‘Prince Leo could not have been more different from the cold, soulless philistine to whom Gabriella found herself enslaved,’ Mimi agreed. ‘And yes, inevitably, they became very close. He encouraged her passion for art, and she in turn confided in him that she had carried on painting in her secret room, behind the count’s back. They were falling in love, though there was no . . .’ Mimi frowned. ‘What is the word?’
‘Impropriety,’ Ben said.
‘That is it. There was no impropriety between them. Nothing of that sort. However, Count De Crescenzo did not see it that way. Crazed with jealousy at the growing bond between his wife and their guest, he accused her of infidelity, had Borowsky thrown out of the house and challenged him to an illegal duel.
‘Gabriella knew that her husband was an expert marksman with a pistol. The night before the duel was to take place, she sneaked out of the house and went to Leo to beg him not to fight. That was the night she stayed with him. Before dawn the following morning, she told him, “Now we really are lovers. There has been infidelity, and so there is no longer any honour to defend and no reason to fight him.” It was senseless to stay and go through with the duel. They could run away together. She could paint, and he could teach music. They might never be rich, but money did not matter. They would have each other.’
‘Leo didn’t listen,’ Ben said.
‘His sense of honour was too strong,’ Mimi said. ‘But he cared deeply for what might happen to her. He told her that if he should die, he had something that would ensure her stability for ever. She would be free to leave her husband and be independent of him. She could pursue her dream, un fettered, for the rest of her life. This was when Leo confided in Gabriella the secret of the Dark Medusa. He gave her the map showing the location of its hiding place. He was convinced that the troubles that had descended on his country would soon pass, and that she would be able to travel there and retrieve the treasure with no danger to herself. After her tryst with the prince . . . this is the right word, “tryst”?’
Ben nodded. ‘Go on.’
‘Afterwards, she hurried home with the precious map hidden in her clothing. I let her into the house before the count could catch her. We ran together to her secret room, looking desperately for somewhere to hide the map. It was I who had the idea for a hiding place nobody would ever discover. We opened up the frame of her Goya copy. And we hid the map inside, between the picture and the back of the frame.’
‘What happened to Borowsky?’ Darcey asked.
‘At dawn that day, he and the count met at the appointed place outside Rome. From forty paces, each fired a single shot. Leo’s ball missed. Count De Crescenzo’s struck the prince in the shoulder.’ Mimi gave a shrug. ‘Honour was done.’
‘So Leo survived?’
‘In the days before antibiotics, such a wound could turn fatal. He lasted three days. Gabriella was by his side until the end.’ The old woman’s voice was hoarse from talking. She took another long sip from her drink. ‘When Gabriella returned from the hospital, heartbroken and weeping bitterly, clutching a dagger in the folds of her dress and vowing to use it to avenge her lover, she found the count gone and her trunk packed outside the gate. That terrible man Ugo had been ordered not to allow her into the house.
‘And that was when I found her,’ Mimi said sadly. ‘Sitting alone in the gardens, inconsolable. She embraced me. We both wept when she told me she must leave, that she would never see me again. I replied that I would leave too, and come with her. She said to me, “Are you mad, girl? You have employment here. I can offer you little. The only money I will have are the few coins I can get by pawning this necklace and these rings.” But I insisted I wanted to stay with her. “And the map,” I said to her. “With the map, you could be rich again.” Gabriella seemed uninterested. “I have lost my Leo,” she said. “But Leo wanted you to have it,” I replied. “Let me run to the secret room and fetch it.”’
Mimi’s voice drifted off. She turned her head slowly and gazed out at the darkening sea for a long moment. When she turned back to face Ben, he saw that her wrinkled old eyes had welled up with tears that spilled down her cheeks.
‘I betrayed her,’ she whispered.
Ben frowned, but said nothing.
‘I went back to the secret room,’ Mimi said. ‘Gabriella’s paintings were stacked against the wall. I found the Goya. I opened the back of the frame, the way I had learned. And then I did something that I have regretted for twenty years, since my Lord Jesus came into my life and I repented of my sins.’
