The Mistress

by Danielle Steel

  And he groaned audibly when he saw Vladimir’s name on the reservation book for a party of five that night. It was the last thing Theo needed now, but he felt ready to face Natasha, and was determined not to let seeing her rock him again as it had before. She belonged to Vladimir, and Theo was sure he had made his peace with it at last. There was no other choice, and he had too much on his plate to think about her at the moment. Real life had taken precedence over his fantasies about her. And knowing how she felt about Vladimir, his obsession with her didn’t even make sense to him anymore.

  He was braced to see her when Vladimir walked in with a group of men at nine o’clock. They arrived in a van, and he left four bodyguards outside. And Theo realized as he greeted him that Natasha wasn’t with him, which was almost a relief. The four men with him were Russian, and they looked like businessmen, although there was a rough quality to them. They were the kind of men Theo could easily imagine Vladimir doing business with, but he was noticeably much smoother and better dressed than the others. And Theo also knew that men like them were the power base of Russia now. For all he knew, they had the five richest men in Russia at the restaurant.

  Vladimir gave him a pointed look when they walked in. Theo assigned the best waiters to their table, and sent over a round of complimentary drinks. All five men ordered vodka, including Vladimir, and they drank steadily through the evening. Vladimir ordered several bottles of two-thousand-dollar wine, and they finished it with abandon. And at the end of the meal they all lit cigars. Theo saw they were Partagás. And he sent brandy over for them. Vladimir looked pleased with the evening as they got up to leave. Da Lorenzo had become his new favorite restaurant. He stopped and said something to the others in Russian on the way out, and then took them into the house to see the paintings. Theo had no idea what he’d said, but it must have been favorable since all the men looked impressed when they came out. And Theo knew there were paintings Vladimir hadn’t seen before, since his mother had recently rotated some of them, and put some of her favorite paintings from her private collection on the walls. There were some exceptionally fine ones on display, and Vladimir stopped and said something to Theo as the others headed toward the van. Their eyes met again. There was a message in Vladimir’s that Theo pretended not to understand, like a warning of some kind.

  “How much is the one of the woman with the little boy?” he asked Theo in a supercilious way. He had bought one of Lorenzo’s paintings. Now he was sure he could buy more. It was one of a series that his father had painted of Maylis and him as a young child. It was a lovely painting, and one of his mother’s favorites.

  “There’s no price on that, sir,” he said politely. “It’s part of Mrs. Luca’s private collection, and very important to her. It’s really not for sale.” But since he had succeeded in getting what he wanted before, Vladimir was sure he would again, at the right price.

  “We know it’s for sale,” he said to Theo conspiratorially. “The only question is the price.” And he was not using an intermediary this time, since he knew who Theo was.

  “I’m afraid not this time. She won’t sell that one, or any from that series.” The others in that series were at the studio, but there were at least half a dozen very important newer ones on the walls. And the one he wanted was the one she loved most. “It has sentimental value for her.”

  “She will sell it,” he said, his eyes hard as he looked at Theo, holding the cigar close to his face. Theo remained courteous and professional but firm, while there was something slightly ominous in Vladimir’s tone.

  “It really isn’t for sale,” Theo said a little more strongly, “and I don’t think she would be ready to sell another painting so soon after the last one.”

  “Call me tomorrow with the price,” Vladimir said to him with flashing eyes.

  “There is no price,” Theo said, enunciating the words carefully, as rage sprang into Vladimir’s eyes, like a lion about to strike, and for an instant Theo wondered if he was going to hit him. It made Theo wonder if he had ever looked at Natasha that way. Suddenly Theo had become an obstacle between Vladimir and what he wanted, and nothing was going to stop him. Theo took a step back to protect himself, and with a growl of anger, Vladimir stormed off to the van where the others were waiting for him. The bodyguards jumped in after him, and they left. It had been an unpleasant moment. And Vladimir hadn’t been nearly as polite as usual, once he didn’t get his way about the painting. After the vodka, wine, and brandy, Vladimir’s temper was very thinly veiled. It accounted for how angry he had been at Theo about the painting, but there had been something more than alcohol in his eyes—there had been pure rage at Theo not agreeing to what he wanted and standing in his way. He had looked absolutely lethal, and Theo wouldn’t have wanted to meet him on a dark street. He was an enemy one wouldn’t want to have. And his previously personable exterior had instantly disappeared.

