Dark Art Ch 03

Episode 3: The Medici Bank

Sweat beaded on Ivan's forehead as he pulled down a heavy block of weights from the arm machine, staring pensively at the aerial view of Chicago outside the windows of his building's 22nd floor gym.

...seventeen, eighteen, nineteen,

he counted in his mind, releasing the handles of the machine and reaching for his phone when he finished the set. With his chest heaving and his back and shoulders burning pleasantly, he checked Instagram, repeating a search he'd done a few times already this morning.

#artinstitute

He refreshed the feed, looking for new posts or anything else he might have missed from last night. There was painfully little from the event online, just touristy-looking pics of older people he didn't recognize, posing in front of unfamiliar paintings.

He sighed.

He'd been able to sneak out of the event without running into anyone from the board again, but to his disappointment, he hadn't caught another glimpse of that girl or her friend, all evening.

He tried a few other hashtags, searching by location, even tapping through stories on his hunt for student accounts, but it was like she and her friends didn't exist online, and with only the nickname "Fee" to go by, he didn't have much hope of running into her again. If he had even a few more clues, he might have been able to track her down, but as the feed started to get stale, he forced the thought of her from his mind.

It was a pity, though. She was so young and beautiful, and clearly submissive, that part of him wanted to hunt her down like an animal, using any amount of resources to find her... but, the very word

"resources"

triggered a surge of unpleasant thoughts, Claire's sagging, papery features rising prominently in his mind.

Although he wanted to ignore the situation with the board, he couldn't ignore his mounting bills. He'd taken a lot of time off at the brokerage to deal with his fathers death, and it was frustrating to still have his inheritance tied up like this. Pocketing his phone in his sweatpants, he stood up, wiped off the bench and headed for the gym's exit.

He thought all of this was going to be a lot easier.

He'd envisioned simply showing up at the lawyers office, signing some papers, and receiving immediate access to corporate accounts and seven figure lines of credit. In reality, he'd stepped into a battlefield against a bunch of overpaid academics, who he sensed would do anything to keep their newfound control.

Sliding his key-card into the elevator, he was shuttled up to the penthouse level, thinking.

Even if some of the staff recognized his new role, if the board wouldn't work with him, he couldn't really do anything, and given enough time, they'd likely find a way to cut him out entirely.

They were probably working on it right now,

he seethed.

When the elevator doors opened on the top floor, he walked down another long hallway with only two other doors, one for his unit and the other for his neighbors, and slid his key-card until a red light flashed over the handle, then pushed the door inward to reveal an expansive, top-floor condo.

It was a modern-looking space, with the exterior walls made entirely of floor-to-ceiling windows. A black leather sectional, trendy coffee table books, and heavy, raw-edge wood tables dominated half the visible space, while a dark, glimmering, kitchen filled the rest. He'd had it decorated by a girl he was fucking when he'd first bought the place, years ago, back when the Chicago real estate market was hot and spending money on frivolous bullshit like rugs and oddly shaped jars barely registered with his continuous cashflow.

...but that was then.

Today, the place only represented a costly mortgage payment to him, and he was keenly aware as he got older how draining such debts could be. When the market was slow, he'd been forced to make the hefty, fifteen thousand dollar monthly payments from his savings account, and lately, he'd been watching the balance on that drain like some slow motion horror film. The stock market too.

Everything was fucked.

Despite being born into an affluent family, his indifference toward his fathers work had set him on a path for disapproval from a young age. As a result, all the money he'd made since leaving home, he'd made on his own through his real estate career (a fact he was generally very proud of), but seeing just how close he still was to the daily grind of work, and how easily it could all slip away only reinforced the feelings of quiet panic that'd been stirring within him since the funeral.

Even the funeral itself had been eye-opening. To see the resources afforded by the CEO of a bank in person after so many years barely speaking at all... the man had staff, a procession of Rolls Royce's, black horses, wave after wave of attendees. It wasn't just a corporation, it was a symbol of wealth and power.

And it was supposed to be his.

It was his right as his fathers only son...but how was he supposed to enforce it?

