by Lyn Hamilton
"Perhaps I should carry on, then, shall I?" Nicola said. "This group has been meeting for what? Almost ten years now?" Several of them nodded. "We're rather fanatical about all things Etruscan. We have a little Internet chat group, to share information and just talk about our passion. At some point—I think maybe four or five meetings ago, wasn't it?—we decided we needed a project. We were beginning to feel we couldn't always be a social club.
"Someone, I think it was Cesar," he said, "suggested repatriating an Etruscan antiquity every year. We initiated an annual assessment for membership and built up a nest egg to help with expenses, and purchase, where necessary. I searched the records for missing artifacts and came up with a list. Alfred Mondragon here, with his inestimable knowledge and connections in the art world, has been able to track down four of them so far, a lovely small bronze of a warrior, a very nice stone sphinx, both of which now rest in Cesar Rosati's collection, a kylix by the Bearded Sphinx painter, which unfortunately we no longer have, and now, the piece de resistance, the chimera hydria, which like the others would be donated to the Rosati Gallery. It's very probably by the Micali painter, did you know that?" I nodded. "Perhaps you could take it from here, Alfred."
"The hydria resided with Robert Godard, Senior, in Vichy," Mondragon said, glancing carefully at Lake. "We found out that Godard was an Etruscophile like the rest of us, and so we offered him a position in the Societa. Godard died shortly after, which put a crimp in our plans, but we persevered and extended the same invitation to his son, also Robert. We thought we had convinced him to bring the hydria as a condition of his membership. Unfortunately, we didn't know that Robert Junior was disabled and would have real difficulty coming to Italy.
"For awhile we were still hopeful that Godard would bring it himself. He kept saying he would. But Nicola here, who went to see it and photographed it for us, thought it was pretty clear Godard was broke, ill, and wouldn't make it," Mondragon said. "At least not without help.
"And so," he said, pausing for a moment, "we had to come up with a different plan. Cesar, I think I'll turn it over to you at this point, as you were the one who came up with the idea."
Rosati cleared his throat. "A few of us got together, a committee I suppose you could call it, to figure out how to make this work. The simplest thing would have been to buy the hydria from Godard. However, we'd already told him not to sell the hydria, that it was his ticket into the Societa. The alternative seemed to be to help him get here. That's when we looked around for someone who could get money to him in a way he would find acceptable, that is to buy something from him. It couldn't be one of us, because if he came here and saw us all, he'd know something was up, and he mightn't be too inclined to donate the hydria then. And maybe he couldn't afford to. That's when we came up with the, um, plan," Rosati said.
"This plan being the one in which you used my name to trick Ms. McClintoch into assisting you with this," Lake said.
"I hope you will understand that our intentions were good," Eugenia said. "Once you've heard the story."
"Ah, intentions," Lake said. "We know all about those, don't we?"
"What I understand is that you thought ends justified means and were prepared to use someone unwitting, like me, to carry out your plans," I said.
"I take it you counted on the fact that no one would know what I looked like," Lake said. "Why did you choose Ms. McClintoch here?"
Dottie looked as if she was going to cry again. "I thought you'd be perfect for it," she said to me. "You have such an honest face, and of course you were here. I found that out easily enough. Now I feel really awful about it. I'm thinking you may never forgive me."
"I arranged for a fellow by the name of Yves Boucher to get Lara to Godard in Vichy," Vittorio Palladini said. "Actually, we'd already asked Boucher to try to buy it for us, or anything else Godard was prepared to sell, but he'd been singularly unsuccessful. Godard didn't take to him at all. We didn't think you knew much about Etruscan bronzes, Lara, so we concocted the idea of the Bellerophon, knowing—Nicola had checked the place out—that there was a large brom that might pass as a Bellerophon."
"Unfortunately," Nicola said. "You seemed to know rather more than we thought you did—I hope you'll take this as a compliment—and you ascertained correctly, and immediately, that it was a fake."
"Then Godard had his unfortunate accident," Palladini said. "Dottie told us." I looked over at Dottie. She was biting her lip and wouldn't meet my gaze.
"There's this little ray of sunshine. Lara has the hydria. We don't know how she managed it, but she does," Hank said. "Not only that, but she gets it across the border. We figure all we have to do is get it from her, and we keep on trying, but it doesn't work out."
"But there's the final catastrophe," Palladini said, looking accusingly at Massimo Lucca. "The carabinieri got it."
"It wasn't my fault," Lucca said. "I didn't make the anonymous calls, and I didn't arrest that woman."
"And then, of course," Gino said. "It disappeared again."
"Unbelievable," Lucca said, "that it could be stolen right out of the carabinieri station. Heads will roll on this one, I can assure you. I just hope one of them isn't mine. And by the way, I'm not sure I can overlook the fact that you stole it, Ms. McClintoch."
"Oh, come now," Eugenia said. "After all, there was another good thing about its disappearance. We felt badly your friend was in prison," she said, turning to me. "We knew it wasn't her fault. So while we were very disappointed not to get the hydria, we were glad she was released."
