The Sirani Connection

by Estelle Ryan

  “She didn’t sound very confident about emailing you.” Just because I hadn’t heard it didn’t mean it wasn’t there. I wanted to understand.

  “Hmm... no, I don’t think it’s a lack of confidence. She sounded unsure, nervous even.” Phillip thought about this some more. “Confident about the theft, but nervous about me.”

  I leaned back. “That is a lot to surmise from those few sentences.”

  “I agree with Doc. It will be better if we can find out who she is and what she wants with you.”

  I tilted my head and carefully catalogued Phillip’s nonverbal cues, ignoring the conversation flowing around me. He was rubbing the nape of his neck, his breathing was irregular, shallow and he adjusted his cuffs much more than usual.

  “This see—” I nodded apologetically to Francine when I realised I’d interrupted her. She smiled back and rolled her hand in a gesture to continue. I turned back to Phillip. “This seems to be a mere mention of your name. Yet you are extraordinarily distressed. Why?”

  Phillip dusted both his sleeves as if to remove specks of lint. He didn’t often employ any form of self-soothing. His lips tightened. “There is something in her voice. I know you want something definitive, but I can’t give it to you. It’s a feeling. I hear something and it worries me.”

  “I hear that too.” Francine shrugged when I looked at her. “That woman sounds nervous and excited and relieved all rolled into one sexy phone voice.”

  My levator labii superioris muscle lifted my top lip in disgust at the last part of her sentence. It took considerable effort to focus on what was relevant. I hadn’t heard any of these emotions they were talking about. Interpreting someone’s tone of voice was not my strength. I decided to keep my focus on my expert skills—nonverbal communication.

  I trusted Francine’s intuition when it came to understanding emotions. She’d proven time and again that she understood much more than what people were saying with their words alone. “You attributed emotions to this woman’s statements. Nervous, excited and relieved. Not angry? Scared?”

  She was shaking her head before I even finished my question. “Oh, definitely not angry. Not scared, not in the we-are-all-going-to-die kind of way. Rather nervous, like she’s going for a job interview she really, really wants.”

  “Is she?” Manny asked Phillip. “Are you recruiting? Interviews with applicants?”

  “No, I’m not hiring new people.” Phillip took his phone and swiped the screen a few times. “But talking about interviews—” He tapped his phone screen, then shook his head. “I don’t have any interviews with magazines or anyone booked for the next month. So it can’t be a journalist.”

  “It might be that she needs your help as an insurer,” Colin said. “It might be as simple as that. Occam’s razor and all that. Maybe she bought a forgery or she lost a piece of art and needs professional assistance.”

  “Nah.” Francine wrinkled her nose. “I tell you now, it’s not that simple. This feels personal.”

  Phillip didn’t have to say it. I could clearly see he agreed with Francine. I’d known him long enough to assume his reluctance to confirm her suspicions was borne from always acting logically after considering the facts. Yet he never discounted his own intuition about people.

  Neither did I. His accuracy in reading people and situations had proven to be unerring.

  “Well, you can feel as much as you want.” Manny lifted his hand to stop Francine when she inhaled to speak. “Hunches won’t help us legally and you know this. We need cold, hard intel.”

  “Of course we do.” Francine lifted her tablet and shook it. “I’m already on it. I’ll have Husky Voice’s name and favourite ice cream for you before you get annoyed again.”

  “You’re annoying me already.”

  I sighed. “Can we discuss the part of the conversation that sounds like they are investigating something?”

  “We can’t assume that they are investigating the Sirani theft just because they are talking about Broz.” Colin looked at the ceiling for two seconds, then looked at me. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know yet.” I didn’t. I also wasn’t going to speculate.

  “Huh.” Vinnie tapped his chin. “Yo, Frannie. You might want to narrow your search for private inve—”

  “Already on it.” Francine rolled her eyes, then looked towards the elevator as it pinged and opened.

  “Tiny punk!” Vinnie got up and walked towards the twenty-three-month-old child running out of the elevator into our team room. So young, yet his nonverbal cues were unmistakable as his eyes widened and his smile lifted his cheeks. He ran to Vinnie, his arms raised.

