“We don’t have to eat on the cheap,” I said. “I have Frank’s credit card.”
“Still. He said this was popular with students and travelers, and I thought it would be fun. Show you a little of what my life is like in Florence.”
We took another vaporetto, then walked a lot, following directions on Danny’s phone. Though it was still daylight, the shadows cast by the close buildings made the narrow streets seem dark, and a couple of times I felt uneasy being jammed in with so many other people, a mix of tourists, locals and more of those African street vendors. I missed the comfort of having my gun by my side.
The restaurant was a boisterous one, filled with students in their early twenties with Canadian and Australian flags sewn onto backpacks. I felt almost ancient, though I was only five years older than Danny. We slid into two seats across from each other at a crowded table, and Danny ordered for us in Italian.
Then he turned to the girl beside him, who had exuberant auburn curls. She and her sister, beside me, were traveling through Europe. Alexandra was a sophomore at Auburn and Beth a junior at Brown. We had a lively conversation with them as we ate our way through courses of tortellini in chicken broth, fried artichokes, and chicken sautéed with lemon and mushrooms.
Accompanied by a bottle of white wine, which we shared with the girls, it was an awesome meal. Danny was such a flirt and it was funny to see him operate, and wonder if I was the same way at Lazy Dick’s.
“My brother’s here on business,” Danny said. “He’s a special agent with the FBI. Tracking down a stolen painting.”
The pride in his voice made me smile. “It’s not a big deal,” I said. But they demanded to know what my job was like, and I told them a couple of stories about cases I had investigated.
“You got shot!” Alexandra said. “Oh my God.”
Though the experience had been pretty upsetting for me, I wasn’t interested in sharing my feelings about it with total strangers. “The bullet bounced off my vest. It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Of course it was,” Danny said. “My brother, the hero.”
I blushed and changed the subject.
By the time we finished it was dark out. “Would you mind walking us back to our hotel?” Alexandra asked. “On the way here these creepy African guys followed us for a couple of blocks, trying to sell us drugs and asking for money.”
“It freaked us both out,” Beth said.
I could imagine how they must have felt, based on my own experience walking through those shaded streets with Danny, and of course we agreed.
It was even creepier walking back to the girls’ pensione in the dark. The streets were no longer so crowded, but some of the cobblestones were slippery and we had to watch our steps. We crossed a lot of bridges and made a lot of turns, and I regretted having had to leave my gun behind in Miramar.
That was ridiculous. There was no way I was going to shoot anyone in Venice. But I had become accustomed to its bulk against my waist, to how comforting it was knowing I could defend myself and those I was with if I had to. I reminded myself that I’d learned a lot of self-defense skills at the Academy, and with all the workouts I did with Lester I was in the best shape of my life.
A couple of times I sensed men hovering on the edges of the street, but no one approached us. In the end, it wasn’t that far from where we dropped the girls to our own hotel, and we made it back there without incident.
“I had a lot of fun today,” Danny said, once we were in our room. “I’m still having trouble believing that we’re together. In Venice, of all places!”
“Me too. And tomorrow, after I pick up the painting, we can do some more sightseeing. Maybe hang out with the girls again, if you want.”
“You think it will be dangerous?” Danny asked. “Meeting with this guy?”
“Not at all,” I said, though I had my doubts. “It’s a straightforward business transaction. He has the painting, and as long as you and I agree it’s the right one, he gets his money. What could go wrong?”
20 – Rendezvous
The jet lag must have caught up with me because I slept late, waking after nine to see Danny sitting on the balcony with a porcelain cup of coffee. I sat up and yawned. “I never thought I’d see the day that I’d sleep later than you,” I said. Danny had always been tough to wake as a kid, and working nights at the restaurant had only reinforced his late-sleeping habits.
“Gotta seize the day, bro,” he said, smiling. “I figure I can sleep when I get back to State College. I’ve been up with the birds every day. I usually go for a walk around Florence, to stretch my legs and absorb the culture. And to pick up a pastry for breakfast, of course.”
My brother sounded more and more like me, I thought, as I used the bathroom. Was it genetics, or upbringing, or was he trying to be like me? When he was younger he’d wanted to do everything I did, have sneakers like mine, eat the same cereal I did.
“Any more of that coffee?” I asked, when I finished my shower.
“Breakfast downstairs only ran until nine,” he said. “But Enrichetta told me there’s a great café down the calle where we can get coffee and pastry.”
“Enrichetta?”
“The girl at the desk. You know, the one I was talking to yesterday.”
Once again I marveled at my brother’s touch with women.
“She also told me some sights to check out as we walk around the neighborhood. So come on, let’s get moving.”
I put on a lightweight shirt and a pair of cargo shorts with big pockets to hold my wallet and passport secure. Once again I missed the feel of my Glock against my waist.
Danny was a walking guidebook as we strolled over to the café. We passed a set of seven bronze plaques with scenes from the Holocaust, including a crowd lined up to board railroad cars and one that showed three soldiers aiming rifles at a woman, while a man and child looked on. It chilled me despite the hot morning air. This was what Ugo Sena had faced, all because he was gay and Jewish.
