‘She’s with me, now,’ he said.
‘Why, what do you want?’ Li shot back, flashing Allegra a suspicious glance.
‘Your help.’
‘I thought you’d retired?’ Li’s question sounded more like an accusation.
‘A friend of mine has been killed. We’re both after the people who did it.’
Li paused, glancing at Tom and Allegra in turn. Then he handed Allegra her gun back with a grudging nod.
‘What do you want to know?’
Tom handed Li the drawing of the symbol.
‘What can you tell me about this?’
Li took it over to an architect’s desk on which he had been examining a sheet of freshly printed notes under a microscope and angled it under the light. He glanced up at them with a wary look.
‘Is this who you think killed your friend?’
‘You know what it means?’ Allegra asked excitedly.
‘Of course I do,’ he snorted. ‘It’s the symbol of the Delian League.’
Allegra gave Tom a look. As they had both suspected, far from being a footnote in some dusty textbook, the Delian League, or rather some bastardised version of it, was clearly alive and well.
‘Who runs it?’ Tom pressed.
Li sat back.
‘Come on, Tom. You know that’s not how things work.’ He smiled indulgently as if gently scolding a child. ‘I’m running a business here, not a charity. Even for deserving causes like you.’
‘How much?’ Tom asked wearily.
‘Normally twenty-five thousand euro,’ Li said, picking at his fingernails. ‘But for you and your friend I’m going to round it up to fifty. A little…five-o surcharge.’
‘Fifty thousand!’ Allegra exclaimed.
‘I can get it.’ Tom nodded. ‘But it’s going to take some time.’
‘I can wait.’ Li shrugged.
‘Well, we can’t,’ Tom insisted. ‘I’ll have to owe you.’
‘No deal.’ Li shook his head. ‘Not if you’re going up against the League. I want my money before they kill you.’
‘Why don’t you just pay yourself?’ Allegra tapped her finger angrily against the sheet of uncut notes on the desk.
‘This stuff is like dope,’ Li sniffed. ‘You never want to risk getting addicted to your own product.’
‘Come on, Johnny,’ Tom pleaded. ‘You know I’m good for it.’
Li took a deep breath, clicking his front teeth together slowly as he considered them in turn.
‘What about a down-payment?’ he asked. ‘You must have something on you?’
‘I’ve told you, we don’t…’
‘That watch, for example.’ Li nodded towards Tom’s wrist.
‘It’s not for sale,’ Tom insisted, quickly pulling his sleeve down.
‘Think of it as a deposit,’ Li suggested. ‘You can have it back when you bring me the cash.’
‘And you’ll tell us what we need to know?’ Allegra asked in a sceptical tone.
‘If I can.’
‘Tom?’ Allegra fixed Tom with a hopeful look. Unless they wanted to wait, it seemed like a reasonable deal. Tom said nothing, then gave a resigned shrug.
‘Fine.’ Sighing heavily, he took the watch off. ‘But I want it back.’
‘I’ll look after it,’ Li reassured him, fastening it carefully to his wrist.
‘Let’s start with the Delian League,’ Allegra suggested. ‘Who are they?’
‘The Delian League controls the illegal antiquities trade in Italy,’ Li answered simply. ‘Has done since the early seventies. Now, nothing leaves the country without going through them.’
‘And the tombaroli? Where do they fit in?’
‘They control the supply,’ Li explained. ‘Most of them are freelance. But since all the major antiquities buyers are foreign, the League controls access to the demand. The tombaroli either have to sell to them, or not sell at all.’
‘And the mafia?’ Tom interrupted. ‘Don’t they mind the League operating on their turf?’
‘The League is the mafia,’ Li laughed, before tapping his finger on the symbol. ‘That’s what the two snakes represent-one for the Cosa Nostra. One for the Banda della Magliana.’
‘The Banda della Magliana is run by the De Luca family,’ Allegra explained, glancing at Tom. ‘They’re who Ricci worked for.’