  Vinnie caught him and lifted him high in the air. The result—squealing giggles. I smiled.

  For a man who’d started a criminal career in his teenage years and had built a continent-wide reputation for callous criminal behaviour by the time he’d turned thirty, Vinnie showed none of that ruthlessness as he swung Eric into the air again.

  “Well, hello to me too.” Nikki struggled into the team room, raising her shoulder awkwardly to keep the sling of her canvas bag from slipping down her arm, her hands clutching bulging shopping bags. The responsibilities of motherhood and of her art restoration job had not made her any more organised or less messy. The bun on top of her head was a perfect example, half of her hair no longer contained by it.

  She walked to the round table and put all the bags on it with a rustle and a loud sigh. She shook an angry finger at the plate with two remaining cookies. “Don’t tell me you’ve eaten and now you don’t want Chinese.”

  “No worries, punk.” Vinnie walked to the table, with Eric on his hip. “I made sure everyone only got two cookies. Think of them as appetisers.”

  “Humph.” She opened one of the three brown paper bags with familiar logos on them. “Lunch is served. The rest of this stuff is all for that little goblin.”

  “Not little for much longer.” Colin smiled at Eric. “He’s getting bigger by the day.”

  Eric noticed me and immediately started wriggling in Vinnie’s grip, his arms reaching towards me. Vinnie laughed and put Eric down. “Go on, tiny punk. Run free!”

  Eric ignored everyone’s chuckles, only focused on running around the table to where I was pushing my chair out. Nikki often joked that Eric never walked, he only ran at full speed. It certainly looked like that as he made his way to me, his hands outstretched and his face lifted in a genuine smile.

  A quick inspection of his hands revealed no grubbiness. I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to worry about a major transfer of germs. I caught him as he threw himself against my legs. He grabbed my thighs and lifted his foot to get leverage to pull himself onto my lap. “Dohgee. Up. Dohgee.”

  “I love that he calls you that.” Francine laughed as I picked Eric up and settled him on my lap to face the others. Nikki had moved into the flat I shared with Colin five years ago when she’d still been a minor and her father had been killed while we’d investigated a case that involved him and his illegal activities. Since the first day, she’d called me ‘Doc G’. Eric had only recently started speaking his first words, so it had not been surprising that he couldn’t separate sounds. The closest he got to my name sounded far too similar to ‘dodgy’. For now I allowed it.

  Eric didn’t like the position on my lap and turned around to look at me. He stared into my face for a long time, gripping my shirt with both hands. He studied me with an intensity that made me smile and he reacted immediately. His face lifted in a happy, toothy smile. After a few moments, he wriggled around to face the others.

  Francine gave Nikki a quick hug and helped her unpack the many takeaway boxes.

  “I haven’t seen you in ages.” Nikki turned to me, her smile soft as she looked at Eric. But then her eyes narrowed as she looked around the table. “Something tells me I interrupted a serious discussion.” She straightened, her open palm pressed against her chest. “Did you find Shahab?”

  “No.�
�� I wished we had. It had been eleven months since we’d met Shahab Hatami and discovered that he had been importing heroin into Europe for over nine years. Not only that, he’d also been involved in the smuggling of Near Eastern antiquities—a crime that his police unit had been investigating.

  It had been a shock to his unit leader to discover that one of their own had been involved in these crimes as well as the brutal murders we’d been investigating. Even worse, Shahab had been smuggling drugs and art while enforcing the law with highly trained officers. For years, he’d been the team member everyone had relied on. Not only for his tactical skills, but also his more advanced IT skills.

  “We’re stuck.” Francine pushed the Chinese food my way and opened a box that I assumed contained her most recent favourite—duck chop suey. “We know more than we did ten months ago, but not much.”

  “We have three more victims than we did a year ago, but that fu”—Vinnie looked at Eric—“bad man tortured and killed those people soon after our case last year.”

