‘What did Signor Argento do for you?’
‘God’s work.’
‘In a bank?’ The words came out sounding more sceptical than she had intended.
‘The Vatican Bank is our largest shareholder,’ he explained with the weary patience of someone who had had to give this explanation many times before. ‘We take deposits in the normal way and then lend money at subsidised rates to worthy projects that might not otherwise get funding. Gio had responsibility for managing the relationships with some of our larger accounts.’
‘So no reason to think that anyone would want to -’
‘This?’ Santos gestured with disgust. ‘This is the devil’s work.’
‘The devil?’ she asked, not sure from his expression if he meant it literally or had someone in mind.
‘I trained as a priest in Rio before I realised that my true calling lay in financing God’s will rather than trying to live by it.’ He fiddled with the buckle of his belt, aligning it with his shirt buttons. ‘But I still recognise the hand of evil when I see it.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘Of course.’ With the memory of Ricci’s staring eyes and Argento’s congealed scream still fresh in her mind, it was hard not to agree with him.
‘The irony, of course, was that, despite working for us, poor Gio was not a true believer.’ Santos glanced up at Allegra with a rueful smile. ‘He used to say that life was too short to waste it worrying about what might happen when he was dead. At times like this, when it almost seems that God might have deserted us, I almost understand what he meant.’
Folding the sheet back over Argento’s face, Santos made the sign of the cross and then eased the drawer back into the wall and swung the door shut. It closed with a hollow metal clang, the echo reverberating around them as if a stone slab had been dropped over a tomb. Allegra turned to leave, then paused.
‘I wonder, did he ever mention an organisation or group called the Delian League?’
‘The Delian League? Not as far as I remember.’ Santos shook his head, frowning in thought. ‘Why, who are they? Do you think they…?’
‘It’s just a name I’ve come across,’ she reassured him with a smile. ‘It probably means nothing. Shall I see you out?’
A large Mercedes with diplomatic plates was waiting for Santos on the street outside. The chauffeur jogged round and held the rear door open for him.
‘A small perk of the job,’ Santos smiled as he shook her hand. ‘Saves me a fortune in parking tickets.’
He slipped inside and peered up at her through the open window, an earnest look on his face.
‘Gio had many faults, but he was a good man, Lieutenant Damico. He deserved better. I hope you catch whoever did this to him.’
‘We’ll do our best,’ she reassured him with a nod.
The windo hummed shut and Santos settled back into his seat. As the car drew away, he reached for his phone.
‘You know who it is. Don’t hang up,’ Santos said carefully when the number he had dialled was answered. ‘I need a favour. And then I’m gone. For good this time, you have my word.’
TWENTY-ONE
Hotel Bel-Air, Stone Canyon Road, Los Angeles
18th March – 7.12 a.m.
Verity always sat at the same table for breakfast. In the far left corner, under the awning, behind a swaying screen of bamboo grass. It was close enough to the entrance to be seen by anyone coming in, sheltered enough not to be bothered by anyone walking past.
‘Good morning, Ms Bruce.’ Philippe, the maître d’, bounded up to her, his French accent so comically thick that she wondered if he worked on it at home. ‘Your papers.’
He handed her meticulously folded copies of the Washington Post and the Financial Times, both still warm from being pressed. Politics and money. The cogs and grease of life’s little carousel, even if the deepening global economic downturn had rather slowed things recently
‘Your guest is already here.’
She pushed her sunglasses back on to her head with a frown and followed his gaze to where Earl Faulks was sitting waiting for her, absent-mindedly spinning his phone on the tablecloth.
‘He tried to sit in your seat,’ Philippe continued in an outraged whisper. ‘I moved him, of course.’
Faulks had just turned fifty but was still striking in a gaunt, patrician sort of way, his dark hooded eyes that seemed to blink in slow motion looming above a long oval face and aquiline nose, silver hair swept back off a pale face. He was wearing a dark blue linen suit, white Charvet shirt with a cut-away collar, Cartier knot cufflinks and one of his trademark bow-ties. Today’s offering was a series of garish salmon pink and cucumber green stripes that she assumed denoted one of his precious London clubs.
