” He shook his head and spoke through gritted teeth. “I’m gonna kill that kid.”
“It wasn’t his fault.”
“Like Barcelona wasn’t his fault?”
“Yeah, well . . .” Kat heard herself repeating Hale’s words: “We all agreed that that monkey seemed perfectly well trained at the time.”
Her father scoffed.
“Dad—”
“Sweetheart, would you believe me if I said I didn’t pull any jobs in Italy last week?” The bells stopped, and the guide resumed his lecture. Kat’s father glanced around the square and lowered his voice. “If I said I had an airtight alibi?”
“You have an alibi?” Kat asked. “You swear?”
Her father’s eyes glowed. “On a Gutenberg Bible.”
“You can prove it?”
“Well,” he hesitated. “It’s a little more complicated than . . .” But then he trailed off and the crowd shifted, revealing a newsstand—headlines calling out in black and white: Nouveaux Pistes Dans le Vol de Galerie: La Police Dit Que les Arrestations Sont en Vue.
“Dad,” Kat said slowly, “you don’t happen to know anything about that gallery that was robbed last week, do you?” His smile was part pride, part mischief, and yet he didn’t face her. He didn’t say a single word. “So you didn’t do a big job in Italy last week because on the night in question you were doing a little job in Paris?”
He blew on the steaming coffee, then whispered, “I told you it was a good alibi.” He took a small sip. “Of course the work wasn’t quite up to my usual standards—you know my best assistant left me recently?” He shook his head and drew an exaggerated breath. “Good help is so hard to find.”
One of the Russian ladies hissed, warning them to be quiet, and Kat started to feel claustrophobic. She wanted someplace private. She wanted someplace she could yell. Then suddenly Kat found herself wondering . . .
“Dad, if the job was last week, why are you still in Paris?”
As he paused mid-sip, Kat couldn’t help but think that the thief had been caught, busted. The father, on the other hand, just seemed proud of his little girl.
“Sweetie, let’s just say possession is nine tenths of the law, so right now I’m not as guilty as I might like to be.”
“Dad . . .” She stared up at her father, not quite sure she wanted to know the answer to her next question: “Where’d you stash them?”
“It,” he corrected, “is someplace safe.”
“Someplace lonely?”
“No.” Her father chuckled. “Unfortunately, at the moment, it has plenty of friends.”
He continued to smile, but something about the way his eyes kept darting around the square made Kat worry.
“Then maybe you should leave it there,” Kat suggested.
He rocked on his heels, but didn’t meet her gaze. “Now what would be the fun in that?” He smiled wider, and Kat could have sworn she saw one of the Russian women swoon a little at the sight. A pair of teenage girls were whispering and giggling in their direction, but as far as Kat could tell, there was only one woman on the square who dared to openly stare. Perhaps she was too beautiful—too self-assured—to care who saw her looking. And yet this gorgeous, dark-haired woman’s unwavering eyes made Kat feel strange.
“Watching women checking out my dad is creepy, you know?”
“Sweetheart”—her father’s voice was steady—“sometimes it can’t be helped.”
He was teasing, Kat thought. Wasn’t he? But as they started to follow the tour group to the steps of a nearby church, Kat still felt the staring, as if someone were watching her every move.
Kat pulled a tiny camera from her purse and scanned the crowd. A man sat beneath an umbrella at a sidewalk café, not eating. She zoomed in on two men who lingered on a bench at the corner of the square, and recognized the plain clothes, bad shoes, and haggard look of a surveillance team five days into a job. And finally, Kat studied the woman standing at the edge of the square, staring at her father, who had barely met Kat’s eyes since she’d found him.
“So who are your friends?” She turned back and sighed. “Local cops?”
“Interpol, actually.”
“Nice,” Kat said, drawing out the word.
“I thought you’d be impressed.”
“It’s every little girl’s dream,” she said. “Interpol surveillance. And kittens.”
