Robbed

By Neil Hetzner

Artwork worth a half billion dollars at today’s prices was stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. Twenty years later, the paintings and drawings are still missing. Who robbed the Gardner? Where is the art?

Marcie Sullivan thinks she may know. She suspects that Colby Reech, the famous painter she is taking care of, was the mastermind of the robbery. She also thinks her demented patient may have killed her brother. Has Reech been offering her clues about where he’s hidden the stolen works, or is that just his dementia talking? If the nurse can find what has been lost for so long, does she want the art or does she want the $5,000,000 reward? Or, does she just want revenge for her brother’s murder?

A dying investigator and an alcoholic mobster also are looking for the loot. Marcie is getting desperate, but is she desperate enough to join forces with two men she doesn’t trust?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Neil Hetzner
• Release date: Mar 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311463265

Neil Hetzner

Neil (aka C.N.) Hetzner is married, has two children, and lives a mile from the edge of the continent in Rhode Island. Since his inauspicious birth in Indiana in 1948 he has worked as a cook, millwright, newspaper columnist, business professor, vacuumist, printer's assistant, landscaper, railroader, caterer, factory worker, consulting editor, and, currently, real estate agent. In addition to working, which he likes a lot, and writing, which he likes even more, he enjoys reading, weaving, cooking, and intrepidly screwing up house repairs. His writing runs the gamut from young adult futurism to stories about the intricacies of families; however, if there is a theme that links his writing, it is the complicated and miraculous mathematics of mercy.

Book preview

ROBBED

A Novel By

NEIL HETZNER

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2014 by Neil Hetzner

All Rights Reserved.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Martha Day, Zoe Hetzner, Lea Renfro, and Tony Reynolds for their interest and insights into making this a better story.

As always, all mistakes are my own. To serve the telling of the tale some aspects of the robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, as well as Boston and its environs, have been altered.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Caveat

The author would like to make the reader aware that the words attributed to Colby Reech have been edited. Those words, both the ones found written in a small sketch pad as well as those recorded both on cassette player and cell phone, tended to become more garbled as Mr. Reech progressed in his dementia. Repetitive phrases, blatantly illogical thinking, and malapropisms have been corrected by the author.

To give the reader some idea of the extent of the author’s intrusion, let him state that the communication made by Mr. Reech in 2009 might have had a correction rate of less than five percent. By the beginning of 2011, the disease had progressed to such an extent that more than eighty percent of Mr. Reech’s words were, in the author’s estimation, gibberish.

The words of Colby Reech, always italicized, are interspersed throughout the text. Mr. Reech’s arrogance and narcissism are of such an extreme degree that the author would suggest to the more casual reader that there is no particular need to read those entries. Mr. Reech’s words, however, may be of use to future biographers or art historians who attempt to make connections between Colby Reech’s art and his acts. It is to leave open that possibility that the author, despite his personal distaste, has included Reech’s words from his last years.

Am I, Colby Reech, trustworthy? As an eighty year old man who is faithfully trudging toward his death, shouldn’t I be trustworthy? Isn’t that the power afforded to a deathbed confession? As you read the words of a dying man, you should be able to trust them, no? No. No? I hear no and I wonder if your doubts come precisely because I am an old dying man and you think my brain is apt to be undone by a salted gold mine’s worth of plaque and further addled by a cornucopia of drugs meant to power my feeble boat across the Styx. Those are legitimate concerns, I admit. Any reader might be wary. Can I reassure you that I’m not addled? No Klonopin. No Haldol. No Resperdal. No Exelon. No Aricept, as yet. I do not mistake my napkin for my lunch. I never have cleansed myself of any trace of my meager defecatory efforts with a motley of five, ten and twenty dollar bills.

