The Noble Thief

Ask any art thief which would be worse, reaching the trophy room only to find that the treasure they came for was already gone, or being caught red-handed after successfully obtaining the said treasure, and you’ll get a split response. It all depends on their motives. Are they doing it for the thrill? For pride? For clout? Or are they doing it because they’re desperate for the payout? The ones who want the glory would choose the first answer. Those in need of cash would no doubt go with the second.

But what if the reason behind a heist was more noble than notoriety or riches?

That was the question that Johan Anders was faced with when the invisible sensor he tripped on his way out of famed art collector Quentin Pierce’s estate alerted the man that someone was attempting to make off with one of his prized possessions. Two security guards, tasers drawn, flanked Pierce as he calmly descended the grand staircase to where Johan stood, one of the world’s only Cézannes not in a museum or gallery tucked under his arm. Two more guards emerged from a hallway to block the exit as Johan muttered a string of swears under his breath.

He’d never been caught before. Not when he’d lifted pieces from personal collections around the globe, not when he’d ravaged a high-end jewelry boutique in Paris, not even when he made off with a torso-sized sculpture from a trendy art gallery in London. His shoulders slumped with defeat, not because he knew it meant prison time, but from the sheer humiliation of the situation he was in.

This news would spread like wildfire in the underworld of art thievery. Even if he somehow managed to talk himself out of legal punishment, Johan knew he’d never live this down. Caught in the middle of the night by an old man in his housecoat because he hadn’t done proper recon? Tragic. What was he, some idiot greenhorn?

“I know this is new for you, Mr. Anders,” Pierce said, his tone curved towards amusement from the smirk he wore. His ice blue eyes twinkled with something like glee. Great, Johan thought, I got popped by one of those guys that gets off on schadenfreude. “And I know you’d rather go to prison than show your face in your usual haunts after this gets out,” the millionaire art collector continued.

Johan frowned, eyes darting around the room to the four guards, confused as to why none of them had made a move towards him, as another thought occurred to him. Wait. How does he know my name? Standing up straighter and squaring his shoulders, Johan snapped his attention back to the old man. No one knew his real name. No one that mattered, anyway.

For decades he’d been known only as ‘Dutch’ or ‘The Dutchman’ amongst his fellow thieves, black market traders, and a few ambitious detectives who each thought they might finally be the one to bring him in. Truth be told, he didn’t have a drop of Dutch blood in him, half Belgian and the other half a Scandinavian blend, but Johan always figured that made for an even better alias. He may as well have been called ‘Aussie’. That was why it made no sense whatsoever that Quentin Pierce, of all people, had just called him by his given name.

“How do you know who I am?” He demanded, chin jutting out in defiance.

To Johan’s mounting frustration and unease, Pierce chuckled, that goddamned twinkle in his eye shining even more. “Oh, Mr. Anders, I know quite a bit more about you than your name.” He winked then, motioning to his men to lower their weapons. They did so immediately, but remained posted where they were. “Why don’t you hand over that painting so we can talk. I’m sure it’s getting heavy by now. The frame alone is a hulking thing.”

Only then did one of the guards move, the nearest one stepping up beside Johan and holding out his arms expectantly. For a half second, Johan considered refusing, but then logic kicked in, and as much as he didn’t want to surrender, he also didn’t want to be tased. Fine. He relinquished the Cézanne to the silent sentinel, who then returned it to the room where it had hung before Johan arrived.

“Now,” Pierce said, bringing his palms together. “If you’ll come with me to my study, Mr. Anders, I believe I have a job you might be interested in.” He turned towards the stairs before Johan could respond, assuming the thief would follow.

He was wrong.

Feet remaining firmly planted where he stood, Johan scoffed, crossing his arms over his chest. “You want to offer me a job? I just tried to rob you. Why aren’t you calling the police?”

Raising one eyebrow, Pierce spun back around and let out another chuckle. “Well I certainly could call them if that’s what you’d prefer. But I had something a little, well, a lot more fun in mind if you’ll indulge me.” His smirk cracked into a full blown grin, making Johan wonder if maybe he’d pegged Quentin wrong with the schadenfreude thing. Maybe this guy is just plain nuts.

Weighing his options and finding them extremely lopsided, Johan sighed and acquiesced to the invitation. Anything to buy himself more time before he lost everything. He never could have guessed then just how much time he would be investing in with Pierce’s proposed project.

“You want me to do what?” The non-Dutch Dutchman exclaimed upon hearing Quentin out, practically leaping from his seat in the collector’s wood paneled study.

