The car matched the gangster image—a sleek black Lexus that was distinctly out of place among the battered old Fiat Pandas that made up the rest of the parking lot.
“Is it far?” Serena asked. The driver didn’t respond. She tried again, in Italian.
“No,” grunted the driver.
“Good,” said Katie. “I’m hungry.”
But the driver was wrong. He was taking them a very long way from Empoli. Serena was working hard to keep the anxiety at bay now. They had been driving for half an hour, the last ten minutes of that half hour on a track that looked as though it hadn’t been used in weeks. The farther they went, the narrower it became, as the surrounding forest seemed determined to take back the land.
But finally there it was. The road widened up again, and in front of them was the warm red and yellow brick of a traditional farmhouse.
From the outside it was picture-postcard perfect. On the inside, where animals had once slept, there was now a state-of-the-art kitchen, complete with the kind of oven that even Gordon Ramsay would be pleased with. The oven was one of the things that Serena had explained she would need—though not for cooking lasagne.
Katie immediately set about choosing her bedroom. There was a small room at the top of the house with bunk beds. Katie proclaimed it hers and installed her toy rabbit on the top bunk. Meanwhile, Serena couldn’t help but give a little snort of delight and amusement when she was alone for a moment in what was to be her room—far bigger and grander than the room she and Tom had shared on their honeymoon in Tuscany.
This was the strangest situation Serena had ever found herself in. She wasn’t sure what she had expected when the Russian had summoned her to Italy. A hotel room, bare and cheap. She’d expected to have to share the space with her daughter. But here they were in an enormous farmhouse with an infinity pool to themselves.
“It’s brilliant,” Katie shouted as she stripped to her undershirt and panties and jumped in. “Come on, Mummy.”
“All right.” Serena joined her daughter in the water.
To an observer, it looked idyllic. And on the surface it was. The house on the hill was the stuff of middle-class holiday dreams: a mother and daughter—gray from an English winter—splashing around in a pool under the Tuscan sun. But when she’d put her daughter to bed for the night, Serena’s face reflected an altogether different reality. She sat on the step, smoking her first cigarette in years, and stared blindly into the trees that surrounded this gilded prison. The only sound was the curious bark of a deer. Miles away from anywhere, with no lights in view to reassure her that help was within reach if she needed it, Serena felt a hot tear run down her cheek.
What would the morning bring?
CHAPTER 45
Yasha spent the night on the road with Leonid. Their brief time in Moscow had been far from pleasant. They were met at Domodedovo airport by more of Belanov’s men, including one of his pet bankers, and were driven straight to Vasilyev’s veritable fortress on Rublevka Avenue. There were no niceties. No welcoming tea or vodka. Belanov’s party was simply led down into the basement where the painting was kept pending sale.
The portrait, just fifteen inches high, was revealed to Yasha and his new colleagues without ceremony. It lay, unframed, on Vasilyev’s desk, with a half-finished cup of coffee perilously close by. The only sign that the painting was valuable at all was the number of men who packed into the remarkably small office, with their guns on show.
“Mr. Suscenko.” Vasilyev motioned for Yasha to step forward. “Your opinion, please.”
Yasha’s first instinct was that this was the real thing. He had explained to Belanov that it would take a barrage of scientific tests to be 100 percent sure of the painting’s age and provenance, but with a simple black light that would highlight any recent touch-ups, and a well-trained eye, Yasha felt he could give Belanov an assurance that was 99 percent accurate.
The room was silent as the main lights were extinguished and Yasha ran the black light over the canvas. You could have cut the tension in the air. After all, who wants to be in a dark room with fifteen armed gangsters? The whole party seemed to sigh in relief when Yasha requested that the main lights go back on again. Then he nodded toward Leonid and the nervous rat-faced banker who had joined them at the airport.
“It’s what he said it was,” Yasha confirmed.
The banker stepped forward with a case containing thirty million sterling. Vasilyev handed Yasha the painting.
“I can buy something nice and new now,” Vasilyev said.