  Theo was still thinking about it when he turned off the lights and locked up, and turned on the alarm, after all the employees left, and he drove home. He was relieved that he hadn’t had to see Natasha that night. He thought he was ready for it, but he was in no rush to test his new indifference to her, and he was sorry that Vladimir had chosen to come to the restaurant with his cohorts. They were an unsavory-looking group, and would have looked like thugs if one didn’t know who they were. Vladimir had covered his origins with a veneer of polish, but it had worn thin that night when he looked at Theo. They were an unpleasant lot, and he hoped they didn’t come back soon. But all that really mattered, he thought as he let himself into his house, was that Gabriel had survived, and they would be home soon. The rest were all the usual aggravations of running a restaurant and dealing with unruly, arrogant clients. And for once, Mr. Stanislas didn’t get his way. Theo smiled to himself. It was suitable revenge for Vladimir having the woman Theo wanted. The painting was not for sale.

  Chapter 10

  The phone rang the next morning just after seven o’clock, and Theo opened his eyes to a brilliantly sunny day. He’d been hoping to sleep in that morning, but now that he was running the restaurant, and had been for nearly a month, the staff called him with every detail and every question. He never understood how his mother managed all of it without going crazy. It was like running a school for badly behaved children, who argued about everything, couldn’t get along, and couldn’t make a decision on their own. He could see that the call was from the restaurant, and not from his mother in Florence, when he answered his cellphone. He was not pleased to have been woken up so early. He hadn’t left the restaurant until nearly two A.M., after his brief confrontation with Vladimir, which had delayed him, and ended the night on an unpleasant note. And the kitchen staff had been slow cleaning up. He had promised his mother that he wouldn’t leave before everyone else did, and he never had. He had kept his word. She wanted him to set the alarm.

  The call was from one of the sous-chefs who had come in early. The chef had gone to the fish market at six A.M., and they’d been cleaning fish for half an hour, and had waited to call him at a slightly more reasonable time. The sous-chef sounded nervous as Theo made an effort to wake up and sound alert.

  “What is it?” It was usually something ridiculous like they had noticed two chairs were broken and what should they do about it? Or one of the dishwashers wasn’t coming in.

  “Fatima says there’s a problem,” the sous-chef said cautiously.

  “What kind of problem?” Theo frowned as he listened. The only thing he worried about seriously was leaks in the old house that could damage the paintings. They were heavily insured, but a damaged painting could not be replaced.

  “She says you have to come in.”

  “Why? What happened?” Fatima was their cleaning woman. She was Portuguese, spoke very little French, and her two sons worked with her, and spoke none at all. “Can you at least tell me what’s wrong?” If it was trivial, he wasn’t moving.

  The sous-chef nearly cried when he told him. “There are twelve p
aintings off the walls.” He sounded strangled as he said it. “Fatima wants to know if you took them down.”

  “No, I didn’t, and what do you mean ‘off the walls’? Did they fall down? Are they damaged?” It sounded odd to him since they were bolted to the walls. Theo threw back the covers, and put his feet on the floor. It was obvious he had to go in. And what the sous-chef had told him made no sense.

  “Not damaged. Gone. Someone undid all the bolts. The alarm was off when I came in, which I thought was strange, unless you forgot to set it last night, but you never have before.” And Theo knew he didn’t forget it. He was meticulous about it and remembered turning it on as he always did. “They’re gone. Missing. Someone took them. I thought the lock on the door had been played with, but everything was in order. Just the twelve paintings.”

