Heist Society

“Do you know this painting, Katarina?”

“No.” Kat’s voice cracked.

“Look closely,” he urged again.

“I don’t know it,” Kat said, sensing his disappointment.

“It is called Girl Praying to Saint Nicholas,” Mr. Stein said, gazing at the picture again and then at Kat. “It is a long, long way from home.”

Mr. Stein studied Kat closely.

“Your mother used to sit in that very chair and listen to this old man rant about the lines on maps and laws in books that, even decades later, can stand between right and wrong. Countries with their laws of provenance,” he scoffed. “Museums with fake bills of sale.”

Mr. Stein’s sadness turned to fervor. “And that is why your mother came to this room. . . . She told me that sometimes it takes a thief to catch a thief.” His eyes shone. “You’re going to steal these paintings, aren’t you, Katarina?”

Kat wanted to explain everything, but right then the truth seemed like the cruelest thing of all.

“Mr. Stein.” Hale’s voice was calm and even. “I’m afraid it’s a very long story.”

The man nodded. “I see.” He looked at Kat in the way of a man who had long since given up trying to right all the wrongs of the world himself.

“The men who took Dancer Waiting in the Wings from the Schulhoffs’ dining room wall were evil, my dear. The men those men gave it to were evil. These paintings were traded for terrible favors in terrible times.” Mr. Stein took a deep breath. “No one good could have that group of paintings, Katarina.” Kat nodded. “So wherever you have to go”—he stood—“whatever you have to do—”

He reached out his hand. And when Kat’s small hand was wrapped in his own, he looked into her eyes and said, “Be careful.”

Standing on Abiram Stein’s front steps, facing the street, Kat felt very different from when she’d stood in that same spot forty minutes earlier, facing the door. Suspicions were facts. Fears were real. And ghosts were alive as she stood where her mother had once stood, unsure how to follow in her footsteps.

“It was good to see you again, Katarina,” Mr. Stein called from the doorway. “When I realized who you were . . .”

“Yes?” she asked, and Mr. Stein smiled.

“I thought perhaps you were here because of what happened at the Henley.”

Hale was already at the car, but mention of the best museum in the world caught his attention. “What happened at the Henley?”

Mr. Stein laughed a quick, throaty laugh. “You two should know better than I. It was robbed.” He whispered that last word. “Or so they say,” he added with a shrug, and despite everything, Kat managed to smile.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Stein. I’m afraid I’ve been in no position to rob the Henley.”

“Oh.” The older man nodded. “I know. The police, they are looking for someone already—a man named Visily Romani.”

7 Days Until Deadline

Chapter 15

There are two dozen truly great museums in the world. Maybe two dozen and one if you don’t mind the crowds at the Louvre, Kat’s father always said. But, of course, even great museums are not created equal. Some are nothing but old houses with high ceilings and gorgeous moldings, a few security cameras, and minimum-wage guards. Some hire consultants and get their equipment from the CIA.

And then there is the Henley.

“So this is the Henley,” Hale said as they strolled through the great glass hall. His hands were in his pockets, and his hair was still damp from a shower. “It’s smaller than I expected.”

Kat had to stop. “You’ve never been to the Henley?”

He cocked his head. “Should alcoholics go to liquor stores?”

Kat kept walking. “Point taken.”

There were nine official entrances to the Henley, and Kat was actually a little bit proud of herself for choosing the main doors (or any door, truth be told). Maybe she was maturing. Or maybe she was lazy. Or maybe she just loved the Henley foyer.

Two stories of glass cut at dozens of angles framed the entrance. It was part solarium, part grand hall. Part sauna. The sun beat down, and despite the chilly wind that blew outside, the temperature inside the atrium was in the eighties at least. Men were taking off their suit coats. Women unwound scarves from around their necks. But Hale didn’t break a sweat, and all Kat could do was look at him, and think Cool.

Two days before, the Henley had been closed until one in the afternoon, after a security guard doing his midnight rounds discovered a business card tucked between a painting and its frame. It was a small matter, really, except the guard had sworn that, at ten p.m., no card had been there.

An alarm had been raised. More security officials had been called. And, unfortunately, so had a reporter from the local news. Scotland Yard had reviewed every piece of surveillance footage. Every member of the security staff, the cleaning crew, and the volunteer corps had been interviewed, but no one had seen anyone dangerously close to the painting in question.

And so, by Tuesday morning, the official stance of the official people, from the director of the Henley to the lead prosecutor at Scotland Yard, was that the guard was mistaken. The card must have been left by a guest earlier in the day and missed by housekeeping.

The unofficial stance of unofficial people was that someone from one of the old families was playing a joke. But Kat and Hale weren’t laughing. And neither, Kat thought, was the Henley.

