Total pages in book: 39
Estimated words: 36890 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 184(@200wpm)___ 148(@250wpm)___ 123(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 36890 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 184(@200wpm)___ 148(@250wpm)___ 123(@300wpm)
Both men were devoted to their families, as well as to “The Family” as we referred to ourselves. But they were also ruthless and deadly to those they felt deserved it.
We’d all been close since childhood, which had grown into a deep friendship as adults. But ultimately, I still worked for them. While a fuckup at any normal job would get you fired, if you royally fucked up Family business, you could end up with a bullet in your skull. And choosing a new art authentication specialist I had doubts about would definitely qualify as a royal fuckup if they ended up betraying us.
Although, the unique skills I possessed definitely meant I was less likely to end up swimming with the fishes.
Nic had been the one to convince me to relocate from Paris to Georgia five years ago. I’d moved to Camillia Falls to work with Rafa because The Family’s prominent business in the South, particularly the Georgia and Carolina branches, was my specialty. Art and antiquities.
Although we were French, Charles and I had been born into The Family. Our grandfather Aimé had been best friends with Francisco DeLuca—Nic’s grandfather. Who was also the half brother of Rafa’s grandfather…because it was a typical big, confusing Italian family. Francisco and Aimé had gone to boarding school together, and when Francisco took over as boss, he and Aimé worked together to smuggle art and antiquities in and out of France.
The operation had been passed down to our father, then Charles and I eventually took it over. When I moved to the States, Charles continued to manage the operations in France while I handled things on this end.
I also managed Belladonna Gallery, the largest art gallery in Atlanta, as well as Vellum & Vine—an exclusive, extremely high-end museum. Both were among the many legitimate businesses owned by The Family, although some of their dealings were done in the shadows.
However, those jobs were not the skill that made me the most valuable to The Family. I was an artist. And I was fucking exceptional, which was how I’d become one of the best art forgers in the world. Although that was only speculated about in the smallest circle so I’d been able to stay off the FBI’s radar. And any other law enforcement organization.
In the smuggling game, being able to replace originals with a perfect forgery added more layers to the business. We could boost a shipment of paintings and replace some with replicas before we left them to be recovered by the cops or insurance investigators. Which gave us the option of selling the real piece on the black market without the same amount of heat there would be if the stolen items hadn’t been “recovered.”
Or, as was the case this evening, we had a collector who “discovered” a rare, or rumored to exist, painting. Only our guy existed in every way except being actual flesh and blood.
A couple of months ago, the boss of the Sicilian Mafia—whom the DeLucas stemmed from back in the early 1800s—died. There had always been rumors about a secret art collection, especially since The Family had been linked to several high-profile thefts over the years. The collection existed, but no one outside the organization knew, so the contents could only be speculated upon.
One of the pieces allegedly part of the collection was Caravaggio's Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence. People had no idea that their conjecture just happened to be true.
Nic had called his distant relative, the boss’s son and successor, to convey his sympathies. During his conversation with Fiero DeLuca, they talked about the collection of art. Fiero only wanted to keep a handful of them and asked Nic to handle the sale of the others. They would smuggle some of them out of Italy to be sold in backdoor dealings or put up for public auction as newly discovered, or recovered, pieces.
Fiero intended to keep Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence, but he was aware of my skills and suggested we create a forgery to sell. Since the original would remain in The Family’s private possession, there was less risk of getting caught.
I’d taken a last-minute trip to Italy, where it was easiest to collect the necessary ingredients to create an authentic replica that would stand up to the most intense authentication processes. Then I made the paints and brushes to match the ones Caravaggio would have used, mixed with remnants scraped from art created in the same timeframe so that it would have the same microbial ingredients—like microscopic pollens and other things that would have been in the air and ground in 1609. We’d even used a canvas from the same time period, cleaning off the original painting before I created the forgery.
Then Charles had come to collect the canvas and escort the “newly discovered” piece to the States while I stayed in the shadows and returned home.