A Magnificent Crime (25 page)

Jack looked over his shoulder at me. “Mademoiselle,” he said to me, “please guard her belongings, will you?”

I nodded. I realized what was happening, of course. Jack was helping me. He was giving me a chance to do what I needed to do.

I had no time to question why. I grabbed the opportunity; I'd deal with the confusion later.

While he “checked her for head injuries,” I turned slightly away, holding the box tight with one hand. With the other hand, I slipped two fingers into my purse and withdrew a lock pick—something I always carried—and sliced open the tape. I slid my hand inside the box and grabbed three invitations.

“That should do it,” Jack was saying. “I think you're going to be just fine.”

I tucked the invitations in my purse, then turned back around. I handed her the box with an apologetic smile. “I'm afraid the box tape may have opened a little when it fell,” I said, hoping she wasn't sharp enough to question this.

She looked at me for a minute, hesitating, then said, “Oh, thank you.
Merci.
”

I exhaled. It was okay. She was still a little dazed from the fall, and from her close encounter with a handsome American doctor.

Mission accomplished.

Unfortunately, I now had to figure out what to do about Jack. Because suddenly I had an FBI agent who was not merely investigating my work, but getting
involved in it.

“No, no, no,” Brooke was saying to me. “You need more misdirecting flourishes with your left hand. Okay, no, that's too much.” She sighed with exasperation.

We were in Ethan's hotel suite at the Ritz, lavish rooms appointed with damask curtains and tufted furniture. Room service had brought up a tray of steaming coffee and pastries for us. I glanced over and my stomach groaned, but I wasn't stopping until I had mastered this.

Jack, surprisingly, had let me off the hook after the invitation incident. He had refrained from asking me any questions and had simply nodded when I said I had some work to do.

Or maybe it wasn't such a surprise, given our unspoken agreement.

Things were falling into place for the Louvre job. We had tickets to the gala. Gladys had finagled it so I would be one of the winners. But it would be all for nothing if I couldn't learn to seamlessly swap the jewel.

As a professional thief, you have to possess good sleight of hand. It's part of the job. But in this situation, “good” was not going to be good enough. My preferred modus operandi had always been to sneak in, snatch the target, and sneak out. Nobody sees me, I don't see anyone. It's all very covert, and the jewels just disappear like magic.

But this job was going to flex my skills in a whole new way.

“We're going to need some kind of distraction,” Brooke said.

“Hmm . . . How much of a distraction?” Ethan asked, munching on a Danish pastry. He'd been watching and coaching me through this along with Brooke.

“Not much,” said Brooke. “Couple of seconds, really. Something brief, something plausible.” She looked at me. “If we can get the focus off you even for a microsecond, you'll be able to do it.”

“What about a loud noise?” Ethan suggested. “A siren? A fire alarm? The band?”

“The fire alarm, I think,” Brooke said, nodding. “It's so cliché, it's almost fresh.”

I shook my head. “Nobody ever gets excited about smoke alarms going off,” I said. “If we're expecting people to go running and screaming, leaving me alone with the Hope Diamond, we're going to need to think again.”

“That's not what I envision,” Brooke said. “All you need is a moment. The instant the alarm goes off, people's attention will be pulled away, and that includes all the guards. It'll just be a second, but that's all you're going to need to swap the Hope for a fake.”

It sounded about as possible as achieving a salon-quality blowout at home. I looked at her dubiously.

“Here's how you're going to do it,” she continued. We had made a mock-up display case, and we had two fake necklaces—a red and a blue one, trinkets we'd bought at a flea market—for practice.

She took the red necklace and tucked it up her sleeve. The blue one she clasped around her neck. She kept her arms up, as if she was fiddling with the clasp.

“Okay, Ethan, cough or something,” she said.

Ethan coughed right at the moment Brooke took a step forward and kind of stumbled a little, letting her hair drop down in front of her a bit. All I saw was a twitch and a flourish, and then she straightened up. The necklaces had been switched. The red necklace was now around her neck, and there was no sign of the blue one.

I blinked. “Wow. That was amazing.”

“Where did you put it?” Ethan asked.

She beamed at us. “I let it drop right down my top.” She removed the red necklace, then reached into her top and pulled out the blue one. “That's how it's done, Cat. And that's how you're going to do it.”

On one hand, it was exciting to see that it was actually possible. On the other hand, it was terrifying. Could I really pull it off? Brooke had executed it, but maybe she was the only one who could do it. Were my skills up to the task?

“You're going to need practice,” Brooke said. “A lot of practice. And we're going to have to time it perfectly. You'll have to know the instant before the alarm sounds.”