This wasn't the renaissance. He couldn't just charge into Claire's office at the museum with a sword and shield and demand cessation, even if in his mind, such an approach would've made things a lot faster and easier for him.

With growing annoyance, he realized if he was ever going to have a chance at getting the inheritance he was owed, he'd have to outsmart these people. Or this would go nowhere, and he'd be cut out of the family for good.

He took a shower, reflecting on all the options he'd already tried. He'd consulted with several external lawyers to get advice after he learned of his fathers death and impending inheritance, but the complicated situation with the company drove everyone away. A call with one lawyer stood out uncomfortably in his thoughts, the mans old-timey cowboy drawl as clear in his mind as if he were having the call all over again.

"Oh sonny, I don't deal with annnnythin' primogeniture."

"Say again?" Ivan had said to him, bumping the volume on his phone up a notch.

"Well, I haven't heard of a case of

agnatic primogeniture

since law school. You sure that's what you're dealing with here, son? Your old man didn't leave a will?"

The long silence on Ivan's end of the line must've been what prompted the lawyer to continue.

"

Primogeniture

is a legal term that refers to the firstborn child's right to the parent's entire estate. In the case of agnatic primogeniture, the rights lie with the firstborn son.... but that's not how it works anymore, not in this country. I can't think of a single case in the United States in at least two hundred years. It's very old-world... Salic Law. The House of Viceroy, Kingdom of Italy. All that."

Ivan blinked. "Well, the company is Italian."

"Sounds like you got yourself a classic money laundering operation there, son." The lawyer had paused to laugh at his own joke before continuing. "Not my thing, I like the easy stuff, setting the kids up for college and managing trust funds. Bread and butter, you know?"

As the hot water rolled over him, the memory of the cryptic conversation made a shiver of concern run down his spine. Until now, he hadn't thought of the company as anything other than a vehicle for his own personal gain - but what was the deal with this thing? He'd never heard of a company that had stayed in business for 700 years.

How had it operated so long, if it didn't sell anything? And why didn't anyone seem to acknowledge it existed, outside his own family?

Although he may not have had his fathers sense for philanthropy, he wasn't naive to finance. Even if the bank didn't deal in accounts full of cash directly, the art was making money somehow. He'd grown up very well-off; private school in Italy, winters in Norway, all fueled by this one business. The endless hours in dusty museums and art galleries had been lost on him growing up, but now, his curiosity was piqued.

He had to find out more, and crucially, he had to do it without his uncle or anyone too close to the board learning what he was up to, or they'd find a way to make things harder for him.

Stepping out of the shower, he toweled off and got dressed, his own closet a similar collection of suits and jackets as his fathers. The luxury real estate business demanded such a dress code, although he preferred the newer stuff to his fathers collection of full-cut jackets and peak lapels. Slim fits and athletic cuts. A wardrobe custom-designed to show off the ratio of his waist, to his much broader shoulders.

It would be too warm and humid later to wear a jacket, so he selected a collared shirt and gray trousers before making a direct path to the kitchen, where he flipped open a slender MacBook Air that was sitting on the counter and started searching the internet for clues.

An entry in a Wikipedia page made his eyebrows crease together.

"...The Medici Bank was a financial institution in Italy during the 13th century. It was the largest and most respected bank in Europe during its time, and the family who owned it was, for a while, the wealthiest in Europe. Estimating their wealth in today's money is imprecise, because the fortune was primarily stored in art, land, and gold, and because, in 1494, the bank collapsed after large amounts of funds were used to hire mercenary armies in Florence. Although the bank is credited with inventing the ledger system still used in modern finance today, records of its own accounts have never been recovered..."

"Must be the wrong bank," he murmured, the sentence about the institution's collapse hundreds of years ago sticking out.

...Right?

He continued searching, but the effort only drew more uncomfortable connections, an image of two rearing lions appearing on multiple different websites.

