The Isis Covenant

by Douglas, James

  For answer he received a string of inventive curses, a few of which he’d never heard before. He switched position so his whole weight was on a knee in the centre of Myron’s spine and Myron responded with a satisfactory yelp of agony.

  ‘Look, my trigger-happy friend,’ Jamie whispered in the other man’s ear, ‘whatever happens you’re going to the police, the question is whether you go in one piece or not.’ He pinned Myron’s right arm with his knee and took the left wrist between his hands. ‘Now we have a choice here. I can break every one of your fingers one by one, which feels a bit like this.’ There was a sharp crack and Myron shrieked in genuine agony. ‘That, by the way, is only dislocated. Or I can go the whole hog and force your arm out of your socket and you’ll never be able to use it again.’ He put a little more weight on the arm and was rewarded by another shriek, followed by a whimper as he released the pressure. ‘So let me ask again. What is this about? Why did you try to kill me?’

  ‘Didn’t,’ Myron gasped. ‘Was just going to mug you. Was desperate. Wanted cash for smack.’

  ‘Dear, oh dear, you’re going to have to come up with something better than that. You must think I’m as dim as you are.’ He sighed and took a tighter grip on the arm. ‘One more time.’

  ‘Don’t!’ The would-be assassin cried. ‘Look, I’ll tell. I’ll tell. Some punter put a ten-grand contract on you. Kill and collect, no questions asked.’

  Jamie almost let him go in his astonishment.

  ‘A contract?’

  ‘A contract, I swear it. Please don’t hurt me again.’

  A hundred questions raced through Jamie’s mind, but only one of them really mattered. ‘First I need you to tell me who.’

  ‘I can’t.’ The voice was shrill with desperation and pain. ‘He’ll kill me.’

  ‘That’s a pity.’

  ‘He denies it, naturally.’

  Jamie sat with his back against the gnarled bronze roots of the tree stump supporting Peter Pan as he listened to the plain-clothes detective.

  ‘Says he was minding his own business and you jumped out and assaulted him.’

  ‘The gun will have his fingerprints on it,’ Jamie pointed out.

  ‘Of course it will. But it would help if he didn’t have the injuries he has. That arm of his is a right mess.’

  Jamie shrugged. ‘Man with a shotgun. Man in his shorts. A fairly obvious case of self-defence, I’d have thought, Inspector.’

  ‘I’d have thought so, too, Mr Saintclair, or you’d be up there in the paddy wagon with him. But you never know these days. Bastard lawyers and a liberal judge, anything can happen. Course, I didn’t say that.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  The detective pulled out his notebook. ‘One thing I need to ask? This contract, if it exists, can you think of anyone who might want to kill you?’

  It happened that Jamie had been asking himself just that question. Neo-Nazi nutcases. The Chinese government. Mossad. The list was fairly extensive. Not to mention his enemies in the art world, who might have a more lethal dislike for him than he thought. But one suspect stood pony-tailed head and shoulders above the rest. ‘There’s a man in the United States I came across last year. We had a coming-together that cost him a lot of money. Howard Vanderbilt.’

  The policeman raised an eyebrow and noted the name. ‘The Howard Vanderbilt?’

  ‘Is there anything I can do about it, in the meantime?’

  ‘The contract? We’ll send someone round to offer you some advice. Ten grand’s not really a lot of money.’

  Jamie felt vaguely slighted. ‘Advice, that’s it?’

  ‘ ’Fraid so, sir.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll give up on it after this?’

  ‘You don’t really believe that, do you, sir?’

  ‘No,’ Jamie admitted. ‘I don’t.’

  III

  ‘NO SCRAPS FOR you here, Saintclair.’ The words were uttered with that peculiar mix of sneer, condescension and chumminess that takes even the biggest snob a lifetime to perfect. It was a week after the assassination attempt and Jamie Saintclair turned, tempted to mete out the same treatment he had to the currently indisposed Myron Deloite. Instead, he forced himself to greet the speaker with a smile.

  ‘Hello, Peregrine.’ He nodded, pondering regretfully how much a broken nose would improve the purple boozer’s face. But Sir Peregrine ‘Perry’ Dacre had recently been appointed an adviser to the Keeper of the Royal Collection and wielded an influence that was astonishingly well disguised by the shiny suit, smelly armpits and permanently vacant expression. Perry was a vicious, acid-dripping gossip with a reputation for groping lowly female interns, but in Jamie’s present parlous financial state he had decided, reluctantly, that the man must be humoured. They turned to study the seven-foot painting that dominated the wall of the London gallery where Dacre had peevishly agreed it could be included in an exhibition of Italian Baroque art.

