Perfect (5 page)

S  E  V  E  N

Thomas and I met when he was chief inspector on a bombing case that involved Ballantine & Company. Sir Cramner was gone by then, but I’d been with the company for thirty years, and it was hard to leave. I’d also promised Sir Cranmer I’d continue as executive assistant to his ineffectual son and heir, who was doing his best to run 250 years of family history into the ground.

During the course of the investigation, Thomas invited me out, twice. Wonderful, sophisticated invitations such as a Schumann concert and an afternoon at the Victoria and Albert looking at the Raphael cartoons, the sorts of invitations I’d waited all my life to receive from a sophisticated, witty, urbane fellow, but never had. I demurred, turned down his offers because by then, due to a number of circumstances, it was too late.

As London’s notorious, elusive Shamrock Burglar—Scotland Yard never had a clue who I was (and they still don’t)—it didn’t seem very intelligent to strike up a friendship with the city’s superstar inspector. And I was seeing someone else (a misguided affair if there ever was one, which only served to confirm my belief about men and trouble) and, finally, and most importantly, I was getting ready to take my stash and move permanently to my beautiful little farm in Eygalières outside of St. Rémy. La Petite Pomme, with its quiet view, lavender beds, and hyacinth blue shutters.

Actually, Thomas did invite me out a third time, just for a quick hot-curry dinner at the Indian spot in Cadogan Square around the corner from my flat in Eaton Terrace. I had accepted and he stood me up! Not without a call or anything—a homicide had gotten in the way, as I recall—but I’d simmered alone for about twenty minutes before hearing from him, sipping single malt scotch and excoriating myself. Reconfirming, yet again . . . Men. Romance and I seemed fated never to end up in the same place at the same time.

Two days after the nonexistent dinner date, I padded my body with several million in diamonds and cash from my safe, boarded an Air France nonstop to Marseilles, and decamped to Provence, where I was finally able to stop looking over my shoulder and breathe.

After I’d settled in, I thought about Thomas from time to time—he would drift into my consciousness every now and then, especially when my old friend, Flaminia Balfour—she and her husband, Bill, live on a beautiful hilltop farm down the road in Les Baux—would trot out some relic who was ancient enough to think that I was
“une tomate.”
And I still was (and am) a
“tomate”
in many ways—beautiful, full-figured, luscious, rich, and extremely well maintained—but I had virtually zero interest in spending my time taking care of a groping nonagenarian.

One evening at Flaminia and Bill’s, my dinner partner died, not from any sort of strenuous or amorous activity beyond the effort required to sip soup or white burgundy but simply from being old. Right in the middle of the soup course. He gave a startled little peep, fell face first into my lap—bringing his bowl of cream of asparagus with him—and died. From old age. He was simply too old to be alive anymore.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” I held my hands in the air and stared at the bottom of the yellow-and-blue Limoges bowl that covered his wizened old bean like Don Quixote’s helmet. My favorite pink-and-gold bouclé Chanel dinner suit soaked up the thick pale green liquid like a big expensive sponge.

I’m embarrassed to say the three of us got completely hysterical.

“What on earth are you thinking, Flaminia? Do I really seem that desperate to you?”

“I’m so sorry, Kick,” she said, helping Bill curl the old gentleman onto the floor, where he lay comfortably until the authorities arrived. “I just want so much for you to be happy To meet a man.”

“Why? It doesn’t make any difference, Flaminia. I couldn’t possibly be happier.”

“He was very, very well fixed.”

“So what? So am I. Please, please, give it a rest.”

She nodded as the ambulance drivers wheeled away the shrouded remains. “I suppose you’re right. I did push this one a little too far—I should have let him bring his nurse.”

“He had a
nurse?
Oh, my God. This is getting worse by the second.”

Half-Persian, half-French Flaminia had the grace to blush, probably for the first time in her life.

It was at times such as that—thankfully there weren’t too many of them—that I’d recall Thomas. He’d seemed such a completely decent man, but timing is everything and the timing hadn’t been there.

One afternoon my phone rang. “Kick,” Flaminia said, “can you come to dinner tonight?”

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You’ve met a man.”

“Toujours.”
She laughed. “There’s always that chance. But truly come just because it’s a wonderful group and will be a beautiful October evening. Get dressed up. Seven o’clock.”

