A screech of air horns almost blew out his eardrums. He twisted his head around to see the blinding headlights and massive front grille of a truck bearing down on him like some kind of monster. The truck’s tyres screamed, smoke pouring from its wheel arches. Ben ducked his head down in a hurry. A fraction of a second later, and it would have been torn off. The manhole was filled with roaring noise and grit and diesel stink as the truck passed overhead.
By the time it had come to a shuddering halt fifteen metres further down the road, Ben was clambering out of the hole and kicking the cast iron lid back into place. He was in a broad, straight street with old buildings and shops and parked cars and scooters gleaming under the street lights. He glanced around him for something to lay across the manhole cover to delay the SOCA agent – but large, heavy objects weren’t readily to hand in the middle of the road. All he had was himself. He stood on the plate, feeling just a little self-conscious and all too aware this didn’t present a lasting solution to his predicament. A car sped down the street and swerved to avoid him. Ben ignored the stream of abuse that came at him from its open window. The truck driver had pulled into the side of the road and had jumped down from his cab, storming over with clenched fists to yell obscenities at him. Ben ignored him, too. He had other things to worry about.
Under his feet, the plate gave a lurch as something hit it hard from below. Here she comes, he thought. A second’s pause, then there was a muffled explosion and something struck the underside of the cast iron plate with a loud clang and an impact that rattled him all the way up to his knees. She was trying to shoot her way out. She must have been deafened down there.
Ben looked up as he heard the buzz of a motorcycle approaching. A tall, skinny trail bike was coming down the road towards him. Its helmetless rider was a young guy of about twenty. He slowed the bike uncertainly as he got closer, probably thinking Ben was a drunk who was about to stagger into his path and bring the bike down.
Ben slipped the Beretta out of his belt and yelled ‘Alt! Polizia!’ at the top of his voice.
Seeing the pistol, the truck driver instantly stopped screaming abuse and beat a hasty retreat back to his vehicle. The motorcyclist’s eyes opened wide as he brought the bike to a sliding halt. Up close, Ben could see the Honda legend on the shiny blue tank and the letters ‘250cc’ on the side panel beneath the seat.
‘Sorry about this,’ he said. Still pinning the manhole cover with his weight, he grabbed the young guy’s arm and hauled him roughly out of the saddle. He caught the bike as it began to topple, swung his right leg over it and gunned the throttle.
The instant Ben took his weight off the manhole cover, the iron lid flipped up with a clang. Darcey Kane came bursting out of the hole, pistol first. Her eyes were wild, her face streaked with sweat and dirt.
Ben flashed her a grin, stamped the gear lever into first, opened the throttle wide and dumped the clutch. Before she could make a move, the Honda’s front wheel lifted a foot in the air and the machine took off like a startled horse.
As he raced down the street with the warm wind whistling in his ears and fluttering his jacket, Ben glanced in the handlebar mirror. Darcey was already waving down an approaching car with her drawn pistol. Not just any kind of car, but a low-slung gleaming red sports convertible that looked worryingly like a Ferrari under the street lights. She bundled the protesting driver out, leaped in behind the wheel. Over the tinny howl of the Honda’s engine, Ben heard the roar and screech of spinning wheels as she accelerated after him.
‘This damn woman’s unstoppable,’ he muttered. He ground the throttle against its stop and the little 250cc engine screamed in protest. Parked vehicles and buildings flashed by in a blur. He snatched another glance in the mirror. The sports car was already gaining on him fast.
It was a Ferrari. Not good. No way he could outrun her on this sewing machine on wheels.
Do what you can with what you’ve got. Boonzie had taught him that one.
Ben kept his eyes on the mirror just an instant too long. When he looked back at the road ahead, there was a fat man crossing the street dragging a chihuahua on a lead. He swerved violently to avoid them, narrowly missing crunching into the side of a parked Fiat Cinquecento. He hammered up onto the kerb and rode down the pavement. A corner café was closing for the night, with plastic chairs and tables strewn outside and a waiter gathering up glasses. Ben ducked down behind the bars, gritted his teeth and went ploughing through the tables, sending the waiter diving for cover. The little Honda wobbled furiously but he somehow managed to keep it upright. He jumped the bike back down off the kerb between two parked cars, hit the road with a screech and accelerated away.