‘The story I heard was that the Cosa Nostra was getting squeezed out of the drugs business by the ‘Ndrangheta. So when they realised there was money to be made in looting antiquities, they teamed up with the Banda della Magliana who controlled all the valuable Etruscan sites around Rome, on the basis that they would make more money if they operated as a cartel. The League’s been so successful that most of the other families have sold them access rights to their territories in return for a share of the profits.’
‘Who runs it now?’ Tom asked. ‘Where can we find them?’
Li went to answer, then paused, crossing one arm across his stomach and tapping his finger slowly against his lips.
‘I can’t tell you that.’
Tom gave a hollow laugh.
‘Can’t or won’t?’
‘It’s nothing personal, Felix,’ Li said with a shrug. ‘I just want my money. And if I give you everything now, I know I’ll never see it.’
‘We had a deal,’ Allegra said angrily. Li had tricked them, first reeling them in to show them how much he knew and then holding out when they’d get to the punchline.
‘We still do,’ Li insisted. ‘Come back tomorrow with the fifty k and I’ll tell you what side of the bed they all sleep on.’
‘We need to know now,’ Allegra snapped.
Another pause, Li first centring Tom’s watch on his wrist and then wiping the glass with his thumb.
‘What about the car?’ he asked without looking up.
‘What car?’ Tom frowned.
‘Cavalli’s Maserati,’ Allegra breathed, as she recognized the set of keys that Li had produced from his pocket as the ones that had been confiscated from her on the way in.
‘Do you have it?’ Li pressed.
‘No, but I know where it is,’ she replied warily, his forced indifference making her wonder if he hadn’t been carefully leading them up to this point all along. ‘Why?’
‘New deal,’ Li offered. ‘The car instead of the cash. That way you don’t have to wait.’
‘Done,’ Allegra confirmed eagerly, sliding the keys over to him with a relieved sigh. ‘It’s in the pound, but it should be easy enough for you to get to.’
Smiling, Li slid the keys back towards her.
‘That’s not quite what I had in mind.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
Via Principesa Clotilde, Rome 19th March-8.35 a.m.
Ten minutes later and they were skirting the eastern rim of the Piazza del Popolo, Tom catching a glimpse of the Pincio through a gap in the buildings.
‘Who gave it to you?’ Allegra asked, finally breaking the silence.
‘What?’ Tom looked round, distracted.
‘The watch? Who gave it to you?’
There was a brief pause, a pained look flickering across his face.
‘Jennifer.’
A longer, more awkward silence.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise…’
‘We didn’t have much choice,’ Tom said, sighing. ‘Besides, as long as we can get him the car, he’ll give it back.’
‘It shouldn’t be too hard,’ she reassured him. ‘Three, four guards at most.’
‘It’s worth taking a look,’ he agreed. ‘It’s that or wait until I can get him the cash tomorrow.’
‘Why does he even want it?’ She frowned, checking her mirrors as she turned on to the Lungotevere Arnaldo da Brescia.
‘He collects cars,’ Tom explained. ‘Has about forty of them in a sealed and climate-controlled private underground garage somewhere near Trajan’s Column. None of them paid for.’
They followed the river in silence, heading nor
th against the traffic as the road flexed around the riverbank’s smooth contours, the sky now bright and clear. Tom caught Allegra glancing at herself in the mirror, her hand drifting unconsciously to her dyed and roughly chopped hair, as if she still couldn’t quite recognise herself.
‘Tell me more about the Banda della Magliana,’ he said eventually.
‘There are five major mafia organisations in Italy,’ Allegra explained, seeming to welcome the interruption. ‘The Cosa Nostra and Stidda in Sicily, the Camorra in Naples, the Sacra Corona Unita in Apulia and the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria. The Banda della Magliana was a smaller outfit based here in Rome and controlled by the De Luca family.’
‘Was?’
‘You might remember that they were linked to a series of political assassinations and bombings between the seventies and the nineties. But since then they’ve been pretty quiet.’