Moron, thought Yasha as he nodded at the joke. Belanov had just gotten himself a bargain. Thirty million dollars for a painting that should have been priceless. Quickly he fitted the painting into the special case he’d had especially made for the occasion. He offered Vasilyev his hand. The rich man merely looked at him.
Then it was time to get out of the house with Leonid and Basil, another of Belanov’s favorite goons, close behind. The challenge ahead was to get the painting from Moscow to Portofino, where Yasha would deliver it to Belanov’s yacht, without falling foul of border controls. The first leg of the journey would take them from Moscow to a private airport in Slovenia. Leonid, Basil, and Yasha would be driving into Italy from there.
There was time for Yasha to visit just one of his old haunts before the private jet was due to fly—his brother’s nightclub, Diamond Life. Leonid and Basil waited in the car with the painting while Yasha went up to the door. It was shut. A sign stating that the club would be closed until further notice fluttered from the door. There was little point leaving a message for his brother there. Yasha just wanted to know that Belanov hadn’t been bluffing. Here was the proof. God only knew where Pavel was being kept this time.
When Yasha got back into the car, Leonid was going through the pockets of Basil, who was unconscious, soon to be dead, in the passenger seat.
“What happened?” Yasha asked.
“Heroin,” said Leonid matter-of-factly. “Too pure for his black heart.” Leonid gazed forlornly at the syringe sticking out of his former colleague’s forearm. The syringe that he had prepared himself.
“Thanks,” said Yasha.
“We’ll leave him by the back of the club,” said Leonid, driving around so that he could simply roll the corpse out of the door. “There are always druggies here. I’ll tell Belanov he overdosed.”
Yasha nodded. He knew that even someone so vile as Basil had a mother to mourn him, but he consoled himself with the thought that this guy had probably been part of the squad who’d gotten hold of his brother. He looked away as Leonid arranged Basil’s lifeless limbs in the gutter.
“So the mission is going ahead as planned,” said Leonid as he got back into the car.
“Yes. Yes it is.”
“Good.” Leonid nodded, then he turned to Yasha with a wicked smile that Yasha found oddly comforting.
CHAPTER 46
Yasha and Leonid’s car—an SUV with blacked-out windows—pulled into the driveway as Serena and Katie were having breakfast on the terrace. Serena, who had been awaiting this moment with dread, immediately began clearing the plates and sent Katie inside.
“What for?” Katie asked.
“Because I want you to.”
“Why?”
“You left Bunny upstairs,” said Serena, grasping for an excuse. “I’m sure he must be lonely.”
“I’ll bring him down,” said Katie, nodding.
Katie wouldn’t be long, but her search for the fluffy rabbit would give Serena just enough time to have a moment alone with their visitor. Or visitors. The sight of the enormous, anonymous car was worrying, and sure enough, Yasha wasn’t alone. Serena felt panic surge through her body, followed by a fresh wave of fear when Yasha reached into the passenger seat of the car and pulled out a big black case. What did that hold? A shotgun?
“Hey!” He waved to Serena and smiled cheerily, as though they were old friends. She gave an unenthusiastic wave back to let him know from the
start that she was there because she had to be. She wasn’t doing him any favors. Leonid waved too, before he settled himself on the hood of the car and rolled a cigarette.
“What do you think?” Yasha asked her. “How are the working conditions? Will you be able to paint here? Is the oven good enough? Is it big enough?”
“The whole place is incredible,” Serena said honestly.
“I like the swimming pool,” said Katie. She was back downstairs already, having dressed Bunny in a pair of her own underpants.
“He doesn’t have a pair of swimming trunks,” she explained.
Yasha beamed at her and ruffled her hair. He withdrew his hand quickly, however, when Serena glared at him. They weren’t a happy family on holiday.
“Katie,” said Serena. “Why don’t you give Bunny a tour of the garden? But no swimming until I’m there to watch you.”
Katie pulled a face. “No swimming? In that case,” she said, “we’re going to watch High School Musical.”
