“Why the fuck do you care so much about a painting?” Giennes gasped, his eyes near black in the dark alley, but they glittered with rage and greed.
“Because art matters. It matters more than you and me. More than anything in this world.” Wes slammed the man back into the wall again. “I’m not letting some piece of shit like you steal and destroy something precious like that.”
Giennes still didn’t speak and that was it. Wes shot a glance over his shoulder at Dimitri, who was lounging back against his car, legs crossed at the ankles and looking bored.
“Dimitri, your cigar cutter please.” Still gripping the thief with one hand, he held out his other hand, palm up, toward the Russian.
“Of course.” Dimitri fished a small cigar cutter out of his trouser pocket. “Start with his fingers. He’ll bleed a lot, but he won’t die too fast.”
“Duly noted.” Wes took the cutter and jerked one of Giennes’s hands toward it.
“Wait!” Giennes thrashed about. “Fuck! I’ll talk!”
Wes relaxed, but only enough to pocket the cigar cutter. “Then talk.”
“The Goya came from an American. Someone out of Long Island. That’s all I know.”
Wes’s entire body went rigid. Someone from Long Island?
“Give me a name!” He let loose a shout and slammed his fist right into the wall beside Giennes’s head. Pain exploded through his knuckles and shot up his arm, but he held on to his control, barely. If he didn’t, he’d slam his fist into Giennes’s face.
“It’s a man, midthirties. He had a nickname, the Illusionist.”
“The Illusionist?”
“Yes. He puts forgeries in the place of the paintings he steals. He creates an illusion that the real art was never taken. Most people never know they’ve been robbed. He’s a right dangerous bastard. You’d never see him coming.”
Dimitri burst out laughing. “The Illusionist? Oh, that’s rich. We’re dealing with a dramatic thief.”
Wes didn’t see the humor in this. This was serious. Someone from his island was stealing art and selling it on the black market. Art sold on the black market was mistreated, often ruined, and usually never seen again. There was no honor among thieves and no respect for masterpieces either.
“That’s all I know,” Giennes insisted. “He’s rich, wore sunglasses the whole time we talked. Brown hair…” Giennes added these last few details, but that seemed to be the end of his usefulness.
“Dimitri, I trust you can assure me that Mr. Giennes finds a suitable way out of France in the next few hours? I’m sure he has friends in other countries to visit and that coming back to Paris wouldn’t be wise.”
“What?” Giennes stared at both of them, confused.
The Russian sauntered over and gripped Giennes by the throat, lightly squeezing. “My friend is much more polite than me. At home in Russia, I would have simply said, ‘set foot in France ever again and I’ll kill you.’”
“Kill?” Giennes’s voice shot up an octave in pitch, whether from fear or from being deprived of oxygen Wes wasn’t sure.
“A strong word, but an apt one. No one would ever find you when I’m through,” Dimitri growled. He continued to squeeze until the thief’s eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped forward unconscious.
“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of him.” Dimitri dragged the limp body back to his car and shoved him into the trunk. Wes nodded. He didn’t usually resort to such dark tactics, but he knew there was only one way to handle this and Dimitri had known best how to go about it. There was no sense in paying men like Giennes for information. He’d still hold back until the price was high enough. A little death threat was just as effective and a hell of a lot cheaper.
“Here, you don’t want to forget this.” Dimitri retrieved a white tube from the back seat of his car and placed it carefully into Wes’s hands. “The Goya. Take care of her, my friend.”
The relief at having such a piece back in his hands was intensely overwhelming, like he could breathe again.
“Thank you.” He shook Dimitri’s hand and left the alley, where he hailed a passing taxi. He didn’t want to think about a traitor on his island or what that meant for his friends like the Mortons who collected pieces and were willing to share them with the world. Art was meant to be shared, but also protected. In the hands of thieves, it was only a matter of time before it was destroyed. Knowing that some fool calling himself the Illusionist was stealing paintings made a veil of red descend over Wes’s vision. He would have to call the Mortons tomorrow and get hold of the FBI to let them know he’d recovered the painting.
Holding the tube with the rolled up Goya inside, he set it across his lap in the back of the taxi and gave the driver his address. The bed back in his apartment with a warm and willing woman was the place he wanted most to be in that moment. With Callie in his arms, he’d be able to touch her and soothe the raging fires inside him.
Chapter 15
Callie covered her mouth, stifling the scream that would have shattered the robust activity on the streets of the place the taxi driver called Pig Alley. She’d had him trail Wes’s cab and she’d been afraid to get out and follow him on foot. This was stupid. She shouldn’t have gone after him in a foreign city close to midnight. But she’d rationalized it by promising to stay in the taxi if things looked bad. She just had to know if he was meeting someone else. Part of her still believed she wasn’t enough for Wes and he’d see other women. Logically, her mind told her Wes wasn’t that kind of man, but late-night phone calls and leaving? What was she to think? That was how she’d ended up at Pig Alley.
The flashing lights and the questionable atmosphere had been one thing. Her father would have called this place a knife-fight magnet, since all manner of seedier things were going down. Sex shops, peep shows, toy shops, and women wearing very little and patrolling the streets with one goal in mind.
Clutching her coat around her, she remained in the back seat of the taxi, peering across to the street where she’d just witnessed Wes throw a man into a wall. The moonlight wasn’t bright enough to see everything in the dark alley clearly, but there was no mistaking Wes and Dimitri accosting a man. A man who had been stuffed in a car trunk…A chill rippled through her and she shivered.
“Oh my God,” Callie whispered. Fear sizzled like sharp electricity beneath her skin, frazzling her control until her body shook with the force of it.
Wes was a bad man. A very bad man. And she was all alone in Paris with him. This wasn’t good. What could she do? If she ran, he’d follow her. He’d made that clear enough. But if she stayed, who knew what would happen.
Was he involved in the Russian mob with Dimitri? Was that how he’d accumulated all of his wealth? His love of art was likely a front. Her stomach became a hollow pit.
What the hell was she going to do? There wasn’t an easy way to get home. She’d flown here on Wes’s jet. While she and her father were now out of the woods financially, it didn’t change the fact that she didn’t have the money to buy a ticket home. Even if she did, there was no guarantee that Wes wouldn’t come after her and stop her from boarding the plane. In fact, she was sure he would. The night’s dinner worked its way up her throat. She had to get back to the apartment before Wes did. She didn’t want to think about what he’d do if he found out she knew about his double life.
“Where to, mademoiselle?” the driver asked her.
“Back to my apartment.” She told him the address in the Rue Cler neighborhood and he pulled out onto the street. Callie ducked down as they drove past Wes. In his hands he held a white tube. He hadn’t had that when he left the house. Was he carrying drugs? Or money? Or something else? Callie didn’t want to know. People who knew probably ended up dead.