“What?” Jeff’s mouth felt dry.
“It looks like two friends having lunch.”
Jeff watched the footage again, slowly.
“It’s the oldest trick in the book, and one of the best,” said Victor. “I’ve used it in countless divorce cases. A man and a woman coming out of a hotel at two A.M. and embracing, after the woman’s told her husband she’s spending the night three hundred miles away? That’s an affair. But edit the circumstances just a little, and what have you got?”
Jeff’s voice was a whisper. “Nothing.”
Victor Litchenko nodded. “Exactly. Nothing at all.”
THE DESK CLERK AT the British Museum smiled warmly.
“Mr. Stevens! Welcome back.”
Jeff hurried past her up to his office and pulled open the door.
His desk had been dusted but otherwise was exactly as he’d left it the day he stormed out. The day he last saw Tracy.
Rebecca’s desk was empty.
All her things were gone.
IT TOOK HIM TWENTY minutes to reach Rebecca’s building. Ignoring the bell to her flat—no warnings, not this time—Jeff pulled a hairpin out of his jacket pocket and expertly picked the lock.
Once inside, he slipped upstairs, ready to break into the apartment itself and confront Rebecca. The bitch had deliberately deceived him, sabotaging his marriage and playing him for a fool. When he thought about how close he’d come to sleeping with her, he felt physically sick. But that was all in the past now. Now Jeff knew the truth. Now he was going to make her pay. He was going to find Tracy, and force Rebecca to tell her the whole truth. Tracy would still be angry, of course. She had every right to be. But when she saw how desperately sad and sorry he was for ever doubting her, when she realized what a Machiavellian, twisted young woman Rebecca Mortimer really was . . .
Jeff stopped outside Rebecca’s flat. The door was wide open.
He stepped inside. The place looked like a bomb had hit it, clothes and books and trash strewn everywhere.
An elderly Indian man looked surprised to see him.
“If you’re looking for the young lady, she’s gone, sir. Took off last night and told the security guard she won’t be back.” He shook his head bitterly. “No scruples, these young people. She still owed me three months’ rent.”
CHAPTER 5
SHE OPENED THE BRIEFCASE and looked at the money.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand?”
“Of course. As agreed. Feel free to count it.”
“Oh, I will. Later. Not that I think you’d cheat me.”
“I should hope not.”
“But people do make mistakes.”
He smiled. “I don’t.”
He had made mistakes, of course, in the past. Mistakes that had cost him dearly. The worst mistake he’d ever made had involved taking Jeff Stevens and Tracy Whitney at their word. Those two repellent swindlers had destroyed his life, once. Now, in some small way, he had returned the favor. Destroying their marriage wasn’t enough. But it was a start.
“I didn’t enjoy this job,” the girl was saying, emptying the contents of the briefcase into her own, tattered backpack. She’d cut her hair since he last saw her in London and now wore it short and black, in a sixties-style bob. He preferred it to the look she’d adopted for Rebecca Mortimer, all long tresses and freckles. Youthful innocence didn’t suit her.
“Tracy Whitney may be a bitch, but Jeff Stevens is a nice man. I felt bad for him.”
The man’s upper lip curled. “How you felt is not relevant.”
It is to me, she felt like saying, but she didn’t bother. She’d learned long ago that arguments with this man were fruitless. Despite his brilliant intellect, or perhaps because of it, he had the emotional sensitivity of an amoeba. Come to think of it, the analogy was probably unkind to amoebas.
“Anyway.” He smiled that creepy smile of his, the one that always made her shiver. “You got fucked, didn’t you? Women all love getting fucked, especially by Stevens. Your little titties are probably tingling right now just thinking about it, aren’t they?”
She ignored him, zipping up her backpack and locking it. She had not slept with Jeff Stevens, as it happened. Rather to her annoyance, Tracy Whitney had interrupted them right at the crucial moment. But this was not information she intended to share with him. She’d be happy when they got back to robbing art galleries and jewelry stores.
“I mean it,” she said, standing up to leave. “Any more old scores you can settle yourself.”
