Page 56 of The Picasso Heist

A WEEK OF planning for a three-minute window.

That’s how I explain it to Bergamo. I tell him I need to run the plan by Shen Wan first.

“Why?” asks Bergamo.

“Because it’s Shen’s window.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll see,” I say. “Or maybe you won’t. It will all depend on getting Shen’s blessing.”

I call Bergamo the following day. We got it, I tell him. Shen’s on board.

A week of planning for a three-minute window.

One week later, at two thirty in the morning, I pick up Bergamo at a twenty-four-hour gas station a few blocks away from the Brooklyn Bridge entrance on Chambers Street. I’m driving a rental car with switched plates.

To make sure he wasn’t followed, Bergamo took a taxi to a nearby Greek diner, immediately exited through the kitchen, and got picked up by his driver, Nico, who then serpentined around the city for half an hour, running a couple of red lights along the way, before dropping him off at the gas station to meet me.

“Where is it?” Bergamo asks even before buckling his seat belt.

“Where else would it be? It’s in the trunk,” I say.

The idea of an original Picasso that just sold at auction for one hundred and forty-nine million dollars being stashed in the back of a dinged-up Toyota Camry from Avis clearly doesn’t sit well with Bergamo.

If his body language—mostly squirming—isn’t enough of a giveaway, the tortured noise he lets out after we drive over a pothole leaves no doubt.

He sounds like a wounded animal. This is killing him.

“We really couldn’t take my car?” he asks.

“No. We really couldn’t,” I say. “The painting’s fine, nice and snug in its case.”

The drive out to the Brooklyn Shipyard takes about twenty minutes.

We pass the main entrance with its brick gatehouse and go along the fenced-in container lot to another lot that is neither fenced in nor patrolled by any guards.

It’s basically a junkyard with a bunch of rusted-out forty-foot-high cube containers that made their last transatlantic voyage decades ago.

“This is perfect,” says Bergamo, looking around as we pull in. “Creepy as shit, but perfect.”

I cut the lights on the Camry and use the nearly full moon to slowly drive toward the water’s edge. I stop next to a container flipped on its side and covered in graffiti, and when I shift into park, Bergamo reaches for the door handle.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I was getting out.”

“What’d I tell you?”

“You didn’t tell me anything.”

“Exactly. So why would you think you should get out?” I hit the door locks, if only for effect. “Don’t do anything unless I tell you to.”

Bergamo nods, although he’s clearly not happy about taking lip from me. Pissed is more like it. He mumbles something, nothing Hallmark would ever use in a card, but I’m not really listening to him. I’m not even looking at him. My eyes are trained about a hundred feet away on the water’s edge.

A week of planning for a three-minute window.

Any minute now…