Chapter 37: THE ROTHKO JOB — PART 2
[Upper East Side, Alley — Heist Night, 8:38 PM]
Jimmy's van had the engine running and the rear doors ajar.
I crossed the alley in eight steps — transport tube against my spine, gloves still on, the cold air biting through the black shirt that was damp with sweat from the plenum crawl. Jimmy sat in the driver's seat, watching the side mirror, one hand resting on the gear shift. He didn't turn around when I opened the rear door and slid the tube inside.
"Time?" he asked.
"Forty-two minutes. Two over."
"Two over is clean." He pulled the van into the street. Smooth acceleration, no urgency — a locksmith's van completing a late-night service call, invisible in the grid of Upper East Side traffic. "Any contact?"
"None."
Except that wasn't entirely true. The security guard's radio had crackled during the plenum crawl — a transmission I'd caught through the handheld scanner, barely audible through the ductwork's insulation. Routine check-in, guard confirming his sweep pattern, nothing anomalous. But the timing had been wrong. The guard wasn't supposed to sweep the third floor until nine-fifteen. He was forty minutes early.
Unscheduled sweep. The two words sat in my gut like cold metal.
Jimmy drove south on Park Avenue. I stripped the gloves — double latex, flesh-toned, now carrying traces of dust and insulation fiber that needed to go into a bleach bag before disposal. The lockpick set went into its case. The handheld scanner powered down.
Twelve blocks south, the clone was mid-conversation with a gallery owner about the distinction between investment art and aesthetic acquisition. I could feel the words forming in the clone's mouth — Yuki's vocal modulation guiding the cadence, the collector's responses registering through the shared consciousness as background noise layered over the van's engine vibration.
The headache had crossed from manageable to insistent. Two hours and twenty minutes of dual consciousness — the longest operational deployment yet, exceeding the apartment rehearsal by the margin of adrenaline that real stakes provided. My left nostril was warm. I touched it. Blood, not yet flowing, but pooling.
"You've got something—" Jimmy glanced in the rearview. Gestured at his own nose.
"Sinus thing." The excuse that had worked at the Modigliani job, months ago. Jimmy's expression in the mirror said he remembered.
He didn't push it. Professional courtesy, the currency that kept partnerships alive when questions would kill them.
The van turned west on 72nd. My phone buzzed — Alex, monitoring from her apartment.
Clean?
I typed one-handed: Clean. Package secured. En route to drop.
Buyer ready. Tomorrow morning. Connecticut.
Tomorrow. The Rothko would leave my possession within twelve hours, converted from a canvas worth two and a half million into cash that couldn't be traced, displayed, or connected to a brownstone on the Upper East Side where a forgery now hung in place of an original.
Jimmy pulled into a garage on West 54th — prepaid, cash, no cameras in the individual bays. I collected the transport tube, changed into civilian clothes from a duffel in the van's rear, and bagged the heist gear for separate disposal.
"Your cut's forty percent," I said. "Transport and standby. Alex will arrange payment."
Jimmy nodded. We shook hands — the safecracker's grip, careful and precise. He drove away. I stood in the parking garage holding a tube worth seven months of work and felt the specific exhaustion of a body that had been crawling through ductwork while simultaneously maintaining polite conversation about Basquiat prints.
The clone needed dissolution.
I walked three blocks to an alley between a dry cleaner and a hardware store — dark, narrow, no cameras, the kind of urban gap that existed in the spaces between commerce. The clone was already heading here, having excused itself from the gallery with a headache that wasn't fabricated. Both bodies converging on the same point, the shared consciousness tracking two sets of feet through two different neighborhoods.
The clone arrived from the east. I was waiting against the brick wall, transport tube propped beside me.
Two bodies in a dark alley, wearing the same face. The clone's borrowed suit was slightly rumpled from three hours of social performance. My civilian clothes smelled faintly of fiberglass insulation. We stood three feet apart, and for one disorienting moment the consciousness couldn't decide which body was looking at which.
"Good work," I said to myself. The clone's mouth twitched — my smile, reflected, the humor of congratulating your own reflection.
I dissolved it.
The snap-back was a fist. Three hours of dual sensory input collapsing to one, the gallery's ambient noise and champagne taste and conversational warmth slamming into my brain alongside the alley's cold and darkness and the lingering chemical smell of latex gloves. My knees buckled. I caught myself on the wall. The nosebleed started — proper this time, a steady flow from both nostrils, blood running over my lip and dripping onto the concrete.
The transport tube fell against my leg. I grabbed it before it could topple. Two and a half million dollars of Rothko, almost dropped in a Chelsea alley because its thief's brain was rebelling against the physics of being two people for three hours.
I leaned against the wall. Breathed. Let the reintegration wash through — the disorientation, the nausea, the fleeting identity confusion where my mind couldn't remember which body had been at the gallery and which had been in the ductwork. It passed. It always passed. But the duration was longer each time, the complexity of reconciling two divergent experience streams increasing with the operational stakes.
Blood dripped onto the pavement. I wiped my face with my sleeve. The headache was a steady roar now, the kind of pain that lived behind both eyes and radiated outward into the temples, the jaw, the base of the skull. Recovery would take days.
But the tube was in my hand. The Rothko was inside it. And somewhere on the Upper East Side, a forgery painted in grief and turpentine hung on a billionaire's wall.
I started laughing.
Not loud. Not dramatic. A quiet, broken sound that lived somewhere between triumph and hysteria — the laughter of a man who'd built a life from television memories and stolen skills and had just pulled off the synthesis of everything he'd accumulated in seven months of borrowed time.
The laughter turned into coughing. The coughing turned into spitting blood. The blood turned into silence.
I picked up the tube. Walked home. The city didn't notice.
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