The Night Café

“I haven’t really done much of this before. I mean, once or twice, I’ve acted as agent for a buyer who wanted something different from an artist I was showing, but never an artist in August Koon’s price range. I’d love to do more of this, though. Much better than running a gallery.” Rebecca shook her ketchup-red spikes. “All that financial overhead. Long hours. Trying to guess which way the market’s going.”

“Is being a buyer a full-time gig?”

“It can be. Most wealthy buyers prefer to work anonymously through a broker to keep the price down.”

“So this Koon deal is a biggie?”

Rebecca’s right hand seesawed. “Middling big. The purchase price is just over a quarter mil, plus my commission. Normally, the agent charges ten or fifteen percent, but when he called the other day, my buyer offered twenty percent before I’d even had a chance to name a rate.”

Hannah did the math in her head, then whistled. “Fifty grand for a few hours’ work. Nice little business you’ve got going there, Becs.”

“I wish. Believe me, I don’t usually get to play in this big sandbox. That’s why I’m not about to say no to this. Whatever this buyer needs, I’m happy to try to get it for him, even if I’m not crazy about his choices. Who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth?”

“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “Schlepping artwork…it’s not really what I do.”

Rebecca looked embarrassed—or that’s what Hannah thought she was meant to look. Her face did seem to flush, but it didn’t exactly register emotion. “No, I didn’t think it was, really. Although,” she added, “I guess I don’t know exactly what it is you do do. I mean, I know you used to be a cop, and Nora mentioned that you’re overseas a lot now, and that sometimes you do bodyguard work for celebrities. I saw the news after you rescued that kidnapped doctor, too, of course.”

Hannah nodded. “It’s kind of a mixed bag, what I do. Pays the bills, though.” Most of the time, she thought. At the moment, she had a whopping tax bill that she was paying off in installments, the aftermath of the big reward she got for the doctor’s rescue—a reward she didn’t keep in the end, donating it instead to the widow of her partner in that caper. She’d forgotten about the tax angle. Dumb move, but when the IRS dropped the big bill on her, she chose not to pass it on to her partner’s widow and negotiated a payment plan instead. No good deed goes unpunished.

“Would you be free to take a run down to Mexico this week?” Rebecca asked. “It’s a quick in-and-out thing. And all your expenses would be covered, of course.”

Hannah winced. She didn’t like the idea of taking work from family or friends—or even friends of family. It was too hard to negotiate her usual steep fee, especially with someone whose messy divorce too closely echoed her own.

“You could do it in forty-eight hours,” Rebecca added. “My buyer authorized up to ten thousand dollars for courier fees, plus expenses. That includes first-class airfare for you and the painting. He wants it hand-carried on board.”

Whoa. Ten grand. For two days’ work.

“Where in Mexico?”

“Puerto Vallarta. He’s got a home down there. Like I said, one of several. I gather he’s got places in NewYork and London, and…where else? Tel Aviv, I think. The man is not hurting for money, from the sounds of things.”

“Tel Aviv? Who is this guy?”

“His name is Moises Gladding.”

Double whoa. Moises Gladding. Not the first time Hannah had heard that name.

“Moises Gladding is a pretty shady character, Rebecca.”

“You know him?”

“I know of him. He’s an arms dealer. They say he supplies arms to some of the shadiest regimes and insurgency movements on three continents—and sometimes to both sides of the same conflict.”

“Really?”

Hannah frowned. “And Gladding’s been in your gallery? Recently?” Last she’d heard, some Congressional oversight committee had been trying to subpoena him to testify about a reported illegal arms shipment to a right-wing paramilitary group in Venezuela that was trying to overthrow the regime of Hugo Chavez. One of Hannah’s security buddies had told her that somebody, probably some spook out of Langley, was suspected of having given Gladding a heads-up and helped him slip out of the country ahead of the legal notice to appear—which would explain why Mr. Gladding couldn’t carry his own damn painting to Mexico.

“I’m not sure when he was last in the gallery,” Rebecca said. “Like I say, I can’t really place him, and the request to make this purchase for him came by phone.”

Hannah sat back on the patio chair, watching the light dance on the surface of the swimming pool, reflecting on the trees overhead, turning the yard into a magic fairyland. “You sure you want to be doing business with a guy like that, Becs?”

“It’s just a painting. Somebody’s going to get the business, so I don’t see why it shouldn’t be me. But I really need your help. I don’t know who else to ask. I’d carry it down there myself, except I can’t afford to leave the gallery for two days. Please, would you think about it?”

Hannah sighed. Ten grand was a nice little bite out of her tax bill. She really had no business walking away from easy money, especially since her dance card wasn’t exactly full at the moment. At the same time, experience had taught her to trust her gut about certain people, and instinct told her that anything involving a character like Gladding could come back to bite her in the ass.