She leaned on her horn as she overtook a threewheeled delivery van that was skittering wildly over the worn tarmac.
‘And Ricci worked for them?’
‘Gallo said he was an enforcer,’ she nodded. ‘As far as I know the family’s still controlled by Giovanni De Luca, although no one’s seen him for years.’
‘What about the Cosa Nostra, the Banda della Magliana’s partner in the Delian League? Who heads them up?’
‘Lorenzo Moretti. Or at least that’s the rumour. It’s not the sort of thing you put on your business card.’
The car pound occupied a large, anonymously grey multi-storey building at the end of a treelined residential street. Two guards were stationed at each of the two sentry posts that flanked the entry and exit ramps. Seeing them walking up to the counter, the officers manning the entrance jumped up and tried to look busy, one of them having been watching TV inside their small office, the other sat outside reading the paper, tipped back on a faded piece of white garden furniture.
‘Buongiorno.’ Allegra flashed a broad smile and her badge in the same instant, snapping it shut before they could get a good look at her name or the picture. ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ she continued. ‘But my friend has had his car stolen.’ The two men glanced at Tom accusingly, as if this was somehow his fault.
‘It’s probably in a container halfway to Morocco by now,’ one of them suggested gloomily.
‘That’s what I told him,’ Allegra agreed. ‘Only one of his neighbours says they saw it being towed. And this is the closest pound to where he lives.’
‘If it’s been towed it will be on the database,’ one of the officers said to Tom. ‘Pay the release fee and you can have it back.’
‘He’s already looked and it’s not there,’ she said with a shrug before Tom could answer. ‘He thinks that someone might have made a mistake and entered the wrong plates.’
‘Really?’ The men eyed him like they would a glass of corked wine.
‘He’s English,’ she murmured, giving him the sort of weary look a mother might give a naughty child. The officers nodded in sudden understanding, a sympathetic look crossing their faces. ‘Is there any chance we can go up and take a quick look to see if it’s here? I’d really appreciate it.’
The two men glanced at each other and then shrugged their agreement.
‘As long as you’re quick,’ one of them said.
‘When did it go missing?’ the other asked her, ignoring Tom completely now.
‘Around the fifteenth of March.’
‘We store all the cars in the order they get brought here,’ the first officer explained, pointing at a worn map of the complex that had been crudely taped to the counter. ‘Cars for that week should be around here -in the blue quadrant on the third floor.’ He pointed at a section of the map. ‘The lift’s down there on the right.’
A few moments later the doors pinged shut behind them.
‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you?’ Tom said in a reproachful tone.
‘It could have been worse,’ she said with an amused smile. ‘I could have told them you were American.’
The lift opened on to the southern end of the third floor. It was a dark, depressing place, most of the neon tubes missing or broken, the walls encrusted with a moulding green deposit, the ceiling oozing a thick yellow mucus that hung in cancerous clumps. The floor was divided by lines of decaying concrete pillars into three long aisles, with cars parked along both sides and a spiralling up-and-down ramp at one end linking it to the other levels like a calcified umbilical cord.
They made their way over to the area pointed out by the guard, dodging around oily lakes of standing water, until they were about halfway down the left-hand aisle. Jennifer took out the keys and pressed the unlock button. Cavalli’s car eagerly identified itself with a double flash of its indicators-a souped-up Maserati Granturismo, worth almost double what Johnny was asking for. No wonder he’d pushed them into this.
‘What are you doing?’ Tom called in a low voice as Allegra opened the boot and leaned inside. ‘It must have been searched already.’
‘That doesn’t mean they found anything,’ she replied, her voice muffled.
‘Let’s just get out of here before they…’
She stood up, triumphantly holding a small piece of pottery that had been nestling in a fold in the muddy grey blanket that covered the boot floor. About the size of her hand, it featured a bearded man’s face painted in red against a black background.
‘It’s a vase fragment. Probably Apullian, which dates it to between 430 and 300 BC.’
‘Dionysius?’ Tom ventured.
