“I think you know something.”
“No, I really don’t. However, we are following a track, a possibility, you could say.”
Nancy and Tony remained silent. Intuitively they felt that the conversation had reached a point at which it would not be unusual for the commissaire to say that he had said all he could at this stage. For this reason, to put pressure on to him didn’t seem like a good idea.
After a while the commissaire continued. “Our investigations so far established that the four painters became friends after the victorious conclusion of your and their court case five years ago. They were all around the same age, in their early forties, and they met on average once a fortnight, mainly to talk and drink. On two occasions, as far as we know, they went on holiday together; the first time a bit over two years ago and then again four months ago.”
“Interesting.”
“Yes, we hope so. – Four months ago they went to Rome for two weeks.”
When the commissaire didn’t continue, Nancy asked, “And?”
“There is no ‘and’, not yet. We are still trying to find out what they did in Rome, what places they visited, who they met and whether perhaps they brought something back from Rome.”
“I believe after the court case the value of their paintings increased quite a bit.”
“Oh yes! They didn’t have a huge turnover, but they sold most of their paintings for between fifty thousand and two hundred thousand euros.”
“It’s a lot of work to paint a Leonardo da Vinci that looks like a real one,” Nancy commented. “I stayed in touch with them for a short while after the court case and they told me that they legally copied the big masters with only one difference.”
“What difference was that?” asked Tony.
“Where the master had placed his name they now placed their own names.”
“Amazing.”
“A court had granted them special permission to do that.”
Turning towards the commissaire, Nancy asked, “As far as the value of their existing paintings is concerned, what do you think will be the consequences of their deaths?”
“So far the value has doubled. That’s what I was told by two art dealers who specialise in buying and selling copies of old masters.”
“Maybe they were killed by someone who has a big collection of their paintings,” Tony speculated.
“As far as we could establish, there is one art collector who owns four of their paintings. A few galleries have three and there is one businessman who also owns three. We could exclude all of them from our list of possible suspects.”
“Oh, oh!” Nancy couldn’t help saying.
Tony and the commissaire looked at her.
“I am afraid, you have to put me back on your list of suspects.”
“Why? How many paintings do you have?” asked Tony. He could see that the commissaire was about to ask the same question, he was just a little faster.
“Twelve. I have twelve paintings.”
24
Christina’s head was still on Mike’s chest. He had his right arm around her slim body. His hand rested on one of her breasts. During foreplay he never got tired caressing and kissing them.
“You know,” Christina started, “when we decided to become lovers, we discussed what to do in the event that one of us falls in love with the other. Do you remember?”
“I do.”
“Well, I wasn’t entirely honest at the time.”
“No?”
“No.”
“You want to tell me more about it?” Mike asked after a while of silence.
“I don’t know yet.”
“OK.”
Christina moved her head off his chest and looked at him surprised. “What do you mean OK? You’re meant to be inquisitive.”
“Oh. OK, I am inquisitive.”
“Forget it!” Christina turned around to her side of the bed and pretended to be offended.
“Well? I’m still inquisitive.”
Mike, too, had turned around and moved to Christina’s side of the bed and hugged her from behind. One of his hands rested on one of her breasts and one, coming from underneath her body, touched her stomach.
“Alright, since you are so terribly inquisitive, I’ll tell you.”
“Tell me.”
“I have been in love with you since I saw you for the first time.”
“Good.”
“What do you mean, good? Is this all you have to say?”
“Yeah, I guess so. I mean this is good, isn’t it? You’ve been in love with me since you first met me and you got me. Isn’t this exactly the way it is meant to be? This is how I remember it from my teenage years and I don’t think the rules have changed since.”
“You’re impossible.”
“In this case you are in love with an impossible man.”
They stayed in the position they were in. Mike continued to gently caress Christina’s breast and stomach. She could feel the strength of his masculinity. After a while Mike said, “You wanted to ask me a personal question.”
“Yes! Here is my personal question. – Do you love me?”
25
Mike’s car, which had been given to him only twenty four hours earlier, was unrecognisable. The explosion had ripped it apart and thrown bits and pieces up to thirty yards away in all directions. There was damage in the bitumen where the car had been parked a few minutes earlier. At least another ten cars in the vicinity were damaged.
“One car gone and at least one person dead,” Mike said bleakly.
“What? – Shit, you are right!” said a fraction of a second later his boss when he, too, noticed the torn off leg that was sticking out from underneath one of the damaged cars.
“You think it’s a policeman’s leg?” asked Christina.
Mike studied the leg without touching anything. It was without shoes and socks and he noticed a tattoo just above the ankle that looked like a skull with an axe stuck in it. It was small and probably a piece of art, macabre art. “It could be the leg of the guy who planted the bomb,” he replied. “Let’s hope so.”
In the meantime two dozen or so of police personnel and administrative staff had arrived and stared at the scene. The chief inspector was on his cell phone and arranged for a forensic team to come to the car park.
