“I asked him. He told me to shut up.” Tom looked at his watch. “Four thirty. What time is that in Miami?”
“Ten thirty in the morning.”
He rolled off the cot and went to his cell phone, which he’d left plugged into its adapter on the workbench.
“What are you doing?”
“I’ve got this friend...my landlord, Fritz. He’s retired from working for a private air-cargo business in Panama. Unless he’s totally full of crap, that’s not all he was doing. He was CIA. He says he’s still in touch with his pals. I’m going to give him an assignment: Who is Manny Suarez?”
Chapter 28
The shipment arrived just before nightfall on Tuesday at a warehouse near the port of Genoa. The Ukrainians who had accompanied the boxes
across six international borders got back into their trucks and left. Men from the warehouse pried open the lids and laid the contents on a tarp on the concrete floor. The man working for Oscar Contreras checked the contents against a list. After each box was nailed shut again, it was loaded onto a cart by a dark-skinned Algerian and a Sicilian who was missing one eye. They took the box outside to a steel shipping container. This had been going on for hours.
The boxes had been logged in as used German auto parts destined for Caracas, Venezuela. In their container, the boxes would be loaded into the ship Ulysse, gross tonnage 17,500, sailing under a Tunisian flag. The ship would go through the Straits of Gilbraltar to a port in Western Sahara. The container would be unloaded, put on a flight to Venezuela, and taken overland to Peru. Marek Vuksinic had worked out the details of the itinerary, but after the door of the container was sealed, the boxes were no longer his problem.
When Contreras’s agent was satisfied that everything on the list had been accounted for, Larry Gerard would call a certain banker to confirm the transaction and tell him to release the money to an account identified only by a number. On the day the ship was loaded, Contreras’s man would return and accompany the container to the dock.
Larry Gerard sat watching this from a chair he had rolled out from the office. He carefully put a glass to his lips. Ever since he had arrived, he had been drinking the shipper’s Scotch whisky. A heavy white bandage went across his nose, and one eye looked like a plum with a red slit in it. What Tom Fairchild had done to Larry made Marek think that Fairchild was more than a clerk whose sister owned a map shop.
There were only a few boxes left. Larry set the bottle of Scotch on the floor and motioned for Marek to come over. “Want to talk to you.” His mouth barely moved. His lips were swollen, and two of his teeth had been knocked out.
They went through a side door and into the yard, which was taken up with the dark shapes of stacked shipping containers and a few stunted trees. Larry stopped walking just beyond reach of a floodlight on the corner of the building.
“Want you to do something. I’ll...pay you for it. First, I gotta tell you about the Corelli. The ma-map for Leo Zurin.” Larry was having problems with his Ps and Bs.
Marek smoked his cigarette and waited. “It’s a forgery. A fake. Zurin isn’t going to get the real thing. It’s ruined.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The map is a du-duplicate of the original. It’s a
scam. Don’t you know what you did? When you shot Judge Herron, you shot right through the Corelli. Three...bullets. Blood all over.”
“No.”
“Yes!” Some air came through Larry’s nose, a laugh, which turned into a wince. “It’s funny in a way... when you think about it. If I were you, I wouldn’t tell Zurin.”
Smoke drifted past Marek’s head. “So you are telling me...I destroyed the map? And Stuart Barlowe will give Leo a fake map?”
“Yes. Exactly. He’s ...paying Tom Fairchild a hundred thousand dollars. Believe that?”
This news was so staggering that Marek couldn’t think how to react. “Where is Tom Fairchild?”
“Right now he’s in Florence. He’s going to...print the map tonight. Could be done already.”
“Where?”
“That I don’t know, but he’ll take it to Stuart. They’re staying at the Cellini. Then Stuart will take the map to Leo.”
“Is it a good forgery?”
Larry shrugged. “I haven’t seen it yet, but Leo isn’t stupid.” Larry came closer and put a hand on Marek’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell him what you did. Okay? But you have to help me convince him to stay with The Metro-Metropolis. He has a damn good...apartment. I can make sure he gets more of the... profit. There are ways to do it. I have a creative accountant.” Larry’s swollen lips stretched into a smile. “But I can’t do anything with Stuart there. Do you know what I’m saying?”
Marek watched the dim light shift on Larry Gerard’s ruined face. “No. What are you saying?”
“Stuart needs to go. Shit, Marek. He’s a dead man already. When Leo finds out the map is a f-forgery, he’ll go nuts.” With his good eye, Larry looked past Marek toward the door to the warehouse before he spoke again. “Stuart’s been losing it for a long time. He’s on medication. I’m the one making decisions on the . . . project. He’s deep in debt, but he has a lot of life insurance. I want you to take out Allison, too. How you do it is your decision. Tell me how much you want.”
Tapping some ashes to the side, Marek said, “Why your sister?”
“My stepsister. Why? Aside from... being a cunt?” Larry laughed. “If she’s alive, she gets half his life insurance and a lot of... other property.”
“You don’t care if people in your family die?”
“They aren’t my family. They’re nothing to me.” Larry’s tongue slid over his broken teeth. “How much do you want?”
