Page 77 of The Picasso Heist

“ARE YOU READY to play?”

Lugieri takes a few steps back as he asks, because God forbid he gets any of my blood and brains splattered across his expensive suit.

“Please, no. Please don’t do this,” I beg.

He rolls his eyes. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Are you really going to start crying?”

I lift up my zip-tied hands to wipe the tears from my cheeks. “What do you expect?” I’m nearly shouting. “You’ve got a gun to my head!”

“No, Malcolm has a gun to your head. All I’m doing is asking the questions,” he says. “For instance, what have you told the feds?”

“What do you mean?”

I feel the barrel of Malcolm’s gun dig into my skull. He knows his boss well.

“That’s a really bad start,” says Lugieri. “One more time and it’s game over, Halston. Now, who are you talking to at the US attorney’s office?”

Deep breath. You’ve got this.

“Elise Joyce,” I say softly.

Lugieri nods. He knew it. Of course he knew it. “The top bitch herself, huh? Man, that chick has such a hard-on for me. It’s unbelievable.”

“It has nothing to do with you.”

He steps toward me again, his face turning beet red with rage. Screw his expensive suit, he’s ready to pull the trigger himself. “What the hell did I just tell you? If you lie to me one more—”

“I’m not lying, I swear! It’s Enzio Bergamo I’m giving them. Only him.”

“Bullshit.”

“Why would it be about you? That would be suicide.” I tilt my head, reminding him there’s a gun to it. “This is about my father… what Bergamo did to him.”

Lugieri squints. “I’m listening,” he says. For the first time, I feel as if I truly have his attention. Now don’t lose it, Halston. Hold on to it… for dear life.

“My father’s an art dealer. Or he was an art dealer. He’s in jail right now because of Bergamo,” I say. “Bergamo was a client and leveraged their relationship to get my father involved in a scheme that went south, to put it mildly.”

“Wait,” says Lugieri, palms raised. “Does Bergamo know that you know all this?”

“Of course not. If he did, I wouldn’t have been able to get close to him.”

“So you’re setting him up?”

“Just like he did my father,” I say.

“What was the scheme?”

“Bergamo has two passions when it comes to art: Qing dynasty vases and cubist paintings.”

“Qing?”

“The period in China right after the Ming dynasty, mid-seventeenth century to the turn of the twentieth century.”

“Forget I asked,” he says.

“It doesn’t matter. The scheme involved only paintings.

Bergamo went to my father claiming to have a connection to a French attorney handling the estate of someone who had nearly a dozen never-before-seen Fernand Léger paintings in the attic of his home near Biot, in the south of France,” I explain. “This was a huge coup for my father.”

“And he took Bergamo at his word? He trusted him that much?”

“My father didn’t trust anyone. But Bergamo put his money where his mouth was, buying one of the Léger paintings for himself, using my father as the broker for a private sale.

When the French attorney saw he could offload these paintings discreetly through my father, they were in business.

My father began brokering private sales for his other clients. There was just one problem.”

“The paintings were fake,” says Lugieri.

“Exactly.”

“But didn’t your father have them checked out?”

“Authenticating is a little tricky when the paintings don’t officially exist. There aren’t many secrets in the art world.

Word would’ve gotten out if he’d hired someone.

So my father did the best he could on his own to verify them,” I say.

“But he’d be the first to admit that he desperately wanted those paintings to be real, and that probably affected his judgment.

He never intended to rip anyone off. It was an honest mistake. Or at least it should’ve been.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“After selling about six paintings and banking huge commissions, my father suddenly heard the voice of his own father in his head saying something he used to say a lot when my dad was a kid: An easy buck is the devil’s paycheck.

My father just had this gut feeling that something wasn’t right, so he anonymously arranged to have one of the paintings examined by a black-market authenticator.

And that’s when he found out he’d been selling fakes. ”

“You said he was in jail. So what happened?” asks Lugieri. “He turned himself in or something?”

“I wish,” I say. “He wishes. No, he made a really bad decision. Coming clean would have ruined my father’s reputation, ended his career.

He would’ve been okay with that if it weren’t for the most important thing in his life: his family.

All he could think about was how they would suffer, not just financially but in every way.

They’d forever be the wife and kids of that art-scam guy.

So my father convinced himself that he had good reasons to not reveal the truth. ”

“Are you sure it wasn’t just greed?”

“Greed would be if he kept selling the paintings. He didn’t.

In fact, he went to Bergamo and explained they’d been cheated.

Bergamo wanted to get his money back from the French attorney but the lawyer refused, citing buyer beware—caveat emptor—along with the complexities of a US citizen filing a lawsuit against a French citizen living in France.

It wasn’t impossible to do. It was just impossible to do without it becoming an international news story.

To prevent that from happening, my father promised to make Bergamo whole on the transaction.

He would basically give him all of his commissions to cover the twenty-five million that Bergamo had paid for one of the paintings. ”

“Let me guess,” says Lugieri. “He never got the chance.”

“My father assumed that one of his other clients discovered the painting he’d bought was a fake and turned him in.

The FBI never revealed their source. It was only after the trial, after my father was already serving his sentence, that we learned that Bergamo had been behind the whole thing.

It was his scam. There was never a French attorney.

Bergamo commissioned the fake Légers and conspired to defraud my father’s clients for over two hundred million dollars,” I say.

“And the worst part? Bergamo was the FBI’s source.

Only they didn’t know it. After my father learned that the paintings were fake and went to Bergamo—his supposed friend—Bergamo made the anonymous tip to the FBI. ”

“To cover his ass.”

“In every way possible. He knew my father would protect him. Sure enough, my father never mentioned Bergamo to the FBI. He knew the damage it would do to Bergamo’s brand just to have his name connected with the investigation.”

I watch as Lugieri folds his arms, nodding along with my last words.

“Wow,” he says. “That is one fucked-up, crazy story. And the craziest part? I actually believe every word of it.”

“I told you,” I say.

“Yes, you did. Thanks for telling me the truth, Halston.” He mulls things over for a moment and then shrugs. “Unfortunately, we still need to kill you.”