The Lost Relic

by Scott Mariani

The same picture that had been stolen.

  Ben stared at it. What was going on here?

  De Crescenzo was swaying on his feet with amazement as he stood gaping at the sketch in his hands.

  ‘Now you understand why I asked you to be here in person,’ Segura said, reaching for his pipe. ‘This is not something I could merely describe by telephone. This, my friend, is the real “Penitent Sinner”. As certifiably authentic as it could possibly be.’ He relit the pipe with a lighter from his pocket and puffed clouds of smoke.

  Ben was so stunned he had to bite back a choking cough. The stolen piece had been a forgery?

  ‘How – how do I know—’ De Crescenzo stammered. ‘That this is the genuine article?’ Segura smiled. ‘I have been cautious. More cautious than you, my friend.’ As Ben listened, the Spaniard launched into a whole technical spiel about white lead dating, X-ray diffraction, infrared analysis, dendrochronology and stable isotope testing and a whole lot of other things Ben didn’t understand a word of but which seemed pretty convincing to Pietro De Crescenzo.

  ‘You have had this for—’

  ‘Seventeen years,’ Segura finished for him, nodding. ‘Like the private collector from whom I bought it, I prefer to avoid publicity. For the same reason, I generally refuse to loan out items from my collection.’ He gave a dark smile. ‘As I think you know, it can be a risky business.’

  The count laid the Goya down gingerly on the desk and slumped into a nearby chair. Segura was watching him closely, and Ben could read the look on the Spaniard’s face. Segura was no idiot. He was looking at all the angles. Studying De Crescenzo for any sign of play-acting that might have indicated he’d been up to some kind of scam here. Have a fake painting knocked up by a discreet forger, arrange for it to be stolen in such a way that you could never be suspected, claim on the insurance, then feign total innocence when someone comes up with the original.

  But whatever suspicions Segura might have had were clearly dissipated by the Italian’s reaction. Nobody could have acted so well. De Crescenzo suddenly looked about two hundred years old. For a few moments Ben was as concerned as Segura obviously was that the Italian might be about to keel over.

  ‘Would you care for a drink?’ Segura asked, motioning towards a decanter on a sideboard.

  De Crescenzo dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief, tried to smile and shook his head. ‘Thank you, no. I’ll be all right.’

  ‘This must come as something of a shock, I know,’ Segura said with a note of sympathy. ‘Though I must say I am somewhat surprised you did not conduct similar testing to verify the authenticity of the piece yourself.’

  De Crescenzo sank his head in his hands. ‘I assumed—’ he said weakly. His voice trailed off.

  Segura laughed. ‘I have made similar assumptions in the past, and paid the price for them. It happens to us all.’

  But De Crescenzo wasn’t listening. He sat there quaking, as if the full force of realisation was suddenly hitting him. ‘If I had known – if I had taken the trouble to check, instead of being blinded by sentiment, none of this tragedy might have occurred. This whole thing has been my fault.’

  Segura stared at him. ‘How can you have been responsible for what those animals did?’

  De Crescenzo shook his head furiously. ‘No, no. You don’t understand. The thieves were targeting the Goya specifically.’

  ‘But why would they have done that? They must have known how little it was worth, compared to—’

  ‘I don’t know why,’ De Crescenzo cut in. ‘All I know is that, had I not chosen to include it in the exhibition, innocent lives would have been spared.’ He fell into thought for a moment, then his face crinkled into a grimace and he gave a sour laugh. ‘And so history repeats itself. The first time, the crooks left with nothing. The second time, they left with a fake.’

  Listening in the shadows, Ben wondered what he meant by that.

  Segura shrugged, not seeming to understand. ‘You do look as though you need a drink, Pietro. I cannot begin to imagine what you have been through.’ Chewing on the stem of his pipe, he stepped over to the sideboard and picked up the decanter and a glass. ‘Here. Some cognac will settle your nerves.’

  De Crescenzo shook his head again. ‘I think I will leave you now, and find a hotel.’ He rose unsteadily to his feet, held out his hand. ‘Thank you. Tomorrow I will return to Rome and inform the authorities.’

  ‘I would have preferred that my ownership of the Goya remain a secret,’ Segura said. ‘But I appreciate I no longer have that luxury.’

