The Night Café

“Smith, who has been both a diplomat and an intelligence agent, convincingly conveys what life is like on the streets and sands of Iraq in her compelling new thriller.”

—Publishers Weekly on Slim to None

“Smith’s experience as an international diplomat and intelligence analyst lends credibility to this first-rate political thriller…exciting and intelligent.”

—Booklist on Deadly Grace

“The publisher compares Smith to John Grisham…Smith’s a better prose stylist.”

—Publishers Weekly on Random Acts

“Smith’s latest is a graceful, compellingly written thriller…[The] gloriously intricate plot is top-notch.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Innocents Club

“Sharp characterization and a tightly focused time frame…give this intrigue a spell-binding tone of immediacy.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Best of Enemies

Taylor Smith

The night Café

This one goes out with love and thanks to The Plot Queen, Linda McFadden—ally, muse and coconspirator. Neither time nor distance can squelch a great friendship.

It’s been a decade and a half (hard to believe) that I’ve been working with the wonderful people of MIRA Books, and I feel as lucky today as I did fifteen years ago when they offered to publish my first book. My deepest thanks to Miranda Stecyk, my editor, with whom it’s a joy to work—and to hang out, on those happy occasions where we find ourselves in the same city.

My family, near and far, is unfailingly supportive. Love and thanks especially to my amazing husband, Richard, and our beautiful, brilliant and all-grown-up daughters (how is that possible?), Anna and Kate.

I am thinking of frankly accepting my role as madman.

—Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother,

Theo, March 24, 1889

Just because I am always bowed down under this difficulty of paying my landlord, I made up my mind to take it gaily. I swore at the said landlord, who after all isn’t a bad fellow, and told him that to revenge myself for paying him so much money for nothing, I would paint the whole of his rotten shanty so as to repay myself.

—Vincent van Gogh

Letter to his brother Theo

Arles, 8 September, 1888

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Prologue

Los Angeles

January 1

“People remember pain. They’ve done studies. You want to make a point with a person and make it stick, hurt ’em. Works every time.”

Afterward, before she stopped talking altogether, volunteer museum guide Dorrie Schaeffer kept repeating over and over what one of the intruders had said. She was in shock, of course, what the shrinks call posttraumatic stress disorder. But there was disbelief in her quavering voice, too—incredulity at the monstrous callousness of the man.

It wasn’t that Dorrie was naive about the potential for human cruelty. You don’t get through seventy-six years without witnessing some real wickedness. But this brutality at the Arlen Hunter Museum came out of nowhere.

The sun had gone down after a showery New Year’s Day, and Santa Monica Boulevard twinkled under holiday lights still strung on buildings and over the roadway. There’d been long, snaking queues outside the museum since opening, patrons anxious for one last chance to see the Madness & the Masterpiece exhibit, the high point of the Arlen Hunter’s fall season.

When the trouble started, Dorrie should have been far away. The crowds had gone home, the doors were locked. For the next twelve hours, a skeleton security staff would have the treasure to themselves, enjoying the collected masterpieces for a few hours more before the group was split up and the borrowed art returned to its owners.

Dorrie was in the underground parking lot, hurrying to get home to Wuthering Heights on Masterpiece Theatre. But as she was unlocking her car door, she remembered the van Gogh print she’d bought for a niece who was coming by the next day. Her brother’s daughter never failed to remember her birthday or to include her in family holiday celebrations. Knowing how much Renata loved van Gogh, Dorrie had bought her a beautiful lithographic reproduction of The Night Café, signature piece of the Madness & the Masterpiece show. Except, like a nitwit, she’d left it in her locker.

Bemoaning her absentmindedness, she reentered the building, backtracking toward the staff room located off the south gallery. She was in the hall just outside that gallery when she heard a shout. She froze at the sight of two men near the end of the gallery, their backs to her. Bert Fernandez, an old night guard, was on his knees facing her, although the intruders had his full attention. A brutal kick from one of them suddenly sent him sprawling, blood spurting from his mouth.

