Art of Deception - Light and Shadow

"Officer," Monica said, a note of anxiety now in her voice. "I was on a stakeout. I saw him. He ran into his apartment with a painting. If you send someone over there, I'm sure you'll find it."

"I doubt that," I said. "Your three goons just stole it."

She stared at me. It was clear she wanted to believe I was bluffing, but I could see the panic etched on her face.

"You look worried," I said. "Don't be. The genuine Renoir is safe. It's locked in a vault at the Oxbow."

Monica was glaring at me now, pure hatred behind her eyes.

"Anyway," I continued, "the microscope incident told me you weren't who you said you were. But I didn't realize you were working with Carina until you dropped by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Carina and I were holding hands as we walked. When you called out to us from behind, her hand tensed involuntarily. Just for a second, but a hard squeeze.

"At first, I thought it might have been surprise, because she recovered quickly. But as we talked, her palm began to sweat. I realized she was overplaying her nonchalance to mask what she was truly feeling. Her hand hadn't tensed in surprise. It had tensed in fear. She was terrified of you.

"At that point, I had a few competing theories about what you might be up to. I admit, it took me longer to reach a conclusion than it should have, but eventually I landed on the likeliest probability: you and Carina were conspiring to steal the Renoir and frame me."

"That's absurd," Monica said. "No one is going to believe you."

"Maybe not," I said, unbuttoning my shirt and exposing enough skin to allow her to see the wire I'd been wearing. "But I bet they'll believe you."

*******

What I'd told Monica was true: I had finally worked out that she was planning to frame me. But what I didn't tell her--what I couldn't tell her--was that I never would have figured out her plan if Carina hadn't shown me the way.

She didn't come right out and confess. In fact, she tried to stay committed to Monica's plan until the very end. But I'd like to believe that the more time we spent together, the more her guilt weighed on her, until she finally hit a breaking point. Our argument at my apartment had been the key.

When she broke into sobs and told me she was sorry, I thought she was finally apologizing for deceiving me about her life as a forger when we first met. But as I held her, I considered another possibility. What if she wasn't apologizing for something she had done in the past? What if she was apologizing for something she was doing now?

At that moment, the pieces finally clicked, and I saw our argument in a new light.

When Carina had forced me to recount all my half-baked theories about her real motives for sending the Renoir, I assumed she was simply ridiculing me for my inability to trust her. It had been more than that, though. She talked through each of my hypotheses with me. She poked holes in my guesses when they missed the mark. Intentionally or not, she helped me to eliminate dead ends so that it would be easier to find my way to the truth.

When she stared at the Renoir and said, "I should never have sent this to you. You don't deserve it," I thought she was saying that I wasn't worthy of her gift. But in admitting she never should have sent me the painting, she was really admitting she never should have set Monica's plot in motion. It wasn't the painting she felt I didn't deserve; it was her betrayal.

I realized it was guilt, not anger, that prompted Carina to grab the knife. In trying to destroy the painting, she was trying to save me. Fortunately, I had stopped her. Her shame was clouding her judgement. Had she succeeded, Monica would have found out, and Carina's sister would have suffered.

After she had dropped the knife, I held her and stroked her back until she stopped crying.

"Thank you," I said.

She shook her head against my chest, her face still buried in my shirt. "You shouldn't be thanking me."

"Yes, I should."

"For what?" she asked, looking up at me.

"Trying to stop me from walking into Monica's trap."

She pulled away. In her eyes, I saw a swirl of emotions: panic over whether to admit to her role, fear over how I would react, and relief that she no longer had to bear the weight of her secret.

"I wanted to tell you," she said. "For so long I wanted to tell you. Please believe me."

She was crying again. I pulled her close. "I believe you."

That made her cry harder.

"I didn't know what to do," she said. "No matter what choice I made, someone I love would get hurt."

Carina had never said she loved me before. It was possible she was just manipulating me, protecting herself by telling me what she thought I wanted to hear. People say a lot of things when you catch them in a betrayal, and Carina was as skillful a liar as she was a forger. But my gut told me she was telling the truth.

"Why didn't you confide in me?" I asked.

"I didn't know what you'd do."

