When they’d been growing up, Johnny had known Esme’s home life had gotten a little sketchy at times. By the time they’d reached high school, he’d also figured out why she was so damn careful with all her little personal parts, like her hair, and her buttons, and her shoes. He could have told her that keeping her buttons buttoned and her shoes clean wasn’t going to change a damn thing about running out of groceries, and neither was having all her homework done with extra credit, not in the short run, but he figured, in her heart, she’d probably already known that. He and Dom had always just hustled a little here and there and slid by the rest of the time, but Johnny knew that sliding by and hustling didn’t work out the same for girls.
She’d turned out great, though. She’d gone to college, and whatever he thought about her private investigation business, it obviously afforded her some very nice underwear. There were worse jobs.
He couldn’t think of any off the top of his head right now, not for the smartest girl in school, considering where she’d ended up tonight and who was after her, but he knew there were worse jobs.
“We’re about a half an hour out of Genesee, tops,” he said. “You want to tell me what’s in the bag, what we’re delivering, and maybe everything you know about this Nachman guy we’re delivering it to?”
Even a private investigator had to realize that information, intelligence, was the key to success. It wasn’t to her advantage to leave him in the dark, not about everything, or anything, for that matter.
“Isaac Nachman,” she said, obviously understanding. “Seventy-nine years old, born in Germany, lost his father, a brother, and two sisters to the Holocaust. His mother was American, from here in Colorado. She and Isaac came home to visit his grandfather back in 1939, shortly after the German invasion of Poland, and they never made it back to Europe. Isaac took over his grandfather’s tire business after the war, put his name on the masthead, and made millions.”
“Nachman Tires?” he asked, taking Solange back up into fourth gear.
“That’s the one.”
Johnny let out a low whistle. Multi, multi, multi-millions, Nachman had to be the richest guy in the state. Everyone used Nachman tires-the auto manufacturers, the government, the military, the Indy cars. Nachman rubber hit the road every day of the week from L.A. to New York, and from Baghdad to the Midnight Doubles.
He slanted Esme a quick glance. No wonder she was dressed to kill in couture with diamond earrings.
He didn’t have to look at himself. He knew exactly what he was wearing, what he was always wearing. If it wasn’t a uniform, it was jeans, a shirt, a T-shirt, and a pair of boots.
It worked, that’s about all he could say about his wardrobe.
“There’s going to be a helluva security system on his house.” That was the second thing to pop into his mind.
“Fortunately, we’re not here on a B and E, to break and enter,” she said, her tone a little dry, which was a good sign. She was regaining her composure. “We’re invited. We’re here on business.”
She had her legs crossed in the passenger seat, and her skirt was riding up, and for all that he was thinking about getting up to this rich old tire guy’s house and doing the contraband-for-cash dance, he hadn’t for a second forgotten where he was taking her after that-to bed, his bed. At least he was going to give it his best shot. He wasn’t passing Go. He wasn’t collecting anything.
“You’re invited,” he clarified. “I’m unexpected.”
“It won’t be a problem. He might not even…uh, particularly notice that you’re there. He’ll be pretty focused on the property I’ve recovered. He’s a very, uh, very gracious man, but just a tidge eccentric. I’ve dealt with him before, with my dad.”
That got her a lift of his eyebrows. Her dad? What in the hell was a guy like Isaac Nachman doing hiring a guy like her dad? It didn’t make sense. Multimillionaires usually had their own people on staff to do anything, including investigations and security. He could see where Nachman would hire a brilliant, classy private contractor like Esme for a specific situation, maybe something she specialized in, but her dad, what Johnny remembered of him anyway, and certainly from what he’d seen tonight, was a jerk with about as much class as a ten-cent hot dog.
“Your dad…” he started, then let his voice trail off, hesitating. Her dad was a royal fuckup kinda guy, but it wasn’t Johnny’s place to say it like that, not to her. He’d save his unvarnished opinion for the guy who needed to hear it the hard way-her dad.
“Actually, he has a good reputation when it comes to art recovery,” she filled in his pause with another surprising piece of information.
“Art recovery? You mean he finds stolen art?”
She nodded. “Yes. The Nachman family lost over three hundred paintings to the Nazis during the war, including a Renoir my dad helped them find and reacquire, and they’ve never stopped looking for the rest of them, especially Isaac.”
Nazis. Germans. The guy in the Oxford Hotel with a sliced-and-diced suitcase and a neatly cut-open suit jacket-Johnny’s gaze landed on the messenger bag.
Geezus. He was such an idiot.
“You’ve got a painting in there.” Of course, she did, a damn small painting stolen by Adolf Hitler and, somehow, miraculously recovered by Esme Alexandria Alden and her deadbeat dad.
Easy Alex wasn’t anybody’s drug mule. Hell, no. He should have known that down to his bones- not that knowing it would have necessarily gotten him thinking of stolen art. Nikki McKinney, now she got him thinking about stolen art. One of her “ascending angel” pieces had been stolen in transit to Los Angeles a few years ago, and it had opened up quite a lengthy discussion at Steele Street, and a little personal private investigation on SDF’s part. Dylan had been the one to find the piece, and Hawkins and Kid had gone and gotten it back.
No one had said much more about it, other than Johnny knowing it hadn’t been the first or the last time the guys had done a little inside work off the record. Things came up with friends and family, and the guys had skills. They’d been superlative car thieves at sixteen, and had become absolutely world-class burglars of anything and everything General Grant tasked them with getting in the ensuing years.
“An incredible painting,” Esme confirmed. “Jakob Meinhard’s Woman in Blue, an Expressionist masterpiece. He painted it in 1910, and up until a few years ago, people thought it had been burned in Berlin in 1939, or possibly in the Tuileries in 1941. Hitler had thousands of pieces destroyed in those two fires. The führer hated modern art. He thought it was degenerate, an abomination undermining the character of the state.”
Johnny hadn’t known that. Not any of it. Nazis and art had never collided in his educational experiences. Land navigation-he had that down cold. HALO, High Altitude, Low Opening jumping out of airplanes with a ram-air square parachute-no problema. Small-unit tactics-he’d studied those hard, given them his all. But the Nazis were way before his time, and the only art education he’d ever had was hanging buck-ass naked from Nikki’s studio ceiling while she’d filmed him in angel wings in the middle of a lightshow and music maelstrom.
“And you and your dad found this Meinhard painting?”
“Just my dad. He tracked down its whole history, from when it was initially smuggled from Germany into France via a diplomatic pouch, to its inclusion with a score of the Rothschilds’ collection at one of their castles in the Loire, to when the Nazis discovered the cache of paintings and seized them all. He’s good, he really is, but he’s best at finding the paintings, and not so good at actually getting them back. In the case of the Meinhard, he’d set up a deal, but it fell through in the clutch, and he lost the cash he’d brought for the exchange without getting the painting. I took over the investigation a month ago and managed to get the seller back into place.”