Brilliant (13 page)

T  W  E  N  T  Y  -  F  I  V  E

It was dark when I left home, but the streets were still busy, and by the time I climbed to street level from my first Underground stop, if anyone had noticed me, they would have supposed I was someone’s housekeeper going home from a long day. I blended easily into the foot traffic, innocuous in my tan Burberry, my eyes behind a large beige-rimmed pair of glasses, my hair tucked under a brown wig and a tan rain cap. My grocery basket rattled along behind me, my tools hidden beneath a tall bouquet of leeks, a couple of purple cabbages, a roll of paper towels. I made three different Tube/bus changes to get to South Carriage Square, turning what would generally be a ten- minute walk into an hour’s journey. I switched my hat twice.

At about eight-fifteen, I disappeared into the dark of the mews behind Mrs. Fullerton’s town house and slid behind the trash shed, where I shrugged out of my coat, and traded my walking shoes for soft-bottomed rubber slip-ons.

My surveillance had revealed that the security system the Fullertons installed in the mid-1980s had never been updated. It might have been state-of-the-art then, but technology waits for no one, particularly successful burglars. At Ballantine & Company, we upgrade our entire system every six months, and redigitize the electronic combinations on our safes biweekly. I do my home every eighteen months.

One of the reasons I’ve succeeded for so many years is I never sacrifice professionalism for expediency. The precautions I take may seem excessive, but when you get cavalier, you get caught.

I snapped on skintight, latex gloves, put night-vision goggles over my eyes, turning my world an eerie green, and went to work.

The lock on Mrs. Fullerton’s back gate was old and easily jimmied. I’d been through it a number of times during the past couple of weeks. I crept in and closed it silently behind me, then crossed the garden and climbed the stairs to the terrace that ran the width of the house. I knew as long as someone was in the house, the alarm system would not be activated because the house was not zoned. They couldn’t set the perimeter without arming the whole property—what an incredibly costly and shortsighted mistake. Twice, I’d watched through the garden-level kitchen window as the butler activated the system once the household was in bed, which also meant there were no motion detectors. The system was out of the dark ages.

Tonight, bright lights shone from the kitchen. From the sounds of the television set and the conversation blaring through the windows, the household staff was taking full advantage of Mrs. Fullerton’s evening out.

Sets of French doors to the formal drawing room and dining room opened onto the terrace. A few dim lights burned in the drawing room, but the dining room was in complete darkness. Working quickly, I removed a precut sheet of contact paper from my pocket, peeled off the adhesive backing, and smoothed it onto the pane of glass adjacent to the door latch, leaving a good deep ridge running the center length of the piece to serve as a handle. The paper adhered easily. Then, I pulled my little black matte, hard-rubber, ball peen hammer out of my pocket and tapped around the edges, hard enough to shatter the glass. The broken pane came out as a piece on the sticky paper, just like removing the lid from a pot. I folded it up and tucked it into my pocket.

The rest was simple.

Because Mrs. Fullerton, nee Sheiglah Winthrop, had moved into this house as a bride, and it had been Mr. Fullerton’s family home for generations, I made a few assumptions. I assumed the main safe in the house would be in the library and would be the original piece of equipment, a beautiful relic installed by one of Mr. Fullerton’s long-gone ancestors to safeguard his shares in the East India Company, or some such thing. I also assumed that, at some later time, either by an earlier Mrs. Fullerton, or by Sheiglah herself, a second safe had been added to the master bedroom, or dressing room, to hold the lady’s jewelry.

These assumptions were based on experience. The only question—and it really didn’t make much difference—was: Would it be the original combination-dial safe, or had Mrs. Fullerton had the foresight to replace it with a new electronic model?

In the mid-1990s, when electronic safes became available for residential use, I replaced my standard combination-lock safe with one that has an electronic-locking mechanism. At that time they were considered crack-proof, and essentially they still are, unless you’re in the “business,” and know what you’re doing. If you don’t, then you get three tries at an electronic lock before it freezes for a minimum of fifteen minutes, sometimes more—an eternity in the life of a jewel thief. You can rip off the keypad, but it doesn’t make any difference—the brains of the mechanism are sealed between layers of armor at the top of the box, cooked in there like a little pancake— they’re nowhere near the keypad. You can try a blowtorch, but the second the vault feels the heat, the locking bars seal up and jam themselves, so even if you cut an opening big enough to reach in and try to open the safe from the inside, it won’t do any good. You just have to try to cut a hole big enough to remove the goods through it. If you do all this stuff, you have an awful lot of time on your hands. Or, if you’re a true, state-of-the-art professional, you go to EKM Elektronika in Zurich, and for about twenty thousand dollars you get yourself a high-speed digital scanner and pop the thing open in about two seconds.