“I’ll be in touch,” said the man.
FOR A MONTH AFTER Tracy left him, Jeff went to ground. He rented a flat in Rosary Gardens in South Kensington, unplugged the phone and barely went out.
After more than ten unreturned voice mails, Professor Nick Trenchard tracked him down at the flat.
“Come back to the museum,” he told Jeff. “You need to keep busy.”
He tried not to show how shocked he was by Jeff’s appearance. Jeff wore a full beard, which made him look decades older, and his crumpled clothes hung off his skinny frame like rags on a scarecrow. Empty beer cans and take-out boxes littered the apartment, and the TV was permanently on low in the background.
“I am busy. You wouldn’t believe how many episodes of Homeland I missed since I got married,” Jeff quipped. But there was no laughter behind his eyes anymore.
“I’m serious, Jeff. You need a job.”
“I have a job.”
“You do?”
“Sure. Drinking.” Jeff collapsed onto the couch and opened another beer. “I’m pretty good at it, as it happens. I’m thinking of giving myself a promotion. Maybe something in the Jack Daniel’s division.”
Other friends tried and failed to intervene. In the end it was Gunther Hartog who refused to take no for an answer.
“Pack your bags,” he told Jeff. “We’re going to the country.”
Gunther had turned up at the flat in Rosary Gardens with a small army of Brazilian women who set about picking up the mountains of trash that Jeff had accumulated during his self-imposed imprisonment. When he refused to move from the couch, four of the women lifted it off the ground with Jeff still on it, while a fifth swept the floor underneath.
“I hate the country.”
“Nonsense. Hampshire’s beautiful.”
“Beauty’s overrated.”
“So’s alcohol poisoning. Get your suitcase, Jeff.”
“I’m not going, Gunther.”
“You are going, old boy.”
“Or what?” Jeff laughed. “You’re gonna ground me?”
“Don’t be silly,” said Gunther. “That would be ridiculous.”
Jeff felt a sharp stabbing pain in his left arm. “What the . . .”
He just had time to see the syringe, and Gunther’s satisfied smile, before everything went black.
IT TOOK AN ENTIRE month to dry Jeff out. By the time he was sober, and sane enough to start eating and shaving again, summer was already upon them. Gunther had hoped that perhaps Tracy would have gotten in touch by now, but there was still no word.
“You must move on with life, old boy,” Gunther told Jeff. “You can’t spend the rest of your days waiting for the telephone to ring. That would drive anyone mad.”
They were strolling in the grounds of Gunther’s seventeenth-century manor house, a thirty-acre paradise of formal gardens, lake and woodland, with a small farm attached. Gunther had been a pioneer of self-sufficiency long before it became fashionable and prided himself on the fact that he lived almost entirely off the fat of his own land. The fact that the land had been bought with stolen antiques didn’t dim his view of himself as an honest farmer.
“I agree that I need to move on,” said Jeff, stopping to admire a cote full of homing pigeons. He and Tracy had used one of Gunther’s birds
on their last job together in Amsterdam. “But I can’t face going back to the museum. Rebecca ruined that for me. Along with the rest of my life.”
The bitterness in his voice was painful.
“Ah, about that,” said Gunther. “I managed to unearth some information about the young lady. If you’re interested.”
“Of course,” said Jeff. In some strange way, Rebecca felt like a link to Tracy, one of the few he had left.
“Her real name is Elizabeth Kennedy.”
If Jeff was surprised that “Rebecca Mortimer” had been an alias, he didn’t show it. He’d spent most of his life in a world where nothing was what it seemed.
“She grew up in Wolverhampton, poor thing, raised by adoptive parents who couldn’t control her from the start. Very bright, evidently, but she did poorly at school. Two expulsions by the time she turned eleven.”
“My heart bleeds,” said Jeff.
“At sixteen, she’d had a string of minor run-ins with the law and got her first custodial sentence.”
“For?”