Pierce blinked slowly, expression unchanged as he remained calmly seated across the mahogany desk, and repeated his request. “I want you to board the RMS Titanic, and steal Merry-Joseph Blondel’s La Circassienne au Bain from the cargo hold. It was brought onboard by one of the first class passengers, and unfortunately, it went down with the ship. It remains to this day one of the world’s most valuable pieces of lost art.” When he was done laying out the impossible task a second time, he simply folded his hands on top of the desk and waited for Johan’s reply.

So he is nuts. “So you are nuts.” Johan shook his head incredulously. “How the hell am I supposed to board a ship that has been at the bottom of the fucking Atlantic since 1912? I’m a thief, not a scuba diver.”

“And I, Mr. Anders,” Pierce said, voice still completely calm and eyes still displaying his amusement, “am a scientist, not just a nepotistic socialite.” What does that mean, Johan puzzled, forehead furrowed as he sat back down. “Besides,” Pierce went on, waving one hand. “Diving for the painting after all this time would be impossible. It’s surely degraded beyond what even the best in art restoration could revive. No, the only way to save that work is to do so before the ship sinks. And the only way to do that is with time travel.”

Oh I definitely should have gone after the Monet at the Engelman estate tonight, Johan told himself for what felt like the tenth time in the past fifteen minutes. “Right,” he said, a skeptical and sarcastic edge to his tone. “Time travel. Because you’re a scientist.”

“That’s right,” Pierce confirmed, with not a trace of absurdity.

“So why not go get the painting yourself if you can time travel, huh?” Johan asked. “And you never answered my question before. How’d you know my name is Johan Anders? Everyone just calls me-”

“Dutch. Yes, I know that, too, Johan. And I know because we’ve had this conversation before, and you just told me.”

With that, Pierce opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a small device that resembled something of a cross between a Rubik’s Cube and a cryptex. It had three tumblers with numbers that he explained represented a month, date, and year, and another two that represented hours and minutes. Two more below those controlled longitude and latitude lines. With a few quick spins of the dials, Pierce pressed a button on top of the device. It emitted a flash of white light, and then the two of them were back in the grand hall, the Cézanne back beneath Johan’s arm, and the squad of security guards with their tasers at the ready flanking Pierce and blocking the door.

Johan’s saucer-wide eyes and speechless retort were enough to tell Quentin that his disbelief had vanished. Or had at least been suspended long enough for Johan to wonder if in fact he was the one who was completely nuts here.

“So you see, Mr. Anders, scuba diving really isn’t a required skill for this job.” He spun the dials back to their previous setting and pressed the button again, the white flash dropping them right back in their seats in Pierce’s study. “All you’ll need is this device, and perhaps a change of clothes that are less anachronistic for 1912.”

Johan’s mouth was still agape. Roughly two thousand questions popped into his head at once, but the one that fought its way out first was, “How the hell did you figure out time travel? I thought you were just some rich asshole.”

Pierce laughed heartily at that. “Rich like you would have been, had you made out of here with my painting, you mean?” He arched one eyebrow then let out a sigh. “One of the perks of my family having amassed generational wealth through questionable business practices before the advent of the internet, is that I have been allowed to use it how I see fit. And since I do not wish to continue feeding the capitalist machine the same way my grandfathers and theirs before them did, I have chosen to use our criminal amounts of money for other ventures. I’ve always had an affinity for the arts and sciences, and it turns out that when you have unlimited funding behind you, anything is possible. Even this.”

He held up the device and shook it back and forth.

The next question Johan’s brain released was, “Why me? Why not do it yourself?”

“Ah, well, I’m afraid I’m not as young and spry as I was when I started this endeavor.” He set the time device down. “Unfortunately I developed a heart condition that doesn’t play well with the expansion and retraction of spacetime over long distances or periods. Also, as much as I am and always have been an art aficionado, a thief I am not. Which is the answer to your other question.” He tilted his head. “My reason for choosing you.”

“Let’s hear it, then,” Johan encouraged. “Plenty of thieves out there. Why me?”

“Because, Mr. Anders, you are unique in that you do not do what you do solely for fame, nor do you do it purely for profit. You steal art because you love it. You love the game, sure. But I’m talking about the art itself. You do it to get your hands on things that no one else in the world can touch. You do it to take those pieces from gauche collectors and-” he paused to click his tongue in a playful tutting fashion, “- despite the fact that you still sell them, you do sell them back to their rightful owners.”

