I Don’t Think I’ll Make it On My Own
I Don’t Think I’ll Make it On My Own
Six months earlier
“NOW THAT’S a ship,” Liam said, mostly to himself as he approached the yacht in San Juan harbor. Liam had come quite a ways from his mother’s East End flat and the five younger siblings he’d worked hard to feed from the time he’d hit fourteen.
Even as a copper, his income hadn’t increased that much from what he’d received as a strong back loading freight on the docks.
He’d continued to live in the flat until his brothers and sisters got old enough to help their mum, and then while spending his days as a bobby, he’d done a remarkable thing.
A series of small art thefts had occurred in the local museums about his neighborhood.
Nothing too large—nothing that would bankrupt the places—but small things, almost whimsical items. A button from a uniform worn by a general rumored to be Oscar Wilde’s first lover.
The tiara from a cottage maid who’d lived happily with the Archduke of Somebody, giving him many children while he was ostensibly married to his cousin.
Nothing too spendy. Nothing too spectacular.
And nothing to be related to the following month or two, wherein something fabulous—a Monet thought to be destroyed when the Nazis invaded Paris, for instance—would suddenly resurface, hung on full display for the world to see where no painting or sculpture had been before.
The events were… sporadic. There was no rhyme or reason to them.
No pattern, except that when one small thing disappeared, one large thing took its place.
Liam had been… intrigued. In his spare hours, sitting cross-legged on his twin bed in the room he still shared with his younger brother, he’d mapped out the museums that had been hit, the things taken, the things returned.
And had come to an odd conclusion.
Money wasn’t involved in either the thefts or the returns. The thefts were so small, but they all had to do with, of all things, love affairs ending badly—or held in secret. The returns had to do with righting a terrible wrong.
One day, his day off, he was wandering a small museum—one of the ones that had been hit already—when he came upon a miniature that, Liam could swear it, had been painted by Francis Bacon upon the suicide of his lover, George Dyer.
He stared at the six-inch painting, heartsickened by the image, trying desperately to remember if the artist ever worked this small.
This seemed a sketch, framed, not a fully realized painting, and while Liam wasn’t really a fan of the work—Bacon hurt his heart and his senses—he could appreciate the skill and the passion.
“Lovely sketch, that,” said a man passing by. He was cute—a good ten years older than Liam but puckish, with curly brown hair and slightly crooked teeth. Slender in build, with a vulpine face, the man shouldn’t have been remarkable, but somehow he had Liam’s complete attention.
“Tragic,” Liam said, giving the man a slight smile. Then, quite seriously, he said, “But this sketch doesn’t belong here—these are all nineteenth-century expressionist. I have no idea what a modern-art sketch is doing with this lot.”
“You know your art, then?” the man asked, cocking his head.
Liam got a faint whiff of expensive scotch and tried not to recoil.
It could be as innocent as a businessman having a drink with lunch, but Liam’s father had died young of too much drink—and too much driving near country bridges—and Liam had no fond memories of scotch.
“I know my crime,” Liam murmured, frowning at the sketch. “Have you seen the art docent nearby? I want to ask him about—”
But the man was gone.
And while there was nothing to suggest it overtly—Liam knew his own freckled features with the slight gap in his front teeth were neither elite nor particularly stunning—he had the feeling it wasn’t because the man had found his company unpleasant.
In fact, he was pretty sure it was because he’d spoken to the thief/art restorer himself.
And after a brief, frantic consultation with the docent, who had never seen that Francis Bacon sketch before—this, goddammit, wasn’t that sort of museum!—Liam was quite sure of it.
And after writing a detailed report and sending it to his local Interpol office, he had his guess confirmed and was invited to a one-on-one meeting with Detective Chief Inspector Alec Lawson.
Lawson was about fifteen years Liam’s senior, with prematurely silver hair, tired eyes—wandering eyes, as Liam would discover—and a kind, distracted smile.
And two file boxes on a thief he and half of Europe called “Lightfingers.”
“You talked to him?” Lawson asked excitedly, like a much younger man asking about a pop star.
“I suspect so,” Liam said. “He… he said the sketch was a good one when it clearly didn’t belong there.”
“What was he like?”
Liam thought carefully over the seconds-long exchange. “Sad,” he said after a moment. “That painting. It really… it meant something.”