  ‘I’m grateful for your understanding,’ De Crescenzo said in a hoarse croak.

  It was two minutes after midnight when Segura showed De Crescenzo back downstairs. The Italian took his Burberry raincoat from the ornate antique coat stand in the hallway where he’d hung it, then the two art scholars shook hands and exchanged goodbyes.

  De Crescenzo left the house and walked out into the sultry night. His mind was awhirl as he headed across the road to where he’d parked the Volvo. He patted his coat pocket for the ignition key. Not there. He was so distracted that he couldn’t remember if he’d locked the car or not – maybe he’d even left the key in it. In a daze, he reached for the door handle. It opened and he got in.

  The key wasn’t in the ignition. He cursed softly and felt in his other pocket.

  ‘Good evening, Count De Crescenzo,’ said a voice behind him.

  Chapter Fifty

  Torréjon military base

  24 kilometres northeast of Madrid

  The airfield’s floodlights gleamed off the sleek fuselage of the SOCA Cessna Citation jet as it waited on standby a hundred metres from the giant hangar where Darcey had set up her temporary command centre. The huge space was alive with heavily-armed police and soldiers, technical personnel and government agents, and filled with vehicles and military trestle tables and flight-cased racks of radio and computer equipment. At the rear of the hangar, silhouetted in shadow, stood the official planes of the King of Spain and the country’s President.

  Darcey was deep in a meeting with Comisario Miguel Garrido, one of Madrid’s most senior-ranking police chiefs, when, just after midnight, Paolo Buitoni came sprinting across the hangar and broke in on their conversation. He was out of breath and clutching a card file, full of apologies for the interruption but bursting with news.

  ‘I just had a call from Rome,’ he said excitedly. ‘Your idea to bring Ornella De Crescenzo into custody and put some pressure on her? We’ll probably get our balls – that is to say, we’ll probably get disciplined, but it worked. She remembered. She got it.’

  ‘Don’t beat about the bush, Paolo,’ Darcey said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The name of the man her husband rushed off to meet is Segura. That was all she could remember, but I ran a search using “Segura Spain fine art”. I came up with this guy.’ He plucked a glossy printout from the file. Darcey took it. It showed a serious-looking man in his fifties, with swept-back silver hair and broad shoulders, pictured at some kind of arts event, shaking hands with another man in front of a huge canvas.

  ‘Juan Calixto Segura,’ Buitoni said. ‘A well-respected art collector based in Salamanca.’ He snatched a sheet from his file. ‘I have the address right here. Million to one, Ben Hope followed Pietro De Crescenzo there tonight. And there’s more. Our men just discovered that Ornella’s car is missing. She says her husband left for Spain in his own Volvo.’

  ‘Ben Hope took it,’ Darcey said. ‘We’re looking for a bronze Maserati GranTurismo. Not too many of those around.’

  Darcey turned to Garrido. ‘Comisario, we need your tactical teams and every available patrol officer in there, hard and fast.’

  Garrido was already summoning his aides and issuing commands.

  ‘Darcey, Salamanca is just a hundred and fifty kilometres from here,’ Buitoni said. ‘The jet can get us there in less than fifteen minutes and I’ll have a police chopper waiting for us at the military base outside the city.’


  ‘Nice work, Paolo.’ Darcey flashed a brief smile at him, and then her jaw tightened and the fierce glint came into her eye. She grabbed her Beretta from a nearby steel table.

  As she strode towards the mouth of the hangar she jacked a round into the breech, flipped on the safety and shoved the weapon into her hip holster. ‘Ben Hope isn’t getting away this time.’

  ‘She has that look again,’ Buitoni muttered under his breath as he ran after her. ‘God, I love that look.’

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Salamanca

  Pietro De Crescenzo’s eyes became huge and round in the rear-view mirror. He twisted round in horror to stare at the man who’d suddenly appeared in the back of the Volvo.

  ‘Good to see you again,’ Ben said. ‘Remember me?’

  ‘Mio dio. The murderer.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Ben said. ‘I’m a sick, sick man. A raving psychotic, just like the papers say. I killed Urbano Tassoni and I enjoyed doing it, just like I enjoyed killing a hundred other men, women and children before him. And I’ll kill you, too, Pietro, unless you do exactly what I say.’

