An odd thing tends to happen on the cusp of winter. Ask any better-than-average thief and he’ll tell you that the best time to pull a con is when the weather should be changing—but isn’t. People feel lucky. Marks get careless. They look at the sky and know the snow is up there somewhere, and so they think about how they’ve already cheated Mother Nature. Perhaps they could get away with much, much more.
If Kat had any doubt about this theory, all she had to do was glance around Madison Square Park as she and Hale strolled down Fifth Avenue. The sun was warm but the wind was cool, and children played without their hats and scarves. Nannies chatted beside expensive strollers, while businesspeople took the long way home. And that was when she saw him.
Kat would not have described him as handsome. She’d been raised by Bobby Bishop, after all, and had spent entirely too much time around Hale. Handsome isn’t a synonym for attractive; and while the man walking through the square wasn’t the former, he certainly was the latter.
His hair, for example, was slick and gelled. His suit was the kind of expensive that would be out of style far too soon, and his watch was the only thing about him that was as shiny as his teeth. And yet, for the purposes of Kat’s world, he was—put simply—perfect.
“Oh boy,” Kat heard herself mutter as the man traipsed forward, his gaze glued to his cell phone, and ran right into a bumbling old man in a long trench coat and mismatched socks.
“Oh boy,” Hale echoed.
“Are you okay?” Kat overheard the slick man ask. The old man nodded but gripped the lapels of the other man’s expensive suit, steadying himself.
As the two men parted ways, one stopped after only a single step. But the perfect man—the perfect mark—kept walking. He was well out of earshot by the time Kat waved at the rumpled vagrant and said, “Hello, Uncle Eddie.”
If Kat had stayed at Colgan long enough, a teacher might have eventually told her what her family had been saying for generations: It’s okay to break the rules, but only sometimes, and only if you know them very, very well. So maybe that was why, among the world’s great thieves, Uncle Eddie and Uncle Eddie alone was allowed the luxury of a permanent address.
Stepping inside the old Brooklyn brownstone, Kat felt the sun disappear behind a heavy wooden door, blocking out a neighborhood that had spent the last sixty years morphing from trendy to shady and back again. But inside, nothing ever changed. The hallway was always dim. The air always smelled like the Old Country, or what she’d been told the Old Country smelled like: cabbage and carrots and things simmering for long hours over slow heat in cast-iron pots that would outlive them all.
It was, in a word, home, and yet Kat didn’t dare say so.
Uncle Eddie shuffled down the narrow hallway, stopping only long enough to pull the slick man’s wallet from his pocket and toss it onto a pile of nearly identical loot that sat unopened. Forgotten.
“You’ve been keeping busy.” Kat chose one of the wallets and thumbed through the contents: one I.D., four credit cards, and nine hundred dollars in cash that hadn’t been touched. “Uncle Eddie, there’s a lot of money in—”
“Take off your shoes if you’re coming in,” her great-uncle barked as he continued down the narrow hall. Hale kicked off his Italian loafers, but Kat was already hurrying behind her uncle, trailing him into the heart of the house.
“You’re picking pockets?” Kat asked once they reached the kitchen.
Her uncle stood quietly at the ancient stove that dominated the far wall.
“Tell me you’re being careful,” Kat went on. “It’s not like the old days, Uncle Eddie. Now every street corner has an ATM, and every ATM has a camera, and—”
But she might as well have been speaking to a deaf man. Uncle Eddie pulled two porcelain bowls from the shelf above the stove and began ladling soup. He handed one bowl to Hale and one to Kat and pointed them toward a long wooden table surrounded by mismatched chairs. Hale sat and ate as if he hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks, but Kat stayed standing.
“It’s a different world, Uncle Eddie. I just don’t want you to get into trouble.”
Just then, Hale’s spoon scraped the bottom of his bowl. There was no hiding the dismay in his voice as he asked, “Uncle Eddie, why is the seal of the British Royal Family on your dishes?”
Her uncle’s voice was gruff, impatient. “Because that’s who I was with when I stole them.”
As Kat held the bowl in her hands, she couldn’t help but realize it was hot—in a lot of ways. She couldn’t help but see Uncle Eddie as Hale saw him—not as an old man, but as the old man.
“We practice a very old art, Katarina.” Her uncle paused long enough to toss Hale’s wallet toward him. “It is kept alive not by blood”—another pause as Uncle Eddie dropped Kat’s passport onto the counter next to a loaf of day-old bread— “but by practice.”
The old man turned away from his speechless niece and the boy she had brought home. “I suppose you were absent the day they taught that at the Colgan School.”
Kat’s coat suddenly felt too heavy as she stood there, remembering that she couldn’t take the heat and that was why she’d gotten out of the kitchen. She sat down at the table, knowing that now she was back in.
There were a lot of things that could have happened next. Uncle Eddie might have commented that the boy Kat had brought home dressed far better than the stray her mother had chosen. Hale might have worked up the courage to finally ask Uncle Eddie the story behind the fake Rembrandt that hung above the hearth. Kat might have admitted that the food services department at Colgan had nothing on her uncle’s cooking. But when the back door slammed open, everyone’s attention was on the two boys who hurried in, struggling to restrain the largest, shaggiest dog that Kat had ever seen.
“Uncle Eddie, we’re back!” The smaller boy tightened his grip on the dog’s collar. “They were out of Dalmatians, but we got a . . .” He looked up. “Hey, Kat’s here! With Hale!” Hamish Bagshaw was slightly shorter and stockier than his older brother, but otherwise, the ruddy English boys could have passed for twins. The dog lurched, and Hamish hardly noticed. “Hey, Kat, I thought you were at . . .”
When he trailed off, Kat told herself it was the heat from the stove that was making her face red. She focused on breathing in the fresh air from the open door, and swore she didn’t care what anyone thought. Still, she was relieved to hear Hale ask, “So, Angus, how’s the bum?”
Her relief quickly faded when Angus started unbuttoning his pants. “Good as new. German docs fixed me right up. You wanna see the scar?”
“No!” Kat said, but what she thought was: They were in Germany?