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 fragments 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.’
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?’
‘How do you know that?’ Allegra asked sharply.
‘When you’ve been around as long as I have, you get to hear about most things.’ He winked. ‘Now, I can’t really let you sign it out, but …’ He paused, clearly trying to decide what to do. ‘Wait there.’
A few moments later there was the sound of bolts being thrown back and the steel door opened. Gambetta stuck his head out into the corridor and,
having checked that it was empty, ushered her inside.
‘Are you sure I’m allowed to…?’ she began, frowning.
‘I won’t tell if you won’t,’ he whispered, as if afraid of being overheard. ‘But I need to show somebody. Are you carrying?’
‘Yes.’ She swept her jacket back to reveal the gun holstered to her waist.
‘Pick it up on your way out.’ He tapped his desk, the determined look on his face telling her that this was one rule he clearly wasn’t prepared to turn a blind-eye to.
‘Of course.’
The room was divided into five narrow aisles by a series of floor-to-ceiling metal shelving units. Waddling unsteadily, Gambetta led her down the second aisle. Allegra blinked as she followed him, her eyes adjusting to the anaemic glow of the overhead strip lighting that was competing for ceiling space with a snaking mass of heavily lagged water pipes and colour-coded electrical cabling. Even so, she could see that the shelves were crammed with hundreds, if not thousands, of cardboard boxes and plastic evidence bags, each one sealed and diligently identified by a white tag.
‘They think that all we do down here all day is sit on our arses and read the paper,’ Gambetta moaned, grabbing hold of a small set of steps and wheeling them ahead of him, one of the wheels
juddering noisily on the concrete. ‘They forget that we have to check every piece of evidence in, and every piece out.’
‘Mmm.’ Allegra nodded, wondering how on earth he managed to bend down to tie his shoes every day, until she realised that he was wearing slip-ons. Not that that accounted for his socks.
‘Most of the time they barely know what the people in their own teams are doing, let alone the other units,’ he called back excitedly over his shoulder. ‘That’s why they missed it.’
The neon tube above where he had stopped was failing, the light stuttering on and off with a loud buzzing noise, creating a strange strobing effect. Climbing up the steps, he retrieved a box that Allegra could see was marked
Cavalli
and dated the fifteenth of March.
‘It’s the Ricci and Argento cases I’m interested in,’ she reminded him impatiently, but he had already placed the box on the top step and ripped the seal off.
‘Three murders in three days. They may have me stuck down here in the dark with the rats and the boiler, but I’m not stupid.’ He tapped the side of his head with a grin.
‘Three murders?’ She frowned.
‘I left the details on Gallo’s answer machine: Luca Cavalli. A lawyer from Melfi they found hanging from the Ponte Sant’ Angelo with this in one of his pockets -’
He reached into the box and handed her a clear evidence bag. It contained a small lead disc, the plastic slippery against its dull surface as if it had been coated with a thin layer of oil. And engraved on one side, just about visible in the flickering light, was the outline of two snakes and a clenched fist.