Survival Is a Dying Art Page 5

  I found Dr. Barry’s office and waited until he was finished with the student he was speaking with, a young woman with black hair streaked with neon green. When she left I stepped up and introduced myself.

  Dr. Barry was a rotund guy in his mid-forties, and his office was decorated with Haitian landscapes in lively primary colors. I explained that I needed a crash course in the Macchiaioli because I was helping on an investigation into a painting from that group that had surfaced after years being missing.

  “I read about them online,” I said. “I know they were a group of Italian painters active in Tuscany in the second half of the nineteenth century, and I’ve read they were the Italian equivalent of the Impressionists, because they liked to paint outside. But I’d like to know a little more about them, and about one particular painter named Mauricio Fabre.”

  “I can tell you what I know,” he said. “And then I can refer you to some sources.” He sat back in his chair. “Let’s start with some Italian history. Back in the 1800s, the northern provinces were under the control of Austria, and the Italians staged a series of revolutionary actions to retrieve control of their territory.”

  “Was that the Risorgimento?” I asked.

  He nodded. “You know your history. Good start. Many of the artists who became part of the Macchiaioli had fought in various battles toward the unification of Italy, so that gave them more of a political bent than the Impressionists, and they brought that revolutionary outlook to their art. They felt a responsibility to reinvigorate Italian art and bring it back to the prominence of some of the old masters.”

  “Was Fabre one of those revolutionaries?”

  “I’m not familiar enough with his background to say,” Barry said.

  “What about the name of the movement. Was that a revolutionary term?”

  “The word ‘macchie’ means patches or spots in Italian, and the Macchiaioli believed that little spots of light and shadow were the chief components of a work of art.”

  “Like the French pointillists,” I said.

  He nodded. “Macchia was commonly used by Italian artists and critics in the nineteenth century to describe the sparkling quality of a drawing or painting, so it was logical that the name would stick to them. Like the Impressionists, they weren’t exactly welcomed by the powers that be, and they were ridiculed, and their early works received hostile reviews.”

  A student hovered in the doorway of Professor Barry’s office, this one a skinny boy in drooping board shorts and an FIU T-shirt.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said to Dr. Barry. “Can you suggest any places I could go to look for more information?”

  “There’s a database called Oxford Art Online,” he said. “You can get into it from the library here. They’ll have more information on the Macchiaioli and on Fabre.”

  I left Barry’s office even more energized. I was going to learn everything I needed to know about this movement, this painting and this artist in order to get Frank Sena his uncle’s painting back, then trap Jesse Venable and force him to tell us everything he knew about the smuggling of watches and immigrants.

  6 – Agent Asshole

  I ducked into the student union building to get a cold drink, and walked into the middle of some kind of summer festival. One student club was selling used junk for a fund-raising project, a number of vendors sold merchandise from silver rings to T-shirts, and the advising department was giving away literature on career options.

  As I browsed, I spotted a display of Armani Exchange T-shirts in a variety of colors and sizes, and I was immediately suspicious. First-quality T-shirts went for fifty to sixty dollars, and these were on sale for ten bucks apiece. I picked one up, and it didn’t feel like the quality I would have expected—the fabric was thinner and the label on the inside was held on only by a single thread.

  They could be seconds, I reminded myself. Not necessarily counterfeit.

  A South Asian girl with flowing brown hair picked up a shirt with the Armani eagle spanning the entire front. “Wow! These are cheap. Are they real?”

  “No, they’re imaginary,” the woman behind the table said, without looking up from the laptop she was focused on. “And I’m a unicorn.” Her blonde hair was pulled into a scrunchie, and her FIU-logo T shirt, with a growling panther leaping across the front, was wrinkled and spotted with some kind of stain. A baby of about a year old slept in a stroller beside her.

  The South Asian girl snorted, but she couldn’t seem to resist a bargain, and she slapped a ten-dollar bill on the table and walked away with a bright orange shirt.