It was only as he sped off down the street that he realised the bumpy ride had jolted the Beretta out of his waistband. Any thoughts he had of going back for it were quickly scotched as the Ferrari came hurtling round the bend just a few metres behind him, glued tight to the road, bearing relentlessly down on his tail.
A street sign flashed by: Via dei Coronari. Buildings parted, and Ben could suddenly see the city lights glinting off the smooth waters of the Tiber to his left. A line of lanterns traced the shape of a bridge spanning the river and illuminated the facing rows of angelic white statues along its sides. But it wasn’t the graceful beauty of the architecture that made Ben swerve the Honda hard left and take a closer look at the bridge – it was the fat concrete bollards set across its entrance, blocking the way to anything wider than a skinny little trail bike. He passed between them and sped out across the smooth paving stones of the bridge. Heard the scream of tyres behind him as the Ferrari skidded to a halt at an angle in the road.
Halfway over the bridge, Ben stopped the bike and looked back. Darcey Kane was out of the car, standing under the glow of a street light, gun in hand. Even at this distance he could see she was virtually dancing with frustration. Her shout of rage echoed across the river.
Ben had to smile to himself as he rode away into the night.
Though somehow, he had the feeling he hadn’t seen the last of this Darcey Kane.
Chapter Forty-Three
The De Crescenzo residence, Rome
Ten to two in the morning and Count Pietro De Crescenzo was too tired to pace up and down any more, too tired to think, too tired to do anything except sit slumped in his armchair and stare dully across the large living room at his wife Ornella. She was lying with her back to him, her glossy blond curls fanned out over the arm of the sofa. The flimsy material of her dress had ridden up to mid-thigh and her legs were kicked out carelessly over the cushions. One white high-heeled shoe had fallen to the rug; the other was dangling from her toe, ready to drop at any moment like the last autumn leaf from a twig.
Once upon a time, Pietro De Crescenzo would have got up and gone over to her, brushed the hair from her face and straightened her dress for modesty’s sake, maybe covered her with a blanket, or else carried her tenderly to bed. But he didn’t move. Just sat there and listened to her soft snoring, watching the curve of her hip rise and fall as she slept.
Though, he reflected bitterly, ‘asleep’ wasn’t quite the right word for someone who’d spent the last almost three hours passed out in a comatose stupor. She’d hit the vodka particularly hard that night, and he had no sympathy for the selfish bitch. He was the one who should be drinking himself stupid all day, after what he’d been through. The tremors in his hands and knees were slowly fading, though there were moments when the horrors came flooding back and he was rendered virtually prostrate with nerves. The trauma was going to stay with him for the rest of his life – he was sure of it.
He looked at his watch and sighed. He dreaded going to bed. Night was the worst time. Night was when the ghosts came out to revisit him. Aldo Silvestri and Luigi Corsini, and the woman who had died in front of them all on the office floor, and all the other poor souls who had lost their lives. Their sightless eyes staring at him in the dark, their bloody fingers groping out to claw at him until he woke gaspin
g and covered in sweat. Then he’d be awake till dawn, with only more horrors to look forward to – more agonised phone calls with Aldo’s and Luigi’s relatives, more terrible funerals to attend, more wrangling with obtuse insurance company directors and more hysterical gallery owners threatening dire litigation. It was a mess on a cataclysmic scale.
And meanwhile, the police investigation was drawing blanks every way it turned. Pietro had no faith in any of the detectives who’d been assigned to the case. Lario was a fool, and when he failed he’d simply be replaced with another fool. Though Pietro had to admit that he was having just as little success in solving the enigma that haunted him feverishly day and night.