  De Crescenzo cowered behind the steering wheel. Ben dangled the Volvo keys from his fingers. ‘This town’s pretty by night. Why don’t we take a scenic tour while we talk?’

  De Crescenzo took the key from him with a trembling hand. He was shaking so badly it took him three attempts to fit it into the ignition.

  ‘Don’t drive too fast,’ Ben said. ‘Don’t drive too slowly. Don’t do anything that might attract attention to us.’

  De Crescenzo nodded frantically, took a deep breath and pulled away. The Volvo glided through the night streets. Traffic was thin. As they skirted the old city, the ancient sandstone buildings and domes and steeples were lit gold under the moonlight.

  ‘How did you know where to find me?’ De Crescenzo quavered.

  ‘The contessa was a great help,’ Ben said. ‘She even lent me her car.’

  ‘Ornella! You did not—’

  ‘You can relax, Pietro. She’s fine, apart from a hangover. Needs to ease up on the Smirnoff a little. As soon as I’m finished with you, you should think about getting home to her before she overdoes it. You’re not giving her the attention she deserves.’ Ben Hope, marriage counsellor.

  De Crescenzo’s shoulders slumped at the wheel. ‘What is it you want from me?’

  ‘I came to ask you what the hell’s going on,’ Ben said. ‘But now I can see you don’t know any more than I do.’

  De Crescenzo glanced back at him in the mirror. ‘You were there? In Segura’s home?’

  ‘I heard every word you said, Pietro.’

  ‘Then I can tell you no more. Please. Let me go. I promise – I swear – I will tell nobody that I saw you here tonight.’

  ‘Tell me one thing, and you won’t see me ever again,’ Ben said. ‘Tell me about the first time.’

  ‘The first time?’

  ‘Something you said to Segura. “The first time, the crooks left with nothing.” You weren’t talking about the gallery heist, were you?’

  De Crescenzo was silent for a few moments, then let out a long, sad sigh. ‘When Gabriella Giordani passed away in October 1986 from a heart attack, it was as the direct result of a violent intrusion at her secluded home outside Cesena. She was all alone when it happened. Her former maid and longtime companion and confidante was no longer living with her. When Gabriella was later found dead at the scene, the coroner’s conclusion was that the heart attack had been induced by acute terror.’

  ‘What were they looking for? Cash? Valuables?’

  De Crescenzo grunted bitterly. ‘That is the strange thing. Gabriella Giordani had been an established artist for quite a few years and her work was worth a fortune. She was extremely wealthy, her home filled with beautiful things. Antiques, jewel-lery, artwork, every piece itemised for insurance purposes. The burglars could have helped themselves to everything. And yet, they touched not a single item of her possessions, though they searched the house violently from top to bottom. What they were looking for remains a mystery.’

  Ben could see a pattern forming here. Criminals broke into a house full of valuables, were willing to cause death in order to obtain what they wanted, yet left the place apparently empty-handed. Twenty-five years later, an armed gang committed multiple murder, just to obtain a relatively valueless drawing once owned by the same person, which now moreover turned out to have been a fake. When history repeated itself like that, there had to be a reason.

  ‘You think they were looking for “The Penitent Sinner” the first time round?’ he asked.

  De Crescenzo shrugged helplessly. ‘I have asked myself this many times. There is no way to know the answer.’

  ‘I can think of one way. Talk to the people who did it.’

  De Crescenzo said nothing.

  ‘Tell me again about this drawing,’ Ben said. ‘What was it, a pencil sketch?’

  ‘Charcoal, drawn on laid paper.’

  ‘Laid paper?’

  ‘A special kind of art paper, thick, textured rather like a fabric print. But essentially just a piece of paper, nothing more. The sketch itself is interesting and masterfully executed but, as you have seen yourself, it is by no means a spectacular piece of art. Its only possible value was the signature at the bottom. If it had only been genuine,’ De Crescenzo added sourly.

  ‘The sketch couldn’t have been superimposed on some other piece of artwork?’ Ben asked. ‘The original painted out, then redone over the top?’ He was thinking that maybe whatever the thieves had been after was hidden underneath – but he was clutching at straws and he knew it.

