Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

There were over a hundred people in the West Chelsea gallery that night for the opening.

You could tell right away that these were not the PBS tote bag–schlepping bridge-and-tunnelers you sometimes saw at MoMA and the Met. Quite the contrary. With the amount of Botox and Hermès Birkin bags and bespoke tailoring on display, it was obvious that some of the most serious players in the multibillion-dollar downtown NYC art world were on the scene.

In front of the mixed-media installations and huge paintings, you could hear exotic languages being spoken: Portuguese, Chinese, Russian. The art market, like the real estate market, in New York was red-hot right now with the new influx of foreign billionaire money. One had to have something just so to hang on the wall of one’s new twenty-million-dollar sky-view apartment, after all.

Since I wasn’t a foreign oligarch and my art collection consisted mostly of finger paintings on my fridge, I was there because I was on the job, of course. In the Chanel-scented crowded gallery behind me, about twenty feet away, over my right shoulder, stood Matthew and Sophie Leroux, the ex-CIA art dealers who for some unknown reason seemed to want to pull a Lee Harvey Oswald on President Buckland. They were under 24/7 surveillance now, and we’d been on them from the second they left their SoHo town house an hour before.

In his sleek black suit and expensively simple white shirt, Mr. Leroux certainly looked the part of the rich art dealer. And could act it as well, given the expert way he and his pretty and slim wife, Sophie, air-kissed and backslapped with all the globally loaded folks in attendance.

As I watched them, I couldn’t help sensing how tight they seemed. The way they held hands and conferred with each other between meet and greets when no one was looking. They were attractive and sociable, but their relationship seemed quite real. They seemed like serious, committed people.

Which was more than a little troubling, I thought, considering the two highly trained ex-spies seemed very much to be plotting to blow the president of the United States’ head off in less than a week’s time.

I turned as my old buddy Brooklyn Kale arrived in a cocktail dress and handed me a club soda. I noticed that my head wasn’t the only one turning at the sight of my tall and lovely partner in her little black undercover dress.

I’d actually pulled some strings and had several of my old Harlem crew buddies reassigned to the anti-assassination task force. In addition to Brooklyn, I had Arturo Lopez and Jimmy Doyle in an unmarked Chevy parked outside, across West 24th.

With the president and now Putin due in town, and still having really no clue what was up, we definitely needed all the help we could get.

“What are these paintings supposed to be about again?” Brooklyn said, staring up at the immense dark-toned abstract canvas in front of us.

“‘With their never obvious inert compressions,’” I read off a pamphlet some pretty blond waif had handed me at the door, “‘Scheermesje’s latest work possesses a fragmented rawness that is at once a departure from, but also a profound echo of, his earlier work’s often gummy tactile resonances.’”

“Oh, I’m feeling those compressions,” Brooklyn said, shaking her head. “Every time I look up at it, I want to pop a couple of Tylenol.”

When I glanced over my shoulder, I saw that Leroux and his wife were suddenly moving through the crush of people.

“Maybe they’re heading for the bar,” Brooklyn said hopefully.

But they weren’t.

We stood there watching as Matthew and Sophie reached the gallery steps near the entrance and went up them and straight out the front door.

Chapter 55

“Arturo, Doyle. Look lively. They’re coming out,” I called into my hastily dialed phone as we made a not-so-subtle beeline after the couple through the dense crowd.

When we finally climbed the steps and hit the street, I could see a gaggle of models oohing and aahing at one of those Mercedes six-wheeler super-SUVs that had pulled up on the cobblestones out in front. What I wasn’t seeing was the Lerouxes.

“Where are they?” I asked Arturo.

“Down the block. On your left,” he told me.

Damn it! Half a block away, on the corner of Eleventh Avenue, I could see the Lerouxes already getting into a taxi. No, wait: it was only one of them. Sophie Leroux sat in the cab while Matthew closed its door and quickly jogged east across dark Eleventh Avenue.

“What the…? Splitting up?” Brooklyn said.

Had they made us? I wondered.

“Arturo, you guys stay on the wife in the taxi,” I said into my phone as I hurried east with Brooklyn. “We’ll stay with the husband on foot.”

On the other side of Eleventh Avenue, Brooklyn and I picked up the pace as we watched Leroux moving quickly along West 24th Street’s shadows and steel shutters. He was on his phone now, I saw. He definitely seemed purposeful, which was weird since the entire industrial area was completely deserted.

Where was he going now? I wondered as I rushed to keep up. To meet his contact?

He was about halfway to Tenth Avenue when it happened. Leroux put his phone back into his pocket. Then he hooked a sudden left off the sidewalk and dropped completely out of sight.

No! Had he ducked into a building? An alleyway? I wondered in a panic as I started running. What now? What the hell was up with this guy? He had just suddenly disappeared.