‘Yes,’ she said, looking impressed. ‘I’d guess it was part of a krater, a bowl used…’
‘For mixing wine and water,’ Tom said, grinning at her obvious surprise. ‘My parents were art dealers. My mother specialised in antiquities. I guess I was a good listener.’
‘Notice anything strange?’ she asked, handing it to him with a nod.
‘The edges are sharp.’ He frowned, gingerly drawing his finger over one of them as if it was a blade.
‘Sharp and clean,’ she agreed. ‘Which means the break is recent.’
‘You mean it was done after it was dug up?’ Tom gave her a puzzled look, still holding the fragment.
‘I mean it was done on purpose,’ she shot back, Tom detecting a hint of anger in her voice. ‘See how they’ve been careful not to damage the painted area so they can restore it.’
‘You mean it’s been smashed so it can be stuck back together again?’ he asked with a disbelieving smile.
‘It makes it easier to smuggle,’ she explained with a despairing shake of her head. ‘Unfortunately, we see it all the time. The fragments are called orphans. The dealers can sometimes make more money selling them off individually than they would get for an intact piece, because they can raise the price as the collector or museum gets more and more desperate to buy all the pieces. And of course, by the time the vase is fully restored, no one can track where or who they bought each fragment from. Everyone’s protected.’
‘Then Cavalli must have been working either with or for the League,’ Tom said grimly as she dropped the boot lid. ‘Perhaps they found out that the FBI had his name and killed him before he could talk?’
The noise of an engine starting echoed up to them from one of the lower floors, and drew a worried glance from Tom towards the exit.
‘We should go.’ He opened the passenger door to get in, but then immediately staggered back, coughing as a choking chemical smell clawed at his throat.
‘You okay?’ Allegra called out in concern.
‘It’s been sprayed with a fire extinguisher,’ he croaked, pointing at the downy white skin which covered most of the car’s interior, apart from where it had been disturbed by the police search. ‘Old trick. The foam destroys any fingerprint or DNA evidence.’
‘Which Cavalli’s killers would only have done if they’d been in the car,’ Allegra said thoughtfully, opening the driver’s side door and standing back to let the fumes clear.
‘Where did they find the
car keys?’ He asked, rubbing his streaming eyes.
‘In his pocket, why?’
‘I’m just wondering if he was driving. Based on that I’d guess he was.’
‘How do you work that out?’
‘Because I doubt his killers drove him out to wherever the car was dumped and then planted the keys on him before killing him.’ Tom shrugged.
“What does it matter either way?’
Taking a deep breath, Tom disappeared inside the car. Leaning over the passenger seat, he plunged his hand down the back of the driver’s seat, wisps of foam fluttering like ash caught by the wind. Feeling around with his fingertips, he pulled out first some loose change, then a pack of matches, and finally, pushed right down, a folded Polaroid. He stood up, brushing the sticky white paste from his clothes.
‘If Cavalli was driving, that’s about the only place he would have been able to hide something once he realised what was going on,’ he explained, enjoying the look on Allegra’s face. ‘Here.’ He leant over the roof and handed the photo to her. ‘Any ideas?’
‘Some sort of statue fragment,’ she said slowly. ‘Greek, I’d guess, although-’
She was interrupted by a shout.
‘Rimanga dove siete!’ Stay where you are!
THIRTY-NINE
19th March-8.51 a.m.
Spinning round, Allegra immediately recognised the two officers they had talked their way past downstairs. One was hunched over the wheel of the blue Fiat squad car that had ghosted up the ramp behind them, its headlights now blazing through the darkness. The other was standing next to it, his voice echoing off the car park’s low ceilings, gun drawn.
‘We found the car after all,’ Allegra stepped towards him with a smile, switching back into Italian. ‘My friend just needs to pay…’
‘I said stay where you are,’ the officer barked again, his trigger finger twitching.
‘I don’t think he’s buying it any more,’ Tom whispered out of the corner of his mouth.
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Get in!’
The Geneva Deception Page 16