  ‘Impossible,’ De Crescenzo said. ‘On canvas, this could be feasible. On paper, however, such an overpaint would be immediately apparent, as well as highly impractical. No artist would do such a thing. The mystery is simply unsolvable.’

  Ben leaned back against the seat as De Crescenzo drove on, and thought for a while in silence. Then an idea hit him. ‘You mentioned Gabriella had a longtime companion. Someone she might have confided in. Maybe that person would know something.’

  ‘I do not know what happened to her after she left Gabriella,’ De Crescenzo said. ‘If Mimi is even still living, she would be impossible to trace.’

  ‘Did you say Mimi?’

  De Crescenzo looked blank. ‘Yes.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be Mimi Renzi, would it?’

  ‘Her surname was unknown. In all the biographical accounts of Gabriella’s life, she was referred to only as Mimi.’ De Crescenzo’s bemused look turned to one of desperation. ‘Now you know everything I know. That’s it. There is nothing more I can add. Will you please let me go?’

  ‘I’m true to my word,’ Ben said. ‘I’m not who you think I am.’

  ‘Why did you kill Tassoni?’ The question burst out of De Crescenzo’s mouth as though it had been burning on his tongue all day.

  ‘You really think I did?’

  ‘It was on television.’

  ‘I thought you were smarter than that, Pietro.’

  At that moment, something caught Ben’s eye out of the car window. He turned and saw it again – a blinking light suspended high in the air over the rooftops. He whirred the glass down a few inches, felt the hot sticky night air on his face.

  And heard the thump of helicopter blades over Salamanca – as well as the high-pitched chorus of police sirens.

  Ben reached into his pocket for the Maserati keys. It was time to be out of here.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Within minutes, the dark, quiet street outside Juan Calixto Segura’s home was filled with noise and activity as a whole fleet of police vehicles pulled up outside and armed officers spilled out. Segura was standing at his front door wearing a silk dressing gown and a bewildered expression as eight cops came storming up the steps, bundled him aside and poured into the house with their weapons drawn. Within moments, the radio signal came back that the place was clear.

  Two ki
lometres across Salamanca, a black Eurocopter deployed by the Grupo Especial de Operaciones, Spain’s specialist tactical firearms police unit, was hovering low scanning the streets with its powerful spotlamp when the co-pilot spotted the bronze Maserati GranTurismo making its way out of the city. In a flurry of radio calls the chopper overtook the car, banked round one hundred and eighty degrees and came down to block the Maserati’s path. Ropes tumbled down from the aircraft’s open sides and six heavily-armed cops in black fatigues, helmets and goggles came abseiling down and hit the road running.

  The Maserati halted in the middle of the road as they circled it, six bullpup FN submachine gun muzzles trained steadily on the dark figure behind the windscreen. The men had all been briefed on the nature of their target. They were taking no chances. Over the roar of the chopper the team leader yelled into his throat mike, ‘Fugitive apprehended!’ The others were shouting at the car: ‘Get out of the vehicle NOW! Hands on your head! Move SLOW or we WILL shoot!’

  The Maserati’s door swung open. In the blazing spotlight from the chopper the driver got out very nervously and dropped to his knees on the road with his fingers laced over his head. Laser sight dots danced around his head and chest like a swarm of red insects as the cops advanced warily. But the man didn’t seem like the fearsome adversary they’d been briefed to expect – in fact he didn’t match the description of the fugitive at all. This guy was much older, skinny and gaunt. The team leader signalled to his men to bring him in anyway.

  ‘I didn’t do anything!’ Pietro De Crescenzo screeched in Italian as they put him face down on the road and fastened his wrists behind his back. ‘He told me to take my wife’s car home—’ His protests were lost in the noise as an armoured police van skidded up to the scene and he was dragged into the back.

  Three minutes’ fast sprint away in a quiet backstreet overshadowed by tall houses, Ben was working his way up a line of parked vehicles looking for a ride out of Salamanca. Stealing cars wasn’t something he liked doing, but when he saw the rusted-out Renault 5 at the kerb he had a feeling the owner would probably thank him for taking it. No alarm, no immobiliser. Auto theft, the old fashioned way. The passenger side window gave after just a couple of hits. Ben popped the locks, and then he was in and working on the wires behind the steering column. The engine fired with a rattle.