  “Oh my God.” Theo felt dizzy as he stood up. Nothing like it had ever happened before. “Call the police. I’ll be there in ten minutes.” He didn’t waste time asking which ones were gone. It wasn’t possible. How could anyone rob them? They had a state-of-the-art alarm system, beams, video cameras, surveillance, and a direct line to the police. They had nearly three hundred million dollars’ worth of art in the house, their alarm was infallible, or so they’d been told.

  He pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, slipped his feet into sandals, brushed his teeth and not his hair, and ran out the door with his cellphone and car keys and forgot his wallet on the kitchen table. He stopped at the house where his mother lived on the way, his father’s old studio, where the bulk of her collection was, to see if she had been robbed too, but everything was intact there, the alarm was on, and nothing had been disturbed.

  He jumped back in his car then and raced to the restaurant. He ran through the front door when he got there, and stood looking at the empty spaces that had been left. There had been no damage to the walls. The bolts hadn’t been opened with force—they had been professionally disabled and the paintings removed. Theo thought to warn everyone not to touch anything, in case there were fingerprints the police could use. But there was no question in Theo’s mind. They had been struck by highly trained art thieves who knew what they were doing. All the paintings his mother had recently put up, including the one Vladimir had tried to buy the night before, were gone. But this wasn’t the work of thugs, it was entirely the work of pros.

  He went into the office while waiting for the police to look at the security tapes from the night before, and all he saw was static. They had been able to cripple the cameras and disable them, so that they had recorded nothing of the robbery. The tapes were blank. They had stopped functioning an hour after he left, and were blank for nearly two hours. It had apparently taken them that long to remove all twelve paintings. He felt like he was in shock as two inspectors walked in, and he spoke to them in the office after they surveyed the scene. Theo was badly shaken. He hadn’t called his mother yet, and didn’t know what to say or how to tell her. And he wanted more information from the police before he said anything. Maybe there were known art thieves in the area, and they would have an idea who had done it.

  The two inspectors had been dispatched from Nice, and were part of a high-end robbery detail that patrolled the entire coast where there were homes that were robbed most frequently, and jewels, art, and large amounts of money were stolen, and sometimes hostages were taken. One of the inspectors was older with gray hair, the other was in his late thirties, and both appeared to be experienced. They asked for the approximate value of what was missing, and if the paintings were by varied artists.

  “No, only one. My father, Lorenzo Luca. All the paintings here are in my mother’s private collection, and the value of the twelve that are gone is in the vicinity of a hundred million dollars.” They didn’t appear to be surprised, and were accustomed to robberies in those amounts from major villas along the coast in Cap-Ferrat, Cap d’Antibes, Cannes, and the other wealthier communities. St. Tropez was in a different district, in the Var, and Monaco was a separate country and had its own police force. “Have there been any other major art thefts recently? Could this have been done by a gang you know of?” Many of the truly dangerous professionals were Eastern European, and the police knew all of them, but they said none had been operative in the past few months, not since the previous winter. This was the first big robbery they’d had in a while.

  The area was closed off, and police lines were set up. And a team of technicians and experts arrived half an hour later to take fingerprints, and examine the alarm system and cameras. Theo dispatched another of the sous-chefs to call everyone listed in the reservation book for that night, and cancel them, and say there had been an accident and the restaurant was closed.

  It was noon before the two inspectors in charge had something to tell Theo. There were no prints. The alarm had been electronically disabled, possibly from another location by remote control, and the cameras along with it. All their high-tech devices had been crippled for the duration of the robbery and restored when it was over.

  “The only good news,” the older inspector said to him, “is that these people knew what they were doing, and they’re not liable to damage the paintings or destroy them. We will contact all our informants. Someone is going to try to sell these paintings on the stolen-art market, or possibly sell them back to you at a higher price.”