Lawson’s face fell. “That’s too bad,” he said. “In the past he’s been… whimsical. Happy paintings, pretty families.” He brightened. “He once substituted a child’s sculpture of a cartoon character for the sculpture he stole from a private collector who had the original illegally.”
“He kept the original?” Liam asked.
Lawson shook his head. “No, no—it found its way back to the French museum where it had been stolen.” That soft expression again.
“No fatalities,” he said. “No big break-ins through glass ceilings. Ninety percent of the time the thefts are to return something where it belongs. I swear to God, he’s like king of the goddamned fairies. ”
Liam—who’d once been given that moniker in school and had to bloody a lot of noses before losing it—grimaced.
Alec caught the expression and misinterpreted it. “I don’t know if he’s that kind of fairy too, but so what?” That last was said challengingly, and Liam gave a startled chuckle.
“I thought that was my name,” he said, and Lawson’s sad eyes turned speculative.
“I could have sworn it was mine.”
The dalliance lasted only six months, but it was long enough for Liam to get promoted to Detective Inspector and Interpol liaison—and for Lawson to rekindle his romance with the wife he’d never told Liam about.
Disappointed and more than ready to move out of his mother’s flat, Liam took an assignment from Interpol that involved a more frightening kind of criminal.
Andres Kadjic was a Jack-of-all-trades. Guns, drugs, girls—he trafficked them all, and surprisingly, he spent much of his ill-gotten gains on art.
Before Lawson retired into politics, he’d put Liam on a task force trailing Kadjic through North Africa and Eastern Europe.
Liam had been but a tiny cog in a big bureaucratic wheel at the time, but he’d gotten to travel, gotten to see Morocco and Prague, St. Petersburg and Istanbul, and everywhere he went, he’d catch a whisper, a scent, of Lightfingers, the man who sometimes stole for profit (but usually from the filthy rich) and often stole to even the scales.
(He was the tinier museums’ best friend.)
The hard-core law and order folk at Interpol would loudly decry that a thief was a thief, but the younger generation would file their reports on the crimes—still with that element of whimsy—and say to themselves that they’d be very disappointed if this man was caught.
“Seriously, we’ve got the likes of Kadjic literally polluting the world with misery, and this guy swaps out the portrait of some noble’s wife for a privately commissioned one of his mistress, and we’re supposed to go after him, guns blazing? It’s a joke, for God’s sake.”
For his part, Liam kept to himself that memory of the puckish, boozy man who had chuckled to himself about the painting being hung in the wrong place.
He felt as though he’d been allowed a privileged glimpse of an endangered species in its natural habitat.
The gentleman thief was, after all, a rare bird indeed.
And then Liam tracked a pair of forged passports to Moroccco.
The carriers of the documents were a father and his son—both artists—but Liam had noted that they seemed to be running from wherever Kadjic was.
Which made him think that if he could find them before Kadjic did, he could make one of those arrests that young up-and-coming officers only dreamed about—and maybe earn the rank that Alec Lawson had bestowed upon him out of guilt.
He was literally wandering the streets one evening when he heard the chatter of excited children.
He walked through that back alley and saw a dozen kids, each with their own set of thick crayons, all of them scribbling on the outside wall of one of the most unpleasant vendors in the square—a man who sold Khubz, and who sold it dearly and would rather feed the crusts to the pigs or chickens than to give even a scrap to the hungry children.
The children were not drawing graffiti, though; they were drawing pictures. Yes, some of them were of the baker, and none too flattering, but some of them were of hawks from the world-famous aerie nearby, and some were of horses, and some were of sparrows.
Liam approached a little girl drawing a dragonfly and offered her a dirham. “Yes?” he asked.
She nodded, her eyes fastened hungrily on the coin.
“Who gave you the crayons?” he asked in passable French.
Her response sounded like “Dwyleje,” and it took him a moment to translate.
Doigts Le’gers.
Light fingers.
“Only crayons?” he asked her.
“Khubz,” she replied happily, and only then did he notice the paper-wrapped bread in the pocket of every child there.
Lightfingers bringing food and art to street children.
Idly, he wondered which item would be reported stolen next.
In any event, it wasn’t his circus—nor his particular monkey—and he had business to attend to in Casino de Monte Carlo, where the current pit boss was trying very hard not to turn on Liam’s big fish, who also happened to be the casino’s biggest client.