But, even though I assure you that I am not addled by physiological or chemical causes, yet, I sense that you harbor doubts. Is this because I am an artist and artists are apt to ape God in their twisting of the truth? If you look upon the body of my works I believe that you cannot come to any conclusion other than that there is a cool, distant, and objective thread that binds those somewhat disparate works into a whole. A painterly counter-pane. Separate and distinct pieces brought together by a common binding. That binding is an unimpaired, dispassionate mind. Is that not enough? What, then, gives you pause? The fact that I am a thief and a murderer? How do those two avocations—and they were no more than that, just one theft and only two murders—affect my ability to speak the truth? And why would they affect your penchant to trust me? Is it not true that we are more likely to believe the confession and doubt the protestation of innocence? Then, why doubt my words? I believe that rather than you distrusting me, it makes far more sense for me to distrust you. I choose my words carefully. You, however, read them casually, unless something prurient happens to catch your eye. Don’t deny it. In your multitude of distractions, in your desperate desire to feel a moment’s comfort, you will elide, slide and smear my words. You will read me like some querulous drunk who, while desperately absorbed in the vapid images on his television, fails to attend his wife when she calls his name.

I ask, Are you trustworthy? Will you read carefully, ponder thoughtfully, judge slowly? Will you look for the commonality rather than the differences between us? If you espy genius, will you accept it, welcome it, honor it rather than dismiss it because it is a gift of which you have no knowledge? If you can say yes to those last words, then, Dear Reader, read on. And read with the full comfort of knowing that I am trustworthy.

Prologue

The small dapper man’s hair was white. His face was calm. The fingers of his hands were still. Across the small desk, Scabby O’ Rourke waited for the storm.

"You don’t know? They don’t know? I don’t know. I don’t like ‘I don’t know.’ JB in the dark. That doesn’t happen. The biggest theft in Boston since Ruth went to the Yankees and I hear it on the radio? That’s not how I want to get my news. They’re saying thirty, forty million. Some shit-bird steals something worth eight digits and doesn’t ask me?

The words stopped for a moment. The tips of the manicured hands were joined together as if in prayer. The silence grew and as it did it became more deafening to Scabby. He fought the urge to draw up his legs and grasp the chair’s arms.

I want to know who did this. And I want to know before the cops know.

With his men asking questions and demanding answers on the streets of Southie, in the jails, at the bars and from their FBI handlers, JB McVite, the head of a successful Boston gang, soon knew exactly who had robbed the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of a baker’s dozen pieces of artwork, including three of the most valuable paintings in the world. JB had to know because JB himself had done it. The art dealers who slipped in and out of the moral chiaroscuro of very wealthy, very determined art collectors knew it. The T conductors and cabbies knew it. The Quincy Market vendors who knew which apples went on top and which got hidden deeper in the basket knew it. Even the ardent fans of the Celtics watching Larry Bird’s last year, took time to know it. The Italian mobsters in Boston’s North End definitely knew it. Boston’s cops and crooks and crooked cops all knew that JB McVite had robbed the Gardner. Who else had the stones to do it? Who else had the brains to do it?

Hearing that everyone knew that he had done it, yet no one from BPD or the FBI had reached out, left McVite proud of his reputation, angry that he had never thought to rob the Gardner, and incensed that he was being played for a chump. Three days after everyone in Boston knew that the museum heist was his, JB learned that the world beyond Boston also knew who had pulled off such a phenomenal robbery. Two emissaries from Sein Finn informed McVite as they sat on a bench facing the gray, lapping slop of Boston Harbor that in exchange for half of the ransom they would be happy to get the paintings out of the country and be the principals in conducting the negotiations for their return. In addition, they would guarantee that more than eighty percent of their half would flow back through JB’s hands as they purchased weapons for the cause.

If it’s not me, and I think I would remember, and the guineas say it's not them, then who is it? Some Chicago guy on vacation? A Patty Hearst kind of thing? An inside job? A couple of ambitious cops? A couple of shoplifting friends of one of the guards? Some junkies? My money, if I were a betting man, which I’m not because my money only goes on sure things, is that it’s an inside job. A guard and a couple of his mope friends.

McVite looked at the slight, pock-faced thirty-six year old man sitting across from him. Not for the first time, he had the idea that Scabby O’Rourke’s face looked like a walnut shell with eyeholes. A manicured finger shot out.

Scabby, have a conversation with the Gardner guards and, especially, with anyone who called in sick. And, Scabby—don’t get so involved that it ends up being a one-sided conversation.