  “Or sequester them,” Theo said, looking as though he were about to cry. There was a market for stolen paintings sold to unscrupulous collectors who were anxious to acquire work at any price, knowing they could never show them, but simply have the thrill of owning them, and with his father’s work so rarely on the market, they qualified for that kind of buyer. Some people would do anything to own them, even if they remained a secret forever. Some of the paintings stolen by the Nazis had disappeared that way.

  “We’d like to bring Interpol into it. And I have a call in to the art detail in Paris. I’d like one of them to come down. I can assure you we’re going to do everything we can to find your paintings for you, or as many as we can locate and reclaim. Time is of the essence, we have to move quickly, before they’re shipped out of the country to Russia, South America, Asia. As long as they stay in Europe, we have a better chance of tracking them down. We’ll need photographs of the work to put on the Internet throughout Europe.” It was one of the most important art thefts of recent times. There had been a comparable one two years before. There were more jewel thefts, since they were simpler to break down into loose stones. Art was much harder to sell and transport, and was too easily identified. “We’ll stay on this, I can assure you. You need to put security guards on the house.” And Theo wanted them on his mother’s house too.

  He still had to call their insurance company, and his mother. The inspector gave him the case number for the insurance company, and they were still swarming all over the house when he went into the office to call his mother, which he dreaded, but it couldn’t be avoided. And just as he was about to, he thought of something. Vladimir the night before. He went back to find the inspector, who confirmed that the back door had been tampered with. And they were running criminal checks on all the employees. They hadn’t ruled out the possibility that it was an inside job, that one of their employees had tipped someone off and sold the information about the security system to them. Fatima was crying while her sons were being interrogated. She was horrified to think that someone could think they had committed a crime, and a police officer was trying to explain to her that all the employees would be investigated, not just her sons.

  “This might sound crazy,” Theo said to the senior inspector quietly. “Vladimir Stanislas was here last night, with four Russian men. He wanted to buy one of the paintings, and I told him it wasn’t for sale. He bought one from my mother a year ago, at a very high price, which was also not for sale initially, and then she accepted his offer. But I knew she wouldn’t sell the one he was inquiring about this time. He left in a rage. I just wanted to mention it, in case there is some sort of tie-in. You mig
ht want to talk to him. His yacht is usually off Antibes. It’s probably there now. And possibly someone like him would be willing to buy a work that’s not for sale normally.”

  The inspector smiled at what he said. “I think Stanislas could pay any price to get what he wants, legally.”

  “Not if it’s not for sale,” Theo persisted. “My mother wouldn’t sell these. The one he wanted last night was among the twelve that were stolen.”

  “I think we can assume that’s a coincidence,” the inspector said in a patronizing tone. To him, Vladimir Stanislas might look like a rough customer, but he was no art thief.

  “I don’t think we can assume anything,” Theo said doggedly.

  “We’ll keep it in mind,” the senior inspector said, and then went back to the others, still conducting their investigation. They were taking the house apart, and examining all the other paintings for fingerprints, but there were none so far.

  Theo called the insurance company then, and they said they would have their own inspectors there that night, including two from Lloyd’s of London, who had an umbrella policy for the paintings. And then he called his mother in Florence. She said they were having lunch on the balcony of the suite when she answered, and Gabriel was feeling much better.

  “Maman, I have something awful to tell you.” He plunged in quickly, not wanting to keep her in suspense. “We had an art theft here last night, by professionals who disarmed our system.”

  “Oh my God.” She sounded as if she were about to faint. “Which ones did they take?” Her paintings were like children to her, and it was like telling her that her children had been kidnapped. He told her which ones and how many, and everything he knew from the police, and told her that there were inspectors coming down from Paris, and the insurance company, and that the men on the scene seemed to know what they were doing. He didn’t tell her about Vladimir, because it was a long shot, and they didn’t take it seriously, but Theo had put it out there just in case. She sounded heartbroken and agitated, and told Gabriel everything Theo was telling her, and then he spoke to Theo. He sounded much calmer than Maylis, and he reassured Theo.