“That's no problem,” Ethan said. “We'll be connected via earpieces.”

Brooke handed me the necklaces, and I gave it another try.
Okay . . . you can do this, Cat. You own this . . .

The necklaces dropped to the floor with a loud clatter. Both of them.

Ethan winced, then quickly recovered. “It's cool, Montgomery,” he said. “You got this. You just need to work on it a bit.”

Brooke showed me again. I watched her do it a few times. She slowed it down, did it in slow motion until I saw how she actually did it. Where she put her hands, how she moved the two necklaces back and forth, going from visible to invisible, and vice versa. “Got it?”

I tried again.

The necklace got tangled in my hair.

I sighed. “Brooke, maybe you could just do this for me? It would be a piece of cake for you.”

“No can do, sugarplum. LNY would fire me. Kill me first and then fire me.” Her tone indicated the matter was nonnegotiable.

It was no good looking at Ethan, either. There were no men in the contest to wear the Hope Diamond. Nope, it would have to be me.

Fine.
I could do this.

“Don't get discouraged, babe,” Ethan said. “You just need more practice. I've seen you pickpocket, and you're flawless at that. You can totally do this.”

So I practiced. Over and over. But as I worked at it, a niggling little concern came into play.

I would be up on the stage, surrounded by Louvre guards. Louvre guards carried semiautomatic weapons. If I made a mistake . . .

Just thinking about it, I felt my heart start picking up pace. What if . . . what if I had a panic attack while I was up there?

I nibbled a fingernail and looked at Brooke and Ethan. I didn't particularly want to admit this fear to either of them right then.

But Ethan seemed to be reading my mind. “You don't have to worry, Montgomery. Magicians go onstage to do this in front of everyone all the time.”

“I know,” I said. “But if
they
make a mistake, they're not going to get shot. Or thrown in prison.”

He shrugged. “True. But it would be the end of their professional careers.”

Just like it would be for mine. And then some.

Later that afternoon Brooke and I went to Les Puces, the flea market at Porte de Clignancourt. We had a very particular goal: to find a replica Hope Diamond. And it couldn't be just any old fake. We needed one that was virtually flawless.

It was exactly the sort of thing that would slip through official cracks, though, forgotten in somebody's attic for years, then turn up with the rest of their estate at a flea market.

Brooke wrinkled her nose in distaste as we climbed out of our cab just outside the market. Les Puces is in a rather undesirable neighborhood of Paris, and clustered around the outside of the flea market was an infestation of stalls filled with cheap clothing and replica football shirts. The air smelled of frying onions and falafel and sausages on food trucks and carts. I thought it smelled delicious, actually, but we didn't have time to stop for a bite.

Inside the enormous central pavilion of the flea market, however, the atmosphere changed. The air was powdery with the old-fashioned smells of perfume and talc and mildew. And the bargaining in here was less raucous. More of the cajoling variety, almost genteel. Music floated through the two-storied antiques market, a scratchy recording on a phonograph.

Still, I was on the lookout for cutpurses and con men. It would be a huge irony to be pickpocketed in here. And this sort of place was a pickpocket's office.

In fact, I witnessed a couple of street thieves operating as we wove our way through the stalls outside. It was fascinating, really, to see them in operation. It made me wonder how other people didn't see what was so plainly in front of them.

On the second level of the market, Brooke was rifling through a display of old locks, and I was studying a table of antique costume jewelry. Flea markets are wonderful places for a criminal to pick up supplies. For one thing, there's no record of sale. And you can find many interesting things that aren't available through traditional merchants. Old lock picks, for example, and grappling hooks and varied other bric-a-brac. People collect these things as curiosities.

We were finding many things, but none of them was a replica Hope.

I looked up from the jewelry table then and saw a sign for a fortune-teller. I peered into the alcove, and the face of the fortune-teller I'd seen in Montmartre stared back at me.

There was no mistaking Esmerelda as she stood at the entrance, tucked beside a heavy curtain: petite, masses of curly brown hair, and that faint scar on her left cheekbone.

Why she was here, I had no idea. Maybe she was helping out a friend. Or branching out. Her shop, perhaps, had burned down. Who knew? Regardless, here she was.

The minute I saw the fortune-teller, I knew I had to talk to her. Not because I wanted to know my fortune, but because my previous encounter with her had caused such a loss of sleep, I needed to reassure myself somehow that it was a bunch of baloney. That it was parlor trickery.