Still, as Rebecca said, it was just a stupid painting.

“I’ll need to see this painting before I agree to carry it,” Hannah said. “And to supervise the packing of it. No way am I getting on a plane carrying a sealed package I haven’t thoroughly examined with my own eyes.”

Rebecca actually giggled. “Oh, thank you, thank you! Hannah, this is such a huge help to me, you have no idea. You won’t regret it, I promise.”

Lord, Hannah thought. Moises frigging Gladding. I sure hope not.

It was well after nine when Hannah finally got home from her day at Nora’s. She’d taken Gabe home to his father’s first, enduring the weekly gut-wrench of saying goodbye and then watching him walk inside the house with the very pregnant woman who’d taken Hannah’s place in her son’s life.

Her ex, a high-profile criminal defense attorney, made his living helping celebrities avoid the consequences of their bad behavior. Cal was good at his job—very good. It had rewarded him with a gate-guarded mansion off Mulholland Drive, a gorgeous second wife, and the money to convince the courts that he and Christie offered a safer, more stable home environment for their son than Hannah could. The fact that the judge had probably made the right decision didn’t make it any less painful. Or galling.

Pulling into the short driveway that fronted the row of garages next to her building, she hit the opener switch and watched the door rise. Her condo was on a quiet, tree-lined road that ran steeply uphill from Sunset Boulevard. The low brick building, constructed in the nineteen-twenties, had originally housed offices. Sometime during the real estate boom of the eighties, it had been converted to row town houses, but pleasingly so, retaining period details like deep crown moldings, gargoyled pediments and a few interior walls stripped back to showcase the red brick. It was a rare thing in L.A., real brick. Since the tightening of earthquake codes, nobody built with it anymore. The walls of Hannah’s building had been reinforced with rebar during the conversion. Even so, she suspected it would crumble like a house of cards when The Big One hit, but like everyone else in the city, she lived in a state of perpetual denial.

The lights were on in the open garage bay next to hers. Hannah switched off the nearly silent motor of her Prius, grabbed her purse and wandered over to see what was going on at Travis and Ruben’s. The intensely sweet smell of night-blooming jasmine wafted on the warm night air. Over the sound of traffic from nearby Sunset Boulevard, she heard the faint click of moths batting themselves stupid against the streetlight.

Travis Spielman was inside his garage, crouched next to his ten-speed touring bike. The bike, with a baby seat on the back, was leaning against a worktable that ran down the side wall.

“Hey, Trav. What’s up?”

Her neighbor’s curly blond head bobbed up and he smiled. He was dressed in faded jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, washed so often that the black was now a tissue-thin gray. Jerry Garcia’s hairy mug was barely visible on the faded cotton.

“Hey, girlfriend,” he said. “Not much. Just tightening the bolts on Mellie’s seat. We went for a ride today and it was feeling wobbly.”

Mellie was his two-year-old daughter and she loved going for rides, whether on the back of Travis’s bike or in the jogging stroller that Travis’s partner Ruben pushed ahead of himself when he went for a run. The guys said the wind in her hair made her life. Child was obviously a born speed demon, although the cerebral palsy that threatened to lock up her little body left her unable to travel under her own steam.

There were only three units in the converted building. Travis and Ruben had the biggest space, with two large bedrooms and a massive open kitchen and entertaining space. On the other side of them lived a yuppie couple who seemed to work all the time. The couple had been in the building for over a year and neither Hannah nor the guys had seen either the husband or wife more than a couple of times. Their cars, matching black Mercedes sedans, were rarely in their driveway. Ruben said they were CIA assassins who spent all their time abroad carrying out nefarious plots. Ruben had an overactive imagination.

“Didn’t you have Gabe today?” Travis asked.

Hannah nodded. “We went down to my sister’s. My nephew was home for the weekend, so the boys spent the afternoon in the pool.”

She stood in the open doorway watching Travis tighten the bolts that held the baby seat in position. He was a little guy, a couple of inches shorter than Hannah’s five-seven, but what he lacked in height, he made up for in wiry fitness. The Grateful Dead T-shirt bulged around the sleeves as he worked the wrench.

“Great day for a pool,” Travis said. “Don’t ya just love how spring arrives with a bang in this place?”

Travis had grown up in North Dakota, so like Chicago-bred Hannah, he had a real appreciation for Southern California’s nonexistent winters and early springs, even if they did they miss fall colors and the sparkle of snow at Christmas.

“For sure.” Hannah pushed off the Jeep and sorted the keys on her chain, looking for her front door key. As she did, a thought occurred to her. “Hey, Trav, you ever hear of Moises Gladding?”

“The arms dealer?”

“Yeah. Wasn’t he under indictment for something a while back?”