“I didn’t take the da Vinci,” she said flatly. Taccone laughed.
“And your father did not take my paintings,” he said, indulging her, still unwilling to believe. “You do, indeed, have a most interesting family. And you, Katarina, are a most exceptional girl.”
She felt it was her turn to return the compliment, but there were some lies that even Uncle Eddie’s great-niece couldn’t tell. So instead she just asked, “My father?”
Taccone shrugged. “His debt to me is forgiven. It has been most”—he considered his words—“enjoyable. Perhaps he will steal something from me again sometime.”
“He didn’t—” Kat started, but then thought better of it.
Taccone nodded. “Yes, Katarina, let us not leave things with a lie.”
Kat looked at him as if to measure what amount of truth might lie in the soul of a man like Arturo Taccone, if any soul at all remained.
“The paintings are in pristine condition. Not even a fleck of paint is out of order.”
Taccone adjusted his leather gloves. “I expected nothing less of you.”
“They are ready to go home.” Her voice cracked, and Taccone knew somehow that she wasn’t lying—there was a sincere longing in her words. “They’re across the street,” she told him. “An abandoned apartment.” She pointed through the foggy windows. “There,” she said. “The one next to that gallery.”
Taccone followed her gaze. “I see.”
“We’re finished,” she reminded him.
He studied her. “We don’t have to be. As I said before, a man in my position could make a young woman like yourself richer than her wildest dreams.”
Kat eased toward the door. “I know rich, Mr. Taccone. I think I’ll just aim for happy.”
He chuckled and watched her go. She was already out of the car when he said, “Good-bye, Katarina. Until we meet again.”
Kat stood beneath the awning of a shop and watched him leave the car and cross the street. The driver did not go with him. He walked through the apartment door alone.
Although she was not there to see it, she knew exactly what he found. Five priceless pieces of art.
Four paintings: one of Degas’s dancers and Raphael’s prodigal son; Renoir’s two boys; The Philosopher by Vermeer. And something else he hadn’t been expecting: a statue that had recently been stolen from the gallery next door.
Kat often wondered what he must have thought as he looked through the dusty, abandoned apartment at the paintings that he loved and then at a small statue that he had never seen before.
She wondered if he turned and watched the door. Perhaps he heard the Interpol officers as they rushed down the wet street and stood poised outside the apartment windows.
Did Arturo Taccone know what was going to happen? Kat would never know. It was enough for her to stand in the damp air and watch the uniformed officials swarm into the place where she had put Taccone’s paintings, and her father had stashed his stolen sculpture.
It was very much enough to stand there and watch as Arturo Taccone’s driver sped away, which was just as well. Interpol was more than willing to give his boss a ride.
“Are they in there?”
Kat shouldn’t have been surprised to hear the voice, and yet she couldn’t fight the shock in seeing the boy.
“What do you think?” she asked.
Nick smiled. “I’m not in prison, by the way,” he told her. “Just in case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t.” For a moment he looked almost hurt, so Kat added, “No one arrests a cop’s kid for being in a room where nothing was stolen.”
But something was stolen at the Henley. They stood there for a long time, not talking, until Nick finally said, “He used us . . . or, I guess . . . you. This Romani guy used you for a diversion, didn’t he?” Kat didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. Nick stepped closer. “A con within a con.” He looked at her. “Are you mad?”
Kat thought about the Angel of the Henley, who was, at that moment, probably winging her way back to her rightful home, and she couldn’t help herself. She shook her head. “No.”
And still nothing could have surprised her more than when Nick smiled and said, “Me neither.”
“Are you flirting with me?” Kat blurted.
Kat thought it a valid, scientific question until Nick inched closer and said, “Yes.”
She stepped away from him—from the flirting. “Why’d you do it, Nick? And why don’t you tell me the truth this time?”
“I thought you’d help me catch your dad at first.”
“And then . . .” Kat prompted.
Nick shrugged and kicked at a pebble on the sidewalk. It skidded into a puddle, but she didn’t hear the splash. “I wanted to impress my mom. And then . . .”
“Yes?”
“And then I thought I could catch you—stop a robbery of the Henley, be a hero. But . . .”
Kat stared into the rainy street. She shivered. “I don’t take things that don’t belong to me.”
Nick gestured across the street to the pair of officers who were leading Arturo Taccone from the apartment in handcuffs. “You took from him.”
She thought of Mr. Stein. “They don’t belong to him either.”
A moment later another car pulled through the crowd that was quickly growing across the street. A beautiful black-haired woman stepped from the backseat. If she saw her son beneath the awning, she did not wave or smile or question why he’d ignored her instructions not to leave their hotel without permission.