“Step back,” Christina told the onlookers. “You are much to close.” They obeyed her request.
Mike and the chief inspector circled the scene. They found more parts of the dead man including his head which was still attached to his upper body.
“This looks like the same kind of bomb they use for terrorist attacks in Afghanistan,” the chief inspector said.
“How do you know?”
“I know someone who worked there as bomb disposal expert for a while.”
“What’s a while?”
“In his case less than six months. His fiancée told him to get out of this kind of work or look for another girlfriend.”
“And he got out?”
“Yes.”
“Seems to me he’s a sensible guy.”
Mike and his boss were standing and surveying the scene and waiting for the forensics to arrive. The cars on each side of the spot where Mike’s car had been parked were most severely damaged. Mike had a closer look at what was left of one of the cars. “I think this might have been his car,” he said.
His boss joined him and also noticed the machine gun on the floor in front of the passenger seat. He replied, “Let’s hope there is useful information coming out of this mess. I’ll see if I can arrange for a few extra forensics working on this.”
The next day the first preliminary forensic report and a few other details became available. The dead man was identified as a John Mortimer. The car was stolen. John Mortimer had spent six years in jail for trying to blow up a factory in the Bronx after he had been sacked for stealing. He had been released from jail four months earlier, was 48 years old, married and had no children; at lea
st not as far as official records were concerned.
Mike and Christina went to his last address. A tired looking and overweight woman let them in. After they introduced themselves, the woman asked, “Is it about John?”
“I am afraid so, yes,” Christina replied.
“Has he done something or is it about an accident?”
“Can we sit down?”
The woman pointed to a table with four chairs. After they were all seated, Christina continued. “He was involved in something which resulted in an accident. Are you his wife?”
“Yes, according to the law we are still married.” The woman did not ask what had happened. She appeared resigned, indifferent, perhaps she felt depressed.
Mike asked, “Can you tell us who your husband had met in recent days or weeks?”
“There were two men. They didn’t talk much. They picked him up and John told me that they went to a bar for a beer. What happened to him?”
“There was a bomb that exploded.”
“Is he dead?”
“Yes, I am sorry.”
For a few seconds the woman did not respond. Both Mike and Christina were waiting for her to show an emotional reaction, but she didn’t. Her face remained tired. She looked at the table and said, “Maybe this is for the best.”
“The best for whom?” Christina asked.
“The best for him, the best for me.”
“Why do you think so?”
“He was a deeply unhappy man; unhappy and confused. One day he tried to be good, the next day he hated everything and everybody; one day he talked about starting a new life, the next day he talked about committing suicide.”
“Did he suffer from depression?”
“Don’t we all?”
“Mrs Mortimer,” Mike asked, “what else can you tell us about the two men who picked your husband up?”
“Nothing, I guess. As I said, they didn’t talk. They ignored me; didn’t say hi or bye or anything.”
“Can you describe them?”
“They were tall, but not quite as tall as you. They wore suits; the kind of suits business people often wear, grey and … nothing else, I guess.”
Mike took a photograph from the inside pocket of his jacket and showed it to the woman. “Were the men the same as the ones on this picture?”
The woman took the photograph into one of her hands and looked at it thoroughly. “I would say no. I saw them only for a few seconds, but I would say no, they don’t look the same. They were smaller.” Good, Mike thought, they are meant to be dead. Torn apart by their hand grenades. Would have spooked me if they had been here.
“Have you seen them before?”
“No.”
“Do you remember what car they drove?”
“No, I don’t care about cars. I think it was a dark coloured car, a big car, but I’m not really sure.”
Mike and Christina spent another thirty minutes with the woman; she allowed them to look through her dead husband’s belongings, which were few and kept mainly in a drawer in the bedroom. It didn’t seem that he had hidden anything from his wife since his release from jail four months earlier. There was nothing else she could tell them and there was nothing they found that could have been of further help in their investigation.
