Page 105 of The Picasso Heist

I LOVE FALL in New York City.

For all the same reasons you hear about. I don’t care if they’re clichés. The leaves turning in Central Park. The crisp, cool nights. The drumbeat of the sidewalks with everyone rushing—quick, quick, quick—to all the places they need to be. There’s definitely a rhythm to it. Chaos in control.

And all of New York City seems to love the fall of Elise Joyce.

It’s not as if she were a household name.

At least, not before. What resonated with people, beyond the facts of what she’d done, was the perception that she had no remorse.

Consumed by ambition, she’d managed to rationalize the very behavior she was tasked with rooting out as a US attorney.

Worse, she wasn’t one among many, a foot soldier who got out of line—she was the one in charge.

In the days that followed, some of those pit-bull reporters managed to uncover a few more instances in which she bent the law so far, she might have broken it.

Time will tell. Or, more accurately, a jury will.

Yeah, if I had a nickel for every time I either heard or read someone quote the British historian Lord Acton on the heels of the press conference. But that’s the thing about clichés, and why I don’t mind them. They’re invoked so often because they’re always true.

Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

If I had to bet, Enzio Bergamo, currently out on bail and wearing the world’s least fashionable ankle bracelet, will ultimately accept some type of plea bargain in exchange for pleading guilty.

As for Dominick Lugieri, there’ll be no bargains on the table.

He’ll remain in custody, awaiting trial, along with eleven guys in his crew against whom the state was able to bring charges.

That alone was enough to warrant my being placed in the Witness Protection Program, but apparently we’ve also got to contend with the brother of the guy Lugieri killed at Osteria Contorni—although before he left the country, my brother no longer seemed too concerned about him, and it wasn’t simply because Skip would be flying in a C-27J Spartan to rejoin his unit embedded somewhere in the Middle East. He knew something about the brother that I didn’t, and I was fairly certain it was the kind of something that I—and every other civilian on the planet—would never know.

Never you mind, metalhead, I knew he’d say if I ventured to ask. I didn’t.

After my father’s successful stent procedure and after our family spent a few additional days reconnecting at an “undisclosed location,” Skip was off. I followed the next day, but not before my father and I had one more conversation.

“I’m proud of you,” he said. “Even though you didn’t listen to me.”

“I always listen to you. But it’s like you used to say to us: Be confident or be nothing. So maybe I’m just a little stubborn with my ideas.”

My father hadn’t wanted Skip and me to do what we did. He thought it was too risky, too ambitious. “I don’t mind a game of solitaire,” he’d told me one Sunday afternoon in the prisoners’ visiting room, “but I’m not a big fan of dominoes.”

Meaning: Did we really have to take down everyone who’d screwed him over all at once?

In my mind, it was the only way.

“Speaking of stubborn,” he said, “that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

I knew what was coming. “It’s about Mom, isn’t it?”

“It’s more about you, sweetheart. Because there’s nothing your mother can do anymore to change. She’ll always be exactly as you remember her.”

“I know.”

“You never talk about her. You never even mention her name.”

“I know that too,” I said. “It’s hard.”

“Of course it is. And Lord knows you excel at holding a grudge—as Bergamo, Lugieri, and Joyce know,” he said. “But this particular grudge you need to let go. And if you can’t do it for yourself, can you do it for me?”

“I’m not sure I even know how.”

“It doesn’t have to be all at once. But maybe with each passing day you can try to be a little less mad at her, not blame her as much for giving up on herself… for giving up on us.”

I took my father’s hand, squeezed it tight. “I promise you I’ll try,” I said.

“Good. Now go do what you told me about,” he whispered. “Make me even prouder.”