Standing in the long line that day, Kat shifted on her feet. She crossed her arms. It felt as if her body held more energy— more nerves—than normal. She had to fight to keep them all in.

“I was here visiting the Angel exhibit in August,” the woman in front of them told her companion. “There weren’t metal detectors then.”

Hale looked at Kat, and she read his mind. The metal detectors were new. If the metal detectors were new, what else was?

“Well, in August, mysterious men weren’t breaking in and leaving their calling cards,” the woman’s companion replied.

They took a step forward. “Maybe he was a handsome debonair thief who had a change of heart.”

Kat blushed and thought about her father.

“Maybe he’s here right now,” the other woman said, giggling. “Scoping out the place?” She turned and scanned the atrium as if looking for the thief. What she saw was Hale, who nodded and smiled, and then it was the woman’s turn to blush.

“I wouldn’t mind meeting a dashing thief,” the woman’s friend whispered. Hale winked at Kat.

Kat raised her eyebrows and whispered, “I’d like to meet one of those, too.”

Hale brought his hands to his chest, feigning injury, but Kat was far too worried and too tired to play along. She saw Hale looking at her and felt the hope that was growing inside of him. She pretended not to notice. “It’s probably nothing,” she told him.

He took a step. “Of course it is.”

“I mean, in all likelihood, it’s a coincidence,” Kat said as if she really meant it.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Hale lied.

The line inched forward. “We’re probably wasting our time.”

“I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

But the downside of being a con artist is that it makes you very hard to con. Even if the lies you tell are to yourself.

It was a most unusual day in what was shaping up to be the most unusual week in the Henley’s anything-but-usual existence.

Even if Katarina Bishop didn’t quite know to appreciate it, this fact was more than obvious to the guards, docents, custodians, staff, managers, and regular visitors who were all very well aware that lines never formed before nine a.m. on weekdays. The elderly ladies in the burgundy blazers who sat at the information desk commented that the eight different school groups who were visiting that day all seemed particularly quiet, as if listening and looking for a ghost.

The floors in the Renaissance room always glowed a little brighter, and the frames hung a little straighter, and the painting at the center of it—Leonardo da Vinci’s Angel Returning to Heaven—always attracted more awestruck visitors than any other thing inside the Henley’s walls. But on that morning, it felt very much as if the museum’s crown jewel had somehow lost its shine.

Today, the Renaissance room stood empty as long lines moved down the marble halls, all heading for the exact same place.

“This is it.”

Kat didn’t have to read the sign on the entrance to know they’d reached the right collection. All she had to do was see the crowds and hear the whisper on the air: Visily Romani.

Tourists and scholars alike stood shoulder to shoulder, heel to toe, gawking, waiting to see the place where a card had mysteriously appeared in the middle of the night in one of the most secure buildings in all of London.

Kat and Hale didn’t talk while they waited to enter the packed room. They didn’t comment on the angles of the cameras or the positions of the guards. They were tourists too, in a way. Curious. Eager to know the truth about the very strange thing that had happened, but needing to know for entirely different reasons.

“He was here,” Kat said when she finally made it inside. Most people looked for only a few seconds, then moved on. But Kat lingered. She and Hale were like the center of a wheel, barely moving while the rest of the crowd circled past.

“Yeah, except he didn’t take anything,” Hale said.

“He was there.” Kat felt her hand raise. She saw her finger point. Five paintings hung along the gallery’s far wall. Two days before, Visily Romani had left his card tucked inside the frame of the center painting.

A business card, the rumors said. White cardstock and black letters spelling out a name that, until then, had only been whispered in the darkest corners of the darkest rooms.

A calling card, left by a ghost, saying simply, Visily Romani was here.

Kat thought about that card, and something in her heart— or maybe just her blood—told her that of all the people who filled the Henley that day, the world’s greatest thief was speaking directly to her.

“Why break in and not take anything?” Hale asked, but Kat shook her head.

She asked a better question: “Why break in and leave something?”

Kat stepped closer to the painting at the center of it all. Flowers on a Cool Spring Day, it was called. It was a lovely little still life. The artist had been reasonably well-known. But there was nothing remarkable about it besides the fact that this was the place where Visily Romani had chosen to leave his card.

Kat stayed back, staring at the other five paintings in the room, trying to guess what Romani had been thinking.

She closed her eyes and remembered the stories she’d heard her whole life—legends of the greatest thief who never lived:

A man walked into the Kremlin and walked out with a Fabergé egg under his top hat.

A corrupt German art dealer sold a fake Rembrandt to an Englishman, not aware that stolen Nazi plans were hidden inside.

Now five paintings were missing.