“Now he won’t have to. But he’d better figure on keeping them out of sight for a year or two.”

“I’ll make sure he knows that.” A slow smile spread on his face. “What’s the line from Casablanca? At the very end, Bogart to Claude Rains.”

“This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

“Indeed. And a profitable one. Get some sleep, Bernie. I’ve a feeling the next few days are going to be busy ones.”

He was right. It was a busy week.

Tuesday night, while an eminent cardiologist and his wife were at the Met oohing and ahing over David Hockney’s sets for Die Zauberflöte, Marty and I were on the way to their house in Port Washington. A security patrol watched over the neighborhood according to a strict schedule; armed with that schedule, we synchronized our own movements accordingly.

There was no alarm this time, just a formidable door with a brass lion’s-head knocker and one of those legendary Poulard locks, to which I laid a successful siege. Inside, I dumped a couple of drawers without bothering to see what hit the floor, hurrying directly to the master bedroom, where the doctor’s wife kept her jewelry in a handsome dresser-top chest with five inch-deep drawers and a mirrored lid. I grabbed a pillow off one of the twin beds, stripped it of its pillowcase, and scooped all of the jewelry into the pillowcase. I dumped a drawer or two, knocked over a lamp, and hurried downstairs. I was right on schedule, and so were the security forces; I hunkered down by the living-room picture window and watched in admiration as they slowed their prowl car in front of the house and beamed their pivoting spotlight here and there. Then, satisfied that all was well, they pressed on.

For variety’s sake, I left the Poulard’s pickproof reputation unsullied, picking it shut behind me and scuttling around to the side of the house, where I kicked in a basement window and made a mess of a flower bed. Then I swung the pillowcase over my shoulder, checked my watch, and met the Lincoln out front.

“Poor Alex,” Marty said. “A couple of wrong moves in the commodities market put his back against the wall. Unfortunately, frozen pork bellies aren’t like stamps and coins and baseball cards. You can’t cash them in when times get tough.”

“Or arrange to have them stolen.”

“Quite. He swallowed his pride and went to Frieda, told her the situation. Pointed out that they had a substantial amount of money invested in her jewelry, and that it could see them through a tight spot. Perhaps they might sell some of the pieces she never wore anyway.” He shook his head. “The woman wouldn’t hear of it. Well, he suggested, it was only a temporary difficulty. A few triple-bypass operations would set them right again, but in the meantime suppose they pledged the odd tiara as collateral with Provident Loan.” He chuckled. “Alex said she was aghast. Pawn her jewelry? Hock her bracelets at some corner pawnshop? Not a chance.”

I told him I’d barely had time to look at what I was taking, but the quality looked good.

“The insurance coverage is close to two hundred thousand,” he said. “Of course one dresses for the opera, so whatever she wore tonight will have escaped us.” I said it was a shame they couldn’t have gone square dancing instead, and he smiled at the very idea. “One thing, Bernie. There should be a jade-and-diamond necklace with matching earrings. Everything else is ours to sell, but Alex would like that back.”

“No problem,” I said, “but how’s he going to manage that? Won’t it tip her off that he staged the whole thing?”

“Oh, it’s not for Frieda,” he said. “But Alex is especially fond of that particular ensemble. He wants to give it to his girlfriend.”

Wednesday I didn’t need the Lincoln, or Marty’s company either. I closed the store in the middle of the afternoon, hung the clock face in the window, and told Raffles to take messages if anybody called. I caught a cab and got out half a block from a four-story townhouse in Murray Hill. On the parlor floor, I found what I was looking for in a place of honor over the living-room fireplace. It was an oil painting about twelve inches high and sixteen inches wide, a rural landscape showing some fat cattle taking shelter beneath an enormous tree.

I cut it from its frame and rolled the canvas so that it would fit wrapped around my forearm between my shirtsleeve and my jacket. Minutes later I was on Third Avenue, my hand raised to summon a taxi that took me uptown to Marty’s apartment. His eyes widened when I walked in empty-handed. Then I took off my jacket and he smiled and reached for the canvas.

“Here we are,” he said, unrolling it. “Many’s the time I’ve admired this little beauty over the years. ‘Best investment I ever made,’ George Hanley always said. ‘Gave ten thousand dollars for it to a little mustachioed froggy art dealer on the Boulevard Haussmann. Barb thought I was crazy, but we both liked it and it made a nice souvenir of the trip. I’ll be honest with you, I never even heard of the artist at the time. Courbet? I didn’t know Courbet from Beaujolais.’ He never tired of that phrase, Bernie. ‘I didn’t know Courbet from Beaujolais.’ ”

“Well, it has a nice ring to it.”

“It turned out to be worth two or three times what he paid for it, and that was twenty years ago. When the art market went crazy, the value of the little Courbet just kept climbing. A few months ago George realized he had a painting worth several hundred thousand dollars, and that he could use the money and they could hang something else over the fireplace.”

“But his wife didn’t want to sell it?”

“It was her idea in the first place. George had a chap from Christie’s look at it, and that’s when he got the bad news. The little Frenchman with the mustache had been the screwer, not the screwee. George had paid ten thousand dollars for a fake. He felt so abashed he couldn’t even tell his wife. ‘Oh, we can’t sell our Courbet,’ he told Barbara. ‘It would be like auctioning off a member of the family. And it just keeps going up in value. We’d be crazy to sell.’ What he said to me, one afternoon at the club when some single-malt scotch had loosened his tongue, was that the most infuriating thing was what he’d paid over the years for insurance. ‘The premium kept going up,’ he said, ‘to reflect the steady increases in value. Turns out I’ve just been throwing good money after bad. I’ll never see a dime of it back.’ The other day I took him aside and reminded him of our conversation. What you said about never seeing any of the money back,’ I said. ‘You know, George, that’s not necessarily so.’ ”

“The insurance company won’t know it’s a fake.”

“Of course not. The man from Christie’s wouldn’t have run off and told them. But if they did know, they’d refuse to honor the claim.”

“Obviously.”

“But suppose George had told them the truth as soon as he’d learned it. Unwittingly, he’d been insuring a worthless painting for twenty years. That being the case, the company had been taking his premiums without assuming any actual risk. So, now that the actual circumstances had become known, would they agree to refund the premiums he had paid?”

“Obviously not.”

“That’s why I see nothing wrong with defrauding the sons of bitches,” he said with feeling. “They’ve taken larceny and institutionalized it.” He clucked his tongue at the faux Courbet and carried it over to the fireplace.

“Wait,” I said.

“George never wants to see the thing again,” he said, “and I don’t suppose you could find a customer for it, do you?”

“I wouldn’t know how to sell it even if it were real.”

“I shouldn’t think so, not without provenance. George gave me ten thousand dollars on signature, as it were, as an advance against half the settlement from the insurance company. The painting’s currently insured for $320,000, but they’ll very likely stall, and they may even try to chisel.” He shook his head. “The swine. If they live up to their part of the deal, you and I walk away with eighty thousand apiece.”