Luck found Dorrie standing next to an unlocked custodian’s cupboard and fear drove her inside. Her entire body shaking, she watched through a crack between the frame and the door as a third man, black-hooded like the others, rounded the corner from the west hall, shoving another security guard ahead of him.

There was no doubt this last man was in charge. He looked young to Dorrie, his body lithe, yet he seemed to harbor a sense of his own intellectual superiority and to feel a mission to instruct his colleagues on the efficacy of torment to ensure compliance. There was no other explanation for the violence. From what Dorrie could see, neither security guard offered any real resistance.

“People remember pain,” the leader said. “A bullet to the brain shuts ’em up, of course, but what if you need a pass code or something later? Bloody corpse on the floor’s not gonna do you much good.”

And so they used fists that flashed with metallic gleam—brass knuckles. Dorrie watched, stunned and terrified by the casual brutality. The younger guard, just a boy, really, tried to protest, but the leader swung a short wooden bat and the lad’s knee shattered like a teacup. Dorrie clamped her hands over her mouth as he crumpled, screaming, to the floor. Bert tried to drag himself over to help him and was rewarded with an equally vicious clout with the stick.

The leader bent down next to Bert, murmuring in a voice too quiet for Dorrie to hear. The old guard raised a shaking hand and pointed around the corner.

“Wait here,” the leader told one of the others. “If they move, shoot them.” He cocked a thumb at the other intruder and the two disappeared into the east wing.

Dorrie’s body shook like a thing possessed. The young security guards lay on the marble-tiled floor, crying and writhing with pain, his arms wrapped around his battered leg, while old Bert, face bloodied and swollen, glared at the thug standing guard over them.

Time seemed to stand still. Later, Dorrie couldn’t say how long it took until the other two thieves returned carrying the one item they had obviously come for—the van Gogh.

As the guidebook for Madness & the Masterpiece reminded visitors, Plato had called creativity “divine madness, a gift from the gods.” Psychobabble in the accompanying text discussed how great angst fed the vision needed to produce great art.

That “gift from the gods” was a mixed blessing, Dorrie had told her “goslings,” the chattering patrons who pattered along behind on her guided tours of the galleries. The celebrated artists represented in the show—Jackson Pollock, William Blake, Edvard Munch, Georgia O’Keeffe and a dozen or so others—had all suffered from severe, debilitating depression or other psychological disabilities. And Vincent van Gogh, of course. No exhibit linking art, anguish and madness could possible ignore the gaunt, ear-slashed Dutchman. Most of these artists, Dorrie told the goslings, had been institutionalized at some point in their lives. Several, like Vincent, had committed suicide.

It was Vincent’s The Night Café that was featured on posters and banners promoting the exhibit. The painting showed a nighttime scene in a harshly lit bar peopled by bereft-looking patrons who seemed to have nowhere else to go. Vincent had lived over the café during his time in the south of France, when his psyche finally began to unravel. Not long after creating this piece, he sliced off a piece of his ear and presented it to a prostitute.

The thieves’ leader wrapped the painting in a sheet now, knotting the corners. Then he turned to his men.

“Okay, we’re done here now. Finish them.”

Dorrie watched, horrified, as one of the men fired into the head of the old security guard. The explosion echoed through the marble halls and Bert crumpled in a pool of blood. The other intruder hesitated long enough for the boy to start scrabbling away, dragging his bloody leg across the floor. The leader snapped a command. Then, eyes flashing contempt, he grabbed the gun, strode over to the boy and took him out with a quick tap of the trigger.

Tears coursing down her cheeks, Dorrie watched the intruders stroll out toward the lobby. A moment later she heard the opening and closing of the stairwell door leading down to the parking lot.

Then there was only silence.

“People remember pain.”

Afterward, the police kept pressing Dorrie to remember more. Some tiny detail, they said, could be the key to bringing the security guards’ killer to justice. Try, they insisted. But Dorrie didn’t want to remember. She wanted to forget it, all of it.