I learned that breakfast was called prima colazione in Italian, and Danny ordered us steaming mugs of cappuccino and a platter of cornettos, rolls that looked like French croissants but were sweeter. Some were filled with cream, others with jam. I was surprised to see that the café served kosher meals, but then figured that they must get a big clientele of Jewish tourists.
The food was great, and we laughed and talked, continuing to catch each other up on the small things hadn’t been worth putting into an email or using up time on Skype. We walked around the neighborhood for a while, and I noted a yellow haze in the air. I couldn’t tell if the nasty odor was from that pollution or the murky green water in the canal, but I didn’t like it.
At ten-thirty we made our way through crowds of tourists to the Caffe del Campo, a small storefront jammed with backpackers using the internet, laptops displayed on tables, charging on long snaking cords. We waited until a table became available, and while Danny turned on my laptop I got us a pair of cappuccinos. “How will you know who’s coming?” he asked, when I returned with the coffees.
“It’ll be the guy with the big painting under his arm,” I said. “And he’s been told to look for an American with red hair.”
While we waited, I sent Lester a long, enthusiastic email, about how great it was to see my brother again, describing the buildings and canals but leaving out the yellow haze and the nasty smell. A few minutes after I finished and sent it, a skinny man with a rectangular parcel nestled in his tattooed arms walked in the café, took one look around, and headed for us. “Guess I’m easy to spot,” I said to Danny as I waved at the man.
“Hello, I am Remi,” he said, as he eagerly shook our hands. His accent was heavy but understandable.
“I’m Angus, and this is my brother Danny,” I said. “And that’s the painting?”
“Si,” he said.
I moved my laptop so there was room on the table to lay out the package, and he unwrapped the single layer of brown paper.
; “Wow,” I said. There was a layer of dust on the painting, but it looked vibrant. It was the closest I’d ever been to a painting and I didn’t know what to do.
Danny was prepared, though. He used my phone to pull up the information Frank had given me, and we compared the painting and the frame to that, and to what I’d seen in the 8-millimeter movie. Fabre’s signature, with a big ornamental F, matched other paintings he had done.
“You like?” Remi said, after we looked back at him.
“It’s beautiful.”
“Can we see the back?” Danny asked.
“Of course.” Grassini carefully lifted the painting up and flipped it over, then rested it once more on the brown paper. The frame was deep enough that the paint didn’t touch the paper.
Danny pointed to a piece of wood on the bottom of the frame that looked different from the rest. “What happened here?” he asked.
Grassini shrugged. “Was like that when I find painting. Is old, after all. Maybe frame break years before and was repaired.”
I looked at my brother. “What do you think?”
“He has a point,” Danny said. “As long as the picture’s the same, who cares if there’s a little problem with the back of the frame?”
“Let me get Mr. Venable on the computer.” I initiated the call and plugged in the headset and microphone I used when I spoke with Danny. A couple of moments later Jesse Venable’s face appeared on the screen. I held the painting up to the screen, and his voice was excited. “That’s it! You’ve got it!”
“Looks like it,” I said.
He shifted places and Frank Sena popped in. He’d already put through the transaction, and all he had to do was enter an authorization code to release the funds. “That should only take a little while,” he said.
I told Grassini what Venable had said, and he agreed. “But I don’t give you the painting until I see the money.”
“That’s all right. We have all afternoon, if you need.”
Frank let me know that the money had been released. “There’s no reason for me to stay on the line,” he said. “Just email us when you’re all finished.”
I agreed, and ended the call. I remembered my conversation with Miriam, that if Grassini had one stolen painting he might have more. And other paintings would add to our evidence against Venable.
“Do you have any other art like this?” I asked Grassini. “Mr. Venable might be interested in buying something else.”
“I have, at my apartment.” Grassini looked at his watch. “I have other appointment there, but not for some time.”
“Then let’s go,” I said. “You can check your bank on your phone, right?”
“Yes. I will check soon.”
Danny and I drained our cappuccinos as Grassini taped the paper over the painting again. Then we followed him outside, into the hot sun of the calle. “Is just up there, around corner,” he said.
I had a momentary pang of doubt. We were going off script here, and who knew what could happen? But Vito had told me to trust my instincts, so I did.
“How did you find this painting?” I asked, as we walked.
“My family, they live a long time in same apartment,” he said. “From before my grandfather, even. He die a few years after the war is over, when my father is still boy. Then as he grow up, my father store things in shed on roof of building. I never go up there—who needs old stuff, right? But then my father die last year, and I have to clean up.”
He stopped in front of a narrow, four-story building beside a church, and I realized from the name plate that this was Beata Vergine della Laguna, the church where the Nazis had stored some of the art works they confiscated from the Jews of the Ghetto.
No wonder Remigio Grassini had ended up with the painting. Had he stolen it himself? But then I remembered it had disappeared a few years after the end of the war. Had his grandfather been the one who “liberated” it from the church?
His phone trilled, and he pulled it out his phone. “Eccellente! Money has arrived.” With a sketchy bow, he handed me the painting. “Is all yours now.”
I took it, and then we walked into a dim lobby and began climbing the stairs. Grassini “You grew up here?” I asked.
