David Hosp - Among Thieves

“Whoever was involved is in some serious danger. I haven’t seen anything like what was done to Murphy in all my time at the Bureau.”

“Murphy got what he deserved,” Porter said. “I don’t care how many of their own these people kill, as long as we find the paintings.”

“You really think the art is more important than lives.”

Porter seemed to consider the question. “Not all of the art, only some of it. The Vermeer and the Rembrandts, certainly. Maybe even the Flinck and the Manet. The rest of it, though, is irrelevant. The five unfinished sketches by Degas? Certainly not worthless, but trivial compared to the other works. I can’t even begin to fathom why the bronze beaker from the Shang Dynasty was taken, and the notion that they took the finial from the top of Napoleon’s battle flag is just flat-out insane. That’s one of the great mysteries of the theft. In so many ways it was perfectly executed, but why waste time on trivial pieces like that? Not to mention what wasn’t taken. These men were only steps away from Titian’s Rape of Europa. Arguably the greatest and most valuable Renaissance piece in the United States. If they had the knowledge necessary to identify the Vermeer and the Rembrandts as worthwhile, surely they would have known about the Titian.”

“Maybe they just got lucky.”

Porter laughed. “It wasn’t luck. Not with how smoothly the job went off. Not with how successful they have been in keeping the paintings hidden all this time. There are just some things about it that don’t seem to fit.”

Hewitt folded his hands on his lap. He wished Porter would leave; he didn’t enjoy being around him. There was something bloodless about the little man that set him off. “If we do this right, maybe you’ll be able to ask these guys about all that. We just need to keep them alive.”

“That’s hardly a priority of mine at this point,” Porter said. His expression darkened, and his eyes glassed over in anger. Even when Porter had been an agent in the Boston office, he had always seemed off to Hewitt, particularly when it came to art. It was an obsession of his, and it had led him to push for the establishment of the special unit in the FBI to focus solely on art theft. It was a small group, but they were dedicated, and they were the best in the world at locating stolen art.

“What these men did wasn’t just a crime,” Porter said. “It was a sin. They deprived the world of some of the greatest works of art ever produced. I have no sympathy for them, and I wouldn’t let a little thing like their safety jeopardize a chance to give these works back to the public.”

Eddie Ballick loved the sea as much as he was capable of loving anything. There was something about the unforgiving nature of the deep gray waters off the northern shores of the Atlantic that made him feel as though he had a place in the world. As a young man in the 1970s, he’d worked as a hand on the swordfish boats out of Gloucester. On his tenth run his boat ran into a squall and foundered. Three of the six-man crew had gone down with the ship. He, the first mate, and one other had survived for three days in a tiny raft, riding through some of the roughest seas of the season, before they were rescued. Since that time, Eddie Ballick feared nothing.

He’d never planned to enter a life of crime. But fishing jobs could be hard to come by, particularly for a hand who had already been on one doomed ship. There was never a suggestion that he was at fault, but it didn’t really matter; sailors are a superstitious lot, and in the minds of many, Ballick was a jinx.

Jobless, and without any friends or family to speak of, Ballick drifted through his early twenties. He was a big man-not tall, but solid, with bones as thick and strong as petrified branches, held together with thick slabs of muscle. He found work as a bouncer at one of the roughest bars, where some of the city’s connected hung out. It wasn’t long before some of them recognized the potential in a strong young man without fear.

Ballick was a perfect fit for Boston ’s criminal underworld. He had a disdain for other human beings that allowed him to cross lines of cruelty even some of his colleagues found troubling. He lived to live, without any care given to how long or how well. As a result, his rise through the ranks of Boston ’s organized crime in the eighties and nineties had less to do with any active ambition, and more to do with an oddly indifferent efficiency. Within five years, he owned the bar where he’d first been hired to run the door. It was rumored that his former boss was buried under the parking lot out back.

The bar was only one of Ballick’s quasi-legitimate businesses. For him, the crown jewel in his mini-empire was a run-down fishing shack at the edge of the water at the southern tip of Boston, just north of Quincy. It was the only place he cared about, and it was where he spent most of his time. It wasn’t much to look at: a small, rickety two-story building ready to slide into the edge of Quincy Harbor.

Ballick was sitting in a cheap aluminum folding chair at the corner of the building, watching the activity on the pier closely, when Finn and Kozlowski arrived. He looked as if he fit in there, and as if he would have a hard time fitting in anyplace else. He was in his late fifties, with a large round head fringed with matted white hair. A fisherman’s beard traced a smooth oval from ear to ear under his chin, and the only parts of him that seemed to move at all were his eyes. Boats were pulled up along a nearby pier, some of them already unloading their catches in the mid-afternoon sun. A few of Ballick’s buyers from the shack moved along the pier, watching over the unloading process, calculating their needs and the respective purchase prices in their heads.

“Eddie Ballick,” Finn said as he approached. He’d called earlier to tell Ballick he was coming; Ballick was known to be a man who abhorred surprises.

Ballick turned his head; the rest of his body remained still. He said nothing.

“I’m Scott Finn. Devon Malley’s lawyer. We spoke earlier.”

Ballick looked past Finn toward Kozlowski. “You didn’t say you were bringing someone with you.”

“Sorry,” Finn said. “This is Tom Kozlowski. He and I-”

“I know who he is,” Ballick said. “He’s a cop.”

“He’s no longer with the department,” Finn said. “He’s a private detective now.”

“He’s still a cop,” Ballick said. “Now he’s just a cop without a badge.”

Ballick’s head turned back toward the pier. “I only got a few minutes. I’m busy.” He shifted in his seat and brought his hands together on his lap. Finn had never seen thicker fingers. “Scott Finn,” he said. “I remember you.”

“I didn’t know whether you would,” Finn said.

“Looks like the other side is working out for you.”

“I suppose.”

“Fuckin’ shame.”

Finn was noncommittal. “In some ways, maybe.”

“And now you want to talk to me about Devon Malley.”

“It would be helpful.”

Ballick frowned. Then he got to his feet slowly. “We’ll talk inside,” he said. “Cop stays out here.”

Finn followed him around the corner of the building and through an undersized door that looked as though the hinges might fail soon. One room took up the entire first floor. It was concrete from wall to wall, and along the back there was a long sink where men in bloodstained sweatshirts and aprons worked steadily with long, thin gutting knives, slicing into the bellies of fish carcasses stacked in holding bins. With each casual flick of their wrists, innards spilled into the sinks and were washed down through an open drain that emptied into a trough in the cement along the wall, and were carried out through a chute in the corner of the building that led into the harbor. The sights and smells brought a rush of bile into Finn’s throat, but he managed to suppress the gag reflex.