“For two people?”
“Yeah. What do you get for this kind of job?”
“What about Tom Fairchild?”
“Sure. Him, too. What he did to me, he deserves it. Okay. Three. How much?”
“We’ll talk about it later.” Marek motioned with his head toward the door of the warehouse. “Let’s go inside. It’s cold tonight. We’ll have a drink and wait until the boxes are in the container, then we’ll talk.”
At 2:35 AM the container was sealed with a steel cable and a plate with the name of a shipping agent that existed only on paper. The warehouse workers left right away, but Marek told the Algerian and the Sicilian to stay until all the business had been settled. They went into a back room with their hashish pipe.
Marek went outside to light a cigarette while Oscar Contreras’s man made a call to Peru. After that, Larry Gerard would speak to the banker.
Walking down the slope behind the warehouse, Marek could see the old section of Genoa. The hill was high enough to give him a clear view of the port, which was lit as brightly as an American shopping mall. Loading cranes pierced the black sky, and two dozen or more freighters were tied to docks. Cruise ships waited for their morning embarkation.
He gazed through the chain-link fence. A long breakwater separated the omega-shaped harbor from the Ligurian Sea. Marek had learned from the Italians in the warehouse that Christopher Columbus had sailed from this port in the days of its glory. A hundred and fifty years before that, the Black Death had arrived on the backs of rats from Odessa running down the hawsers to the dock.
Holding the cigarette between his teeth, Marek went into the breast pocket of his coat for his Walther P99 and its noise suppressor. He screwed the suppressor to the end of the barrel. The dull black finish reflected no light. After routinely checking the magazine, Marek returned the gun to his coat.
He watched the distant blinking lights of a jet cross the sky and disappear behind a mountain. He could never allow Leo to know that the Corelli was a fake. How would he explain that his bullets had destroyed it?
Marek had shot the old map collector, Herron, because Larry had said it was necessary. Larry had told him the old man had to die because he knew about the bribery and prostitution, and if he told the police, this might ha
ve prevented The Metropolis from being built at all. Marek had done it for Leo Zurin, but he had accidentally destroyed the thing that Leo wanted most.
Marek wondered if the forgery was any good. He wondered if he could give the duplicate to Leo and say nothing. If only the fake existed, then in its own way, it was real.
He heard footsteps behind him. In the dim light from the city, the fence made a pattern of squares on Larry’s face and his zipper jacket.
“You made the phone call?” Marek asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“The bank will transfer the cash?”
“I said yes.” Larry noticed the harbor. “Check out
those yachts down there. That’s what I want. I’m going to sail the world on a...big-ass boat, eighty feet, with an all-female crew.” The red in his left eye was the only color in his face. The bruises were dark gray. “Did you decide on a p-price?”
“Larry, you think I’m a hit man?”
“You took care of Judge Herron.”
“Not for you. For Leo.”
“Okay. You did it to save Leo’s investment. That’s
why...you have to convince him to stick with it.” “And you won’t tell him what I did to his map.” “Course not. Our secret.”
Marek took the pistol from his coat and shot Larry
Gerard twice in the chest, then once through the forehead. Larry fell into the weeds, twitched for a few seconds, and lay still.
Marek walked back up the hill and told the others to get a tarp. They rolled the body into it and carried it around to the front of the building. They dropped it on the ground in front of the shipping container.
“Open the door.” The Algerian used a heavy set of bolt cutters that sliced easily through the cable. The door swung open, and they wedged the wrapped body between two of the wooden boxes and laid another on top of it.
Marek crushed out his cigarette and flicked it inside. “You wanted to go on a big boat. Have a nice trip.”
He motioned for the men to close the door and reseal the container.
Chapter 29
The sign by the door read LUCCHESE E FIGLI, STAMPATORI, DAL 1826. Lucchese and Sons had been in the printing business for almost two centuries. The front rooms had been updated—probably just after World War II—and the original printing press had been shoved into a long, narrow storeroom with an arched, brick ceiling. The heavy, wooden timbers of the press supported a table and four long, metal spokes connected to a central gear that would turn two rollers. The rollers would press the engraving plate and paper together with such force that as they went through, the paper would suck the ink from the fine lines in the etching.
Tom unloaded a box on the workbench while Eddie Ferraro pulled the dustcover off the press and plugged in some lights so they could see what they were doing. Eddie put on a blue printer’s apron and gave Allison another. She gathered her hair into a clip at the nape of her neck and announced she was ready for orders.
Tom had to keep his hands clean, so Eddie put him to work laying out sheets of modern laid paper on blotters and sponging water onto both sides. These would be test sheets. Eddie explained that unless the fibers were pliable, they couldn’t be pressed into the grooves in the plate. When the sheets were evenly damp, Tom put them in a neat stack next to the printer.
Eddie slid the eleven sheets of antique paper out of the box they had come in. “Now wet these—and remember, they’re fragile.”