"We'd pretty much given up on the whole idea," Hank said. "We figured we'd just get together for the social event this year, and decide what, if anything, we wanted to try to do next year. And then who shows up but you, little lady, with the hydria!"
"So there you have it," Mario said. "We are in your hands really, all of us. I hope you'll understand our intentions were good, if we were occasionally a little heavy-handed."
"Yes, you could lose several of us our jobs," Lucca said.
"She won't," Dottie said. "Will you, sweetie, please? We were planning to donate it. You have to believe us." They all looked at me.
I had felt myself getting more and more furious as these waves of self-serving rationalizations and downright lies washed over me. "Is that it?" I said. I was almost gritting my teeth as I spoke.
"What do you mean?" Eugenia said.
"I believe Ms. McClintoch is referring to the fact that there are lacunae, holes, in this story that even I, as a relative outsider, can see," Lake said.
"I suppose there are one or two details missing," Mauro said.
"We're not talking about one or two minor details," I said.
"We don't know how you got the hydria out of the carabinieri station, if that's what you mean," Lucca said. "As I believe I've already mentioned."
"That's not what I mean," I said. "Your version mentions only one of the three people involved in this farce who are dead, omitting the two that were almost certainly murdered."
"Murdered? What is she talking about?" Hank said. "Nobody was murdered."
"Antonio Balducci was," I said. "So was Pierre Leclerc. Robert Godard may have been."
"Oh no, not Robert Godard! He wasn't!" Dottie said.
"Balducci? He killed himself," Mauro said. "At my farmhouse. Why he would choose that moment and that place I will never know. But he did kill himself."
"No, he didn't," I said.
"He was my best friend," Romano said. "I'd never do anything to hurt him. This is outrageous."
"The papers didn't say anything about him being murdered," Eugenia said. "He killed himself. I must object to this as well. He was one of my actors."
"Please," Lake said. "Enough of these protestations. If, in fact, some of you think that this is impossible, then I'm afraid that makes you the goat. You may object to this term, you may prefer to use Cesar's word committee, but the analogy is yours. You are the ones who have adopted the chimera as your symbol, and quite
frankly, you fit it better than you know."
Lucca, I saw, was looking at me with some interest. "I'd like to know who Pierre Leclerc is or was," he said.
"A sleazy art dealer," Mondragon said. "Lake knows him, too. But I didn't know he was dead of any cause, let alone murder."
"He's the man found out by the Tanella," I said to Lucca. "The one you haven't been able to identify yet."
"I've never heard of him," Eugenia said. "What has he got to do with any of this?"
"Perhaps we should begin again, and hear Ms. McClintoch's version of events," Lake said.
"Last night I made three lists, although I think I now prefer Mr. Lake's analogy," I said. "Three lists, three groups, three heads of the chimera. I called the first of mine the charade. This roughly corresponds to the plan you had to get me to Vichy with money for Godard, and yes, Mr. Lake is quite right. Those of you, assuming there are some, who believed this version of events, are indeed the goat. So let's start the story again. Dot-tie?"
"Oh," she said, putting her hand up to her mouth. "I don't think.. ." She took a deep breath, and straightened up. "Okay," she said.
"Don't!" Gino said.
"I've got to," she said. "I can't live with myself otherwise."
"We're all waiting, rather breathlessly, I must say," Lake said.
Dottie opened her mouth a couple of times, but no sound came out. "You went to the chateau in Vichy the morning Robert Godard died," I prompted her.
"That's right," she said at last. "My job was to keep an eye on things in Vichy, but I also wanted to buy a dining suite," she said. "I'm opening a new store in New Orleans soon, and I need inventory. Godard said he'd think about it, and that I should come back the next day. I went into the chateau without knocking. He didn't answer, you see. It would take him too long to get to the door. It was open, though, so I just went in. When I got to that room with all the antiquities, you know that awful one with the bare light bulbs and the birds flying around," she said to me.
I nodded encouragingly.
"The cabinet with the hydria in it was open. I went over and decided I'd just try and buy the thing, or tell him I was a member of the Societa and I'd take it to the group on his behalf or something. All this pretend stuff about Lake seemed silly once I was there.
"I took the hydria out of the case and carried it to Robert Godard's study," she said. "I didn't mean to frighten him. He was just attaching some ropes to a harness and there was a trapdoor open. He saw me standing there with the hydria and he must have thought I was planning to steal it from him, because he started yelling at me and then sort of lunged at it. He fell right into the hole. It was the most horrible sound when he hit the floor down there. There was this crack..."
"His skull, I expect," Lucca said. "Hitting stone."
"Don't, please," Dottie said. "I can't bear to think about it. He looked so horrible lying down there, with the blood oozing out of his head like that. I panicked."
"So where was the hydria then?" I asked her.