“Credit-card fraud. She volunteered at a local charity and downloaded details of all the donors from their computer. Then she skimmed tiny amounts, a few pence here or there, off each contribution. She made off with over thirty thousand pounds in eighteen months before anyone caught on. Like I say, she’s smart. She kept it simple.”
Jeff thought about the amateurishly doctored video footage of Tracy and Alan McBride and felt sick.
“After she got out of prison, she never went home again. These days she’s after bigger fish. Jewel thefts mostly. She’s quite the expert. Works with a partner apparently, but nobody knows who.”
“What was she after at the British Museum?” Jeff asked. “Apart from me.”
“We don’t know. But I suspect nothing. She used the internship as cover while she pulled off other jobs in London. Her name’s been linked to that hit on Theo Fennell last Christmas.”
Jeff’s eyes widened. The theft of half a million pounds’ worth of rubies from Theo Fennell’s flagship store on Old Brompton Road had been the talk of the London underworld. The job had been perfectly executed, and the police had been left without a single clue.
“Any idea where she is now?”
“None,” said Gunther. “Although if I knew, I’m not sure I’d tell you. I’d hate to see you spend the rest of your days banged up for murder, old boy. Such a waste.”
They strolled on, along a gravel pathway lined with cottage garden plants: roses and hollyhocks and foxgloves and lupines. He’s right, thought Jeff. Hampshire is beautiful. At least Gunther’s little corner of it is. He wondered if he would ever be able truly to appreciate beauty again. Without Tracy, every sense seemed dull, every pleasure blunted. It was like looking at the world through glasses permanently shaded gray.
“I do need a job,” he mused. “Maybe I could try a smaller museum. Or one of the university history departments. University College London is supposed to be looking.”
Gunther stopped dead in his tracks. When he spoke, he was quite stern.
“Now look here. Enough of this nonsense. You’re not cut out to be a bloody librarian, Jeff. If you want my opinion it was the nonsensical decision to give up your career that caused all the problems with you and Tracy in the first place.”
Jeff smiled indulgently. “But, Gunther, my ‘career,’ as you call it, was breaking the law. I was a thief. I ripped people off.”
“Only people who deserved it,” said Gunther.
“Maybe. But it still meant I lived my life on the run, always looking over my shoulder.”
The older man’s eyes gleamed mischievously. “I know! Wasn’t it fun?”
Jeff burst out laughing. It was the first time he could remember doing so in months. It felt good.
“Just think what a comeback you could have,” Gunther said, waxing enthusiastic, “now that you’re a bona fide specialist in antiquities. You have the contacts and the brains. You can talk the talk and walk the walk. Nobody else out there can do that, Jeff. You’d be unique! Have you any idea what some of these wealthy private collectors are willing to pay? These are people who are used to buying whatever they want: homes, planes, yachts, diamonds, lovers, influence. It incenses them when they covet objects that simply aren’t for sale. Unique pieces of history. Objects that only you can track down and acquire.”
Jeff allowed the appeal of the idea to wash over him for a moment.
“You could name your price,” said Gunther. “What do you want, Jeff? What do you really want?”
The only thing I want is Tracy back, thought Jeff. I’m just like Gunther’s collectors. I can have it all. But the one thing I really want, no one can give me.
Gunther watched Jeff’s face begin to fall. Realizing he was losing him, that the moment was passing, he made his move.
“It just so happens I have exactly the job to get you started,” he said, clapping his bony hands tightly onto Jeff’s shoulders. “How would you like a lovely little jaunt to Rome?”
CHAPTER 6
ROBERTO KLIMT STEPPED OUT onto the balcony of his sumptuous apartment on the Via Veneto and watched the sun setting over his beautiful city.
Roberto Klimt considered himself a lover of beauty in all its forms. Tonight’s wine-red sun, bleeding into the Rome skyline. The Basquiat portrait hanging above his bed, showing two simian faces in a riot of yellow and red and blue. The perfect curve of the rent boy’s buttocks awaiting him in bed at his country house in Sabina, forty minutes outside the city. Roberto Klimt enjoyed and savored and delighted in them all.
I have them because I deserve them. Because I am a true artist.
