2 Priceless

by Marne Davis Kellogg

  “Lucia, darlin’, come over here and talk to me.” Sissy put her arm around Lucia’s waist and said to me, “Do you know, I’ve known this girl since she was an itty-bitty thing. Didn’t she turn out to be lovely?”

  Lucia looked uncomfortable.

  “Your daddy used to get so mad at you and Marjorie when you girls were in school. Always in trouble. He was always having to get on the train to Lausanne and have a meeting with the directrice to beg her not to throw you out. You girls were terrible! And now look at you. You’re a world-famous art historian and Marjorie’s a world-famous actress. I never thought either one of you’d amount to anything. When are you going to get married, honey?”

  “Sissy, stop. You’re embarrassing me,” Lucia said kindly.

  “I just hate to think of you rattling around in that big place all by yourself. We both know your daddy’s about as useless as tits on a bull.”

  “I’m really very happy.”

  “I suppose you are. You’ve always been happy. You and your collections.” She couldn’t keep the envy out of her voice. Sissy’s problem was that she needed to get a life—cruising around the world half drunk and drugged all the time didn’t qualify. She turned to me. “Lucia is a born collector.”

  “I know.”

  The sun was setting as we pulled away from the dock and headed into the ocean and cruised along the coastline. Giancarlo, Sissy, and Lucia pointed out various villas that dotted the steep hillsides and told funny stories about the people who lived in them.

  I wondered where Lucia kept the speedboat she’d used to get up to Beaulieu, Saint-Tropez, and San Remo and back. I could picture her, all in black, roaring across the open sea to the Riviera and changing into dinner clothes before she docked at her destination, where she would probably be a familiar patron, there to meet friends for dinner. How would it go?

  Principessa, the headman would say. What a welcome surprise. We weren’t expecting you.

  You weren’t? she would answer. But I’m supposed to meet the Mountbattens here, she would lie.

  Oh. He would check his book and not see their name and make a mental note to have words with his reservation manager. Let me offer you an aperitif while you wait.

  She would pretend to wait while she checked out the guests, specifically, the older, solitary, bejeweled women. After a while, she’d approach one of them. I feel uncomfortable sitting in a cocktail lounge by myself, she’d say. Do you mind if I join you until my friends come?

  Then what? Well, if it were me, I would slip something into her drink, wait until she was woozy and asked me to escort her upstairs, where I’d tuck her in and steal her jewelry. I don’t know if that’s what Lucia did, but in my opinion, it would be the only humane, ladylike way to approach it. And Lucia was most certainly a lady. I couldn’t picture her conking people on the head or rappelling down the façade of a hotel and through an open window.

  I studied her as we stood along the rail, watching the moonlit coastline slip past. She had such poise and self-possession.

  Her profile was classic, her high cheekbones, arching nose, and full mouth mirrored the antiquity of her heritage. She could have been a Roman emperor.

  She turned and caught me staring at her. “What is it, Priscilla?”

  “Oh,” I said. “You just reminded me of someone. An old, old friend. Someone I love very much.”

  Lucia smiled. “Oh? Who?”

  “My daughter, actually”

  “How flattering. Thank you.”

  What I wanted to say was, You remind me of myself.

  F O R T Y - F I V E

  We spent a completely relaxing, convivial evening aboard the Ercole, and after a delicious supper of antipasti, osso bucco, and several bottles of Chianti—of which I drank very little—we returned to the dock after one o’clock in the morning. I was glad to be back on dry land. I didn’t want to make any hasty judgments, but based on this experience—even though it was, as I’ve already admitted, a convivial sojourn on a small craft—boats weren’t my thing. A bigger boat? Possibly. But I doubt it.

  I rode back up the hill with Lucia. She drove at a somewhat calmer pace.

  Sissy rode with Alesandro and I was relieved to watch them turn into the hotel drive instead of returning to the villa.

  “That was great fun,” I said. “Thank you for inviting me.”

  “It was a fun evening, wasn’t it? Poor Sissy. I worry about her.”