  ‘Charles One had an eye for the ladies,’ the older man mused.

  By Charles One, Jamie deduced that Dacre meant King Charles I, the monarch reputed to have added the painting to the collection. Clearly, rubbing shoulders with royalty gave you a familiarity denied lowly outsiders. But it was true. She was quite something. Dark of eye and pale of flesh, the young girl’s cupid-bow lips pursed as she looked up at the cherubic angel who had appeared miraculously from the ceiling, as if wondering whether to swat it or eat it. Although he’d clothed her in what looked like someone’s spare curtains, the artist had still managed to capture the rare beauty that had drawn the eligible men of Rome to her and had eventually led to her death. St Agnes was said to have marched cheerfully to her martyrdom and Jamie hoped that if it ever came to it, he would go with the same grace.

  The opportunity came more quickly than he bargained for.

  ‘One of Domenichino’s finest, I’d say.’ Dacre’s nasal bray attracted attention from all around, which was exactly what he’d intended.

  As it happened, Jamie agreed with him. It was certainly one of Domenico Zampieri’s best works and a near perfect example of what was called Bolognese classicism; all unaffected clarity, purity of line and subtle harmony of colour. Still, his only reply was a mildly perplexed ‘Hmmmhhh’.

  ‘You don’t agree?’ The piglet eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  ‘Oh, yes, Peregrine. It’s just …’

  ‘Just what?’

  Jamie dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘It’s just that I was in the Vatican museum the other day. You know Genaro, of course?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, I was talking to one of his assistants about the Sybils.’ Zampieri had painted two near identical canvases of the Cumaean Sybil, one of which hung in the Pinacoteca building in the Vatican, and the other in the Borghese Gallery. ‘It seems there’s talk of reclassifying one of them as “school of”, which could call into question some of his other works. I’m sure I heard a mention of poor Agnes.’ He waited just long enough for the wine-dyed skin of Peregrine Dacre’s face to fade to a pleasing pale pink. ‘Samantha, hi! I really must go, Perry; lovely to chat with you.’

  He attached himself to a tall, blonde gallery assistant passing with a plate of canapés. She glared at him. ‘What are you up to, Jamie Saintclair? I’m not sure we’re talking yet.’ She glanced back to where Dacre was staring pop-eyed at the Domenichino. ‘Still, you seem to have taken the wind out of the Pink Baboon’s sails, so I suppose I might forgive you.’ Samantha stopped abruptly and turned to study him. He knew she was seeing beyond the dark hair that flopped untidily over the intense green eyes and the thin-lipped mouth with the determined set, to the last time they’d met. She was gorgeous and leggy – they all seemed to be gorgeous and leggy – and typical of her breed. A double first in some spired cathedral of learning, spent her winters skiing at Klosters, her summers on somebody’s yacht in the Med and popped in to work to say hello to her chums every second Tuesday. He’d thought it would be like making love to a piece of fine ch
ina, but she’d treated him to the filthiest four hours of his life and insisted it would only have been better if someone called Charlie had got involved as well. The memory made him groan inwardly and Sarah Grant’s face filled his vision. It had been her decision to go back to the States, but that didn’t make the guilt any less real.

  ‘You all right, Jamie darling?’

  He grimaced and waved at the canapés. ‘A touch of indigestion.’

  A lined, half-remembered face beamed at him from across the room, but Samantha steered him in the opposite direction. ‘You’ll thank me later,’ she whispered. ‘That dreadful little man bored me silly for half an hour about some grubby pieces of torn manuscript some other dreadful little man has found in Paris.’ To Jamie’s certain knowledge ‘that dreadful little man’ was one of Britain’s most eminent Roman scholars, but he couldn’t get Sarah Grant and the Raphael out of his mind. For six all too short months Sarah had enriched his life and the Raphael they had discovered together in a lost Nazi bunker in the middle of the Harz Mountains had looked like making him rich. But eventually the American-born Mossad agent had realized that the Jamie Saintclair who had accompanied her halfway across Europe dodging bombs and bullets wasn’t the same man who had settled all too quickly into his old London routine. After a tearful farewell she’d left for Boston to think things over and, in his heart, he knew she wasn’t coming back. At the same time, the Raphael teetered on the edge of that permanent limbo the art world reserves for things it doesn’t quite understand, and all payments were put on hold.