Eventually she stopped answering their questions. Clammed up when the LAPD Robbery/Homicide detective in charge of the investigation pressed her for more details. Refused to speak to the gray-suited agents from the FBI’s art theft division who showed up at her door. Even snapped at the kindhearted elderly neighbor who stopped by her home to ask how she was doing.

God, how Dorrie wanted them all to just go away. She became detached and unapproachable. Her sister in Minneapolis said she stopped returning phone calls. Her L.A.-based niece left reluctantly on a business trip, determined to call in professional help if her aunt didn’t seem any better by the time she got back.

Except by then it was too late.

The manager at the local Vons supermarket down the road from the seniors complex where Dorrie lived said she started phoning in her meager food orders. The delivery boy said she left her payment in an envelope under the doormat and made him leave the bags on the threshold. The only time she scuttled outside was to snatch the mail when it started overflowing her curbside box. A neighbor who saw her out there one day reported that Dorrie’s tidy brown helmet of curls had grown lank, frizzled and gray at the roots. Her normally pin-neat clothes hung rumpled and loose on a frame that seemed to have turned spindly and frail overnight.

One day the postal carrier found bills and junk mail spilling out of her box. When he knocked on her front door, he hoped she’d simply forgotten to arrange a vacation hold, but the dread in his gut told a different story. When no one answered, instinct made him call the police.

It was the cops’ experienced noses that picked up the faint, sweet odor seeping from the cracks around the barred doors and windows. Hearts heavy, dreading what they knew they were going to find, they jimmied the locks, ripped the chain bolt from the wall and broke in.

Dorrie Schaeffer had been dead about a week. Sleeping pills, the medical examiner’s report said. She’d swallowed enough to euthanize a horse.

People remember pain…

Dorrie Schaeffer had remembered. And like Vincent, when the agony became too much to bear, she had put an end to her suffering.

One

Orange County, California

Sunday, April 16

Hannah Nicks, loser. Black sheep. She whose bizarre line of work is not really suitable dinner-table conversation.

The accusations ran on a loop through Hannah’s brain during these family get-togethers. How could anyone not feel inadequate faced with the perfection that was her sister Nora?

Sliding onto a tall stool, Hannah tucked her unruly dark hair behind her ears and helped herself to a homemade scone from the linen-lined basket on the kitchen island.

The island was a granite oasis in a sea of domestic perfection. Nora’s home in the upscale seafront community of Corona del Mar was right out of Architectural Digest. Her kitchen was a Tuscan-inspired designer’s vision of terra-cotta and honey tones, run through with a grapevine motif. Outside the mullioned French doors that covered the entire west side of the house, the view was of tented gazebo, patio and pool, the blue-gray Pacific Ocean beyond stretching to the horizon.

Selecting a jar from a carousel in front of her, Hannah spread preserves on the scone. She took a bite, then leaned back and sighed over the warm, flaky pastry. “Oh, Lord, these are bliss.”

Nora, standing on the other side of the island, looked over and smiled. “Those are the last of the raspberries the kids and I picked at the cottage last summer.” Her husband’s family had a three-thousand-square-foot post-and-beam house in Ogunquit, Maine, where the California Quinns spent part of each summer. It was a “cottage” like the Hope Diamond was a bauble.

Hannah’s travel destinations tended to be war zones, where accommodations were spartan, at best. Her own home, a condominium in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, was a replacement for the only house she’d ever owned—well, not owned, exactly, given the size of the mortgage, but it had been a real house, an old Craftsman bungalow in Los Feliz. Her ex had signed the property over to her in the divorce but sadly, before she got around to renovating the place, it had been blown up by Russian gangsters intent on her demise.

In addition to a condo and a broken marriage, Hannah was the proud possessor of a son she saw only intermittently and a bank balance that constantly hovered near the red zone. She, needless to say, was not the daughter their mom bragged about to the other white-haired ladies in her Tuesday-Thursday Aquasize classes. Nora, oldest child of immigrant parents, was the American Dream personified. For Hannah, a major achievement would be getting through a week without being shot at, maimed or killed.