‘Verity! Looking gorgeous as always.’
He rose with a smile to greet her, leaning heavily on an umbrella, an almost permanent accessory since a riding accident a few years ago. She ignored him and sat down, a waiter pushing her chair in for her, the maître d’ snapping her napkin on to her lap.
‘Muesli with low-fat yogurt?’ he asked, his tone suggesting he already knew what her answer would be.
‘Yes please, Philippe.’
‘And a mineral water and a pot of fresh tea?’
‘With lemon.’
‘Of course. And for monsieur?’ He turned to Faulks, who had sat back down and was observing this ritualistic exchange with a wry smile.
‘Toast. Brown. Coffee. Black.’
‘Very well.’ The maître d’ backed away, clicking his fingers at one of the waiters to send him running to the kitchen.
Verity reached into her handbag and took out an art deco silver cigarette case engraved with flowers. Opening it carefully, she tipped the thirty or so pills it contained into a small pile on her side plate. They lay there like pebbles, an assortment of vitamins and herbal supplements in different shapes and sizes and colours, some of the more translucent ones glinting like amber.
‘Verity, darling, if you go on being this healthy, it’ll kill you,’ Faulks warned as their drinks arrived.
He was American, a shopkeeper’s son from Baltimore, if you believed his detractors – of which he had amassed his fair share over the years. Not that you could detect his origins any more; his affected accent, clipped way of speaking and occasional Britishisms reminded her of a character from an Edith Wharton novel. She’d always thought it rather a shame that he didn’t smoke – she imagined that a silver Dunhill lighter and a pack of Sobranies would have somehow suited the casual elegance of his slender fingers.
‘I mean, what time did your trainer have you up this morning for a run? Five? Six? Only tradesmen get up that early.’
‘I’m still not talking to you, Earl,’ she replied, watching carefully as the waiter strained her tea and then delicately squeezed a small piece of lemon into it.
‘You were the one who wanted to meet,’ he reminded her. ‘I was packing for the Caribbean.’
She ignored him again, although she couldn’t help but feel a pang of envy. Faulks seemed to ride effortlessly in the slipstream of the super rich as their sumptuous caravan processed around the world: Gstaad in February, the Bahamas in March, the La Prairie clinic in Montreux in April for his annual check-up, London in June, Italy for the summer, New York for the winter sales, and then a well-earned rest before the whole gorgeous procession kicked off again.
She began to sort her pills into the order in which she liked to take them, although she had long since forgotten the logic by which she’d arrived at this particular sequence. Satisfied, she began to take them in silence, washing each one down with a mouthful of water and a sharp jerk of her head.
‘Fine, you win,’ Faulks said eventually, throwing his hands up in defeat. ‘What do you want me to do? Apologise? Wear a hair shirt? Walk up the Via Dolorosa on my knees?’
‘Any of those would be a start.’ She glared at him.
‘Even when I come bearing gifts?’ He unfolded his napkin to reveal three vase f
ragments positioned to show that they fitted cleanly together. ‘The final pieces of the Phintias calyx krater that you’ve been collecting for the past few years.’ He smiled at her. ‘In our profession, patience truly is a necessity, not a virtue.’
‘The same fragments I seem to remember you wanted a hundred thousand for last year,’ Verity said archly. ‘Are you feeling generous or guilty?’
‘If I had a conscience I wouldn’t be in this business,’ he replied with a smile, although there was something in his voice that suggested that he was only half joking. ‘Let’s call it a peace offering.’
‘Have you any idea of the embarrassment you’ve caused me?’
‘You have nothing to be embarrassed about,’ he assured her.
‘Tell that to Thierry Normand and Sir John Sykes. According to them, I paid you ten million dollars for something that was at best “anomalous”, at worst a “pastiche”.’