Chapter One

1990

Michael, if you could only have one or the other, would you rather have the fame and fortune of being a celebrated artist, or would you rather have the opportunity to paint all of the time?

Twenty-eight year old Mike Sullivan, surly Mike Sullivan, whose shrugs of heavy shoulder and constant scowls were a more frequent form of communication than words said, Fame and fortune isn’t one thing. It’s two.

Colby Reech, a fine-featured, spare-framed sixty-two year old artist, shrugged before countering, They’re usually linked and treated as one.

Sullivan’s short, thick fingers picked up a coffee mug repurposed to hold a collection of pens and markers, shook it, and studied the results as if they were tea leaves. After putting the mug back on The Perfect Frame-up’s scarred counter, Sullivan lifted up a ring of mat samples and flipped through the colors.

Fame or fortune? Fortune? Money doesn’t mean much to me. Beer and a burger is as good as seared scallops and champagne. If I had money for paint and canvas, beer, books and a bed, I’d be fine. But fame? Mike set the mat samples back down. Not fame, really. I don’t want to be recognized. I want my work to be recognized. I want people who I think know what's going on saying, 'Mike Sullivan’s stuff? Good. Goddamn good.'

Reech was pleased that his question had elicited such a long response from the normally taciturn clerk. That augured well.

And how do you think that might happen? How could fame, Colby Reech carefully brought the fingertips of both hands together to form a temple, or an unobtrusive recognition come to Michael Sullivan? Your work is good. You believe that, no? And, of course, it goes without saying that I believe that. Why else would I be here having this conversation? Other than to have these two new pieces framed, of course.

Colby Reech looked around the Boston frame shop at the uninspiring works hanging on the walls. The painter, who also was a well-regarded art professor, spread his delicate fingers apart and gave them a fillip to indicate the store. Is this the life you want? Salvaging other peoples’ … tepid … efforts?

When the young man’s spine stiffened, Reech’s left hand smoothed the air. Yes, Michael. I understand. You must pay your rent. You have chosen not to be a mooch, or leech, unlike so many of those pretenders who think that because they own a piece of charcoal and a brush the world owes them a living. But, I understand that your life, your esthetic life, is not easy. I am not having this conversation because of a whim. I believe the world benefits in, perhaps subtle but nonetheless, profound ways when a good artist is afforded the opportunity to make good art. However, all of that do-goodism begs the question, ‘How does recognition come to worthy work?'

We barely have to turn our heads in this small outpost to see that unworthy art is too often recognized. How does that happen? And the opposite? Worthy art is unknown, ignored, hidden in attics, forgotten in garages, or never made because the public arbiters are blind or the weak-willed artist chooses to eat, or pay his rent, or have his rotting teeth repaired rather than pay obeisance to his muse. What explains those injustices?

As Reech had delivered his carefully composed speech, Michael Sullivan had fidgeted with a small dish of paper clips, separating the larger from the smaller. When Reech finished, he extended his hands and patiently waited. After a few seconds the clerk tossed the clips back into the bowl.

Michael, the latter was not rhetorical. Paint. And paint well. But, leave a moment to consider how, in your specific case, justice might be done. I will do the same.

***

Colby Reech didn’t know whether to feel amusement or anger when he saw Tad Welch’s attention drifting past him to the customers seated further back on the patio of Pete’s Retreat. It was a perfect July afternoon and, in the sun and under the shade of bright umbrellas, the patio was filled with the perfect young men that Cape Cod’s Provincetown attracted. Perhaps, Reech thought, amusement was a better choice. After all, he was being tendentious. On purpose. He himself would like to forget his current task so that he could let his own eyes drift over today’s height of season menagerie. But. But, time was passing in its own inexorable amusement and Reech felt that if he were to allow his eyes to slide away from Tad’s face for just a moment that by the time they returned to the task at hand, he would be dead.

Sixty-two. Sixty goddamn two. Paintings made. Money spent. Lies told, sold or shared. Regrets earned. Surely deep into the fourth quarter of his life and, yet, too often, his life felt like some fey post-modern art essay. A small nothingness tagged with a long purposefully abstract exegesis. How many openings had he been to where it took a moment to absorb the puerile art and a long, tedious minute to read the self-referential, self-reverential description alongside? When he was wandering around those obligatory shows he felt like he was listening to some superannuated athlete telling lies about the victories of his youth.

