Ch 26

Across the continent, the man known as Tony sat back on his heels, surveying his handiwork for the day. He loved seeing the crisp, hard line of a well-manicured lawn. He had been caretaker of this beautiful estate since the late 1980's. He had never met the owner, in fact, nobody on the staff ever had. He didn't care. He took great pride in beauty. Any sort of beauty.

He slowly walked to the carriage house on the property, his home. He was the only live-in staff on the property. He liked that too. Solitude. Even though Santa Barbara was a bustling metropolis full of the rich and famous, he preferred the throngs to remain on the outside of the gate. He hoped now that the owner had died this estate would remain untouched. He had heard they had set up a foundation to manage the estate now that she was gone, but the family was roiled in legal battles over her will. It could take years, decades to decide what was to happen to his beloved Bellaguardo. In a way, he felt like he owned the place. Sure, staff came and went every single day, and he liked the feeling of making all the decisions on what happened to the grounds there, but he had a deeper secret for wanting nothing to change. An expensive secret. A secret, if it came out, would sent him to jail for the rest of his life. That's why he had paid the underbelly of Boston to keep their ears out for him. If anything were to reach their ears, they were to take care of it-immediately.

He began walking back to the main house to close it up for the night. He hadn't heard anything in a few weeks, which was promising. No news was good news, after all. However, a month or two earlier, he had gotten word from one of the worst kingpins in Boston that the gallery curator, who was set to retire, was rekindling her desire to find the missing works. Like hell she is, not if I can stop it, he had thought when he was told. He had put in an order to scare away, or buy off the pursuers; he didn't care which. Most cops were living on government salaries and were happy to take a payout to stay silent. The curator however, had seemingly, hired teenagers. That didn't make any sense. Upon research, they appeared to be filthy rich teenagers with no adult supervision. I don't want to know too much more, he had thought, but if they start snooping around anymore, kill them he had instructed.

He walked through the main floor of the estate and made his way to the grand curved staircase in the foyer. At the second floor, he made his way around the twisting passages to the back of the estate, where the servant's quarters were. He pushed a knot of wood and a bookcase slid forward. He silently entered the dark room, closing the door behind him. He had to see his baby, his magnum opus, his reason for living, his master piece.

He pushed a button on the wall and the ancient electrical lighting lit a single bulb over a rough canvas tacked to the wall. He knew it needed re-stretching and a proper frame, but that would never happen without attracting suspicion. So, he admired the art he had loved from his youth when he had been a student and written his masters thesis about this painting. He had sat in front of it in the lone chair at the gallery and admired it for years before he got enough capital to hire thieves to make it his own. They had botched the job, badly. They had hacked the art and it would never be the same again, but it was his. It was too dangerous to try and sell the other pieces they thieves had taken. He had only instructed them to steal the Rembrandts and the Vermeer, the other pieces should have never been taken, but he was grateful they had taken them, it drew suspicion away from himself. Nobody would ever assume all 13 pieces were still together all these years later.

He ran a tender hand down the side of the work. Nobody would ever admire Vermeer the way he would. He had spent his entire fortune to pay the thieves to own it. He'd had to declare bankruptcy and change his name, but thanks to a generous woman who had more money than God, he was able to recoup his losses and then even be hired on as head of estate maintenance for her California mansion. How easy it had all been. Use his skill as an art historian to win the graces of an old woman, visit her in the hospital and express a shared interest in the art she so loved, and boom, she had written him a check for 5 million dollars to help him start a collection for the great city of Tulsa, at least, that's what he told her he was doing. Never would she have imagined that her millions helped him start a new life, and the art he stole was right under her nose this whole time. Good investments and a strong stock market had grown his 5 million into nearly half a billion dollars now. He didn't need to work as maintenance staff, but it kept him close to his collection.

Antonio Marcellius turned off the light and locked the hidden room away for another month when he would dare to look at his precious collection once more.