  “He tortured only two.” I despised incorrect reporting. “One he executed.”

  “That was his lawyer, right?” Nikki asked.

  “Hmm.” Manny nodded. “Didn’t think he would do that to his own lawyer. But he’s not been active since. And those later victims and crime scenes didn’t give us anything extra to go on.” He exhaled angrily. “All in a bloody nutshell. Dammit. We need to find that man.”

  Phillip nodded. “I agree. Finding Shahab and stopping him from torturing and killing more people takes priority. This email can wait.”

  Nikki sat down and looked at Phillip, then at me. “What email?”

  “Franny reckons Phillip received an email sent by an AI,” Vinnie said.

  “By accident, I might add.” Francine glanced at her tablet. “I’m pretty sure they didn’t actually want Phillip to hear that conversation.”

  “Oh, come on!” Nikki grabbed chopsticks and shook them at Francine. “You’re killing me with your hints. Give me the low-down. Uh. That is if I’m allowed to know.”

  Phillip reassured her there was nothing classified about this email and asked Francine to play it again. After wiping her hands, Francine tapped her tablet screen. I absently stroked Eric’s denim-covered legs and listened even more attentively to hear any inflection or intonation that might confirm what Phillip and Francine had heard in the woman’s voice. I didn’t hear that.

  What I did hear was an accent close to mine. An accent shaped by living in different countries where English was not the first language. Now living in France, I spoke French fluently, but the times I did communicate in English, I’d learned to temper my accent to make my pronunciation clearer, easier for people to understand. But this observation was too speculative to share with the others.

  “Ooh! Elisabetta Sirani!” Nikki looked at Colin when the recording ended. “How cool is that?” An immediate frown followed her enthusiastic outburst. She turned to Phillip. “I suppose you’ve been over this, but do you kn—” Her shoulders slumped when Phillip shook his head. “Thought so.”

  Francine put her tablet next to her takeaway box and picked up her chopsticks. “I’m running a search, but have very little to go on.”

  “Huh.” Nikki looked at Colin. “What do you make of the art angle?”

  “Nothing more than what is being said.” Colin smiled. “I’ve only told them the basics about Sirani. Want to tell them more?”

  “Ooh, yes!” Nikki straightened. “She’s part of the 27 Club, also called the Forever 27 Club.”

  “Nikki.” Colin shook his head.

  “I was not being disrespectful. She died when she was twenty-seven like many other very famous people.” She counted on her fingers. “Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse.”

  “These were all musicians,” Francine said.

  “There are more. Jean-Michel Basquiat was a famous neo-impressionist and graffiti artist, but yeah, most of the club members are musicians.” She smiled at Manny’s frown. “More about the artist, gotcha. She was born in Bologna in 1638. Her father was a painter like her and also an art merchant.

  “Her father wasn’t keen on training her at first, but then he taught her the way of Bolognese painting. When her father could no longer work because of gout, she started running the family workshop and landed up supporting her whole family, three siblings and all.”

  “She was prolific,” Colin said. “She produced over two hundred paintings, a few etchings and hundreds of drawings.”

  “And she was one of the few female artists of that time to depict male nudity in her Ten Thousand Crucified Martyrs.” Nikki sat back in her chair and sighed dramatically. “She’s like only my favourite Italian Baroque artist.”

  “I thought it was Caravaggio.” I closed my eyes, then sighed and stared at Nikki. “Stating that someone is your favourite implies there is only one favourite. Be accurate and say she is one of many.”

  “Aah.” Nikki’s expression softened. “I really miss you, Doc G. The last two weeks have been too busy. Pink and I will come over for dinner tonight.” She winked at Eric sitting quietly on my lap. “We’ll even bring him too.”

  Nikki and Pink shared an apartment two floors below the apartment I shared with Colin, Vinnie and his partner Roxy. Pink was given this an inane moniker, yet he was a very capable young man who was part of the top GIPN team here in Strasbourg. Similar to the SWAT teams in the US and the SCO19 teams in the UK, GIPN had become an integral part of our investigations in recent years. After six years of working together on numerous cases, I’d come to consider the team leader, Daniel Cassel, a close friend.