For once Serena didn’t argue. Whatever it took to get Katie out of the way.
“Well,” said Yasha, suddenly businesslike. “I suppose we should get started right away. You’ll need what’s in here.”
He tapped the case and they went inside, upstairs to the room that would be Serena’s studio. Once the door was safely closed (and locked) behind them, Yasha clicked the case open. It contained an accordion. Yasha lifted the accordion out and played a few melancholy bars.
“Russian folk tune,” he said. “It’s the only thing I can play. I learned especially for this trip.”
“Why?”
“So that when a customs officer wants to know why I’m carrying an accordion to Italy, I can explain to him that it’s because I love to play.”
Next Yasha reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a knife. “But, of course, I don’t love my accordion anywhere near as much as I love my art.” He began to slit open the velvet lining of the music case. Serena held her breath for what seemed like an age as Yasha made a neat incision all the way around. She had guessed what was beneath it, and the idea of a knife in such close proximity to a priceless work of art made her feel quite queasy. At last he finished. Almost gingerly he picked up the edges of the velvet and peeled it back. And there was the pearl in the oyster.
“Oh my God,” said Serena as she finally laid eyes on the painting he expected her to copy. It was Ricasoli’s painting of the Virgin Mary in a moment of contemplation before the Annunciation. Property of the Wasowski family of Warsaw. Looted by the Nazis in 1944 and hidden away, until now.
Carefully, reverently, Yasha laid the painting out on the table. Serena, with her hand at her throat as though to stifle a gasp, kept her distance from it as she took her first look.
“It can’t be real.”
“Of course it’s real,” said Yasha.
Serena made a silent inventory of the details. The picture was so familiar. She had first set eyes on the composition as a child, seeing it in the pages of an encyclopedia. She had fallen in love with this depiction that brought the Virgin Mary to life in a way that only a young girl could really appreciate. She looked so carefree, sitting by an open window with a ripe black fig in her hand. And so beautiful. Her golden hair swept back from a high forehead. Her nose was straight and elegant. Her lips were full and seemed always to be on the verge of a smile.
Never had Serena expected to see the original. When once she expressed a desire to see it, her father had broken the news to her that its whereabouts were unknown. The encyclopedia that attributed the painting to the Wasowski family collection was woefully out of date. The Virgin had been stolen before Serena was even born.
“It has a little swastika on the back,” Yasha confirmed.
“I can’t believe it,” Serena murmured.
“It’s okay,” said Yasha. “It won’t disintegrate if you breathe on it! Step forward. Have a proper look. You’re going to need to know it inside out.”
“It’s …” Serena struggled to find the words. “It’s just so beautiful!”
“It is,” said Yasha.
Serena took a tentative step forward and gazed at the picture. “I’m going to ask the obvious question.”
“And I can’t tell you the answer,” said Yasha. “So please don’t ask.”
“I understand.” For the moment, Serena was content just to look at this painting, which had been lost for more than half a century. She would ask how Yasha came upon it later.
“You look a little worried.”
“I’m just wondering whether I can possibly do it justice!” she said. “Really, Yasha. This isn’t just any Old Master. It’s a masterpiece. It’s impossible to re-create. Impossible.”
“I don’t like that word, ‘impossible.’ ”
“I’m afraid I would be wasting your time,” said Serena. “I’m sorry. You need someone much better than me.”
“I can’t think of anyone better than you. If there were someone better than you, he or she would be here instead. I know you can do it, and I didn’t have you down as someone so defeatist,” said Yasha. “You haven’t even picked up your paintbrush.”
“I don’t think I should. I don’t think I can.”
“I need you to try,” Yasha insisted. “You have to.”
Yasha’s soft tone made Serena think that perhaps it was possible. Perhaps she could recreate the painting to such a standard that an expert might be fooled. But beneath the softness there was a determination that she would do what he required of her. And she was reminded when he said “I didn’t bring you out here to have you make excuses” that she had taken the commission not for the challenge of it or the incredible fifty-thousand-pound fee they had negotiated but because he had made it clear to her that the alternative was far less appealing.