The evening was chilly, so I draped a black pashmina over my black silk evening pajamas and secured it with a large art deco diamond brooch, put on three graduated strings of sixteen-millimeter pearls and diamond-and-pearl earrings, all of which I feel obliged to point out I’d bought legitimately at auction at Christie’s in Geneva. On my wrist I clasped the one piece I’d stolen and kept because it was too magnificent to break down and I couldn’t bear to sell it: the Queen’s Pet, a cuff of five rows of 5-carat diamonds with an egg-sized clasp encrusted with a diamond melee. The clasp concealed a locket with a miniature of Prince Albert painted by Winterhalter for Queen Victoria. The bracelet was unfenceable and no one with a brain in his head would break down such an exquisite creation, reduce it to its basic elements of gemstones and precious metal and sell it for scrap. On this particular evening, it seemed like the perfect thing to complete my ensemble.

And there, at Flaminia and Bill’s cocktail party, was Thomas Curtis.

My heart stopped, and not from any romantic notion or pleasure at seeing him again. I was filled instead with the deep-down sorrow and grim realization that he was there to arrest me. That my beautiful life was finished. That all my years of meticulous planning and disguise and secrecy had evaporated like fog. That he had tracked me down and would now unceremoniously haul me off to the hoosegow like a common criminal.

I glanced up, and far off in the distance I thought I could almost make out the lights at La Petite Pomme where my little Bijou was curled up asleep in her basket waiting for me. My head ached as though in a vise and my eyes filled with tears.

E  I  G  H  T

I stared at his hand. It was strong and square and had a firm hold on a tumbler of Scotch, not a badge or a pair of handcuffs. His other hand was casually in the pocket of his tweed sports coat and he smelled vaguely of Trumper’s Lime cologne.

“I didn’t like the way it ended between us,” Thomas said. “With me standing you up.”

“Really?” I said casually. “How did you find me?” My voice sounded completely normal even though my mouth felt filled with cotton and I was quite sure I would need to be defibrillated to get my heart and breathing to resume. The headache arced through the center of my head like lightning bolts and would have buckled a weaker person’s knees.

He didn’t answer. He studied me up and down, not in a lecherous or leering way but with appreciation. “I’m so glad to see you, Kick. You look sensational. You’re even more beautiful than I remember.” He admired my bracelet. “That’s an impressive piece.”

You know, it is true that criminals are compelled to reveal themselves one way or the other. They—we—cannot stay away from their works because their works eat them alive. At some point they have to say the truth about themselves if they’re going to have any sort of real life at all. It becomes an unstoppable mandate, almost a crusade to tell someone. To confess. You cannot restrain yourself from freeing the swarm of bees that lives in your mouth. This was that moment for me. This would be when the truth flew out of my mouth like a beautiful flock of liberated bluebirds—I would not live the lie any longer, no matter the consequences.

“I stole it,” I answered evenly, now fully prepared to present my wrists for the obligatory handcuffing. “I’m the Shamrock Burglar.”

“Of course you are.” He raised his glass to me in a mock toast. “And I’m the Samaritan Burglar.” He was alluding to another of London’s “celebrity” burglars, but one that was a do-gooder. The Samaritan stole priceless works of art from peoples’ homes and left the paintings at police stations with notes warning the owners to take better care of their valuable property or some real thief might get his hands on their goods and actually steal them for good.

We both laughed and laughed—the Shamrock and the Samaritan. What a ridiculous idea. I felt wonderful, lighter than air. Because no matter the outcome, the fact remained, I’d told the truth. For the first time in my life! I was liberated. It wasn’t my fault he didn’t believe me.

Later that evening, when we returned to my house and I was whipping up a little midnight snack—a tarte Tatin, one
of my specialties—he brought a painting in from the car and hung it over the fireplace in my living room.

“Come here a minute, Kick,” he said from the living room door. “There’s something I want to show you.”

I recognized the painting immediately,
La Polonaise Blanche,
by Renoir. I’d last seen it in Sheilagh Winthrop’s bedroom when I was in her pitch-black closet cleaning out her safe while she was at her father’s ninetieth birthday party. I’d watched, horrified, through my night-vision goggles, as a masked burglar entered the room, replaced the painting with a note card, and then for some reason unknown to me, came into the closet. I had no choice. I whacked him with my little hard rubber ball peen hammer and he’d fallen like a ton of bricks. I got out of there as fast as I could. In the newspapers, the theft of the painting was attributed to me, the Shamrock Burglar, a bit of notoriety I never cared for. Any hack could break and enter and swipe a painting off a wall, it took virtually no skill or finesse. Clearly, it had been the work of the Samaritan Burglar, except the painting was never recovered.