PART 2
26
Mike and Christina continued working for the police for another month. There were two more attacks on Mike’s life and one attack on Christina’s life. In each case Mike and Christina were able to take the actions that were necessary to stay alive. Mike was attacked by four men, and he managed to kill three of the four with his pistol and the fourth by throwing him off a sixth floor balcony. Christina managed to run over her attackers with her car. She had her car in a car park and was shot at from the front just after she had reversed from her parking spot and switched into the first gear. A woman and a man, both with machine guns, stood ten feet in front of her and sprayed the windscreen of her car with bullets. They didn’t know that the windows of Christina’s car were made of bullet proof glass, a lucky coincidence which saved her life; a coincidence because the car, a powerful V8, had previously been used for chauffeuring an Arabian dignitary with plenty of enemies around New York. It was therefore equipped with all sorts of protection stuff and was allocated to Christina for no particular reason, except that it was available. Christina pushed the accelerator pedal flat onto the car’s floor and the V8, in what felt like the sudden jump of a horse, hit and ran over both attackers. They were left dead on the basement floor of the car park with cracked skulls. Another attack against Mike took place when he watched a baseball game. For no apparent reason, Mike suddenly got up and looked around. Until this day he can’t explain why. Something didn’t feel right. He noticed a man who was also standing. The man held one hand behind his back. Mike had the impression that the man was staring at him and quickly looked away when Mike looked in his direction. The man was located to the side of Mike at the end of a row of seats four or five rows further back. Mike was just about to turn back around when he noticed a sense of surprise, or rather shock, on the face of the man in the seat behind the standing man. Intuitively Mike knew what that meant. The standing man was hiding a pistol behind his back. Both Mike and the standing man reacted at once. Mike pulled his pistol and the man brought his from behind his back. The man was either faster or had an advantage because he didn’t have to move his hand to a pocket in his jacket first. Fortunately for Mike, the man’s bullet missed. Mike felt it going past his head. The distance between the bullet and his head was less than an eighth of an inch. Mike was convinced of this. The second bullet came from Mike’s pistol and didn’t miss. It hit the standing man in the middle of his chest. The bullet which the man had fired injured another spectator slightly. The baseball game was interrupted for forty five minutes. Mike didn’t stay to watch the end of the game.
The case of the murdered publisher had not progressed significantly. For Mike it had turned into a series of life threatening events. If the forensics had not identified the two men who had attacked him the first time as the same two men who had killed the publisher and injured him in the bar, he could not even be certain that the attacks on him were linked to the murdered publisher.
The reason why Mike and Christina decided to quit their jobs and leave the police force for good had nothing to do with the attempts on their lives. There were two other developments that left them with little choice.
Mike’s boss received a phone call from a woman who claimed that Mike was the son of an Italian gangster. The woman said she wanted to remain anonymous. However, she agreed that her claim was not very convincing unless she provided evidence, which she admitted she didn’t have. Nevertheless, Mike, she insisted, was the son of a gangster. He was born in Rome and brought to the USA when he was two months old. He was not born in New York as his birth certificate stated. As a matter of fact, he was actually two months older than what he was, according to his American birth certificate. His father’s name was Antonio Garcia, also known as La Volpe: the fox. He had robbed a bank on the day his son was born and was fatally shot by the Italian police one week later. Mike’s mother, whose first name the woman said she didn’t know, managed to escape before the Italian police had an opportunity to question her about the bank robbery. The money that was stolen, over five million euros in today’s currency, was never found and it was believed that Mike’s mother brought it to America together with her then two months old son. This is the story, the woman said, and if anybody wanted to find out more they could either question Mike, who may or may not confirm the story, or they could do a bit of research in Rome which, if done with sufficient thoroughness, would confirm her story and probably also unearth further interesting details.
During the phone conversation Mike’s boss made notes about what the woman told him. This sounds like a lot of bullshit, he thought, I bet someone is trying to give him a hard time; probably the relatives of a crook of Italian descent who Mike’s put behind
bars.
When he told Mike the story the next day Mike didn’t seemed fussed. Even if it was true he asked, what could I do about it. His boss asked him if his mother was still alive. He replied that she had died when he was sixteen years old. He added that she was buried in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn and that he used to visit her once a year, but that all ended more than a decade ago when the cemetery people decided they needed the plot where she was resting for someone else.
“Really? That’s kind of sad.”
“You can’t keep everybody’s grave forever,” Mike replied. “Imagine if we did, our graveyards would be bigger than our cities.”
“What about your father?”
“What about him?”
“Do you know him?”
“No. He left before I was born. All I have of him is a name, Robert Thompson, a photograph and an address in Chicago. When I was twenty I tried to contact him at that address, but he didn’t live there and nobody I spoke to remembered him.”
“Which wouldn’t be surprising,” Mike’s boss commented, “assuming that this was his first address after he had left your mother before you were born.”
A few hours after the conversation with his boss Mike went to the house of the elderly lady who had provided the woman who had murdered her husband with a new identity and tickets to Australia. He parked his car nearly two blocks away from where she lived and made sure nobody followed him.
“Who do you think could have phoned my boss?” he asked after he had told the elderly lady about the conversation with his boss chief inspector Neil Norman.
“I’m wondering if it could have been someone from the same group who have been trying to kill you,” she replied.
“I had the same thought.”
They both had some coffee and a piece of Millefoglie cake. Before Mike talked about his conversation with his boss, he and the elderly woman had discussed aspects of America’s financial situation. The elderly woman had to make important investment decisions and was wondering if she should start moving some money to countries like Switzerland, Germany, Australia or perhaps China. They agreed that Australia should be researched further.
An Almighty Conspiracy – A novel, a thriller, four people doing the unexpected Page 9