As she stood over the painting, studying its beauty and nibbling at one of her cuticles, the sound of Katie’s singing drifted up to the open window. Serena glanced out to see her daughter serenading Bunny, who was propped up on one of the garden chairs. Leonid watched too from his seat on the hood of the car.
“I’ll do my best,” she said.
“I know you will.”
After Yasha went back downstairs, Serena remained alone in the attic with the painting. This was by far the strangest moment of her life. She was reminded of the story of the farmer who told the king that his daughter was able to spin straw into gold. Serena remembered a drawing in the book of fairy tales that now had a place on the shelf in Katie’s bedroom. The girl all alone. The dust motes dancing in the shaft of sunlight from the single high window. The enormous pile of straw. Well, here was her enormous pile of straw: one Renaissance masterpiece and a worthless old canvas upon which to re-create it. But where was her Rumpelstiltskin?
Serena ran her fingers over the young girl’s face, trying to imagine the moment when the paint was still wet and the girl sat living and breathing in front of the artist. It was as though she hoped that by touching the painting some magic might happen. Sensing a woman in distress, perhaps the artist himself might slip in spirit from the painting into the ends of her fingers. Nothing happened. And when she tried to conjure her spirit artist to her, she could only see Colin Firth in that movie about Vermeer. Perhaps not even in the right movie. Was Vermeer ever wet-shirted?
She could just steal the painting. It was almost certainly in the wrong hands. There would be some kind of reward, surely, for returning it to its rightful owner. It would be enough to keep her and Katie going for a while. But glancing out of the window again, she saw Leonid, smoking in his studied casual way. She had no doubt that he did more for Yasha than park the cars and that he would be very happy to get his hands dirty. And if she did manage to get away from the farmhouse with her daughter and the picture, if she managed to get the painting to INTERPOL, she would have to spend her whole life on the run.
There was no way out. Only through.
So Serena decided she would give this craziest of commissions a shot
. She could only hope that when Yasha saw how foolish it was to think that he could ever pass off her work as that of Ricasoli, he would not be too angry and let her and Katie go back to London without a fuss. To that end, she set up her working materials at once, so that Yasha would believe she was in earnest.
“Leonid and I are going to stay here until you’re finished,” Yasha announced over lunch. “I’m sure you understand that I don’t want to leave you alone in the house with a priceless Renaissance masterpiece, and it’s hard to get a security staff you can trust. I mean, I don’t think Luca, the guy who brought you here, knows an old master from his arsehole, but there have been a lot of burglaries around here lately, and I don’t want my painting to end up in some Sienese flea market.”
Serena nodded. Katie was less upset at the thought that they would not be alone in the house.
“Good,” she said. “Leonid can be the lifeguard so I can go swimming.”
CHAPTER 47
Just before coming to Italy, Serena had sent Yasha a shopping list. It had contained not only the food she would need to keep Katie happy, but also a variety of far rarer items. Since painting the Renaissance Madonna for Julian, Serena had become quite the expert on the tools of the Renaissance artists. Yasha had sourced every one. He had understood that Serena was not going to be able to pull off this piece of alchemy with a few tubes of paint from Winsor and Newton. He’d found the raw ingredients. Here were mercury and lead oxide, resin from the Garcinia tree for gamboges, yellow ochre, and lead tin. A piece of old ivory to burn for bone black. A jar of cochineal beetles to make carmine. And for the ultramarine she would need for the Virgin’s robe, a piece of lapis lazuli worth thousands of pounds. From Afghanistan, Yasha promised. That was important, as at the time Ricasoli was painting, it would have been his only source. Lapis from anywhere else would give the painting away in a second when someone sampled a sliver of paint, as they inevitably would at some point. To that effect, the lead oxide to make white also gave Serena pause. “It could give us away,” she warned Yasha over dinner.
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