‘You took the map for yourself,’ Ben said.
Mimi wiped her eyes. ‘I was frightened. I was just a child. I suppose I could have simply taken it, hidden it and left. But I was terrified that somehow Gabriella would find out what I had done. There were papers and crayons on a table. I made a copy of the map before replacing the original inside the back of the frame. Then I ran back to Gabriella in the gardens, crying and telling her that Ugo had come and seen me before I could get to the secret room. It was a lie, but the next moment, we heard the dogs barking. Now Ugo really had spotted us. We had to run. We fled to the city.
‘Pawning the few belongings that remained to her, Gabriella was able to rent cheap lodgings for us in a very poor quarter of Rome. We took work where we could find it. We cleaned. We mended clothes. By night, Gabriella would paint, driving herself to exhaustion in the hope that one day soon, she would find some small success as an artist. She never dreamed that she would become so successful – or that it would take so many years of hardship before she was able to sell her work. The art world was as ruthless and narrow-minded as it is today, and in Italy it was hard for a woman.’
Mimi gazed into space for a moment, as if reliving the memories. ‘She did not find true success until the middle of the 1970s, when she was in her sixties. By that time, I had long since left her. We had lived together as friends for almost thirty years,’ she added regretfully, hanging her head. ‘And in all that time, I never told her that I had made a copy of Leo’s map.’
‘When did you go back for the Dark Medusa?’ Ben said.
The old woman looked up at him sharply, then let out a long sigh. ‘You have understood, Mr Hope.’
‘All this didn’t come from nowhere,’ Ben said.
‘I schemed for many years behind Gabriella’s back. I learned much about Russia, its history and its politics, even studied some of the language. I knew that the country was impenetrable. Joseph Stalin held Russia in a ring of steel, making it too dangerous for a woman on her own to attempt to smuggle out such a treasure. I would certainly have been caught and sent to die in the Siberian labour camps. So I waited.
‘Then, in 1953, I heard the news that Stalin had died. The same year, I took a job in a factory where I met Eduardo. He was three years older than me, a union representative and a member of the Italian Communist Party, which was very strong at that time and had particular links with Soviet Russia. I began to go to political meetings with him, and it was through those connections that the chance arose for the two of us to visit Russia on a special visa. My time had come at last. We travelled to the location shown on the map. In the graveyard of a ruined church near St Petersburg, inside the grave of a man called Andrei Bezukhov, just as Leo had said, it was there waiting for me. It was mine. It was beautiful.’ Mimi’s voice trailed away to a croak.
‘You didn’t keep it long, did you?’ Ben said.
‘We had to be careful. We found a dealer who valued the egg for us, and for a very high commission agreed to be discreet. This took many months. The man who eventually bought it was from Arabia, a sheikh who had made billions from oil. We met in a suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris on 27 July, 1955, surrounded by his bodyguards and lawyers and the experts he had brought with him to verify the egg was genuine. I can still remember the sheikh’s face as he held the Dark Medusa for the first time. The money was in two suitcases. Nine million US dollars in one, eight million dollars in the other. Ten minutes later it wa
s ours.’
‘I’m betting the Italian Communist Party never saw a penny in donations,’ Darcey said.
Mimi ignored her. ‘Eduardo and I never even returned to Italy. The possessions we had left behind were not worth going back for. Instead we moved here, to the Principality of Monaco where we knew our money would be safe from tax collectors.’
‘And the two of you lived happily ever after,’ Darcey said.
Mimi sighed. ‘It seemed like a dream at first. We had been poor all our lives, and now this. Life became just one big party. We had no real friends, but we did not care, as we could buy all the false friends we needed to make ourselves feel contented. Eduardo began collecting fast cars, Ferraris, Bugattis. He bought a yacht.’ She prodded her chest. ‘By the time two years had gone by, this little Italian woman in her mid-forties was no longer enough to satisfy him. He began to stray. Then when he realised that these beautiful young French girls were only interested in him for his money – that they laughed about him behind his back and called him an old connard – he began to drink. One night, when he was very drunk, we fought bitterly. Eduardo stormed out of our villa, got into his racing car . . . and I never saw him alive again. The police found the wreck at the foot of the cliffs the next morning.’
