The Black Sun Read Online Free PDF

I know,” Archie said sheepishly. “I just plain forgot and now . . . well, Apples has got a game round at his place tonight. Big money. Invitation only. I can’t get out of it.”
    “More like you don’t want to get out of it.” Tom’s voice was laced with disappointment. “This whole gambling thing’s getting a bit out of control, isn’t it?”
    “No, it’s just a laugh.” Archie spoke a little too emphatically, as if it wasn’t just Tom he was trying to convince.
    Looking back, Tom sometimes found it hard to remember that throughout the ten years Archie had been his fence, he had known him only as a voice at the end of a phone line. Archie had always insisted it was safer that way. For both of them. Tom still remembered his anger when Archie had broken his own rule the previous year, back when they were both still in the game, tracking him down to convince him to follow through on a job. And yet from that first difficult meeting, a friendship had developed. A friendship that was still finding its way, perhaps, as they both struggled to overcome a life built around suspicion and fear, but a friendship nonetheless, and one that Tom
    increasingly
    valued.
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    “Besides, I need a bit of excitement now and then,” Archie continued. “The art recovery game, well, it’s not exactly got the buzz of the old days, has it?”
    “I thought you got out because you’d had enough of the old days.”
    “I did, I did,” Archie conceded. “It’s just, well, you know . . . sometimes I miss it.”
    “I know what you mean,” Tom mused. “Sometimes, I miss it too.”
    “Dom told me about those ads in the paper, by the way.”
    Tom nodded grimly. “Seems the FBI aren’t the only people looking for Renwick.”
    “You all right with that?”
    “Why wouldn’t I be? He deserves everything that’s coming to him.”
    They had left the market now and were making their way down Park Street toward Archie’s car. Although the pub on the corner was busy, the crowds soon thinned out away from the main market, and Tom was relieved that it was easier to make himself heard now. They walked past a succession of small warehouses, the faded names of earlier, now forgotten enterprises still just about visible under the accumulated grime. Archie reached for his packet of cigarettes and lit one. Smoking was a relatively new vice of his. Tom put it down to his missing the buzz of the underworld. Archie put it down to the stress of being honest.
    “Did you find what you were after in the States?”
    “More or less,” Archie replied. From the way his eyes flashed to the ground, Tom sensed that he didn’t really want to talk about it. “How was Prague? Worth following up?”
    “Maybe. You ever heard of a painter called Bellak?”
    “Bellak? Karel Bellak?”
    “That’s him.” Tom had long since ceased to be amazed by Archie’s encyclopedic knowledge of the art market, painting especially.
    “Yeah, course I’ve heard of him. What do you want to know?”
    “Is
    this
    one
    of
    his?”
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    Tom reached into his pocket and withdrew the photograph the rabbi had given him. Archie studied it for a few seconds.
    “Could be.” He handed it back. “Bleak palette, heavy brushstrokes, slightly dodgy perspective. Of course, I’ve never actually seen one in the flesh. As far as I’m aware, they were all destroyed.”
    “That’s what I told the rabbi,” Tom said, “that the Nazis are said to have burnt them all. I just couldn’t remember why.”
    Archie took a long drag before answering.
    “Bellak was a journeyman artist. Competent but, as you can see, no great talent. A portrait here, a landscape there, basically whatever paid that month’s bar bill. Then in 1937 an ambitious SS officer commissioned him to paint Him-mler’s daughter Gudrun as a gift for his master.”
    “But wasn’t Bellak Jewish?”
    “As it turned out, yes. But by then a grateful Himmler had hung the portrait in his office on