"You thought I'd turn you in? No matter the cost to your sister?"

"I couldn't risk it. She's all I have."

I shook my head. "You have me. But if you want to earn back my trust, you have to start by trusting me."

She nodded and held my eyes, a determined look on her face. "I trust you."

"Good," I said. "Then I'll need your help. Because I don't want someone I love to get hurt, either."

*******

My plan was pretty straightforward. Carina would tell Monica about my suspicions, emphasizing my theory that Carina was somehow planning to swap the forged Renoir for the real one. She would also tell Monica that I was determined to find some discrepancy between the two Renoirs so that they couldn't be swapped without detection. Monica would be thrilled, because to find a discrepancy, I would need to examine the real painting at the Oxbow.

Carina would also tell Monica about our big argument. In her version of events, our fight ended with me kicking Carina out of my apartment and telling her I didn't want to see her again. I'd said I didn't believe her painting was a gift, would never trust her, and wouldn't rest until I was able to prove her work was a forgery. Monica would likely encourage Carina to stay away from me, just as I'd asked, so that I could finally focus my efforts on analyzing the real Renoir.

This gave Carina a plausible excuse for lying low, which was vital to the next phase of my plan.

If I wanted to help Carina and her sister, it was critical that I expose her. Whoever Carina was working for needed to believe that I wanted her arrested just as badly as I wanted Monica arrested. Otherwise, they would assume that Carina had tipped me off about Monica's plan and that I was protecting her by concealing her identity.

I went to Nora and told her everything. Well, almost everything. In my version of events, Carina was a willing participant in the conspiracy rather than the person who had helped to reveal it.

Nora was less than pleased to learn I'd known the truth behind the Modigliani forgery all along but kept it hidden because I was dating the forger. She was also skeptical about my theory that Carina and a private investigator were conspiring to steal the Renoir and frame me for the crime.

When I finished my explanation, Nora reacted in two ways. First, she fired me on the spot. That didn't surprise me. It's a minor conflict of interest when the forensic scientist in your employ has been secretly sleeping with a master forger. Second, she agreed to help me. That did surprise me. I suppose that even though she was furious with me, Nora still trusted my instincts.

I explained to Nora my plan for catching both the forger and the would-be thief. So as not to arouse Monica's suspicions, she agreed to contact the police and coordinate details.

The first step was to move the forged Renoir from my apartment without alerting Monica. The police staged a mattress delivery and removal with a non-existent tenant on the floor above me. The same mattress that went up the stairwell also came back down it. The only difference was that on the way back down, the mattress happened to contain a plastic-wrapped Renoir forgery concealed in a custom-made compartment.

The next step was convincing Antoine to cooperate with the sting. He adamantly refused to display the forgery in place of the original until Nora convinced him of the publicity his gallery would receive for having been the target of a foiled plot to steal a masterpiece. The exposure would undoubtedly increase attendance and inflate the bidding at his upcoming auction. After that, he selflessly complied with the plan. He didn't even ask for any compensation. His only concern, he assured us, was for the greater good of the artistic community.

Keeping Roland in the dark was the one part of the plan that gave me pause. It was critical that we limit the number of people who knew about the sting. Still, it wasn't fair to put him in harm's way without his consent. We ended up telling him the bare minimum: that we expected there to be an attempted theft of the Renoir when I inspected it, that we believed violence was unlikely, and that he did not need to be involved. He insisted on being in the room and promised not to interfere. He told me later he knew it would give him a killer story to share on a date.

In the days leading up to the sting, the police asked me to try to draw out Carina and meet with her. They wouldn't take her down until Monica was arrested, but they wanted to establish a tail in advance.

Carina ignored every one of my texts and calls, just as she and I had discussed in advance. I told the police I wasn't surprised by her silence, given that we'd had a big argument at my apartment that had ended with me telling her I didn't want to see her again. At their suggestion, I tried visiting her at the hotel where had been staying in Brooklyn, but the front desk said she'd already checked out.

The longer we tried to draw out Carina, the more likely it was Monica would grow suspicious about why I hadn't yet examined the real Renoir. The police decided to move forward without the tail. The thief was a more important target than the forger.