  “She can change if she wants to,” I said.

  Lucia glanced over at me, surprised.

  “I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic, but I do get impatient with people who have great financial resources and complain about how hard and empty their lives are—I just don’t understand it. It’s like people who complain about the consequences of their actions—people who go out and break the law and get caught and then complain when they get sent to jail. It’s beyond me.”

  “Umm.” She nodded and put her foot on the accelerator, indicating the end of the conversation. I knew she was thinking about the Star and how she would steal it tomorrow night and how she wouldn’t get caught. How her actions would have no consequences because she was above the law. She was the principessa. She didn’t know it, but time was up and she was out of the running. She’d picked the wrong brand name to plagiarize and she wasn’t ready for the big leagues anyway. But she’d figure that out for herself soon enough.

  Evidently, all the other houseguests had already gotten home. The house was dim and quiet. Giancarlo escorted me to the top of the stairs where he kissed my hand. “Guilberto tells me you’ve become an excellent tennis player,” he said.

  I laughed. “Far from it.”

  “Would you like to play in the morning?”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Bene. How’s ten o’clock?”

  “Perfect. Grazie, Giancarlo. It was a perfectly lovely evening. Buona notte.”

  He put his arm on the doorjamb and leaned toward me. His lips were very close. “Wouldn’t you like for me to come in? Just to visit, I swear. No funny business. No chasing, Just a sip of champagne.”

  “No, Giancarlo. Thank you, but I wouldn’t. I’m going to get some sleep.”

  He came closer, heat radiated from his body like a nuclear reactor. “I know you want me, Bella. I can feel it.” He put his body next to mine and began to kiss me.

  The burglar alarm went off.

  Giancarlo’s head jerked up and he spun around. “God damn it! God damn it!” he yelled and headed for the stairs. ”Basta! Basta!Off! Off! This is over. We need to sleep.”

  I laughed and took my finger off the innocent-looking Palm Pilot in my pocket that had been responsible for setting off all the false alarms—part of my order from EKMElektronika. The gizmo could identify alarm codes and activate alarms up to a distance of one-hundred meters, through cement walls and floors. For one hundred thousand dollars, it should also be able to cook your dinner.

  It was time to go to work.

  F O R T Y - S I X

  I waited a couple of moments outside my door and looked down toward Lucia’s bedroom to make sure her end of the hall was still dark, and then I dashed into my suite, fastened my tool belt around my waist, slid my copy of the Millennium Star into my pocket, and tiptoed down the back stairs. Giancarlo, the electrician, and the security chief were shouting and arguing in the middle of the cavernous foyer—their angry voices echoing throughout the hall and up the stairs. Even the Jewelry Room guards had joined the fray, leaving the Jewelry Room door closed and locked, but unattended.

  My lock pick hit the mark and within seconds I slipped in, closing the door silently behind me. The room was dark except for the DeBeers vault squatting at the far end in its spotlight. It looked like a giant, hulking, impenetrable black rock on top of an iceberg. I pulled on my night-vision goggles and skintight latex gloves. On the wall just inside the door was a switch panel. I quickly unscrewed it, and then, using a wire with an electrical current, I shorted out the swit
ch. The room fell into inky blackness. The acrid smell of burning wires had evaporated by the time I reattached the switch plate.

  I was energized. My blood flowed through me in a smooth, powerful current, like a fast-running river. I’d missed this high, this living at the edge of danger, and tonight I was really out there with minimal preparation. I hadn’t had the opportunity to study what times the guards did their rounds, so I had no clue what sort of timeline I was on. Sixty seconds or sixty minutes. It didn’t matter. My mission was specific and my focus complete. It was thrilling—like an adrenaline shot that sharpened my senses and filled me with the power of a freight train.