Tad, did you bring the Polaroids of your progress?

The gorgeous boy’s eyes drifted back and he nodded as he reached down to retrieve an ancient leather attaché that Reech imagined Tad’s grandfather receiving as he graduated from Princeton and anticipated Wall Street. After Tad handed over the photographs, the professor curbed his urge to flick through the white-bordered square prints like a bridge player rifling a deck looking for the jokers. He forced himself to take his time and make small babbling brook sounds of affirmation.

Oh, my. Very good. Very, very good, Tad. You’ve walked far out on a narrow bridge showing a kind of hold-your-breath courage. Well done, Tad. Very well done.

Still nodding his head, Reech tapped the lower right corner of a picture filled with a slodge of aqueous colors. And here, Tad? What will happen here? Don’t you think it might call for more energy, more tension?

A corona of puzzled disappointment spread across Tad’s tan face like a child learning that his ice cream cone is to be but one scoop. The older man suppressed the urge to fling the whole stack of photographs at the fatuous boy sitting across from him. He was not a patient person. One of the few benefits of being wealthy was that one did not often need to be patient. It was one of the reasons he had given up oils for acrylics. Oils just took too damn long to dry. Now, he felt his patience to be at an end. He had spent the summer coddling and prodding, tilling soil and planting seeds, harrowing, weeding, and watering—if providing endless bottles of Chablis and kir, lager, sloe gin and soda could be considered watering—and he felt like he was done. He wanted to throw the pictures in Tad’s perfect Gold Coast bred face and then stand up and shout, regardless of Pete’s Retreat’s patio full of people, Pay attention, Tad. We’re robbing the Gardner Museum. You, another boy, and I, for lots of the very best reasons, are going to rob the most conceited museum in the world, including Dr. Barnes' Merion folly, of its biggest conceits. Not a word. Not a wander. Focus. The three of us, a small focused triumvirate, are going to collaborate on a captivating piece of performance art.

After Tad wandered off to look for another episode of fleeting love, Colby Reech, while stroking the rough edge of a small chip in the handle of his espresso cup, watched the graceful movements of Pete’s Retreat’s long time maître d’ Raoul shuffle and deal the tourists and townies into their appropriate slots. Not for the first time, Reech considered whether his two recruits could work together. Michael Sullivan would be sure to consider Tad Welch a rival. On the other hand, Tad, unless he just happened to be in one of his slumming tomcat moods, would make it subtly but unmistakably clear that he looked down on his new partner’s unfortunate upbringing and plebian education. Petulant Tad could take it as a slight if Michael were to be given more responsibility in the planning of the robbery; Michael, of course, would be resistant to following in anything that might be perceived as Tad’s footsteps. Abbot and Costello. Jules et Jim. Mutt and Geoffrey. Not Leopold and Loeb. Not yet.

The magister is deep in thought?

Reech looked up from the espresso cup he had been using as a crystal ball to study Raoul’s tanned, lined, but still handsome face with its crooked eyetooth that had always fascinated him.

Was I? It could be more murk than thought.

In disagreement, Raoul slightly waggled the empty wineglass he had just found hiding in the Retreat’s sarcophagus-sized copper planter, which held a froth of pale pink tea roses.

I’ve eavesdropped on too many of your conversations to think it would be murk, unlike myself who for too long has been a resident in the house of murk.

With the slightest of nods, the artist indicated his appreciation before nodding at a slight, wiry, curly-haired young waiter who he once had considered recruiting for his plan.

Is Destry being pleasant?

Raoul gave his patented je’ne sais quoi shrug, No, not especially pleasant, but somewhat servile, mostly steady, often competent, and, of course, always angry.

Worse than last year?

Probably a little.

When fame delays, the defamed inflame, no?

Reech studied the young man as he took an order from a tittering quartet. You know, Raoul, he’s an unusually talented boy. He knows that, even though the world doesn’t … at least, not yet. His anger is fed by the knowledge that his time would be better spent painting rather than waiting on people who aren’t developed enough to recognize his gift.