The genuine Renoir was placed in a safe, and the police embedded a tracking device into the frame of the forged Renoir before it was mounted at the Oxbow. It's not an uncommon practice with valuable works of art. Monica's squad was clever enough to ditch the frame after they stole it, just in case it had been tagged. Fortunately, the detectives assigned to follow the thieves were expecting them to split up and change cars, so they never lost the tail. They arrested the driver transporting the forged Renoir, as well as the two men who dropped me off at the park.

The police had doubted Monica would be foolish enough to show her face on the night of the theft, but I knew she wouldn't be able to resist gloating. It would be the perfect opportunity to secure a confession. Wearing a wire made me a little nervous, but Monica had no reason to suspect I was on to her. By asking to inspect the original Renoir, I was walking right into the trap she'd set for me.

The only person the operation didn't catch was the forger. The police plastered Carina's image everywhere in the days following the attempted theft, hoping someone would call in a tip. At their request, I had provided recent photos of Carina as a redhead. Nora and I also helped a forensic artist create a portrait of Carina just as she had looked when she tried to auction the Modigliani through the Kiefer Gallery: auburn hair styled into a long bob, delicate features, and those piercing blue eyes.

The police came up empty, so they sent the photos and the forged Renoir along to the FBI, who had more resources to attempt to track down Carina. With any luck, Carina had already managed to make it back to London, just as we'd discussed.

I emerged from the chaos relatively unscathed. True, I'd lost my job, but I'd had a successful consulting business before the Kiefer Gallery, and I had every reason to believe that success would continue.

The police continued to poke around for a while. I was pretty sure they assigned plainclothes officers to follow me for a few weeks, probably to see if I'd lead them to Carina. There was also talk of obstruction of justice charges for my reluctance to come forward sooner with the forger's identity, but apparently there wasn't much appetite to pursue a case against someone who had helped to foil both an attempted forgery and an attempted heist.

After things finally settled down, I took a much-needed solo trip to the Adirondacks. The mountain air usually helped to clear my head, but this time all it did was intensify my anxiety. It upset me that Carina was likely back with her employers somewhere in London, maybe even discussing her next assignment. In a different world, her incredible talent would have been nurtured, not exploited. Decisions she made as a child had robbed her of a relationship with her sister, the chance for a normal life, and the opportunity to be recognized for the artistic genius she was. It wasn't fair.

I hoped we had done well enough to convince her employers that she had narrowly escaped a botched job in New York that had gone sideways through no fault of her own. Even if they bought it, we'd managed only to avert the immediate crisis. The circumstances that precipitated that crisis remained: Carina was an indentured servant to a criminal organization that was using threats against her sister to control and manipulate her.

My pity wasn't reserved only for Carina. I had plenty to spare for myself. For more than a year, I'd allowed my anger at Carina's deception to serve as a shield. It protected me from the enormous loss I felt after she left. And it made it easy to ignore my true feelings for her. When she came back into my life and I eventually lowered that shield, it was astonishing how good it felt. Like I was being honest with myself for the first time.

Now, she was gone. Again.

We'd agreed that we should both lie low and avoid contact for a while after she left. That was especially true now that she'd aroused the attention of the FBI.

That's why I was surprised when a small package arrived at my apartment two months later. There was no return address, and no handwritten note like last time. Only a wooden Orthodox icon.

It took just a few minutes on my phone to identify it. It was an icon of Saint Phanourios. In the Orthodox tradition, he interceded to help the faithful who were searching for something. As the patron saint of lost things, he helped reveal not only lost objects, but also hidden matters of the heart.

I didn't know where Carina was, and I didn't know why she felt lost. But I knew what to do with lost things.

You find them.

*******

Author's Note:

When I finished Art of Deception, I had the germ of an idea for a sequel. I never would have pursued it if it hadn't been for the comments and feedback I received from readers. Thank you. Knowing that some folks out there liked the original enough to want to read more was immensely gratifying.

I finished this story with the germ of a third chapter in mind. I hope it will take root more quickly than it did last time. In the meantime, I have another story idea or two that I hope to explore before returning to the world of Adam and Carina. Thanks for reading.