"I had it," she said. "I was halfway to town before I realized I was still holding onto it. I swear I didn't mean to take it. And I didn't kill Robert Godard. It was an accident. I didn't touch him. But I know it was my fault." She started to sob.
"If you had it, why didn't you just bring it?" Hank said. "I mean how did Lara get it?"
"When I got back to town, I tried to decide what to do," she said. "I knew I had to report Godard's death. I thought I'd do it anonymously, from a phone booth or something. But then that odious man found me."
"What odious man?" Eugenia said.
"Pierre Leclerc," she said. "He must have been at Godard's, he must have seen what happened, and followed me. He pretended he was being helpful, but I knew he wasn't. He was horrible. He said the police would think I'd pushed Godard into the basement and stolen the hydria, but he, of course, was sure I hadn't. I told him how we were a group of people trying to get the hydria back to Italy for the Rosati Collection. He pretended to be sympathetic. All I had to do was give him the hydria and twenty thousand dollars, and he'd take care of everything."
"Good lord," Hank said. "That's extortion!"
"You think?" Gino said.
"I didn't have twenty thousand dollars, so I called Gino for help," Dottie said. "He's wonderful. We're getting married."
I thought I heard a soft harumph from Lake.
"He told me I should just head for Italy."
"That's all there is," she said. "Gino said he'd look after it. I'm sorry to bring you into this, honey," she added, turning to him. "But neither of us did anything wrong, so I think we should just tell everybody what happened."
"What's to tell? I arranged to have the guy paid what he wanted, and that's the last I've heard of him, Mauro said.
"Gino!" Dottie said.
"Okay, okay. The deal was that Leclerc would get the twenty thousand bucks only if he delivered the hydria to Italy. I figured we might as well try to get something out of this fiasco. I arranged to have him paid ten thousand in France, with the second ten to be given to him once the hydria was safe in Italy and turn over to one of us."
"And was it?" Lucca said.
"Yes," he said. "Leclerc told me that Lara had it."
"And did you?" Lucca said.
"Yes," I said. "For awhile, anyway. Leclerc put it in my car in Nice."
"He gave it to you? Why would he want to do something like that?" Hank said.
"So Lara would get it across the border, of course," Lake said. "Leclerc may have been a bottom feeder, but he wasn't stupid. He wasn't going to risk getting stopped at the border with it. If Lara got caught, then he still had his ten thousand."
"I expect that's essentially correct," I said. "I did get it into Italy, so he called Gino and told him I had it, and once that was confirmed, Leclerc had twenty thousand. Not bad for a day's work."
"That man is a disgrace to our profession," Mondragon said. "An absolute brigand."
"I guess we know what happened after that," Hank said. "We tried to retrieve it, failed, and then it ended up in the carabinieri station."
"There were a few more 'incidents,' shall we say, in between," I said.
"The thing I can't figure out," Palladini said, interrupting me, "is why all those phone calls to the carabinieri? Was that Leclerc being cute?"
"I think, given the reports I've read, and if that body at the Tanella really is Leclerc, that he was dead at the time some of the calls were made," Lucca said.
"I believe that brings us to my second list," I said. "The lion, or what I called the anti-Lake group."
"I can hardly wait," Lake said. "Sorry to interrupt," he added.
"The lion head of the chimera wasn't nearly as keen on seeing that the hydria was returned to an Italian museum as some of the rest of you were."
"What were they keen on?" Palladini said.
"Discrediting Crawford Lake."
"I'm thinking of suing," Lake said.
"Be careful what you say, all of you," Palladini warned. "Remember, I'm a lawyer."
"I'm not afraid of saying what I think," Mariani said. "I don't intimidate that easily. You put me out of business, Lake, and not in an ethical way, either. Your business practices stink."
"I couldn't agree more," Gino Mauro said.
"Nonsense," Lake said. "Both of you. To carry the chimera metaphor a step further, your roar is a toothless one. You, Mariani, are a blowhard who knows what everything costs but the value of nothing. You paid too much for the Etruscan Aplu, and you paid too much for everything else. If I hadn't come along to take over your company, someone else would have.
"As for you Mr. Mauro, you've been too busy enjoying the trappings of wealth, or at least what you see to be the trappings. While you were spending time with your countless girlfriends, making promises you had no intention of keeping, your customers were leaving in droves."
"Did he say countless girlfriends?" Dottie said, looking at Gino.
"I regret to tell you, m
adame," Lake said, looking at Dottie, "That your boyfriend is still with his wife. And you, Rosati? Are you going to join in?"
"I'm not wild about you, Lake," Rosati said. "But when it comes right down to it, I don't much care, and I have absolutely no knowledge of what you call this lion plot."
"I think we are forgetting there are more important issues at stake here," Gianni Veri said. "Like freedom of the press. I am not afraid to speak out against censorship. I lost my job because I dared to print something negative about you, Lake. You had me fired. I was on the fast track to editor, and you ruined my career. As far as I'm concerned, your continued success is a slap in the face to freedom of speech everywhere."