A Rather Lovely Inheritance

by C. A. Belmond

  Jeremy took all this in at a glance. “There must be hundreds of guests at this hotel, not to mention people who walk in just to eat in the restaurant or gamble in the casino,” he said. “Even if we could track Rollo down, how do you propose to get hold of the painting? Are you merely going to make a citizen’s arrest for art theft? Possession, my dear girl—”

  “Just follow the plan,” I said tersely, and to my surprise, he did.We split up and communicated with our mobile phones as we cased out the hotel, looking for Rollo.

  While I was checking the cocktail lounge and dining room, pretending to be thinking about making future reservations for a rather large party of guests, Jeremy went to the casino, ordered a drink, and sat at the bar to keep watch. I waited in the tea lounge for his call; I sat at a tiny table and ordered a champagne cocktail. I had my portfolio with me, but I kept it at my feet so as not to attract undue attention.

  The cocktail cost more than I would normally pay for lunch. My chair was the kind that makes you sink deeply and alarmingly into it. And perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to be drinking alone, because I started getting a few looks from some men at the bar, obviously on the prowl. I refused to catch their eye. It’s funny, but when you are very intent on accomplishing something, it translates physically into confidence, which attracts people. Maybe they think you’re on the trail of the biggest pot of gold on earth. I studied my drink, trying to look nonchalant.

  Finally I got up and went back to the lobby, which had those big two-club-chairs-in-one, attached by a central shared armrest. One seat faces north, the other south, yet two people can still look at and talk to each other. I found one with two empty seats, so I parked myself on the side facing the main entrance. It was an ideal spot to watch people arriving.The waiter trailed after me, transporting my drink.

  Shortly after that, my phone rang. Jeremy’s voice said, “This is a waste of time.”

  I looked up, and there was Jeremy, walking across the lobby toward me, staring at me dolefully as he continued talking into his phone. “I see you,” he said.“Do you see me? Good. Because I’m coming to take you home.”

  “Listen, my dear fellow,” I said. “Rollo just walked in the main door, right behind you. And with him is one of the skanky guys who tried to steal my car. The guy is carrying a wrapped parcel shaped exactly like a painting.They’re at the front desk now. Rollo’s getting a key. Come here quick, and don’t turn around.” I ducked my head, in case Rollo looked up.

  Jeremy dropped into the seat attached to mine. “Do you see what I see?” I demanded. I nodded toward the reception desk. There was Rollo, all right, in a white linen suit and a panama hat. Accompanied by the aforementioned creepy pal, who was wearing a dark, ill-fitting suit.

  “Yep,” Jeremy admitted, and he stared, fascinated, as the two men went up in the elevator together, with Rollo’s pal carrying the plain, flat package wrapped in brown paper and string. It looked like the kind of package you’d see tourists carrying around when they’ve bought a picture at a local gallery selling views of the Riviera to remember their vacation by.

  We sat there and waited, watching the elevator doors. Jeremy drank half my cocktail. It wasn’t long before Rollo and his pal emerged, sans painting. I could barely sit still.

  “He left it upstairs,” I squealed.

  “Shut up,” Jeremy hissed. “They’re heading for the casino.”

  “Jeremy,” I said, “you follow them, and proceed with Phase Two.”

  “You’re out of your mind. It’s too risky,” he said.

  “It’s our only chance and you know it,” I said. “Go. I need you to look out for me.”

  Jeremy gave me a hard stare; then, resolutely, he got up. Within minutes my phone rang. “I found him,” Jeremy said in a low voice. “Roulette’s his game. He’s settled in for a bit. Believe it or not, I think he’s paying the guy off in chips. He keeps splitting his pile and sliding it in front of the guy.”

  “Okay,” I muttered into my phone. “Proceed with Phase Three.”

  “You fool,” he hissed. “Forget Phase Three.”

  “You’d better do it,” I returned, “because I’m going ahead with Phase Four, regardless.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, all right. Wait for my call,” he said. Phase Three was for Jeremy to phone the front desk, say that he was Rollo and that he was expecting his little female American cousin to show up and they should give her a key to his room. A few interminable minutes later, my phone rang again.

  “Okay,” Jeremy said. “I did as you asked. Wait for me for Phase Four, you nut—”

  “Stop gumming up the plan,” I snapped. “You should be getting ready for Phase Five.”

  So I went ahead with Phase Four by going to the desk and being my most winsome, scatterbrained self.