  I made my way quickly to the safe and examined it thoroughly before touching it. It was freestanding—no cables or wires emerged from it or from the marble base. The fingerprint reader was behind a small panel on the side, next to the keypad. I lifted the cover and it beeped a couple of times before stopping. Its red light glowed back at me. I flipped down magnifying lenses and studied the glass on the reader itself. I shook a whisk of black powder into the palm of my hand and blew it gently on the front corner and top of the safe, revealing three or four clean prints. I applied a strip of wide double-stick tape to my finger, and then, being careful not to let the tape adhere tightly to the metal, I rolled it across the cleanest-looking print and lifted it off the black steel.

  The reader needed not only the right print to connect, it also needed the right pressure and heat. If I made the wrong selection, there would be sticky tape and black powder all over the glass and the system would take a few minutes to reset itself after I’d wiped it clean with acetone. So if this wasn’t the right fingerprint, I’d really be way, way out there.

  I took a deep breath and shook my shoulders around to loosen them up. The print looked sharp. I pressed it firmly onto the glass. The red light blinked and blinked and finally turned green and started to beep. I had less than thirty seconds to enter the correct combination into the electronic lock.

  Electronic locks can be very temperamental, daunting, and usually defeating, unless you know what you’re doing.

  In the mid 1990s, when electronic safes became available for residential use, they were considered crackproof, and essentially they still are. You get three tries at an electronic lock before it freezes for a minimum of fifteen minutes, sometimes more—a demoralizing situation in the high-speed, smash-and-grab life of a jewel thief. You can rip off the keypad, but it doesn’t make any difference. The brains of the mechanism are sealed between layers of armor, cooked in there like a little pancake, nowhere near the keypad. You can try a blowtorch, but the second the vault feels the heat, the locking bars freeze themselves into place. So, even if you were to cut an opening big enough to put your hand through and try to open the safe from the inside out, it wouldn’t do any good. At that point, your only recourse is to try to cut a hole big enough to remove the goods through—but then you can only take what you can get, like reaching into a party grab bag.

  On a safe as sophisticated as this one, I assumed the locking bars were the latest thing: flexible rods that circled the entire box like a mesh of ribbons around a package, not just across the door. I’d never tried to crack one of these safes with the flexible rods. We’d gotten one at Ballantine & Company just before I left, but there’d never been a reason or opportunity for me to try to break in to it. All the safes I’d cracked were residential and had either a regular combination lock or a standard electronic one.

  On the plus side, the availability of black-market, digital-scanner technology had kept up with industry electronics, and I’ve always kept myself up-to-date on what’s new. It was serendipitous that also shortly before I left Ballantine & Company, I’d purchased a new, state-of-the-art, high-speed scanner from EKM for forty-five thousand dollars. It would disarm this vault’s state-of-the-art lock in about two seconds.

  I held the scanner right next to the keypad and pushed the button. The lights flashed and almost instantly the web of flexible locking tubes inside the black armor begin to retract—the most beautiful sound in the world. To a jewel thief at any rate.

  Five drawers.

  I started with the top one and moved down. They held a king’s ransom in diamonds and pieces of jewelry—even without the Millennium Star, this heist could rank among one of the biggest in the world. But, like Lucia, I was on a trophy hunt. I found the Star in the fourth drawer. All by itself in its navy-blue velvet box. Even in total blackness, complete absence of light, looking at it through the eerie green of goggles, the diamond looked alive, as though it would burn me if I touched it. It was the most beautiful stone I’d ever seen. I pulled the replica from my pocket—gave it a last, quick polish—and made the switch, attaching the real Star onto the thin platinum chain around my neck next to the Pasha. I tucked them both into the top of my bra, next to my heart. I took one last look at my stone, it was only slightly less lively than the real thing. Without detailed scrutiny, no one would spot it as a fake. I slid the box back into the drawer, closed it up, swabbed the reader with acetone and reset the lock. Finally, I pulled a soft cloth and a tiny spray bottle of fine gun oil out of my back pocket and began to polish the black powder fingerprints off the vault.

  The door flew open. A shaft of light cut across the room. “What’s happened in here?” one of the guards said. “It’s pitch-black.” He stepped around the open door to the wall and flipped the light switches up and down. “Hey! The lights are out.”

