Hot Art by Joshua Knelman

will leave instructions for you on your phone, in your room. They will include my room number. You will follow those instructions. You will follow those instructions and leave the money at the room that I tell you. There will be a message on your phone in your room.”
    And then he left. I turned back to the clerk. He looked like a kid watching his father leave the dinner table after a fight. I didn’t understand. How could the Organizer have power over the entire Marriott staff? Who was he? Czegledi and I went and had our drink on the patio. I was shaking from adrenaline. Later, on the way to our rooms, we had to pass through the lobby. The clerk approached.
    â€œSir,” he said politely. “Mr. ——— has instructed me to tell you he has left a message on your phone and you are to follow the instructions and deliver the envelope to his room. He wanted to make sure I told you this.”
    I was worried now. I was staying in a hotel that seemed to be completely under the Organizer’s control. What would happen if I didn’t pay? He obviously knew what room I was in. He probably had a key-card to it. It was past midnight. Czegledi looked concerned as well. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “Do you think you should go to your room? He might be waiting for you.”
    â€œI’m going to go to my room right now, grab my stuff, and sleep on your floor,” I said.
    Czegledi agreed. Before I left my room with my bag, I looked at my phone. The message blinker was flashing hypnotically. Czegledi let me into her room. I was so tired I don’t even remember hitting the pillow. The next morning we woke at 5:30 and went straight to the airport, then flew to London, where I stayed on for a week.
    Before we’d said goodbye, I’d asked St. Hilaire about the size of the global black market. “I know in terms of dollar value that it’s the fourth-largest crime, globally,” he said, “but it has remained a mostly invisible problem on the world stage. There isn’t a lot of data out there, so it’s very difficult to get models. What would be especially valuable is an anatomy of an art thief. Not the movie version of the billionaire who steals a Picasso. Just a thief who uses the giant black market to make a living.” As it turns out, there was someone just like that in the United Kingdom, and he wanted to talk.

4.
    THE ART THIEF
    â€œIt’s a marvellous time to be an art thief. Art theft has become one big game.”
PAUL
    P AUL BROKE INTO a house for the first time when he was sixteen years old, in Plymouth, a small city in the English countryside not far from where he was born.
    A different teenage boy had already visited the house, posing as a door-to-door merchant who was trading in junk. The scam was called “knocking” because it began by knocking on a stranger’s door. It was a more sinister version of the encyclopedia-salesman routine—a cold call with malice.
    The whole point was to get inside the house and look around. If possible the knocker would buy something cheap from the family—maybe a few pieces of grimy silverware or an old watch. Once the family had allowed the boy in, he could figure out what he really wanted but could not buy, items too valuable or too prized by the family to sell. Jewellery, cash, antiques.
    Now it was late at night and the first boy was sitting in the car outside the house, waiting for Paul to finish the job. Paul stepped around the back to a window he knew was unlocked. The first boy had provided the intelligence: no alarm system, no dogs. The residents were old and had retired to bed early. It should have been easy. The problem was that Paul was not agile or quiet. In fact, he was surprisingly clumsy. Nothing went according to plan.
    Instead of lowering himself gracefully through the window, he decided to jump. “I was so stupid,” he remembered. The minute Paul landed