It was a logo, one he'd seen before, too. On the corner of a credit card, the glint of a gold and ruby lapel pin, even a set of wrought iron gates from boyhood if he really pushed himself to remember far back enough. He hadn't thought anything of it at the time, all those old, artsy symbols so easily lost on him back then. But now it was everywhere... it was like he couldn't un-see it.

Couldn't be the same, though,

he thought, switching to another browser tab about the museum itself. But doubt swelled within him.

Could it?

With the banks supposed collapse, he couldn't find any immediate connection between his inheritance and the museum, but Claire herself had confirmed his fathers collection made up half of their inventory, so he was becoming more and more confident that these symbols weren't coincidental.

An hour passed while Ivan did more research than he'd ever wanted to in his life about how museums worked when he arrived on a webpage for a building called The Conservatory.

"Safeguarding more than 400,000 works of art in the Art Institute's collection"

read the webpage, along with a list of warnings.

WE DO NOT GIVE TOURS.

WE DO NOT WORK WITH PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS.

WE DO NOT OFFER APPRAISALS.

ACCESS IS RESTRICTED TO AUTHORIZED PERSONELLE ONLY.

Ivan thought about this, then looked up the building's address.

The Conservatory was across town, but he decided he would go in person, his plan for the day quickly coming together.

From the elevator, through his building's sparkling ground-floor lobby and during the short walk to the train station, his heart beat with anticipation. It was the feeling of finally making progress. He was going to figure out a way to come out on top of this situation no matter what, if it meant personally taking paintings off of wall hooks and selling them himself, he would get it done.

He double checked the route on his phone:

Green line train to Ashland, then change to a Red Line train and get off at Morse,

before he got on board.

It didn't matter how much money a person had in Chicago, everyone took the train, and he easily settled into a window seat while being shuttled across the city. He was thinking about what he'd say to the people at the Conservatory when the train stopped at another station and a large group filed in, men and women of all different ages and sizes.

Ivan glanced over the top of his phone, picking out women from the crowd without his expression changing. These days, ranking them by age, weight, and looks came to him automatically, and he was attentive to even the smallest details. When a girl in black shorts and a tight tank top came to stand right in front of him, holding onto the overhead railing with one hand, he studied her body in glances, taking great care to make it look like he wasn't.

Slender legs, rose-pink knees. Both scuffed and bruised.

Probably because she spent a lot of time on them,

he mused, imagining her crawling around on the floor, the way women in porn videos behaved. He liked to think of them all like that, eager and available.

Well...

If they were young and hot enough to be interesting to him, anyway.

At the faintest sign of sagging skin, or fat protruding unflatteringly over a tight waistband, his eyes tended to glaze over, thoughts twisting to disdain. With such an imagination, it was a wonder he hadn't been more interested in the arts as a boy. He certainly wouldn't have minded spending his college days sketching nude models, especially a young hottie like this one.

Just as his attention was turning to another girl, the train arrived at its next stop and most of the crowd filed off, leaving Ivan with nothing to look at for several more stations, until the tinny intercom voice eventually clicked on to say "The next stop is Morse. Doors will open on the right at Morse..." and he stood up, easily keeping his balance while the train pulled into the platform.

He was much further outside of the city than he usually ever went. Unlike downtown, everything on this side of town was short and squat, the smell of stagnant water rising from a shallow tributary that ran alongside the sidewalk he was on.

Some of the store windows were barricaded, and the street was dotted with overgrown grass lots that made the area feel strangely rural and deserted. It didn't feel right at all when he arrived in front of a tall chainlink fence with heavy spools of barbed wire running across the top.

He looked doubtfully between his phone and a tiny copper plaque fixed on the building, indicating its address.

It was a perfect match, but not at all what he expected. Just another warehouse, overgrown with half-dead black vines on one side, a few broken windows near the roofline. There was no way such a small, decrepit building could house an inventory of 400,000. It looked like it could barely store the furniture from his condo.

He stiffened when he saw a crimson-red armored van parked off to the side of the building in the shade, bearing the insignia of two rearing gold lions, and the words THE MEDICI BANK, EST. 1397 running underneath in delicate capitals.

