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When they’d been growing up, Joh
She’d turned out great, though. She’d gone to college, and whatever he thought about her private investigation business, it obviously afforded her some very nice underwear. There were worse jobs.
He couldn’t think of any off the top of his head right now, not for the smartest girl in school, considering where she’d ended up tonight and who was after her, but he knew there were worse jobs.
“We’re about a half an hour out of Genesee, tops,” he said. “You want to tell me what’s in the bag, what we’re delivering, and maybe everything you know about this Nachman guy we’re delivering it to?”
Even a private investigator had to realize that information, intelligence, was the key to success. It wasn’t to her advantage to leave him in the dark, not about everything, or anything, for that matter.
“Isaac Nachman,” she said, obviously understanding. “Seventy-nine years old, born in Germany, lost his father, a brother, and two sisters to the Holocaust. His mother was American, from here in Colorado. She and Isaac came home to visit his grandfather back in 1939, shortly after the German invasion of Poland, and they never made it back to Europe. Isaac took over his grandfather’s tire business after the war, put his name on the masthead, and made millions.”
“Nachman Tires?” he asked, taking Solange back up into fourth gear.
“That’s the one.”
Joh
He slanted Esme a quick glance. No wonder she was dressed to kill in couture with diamond earrings.
He didn’t have to look at himself. He knew exactly what he was wearing, what he was always wearing. If it wasn’t a uniform, it was jeans, a shirt, a T-shirt, and a pair of boots.
It worked, that’s about all he could say about his wardrobe.
“There’s going to be a helluva security system on his house.” That was the second thing to pop into his mind.
“Fortunately, we’re not here on a B and E, to break and enter,” she said, her tone a little dry, which was a good sign. She was regaining her composure. “We’re invited. We’re here on business.”
She had her legs crossed in the passenger seat, and her skirt was riding up, and for all that he was thinking about getting up to this rich old tire guy’s house and doing the contraband-for-cash dance, he hadn’t for a second forgotten where he was taking her after that-to bed, his bed. At least he was going to give it his best shot. He wasn’t passing Go. He wasn’t collecting anything.
“You’re invited,” he clarified. “I’m unexpected.”
“It won’t be a problem. He might not even…uh, particularly notice that you’re there. He’ll be pretty focused on the property I’ve recovered. He’s a very, uh, very gracious man, but just a tidge eccentric. I’ve dealt with him before, with my dad.”
That got her a lift of his eyebrows. Her dad? What in the hell was a guy like Isaac Nachman doing hiring a guy like her dad? It didn’t make sense. Multimillionaires usually had their own people on staff to do anything, including investigations and security. He could see where Nachman would hire a brilliant, classy private contractor like Esme for a specific situation, maybe something she specialized in, but her dad, what Joh
“Your dad…” he started, then let his voice trail off, hesitating. Her dad was a royal fuckup kinda guy, but it wasn’t Joh
“Actually, he has a good reputation when it comes to art recovery,” she filled in his pause with another surprising piece of information.
“Art recovery? You mean he finds stolen art?”
She nodded. “Yes. The Nachman family lost over three hundred paintings to the Nazis during the war, including a Renoir my dad helped them find and reacquire, and they’ve never stopped looking for the rest of them, especially Isaac.”
Nazis. Germans. The guy in the Oxford Hotel with a sliced-and-diced suitcase and a neatly cut-open suit jacket-Joh
Geezus. He was such an idiot.
“You’ve got a painting in there.” Of course, she did, a damn small painting stolen by Adolf Hitler and, somehow, miraculously recovered by Esme Alexandria Alden and her deadbeat dad.
Easy Alex wasn’t anybody’s drug mule. Hell, no. He should have known that down to his bones- not that knowing it would have necessarily gotten him thinking of stolen art. Nikki McKi
No one had said much more about it, other than Joh
“An incredible painting,” Esme confirmed. “Jakob Meinhard’s Woman in Blue, an Expressionist masterpiece. He painted it in 1910, and up until a few years ago, people thought it had been burned in Berlin in 1939, or possibly in the Tuileries in 1941. Hitler had thousands of pieces destroyed in those two fires. The führer hated modern art. He thought it was degenerate, an abomination undermining the character of the state.”
Joh
“And you and your dad found this Meinhard painting?”
“Just my dad. He tracked down its whole history, from when it was initially smuggled from Germany into France via a diplomatic pouch, to its inclusion with a score of the Rothschilds’ collection at one of their castles in the Loire, to when the Nazis discovered the cache of paintings and seized them all. He’s good, he really is, but he’s best at finding the paintings, and not so good at actually getting them back. In the case of the Meinhard, he’d set up a deal, but it fell through in the clutch, and he lost the cash he’d brought for the exchange without getting the painting. I took over the investigation a month ago and managed to get the seller back into place.”