To discover that night, in my living room, that Chief Inspector Thomas Curtis actually was London’s Samaritan Burglar absolutely stunned me. That he had conducted these robberies while the people who owned the works were out to dinner or out of town and had asked the police to keep an eye on their homes left me with my mouth hanging open. It was as egotistical as it was disgraceful.

We sipped Champagne and made love all night long.

Beyond acknowledging the reality of our former lives, Thomas and I had never gone on to discuss the subject in any significant detail—we didn’t talk about methods or favorite heists. He’d never asked me about my techniques, my various identities, or my stash, which, depending on the market price of precious gems—mostly diamonds—and metals, could maintain my lifestyle at the height of ultimate luxury for two or three hundred years at a minimum.

And I’d never asked him.

Our pasts weren’t hidden from each other, but we’d both come to Provence to become new people, learn new things, to look to the future, not spend a lot of time reflecting on the past. Our histories sat like expensive books on a coffee table that you walk by and see every day and maybe even pick up occasionally but never really delve into. Like the giant volume of Impressionists in my living room that serves as the stand for the drinks tray, they finally became fixtures in our existence, window dressing or decorations. They were just there.

One thing I do know, though, is that Thomas had been a do-gooder, a helpful thief, a scolder and a disciplinarian.

I, on the other hand, had no altruistic or philanthropic motives at all. Not only was I an unparalleled burglar, I was also a master jeweler and made perfect copies of pieces I stole from the auction house where I worked. So while many of the thefts from residences—where I knew the owners were out of town or out for the evening, and where I left my lovely, famous bouquet of fresh shamrocks, tied with an ivory satin ribbon in place of their precious gems and jewels—were made public, the majority of my robberies had gone undetected. As a matter of fact, even Thomas didn’t know of my jewelry-making skills or the auction-house switches. It was actually from those thefts that I’d realized my greatest gains.

There were many, many other things Thomas didn’t know about me and, I’m sorry to say, it seemed as though that was how it would stay. Throughout my life, “truth” has always been a relative thing. Nothing about me has ever been as it seems. And while I’ve revealed many truths about myself to him, the body of my life remains out of sight, like the proverbial iceberg under the water, or actually, like my body itself. I don’t think anyone should be forced to look at anybody’s middle-aged skin from the neck down. Unless they want to, of course, and the bedroom door’s closed and the lightbulbs are pink.

We fell in love, got married at the little Anglican church in St. Rémy, and settled into a wonderfully comfortable life filled with beautiful food, lovely wine, long walks, books, art, and love in the afternoon.

Our lives of crime were over, behind us, part of our history. And that’s where they would stay—in the past. Everything at La Petite Pomme was on the up-and-up.

N  I  N  E

Five minutes after walking into the ladies’ room at the Avignon airport, I walked out as somebody’s grandmother in flat shoes, a gray wig, beige-rimmed glasses, and an unbecoming maroon wool coat that was slightly snug. Before leaving the restroom, I took my personal cell phone out of my pocket, snapped the front off it, removed the battery, and dropped the pieces in separate trash bins, rendering it fundamentally unreconstructable. I proceeded to the ticket counter.

“Any baggage to check, Mme. Garnier?” the Air France agent asked without giving me a glance.

“Non, merci.”

“Your flight to Paris departs in fifty minutes. Gate three. You can enter security just there.” She pointed to her right and slid my driver’s license and boarding pass across the ticket counter. “Have a nice flight.”

“Merci.”

There are certain rules to major-league theft, to planning a big heist—not a standard hotel or residential robbery. You need to do it on your terms, control the circumstances as much as possible. Study your prey and create the scenario. I knew nothing about Bradford Quittle—now known as Sebastian Tremaine—the queen’s retired footman. But I knew that if he had stolen the jewels and was hanging around with Robert Constantin, the world’s leading concert tenor, he’d been stealing for a long time. And he’d amassed a pile of cash that had let him become something he wasn’t. Sebastian Tremaine had been living a secret double life that had gained him access to Constantin’s constellation. As Thomas pointed out, the superstar had an army of bodyguards to protect him from the millions of fans constantly trying to break through the visible and invisible cordons that surrounded him and get his attention. So Sebastian had done what I was preparing to do—created a setup that put him in that world in a way that attracted Constantin to him, rather than the other way around.