The logo looked exactly the same as the images he'd seen online.

So it was the same company,

he thought.

Which meant it hadn't collapsed, despite what Wikipedia said... Interesting.

After a moments hesitation, he opened the gate and walked into the lot. Although the building looked abandoned from the outside, he soon heard noises, the high-pitched squealing of a table saw audible long before he got to the door. It was one of those heavy rolling doors, fifteen feet tall at least, and propped open just a sliver on one side.

Straightening his back and flattening his shirt, Ivan looked both ways before he slipped inside.

It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the light, but after a moment, he could make out tables, chairs, and crates filled with supplies. Paper and rolled canvases, metal clamps and rods and all sorts of other bits he couldn't recognize. Further into the dim, there were rows of tall aisles overflowing with boxes and bins, but he only had a few seconds to take it all in before he saw a man speed-walking toward him with his hand in the air.

"Hello, excuse me. Can I help you?" called the man politely. "I'm afraid we are not open to the public. If you're looking for the Institute, you'll want to take the train to Museum Campus, a few stops back."

Ivan extended his hand when the man was close enough. "Ivan Masters."

Saying his name out loud had the desired effect. The man paused, taking him in anew, then his expression changed to something like surprise, or even concern.

"Mister Masters," he exclaimed. "We- we weren't expecting you."

"Mmn, well," Ivan smiled a little, the tactics he used for selling real estate coming to him effortlessly. Controlling a situation was all about posture, tone of voice, storytelling. "That was a bit by design. The bank is performing an audit."

"Oh," said the man, suddenly confidential. "Goodness. Is everything alright? Security hadn't mentioned anything."

"Fine, fine," Ivan assured. "It's standard practice in these situations. New year, new staff. You know?"

"I see. Of course," he said, looking around distractedly. The man seemed close to his age, although the dark-rimmed glasses and brown vest he wore made him look a bit older.

Ivan's eyes cut to the crimson lanyard hanging around his neck with a plastic ID card attached to the end, displaying the man's photo and name.

Professor Andreas Beauregard

"Well, the restorations department is happy to help out however we can. It's just...I'm terrible with these computer systems. It's like every time I get it down, they go and change it again. Would you mind if I had one of the students help you instead? Serafine! Could you come here a moment, please?"

Ivan followed his gaze.

On the other side of the room, a group of five college students were standing at a large desk, although they could have been a bunch of surgeons around an operating table the way they were dressed, in long white smocks and plastic goggles. A few of them looked up until one was playfully nudged out of the group, followed by a few low, "Ooooh"'s.

Stiffly as a marionette, he watched a figure approach, taking off a plastic eye mask to reveal an uncanny pair of blue eyes that he recognized even from halfway across the room. His mouth opened a fraction at the sight of her --

the girl from the last night? What were the fucking odds?

Even though she looked much different now, her hair tied up in a messy bun, baggy clothes hiding her figure, there was no mistaking her.

He clasped his hands behind his back as she approached, inhaling deeply to steady himself. From her perspective, he must have looked like one of those old school Chicago gangsters, dressed in a pair of crisp pants with his hair slicked back. The kind of guy that only showed up unannounced if it was to mete out some unspeakable retribution.

"Professor?" she inquired, not immediately looking at Ivan.

"Ivan Masters is here. From the bank," said Beauregard, Ivan's interest in him briefly renewed as the girl's words from last night echoed in his mind.

"Please don't tell tell the professor..."

"Um-" her gaze shifted between them, landing on Ivan for less than a second before she looked back at Beauregard. "Am I in trouble?"

He laughed. "Goodness, why would you think that? No, no, Ivan just needs some help with the computer, and you know how I feel about technology. Would you mind?"

"Oh," she looked back at the other students, searching for an excuse. She wanted to say no, it was obvious, but something held her back. She looked down.

"I- um- I could probably-", she began, but the professor squeezed her shoulder gratefully before she could finish talking, turning back to the other students with a quick. "Thank you." Then, shouting. "Boys! Be careful with the grain on that one, you know the walnut is a tricky match."