  My eyes were drawn to Manny when he shifted in his chair. He scratched his stubbled jaw and looked at Nikki. “Don’t stay too long. Doc has to pack.”

  “I do?” Panic pushed down on me. Any change in my carefully planned schedule caused me great anxiety. My hands tightened on Eric and he turned around to look at me. I forced myself to relax.

  Manny nodded as if confirming a decision. “Yes. We’re going to Prague.”

  Manny’s expression was unusual. I studied his non-verbal cues.

  “Ooh, goodie! Prague.” Francine clapped her hands, but then stilled. “What about Shahab?”

  “We’re not getting anywhere with him at the moment.” Manny’s tone hardened in frustration. “Five weeks and we haven’t unearthed any new intel. We can take two days to find out what this bloody robot email is all about.”

  Phillip pulled his shoulders back and lifted his chin. “No. This email sent to me is definitely not a priority. Finding a terrorist is much more important than this.”

  “Nothing is more important than family.” Vinnie pushed his empty meal box away and lowered his chin as he looked at Phillip. “You’re family and that’s all there is to this.”

  Phillip swallowed as colour slowly crept up his neck. He nodded once at Vinnie. “Thank you.”

  “Let’s not forget about the art thief and the stolen Sirani,” Francine said. “This is right up our alley.”

  She was right. Our team worked directly under the supervision of the president of France. He only assigned a few cases to us, giving us discretion to investigate select cases. Most of these involved art crimes to some extent, some of these leading us to more sinister crimes.

  My eyes widened and I turned to Manny to confirm my sudden suspicion. “The president has already spoken to you about this case.”

  “What? Dude!” Vinnie lifted his chin and peered at Manny through narrowed eyes. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

  “Don’t ‘dude’ me.” Manny shifted in his seat. “The president received a phone call from Prague asking if we could take a look at this case. It sounds like they have a suspicion that there is more behind Broz’s theft.”

  “You’re a sneaky bastard, Millard.” Colin crossed his arms. “Why didn’t you take this case on?”

  Manny shrugged. “We’re looking for Shahab and I know Doc doesn
’t like travelling. And they already have the painting and the thief.”

  “All this is true.” I pointed at Manny’s face. “But this is not the reason you didn’t take the case.”

  “Oh, my God!” Francine burst out laughing. “Oh, this is priceless. Oh, oh.”

  “Franny!” Vinnie was smiling, his frown one of curiosity.

  Francine took a breath and giggled. “Manny had a... well, let’s just call it a”—she raised both hands to make air quotes—“‘situation’ in Prague a few years ago.”

  “Enough of that for now.” Manny slapped one hand on the table and straightened. “I’ll tell the president we’re taking the case.”

  “Ah, man!” Nikki sighed dramatically. “This sucks big time. Prague. I wish I could go.”

  “Says the chick who just returned from two weeks in Rome for work.” Francine’s emphasis on the last words indicated her doubt that Nikki had indeed been in Rome for work.

  I knew Nikki had worked ten hours a day while there. She’d only managed to sightsee the day before she’d returned.

  “Hah! I knew you were jealous.” Nikki laughed. “Okay, I feel a bit better now for having to stay in boring ol’ Strasbourg without you guys.”

  “When are we leaving?” Francine tapped a manicured nail on her lips. “I will need at least two hours to pack.”

  “Let me liaise with Prague and speak to Daniel.” Manny looked at Phillip. “Most likely, we will leave in the morning.”

  Only when Colin put his hand over mine did I realise I was gripping the arm of my chair. His smile was gentle. “We’ll drive if you want. It’s only a six-hour drive.”

  Immediately relief flooded my mind. I had no fear of flying. It was sharing an enclosed space with too many other people and their countless germs that brought intense panic at the mere thought of entering a plane.

  That and the sudden change to my routine. The only unchanging constant was Colin’s presence and the space he gave me to decide how to handle changes.