Aren’t artists supposed to be tortured?

The moue Reech manufactured was one first practiced in Paris cafes in 1948.

In these good times, my friend, I think the more common case is that the path of the artist is torturous.

I’ll ponder the difference, Magister, as I bring order to my realm.

Magister, maître, les memes choses.

Just as Raoul turned toward the Retreat’s embowered entrance, Reech asked, Have you seen Paul?

The maître d’ turned around and raised the empty wineglass in a mock toast.

Paul’s gone. In February. I have his obituary if you would like to read it.

Was he buried with his fondue pot?

My understanding, Magister, is that God doesn’t welcome flames in paradise.

Paul was that.

D’accord.

As he made his way to the gingerbread Victorian on Bradford Street that his family had owned since the turn of the twentieth century, Colby Reech found it far more dangerous threading the fervent crowd of beautiful male pilgrims and overweight lesbians who were thronging the town’s narrow streets than he had three hours earlier. After he had banged into a third shoulder, Reech decided to pay more attention to where he was walking and less attention to what he was thinking.

***

Michael….

Mike.

Yes, Mike. Do you think you could frame this before the end of the week? I have a buyer. I know this would be a huge rush, but I also know that you are very, very good at what you do.

Reech assumed Sullivan’s grunt meant yes. He nodded at the canvas that was to be framed. Do you know, Mike, after your reputation is established and the name Mike … no, Mike will never work. No matter how well you paint, you won’t be successful without changing your name. Michael. M. Wicklow Sullivan. When the name, M. Wicklow Sullivan, is spoken with the same hushed awe as the world uses for Pollock and Rothko, Bacon and my erstwhile friend Lucien, you will look back on these trying times of poverty, obscurity, and menial chores as the halcyon days of your youth.

Like you do?

Pissy, pissy, Mike. Fortunately, I’ve never been poor or obscure, and, if I have ever happened to do a menial chore, I was either slumming or playing out an ironic pastiche.

Interested to see if he could as easily remove the scowl he had caused, Reech asked, Did the painting go well last night?

I didn’t want to stop.

When we’re poor and ignored, we don’t want to stop. When we’re rich and successful, we don’t want to start.

Why’s that?

Because, my young talented friend, when we’re ignored, it is only our own judgment that counts. When we’re famous that changes. The crowds yell ‘Yea!’ and the misanthropic two finger typing critic yells, ‘Nay!’ and we don’t know whom to believe and whom to ignore. Trust me, Mike, get your good work done before you’re forced to play the whore. It isn’t fun to have your knees spread wide while a raging mind struggles to leave the room.

Colby Reech picked up his painting and stared at it in what he hoped Sullivan would see as a pensive manner. What is more meaningful? The moment of creation, or the creation itself? The public thinks the creation, but for the artist, I think it must be the moment of creation. Does the novelist open his eyes and hands and stare at the multi-leafed object he has just pulled from its pride of place on his bookshelf? Does he lovingly stroke the rigid spine and caress the rough buckram, or does the writer lie in bed, lids closed and, with awe, gratitude or the utmost smugness, contemplate from whence and how the germ of his story came?

***

Since I am near my ending, Dear Reader, let me entertain you with my beginnings. If I must admit to being born with a silver spoon in my mouth, I would add that it was a good spoon, but not a great one. A Wallace, perhaps, rather than a Bateman or Boulton.

I was born into one of those families which has far more knowledge of its ancestors than it does of its neighbors. We were an old family with good old furniture and bad old paintings. As a child, that collection of portraits with their lifeless eyes, embalmed cheeks, stiffly draped black bombazine dresses and severely disappointed mouths looked to me like a queue of unfortunates who had missed the lottery ticket to a Calvinistic Paradise by just one number.

