Page 107 of The Picasso Heist

“Anthony Quinn. You remember him, right?”

“Of course.Zorba the Greek.”

“Yeah, although it’s interesting. In thisRevengemovie he plays a wealthy Mexican businessman, but he reminds me more of a mob boss.”

“Why’s that?”

“He commands a lot of loyalty from his men.”

“Meaning there’s little they wouldn’t do for him.”

“Exactly.”

“RememberThe Untouchables? That’s probably my favorite Kevin Costner movie.”

“Probably mine as well.”

“The best part is when he recruits his team to bring down Al Capone, the people he knows for sure he can trust. He has to go outside the department, think outside the box.”

“Exactly.”

“Yeah, that was a great movie, all right, although it probably appeals more to men. I mean, it’s safe to say a certain someone in our family hasn’t seen it.”

“Very safe.”

“Come to think of it, she’s never been a big fan of men-saving-the-day stories, has she?”

“No, not at all. I wouldn’t even recommendThe Bodyguardto her.”

“That’s your sister, all right. But she’s the only one you’ve got, son.”

“Trust me, Dad, I know.”

CHAPTER90

SKIP RARELY PLAYSthe combat card or any card related to his role with Special Forces. So if he’s telling you a story about a certain mission he was part of, rest assured there’s an ulterior motive lurking.

“I’m only here because my brother told me you wanted to apologize,” I say, sitting across from Elise Joyce in her Brooklyn office. Her window overlooks the Korean War Veterans Plaza where Fulton and Tillary Streets meet.

Joyce, sitting behind her desk, laughs loudly, mocking me. “And you believed him?”

I look over at Skip and his lying eyes and then spring up from my chair to do exactly what I did the last time the three of us were together—storm out.

Only this time I don’t even make it to the door. I barely make it out of my seat. As soon as I stand up, Skip puts his big-brother hand on my shoulder and pushes me back down.

“There was this one time in Fallujah,” he says, his hand still onmy shoulder, “our Persian interpreter, who spoke both Dari and Pashto, came down with the chicken pox, of all things. There was no other interpreter embedded with us in our unit, but it’s not like we could just call a time-out in the war. We had a sweep planned—when we literally go door to door in the neighborhood searching for weapons—and while a few of us knew a couple of words and phrases, no one was even close to fluent in either dialect. So we had to scramble, and what we did was find a Sunni carpenter who spoke Pashto but wasn’t a Taliban sympathizer, and we paired him with a Hazara farmer who was fluent in Hazaragi, which is very close to Dari. Now, normally these two guys would hate each other’s guts, but as it turns out, their fathers had fought together against the Soviets. In other words, having a common enemy had allowed their fathers to put aside their differences, and these men did the same—at least long enough for us to complete our sweep without anyone getting their freakin’ head blown off. Do you two understand what I’m getting at?”

“That depends,” I say. “Am I supposed to be the Sunni carpenter or the Hazara farmer?”

Skip’s answer is a quick, hard pinch of my clavicle, which is what he used to do to me when I was a kid and he wanted me to shut up. The death grip, I called it. It still works.

“Can we talk about the common enemy now?” asks Joyce. “And this plan of yours?”

“You meanours,” says Skip. “It’s our plan now.”

“That depends,” says Joyce.

“On what?” he asks.