She spooned another dollop of raspberry jam onto the scone. “Can I just say for the record that these are going to be the death of me?” She popped it into her mouth. “Want me to slather one for you?” she mumbled.

“No, I’m good. Thanks so much for that view, though.”

Hannah opened wide. “Bwah-ha-ha.”

Nora rolled her eyes. “Very mature.”

Hannah grinned. She couldn’t help it. Put her in a room with Nora and she was ten all over again.

On first encounter, Nora was often mistaken for Hannah’s better-groomed twin. No one ever guessed that dark-eyed, glossy-haired Nora was a dozen years older than the misfit baby of the Demetrious clan. Of course, in affluent Orange County, the trickery of Botox and the surgeon’s knife kept a lot of women looking preternaturally young. In Nora’s case, though, the only magician at work was Mother Nature herself. At forty-two, she was an elegant beauty, grace personified. She knew the names of china patterns, the art of Japanese flower arranging and how to put together a gourmet dinner for twenty on a few hours’ notice.

Hannah knew aliases and suspected hideouts for a dozen of the world’s worst terrorists, the art of covert message drops, and how to dismantle and reassemble an M-16 assault rifle in sixty seconds flat. Nora invariably put others at ease. Hannah, who leapt into high alert at the snick of every opening door and scrutinized every stranger for signs of lethal intent, didn’t even know how to put herself at ease.

As if grace, brains and beauty weren’t enough, there was also Nora’s gorgeous, castlelike home overlooking the Pacific Ocean, her doting, successful husband, Neal, and their two picture-perfect kids, Nolan and Natalie. (Nora, Neal, Nolan, Natalie—they were big on alliteration, the Quinns. Even the dogs, golden retrievers with sleek Lady Clairol coats, were called Nugget and Noodle.) Nora’s entire, flawless life was a page out of frigging Martha Stewart Living.

Hannah, at thirty, was on her own but already on her second career, one she’d taken up after eight years as an L.A. cop. Switching from police work to the world of private security contractors was supposed to have been a lucrative career move, one she’d hoped would put her in a better financial position to regain custody of her son from her wealthy ex and his current squeeze. It hadn’t worked out that way.

She finished her scone, then glanced down and froze. On her wrist, a red drop glistened under the glow of the pendant lights hanging over the island. Hannah could almost feel the pain of the gash, even though her rational mind said it was just a dollop of raspberry. Her memory flashed on gunfire in a dark desert night. On a young man’s bleeding head cradled in her lap. On his life slipping away before her eyes.

“Here, use this.” Nora reached across the island.

Startled by the sudden movement, Hannah shoved back, the legs of her bar stool screeching on the travertine floor.

“Hannah?” Nora’s brow creased with the worried look she often took on when her baby sister was around. She indicated the blue gingham napkin in her hand. “It’s okay. I was just trying to help.”

Hannah gave her best Alfred E. Neuman dopey grin. Bringing her wrist to her lips, she licked away the sweet drop of jam, but when Nora sighed, she relented and took the napkin, dutifully blotting her wrist dry. She might have resented the fact that Nora still treated her like the awkward child she used to be, except she knew her sister couldn’t help feeling the heavy responsibility of serving as maternal figure in Hannah’s life.

They had an actual mother, mind you. Ida Demetrious—“Nana” to her three grandchildren—was snapping green beans over at Nora’s antique pine trestle table this very minute. Nevertheless, Nora had been overheard on more than one occasion to say she’d “raised Hannah.” Not altogether accurate. Not something you’d think she’d want to brag about, either, all things considered.

It was true that at seventeen, Hannah had been sent from Chicago to live with the Quinns in Orange County. It was about the time that their father, Takis Demetrious, began showing signs of the Alzheimer’s that would eventually strip him of his mind, his great physical strength and finally his life. Poor Nana. A sick husband and a rebellious teenage daughter were a tough hand to be dealt, especially when she was also trying to keep their import company afloat in those early days when Takis’s intermittent confusion, intransigence and paranoia were threatening to run the family’s once-thriving company into the ground. Something had to give and, in the end, that something was Hannah.