I found Mrs. Fullerton’s jewelry safe sitting behind a row of musty evening clothes in the late Mr. Fullerton’s closet. It was a good-sized vault, maybe three feet high and eighteen or twenty inches deep. A beautiful, shiny black, custom-made affair, with a late-twentieth-century combination-dial lock. The most unusual part of it was, it had a deposit window in its front above the door, like an after-hours bank drop. So, if Mrs. Fullerton came in late, or tipsy, she could just take off her jewelry and drop it through the night depository, and not have to fuss around with the combination. What a great idea.

I knelt on the floor and fitted a notched magnetic ring around the combination dial. Then, toward the upper left-hand corner of the door, I pushed on a small suction cup from which stuck a short stiff wire that served as a distance gauge to the magnetic ring’s ridges. I moved my shoulders and neck around to loosen them up and settled in, turning the dial, feeling for the tiny hesitations. It took about five minutes to identify the three numbers that made up the combination, and another six to work out their sequence. The lock was a typical four-three-two-one setup, so after a total of eleven minutes, the dial locked itself into place. It’s really enough to make you sick—it really should take longer, be harder, make the thief sweat a little more, or even sweat at all!, to get into such a sophisticated vault. Sadly, if you have age, experience, and the right equipment, it shouldn’t take more than ten to fifteen minutes. As I moved the lever down, I could hear the bars retracting, sliding free, and Mrs. Fullerton’s fine safe pushed itself open with a very satisfying, solid, welcome-to-my-world, click.

It was like a store inside. The shelves were jam-packed with velvet boxes and bags. I didn’t have time to evaluate the goods—just started opening cases and dumping their contents into my pack, scooping soft jewelry sacks in along with them. There was an inordinate amount of jewelry, but within ninety seconds the vault was empty. I shoved the empty containers into the blackness of the back of the safe, with the exception of those that had already been empty, which I assumed were for the jewelry Mrs. Fullerton was wearing tonight. I laid them just as I’d found them, on the front part of the second shelf. I wondered, because of her night deposit drop, how long it would be before she discovered the theft.

On the top shelf, I tenderly placed my calling card: a small bouquet of shamrocks tied with an ivory satin ribbon. Owen was right— I’m not a sprout kind of girl. Those were shamrocks I was growing outside my breakfast room. I guess he wasn’t as much of an Irishman as I thought.

It was probably because my adrenaline was pumping at such a pitch and my senses were so heightened that, just as I was about to close the safe, I was able to hear the other sound. Or sense the presence. I don’t know which came first, but my hair stood on end as though I were about to be hit by lightning, and I knew someone else was nearby. I flattened myself against the closet wall.

T  W  E  N  T  Y  -  S  I  X

A strong, pinpoint flashlight beam cut around the master bedroom, finally settling on what looked like a Renoir hanging over the fireplace. I watched a figure, dressed all in black, approach it. He, or she—even with my night goggles I couldn’t tell which—balanced the adjustable torch on the mantel, directing the beam at the center of the painting, reached up, and removed it from the wall. Whoever this was, he moved with the assurance of a pro. My heart thudded like a freight train. He leaned the stolen painting very carefully against the chair, pulled something out of his pocket, and laid it on the mantel. It was the Samaritan Burglar. He then picked up the picture, carrying it almost tenderly, and headed toward the door. I let my breath out. He stopped. He’d heard me.

I watched him approach the closet, and I pressed myself farther into the wall, seeing everything as though it were in slow motion. He pushed the door open, casting the beam all around until it fell on the open safe. I had no choice. My arm flew up and then down, cracking him on the back of the head with my little rubber hammer. He dropped like a rock.

After that, I moved fast. My insides had turned to jelly. I tried to calm my heart and control my breathing, but I was terrified. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I stepped over the body— please dear God, don’t let him be dead, but I didn’t touch him to find out—and closed the vault door, heard the bolts run themselves home, twirled the dial, rearranged the clothes back around the safe, and flew out, certain all the lights in the house would be thrown on as I dashed down the stairs to the dining room and that I would be caught with what I was pretty sure was going to turn out to be millions in jewels, if they were all real. But there was no sign of any life in the house, outside of the noise in the kitchen. No shadows, no sense of alarm on the part of the staff, no sign of where the other burglar entered. I decided right then and there, this was my last heist. I thought I was probably going to have a heart attack.

At the Pimlico station, the last stop of my long, circuitous, Underground voyage home, I went into the ladies’ room and locked myself into a stall. I had calmed down, and now felt only waves of relief. I was amazed at my own foolhardiness and grateful for dumb luck. I pulled off the wig and glasses and stuffed them into a plastic shopping bag. My hair was soaked and pasted to my head and I opened the roll of paper towels that was part of my grocery camouflage and dried my hair as best I could before pulling it up into its customary twist. I put on some lipstick and blush and by the time I exited the Pimlico ladies’ room at a little before ten o’clock and stepped onto the train home, I looked myself.