There was silence on the balcony for a few moments. Darcey was sitting with her arms folded across her chest and little sympathy showing on her face. Mimi’s eyes were downcast as she clutched her rosary beads tightly in her frail, liver-spotted fists, rocking slightly in her chair. Ben looked at her and all he could see was a desperate old woman consumed with shame. Her conscience had caught up with her late in life, but it was hitting hard. It was eating her alive that she couldn’t go back and repair the things she’d done wrong in her past.
And there was a part of Ben that understood that feeling very well.
‘I betrayed the only true friend I ever had,’ Mimi sobbed. ‘When I had wealth and she had none, what did I do to help her? Nothing. And then, thanks to my deception, in 1986, those men came to her home. And they killed her to find the egg. It was my fault that she died alone and in fear. If we had gone to Russia together to find the Dark Medusa, if it had been sold openly as it should have been . . .’ Mimi shook her head in sorrow.
‘I believe the men who broke into Gabriella’s home were the same that robbed the gallery,’ Ben said. ‘I think they found something in her house that night. Something containing clues that led them, all these years later, to the Goya when it finally resurfaced at the exhibition. I think it was her diary. Gabriella must have written in it that the map was in the frame.’
Mimi nodded sadly. ‘This would explain why they knew to look for “The Penitent Sinner”. She wrote everything in that diary.’
‘Except where the hidden room was,’ Ben said. ‘That much remained a secret.’ He paused. ‘Mimi, I should tell you that the person behind this is a Russian gangster called Grigori Shikov.’
Mimi blinked. ‘A Russian?’
‘He’s a very ruthless man and he clearly wants the Dark Medusa desperately enough that he won’t hesitate to kill for it. In all these years, has anyone ever approached you; threatened you, or anyone around you?’
‘No,’ Mimi said. ‘Never.’
Ben remembered what Pietro De Crescenzo had said about the mystery surrounding Gabriella Giordani’s companion. Nobody had ever known her surname – and Gabriella had obviously never given away her identity in the diary, either. For a man of Shikov’s power and influence, a Simonetta Renzi might have been traceable; but a ‘Mimi’ could vanish without a trace. Free to live a wealthy and contented life, while others had to suffer and die for what she’d taken.
Now Ben understood everything – all but one unresolved question.
‘Why did you want to contact me, Mimi?’ he asked quietly.
The old woman wiped a tear from her eye, then looked at him earnestly. ‘Mr Hope, “The Penitent Sinner” is not a drawing. It is a real person, and she sits before you now. I cannot undo the crimes I have committed in my past, but now it is time for me to make amends as best I can. When I saw you on television, this good man who risked his life to save others – l’eroe della galleria – I knew that I wanted this man to help me repay my debt.’
Ben was silent.
‘After Eduardo died, I started my business. I have worked hard, and been very successful. I am no less wealthy now than I was the day I sold the Dark Medusa to the oil sheikh. Mr Hope, I want you to take my money. All of it, save the small sum that will see me through to the end of my days. I want you to distribute the money among the families of those touched by the tragedy I have caused. I know I cannot bring back the loved ones they have lost. But it is all I can do.’ She leaned forward in her chair and looked into Ben’s eyes. ‘Will you agree?’
Chapter Seventy-One
‘She’s a crazy, rotten, lying old bitch,’ Darcey said through a mouthful of fillet steak. ‘I don’t like her.’
It was just after 9 p.m. and the night was still warm, a slight breeze wafting in from the sea. Their table for two had been set on the poolside patio of the guest annexe in the grounds of the Renzi villa, where Mimi had insisted they stay the night. The old woman had excused herself from dining with them, as she always retired early with just a cup of warm milk before bed. The food and wine she’d ordered in for them had come from one of Monaco’s best restaurants. They were into their second bottle of Château Mouton Rothschild.
‘She needed to confess to what she’s done,’ Ben said.