  Covered by the darkness, and the fact that the guard was concealed by the partially open door, I ran as quickly as I could across the room and crouched close to the floor near the entrance. The second guard came, flashed his large beam around the room, saw everything was in order, and then held it on the panel while his cohort kept flipping the switches.

  “Look at this,” he said. “The wall’s burned around the plate. Maybe this is where our alarm short has come from. Go get the electrician.”

  I waited until the guard left and then, while his partner continued to fiddle with the switch plate, I crept out and made my way back up the stairs to my suite, and after checking to make sure I was alone, that Giancarlo hadn’t returned and was hiding under my bed, waiting to ambush me, I locked the door.

  My face was aglow. I’d forgotten how much fun this was. I undressed slowly, luxuriantly The lights turned my mirrored dressing room into a blaze of stars as the Millennium Star sparkled from between my breasts—it was like being caught in a shower of sparks. I put on a sexy black satin nightgown and robe and admired how beautiful the diamond looked—how beautiful I looked. I wished Thomas could have been there to see me.

  I slept like a baby. My dog and my diamonds kept me warm.

  F O R T Y - S E V E N

  When I arrived at the tennis court on the villa grounds at ten o’clock the next morning, I discovered, much to my relief, that we would be playing mixed doubles: Giancarlo and Marjorie versus Guilberto and me. Before we began, Guilberto pulled me aside and gave me a quick tutorial on serving, which I had never done. It was hugely fun, but if I had thought for even one second that Guilberto and I would win, even if he was the pro, I would have to have been extremely naive. He would never beat Count Giolitti, the patron of his village. We were giving it a good go, though.

  “Deuce!” Giancarlo announced gleefully. “I am going to break your serve, Guilberto.”

  “Not today, Conto.”

  It was the first set and we were behind, two games to four. My first and second services had been quick nonevents, but by some miracle, Marjorie had won hers in the second round. But now Guilberto was up. He tossed the ball high in the air and slammed it as though it were a recalcitrant nail and he was an angry hammer. It went so fast, it screamed invisibly past Giancarlo’s racket.

  “Add in.” Guilberto beamed.

  He made quick hash of Marjorie, who played only slightly better than I, but she did have on a beautiful white eyelet tennis dress that was lined in only the strategic places, which gave her
a distinct advantage.

  I, on the other hand, had the Millennium Star tucked securely into my bra. So I had my own sort of smug supremacy.

  “Four-three!”

  Giancarlo took his place along the service line, bounced the ball a couple of times, and then spun it slowly past me as though it were a special trick ball of some sort. it landed gently right in front of me and then made a sharp right turn. A graphic example of age versus experience: Guilberto’s game had power and speed. Giancarlo’s, finesse.

  “Fifteen-love.”

  He aced Guilberto, as well.

  “Thirty-love.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Thomas arrive courtside, wearing his wrinkled, rumpled linen suit and dark glasses. I know he was amazed to see me and I struggled not to laugh. He’d gotten to know a whole new Kick Keswick in the last twenty-four hours.

  Giancarlo served to me again. I returned it! Solidly! An actual volley ensued. I didn’t participate in it of course, neither did Marjorie. We stood by, pretending to be ready and watched the men charge back and forth—I’ve got it! I’ve got it! I’ve got it!—and Guilberto won the point.

  ’Thirty-fifteen. ”

  Guilberto’s return was out.

  “Forty-fifteen.”

  My return was nonexistent. The ball simply zoomed right past me.

  “Five games to three,” Giancarlo crowed.

  My serve.

  “If I get this in, Giancarlo,” I called. “You’d better be nice to me.”

  “Si, amore. Very, very gentle. Como siempre.”

  Oh, shut up, I wanted to say. But I was glad to see that Thomas, who had sat down under an umbrella, had crossed his arms over his chest. There was a scowl on his face.

  I tossed the ball above my head and thank God, it didn’t fly out of control. It went exactly where I meant it to. I swung my racket over my head at just the right time and the serve sailed across the net and landed in the right box. I was so astonished, I forgot to hit back Giancarlo’s powder puff return.