“Yes. My father, he never make much money. But he is determined I have better life, so he push me to go to school, to get my technical certification.”
Leonardo Foa had told me that Grassini had been arrested a few times for theft, and so I was curious to hear what he said when I asked him what he did for a living.
“I am entrepreneur,” he said. “Little business here and there. You want to buy cell phone, I am man to see. Now, I fix up apartment to sell for big profit. Selling painting will be important money for me.”
The stairwell smelled of stale food and mold and I was glad when we reached the top floor. Grassini opened a door and ushered us into an empty apartment. The wallpaper was peeling and the linoleum on the floor had yellowed. He led us into the kitchen, where he reached up and unlatched a panel in the ceiling, and pulled down a ladder. “Now we climb,” he said. “I go first, so I open door. Then you follow, yes?”
“Yes,” I said, though the ladder didn’t look very strong, and I wasn’t sure how I could manage it while holding the painting under my arm. I thought about leaving it in the kitchen, but what if Grassini had an associate waiting who would come in and steal it? And for that reason, I couldn’t leave Danny with it either.
I’d have to manage.
Grassini climbed up quickly and then opened a door so that sunlight flooded down in to the kitchen. I looked at Danny, who said, “After you, bro.”
I rested my backpack with the laptop inside against the wall, then gripped the painting under my left arm. My right was my dominant one, so I used that to balance my body as I climbed the dozen rungs.
As I reached the light, I stuck my head out onto the roof to see a small square platform between canted roofs of coral tile, much like those back in Florida. Across from me was a small wooden shed.
I clambered off and rested the painting against the wall, glad to be able to put it down. Danny followed me up. “It’s beautiful up here,” I said as I looked around at the panoply of pale pink and orange walls, barrel tile roofs, and lines of laundry stretched from windows to balconies. We were right in the middle of the city, yet the sky was expansive.
A low metal railing that looked as rickety as the ladder was all that stood between us and the street below. Beyond it, I could see the murky blue green of one of the many canals that snaked through the city.
“There, that is San Marco,” Grassini said, pointing through the maze of buildings to where the bell tower and domes stretched toward heaven. “You have been there?”
“Not yet. Maybe tomorrow,” I said.
“You must go! Is very beautiful.”
Danny and I turned three hundred sixty degrees, admiring the landscape, as Grassini opened the padlock on the storage shed.
The inside looked like Aladdin’s cave. Paintings were lined up against the walls, and paper shopping bags filled to the brim were piled in the middle of the floor. A couple of small sculptures sat beside them, including one I recognized as the male nude I’d seen in the film of Frank’s uncle’s apartment. An antique sword rested on top of one of the bags, beside what looked like a brass Russian samovar.
“Your father collected all this?” I asked.
“Was maybe my grandfather.” As I admired the stash, another man suddenly appeared at the top of the ladder to the roof. My first reaction was that Grassini had engineered some kind of double cross, that this man would take the painting away. How stupid of me to have followed Grassini here.
The new man looked older than Grassini, maybe early fifties, but that could have been because his skin was wrinkled and the color of old leather. Angry black and white pandas fought on his green T-shirt.
Instead of going for the painting, though, he began to yell at Grassini in Italian. I stepped back, keeping Danny behind
me. Should I grab the painting and hurry back down the stairs? “Get ready to run for the ladder, bro,” I said.
I moved slowly toward where I’d left the painting, as Grassini argued back at the man, spitting once on the tar roof. Then the man lunged at Grassini and grabbed him by the throat, and I knew that I couldn’t just run away.
“Stay here!” I said to Danny. Then I rushed across the roof and got my arm around the newcomer’s throat in a move I’d learned at the academy. By putting pressure on his throat, I forced him to release his grasp on Grassini, who slumped back, gasping for breath.
The man I held onto struggled against me, and I had to let him go. By then Grassini was back on his feet, yelling something. He grabbed the antique sword from the pile of rubbish in the shed and rushed at the man.
I had only a moment to yell, “No!” before Grassini had pierced the man in the chest with the sword. I stared in horror as Grassini used his grip on the sword to push the man toward that low railing. He gave the man, who stared open-eyed ahead, a final push, and he went backward, over the railing and down, down, to the street below.
I realized I’d been holding my breath. “What the hell!” I rushed over to the edge of the roof and looked down. The man was on his back on the pavement, four stories below, the sword sticking out of his chest.
“Who was that?” I asked Grassini, as I turned back to him.
Sweat was running down his face. “Bad man,” he said. “Thank you for help me.”
“You going to call the police?” I nodded to the phone in his hand.
“No police!”
“Remi. You just killed a man. Of course you have to call the police. You want me to do it?”
He shook his head. Then in the distance I heard the familiar high and low sound of a European police siren. “Looks like someone already took care of it,” I said.
Grassini wanted to get away, but I grabbed his arm and told him that I couldn’t let him go. “Remi, it’s your house. Your shed. Of course the police will find you. And besides, Danny and I are here to tell them that you stabbed the man in self-defense. It wasn’t your fault that he fell off the roof.”
Survival Is a Dying Art Page 13