in fact… from an anguished art dealer in Vancouver, where it was 3:45 a.m., some art fair impresario from Art Basel in Switzerland, where it was 12:45 p.m., an auction house in Tokyo, where it was a quarter of eight at night, and an anguished—no, panicked-to-the-point-of-screaming—private collector in Wellington, New Zealand, where it was just a few minutes from tomorrow, and every sort of news organization, including British, French, German, Italian, and Japanese television, quite in addition to every sort of old, cable, and inter network in America. CBS had a camera crew waiting in the lobby downstairs—at 6:45 a.m.!
John Smith’s story had just broken. The Herald had published it online at six o’clock last night to establish priority—i.e., a scoop. Six hours later it came out in the newspaper’s first edition beneath two words in capital letters, two inches high and bold and black as a tabloid’s and stretching all the way across the front page:
DEADLY COINCIDENCE
Every hotshot in the Chicago Loop Syndicate who was desperate to be “where things are happening” had boarded one of the Loop’s three Falcon jets as soon as the story broke online and had taken off for Miami. Where things were happening was in the office of the Herald’s editor in chief, Edward T. Topping IV. In there right now were eight—or was it nine!—Loop executives, including the CEO, Puggy Knobloch, plus Ed himself, Ira Cutler, and Adlai desPortes, the Herald’s new publisher. For some reason the city editor, Stan Friedman, and John Smith, the man of the hour, had stepped out for a moment. The most intoxicating chemical known to man—adrenaline—was pumping through the room in waves waves waves waves, making the Loop troupe feel they had inside-the-belly box seats for one of the biggest stories of the twenty-first century: A new $220 million art museum, the anchor of a huge metropolitan cultural complex, is named for a Russian “oligarch” following his extraordinary gift of “seventy million dollars’ ” worth of paintings. Master masons have long since carved his name in marble over the entrance—THE KOROLYOV MUSEUM OF ART—and now, look at us at this moment, here in this office. We are the maximum leaders. It is our journalists who have just exposed this great “donor” as a fraud.
Decibels above the hubbub and the buzz of any place where things are happening, Ed could hear Puggy Knobloch’s loud, ripe honk honking out, “Haaaghh—the old lady thinks ‘the Environment’ is the name of a government agency!?” Haaaghh! was Puggy’s laugh. It was like a bark. It drowned out every other sound—for about half a second—as if to say, “You think that’s funny? Okay, here’s your reward: Haaaghh!”
Oh, the adrenaline pumped pumped pumped!
Another voice rose above the rumble and the roar. Attorney Ira Cutler’s. You couldn’t miss it, not that voice. It was like the whine of a metal lathe. He was holding up the newspaper, with its gigantic DEADLY COINCIDENCE, before the eyeballs of Puggy Knobloch.
“Here! Read the lead!” said Ira Cutler. “Read the first two paragraphs.”
He tried to hand the newspaper to Knobloch, but Knobloch raised his big meaty hands, palms outward, to reject it. He looked offended. “You think I haven’t read it?”—in a tone that said, <<>>
But that didn’t stop Cutler for a second. He had immobilized the maximum leader with his laser stare and his ceaseless, insistent, rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of words. He jerked the newspaper back and said, “Here! I’ll read it for you.
“ ‘Deadly Coincidence,’ it says, and right below that, ‘By Dusk, He Claims He Forged Museum’s Treasures. By Dawn—He’s Dead’… and then the byline, ‘By John Smith.’ And then it says, ‘Just hours after Wynwood artist Igor Drukovich called the Herald claiming he forged the estimated $70 million in Russian Modernist paintings now in the Korolyov Museum of Art—the core of its collection—he was found dead this morning at dawn. His neck was broken.
“ ‘His body lay sprawled headfirst at the bottom of a flight of stairs in a senior citizens condominium in Hallandale—where he maintained, the Herald has learned, a secret studio, under the name Nicolai Kopinsky.’ ”
The pit bull lowered the newspaper, gleaming with self-commendation. “You get it, Puggy?” he crowed to Knobloch. “Got the picture now? You follow the strategy? We don’t accuse Sergei Korolyov of anything. The museum that owns the pictures just happens to bear his name, that’s all.” Cutler gave a mock shrug. “Not much we