Tara Janzen - Loose And Easy

It worked, that’s about all he could say about his wardrobe.

“There’s going to be a helluva security system on his house.” That was the second thing to pop into his mind.

“Fortunately, we’re not here on a B and E, to break and enter,” she said, her tone a little dry, which was a good sign. She was regaining her composure. “We’re invited. We’re here on business.”

She had her legs crossed in the passenger seat, and her skirt was riding up, and for all that he was thinking about getting up to this rich old tire guy’s house and doing the contraband-for-cash dance, he hadn’t for a second forgotten where he was taking her after that-to bed, his bed. At least he was going to give it his best shot. He wasn’t passing Go. He wasn’t collecting anything.

“ You’re invited,” he clarified. “I’m unexpected.”

“It won’t be a problem. He might not even…uh, particularly notice that you’re there. He’ll be pretty focused on the property I’ve recovered. He’s a very, uh, very gracious man, but just a tidge eccentric. I’ve dealt with him before, with my dad.”

That got her a lift of his eyebrows. Her dad? What in the hell was a guy like Isaac Nachman doing hiring a guy like her dad? It didn’t make sense. Multimillionaires usually had their own people on staff to do anything, including investigations and security. He could see where Nachman would hire a brilliant, classy private contractor like Esme for a specific situation, maybe something she specialized in, but her dad, what Johnny remembered of him anyway, and certainly from what he’d seen tonight, was a jerk with about as much class as a ten-cent hot dog.

“Your dad…” he started, then let his voice trail off, hesitating. Her dad was a royal fuckup kinda guy, but it wasn’t Johnny’s place to say it like that, not to her. He’d save his unvarnished opinion for the guy who needed to hear it the hard way-her dad.

“Actually, he has a good reputation when it comes to art recovery,” she filled in his pause with another surprising piece of information.

“Art recovery? You mean he finds stolen art?”

She nodded. “Yes. The Nachman family lost over three hundred paintings to the Nazis during the war, including a Renoir my dad helped them find and reacquire, and they’ve never stopped looking for the rest of them, especially Isaac.”

Nazis. Germans. The guy in the Oxford Hotel with a sliced-and-diced suitcase and a neatly cut-open suit jacket-Johnny’s gaze landed on the messenger bag.

Geezus. He was such an idiot.

“You’ve got a painting in there.” Of course, she did, a damn small painting stolen by Adolf Hitler and, somehow, miraculously recovered by Esme Alexandria Alden and her deadbeat dad.

Easy Alex wasn’t anybody’s drug mule. Hell, no. He should have known that down to his bones- not that knowing it would have necessarily gotten him thinking of stolen art. Nikki McKinney, now she got him thinking about stolen art. One of her “ascending angel” pieces had been stolen in transit to Los Angeles a few years ago, and it had opened up quite a lengthy discussion at Steele Street, and a little personal private investigation on SDF’s part. Dylan had been the one to find the piece, and Hawkins and Kid had gone and gotten it back.

No one had said much more about it, other than Johnny knowing it hadn’t been the first or the last time the guys had done a little inside work off the record. Things came up with friends and family, and the guys had skills. They’d been superlative car thieves at sixteen, and had become absolutely world-class burglars of anything and everything General Grant tasked them with getting in the ensuing years.

“An incredible painting,” Esme confirmed. “Jakob Meinhard’s Woman in Blue, an Expressionist masterpiece. He painted it in 1910, and up until a few years ago, people thought it had been burned in Berlin in 1939, or possibly in the Tuileries in 1941. Hitler had thousands of pieces destroyed in those two fires. The führer hated modern art. He thought it was degenerate, an abomination undermining the character of the state.”

Johnny hadn’t known that. Not any of it. Nazis and art had never collided in his educational experiences. Land navigation-he had that down cold. HALO, High Altitude, Low Opening jumping out of airplanes with a ram-air square parachute- no problema. Small-unit tactics-he’d studied those hard, given them his all. But the Nazis were way before his time, and the only art education he’d ever had was hanging buck-ass naked from Nikki’s studio ceiling while she’d filmed him in angel wings in the middle of a lightshow and music maelstrom.

“And you and your dad found this Meinhard painting?”

“Just my dad. He tracked down its whole history, from when it was initially smuggled from Germany into France via a diplomatic pouch, to its inclusion with a score of the Rothschilds’ collection at one of their castles in the Loire, to when the Nazis discovered the cache of paintings and seized them all. He’s good, he really is, but he’s best at finding the paintings, and not so good at actually getting them back. In the case of the Meinhard, he’d set up a deal, but it fell through in the clutch, and he lost the cash he’d brought for the exchange without getting the painting. I took over the investigation a month ago and managed to get the seller back into place.”

“The guy in the Oxford?”

“Yes. Otto Von Lindberg.”

“You knew exactly how to set him up, didn’t you, exactly how to play him?” And that was a sobering thought.

“Otto and I go back a few years,” she said coolly.

And there was another sobering thought. She played hardball on this court all the time. Geezus.

“So what was your dad up to, trying to buy the painting back from Von Lindberg? Was he working for Nachman, being a go-between?”

She let out a short breath. “Initially, yes, but Dad has a way of getting into trouble. He gets in over his head, and then it’s just one big Ponzi scheme for him, robbing Peter to pay Paul, and making deals and promises he shouldn’t, hoping it will all turn out right in the end.”

“He gambles,” Johnny said, and she agreed.

“With everything.”

Which Johnny couldn’t have cared less about, except this time, Burt Alden had gambled with Esme’s well-being, with her safety, and frankly, that pissed him off-royally.

“Can I see it? The painting?” He’d sure like to know what all the fuss was about, because the night had been full of fuss.

“Sure,” she said, reaching down and opening the messenger bag.

He concentrated on the road, until he heard her snap open the metal case she’d slipped into the bag at the office.

He glanced over to where she had opened the case. It was dark inside Solange, but Esme had taken out her flashlight and had it shining on the small piece of art inside its protective covering.

“That’s not canvas, is it?” The painting was too solid, too stiff.

“No. Meinhard painted this piece on copper. It’s one of only three pieces he did on metal. One is in the Louvre, and the other was with the Rothschild collection. It hasn’t been seen since 1942.”

Johnny could see it, even under its covering. Sure he could, and he supposed if a person liked red, orange, gray, and green with a big smear of blue and a little dab of pink-well, yeah, he could see that if a person liked that, well, then they would like Jakob Meinhard’s Woman in Blue on copper.

Alrighty, then. Now he knew. Their asses were on the line, and the one thing that could save them and old Burt was an eight-by-ten-inch brightly colored piece of copper that didn’t look anything like a woman-and yes, it was called art. He wasn’t a complete heathen. He didn’t doubt for a second that the thing was worth all the trouble everyone had ever gone to for it. But by flashlight light, in a moving car, under its cover, it was a stretch to see the “masterpiece” part of the Expressionist masterpiece.