  A boy in a T-shirt that read Team Fuck It Up bought two shirts while I browsed, and the woman barely looked up. I remembered something I’d learned while researching fake Armani products for Vito, and I stepped away and pulled up a site on my phone. Sure enough, Armani Exchange was a separate brand, and never used the eagle with its wings spread, and certainly never with A|X on it instead of GA.

  I went back to the table. “Good afternoon,” I said. I pulled out my badge to show her but she didn’t even look up, her head bowed as if she was zoned out.

  “Whatever. You want a shirt, they’re ten bucks.”

  “I don’t want a shirt. And I don’t want you to sell this counterfeit crap.”

  She finally looked up and saw my badge. “Who are you?”

  “Read the badge, ma’am. Special Agent Angus Green from the FBI. I need you to shut down your operation immediately.”

  “The FBI? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I assure you, I’m not kidding.”

  A group of students had gathered around to watch our interaction. The woman closed her laptop and stepped up to me. “Can I talk to you?” she asked. “Privately?”

  I stepped around behind the table. “Look, I’m in a real bind,” she said. “I teach at the community college, and we don’t get maternity leave, so I registered for a sabbatical when I got pregnant. They never used to care if you published anything or came up with new teaching methods, so I didn’t think twice.”

  I had no idea what her pregnancy and sabbatical had to do with fake T-shirts, but I listened.

  “When I came back from my semester off, suddenly they were all ‘what did you do to enhance student success while you were on sabbatical.’ Like anything we do can help our students succeed when they don’t give two shits about literature or writing essays.”

  “How does that connect to these shirts?”

  “They garnished my salary to pay back the sabbatical leave money,” she said, as if I was stupid and not following her. “And with a new baby I couldn’t afford to lose that income. So my brother-in-law got me a couple of shipments of these shirts and I go around to fairs and sell them.”

  “But you know they’re fake?”

  “Of course. Where are you going to get a genuine Armani Exchange T-shirt for ten bucks? These students are as stupid as the ones at my college.”

  The little girl in the stroller woke up and started to cry. “It’s just too much,” the woman said, as she picked up the baby. “I have to teach the entire summer at slave wages and I still won’t have paid back the money until sometime next year. It’s not fair. I should have gotten paid maternity leave. Then I wouldn’t be in this situation.”

  I felt sorry for the woman. It was obvious she was in a tough situation. But I couldn’t ignore the way she was breaking the law, deceiving innocent students with shoddy merchandise, and cheating the manufacturer out of legitimate profits.

  “Here’s what I can do,” I said. “You pack up and leave, and I won’t have you arrested.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, then shut it again. “Fine. You’re just another cog in the corporate oligarchy that is running this country into the ground. Asshole.”

  “Agent Asshole, if you please,” I said. She put the baby back in her stroller and pulled a couple of boxes from beneath the table. I would have offered to help her pack up if she hadn’t been such a bitch. Instead I watched as s
he packed, then carted the boxes out to her Lexus. Yeah, cry me a river about the money you cheated your employer out of.

  As she backed away, she gave me the finger. I took down her license plate, and when I got back to the office that afternoon, I checked her out. She had been telling the truth, at least as far as her job at the community college.

  “You’ve got good instincts, Angus,” Vito said, when I stopped by his office to tell him about the incident. “She’s small potatoes, but give me her information and I’ll bring her in and question her. Maybe this brother-in-law of hers is a bigger fish, or can lead me somewhere.”

  “You don’t want me to handle it?”

  “You stick to this art case. I need anything you can get me on Venable.”

  “I had one more idea,” I said. “A couple of weeks ago I found a gold bracelet with a broken clasp in a parking lot. I was thinking I’d take it in to one of Venable’s Golden Ticket shops and see what his operation is like.”

  “If you want. Just don’t do anything to spook him. We need to play the line out for a while, see what we can catch. And make sure when you write up your report that you note that the bracelet is yours, so the Bureau doesn’t try to collect the money back from you.”