Why the Goya? Why? Why? Its personal value to him, as a tangible connection to the woman he’d always wished could have been his own grandmother, was inestimable – but its monetary value was minimal compared to so many works that the robbers had just seemingly ignored. To walk past prizes that could have enriched them for the rest of their lives, for whose recovery the art world would have paid whatever gigantic ransom they demanded, in favour of a simple sketch that had spent most of the last century hidden away among the forgotten personal effects of a dead artist: no amount of obsessive brain-racking could help Pietro to see any sense in it.
Something else perplexed him even more deeply. This wasn’t the first time that Gabriella Giordani’s personal possessions had attracted the attentions of dangerous men.
He was worn out from trying to figure out the connection. His eyes were burning from fatigue and his neck and shoulders ached. He rose stiffly from his armchair, turned off the living room light and shut the door behind him.
Pietro’s office was across the other side of the large villa. When things weren’t going well between him and Ornella he often took refuge to sleep on the couch in there. They hadn’t argued, but he felt that way tonight.
As he walked into the office, he noticed the flashing light on his answer machine telling him there was a new message. It had been left after midnight.
Pietro let it play on speaker. The caller spoke Italian with a Spanish accent. His voice was deep and rich, like old wine.
‘Signor De Crescenzo, my name is Juan Calixto Segura. It is extremely important that I speak with you. Please call me immediately, night or day.’ A pause, then: ‘It concerns your stolen Goya.’
Pietro replayed the message with a trembling finger.
He hadn’t dreamed it.
Segura. The name was vaguely familiar. A wealthy art collector and dealer in Salamanca, De Crescenzo remembered – though they’d never met.
Frantic with anticipation, Pietro snatched up the phone handset and returned the Spaniard’s call. Segura picked up on the third ring. He didn’t sound as if he’d been asleep.
‘This is De Crescenzo.’
‘I thought you would call.’
‘My Goya,’ Pietro said breathlessly.
‘Charcoal on laid paper. “The Penitent Sinner”.’
‘That’s it. What have you to tell me?’
‘I think it better that we meet,’ Segura said. ‘I have something to show you.’
‘If you know something, I beg you . . .’ Pietro’s voice quavered; he was near to a sob as he spoke.
Segura was silent for a moment, as though unwilling to disclose too much on the phone. ‘I will tell you this much,’ he said. ‘How can it be that “The Penitent Sinner” was stolen from your gallery in Italy?’
Pietro was stunned. ‘What do you mean? It was stolen.’
‘Then you may care to explain to me,’ Segura said, ‘why it is sitting here safely in my private collection, where it has been for many years.’
Chapter Forty-Four
It was after two in the morning when Ben rode the little Honda along the cobbled streets and through the Porta Settimiana, a Renaissance-period stone gateway that led into the Trastavere quarter on the west bank of the Tiber. Before ditching the motorcycle in a narrow, winding lane, he searched through its side panniers and found a pair of sunglasses and a floppy hat. He slipped the shades in his pocket. From there it was a short walk to Rome’s botanical gardens. He scaled a locked gate, and minutes later was walking free among moonlit parkland. The night air was sweet with the scent of flowers. He stuck to the shadows, silent and invisible.
Always seek out the high ground. A long hill led him to a wooded ridge overlooking the city, where a hollow among some shrubs offered a vantage point to rest up for a few hours. He sat immobile among the leaves and let nature absorb him until he was scarcely even there any more. He watched the stars and the city lights and wondered how Fabio Strada was doing. Thought about Darcey Kane and the things that were happening to him. Thought about Jeff Dekker and the rest of his team back home in France. They must surely have seen the news by now. Jeff would be worried, but he’d know better than to expect a call from Ben. First, the phones would be tapped. Second, it wasn’t Ben’s way to involve his friends in his own troubles. Jeff was ex-SBS. He’d have done the same. Sometimes, a guy just had to work things out on his own.
And then Ben’s thoughts turned to Brooke, and dwelled on her for a long time. He’d never missed her this much. She’d never seemed so far away from him.