  Which left him more or less where he had been before the Doomsday affair. Not quite penniless. Not quite unemployed. A fledgling art dealer whose career had taken a wrong turn when he’d tracked down a Rembrandt stolen by the Germans from a family of Parisian Jews, destroying the reputation of one of his peers and attracting the permanent scorn of Establishment figures like Peregrine Dacre. It was only thanks to old friends like Genaro di Stefano in Rome, who recognized his innate talent for spotting an unlikely kink in an otherwise pristine provenance, and people like Samantha, who, for reasons unknown, genuinely liked him, that he was able to hover on the fringes of his old world, picking up enough scraps to stay in business.

  She eased him effortlessly through the crowded room towards an annexe, her eyes scanning the fringes of the crowd. ‘There’s a chap I thought you should meet. We were chatting and I mentioned your name. It turns out he might have a commission for you. Where is he? Over there. Oleg, darling!’ She waved to someone walking through the door and, before they disappeared, Jamie had an impression of curling dark hair and substantial bulk surrounded by a flurry of attentive minders. ‘Bugger,’ Samantha sniffed. ‘Bloody Russian billionaires. All money and no manners. Look, this is incredibly boring. Why don’t you take me for a drink later?’

  Before he could answer, something trilled in his jacket pocket, attracting glares from everyone within hearing distance, including Samantha. He remembered belatedly that he’d forgotten to switch off his mobile phone.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, grinning awkwardly and putting the phone to his ear at the same time. He made his way to the door and out into the hall where a few people waited for the attendants to bring their coats. At first he couldn’t place the voice, but as the chatter faded behind him he realized it belonged to his lawyer.

  ‘Jamie? How the hell are you?’ The tone was suspiciously cheerful.

  ‘I’m fine, Rashid. I thought you’d be in some sleazy wine bar by now?’

  ‘Actually, I was, but I had a call from Berlin I thought you’d want to hear about.’ Despite himself, Jamie felt a surge of optimism. Here it was at last. ‘The international committee appointed by the Staatliche Museen is agreed that the Raphael is authentic. That it is indeed Portrait of a Young Man, which was taken from the Czartoryski Museum in Cracow …’ His voice tailed off into uncertainty and Jamie’s inner glow faded to ashes. ‘The problem is the two experts they brought in to rubber-stamp their report. We have one who says he can’t be a hundred per cent certain and that there’s a statistical possibility that it’s by one of Raphael’s apprentices. The other says outright that it’s a fake.’ Rashid hesitated, waiting for a response, but Jamie found he didn’t have anything to say. He noticed Peregrine Dacre staring at him from the doorway, a sleepy half-smile on his ruddy face. ‘Look, Jamie, it’s crap. The chap has no evidence, just says he has a gut feeling. But it throws doubt, and they can’t afford any shadow of doubt hanging over a Raphael, especially a Raphael with the history this one has. So it’s back to square one. A new committee—’

  ‘Did they say who this expert was?’

  ‘That’s the surprising thing. He’s English, has a fine reputation. You might know him. Sir Peregrine Dacre. Something to do with the Queen’s art collection.’

  Ten feet away Dacre smiled and raised his glass in a salute. Jamie felt a roaring in his ears and his vision turned red. In his mind he covered the distance to the door in three strides, took Perry Dacre by his scrawny neck and twisted until he felt a satisfying crunch. But when his eyes cleared, the doorway was empty and Rashid’s voice sounded as if it came from underwater.

  ‘We’ll press the Princess Czartoryski Foundation for an interim payment. It’s in their interest to have the Raphael back and I know they have no doubts …’

  Jamie shook his head to clear it. ‘Look, Rashid, this is a lot to take in. Can I call you back in the morning?’

  When he rang off, he felt like a boxer who’d just done fifteen rounds. To go back inside and agree to that drink with Samantha, and all that would inevitably follow? No. That would mean having to endure Dacre’s smug face, and somehow he didn’t feel quite up to Samantha right now.

  ‘Can I have my coat, please?’ He handed the ticket to the attendant and waited. A second later the phone went off again. Fuck. What else could go wrong?