He let Allison help him daub ink onto the plate and wipe it off until the polymer surface shone. Their hands became as oily and black as the ink. Eddie worked on the plate for nearly an hour before he announced it was ready. After cleaning his hands, he lay a test sheet on top of the plate and placed these between several blankets of thick wool felt. He pressed the stack against the ageblackened metal rollers.
“Here goes.” They watched as Eddie walked around to the side of the machine, reached up, grabbed a spoke handle, and pulled. His face reddened with effort as the rollers began to turn. The old wood creaked. He shoved on a bottom spoke with one foot, and the felt blankets, plate, and paper slowly disappeared under the top roller and reappeared on the other side. Catching his breath, Eddie lifted the blankets. Holding the damp proof sheet by one edge, he carefully pulled it off the plate.
Tom leaned closer. This was not antique paper, and this would not be the map, but all the same, he felt a thrill run along his spine. He was looking at the Universalis Cosmographia—minus the bullet holes and blood.
“What do you think?” Eddie asked.
“Wow.” Tom had to laugh in amazement.
Allison peered through her glasses. “Is it all right?” “Nearly.” He glanced up at Eddie. “Let’s try again.
We’ve got a little too much ink on this one.”
They repeated the process until finally the proofs
were coming out of the press the way Tom wanted. “Okay, let’s boogie,” he said.
Eddie positioned the plate on the first sheet of damp,
five-hundred-year-old paper and placed the felt over it.
He crossed himself before taking hold of the spokes that
turned the gears. The muscles in his forearms stood out,
and the rollers turned. When the plate came through the
other side, Eddie was breathing hard. He removed the
felt, exposing the paper, which lay facedown. Holding
two corners, he slowly lifted it away.
“Come on, baby. Come on. Be good to Daddy.” Spinning around, Allison clapped her hands. “It’s
gorgeous!”
“Nobody get too excited yet,” Tom said. “Let me look
at it.” He carried the map closer to the light and flipped
down the lenses of his magnifying headset. “Sorry, guys.
We’ve got some blank spots on the top edge of the border.”
They started over. It was nearly 3 AM before Tom saw
one that he liked. At the workbench, he told Allison to
turn on the hair dryer. When the ink was dry enough not
to smudge, Tom moistened a thin camel-hair brush with
watery brown paint for the age spots. They would be
paler than those on the original; Stuart had told Leo
Zurin that the map had been cleaned. Chemical testing
might pick up modern ingredients in the paint, but that
could be attributed to the restoration process.
For the most part, the age spots were at the margins.
The original map was in good condition, except for the
rip in the fold, which Tom would re-create in the duplicate. Inside the border of alternating black and white,
Corelli had drawn the continents where they should be,
although many parts of the world he had guessed at or
left blank. Europe was more accurate than the New
World or Asia. Florida was a short little nub, and the Atlantic coast of what would someday be Canada swept
toward northern Europe. The original had a few broken
lines and letters, and Tom had duplicated these errors in
the plate.
Hair-thin lines extended from compass roses situated
in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. The place names began
with simple capital letters, not the swooping flourishes of
later maps. Tom was thankful that Corelli hadn’t lived in
the seventeenth century, when every square inch of a
map might be decorated.
As he rinsed out his brush, he saw Allison’s hands on
the edge of the workbench. She had managed to scrub
off most of the ink. Tom swiveled his head to look at her
from under his magnifiers. “You can take a nap if you
want.”
“God, I can’t, I’m too excited.” She looked back and
forth from the original map to the copy. “I got used to all
those red sp
lotches,” she said. “This one seems so
empty.”
He told her to give it a few passes with the hair dryer
on the low setting. As she did so, he glanced over at her
cell phone, which lay on the workbench. She had left it
there in case her father called. He wouldn’t, not in the
middle of the night, but Tom had begun to worry that
Stuart would say no.
At ten o’clock this morning Tom had to be in the Piazza di Santa Maria Novella, a plaza south of a church
near the train station. Manny Suarez would give him the listening devices that Tom would place in Leo Zurin’s house in Champorcher—assuming that Stuart let him go
along to deliver the map.
Tom was reasonably sure that Suarez and his goons
hadn’t followed him to the print shop. Small, iron-barred
windows looked out on a courtyard invisible from the
street. The narrow entrance had been built for horses and
carriages. Eddie had parked his car in the courtyard after
taking such a complicated route through the city that
only a helicopter with a spotlight could have followed
them.
“Eddie? Is it possible to have one more? If I mess up
our only copy, we’re screwed.”
“Oh, Jeez.”
“Sorry.”
“I thought you had the copy you wanted. I didn’t
clean all the ink off the plate. If it’s dried already, there’s
no way...” Eddie held up his hands. “All right. Let’s do
it.” He returned to the printing press, and Allison opened
another jar of ink.
At the workbench Tom added a light touch of
mildew-colored gray to the map, then blotted most of it
off as though it had been recently cleaned. While the
map dried, and to rest his back for a while, he wandered
over to watch the progress on the second copy. The engraving plate vanished as Eddie gently lay another sheet of antique paper on top of it. Ink had worked
The Perfect Fake Page 28