Darcey grunted. ‘Talk to a priest, then.’
‘She just wants to make amends. I can understand that. People make mistakes, Darcey.’
‘Oh, sure.’ Darcey didn’t look convinced. ‘People make mistakes. But they don’t wait until they’re about to cop it before they suddenly start coming on all repentant. So are you going to help her?’
‘I told her I would think about it,’ Ben said. ‘And I am. But things are a little complicated at the moment.’
‘You might say that.’
Ben pushed away his plate. He wasn’t hungry any more. He got up and walked through the open patio doors into the luxurious two-bedroomed annexe, went over to the armchair where he’d dumped his bag and undid the straps. Inside, folded up next to his dwindling money supply, was the list of eight different mobile numbers he’d copied from the call records of Spartak Gourko’s phone on the train journey from Milan. Out of the eight, three stood out as the ones Gourko had called most frequently and for longest. Ben had circled those three numbers so many times on the train that the paper was almost worn through.
And now he knew what to say. He perched on the edge of the armchair, turned on Gourko’s phone and dialled the first number on the list. The call cut straight to a mobile answering service. Ben waited for the beep, then left his message. Short and simple, slow and clear.
‘This is a message for Grigori Shikov. You know who I am. I have the Dark Medusa. Call me if you’re interested.’
Getting no reply on either of the other two most-used numbers, he left the same message and then got started on the others. By the time he’d worked his way through to the bottom of the list, he’d had only two replies. The first sounded like a bar or nightclub, loud music booming in the background. He didn’t leave a message. The second was an Italian guy who cut him off before he’d said three words.
Now all he could do was wait and hope that his message would hit its mark.
‘You look tired,’ Darcey said as he returned to the patio table. ‘Maybe you should go to bed.’
‘I’m fine,’ he said.
‘No, you’re not.’ Their glasses were empty. She grabbed the bottle, but there was no wine left. ‘Shit. Is that all they gave us?’
‘Maybe they thought a bottle of Mouton Rothschild each would be enough,’ Ben said.
‘There’s got to be more booze around here somewhere.’ Darcey jumped up and disappeared into the annexe. She returned five minutes later, wearing
a grin and carrying a bottle and two crystal brandy glasses. ‘Voilá. Now we know what the little door at the end of the passage is. You need to check out that wine cellar. It’s full of champagne. And look what I found. Armagnac, eighteen years old. Fancy a drop of the hard stuff?’
‘You’re a bad influence on me, Darcey Kane.’
‘I will corrupt you yet,’ she said, tearing the foil off the neck of the bottle. ‘If I die trying.’
As she poured out two brimming glasses, Ben used a book of matches to light up one of the Gauloises he’d bought from a kiosk at Monaco station. Still missing that old Zippo of his. He offered the pack to Darcey.
She shook her head. ‘No.’ Then, after a moment’s hesitation, ‘Oh, fuck it, go on then.’ She held the cigarette between her lips and Ben struck another match to light it for her. Inhaling too sharply, she gave a little cough. ‘Who’s a bad influence now?’ she spluttered. ‘What the hell are these things? They’ll kill us.’
‘Everyone says that,’ Ben said. ‘But if it’s a choice between these, the Russian mafia and British Intelligence, I’ll take the Gauloises.’
They sat and smoked and sipped the aged, rich brandy in silence for a while. From somewhere down below on the beach, there came laughter and the sound of someone plucking notes on a Spanish guitar – a soulful, melancholy melody that drifted up through the warm night air.
‘Are you going to call her?’ Darcey said.
Ben looked up from his thoughts. ‘Brooke?’
‘That’s who you were thinking about just now, isn’t it?’
It had been. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said. ‘Maybe there’s nothing I can do. Maybe it’s just over between us, and that’s it.’ He knocked back more brandy and decided he wanted to change the subject. ‘Do you have anybody?’ he asked her.
Darcey shook her head. ‘I’m kind of in-between things right now.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘Well, that’s putting it mildly. I’m very in-between things. Two years.’
The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET Page 200