The first time Christine had pulled a job, it had been with Tessa’s voice in her ear saying, timing is everything. She’d made Christine plan her every move, map it out breath by breath, then practice it all like a dance. What’s the use of knowing the guard’s rotation when you don’t know what time it is? she’d asked, relentless. It’s all luck and timing, so you better make damn sure that you have the timing down.
When Christine turned to Sarah and said, “half an hour,” what she meant was: it will take me half an hour to pull off a robbery that’s worth thirty million, half an hour to get from here to Hugo Moran’s bedroom and then disappear into the darkness - half an hour to walk out the doors of Penthurst just as Sarah is expecting her to appear in its attic. By the time Sarah grows bored enough to go looking for her, Christine will be five kilometers away, making herself comfortable in the passenger seat of Andreas’ car.
So Christine counts breaths as she hunts her prize: five minutes to slip around the back to the kitchen’s entrance, three minutes to take the narrow stairway that would typically lead to the guest rooms but has been undergoing remodeling last week, then 3 minutes to skirt a couple of women whispering by the library and slip into the family’s sleeping quarters. Five minutes to creep into Hugo’s bedroom, shutting the close softly behind her.
Two minutes to stare at A Woman Seated Before a Dutch Stove, sketched in 1658 by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, and currently hanging in all it’s glory directly across from Hugo Moran’s bed.
Having spent the past three weeks studying this work almost around the clock, Christine knows it better than half the experts in the world. She can tell at a glance that it’s the real thing, knows the two-three-five pattern of the folds on the woman’s nightcap, and even the origin and likely craftsman of the stove behind her. It’s well done and ridiculously expensive, though one of Rembrandt’s lesser known works. Yet as she stands there, Christine can’t imagine going to sleep each night with the Woman watching over her. Somehow the most difficult part of tonight is budgeting only two minutes to come to terms with the fact that a grown man has lived, slept, and likely had sex with his now-departed wife in a bed that lovingly faces an image of an elderly woman warming her exposed breasts by the fire.
Christine tries not to think about it as she takes it down and dismantles the frame (three minutes), then sets to work gingerly detaching the canvas. It’s long, consuming labor, and it’s the reason that she’d been sent here and not Tessa or Andreas – Tessa is a better liar and Andreas is a better thief, but Christine has a natural knack for feeling out each thread of canvas and dried stroke of paint. She alone can take the canvas from its mount and roll it up with almost no trauma to the work. She alone is capable of leaving no trace not only on the crime scene, but on the crime itself.
She is snapping the Woman into the thin, cylindrical carrying case, just as the door opens.
Christine is so shocked by Sarah’s appearance that it doesn’t immediately register that she’s been caught. The frame lies in pieces by Christine’s kneeling form, the wall is conspicuously bare behind her, and she’s staring wide-eyed at where Sarah stands only slightly more dressed and significantly more surprised than the Woman on the picture that Christine is so obviously stealing. “Well,” she manages weakly. “You certainly know how to make an entrance.”