Chapter 5 - Shadows on 18th Street
The snow fell in heavy, wet clumps, smothering the industrial rail yards of Pilsen under a shroud of gray slush.
Julian’s armored Maybach navigated the narrow alleyways behind 18th Street, its tires crunching over frozen gravel. The neighborhood, once dominated by Czech immigrants and industrial breweries, was now a labyrinth of rusted sheet metal, graffitied brick facades, and decaying smokestacks.
Julian sat across from me in the plush leather interior, checking an antique silver pocket watch. He hadn't spoken since we crossed the Chicago River.
"Mateo is paranoid," Julian said as the car slowed to a halt outside a derelict five-story masonry building that had once belonged to the Atlas Brewing Company. "He has armed security—local mercenaries who don't care about art, only cash. You stay beside me. You do not touch anything until I give the command."
"I know how to handle artists, Julian," I said, clutching my leather case to my chest. "Especially the mad ones."
The building’s iron freight doors groaned in protest as a burly man in an oil-stained work jacket pulled them open from the inside. Julian nodded to his driver, who remained behind the wheel with the engine idling, and led me into the cavernous dark.
The interior smelled of damp mortar, linseed oil, and woodsmoke. We climbed a flight of rusted iron stairs to the fourth floor, our footsteps echoing against the concrete silos. At the end of a long, dimly lit catwalk, a reinforced steel door stood ajar.
Inside, the loft opened up into a breathtaking cathedral of forgery.
Dozens of easels were arranged beneath industrial skylights caked with soot. Drying racks held hundreds of stretched canvases. Long wooden workbenches were cluttered with glass pestles, jars of raw ground earth pigments—lapis lazuli, cadmium red, bone black—and antique French wine bottles filled with turpentine and aged dammar varnish.
In the center of the room, seated in a high-backed velvet armchair near a roaring cast-iron stove, was Mateo Varga.
He looked eighty, though I knew he was barely sixty-five. His hair was a wild shock of silver, his hands knotted with arthritis, his eyes sunken beneath heavy, shelf-like brows. A stained linen smock covered his frail frame.
"The girl from the institute," Mateo rasped in a voice scarred by decades of inhaling toxic solvent fumes. He looked at me, ignoring Julian entirely. "You wrote that paper on the decomposition of synthetic ultramarine under acidic conditions."
"I did," I said, stepping forward onto the floorboards. "You used natural French lapis on the Braque violin, didn't you? Even though Braque himself had begun experimenting with synthetic pigments by October of 1910."
A slow, yellowed grin spread across the old man’s face. "The master was broke in October. He used whatever scraps Derain left in the studio. You see, Julian?" He spat toward Julian’s immaculate shoes. "She sees! She looks with eyes, not with an accountant’s spreadsheet!"
"Where is the original, Mateo?" Julian demanded, his voice dropping into that chilling, dangerous register. "The games are over. Tariq’s transport aircraft lands at O’Hare at midnight."
"The original is safe," Mateo wheezed, tapping the arm of his chair. "Safer than it was in your damp warehouse in New Jersey, you bloodsucking vulture. But we have a small administrative problem before Clara examines it."
The old man clapped his hands twice.
From behind a row of heavy drying racks stepped two men in dark jackets, carrying automatic shotguns.
May you like
Between them, hands bound behind his back with plastic zip-ties, his face bruised and swollen, was Victor.
***
