Blow the House Down Read Online Free PDF

sneakers. He looked even more out of place in Chanel than I did, but the point is I was almost certain I’d seen him walking toward me ten blocks earlier. If I was right, I was now being tailed from in front, not behind.
    In the business, it’s called a “waterfall.” Whoever is in charge of the operation runs a hundred or more people at you in a constant stream. Two or three blocks after they’ve passed you by, they peel off onto a side street, get picked up by vehicles and ferried on a parallel street up above you, changing appearance every inch of the way, and then the whole process starts over again. I needed more evidence to be certain, but this little game was starting to take on a distinct smell.
    The two size-sixes I’d followed inside were already being treated to a private fashion show, complete with midday flutes of champagne. I might have joined them if a manager hadn’t floated in front of my face just then and asked if he could help me in a voice that suggested he’d rather walk naked through a landfill. I was turning for the door when he aimed the same question at Ohio State.
    â€œJust browsing,” the man mumbled.
    I ducked out in the confusion.
    Three blocks later, as I crossed Sixty-seventh Street, I took a peek to my left and sent a silent prayer to Wild Bill. There they were, those Puma arsenic-orange, powder-blue sneakers I’d last seen in front of Quick & Reilly, only now they were attached to the feet of a woman in a long mouse-gray raincoat and a Phrygian knit cap. Apart from being out of season, the cap, I was sure, was hiding lavender highlights, but the sneakers, you could have spotted from a KH-11 satellite, ninety-two miles up.

    By now I was crisscrossing Madison, checking out art and antiques stores. Every run needs a logic that the surveillance team can buy into, and the East Sixties and Seventies are peppered with the kind of places I had decided to make today’s theme. Better still, since the shops and galleries are so close together, no one had to work very hard. I’d learned long ago that the best way to manage a surveillance team is to lull it into complacency. Make the chase easy on them, let them take in the sights, and never, ever piss them off. If you do, they’re sure to download the flak on you.
    At Sixty-eighth Street, I made a right, walked down a few doors, rang the bell at #14—a handsome brownstone and home to the world-famous galleries of Theodore Hew-Chatworth—and waited for the buzzer that would admit me to the stairs that would allow me entry to the second-floor showroom. If anyone was going to follow me in, he would either have to fast-rope off the roof or buzz the same buzzer and walk up the same flight of stairs I was climbing. Theodore was waiting for me himself, ever the gentleman.
    â€œFuck you, flyface,” he said as he opened the door—an improvement, actually, over the last time we met.
    We had issues. Teddy was a small-time Texas con man until he copped two-to-five years for accepting tuition payments for a chain of imaginary day-care centers. No fool, he used his cell time to acquire an encyclopedic knowledge of Oriental art and an accent that, except in certain circumstances, would do an Anglican bishop proud. Back on the outside, he headed straight for New York to do his apprenticeship. Today he was one of the nation’s foremost dealers in Chinese antiques, but he’d never entirely escaped the con man he used to be.
    A decade earlier, a police dog had discovered a handsome cache of heroin, pure China white, packed inside a shipment of vases meant for Teddy’s store. The charge didn’t stick—Teddy claimed his forwarders in Macau were freelancing—but while they were looking into the case, investigators stumbled upon something that could have put him out of business for good. Antique porcelains are certified by thermoluminescence testing. Don’t ask: It’s to