I knew little about Constantin’s private life because like many classical superstars who live in the stratosphere, he was the darling of the superpowers, the highly wealthy, highly cultured elite who live behind the scenes in the anonymity of private enclaves and clubs. Constantin’s privacy was protected not only by his own security team but also by the powerful security blanket of that exclusive world. He had more than succeeded in keeping his private life private.

I did, however, know two important things: showing up at a charity benefit concert in St. Moritz might get my picture in the paper—something I had no interest in seeing occur—but it certainly wouldn’t get me into his inner circle. And number two: I knew where he lived.

Constantin lived in Mont-St.-Anges, quite possibly the most exclusive, most secret private club in the world. Located somewhere in the Swiss Alps, Mont-St.-Anges was owned lock, stock, and barrel by the richest man in the world, megabillionaire George Naxos. Nicknamed by the media as simply The Greek, Mr. Naxos stayed well hidden from the public eye. His reach and power were so great, the actual location of the club and its membership were known, as far as I could tell, only to the members and their closest friends and associates who could keep their mouths shut. Banishment was the punishment for indiscretion, and for the insiders in this world, the term
banishment
meant more than simple exclusion, it meant financial and social ruin. So far, no one had been willing to risk it and write an exposé of the whereabouts or goings-on at Mont-St.-Anges.

For me, breaking in to Mr. Naxos’s world would be, without question, a far greater challenge than actually stealing the jewelry. But he was the critical, oblique doorway to Constantin—only Naxos could provide me with the entree and credibility necessary to legitimize my plan.

Because he was such a powerful man, I’d had Mr. Naxos on my radar screen for a long, long time, just as I did many wealthy individuals who had the capacity for and interest in acquiring magnificent jewelry. I suppose you could say I was a little like an obituary writer at a newspaper who passes slow times writing the obituaries of famous or influential people just to be ready for when they die. I’d been planning and preparing for how to meet George Naxos for decades.

He and the Royal Ballet’s former prima ballerina, Alma de la Vargas, had been married for over thirty years. She vanished from the stage a long time ago, maybe fifteen years, after suffering a torn ligament in a production of
Swan Lake
at Covent Garden. A short time later, the Royal Ballet announced her retirement. After that, she disappeared, simply evaporated into their hidden world. And she hadn’t been seen since, which was unfortunate because as I remembered her—I’d seen her at a number of our auctions in London—she was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen in my life. We were exactly the same age, and I was curious to see how she’d handled it. She’d been black haired, blue eyed, and had that otherworld quality that prima ballerinas have that makes them seem as though they’re floating above the ground. That every step they take is one of those suspended leaps when their partners carry them through the air one giant flying step at a time.

No one was too certain exactly where the Naxoses called home—their yacht, their island, their London flat, their New York apartment, their Swiss chalet, their plantation home in the West Indies, or any number of other spots no one knew about. Their residences were guarded like military installations. They didn’t eat in public restaurants or attend public functions, and they moved among their properties privately so there was never any opportunity for their pictures to be taken.

Paparazzi wouldn’t even begin to consider haunting them.

I had one shot at getting myself in his orbit, and I was now putting my long-dormant, carefully researched and planned strategy into play.

The flight to Paris-Orly was uneventful. I exited through security in the heart of the crowd, following a couple of women into the ladies’ room in the main terminal. After a few contorted minutes in a cramped stall, I transformed myself back to somewhat more familiar territory. I pulled my mink coat from my overnight bag and shook it out, putting the maroon coat in its place, and tucked my blond hair under a glamorous black turban. I broke the beige glasses in two, stuffed the wig into a plastic bag, and tossed it and the broken glasses in the trash, fixed my lipstick, and put on my dark glasses. I could easily have been mistaken for Catherine Deneuve or Princess Grace back from the dead.

I checked my watch. Thomas wouldn’t know I’d gone missing for another four and a half hours.