I glanced over at Brooke and saw that she was engrossed in negotiations with a stall merchant. I would slip into the fortune-teller's shop for only a few minutes. I didn't need to tell Brooke. Truthfully, I felt foolish, and I wasn't in the mood for merciless teasing from her just now.

When I stepped into the alcove, the fortune-teller recognized me instantly—I could tell by the way her eyes came alive.

“Sit. Please,” she said, pointing to a scarf-covered stool. The alcove smelled the same as fortune-tellers' stalls the world over: faintly smoky, fragrant with incense.

“You think it is a coincidence we happen to be here at the same time,” she said. “Let me assure you, it is not a coincidence.”

I took a seat.

“This was intended,” she continued. “By the fates and by the stars.”

I ignored all this. I didn't have a lot of time. “I need to know if I have anything to, um . . .” I didn't know which words to choose. I wanted to know if I had anything to fear, if the curse of the Hope Diamond was at all, well,
real.
But I felt ridiculous even uttering the phrase.

The fortune-teller wasn't concerned about my unfinished question. She gave me an impenetrable look, and then one smooth, cool hand grasped mine.

She spent a lot of time looking at my hand and then my face. Was she reading my reactions? My aura?
What?

“You are concerned about a curse,” she said. “Are you not?”

A shiver slid down my spine. I nodded.

She pulled out her old tarot deck. “The answer is in the cards.”

She turned over six cards one by one and placed them in a cross pattern. I recognized some of the cards she turned over—some were the same as the ones from before, in Montmartre. I had no idea if that was unusual. How many cards were in a tarot deck, anyway?

And then the fortune-teller turned over two more cards. I stared at them. The Knight. And the
Bateleur.
The Trickster.

I swallowed. “What about those cards? What do they mean?”

“You have two men in your life. You will have to make a choice.”

She had said the very same thing in Montmartre. I still didn't understand how she could know. She had to just be saying things that would be universally true for anyone sitting in front of her. Right? Anybody's “fortune” could be shaped and massaged to suit the circumstances. I forced myself to believe that.

But I struggled. I felt pulled under by the convincingness of it all.

“How can I make that choice?” I asked in a low voice.

She gazed at me. “You need to look into your heart.”

I looked at the cards spread in front of her. Two more cards were still unturned. I glanced at my watch. My time was up. Brooke's haggling was probably over by now. I didn't relish the idea of explaining all this to her. I wanted to wrap this up and get out of here. But the unturned cards were impossible to resist.

I pointed at them. “What about those?”

She raised an eyebrow, then reached for the remaining cards and turned them over.

The Queen of Diamonds. And
La Mort,
Death.

My mouth went dry. I blinked at the pair of cards, trying to hide my reaction.

“These images scare you,” she said. Evidently, I was not doing a good job.

“What do they mean?” I asked, my voice little more than a whisper.

“Within the most precious things always lies a heart of danger. And whenever humans become tangled with such things, strife will always follow. Strife and death. This much has always been true, and will always be true.”

Of course this was true. The race to possess, the desperation for riches . . . Human history is full of bloody incidents caused by that desperation. Especially when it comes to diamonds, with their unique strength, designed by nature to endure beyond human will. You can try to destroy them, but more likely, they will destroy you.

“You are afraid,” she said. “I can see that. And fear can cloud judgment. So
what
do you fear?”

“I-I don't know. The same things most people fear. Pain. Death. Dying.”

The fortune-teller gazed at me with that penetrating stare again. Her eye color was peculiar—hazel, with green rims.

“You are in danger,” she said simply.

“But I'm in grave danger if I stop,” I said hoarsely. More to myself than to her. I couldn't back out of the Hope job, because Faulkner would take his retribution.

She nodded solemnly. “There is no easy choice.”

“Can you tell me what I should do?” I knew I sounded ridiculous, like a pathetic, gullible idiot. But I couldn't help it.

Then, behind me, someone cleared her throat. “Well, I never figured you as the believing type.”

I turned. Brooke stood behind me, her mouth twisted in a wry smile. I cringed.

But then I looked past her and saw someone else I recognized. My heart stopped for a second as I shrank back out of view and pulled Brooke with me. In the stall across the corridor, looking down at something on a table, was Sean Reilly, the other thief who was going after the Hope.

I peered around the fortune-teller's curtain, watching Reilly for several seconds. There was no sign he was aware of my presence. He was thumbing through some old books, not trying to hide or be furtive. He glanced at his watch.

I had to accept the possibility he had followed me to the flea market. But nothing about his body language was consistent with that: he didn't seem vigilant enough, didn't seem particularly aware of anyone else's activity.

And then I realized this could be my chance. I could follow him and see what he was up to. Where he lived, what his story was.