As we were an old family, whose most prized possession was our history, all that we owned had a history. The table we ate from had been ordered by my father’s uncle’s father-in-law from an important, but unfortunately, under-appreciated cabinet maker who had left the employ of John Goddard before having an opportunity to marry into the Goddard-Townsend extended brood. My father’s misshapen ecru cardigan, looking like a madwomen’s tatting from fifty years of summer moths and near constant spring, fall and winter wear, had been a present to him from his maternal grandfather who, in the middle of my father’s third form year at Groton, had decided that my father would grow no more. Unfortunately for the integrity of that garment, in his single act of youthful rebellion, my father had continued to grow and, unfortunately, that growth was more in girth than height. One of my irrepressible memories is of a florid-faced man taking his Haig & Haig assisted ease in an article of clothing that if found on an Italian immigrant emerging from three weeks of steerage would have brought tears to the staff of the Henry Street Settlement House.

We were an old family, but not a wise one; an old family, but not a wealthy one; an old family, but not a particularly distinguished one. We were an old family of the kind which knows the bishop, the governor, the college president, the ambassador, without any of our tribe ever occupying any of those exalted posts. We were an old family with the onerous but unquestioned inheritance of being charged with judging all those who were not of old families. We were… excuse me, Dear Reader, something is going on in my innards such that I feel as though I have swallowed a bluefish lure. As I wouldn’t want to lose my hard-earned trust by blurting some detail that was born of pain rather cognition, allow me my exit.

Chapter Two

Colby Reech may have thought during cloudless, azure-skied last days of a seaside Provincetown summer that he was out of patience; however, luckily for him, his patience endured because it took him another three months before he was able to snare both of his protégés in his plans.

The idea to rob a museum had first come to Reech as a freshman at Harvard when he read newspaper and magazine reports on just how massive the art thefts of the Nazis had been during World War II. Thousands upon thousands of paintings, sculptures, tapestries, pieces of furniture and jewelry had been scoured from Hitler’s victims. From that immense hoard, many had been recovered and returned, but many more had not. It was the idea that art could disappear that had fascinated the young Colby Reech.

Reech knew from his childhood classroom readings, many visits to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and less frequent forays into the museums of New York that, while much art might be created, very little survived over time. However, when it did survive, it brought great wonderment. For the young Reech, a four hundred year old Dutch still life or a five thousand year old sculpture was inherently more interesting, more awe-inspiring, more intriguing than some art made just ten years before. In Colby Reech’s youthful thinking, robbing a museum of some of its older works would have the beneficial effect of adding even more value and interest to those ancient works that remained.

As Reech moved into his thirties, the fantasy of robbing a museum remained; however his reasons for doing so changed. His youthful notion that humans would have a greater appreciation for what remained was replaced with the idea that humans are more apt to pine for what has been lost. He enjoyed thinking about the profound regrets the world would have if certain works were lost.

As the artist passed into his forties, his thinking underwent another transformation. At the time, his career was well-advanced. His work was in the collections of a dozen museums; his shows often sold out. Art students, both American and foreign, came to study with him. ArtFull had run two stories on him in five years. Those accolades and affirmations, politely received by Reech with the utmost public grace, inwardly caused their recipient to seethe. In articles and reviews, in the palaver gallery owners used to sell his works, in the curatorial blurbs that were affixed to museum walls alongside his work, explanations which he considered as helpful as the signs indicating every tenth of a mile's progress along a highway, he and his work were always described referentially. His light was like the light of Fairfield Porter. His rare portraits had the edgy depth of Francis Bacon. His abstract background upon which those portraits rested had a Braque-like calm to them.

As he passed forty-five, Colby Reech began to feel that his work, his ability to perceive, to shape and portray some truths of the world, his capacity to create an object that would compel a reasonably intelligent, sentient human to stop and contemplate, had crested. In a frightening insight, Reech began to sense, that rather than surging forward, pulled along by his creativity in a way that oftentimes had been so exhilarating, he was being pushed from behind by a mercenary force that could only end up leaving him high and dry along a wrack line of other dismissed and discarded artists. Artistic flotsam. It was during those moments, or, too often, long months of feeling that he was falling short, of failing his own and others’ expectations, that Reech began to consider removing from competition some of those works against whom lesser artists were measured.

Over a period of nearly ten years Reech spent untold hours in his studio dabbling at dozens of canvases that brought nothing but a sense of disappointment imagining the after-effects of a world in which the Mona Lisa, Boy in Blue, or