Only true artists should be rewarded with true beauty.
Fifty years old and breathtakingly vain, with thick, dyed blond hair, a full-lipped, cruel, sensual mouth and the amber-yellow eyes of a snake, Roberto Klimt was an art dealer, businessman and pedophile, although not necessarily in that order. He made his first ten million in crooked real estate deals, cutting in the corrupt local police on a piece of the action from day one. The next ninety million came from art, a business for which Roberto Klimt had a uniquely brilliant commercial eye.
Roberto Klimt knew what beauty was, but he also knew how to sell it. As a result, he lived like a latter-day Roman emperor—rich beyond his wildest dreams, debauched, corrupt and answerable to no one.
A late-summer breeze chilled him slightly. Frowning, he withdrew from the balcony into his palatial drawing room, closing the tall sash windows behind him.
“Bring me a blanket!” he commanded, to no one in particular. Roberto Klimt kept a fleet of servants in all his homes. He was never quite sure what any one of them did, but he found that if one had enough milling around, one’s desires were always promptly catered to. “And bring me the bowl. I want to look at the damned bowl.”
Moments later, a pretty, dark-haired boy with long eyelashes and an adorably dimpled chin presented his master with a saffron-yellow cashmere throw from Loro Piana—with fall approaching, Roberto Klimt only tolerated an autumnal palette in his soft furnishings—and a locked, Plexiglas case containing a small, solid gold bowl.
Roberto Klimt unlocked the case with a key he kept on a platinum chain around his neck and cupped the bowl lovingly in his hands, the way a mother might cradle a newborn child.
No bigger than a modern-day dessert bowl, and entirely unadorned by any carving or decoration, the bowl was an object lesson in simplicity. Burnished and dazzling, its sides worn thin and smooth by two thousand years’ worth of hands caressing it, it seemed to Roberto to glow with some sort of magical power.
“This belonged to the Emperor Nero, you know?” he purred to the boy who’d delivered it. “His lips would have touched it just here. Right where mine are now.”
Roberto Klimt pressed his wet, fleshy mouth against the metal, leaving a
glistening trail of saliva in its wake.
“Would you like to try?”
“No, thank you, sir. I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”
“TRY!” Roberto Klimt commanded.
Blushing, the boy did as he was asked.
“You see?” Klimt smiled, satisfied. “You’ve just touched greatness. How does it feel?”
The boy stammered helplessly.
“Never mind.” Klimt dismissed him with a curt wave. “Philistine,” he muttered under his breath. This was the cross that Roberto Klimt had to bear, to be surrounded constantly by lesser mortals, people incapable of grasping the true nature of beauty.
Still, he consoled himself, it was the cross borne by all great artists. A noble suffering.
Tomorrow, Roberto Klimt would leave Rome for his country house. Nero’s bowl would follow a few days later. Klimt employed an elite private security team to protect his treasures. The head of this team had informed Roberto a few days ago about a rumored plot to rob the Via Veneto apartment.
“It’s nothing concrete. Just rumors and whispers. Some hotshot foreign thief’s in town apparently. He likes the sound of your collection.”
“I’ll bet he does!” Roberto Klimt laughed. A thief would have a better chance of infiltrating Fort Knox than of circumventing his state-of-the-art security. Even so, he’d been guided by his expert’s advice and agreed to move Nero’s bowl and a couple more of his rarest pieces to Sabina. The only private residence in Italy better protected than Roberto Klimt’s Rome apartment was Roberto Klimt’s country estate. He would be there himself to oversee the bowl’s installation in his newly redesigned “Treasures Room,” and would enjoy the rent boy’s body while he awaited its arrival.
The boy was eighteen and had been paid handsomely in advance for his services. Roberto Klimt preferred them younger, and unwilling—feigned submission was a poor substitute for the real thing. But after the unfortunate incident with the two Roma Gypsy boys who’d gone and jumped off a building after an alleged encounter with the art dealer, Roberto Klimt had been forced to become more cautious.
Sidney Sheldon's Chasing Tomorrow (Tracy Whitney) Page 7