  Back at my office, I checked the price of gold. There had been a lot of fluctuation over the past couple of years, but it was close to its all-time high, over thirteen hundred dollars an ounce. I was excited at what my bracelet might bring, but when I checked the Golden Ticket website I realized I wouldn’t get anywhere near that. The bracelet I had was fourteen karat, and pretty lightweight—light enough that the woman wearing it wouldn’t have noticed it fell off when the clasp broke. So I wasn’t going to get rich.

  There was a Golden Ticket outlet on Sunrise Boulevard, not far from my house. I stopped at home, where I changed into shorts and a polo shirt, and then took the bracelet to the store, in a small strip mall. I was buzzed in by a uniformed guard, and the bracelet was weighed on a digital scale. The guy I dealt with showed me how much it weighed, then calculated what he could pay me. “A hundred twenty dollars,” he said, and I agreed.

  I had to provide my driver’s license, which they photocopied, then sign a form and include a thumbprint, and then the man I dealt with went into the back to get the cash from the safe. I walked out happily, though I wondered how legitimate the operation was. I could have given them a fake license, for example. Did anyone check their records on the back end? Was there a way I could?

  That would require a subpoena, of course. And in order to get one of those, I’d need to demonstrate evidence that a fraud was going on. Couldn’t do that with what I had, so it looked like I’d need a golden ticket of my own before that would happen.

  7 – An Important Work

  Thursday morning I met with Miriam Washington. “I’ve been researching the painting and the artist, as you suggested, and yesterday I met with a professor at FIU to get his input.”

  “Ah yes, academia. There but for the grace of God go I.”

  “You have a PhD yourself,” I said. “You ever think about academia? Should I call you Dr. Washington?”

  “Please don’t. I always worry someone will get confused and expect me to perform CPR or an emergency tracheotomy.”

  I laughed.

  “My father’s a minister and my mother’s an elementary school teacher, and they wanted me to teach—they thought it was a safe, solid career. Needless to say they’re not thrilled I carry a gun and track down criminals.”

  She sat back in her chair. “I wanted something more. I just didn’t know what at first. While I was in graduate school I worked part-time at a gallery on Newbury Street in Boston. It was an elegant place, very high-end work, and I learned a lot about the business of art there. At one point, an agent from the Art Crimes Team came in to ask about a stolen painting he was tracking, and he and I had a great conversation. He suggested that I consider the Bureau.”

  “And you did?”

  “Not right away. At the time, I just laughed. A black girl with a PhD in art history working as a Special Agent? The idea was ludicrous. Then I got a teaching assistantship and began working with undergraduates. After a few semesters of that the FBI looked better and better. I went back to that agent I’d met, and he mentored me, and here I am.”

  She went back to her computer. “Speaking of mentoring, let’s look at the painting together. You’re going to need some art smarts in order to carry off an interest that will get you the information you need.”

  She brought up a photo of a bronze sculpture on her screen, then angled it so I could see. “Look at this and tell me what you see.”

  “A naked man?”

  “Yes. But what else?”

  I leaned in close. “It’s very sensual, isn’t it?” I asked. “It’s bronze, right? The bronze is so smooth it’s almost like flesh.”

  “Good. Go on.”

  “The pose reminds me a little of the painting, Ragazzi al Mare. The guy on the left side of the scene, looking down at the other guys on the beach.”

  “As well it should,” she said. “You have a good eye, Angus. This is Donatello’s David, after his defeat of Goliath. This is actually the first free-standing male nude statue of the Renaissance. It embodies, literally, the revival of ancient Greece and Rome.”

  “So by mimicking the pose Fabre is trying to evoke that statue?”

  “Absolutely. And what else?”

  I thought for a moment. “If the Macchiaioli were trying to return to the era when Italian painting was dominant, then the painting is making a political statement, too, isn’t it? Calling back to that classical form, but with new technique.”

