Collar Robber by Hillary Bell Locke

in World War II before we got a chance to drop the big one on them. Some crack he’d heard from one of his buddies. After he laid this on his mom, he thought for the third time in his life that she was going to hit him—and the first two times he’d been right.”
    â€œYes,” Meininger said with a knowing grin. “And by now I’ll bet this boy is a congressman from Connecticut and sitting on the Foreign Affairs Committee.”
    â€œActually, he’s a loss-prevention specialist with Transoxana.”
    Meininger spent a couple of seconds putting the pieces together as oh shit slipped over his face and red flushed his pale Teutonic ears. He licked his lips a couple of times and leaned forward earnestly.
    â€œI’m terribly sorry. I certainly hope that I didn’t offend you.”
    â€œNo sweat. Don’t give it another thought.”
    I said that because you didn’t “offend” me, you pissed me off would sidetrack us—something I really wanted to avoid. I’d spent nine hours flying four-and-a-half thousand miles to accomplish something, and I wasn’t going to accomplish a damn thing if our Vienna company liaison spent the rest of our stay looking for bureaucratic cover.
    Looking relieved, Meininger glanced at his watch.
    â€œWe are meeting Nesselrode in not quite two hours. So you’ll have a little time at the hotel to freshen up before I bring him by.”
    Proxy’s ears pricked up at that.
    â€œWe’re meeting him at the hotel instead of Transoxana’s offices?”
    â€œYes. He wants to do it that way.”
    This better be good . Proxy didn’t say that, but her shrug did.
    â€œI’d tell you more if I knew more.” Meininger glanced from Proxy to me and back. “But whatever it is, he said he wants you to hear it from his lips.”

Chapter Twelve
    Jay Davidovich
    â€œWhat if the painting is fake? A forgery?”
    That’s what we’d come to hear from Dany Nesselrode’s own lips. We heard it nestled in a cozy booth in the hotel’s Kaisereine Café—a marvel of intricately carved walnut and subdued lighting that managed to suggest a midnight tryst even at one-thirty in the afternoon.
    Nesselrode had hair the color of India ink, reminding me of the blue-tinged black you see on gun barrels. I made him at five-ten, maybe one-sixty-five. He didn’t have an ounce of fat that I could see so he must have watched his diet like a hawk, but enlarged veins around his nose and under his eyes suggested other indulgences. He was smoking a fat cigar and Proxy was taking it like a big girl, maybe because it smelled like a really good cigar. Just breathing the air gave me a flashback to beer call and after-action parties in Iraq.
    â€œIf it’s a forgery,” Proxy said, “then a number of highly credentialed experts have been badly fooled over a period of decades.”
    â€œArt experts get fooled all the time.” Nesselrode waved the cigar dismissively. “Few will say it out loud, but most people who know what they’re talking about estimate an error rate of ten to twenty percent—and that’s on seven-to-nine-figure art, where the very best experts are being paid top dollar. And don’t get me started on the ‘experts’ who get bribed to come up with the right answer. If doctors were wrong as often as art experts, half of us would be dead.”
    â€œDany has an admirably high level of self-esteem.” Meininger said this in between bites of a glazed cherry torte the size of a discus. “Even when he’s in error, he’s not in doubt.”
    Proxy kept her eyes on Nesselrode.
    â€œIf someone proves the Museum’s painting is fake, the Museum still has a loss, and Transoxana still has a claim to deal with.”
    â€œWhat loss? The Museum will have the painting it has always had. It paid nothing for the thing, so even if it’s worthless the