How does he know all of that?

Before that question could materialize, Pierce pointed at the device. “Do you want me to bring you to the conversation we had in which you told me all of that? Or was the one demonstration enough?”

The one was more than enough as far as Johan was concerned. And though he still had an avalanche of questions falling through his head, the last one he asked before agreeing to the job was, “Why don’t I remember meeting you? If we had these conversations before, if I told you my name and my motives, why don’t I have any recollection of that?”

Pierce went on to explain that the device only allowed the programmer to retain memory while traveling, meaning that only he could recall each and every iteration of the repeated moments. “A burden I gladly bear to rescue lost pieces.” He added that he couldn’t simply use the device to change things so that they never happened in the first place; unsinking the Titanic would cause far more ripples in time than saving a few pieces of art would. “Since many of these pieces were of unknown provenance before they were lost, it’s easy enough to spin a story about how the lost one was actually a replica, and the real piece was never truly lost.”

It was morally questionable, having the technology to save lives but using it to save art. But then again so was Johan’s modus operandi, so he didn’t have a leg to stand on. And he still didn’t want to admit to the fact that he’d been caught.

“Alright,” he said, still with a measure of disbelief that this was actually happening. “When do I set sail?”

Pierce grinned. “April 11, 1912.”

And that was how Johan Anders, born in 1979, found himself on board the doomed ship, strolling the sundeck with early twentieth century passengers, in a race against time and an ill-fated meeting with an iceberg, on a mission to steal a priceless painting from a Swedish wood pulp baron.

Unfortunately, Pierce only knew that the painting had been kept in the cargo hold, not which crate it was in. This meant that Johan was on his own in terms of figuring out not only how to get into the hold unnoticed, but also where the piece was located. Getting it out wouldn’t be a problem, as Pierce had pre-programmed the device so that all Johan had to do once he acquired the painting was press the button and it would bring him and La Circassienne au Bain back to Pierce’s estate. Easy.

Three days into the voyage, however, Johan had yet to locate the painting. Which meant that he only had a matter of hours before the ship and all of its contents were settling into their new home on the ocean floor. And only a matter of hours until he was at risk of doing the same. If he failed to hit the button, if he dropped or lost the device, Johan would meet the same fate as the over sixteen hundred souls who went into the water that night.

He had to find that painting before it was too late.

Luckily, as Pierce pointed out when explaining why he was the man for the job, Johan was a master thief who cared deeply about the works he stole, and as such, had some tricks up his sleeve that would prove useful on this job. Sometimes, Johan reminded himself as he followed Mauritz Håkan Björnström-Steffansson, the passenger in possession of the Blondel masterpiece at the time back to his stateroom, you have to make your mark work for you.

Once he knew which room the Swede was staying in, Johan returned later in the day, and broke in. He knocked over tables and opened trunks, tearing the room apart as though looking for valuables. Then he waited for the man to come back, see the chaos, and report it to the Master-at-Arms. Thinking that the would-be thief was after his other valuables, Björnström-Steffansson demanded to be brought to his crate in the cargo hold so that he could see for himself that his stowed treasures were still safe and sound. Johan shadowed the men down to the hold, hiding behind crates and motorcars until they reached the one they were there for. And then he knew exactly where his prize was, and exactly how to get to it.

Björnström-Steffansson, once assured that his paintings were safe, headed back to his stateroom. The Master-at-Arms escorted him back personally. Johan, though, waited in the hold until it was empty, and went to work. Prying open the crate the same way he’d just watched it done, he found the painting just as the entire ship vibrated with the impact of the iceberg. Fearing being caught in a very different way from how he’d been caught in Pierce’s foyer, Johan let out the same string of swears as he fumbled in his pocket for the device.

Water colder than he’d ever felt began to flood the cargo space almost immediately, seeping between the stitching of Johan’s shoes and soaking his wool socks. A pang of guilt struck through his chest as he realized that nobody on board had any clue about what was going to happen. Nobody but me. He pressed the button on Pierce’s device before he could let his conscience get the better of him.

In a flash of light as bright white as the craggy iceberg that sank the unsinkable ship, Johan, his freezing feet, and the painted, bathing lady he’d been sent to save were standing in Quentin Pierce’s cozy, wood paneled study.

“Welcome back, Mr. Anders,” Pierce applauded from his place behind his desk. “Why don’t you have a seat and get warm.” That damn twinkle was back in the old nut’s eye. “Then we can talk about your next job.”