  ‘Rashid, I said—’

  ‘Herr Saintclair? I have Polizeihauptkommissar Muller for you, sir.’

  Jamie felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. The last time he’d met Lotte Muller had been outside the Frauenkirche in Dresden after landing her in the political, diplomatic and legal manure storm that had been the climax of the Doomsday affair. Somehow it didn’t seem likely that she was about to offer him her sympathy over his Raphael problems.

  ‘Herr Saintclair?’

  ‘Kommissar Muller. What a pleasure to hear your voice again.’

  A moment passed while the German police commander tried to work out if she was being mocked, but the hint of a smile in her voice when she resumed said not. ‘I truly wish I could say the same, Herr Saintclair. Not, of course, that it is not a pleasure to speak with you, but that I wish the circumstances were different.’ A familiar chill settled in Jamie’s lower stomach. He should have known that no matter how bad things were, they could always get worse. His suspicions were confirmed when Muller’s voice took on a tone more suited to a Bavarian undertaker. ‘I was made aware of the attack that took place against you recently in London, and I was asked to make certain inquiries. You may or may not be aware that, as a result of your … relationship … with Herr Vanderbilt your name was placed on what is known as a “watch list” in the United States. You are familiar with this phrase?’

  ‘Yes, I have an idea what it means.’ His voice sounded oddly harsh in the earphone. Jamie was certain in his own mind that Vanderbilt had ordered his grandfather’s death, but the tycoon had escaped justice by pinning the blame on a junior executive fortuitously blown up by an Al Qaeda car bomb.

  ‘As a result of those inquiries, I received a courtesy phone call from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.’

  ‘The FBI?’

  ‘Of course, yes, the FBI. In any case, the name Jamie Saintclair came up in a routine surveillance report filed in New York city two days before Christmas.’

  ‘More than a month ago.’

  ‘Yes, more than a month ago. It appears that even the Fed … FBI is not immune to the ine
rtia of what you in England call the festive season …’

  ‘And this report said?’

  He could imagine the thin lips pursing at the hint that she get to the point, but Lotte Muller would not be hurried. ‘On the twenty-third of December a conversation took place between two suspects known to be involved in organized crime within the continental United States. I was not provided with the location or the identity of the suspects, but I do know that the name Jamie Saintclair was mentioned in connection with a one-hundred-thousand-dollar contract taken out by a person or persons unknown.

  ‘Herr Saintclair?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Yes, I’m still here.’

  ‘Naturally, you are aware what is meant by a contract?’ There was another long silence, which she took as confirmation. ‘You must understand that the people under surveillance were third parties – I believe go-between is the term – and there is not enough evidence for their arrest. It is also not unusual in these cases for the task to be sub-contracted, perhaps to someone in the United Kingdom. However, it is the considered opinion of the FBI that as a result of the failure of the first attempt on your life, a suitably qualified individual will be dispatched to England in due course, with the specific instruction to kill the British art dealer Jamie Saintclair.’

  IV

  ‘JESUS, WILL SOMEBODY check if Charlie Manson’s still in jail?’

  After five years in homicide, Detective Danny Fisher could have predicted the essentials of what she was about to see in the house just off the expressway in Brooklyn Heights, but the specifics tested even her legendary composure. She stood in the doorway and took in the scene with eyes long trained to look beyond the human tragedy to the physics and the mechanics of death. Six bodies in the spacious, open-plan room. The father, tall, slim and dark, strung up naked by the arms from a light fitting fixed to the ceiling and, from the blackened scorch marks that disfigured his body, the source of most of the burned-pork smell that almost overwhelmed the rank, sewer stench of bowels emptied by terror. The mother, blonde and tanned, with what had been a good body, was strapped to some sort of makeshift frame, her arms wide and her legs spread. Fisher studied her face. She would have been beautiful but for the horror that marked her end. The torn shreds of a silky peach nightgown partly covered the body, her features were a mask of blood, one breast had been sliced off and Danny didn’t like to guess what else had been done. Young folks, in their mid-thirties maybe, but she could confirm that later. The four children, three girls and a boy, aged between approximately four and thirteen, lay slumped in a row on a large couch, their blond heads matted with gore and their hands secured behind their backs with plastic ties. All of the dead had four-inch strips of brown plastic tape across their mouths.