  She nodded. “So you see why this is an important work. It’s not just a pretty scene of good-looking naked men at the beach. It helps us understand Fabre, and the Macchiaioli movement.”

  “Which means that it’s worth our while to recover it,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  She pulled up the database of stolen art. “Here’s the information on the painting,” she said. “Painted in 1862, last known sale was to a man named Ugo Sena in Venice in 1941.”

  She hit a couple of keys on her keyboard and I saw the PDF Frank Sena had sent me, which I’d forwarded to her. “The paperwork your Mr. Sena provided matches that. According to the record, the painting was confiscated from Ugo Sena by the Nazis and stored at a church called Beata Vergine della Laguna, the Blessed Virgin of the Lagoon, on the Calle Ghetto Vecchio in Venice. It was coded JVV243. That means it was the 243rd piece of art confiscated from Venetian Jews – Juden von Venedig.”

  I had a brief shiver of recognition – the first two letters of the code matched Jesse Venable’s initials. That led me to consider Frank Sena’s uncle Ugo, losing everything he cared about, then being sent to a concentration camp and consigned to death. At the least the Syrian refugee who’d gotten off the sinking ship with the list of counterfeit watches had been able to escape with his life, even if just barely.

  It made me that much more determined to get the painting back for Frank Sena – and at the same time, I hoped, prevent others from suffering the same fate as Ugo Sena and all those refugees fleeing war or discrimination.

  Friday morning, I went for a long run around the neighborhood. I’d gotten accustomed to running with Lester, and I missed him. What did the cards hold in our future? I’d been a serial monogamist through college, dating guys who caught my fancy until the spark died out. My connection with Lester seemed deeper than any I’d had before, and I knew that I had to nurture it or it could fade away.

  I spent the morning in a meeting with a few dozen other agents from the Violent Crime Task Force, as Vito shared the newest crime statistics in our region, which ran from Key West to Fort Pierce. When we finally broke for lunch, I walked up to him, curious to show him I’d been able to find out the refugee’s name without him giving it to me.

  “Did Ahmadi give you anything more than just the manifest?”

&n
bsp; “Who?”

  I pushed forward. “Elyas Ahmadi. The gay Syrian activist who survived the boat crash.”

  Vito leaned forward. “How did you find his name? We haven’t released any information on him.”

  “I did some research, found an article about a gay Syrian who survived a boat crash. The details seemed to match, but there was nothing in the article about counterfeit goods.”

  “Remind me never to play poker with you,” Vito said. “You’re a damn good bluffer. Yes, Mr. Ahmadi is the one who provided us with the manifest. In exchange for asylum, he also gave up the contact in Istanbul who arranged the trip.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Officially? In a camp in Greece. Unofficially, he’s already been relocated to Amsterdam and given a new identity. His information led to the shutdown of a network of immigrant smugglers. Unfortunately, he didn’t know anything about the watches.”

  “What’s happening to refugees now? There have to be other smugglers, right?”

  “Above my pay grade. All I’m focusing on, and you by extension, is making a connection between those smuggled watches and Jesse Venable.” He glared at me. “Keep that in mind, Agent Green.”

  “I will.”

  I walked back to my office, thinking about the different dimensions of this case. Miriam had said that I’d have to sound knowledgeable about the painting. Was she assuming that at some point I’d have to meet with Venable myself and convince him? How would I? I couldn’t reveal that I was an FBI agent; that would make him shut right up.

  Could I meld my background with my brother Danny’s? Say I was an accountant—which was true. And that I worked for various clients, also true. After moving to Florida, I had begun to pick up a few freelance accounting clients, mostly gay guys I met through the bars who needed some help with paperwork and tax filing. I’d been filtering a lot of I made from them to Danny, to help with the cost of his summer in Italy, but once he was back at Penn State I might be able to use the money to pay my student loans down faster.