James Twining - The Black Sun

‘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 and were making their way down Park Street towards 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. 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 encyclopaedic 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?’

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 Himmler’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 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.’

‘Unless…’

‘Unless what?’

Overhead, a train crashed its way towards 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 cataloguing, 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, nr Malta, Idaho

5th January – 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 wind-breaker, FBI stamped in large yellow letters across his 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 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 moustache, 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, feeling the resentment welling inside him. ‘But they 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.