Nora’s kids had been four and seven at the time. Hannah could give Nora a hand, the thinking went, and maybe if she escaped Takis’s unpredictable rages, she might be less inclined to act out. But she arrived at Newport Beach High School carrying a lumber-sized chip on her shoulder. That, and shyness that came across as aloofness, pretty much guaranteed her the caption of “Most Inscrutable” in her senior yearbook photo. She hadn’t set out to be antisocial, but even the Porsches and BMWs in the student parking lot seemed to be sneering at the hopelessly uncool Midwestern import with the wild hair and the uneasy dark eyes. She stayed with Neal and Nora for two years before moving into a dorm at UCLA. By February of her freshman year, she was pregnant. She dropped out of college and went to work as an L.A. Sheriff’s Department dispatcher so that her hastily married hubby could finish law school.

Pathetic—which only made Hannah wonder why Nora would take the rap for raising her.

“Yee-haw!”

Home on spring break from Stanford, Nolan galloped into the sprawling kitchen, his surfboard-scaled flip-flops slapping the floor. Close behind came ten-year-old Gabe, grinning as he aped his big cousin’s galumphing stride.

“Last one in is a horse’s…um—” Nolan paused, glancing at his mom “—patootie!”

Hannah raised a hand, traffic-cop style. “Hold it! Gabriel Nicks, don’t even think of going out there before I get sunscreen on you.”

The boys’ bodies were winter-pale but spring in Southern California meant the beginning of pool season, and this particular Sunday had turned out to be a scorcher. The thermometer on the blue-and-white striped cabana outside hovered in the mid-eighties. Neal was out there in shorts and T-shirt, stretched on one of the plush chaise longues, working the Sunday crossword, while Natalie was at the beach with a friend. With the pool heated to a balmy eighty-eight degrees, even the adults might venture in, if only for a toe-dabble.

Gabe moaned. “Ah, Mom, it’s only April. I’m not gonna burn. Besides, I’m tough like you. I can handle anything.”

Hannah couldn’t miss the exchange of another of those “what are we going to do about Hannah?” looks between Nora and their mother. Hers wasn’t the sort of family where fearlessness in dark alleys was considered a desirable trait.

“Ultraviolet rays don’t read calendars,” she said, restraining her wriggling son with one hand while she snagged the sunscreen off the kitchen counter with her other.

“Yeah, that’s a fact, bro,” Nolan said, turning back.

Gabe immediately stopped squirming. His mother might be a worrywart, but if Nolan, bless his heart, said something was so, then it was gospel.

“You slather up, too,” Nora said over her shoulder.

The two boys exchanged eye-rolling grins, but Nolan took the plastic squeeze bottle from Hannah and went to work on himself.

At the granite island, Nora went back to spreading phyllo dough for the baklava she was preparing for dessert. Sunday dinners were a big deal at the Quinns’. Today, they would be eight—Nora and her gang; Hannah and Gabe; Nana Demetrious, who’d moved out to Orange County after Takis died; plus Nora’s former college roommate. That wasn’t many. Nora often fed what seemed like half the lonely hearts in Southern California, including single guys invited for the express purpose of meeting her unattached sister—and didn’t Hannah just love being set up like that without her knowledge? Would there ever come a day when she would no longer be the official family fix-it project?

Prague, the Czech Republic

The straight razor gleamed in the morning sun as it passed it back and forth, back and forth over the brown leather strop hooked to a towel ring embedded in one of the blue-and-white ceramic wall tiles. Former Detective Superintendent William Teagarden of Scotland Yard always fell into a reverie as he went about his morning toilette. What he liked about the straight razor was that its handling couldn’t be rushed. The slow rhythm of the archaic shaving routine—blade on strop, brush in bowl, steel on whiskers—forced him to slow his pace, order his mind and think.