The Clause Read Free Page A

their cars, their suits, their wives, and their wives’ flashy couture jewelry.
    You could give me a ring of keys to Martha’s Vineyard mansions, and I’d hand it right back. The people who are used to being rich buy paintings and art because good taste in their circle is valued over cash and flash. I wouldn’t know what to do with a hot Picasso. Frankly, I think I’d be too afraid to get caught with it and burn it. The great thing about jewelry is that most of it isn’t unique; there’s more than one of a kind and they aren’t numbered or anything, not the Fifth Avenue stuff. It’s also small, easy to fence and re-sell.
    I was talking to the Excelsior’s super, Mikos, back in May. We were in the lobby next to the mailboxes, making chit chat, when this hot brunette with collagen lips and unnaturally high cheekbones walked through the front door. She pointed her tits at Mikos and held out her fluffy, little rat dog. Her accent sounded Slavic, and she said, “Please to hold Brane.”
    Mikos took the dog, his eyes on her cleavage. That’s where my eyes were, too, but not on her tits. My focus was the Tiffany “Jazz” diamond and platinum necklace set. Her finger sported a big rock there, too, but I couldn’t make out the brand. On her ears were Tiffany drop pendant earrings. About fifty grand retail was in just the necklace and earrings.
    The brunette opened a mailbox, pulled out a pile of fliers, took her dog, and went toward the elevators, her butt squeezed tight into a white skirt.
    I jerked a thumb at her. “Whossat?”
    “Idi Raykovic, on eleven, hot stuff.”
    That was her, that was the one Roberto told me about, and that’s why I was snooping around. Roberto came to me with targets now and again.
    “I’d do her screens for free. She mobbed up with the Russians?” That was pertinent. You ripped off the Russians, and you had to be extra careful. Roberto never told me those kinds of details. That stuff I had to figure out for myself.
    “Nah. Macedonian, I think. Her husband is Serbian. One of these Gold Coast developers.”
    I didn’t think anything of that at the time. Sure, Serbians could be rat-bastards, but it didn’t necessarily follow that they were part of a ruthless international gem-theft ring.
    I noted Idi’s mailbox number: 11M.
    From there the operation was pretty simple. Google her name at that address, find out more about her, get the phone number, check out her Facebook page, watch the place to see when she went out, and check on exactly how spark-worthy she was. I spied different baubles, too, not a lot of repeats. Her husband, Tito the real estate developer, took her out every Saturday night like clockwork. So after months of surveillance either by me or Trudy or both of us, we waited by the garage and watched Tito guide his Jag up the boulevard, the silhouette of Idi’s giant teased hair next to him.
    There was a functional pay phone across the street, and we used it to ring their apartment. No answer. Nobody home.
    We climbed over a low wall at the edge of the cliff and around the side of the swimming-pool enclosure on a rocky ledge. Just where the ledge gave out, I boosted Trudy to the top of the wall. On the other side there was a dark stairwell that led down into the pool’s pump room. She surveyed the surroundings, then gave me a hand up. We both wore the super-grip gloves, great for climbing walls and ropes. At the bottom of the stairwell, we both pulled pry bars from our packs and in unison levered the lock away from the jamb and pushed in.
    Through a connecting basement room, we made our way to a stairwell. In a high-rise like that, the stairwells were only used as fire exits, except maybe now and again by security or maintenance. Up we went, to the eleventh floor.
    Part of what took us so long to initiate this operation was that Roberto said we had to wait until he gave us the go-ahead. Timing was critical, and he figured July sometime. The other part was that we were