Firebreak

5

If Bert Hayes hadn't instinctively and immediately taken such a strong dislike to Paxton Marino, he probably wouldn't have dug any deeper into the failed Montana burglary, probably would have just taken it at face value. But Hayes couldn't help it, Marino made him wince like a fingernail scraping along a blackboard.

The solid gold toilets themselves, objects of the thieves' intentions, would have been enough to turn Bert Hayes off, but they were nothing compared to the personality of Paxton Marino himself. A jumped-up johnny-come-lately, Marino acted with such smug arrogance it made Hayes want to punch him in the mouth. Marino strolled through life with the self-satisfaction of someone who comes from a long line of rulers of the universe, and goddamn it, he did not!

Bert Hayes, a sandy-haired short pugnacious man of forty-three, came from a long line of detectives. His father and uncle and great-uncle had all been with the New York Police Department, and all had made plainclothes. Hayes himself had started with the NYPD, but his first wife, Marie, had been a high school art teacher when there was still such a thing, and he'd unexpectedly found in himself a great passion for the plastic arts. Not as a painter or a sculptor, but as an appreciator and student.

Around the time the marriage with Marie was being called for lack of interest, Hayes had heard of a job opening for an art cop at the federal level. He'd applied, ready for a change of scene, and had been on that job ever since; nine years now, and counting. He was with the Art Identification Bureau, a minor underfunded subset of the Secret Service, which was itself an element of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the mission of the bureau primarily was to identify stolen artworks imported into the United States. A lot of the bureau's time and effort went into Holocaust-related work, trying to connect orphaned art with the descendants of its former owners. More than half a century later, and Hitler's mess was still being cleaned up.

The Holocaust wasn't all of it, though. A lot of European art was very haphazardly protected from theft—in many Italian churches, for instance, and in private country estates in Great Britain—so Old Masters did crop up from time to time, strayed several thousand miles from home. That's why Hayes was given a heads-up any time the work of some Old Master appeared in conjunction with any kind of crime.

Like the burglary at Paxton Marino's hunting lodge, for instance. An early report, from the local police, had listed among the valuables that had attracted the thieves but had not been spirited away a Rembrandt and a Titian, without tides or descriptions.

That caught Hayes's attention. Usually, he would just glance at such a report and move on to the next, but this time, surprised that such works should be in such a remote setting, he asked for a follow-up, and his curiosity was doubled when the follow-up left the paintings off the list.

Trying to work out what was going on, Hayes started making phone calls, but couldn't get a satisfactory answer from anybody in Montana. Finally, at a time when work had brought him to Los Angeles anyway, he stopped in to see Marino in his little hilltop palace in Bel Air, where the man was so patronizing that Hayes's jaw ached for three days afterward, from clenching his teeth.

And certainly not, Marino had said, there were no paintings at his hunting lodge in Montana. Why on earth would he have a Rembrandt in Montana? Was this an example of government detail work at its best?

Brooding on his Marino encounter afterward, Hayes eventually came to the conclusion that the man was up to something. There was no real reason to believe he was up to something, except for the inconsistency between the two reports, but Hayes had himself convinced of it. So the question was, what was Marino up to, and what could Hayes do about it?

He had no justification to take time off to go to Montana, and wouldn't have known what to do when he got there, but he could make phone calls, and after a while he got to be phone pals with a state CID inspector named Moxon who'd had his own single meeting with Marino, which had been enough to make him loathe the man for life. Moxon agreed to keep an eye on Marino's lodge, and let Hayes know if anything unusual happened.

And now something had. Moxon phoned to say, "A private plane came up from Texas to Great Falls with a shipment of wooden crates. A fella I know at Customs there told me about it."

Hayes said, "Customs wouldn't have anything to do with it, if it came from Texas."

"No, but it isn't that big an airport, and my friend saw the stuff, and wondered about it. They're big thin padded crates."

Hayes sat up. "Like crates you'd use to ship paintings?"

"Could be, I wouldn't know that sort of thing myself. But here's the two things about them. There's labels on all of them, say they're property of the Horace Griffith gallery in Dallas."

Writing that down, Hayes said, "And the other thing?"

"Well, they're empty," Moxon said. "This Horace Griffith is spending a bunch of money and a private plane to send Paxton Marino a dozen empty crates. Thought you'd like to know."