The church bells started to chime again. A bus pulled to a stop in front of them, blocking their view of the square, sheltering them from prying eyes, and in that split second, Kat’s father reached for her, gripping her shoulders. “Look, Kat. I don’t want you to worry about this thing—this Italy thing. No one’s going to hurt me. This guy doesn’t care about me. He cares about his paintings, and I don’t have them, so . . .” He shrugged.
“He thinks you have them.”
“But I don’t,” he said in that no-nonsense kind of way that all good fathers and great thieves are born with. “I’ve got a twenty-four-hour tail and a solid alibi. Trust me, Kat. Taccone isn’t going to come for me.”
She almost believed him. She wondered if he believed it himself. But Kat had learned at a very young age that thieves live and die based on perception—her whole life was a lesson in sleight of hand. If someone thought her father had the paintings, then the truth wasn’t going to save him.
“You’ve got to talk to him,” Kat pleaded. “Or hide, or run, or—”
“Give it till the end of the week, Kat. He’ll turn over enough rocks, and enough things will crawl out that he’ll figure out the truth.”
“Dad—” she started, but it was too late. The bus was moving and her father was already pulling away, his lips barely moving as he said, “So where does your school think you are right now? Do you need me to write you a note?”
“You already did,” Kat lied. “It was faxed directly to Headmaster Franklin from your London office yesterday morning.”
“That’s my girl,” he whispered, and the previous unpleasant conversation seemed a million years ago. “Now go on, get back to school.”
Kat stalled, not knowing whether she should admit to him that she’d been kicked out—that the biggest job she’d ever pulled had just blown up in her face—or whether to let the con live on.
“Do they give you a winter break at the Colgan School?” His gaze was locked on the guide at the front of the group. “I was thinking about Cannes for Christmas.”
“Cannes for Christmas,” Kat echoed softly.
“Or maybe Madrid?” he asked.
Kat held back a grin and whispered, “Surprise me.”
“Kat.” His voice stopped her. She even risked looking at him, framed by the ancient church and cobblestone square. “I don’t suppose you can help your old man out?”
Kat smiled and started through the crowd, clutching her camera, just another tourist. When she saw a pair of Paris cops and shouted, “Excuse me!” she sounded like an ordinary girl on the verge of panic. She had a death grip on her purse and looked utterly helpless as she rushed toward them. “Excuse me, officer!”
“Yes?” one of the cops said in accented English. “Is something wrong?”
“Those men!” Kat screamed, pointing at the two plainclothes Interpol officers who had left the café and were now chatting with their colleague on the bench. “They tried to get me to . . .” Kat trailed off. The cops looked impatient but intrigued.
“Yes?”
“They . . .” Kat gestured for one of the cops to come closer, then whispered in his ear. In a flash, both men were pushing through the crowd.
“Vous là!” the cop called to the surveillance team in rapid French. “Vous là! Arrêtez!” The Interpol officers were almost to the fountain when the cops called again. “Arrêtez-moi disent!”
The men tried to pull away, but it was too late. People were staring. The cops were bearing down. French obscenities were flying. Pockets were searched and I.D.s were studied, and through it all, the pigeons kept scavenging, the bells kept ringing.
And Kat knew that her father was already gone.
She turned her back on the chaos, ready for a taxi and a long, quiet plane ride over the Atlantic. But suddenly, someone grasped her arms. She heard a car door open behind her, and for the second time in two days, she found herself in the back of a limo, greeted by another unexpected voice.
“Hello, Katarina.”
Chapter 5
The only person who consistently called Kat by her full name was Uncle Eddie, but the man in the back of the car could not have been more different from her great-uncle. She studied him—his cashmere coat and matching suit, his silk tie and slicked-back hair, and she remembered Hale’s warning: He’s a different kind of bad. Her first thought was to fight, but two men were settling into place on either side of her, and Kat knew it wasn’t an option. So instead she asked, “I don’t suppose you’ll let me go if I ask nicely?”