  “Excuse me,” I said in a sweet, I’m-just-a-dopey-American voice. “My cousin Rollo told me he’s staying here and—at least, I think it’s here.There’s so many hotels on this street, gosh, I hope I’m in the right one! Mummy said it was this, but she’s so forgetful sometimes . . . !”

  “The last name, madame?” the bored man at the reception counter inquired. I told him, and another man behind the counter looked up and said,“Yes, your cousin called. He is at the casino, but asked that you wait in his room.” And he handed me the key to room 719.

  From the minute I got into the elevator my heart began to pound unnaturally hard and I could barely breathe. It dawned on me that I was not really cut out for this line of work—spying, stealing, what have you. I thought that everyone—the young elevator operator, the maids with their carts, and the other guests at the hotel—must surely be able to hear my racing heart banging against my ribs.

  But everything went as smoothly as clockwork. I found Rollo’s room, the key fit into the lock, and I slipped into the room unnoticed, because I waited for the maids to go round the corner. I’d listened at the door before I went in (I was proud of this foresight), and when I was sure that no one else was in the room, I phoned Jeremy on my mobile.

  “I’m in the room. It’s number 719,” I said. “Proceed with Phase Five.”

  That meant that Jeremy was to keep an eye on Rollo, and if he got up and seemed to be heading back to the hotel room, Jeremy was to alert me. Meanwhile, it was my job to find the damned painting.

  “You truly are a complete nutter,” Jeremy muttered, but he hung up and continued staring at Rollo, who, he later told me, was drinking like a fish.

  Rollo’s room was so empty that at first I thought the man at the front desk was mistaken.The bed was still made, and there wasn’t any luggage or clothing about, not even in the closet, as if nobody had checked in yet. But then I got that prickly feeling at the back of my neck again.The painting was in here. I could feel it. And I found it in the first real place I thought it might be. Under the bed.

  I dragged it out and onto the bed, and my hands were shaking as I carefully untied the string and unwrapped the brown paper with agonizing care. Inside, plain cardboard lay on top, then blue tissue paper—then there it was.

  It wasn’t nearly as big as I’d expected. About fourteen inches wide and twenty inches long, it could easily fit into my own portfolio. Signed by an artist named A. Fabrizi, whom I believed I’d heard of, perhaps, but I was blanking out on exactly what I’d heard. This was the Madonna and Child, all right, just like the one in the photo stolen from Aunt Penelope’s album.

  Except for one stupendous difference—the way it made me feel when I looked at it. That stunned thing that happens to you when you turn a corner in a museum, and a particular painting seems to leap right at you, grab you by the throat. I felt mesmerized, as if I were suddenly rooted to the spot, my feet nailed down, and wild horses couldn’t drag me away. I simply couldn’t take my gaze away from the picture for a second, not even to blink.

  The painting’s background was done in those rich ochre tones that I had become so familiar with in my research on Italian art at the turn of the fifteenth c
entury to the sixteenth.There was even, I think, real gold painted on it, amid dark autumnal colors of burnished brown and blood-red, smoky blue and golden yellow, burnt orange and olive green and dusty plum.

  But the faces of the Madonna and her infant had a radiant lightness about them, in soft creams and pinks, opaline whites, even a shimmering violet, which gave them an eternal quality, a vernal sweetness in contrast to the darker background and clothing.The infant, unlike so many paintings of cupids or babies, did not have that usual awful face of a wizened old man attached to a baby body. This one really looked like a baby, gazing up in calm wonderment and adoration at his mother as if she were the sun, the sky and the clouds.What made the Madonna so remarkable, though, was the almost ordinary quality of the sweetness of her face. She looked young, human, girlish except for her mature serenity; and the effect was that you felt as if you had just walked down a street, entered a house, and opened a door on a real young woman who just happened to be living in another century but was archetypal of all young, sweet mothers from Italy. It was as if she’d looked up and caught you with her soft brown eyes and delicate rose mouth, emanating a pure but natural and touching innocence as she gazed benevolently not just at her baby but at you as well.

  I felt that time had stopped and I’d found a portal to eternity, a captured moment of the past. I had to make a supreme effort to shake myself out of my reverie and tear my gaze away. For once, I thought I understood Rollo and anyone else who was obsessed with a work of art.

  “Oh, God,” I whispered, “this is the real thing.” My heart, which had just begun to resume its normal beating, now started rat-tat-tatting again. Strangely enough, the thought that occurred to me then was, “I’m in bigger trouble than I thought.” I suddenly knew that I had to wrap this all up and get out, fast. I had just finished tying the string when my phone rang. It was Jeremy.

  “Got it,” I breathed. “Proceed with Phase . . .” I paused forgetfully, still dazed.