No, that’s not quite right. I looked better than myself. I looked exhilarated. Awestruck. Young and exuberant. I’d just dodged the biggest bullet of my life and I was safe. And I was never going to do it again. Every inch of my body complained from tension. All I could think about was how good my bathtub was going to feel. Steaming hot, pikaki bubbles, Schubert, and champagne.

I sailed through Sloane Square, my shopping basket bouncing along behind, down a side street past all my familiar neighborhood spots, all tidied up and closed for the night, the cleaner, the baker, the greengrocer, the café, the bookshop. I thanked God for every single one of them. They were my touchstones. I went faster and faster, so anxious to get home, I was practically running by the time I rounded the corner into Eaton Square. Tears filled my eyes and streamed down my cheeks.

So, it was a miracle I saw it in time: the Ballantine & Company Bentley was parked at my front door. Owen was in the backseat, watching out the window, waiting for me to come home.

I swerved into the shadowy protection of the front staircase of a neighboring town house, and peered out. My God, it was lucky I’d seen him before he saw me. I waited. Shortly, the Bentley purred away and turned the corner. I waited a few more minutes to be certain he was gone, then circled back into the dark mews and let myself into my sleeping building.

T  W  E  N  T  Y  -  S  E  V  E  N

“Knew you’d want a report about how the Winthrop affair went,” Owen’s message came over the speakerphone in my kitchen as I tugged off my clothes, which were completely drenched, and shoved them into the washing machine. “Made contact, not only with him and his daughters, man . . . talk about a couple of bowwows . . .”

“Oh, that’s nice, Owen,” I talked to the machine.

“. . . but also ran into Odessa Niandros.”

I stopped what I was doing. Odessa Niandros could secure our future. She was the sister of the late Princess Arianna, and controlled her estate, which had been estimated at over a billion dollars. The curators of her late sister’s collections were still making their final inventories before Odessa decided on their disposition, whether to sell, donate, or maintain them. A few minutes of face time with Odessa, especially for Owen, was invaluable.

“Tried to come by and tell you in person, but you’re still out on your date or whatever you want to call it. It’s about ten-fifteen. See you at nine. Sweet dreams.”

I’d almost forgotten, we were going to the Panther plant on Saturday morning for a meeting with Gil.

As I’d suspected it would be, based on the sheer volume of merchandise, the Fullerton Haul was worth the aggravation. Sheiglah Fullerton had been generous to herself in her widowhood. I knew she’d bought the jewelry for herself. No Englishman, no matter how much money he had, would ever give his wife such daring or big stones in such contemporary settings.

As the lucre came tumbling out of my pack onto the blue velvet padded bench in my workroom and was hit by the high-intensity lights, I realized I was not looking at the payoff of my career, after all. There were dozens of large, nicely matched colored stones, easily sold, including a few colored diamonds—very rare, expensive, highly prized, and generally the domain of collectors, mistresses, or bored, rich, young couples, such as overnight billionaires or professional athletes—all set in platinum or gold. In spite of their good, not great, quality, from my point of view and for my purposes, none of the pieces was worth keeping intact. They were too commercial and too contemporary. Nothing tempting. Except for one suite: The necklace contained forty, two-and-a-half-carat, emerald-cut, white diamonds—not D Colorless Flawless like my bracelet, or even excellent such as E, F, or G, but nice quality: H, I, J, perfectly acceptable. The stones lay tucked closely, side by side, in the invisible setting technique developed by Van Cleef. It was a work of art, easily recognizable as the handiwork of master jeweler Lucien Bragond; undoubtedly one-of-a-kind. Variously shaped silver-dollar-sized clusters of pale pink diamonds were placed unevenly along the band like exploding fireworks. This was probably a 10-million-dollar piece of jewelry. And there were earrings to match. I apologized to Monsieur Bragond as I popped the stones free into velvet-lined holding trays and slid their settings into the platinum smelter, where they surrendered like meringue dissolving in heavy syrup.

I then quickly removed all the stones from all the other pieces, deposited their settings in one of the smelters—platinum, 18-ct. gold, 24-ct. gold, and white gold—and made an inventory.

By the time I closed it, my safe looked like it belonged at Graff on Old Bond Street.

Just before I turned off the lights, I quickly scanned the day’s security tapes of my flat. Nothing at all until the company limousine pulled up at my front door at nine-fifty. Owen got out and rang my bell. Waited and rang again. He turned toward the car and waved and Michael got out. I shouldn’t have been surprised at what happened next, but I was. Michael jimmied the lock on the front door of my building. Actually, I was shocked. He stood back and let Owen pass and followed him up the stairs to my flat where Owen knocked and rang the bell some more. There is no audio with my system, but it was clear that Michael made an enthusiastic offer to break into my place. Owen told him no. They returned to the car and waited another twenty minutes before leaving.