Copyright © 2010 by Richard David Hosp

The largest art theft in history took place in the early morning hours following the 1990 St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in Boston. Two men dressed as police officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum off the Fenway, tied up the guards, and made off with thirteen works of art. Several of the stolen masterpieces were priceless, including two oil paintings and an etching by Rembrandt, a rare work by Vermeer, a Flinck, and a Manet. The thieves also took works of lesser value, including five unfinished Degas sketches, a Chinese beaker from the Shang dynasty, and a finial that adorned a flag from Napoleon’s army.

The works have never been recovered. Today, their value is estimated at half a billion dollars.

Liam Kilbranish looked down at the lump of flesh curled in front of him on the cement floor. His heart rate was steady; his movements economical. His eyes were nearly as black as his hair.

“Still no answer?” he asked.

The lump gave a moan. Liam knew it was useless. It would continue.

He could remember how it had started for him. Or ended. It was all a matter of perspective, he supposed. Whichever view he took, the memory was etched in his mind, as solid and real to him as the gun in his hand. He would have said he remembered it as if it were only yesterday, but no yesterday he’d known in the three and a half decades since had ever lived and breathed for him like that night. It was what drove him; what made him who he was, for good or for bad.

He’d been reading when they arrived, tucked away in the tiny closet of the ten-by-twelve room he shared with his brothers in the row house south of Belfast. A worn woolen blanket was bundled about his spindly, pale, nine-year-old legs; the beam of his flashlight was trained on the pages cradled in his lap. He’d always been a solitary boy, and the closet had been his refuge-a place where he spent hours on end, reaching into other worlds as his brothers slept undisturbed.