Taylor Smith - The Night Café

“Smith, who has been both a diplomat and an intelligence agent, convincingly conveys what life is like on the streets and sands of Iraq in her compelling new thriller.”

—Publishers Weekly on Slim to None

“Smith’s experience as an international diplomat and intelligence analyst lends credibility to this first-rate political thriller…exciting and intelligent.”

—Booklist on Deadly Grace

“The publisher compares Smith to John Grisham…Smith’s a better prose stylist.”

—Publishers Weekly on Random Acts

“Smith’s latest is a graceful, compellingly written thriller…[The] gloriously intricate plot is top-notch.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Innocents Club

“Sharp characterization and a tightly focused time frame…give this intrigue a spell-binding tone of immediacy.”

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This one goes out with love and thanks to The Plot Queen, Linda McFadden—ally, muse and coconspirator. Neither time nor distance can squelch a great friendship.

It’s been a decade and a half (hard to believe) that I’ve been working with the wonderful people of MIRA Books, and I feel as lucky today as I did fifteen years ago when they offered to publish my first book. My deepest thanks to Miranda Stecyk, my editor, with whom it’s a joy to work—and to hang out, on those happy occasions where we find ourselves in the same city.

My family, near and far, is unfailingly supportive. Love and thanks especially to my amazing husband, Richard, and our beautiful, brilliant and all-grown-up daughters (how is that possible?), Anna and Kate.

I am thinking of frankly accepting my role as madman.

—Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother,

Theo, March 24, 1889

Just because I am always bowed down under this difficulty of paying my landlord, I made up my mind to take it gaily. I swore at the said landlord, who after all isn’t a bad fellow, and told him that to revenge myself for paying him so much money for nothing, I would paint the whole of his rotten shanty so as to repay myself.

—Vincent van Gogh

Letter to his brother Theo

Arles, 8 September, 1888

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Los Angeles

January 1

“People remember pain. They’ve done studies. You want to make a point with a person and make it stick, hurt ’em. Works every time.”

Afterward, before she stopped talking altogether, volunteer museum guide Dorrie Schaeffer kept repeating over and over what one of the intruders had said. She was in shock, of course, what the shrinks call posttraumatic stress disorder. But there was disbelief in her quavering voice, too—incredulity at the monstrous callousness of the man.

It wasn’t that Dorrie was naive about the potential for human cruelty. You don’t get through seventy-six years without witnessing some real wickedness. But this brutality at the Arlen Hunter Museum came out of nowhere.

The sun had gone down after a showery New Year’s Day, and Santa Monica Boulevard twinkled under holiday lights still strung on buildings and over the roadway. There’d been long, snaking queues outside the museum since opening, patrons anxious for one last chance to see the Madness & the Masterpiece exhibit, the high point of the Arlen Hunter’s fall season.

When the trouble started, Dorrie should have been far away. The crowds had gone home, the doors were locked. For the next twelve hours, a skeleton security staff would have the treasure to themselves, enjoying the collected masterpieces for a few hours more before the group was split up and the borrowed art returned to its owners.

Dorrie was in the underground parking lot, hurrying to get home to Wuthering Heights on Masterpiece Theatre. But as she was unlocking her car door, she remembered the van Gogh print she’d bought for a niece who was coming by the next day. Her brother’s daughter never failed to remember her birthday or to include her in family holiday celebrations. Knowing how much Renata loved van Gogh, Dorrie had bought her a beautiful lithographic reproduction of The Night Café, signature piece of the Madness & the Masterpiece show. Except, like a nitwit, she’d left it in her locker.

Bemoaning her absentmindedness, she reentered the building, backtracking toward the staff room located off the south gallery. She was in the hall just outside that gallery when she heard a shout. She froze at the sight of two men near the end of the gallery, their backs to her. Bert Fernandez, an old night guard, was on his knees facing her, although the intruders had his full attention. A brutal kick from one of them suddenly sent him sprawling, blood spurting from his mouth.

Luck found Dorrie standing next to an unlocked custodian’s cupboard and fear drove her inside. Her entire body shaking, she watched through a crack between the frame and the door as a third man, black-hooded like the others, rounded the corner from the west hall, shoving another security guard ahead of him.

There was no doubt this last man was in charge. He looked young to Dorrie, his body lithe, yet he seemed to harbor a sense of his own intellectual superiority and to feel a mission to instruct his colleagues on the efficacy of torment to ensure compliance. There was no other explanation for the violence. From what Dorrie could see, neither security guard offered any real resistance.

“People remember pain,” the leader said. “A bullet to the brain shuts ’em up, of course, but what if you need a pass code or something later? Bloody corpse on the floor’s not gonna do you much good.”

And so they used fists that flashed with metallic gleam—brass knuckles. Dorrie watched, stunned and terrified by the casual brutality. The younger guard, just a boy, really, tried to protest, but the leader swung a short wooden bat and the lad’s knee shattered like a teacup. Dorrie clamped her hands over her mouth as he crumpled, screaming, to the floor. Bert tried to drag himself over to help him and was rewarded with an equally vicious clout with the stick.

The leader bent down next to Bert, murmuring in a voice too quiet for Dorrie to hear. The old guard raised a shaking hand and pointed around the corner.

“Wait here,” the leader told one of the others. “If they move, shoot them.” He cocked a thumb at the other intruder and the two disappeared into the east wing.

Dorrie’s body shook like a thing possessed. The young security guards lay on the marble-tiled floor, crying and writhing with pain, his arms wrapped around his battered leg, while old Bert, face bloodied and swollen, glared at the thug standing guard over them.

Time seemed to stand still. Later, Dorrie couldn’t say how long it took until the other two thieves returned carrying the one item they had obviously come for—the van Gogh.

As the guidebook for Madness & the Masterpiece reminded visitors, Plato had called creativity “divine madness, a gift from the gods.” Psychobabble in the accompanying text discussed how great angst fed the vision needed to produce great art.