‘Pastiche?’ Faulks snorted. ‘Did you tell them about the test results? Don’t they know it’s impossible to fake that sort of calcification?’
‘By then they weren’t listening.’
‘You mean they didn’t want to hear,’ he corrected her. ‘Don’t you see, Verity, darling, that they’re all jealous. Jealous of your success. Jealous that while their donors have pulled back as the recession has begun to bite, the Getty remains blessed with a three-billion-dollar endowment.’
‘Sometimes I think it’s more a curse than a blessing,’ she sniffed. ‘Do you know we have to spend four and a quarter per cent of that a year or lose our tax status? Have you any idea how hard it is to get through one hundred and twentyseven million dollars a year? Of the pressure it puts us under?’
‘I can only imagine,’ he commiserated, shaking his head. ‘That’s why the kouros was a smart buy. After all, don’t you think the Met would have made a move if they’d been given even half a chance? But you beat them to it.’
‘Vivienne Foyle is close to the Met.’ She nodded grudgingly, remembering how she had twisted the knife right at the end. ‘She’s never liked me.’
‘The problem here isn’t the kouros,’ Faulks insisted, his full baritone voice taking on the fervent conviction of a TV evangelist. ‘The problem is people’s unwillingness to accept that their carefully constructed picture of how Greek sculpture developed over the centuries might need to be rewritten. They should be thanking you for opening their eyes, for deepening their understanding, for extending the boundaries of their knowledge. Instead, they’re seeking to discredit you, just as the church did with Galileo.’
She nodded, rather liking this image of herself as an academic revolutionary that the establishment was desperate to silence at all costs. The problem was, she didn’t have the time or the temperament to become a martyr.
‘I agree with you. If I didn’t, the kouros would already be on its way back to Geneva. But the damage is done. Even if they’re wrong, it’ll take years for them to admit it. Meanwhile the director can’t look me in the eye, the trustees have asked for a second round of tests, and the New York Times is threatening to run a piece at the weekend. I mean, what if something else comes out?’
‘Nothing else will come out,’ Faulks said slowly, his voice suddenly hard. ‘Not unless someone’s planning to talk. And nobody’s planning to talk, are they, Verity?’
It was phrased as a question, but there was no doubting that he was giving her a very clear instruction. Maybe even a warning.
‘Why would I risk everything we’ve achieved together?’ she said quickly.
‘You wouldn’t,’ he said, his eyes locked unblinkingly with hers. ‘But others…well. I don’t like to be disappointed.’
There was an icy edge to his voice and she gulped down a few more pills, wishing that she’d packed some Valium as well. Almost immediately, however, Faulks’s face thawed into a warm smile.
‘Anyway, let’s not worry about that now. I understand that you’re upset. And I want to make it up to you. What are you doing tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow?’ She frowned. ‘Tomorrow I’ll be in Madrid. The US ambassador is hosting a two-day cultural exchange. We fly out this afternoon. Why?’
‘There’s something I want to show you.’ He reached inside his jacket and handed her a Polaroid. ‘I was hoping you might come to Geneva.’
‘Do you really think that, after what happened yesterday, the director is going to let me buy anything from you again?’ she asked, taking the photo from him with an indifferent shrug.
‘You won’t have to. It’ll come to you as a donation.’
She glanced down at the photo, then heard herself gasp.
‘Is it…?’ she whispered, her mouth suddenly dry, her hands trembling, her chest tight.
‘Genuine? Absolutely,’ he reassured her. ‘I’ve seen it myself. There’s no question.’
‘But no one has ever found…’
‘I know.’ He gave her a schoolboy’s wide grin. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’
‘Who’s it by?’
‘Come now, Verity – 450 BC? Can’t you guess?’
There was a pause, her eyes still not having lifted from the photograph.
‘Where is it now?’
‘On its way to me.’
‘Provenance?’
‘Private Lebanese collection since the 1890s. I have all the documentation.’