By sun-up, he was on the move again.
The obvious place to find an Italian count would have been in his ancestral palazzo – except that Pietro De Crescenzo had said he didn’t live there. Resorting to the Rome phone directory, Ben found four possibles and figured out a route that would take him roughly west, then north, then northeast across Rome. He wore the sunglasses as he made his way across the city. Wear them in Britain, and you drew instant suspicion, as though their only purpose was as a disguise for crooks and terrorists and murderers on the lam. But in Rome, everyone wore shades and he was just another face on board the crowded buses and trams that he used to criss-cross the city.
Someone had left a morning paper on a bus seat, and Ben picked it up. The screaming headline article covered most of the front page. As more details of the Tassoni murder began to emerge, British government officials were remaining tight-lipped over speculation that the killer on the loose was a former soldier of 22 Special Air Service.
On the next page, Ben read an interesting article about himself, written by a leading criminal psychologist called Alessandro Ragonesi. According to Ragonesi, the ruthless training undergone by Special Forces soldiers, notably the British SAS, was designed to strip away any modicum of humanity, programming once-decent men into robotic killing machines capable of committing the worst atrocities without question, pity or remorse. Even years later, the slightest psychological trauma or other stressor could potentially reawaken that programming and trigger random acts of psychopathic behaviour. Amid a welter of scientific jargon, Ragonesi explained how the experience of the gallery robbery might have sent this former black-ops soldier into a state of mental confusion that had resulted in the tragic killing spree at the home of Urbano Tassoni. Who knew where the deranged assassin would strike next?
The wonders of modern neuroscience, Ben thought. Give that man a cigar.
The first De Crescenzo residence he visited, just before 8 a.m., was a tiny terraced house with an ancient Volkswagen Beetle outside and two scraggy german shepherd dogs snarling at him from behind a mesh fence. He couldn’t imagine the dapper count living here. At the second place, he was told the old man called Pietro De Crescenzo had died a year ago. Two down, two to go.
It was after nine by the time Ben found the third place on his list, a crumbling eighteenth-century apartment building that retained a certain elegance and could potentially have been the home of the Pietro De Crescenzo he was looking for. But when he knocked on the door, a stunningly pretty, dark-haired girl of about twenty-two answered and told him her boyfriend was at the office. She could have been a model.
De Crescenzo didn’t seem the type.
Three down. One left.
It was pushing on for ten in the morning and the sun was warming
up fast when he stepped off the bus and made his way on foot through what looked like an even wealthier suburb than Tassoni’s. Tall cypress trees screened the houses from the road. As he approached the tall wooden gates, two things told him he was in the right place. The first was the enormous, sprawling white house he could see through the greenery. It was impeccably tasteful and refined: all the things he’d expect from a man of De Crescenzo’s artistic sensibilities.
The second was the metallic silver Volvo saloon that came speeding out of the gate, scattering gravel over the road in its wake. Ben instantly recognised the hunched, gaunt figure clutching the wheel. The count was going somewhere in a hurry – too much of a hurry to notice Ben standing there on the pavement watching as he sped off into the rising heat haze.
Ben walked in through the open gates before they whirred shut automatically, and made his way up to the house. The front door wasn’t locked. The entrance hall was cool and white, with frescoes on the walls and a tasteful arrangement of gleaming white nude statues. Wandering into a large white living room, he saw a blonde in a flimsy dress sitting on a sofa with her head in her hands. On the coffee table nearby was a fancy lighter set into a block of onyx, and next to it a bottle of vodka and an empty cut crystal tumbler. Both the level in the bottle and the woman looked as though they’d taken a fairly serious hammering the night before.
Ben was standing just a couple of metres from the woman by the time she registered his presence and squinted up at him through a morning-after haze. She looked about forty-five, but if the vodka was a regular thing she might have been eight years younger. Her hair was flattened on the right side where she’d been sleeping on it, and her mascara was smudged. She didn’t seem to care that the strap of her dress had slipped down her arm.
The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET Page 187