“Care to fill me in?” Brooke asked, crossing her arms.

I turned to look at her, and at the fortune-teller seated behind her. I smiled and lowered my voice.

“See that guy over there?” I said to Brooke. “At the bookstall?”

“Short? Dark hair? Looks like that guy who played Henry the Eighth in
The Tudors?
”

I nodded. “Exactly. He's a thief. And he's going after the Hope, too.”

Brooke's eyes opened wide, and she turned her head to give him an appraising look. Then she frowned. “You know, I think I recognize him.”

The thieving world was not huge, so I wasn't surprised at this. “I want to follow him,” I said. “Are you up for it?”

She gave me her best Cheshire smile.

This was good. A two-person follow is always more effective than one. We didn't have time to discuss it any further, because Reilly was leaving the bookstall. Brooke and I switched into business mode.

Now, I may not be able to make a pot of rice without it coming out either mushy or crunchy, but I sure can tail a person without being detected. It's a skill I honed long ago.

Successful tailing requires being in sync with the person you're following. If possible, you need to know their habits, their behavior. . . . You need a
feel
for your mark. You've got to be intuitive, patient, smart. And, above all, invisible.

Most people are oblivious to being followed. They're too absorbed in what they're doing and where they're going to observe the signs. However, Reilly was probably different from most. Being a criminal, he would have a sizable degree of paranoia. Which would keep him vigilant.

Reilly left the flea market and turned left into the surrounding streets. This was a nasty part of Paris. Yes, believe it or not, there are nasty parts of Paris. It was entirely concrete, ugly, and run-down, containing all manner of criminal element. Even I didn't like it, and I was a criminal myself.

Fortunately, Reilly strode to a taxi stand.

Brooke and I split up and approached the taxi stand from different angles. This was a key feature of a two-person follow. Shake up the image of us as a pair and keep changing things around. As with jazz and comedy, the timing has to be impeccable when shadowing someone like this.

A taxi pulled up, and Reilly climbed in the back, looking around him before he did so.

I zipped into the next one waiting in line, careful to keep my face hidden in case Reilly glanced out the back of his vehicle. I instructed the driver to follow the taxi in front of us. Maybe he heard this line regularly, because he didn't flinch. And he didn't laugh at my cheesy cop-show cliché.

We pulled up a few feet, and I instructed the driver to stop. Brooke hopped in. Then the driver continued following the taxi in front for a couple of minutes.

Brooke said to me in a low voice, “How do you know he's going after the Hope, anyway?”

“I saw him casing it.”

“How do you know he wasn't just admiring it? People do that, you know.”

“A few days later he followed me and cornered me in an alley. And then he kind of threatened me.”

“Oh.”

Our taxi took a sharp turn as the one in front of us did the same.

“Do you know who he's working for?” Brooke asked.

“No. I had Templeton run a background check on him. He's a rare rogue, works for himself. Somebody must have hired him, but I don't know who.”

Brooke's eyebrows went up. “Ah, a free agent. So . . . ballsy, bold, and slightly psychopathic? Must have been kicked out of an agency. Doesn't play well with others.”

“Probably a pretty accurate profile.”

Our driver stopped. Up on the block ahead, Reilly's taxi had pulled over to the side. He was getting out and paying the fare.

I knotted a scarf around my head and slipped out of the taxi, while Brooke stayed behind to pay the driver.

We were back in the center of the city now, on the right bank in the Marais, the Third Arrondissement. Reilly walked farther into the village, a cobbled pedestrian area of shops and restaurants. I smelled roasting lamb coming from the bistro we passed, and pop music pumped out from a nearby boutique.

I continued following him on foot, staying just far enough behind. Not for the first time, I experienced second thoughts about this. If he detected me, it could get ugly. Reilly was creepier than the strange guy who lurked at the back of every city bus. And probably way more dangerous. Was this worth the risk?

He was moving quickly, striding with purpose, but I caught him checking window reflections as he went. I had to keep back, well out of sight.

Brooke, I saw, was now following on the other side of the square. Heavy rain clouds started to gather, and a breeze picked up. I dropped back and let her take the lead for a few blocks.

I needed an outfit change, somehow. I hurriedly grabbed a hat from a rack in a market, and a cheap pair of sunglasses, thrusting several euros at the seller. I noted that Brooke had done the same with a cheap hooded coat.

This was proving to be a long, meandering journey. Which meant one thing. He was clearly trying to protect against a tail. I wondered why. Where was he going, exactly?

I had to admit, the harder he tried to shake potential shadows, the more I wanted to know exactly what he was up to.