Another pause as she carefully placed the photograph on the table, sipped some water and then looked up hungrily.
‘I have to see it.’
TWENTY-TWO
Headquarters of the Guarda di Finanza, Viale XXI Aprile, Rome
18th March – 4.25 p.m.
The headquarters of the Guarda di Finanza was located to the north-east of the city centre, just beyond the Porta Pia. It occupied a Spanish-looking building, with shutters at every window and its walls painted a dusty yellow and rich ochre colour. The main entrance was surmounted by the Italian and European Union flags, but these were sagging limply, the light breeze that was chasing the rain clouds away registering only in the rustling fronds of the palm tree that stood to the left of the door.
In a way, Allegra reflected as she stepped out of her taxi, it was perhaps better for her to catch up with Gallo here, rather than at the mortuary. This, after all, was where the physical evidence from the two murders was being kept, giving her the opportunity to have another look at the lead discs in the light of what Aurelio had told her and to get her story straight before seeing him.
Not that the decision to house the evidence here would have been a simple one, given all the different law enforcement agencies with a potential stake in this case. The Guarda di Finanza, for one, was a sprawling empire, covering not only Gallo’s organised crime unit but a variety of money-related crimes such as tax evasion, Customs and border checks, money laundering, smuggling, international drugs trafficking and counterfeiting. A military corps, it even had its own naval fleet and air force.
Allegra’s art and antiques unit, meanwhile, was part of the Arma dei Carabinieri, a paramilitary force with police duties that also oversaw counterterrorism operations, the forensic bureau, the military police, undercover investigations and, bizarrely, sanitary enforcement.
Then, of course, there was the state police, a civilian force that, as well as having responsibility for routine patrolling, investigative and law enforcement duties, also oversaw the armed, postal, highway and transport police forces. And this was not to forget the various layers of provincial, municipal and local police, prison officers, park rangers and the coast guard who further crowded the picture.
In fact, Allegra seemed to remember from one of the induction lectures she had had to endure upon first joining up, any one area in Italy could theoretically be under the jurisdiction of up to thirty-one different police or police-type forces. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in a sea-fog of overlapping responsibilities, unclear accountabilities and red tape that more often than not led to the different agencies competing against each other when they
should have been collaborating.
Allegra’s temporary secondment from the Carabinieri to their fierce rivals at the Guarda di Finanza was, therefore, a relatively unusual request on Gallo’s part, as proved by the raised eyebrows of the duty officer who buzzed her in and directed her towards the basement.
Following the signs, she found the evidence store next to the armoury. It was secured by a steel door with a lock but no handle, suggesting that it could only be opened from the inside. Next to it, a low counter had been chopped out of the reinforced concrete wall. An elderly officer in a neatly pressed grey uniform with gold buttons and a green beret was sitting on the other side behind a screen of bullet-proof glass. Allegra knocked on the window and then placed her ID flat against it.
‘You’re a long way from home, Lieutenant.’ The man gave her a quizzical look over the top of his glasses, his feet up and the newspaper resting across his knee. His badge identified him as Enrico Gambetta.
‘I’ve been seconded on to the Argento case,’ she explained.
‘You’re working with Colonel Gallo!’ Gambetta struggled to his feet, anxiously peering out into the corridor as if he half expected Gallo to jump out of the shadows.
‘Until he decides he doesn’t need me any more,’ she said, unable to stop herself wondering what strange gravitational anomaly was securing Gambetta’s trousers around his enormous waist.
‘So he got my message?’ he asked excitedly. ‘He sent you to see me.’
‘Your message?’ She frowned.
‘About the other murder.’
‘I haven’t spoken to him all afternoon,’ she said with a shrug. ‘I was just hoping to take another look at the lead discs from the Argento and Ricci killings before I see him.’
‘The lead disc – exactly!’ He beamed, looking like he might break into a lumbering jig. ‘Like the ones you found in their mouths, right?’
The Geneva Deception Page 10