  “Six, you idiot,” Jeremy said. “Get your ass out of there. Now. Rollo’s boy is cashing in his chips, and Rollo’s stopped winning, and he’s looking restless.”

  “Okay, I’m out of here,” I promised.

  And damn it, I would have made it out of there, if it hadn’t been for the maid.

  She stuck her key in the door right after one short, useless knock of warning. All I could do was dive under the bed. This is not a place you want to be, even in the best hotels. I won’t discuss dust balls and such, here and now. Suffice it to say, it was a suffocating spot to be in.

  I at least had my wits about me enough to shut off my phone so it wouldn’t ring and expose me. Now my heart seemed to be pounding against the floor.The maid took her time, turning down the bed, plumping up the pillows, adjusting the temperature, whatever it is they do when the room is already clean but they are giving it that final dumb thing, which I always find a nuisance but which, I suppose, some people like, I suspect because it is so psychologically maternal, offering a parental, loving good-night tuck-in.

  So of course Rollo came in. Very sharply he said to her, “What the devil are you doing? Get out of here, you wretch!” He must have scared her, because she rushed out before he had time to holler about the package being pulled out from its hiding place. When he saw it, he sucked in his breath and said, “That stupid, stupid bitch! Leaves it right out on the table in the damned sunlight!” She had apparently taken the parcel off the bed where I’d been forced to leave it, and when she turned down the covers, she must have put it on the table near the glass sliding doors. I watched Rollo’s white-leather-shod feet pacing around the room. While he was seething, his telephone rang. He picked it up on the first ring.

  “Hello,” he said in the sharpest tone I’d ever heard him use. “Yes. Yes. Of course I have it. Those morons botched the whole thing in Antibes, but you just do your job, and then nobody can prove a thing. Is the copy ready? And you have it? All right. I’m leaving now.”

  And he hung up. He sounded more aggressive without his mother around.With another gusty sigh, he went into the bathroom and peed. Then, I’m sorry to say, that without washing his hands, he picked up the package and went out.

  I didn’t move right away, because I didn’t know for sure if he’d taken the painting, and I was afraid he’d come back for something, even though there was nothing else in the room. Finally I popped out, saw that the package was missing, and frantically called Jeremy.

  “Christ!” he hissed. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been wild—”

  “The maid screwed me up,” I said. “Then Rollo came in. I hid under the bed.”

  “God Almighty,” Jeremy groaned.

  “Did you get the valet to bring the car around?” I asked.

  “Of course. He’s parked it in the turnaround. I’m in the lobby, waiting for you.”

  “Jeremy,” I said, “I saw the painting. He’s taken it with him. You can’t let him out of your sight. If you have to follow him without me, go.”

  It was almost intolerable, waiting for the elevator. A German family with two little girls came straggling out with a lot of shopping bags. It was a different elevator this time, run by a plump, slow-moving woman. Every time we stopped for someone I could feel my throat clutch, but I somehow managed to make it down to the lobby without fainting dead away.

  Jeremy met me at the elevator and yanked me behind a marble pillar.“He’s waiting for his car to come round,” he said in a low voice. “He hasn’t seen me.We’ll let him get in his car, then we’ll jump into ours and follow him. He’s alone, because his buddy took off in another car as soon as he cashed in the chips. I got the license number of the other guy’s car. Severine can give it to the police. I left a message on her machine.”

  Chapter Thirty

  FORTUNATELY FOR US, IT TURNED OUT THAT ROLLO WAS A CAUTIOUS driver. I suppose he was being especially careful so that no gendarmes would pull him over and get a look at what he was transportdarmes would pull him over and get a look at what he was transporting. Still, it was torture trying to keep him in our sights in the dark of night, once we pulled away from the well-lit main streets and hotels. He was driving a silver Mercedes, and just following him out of Monte Carlo itself was dicey.

  “He isn’t heading for the airport,” I observed.This didn’t surprise Jeremy.

  “He can’t,” he said. “He’s got stolen art. He’d have to show it at customs.What did it look like? Is it the one in the photo?”

  “Yes. It’s beautiful. A Madonna with Child, by Fabrizi. Reminds me of Dossi, Albertinelli . . . where the hell is he going?” I said as we followed him onto the highway. I looked at the letters and arrows painted on the ground to let you know what direction you’re about to go in. “Ventimiglia,” I read aloud.

  “He’s heading for the Italian border,” Jeremy said.“There’s no border patrol there anymore. If you manage to smuggle a stolen work of art into certain countries, then sometimes it can be resold to someone who, for instance, innocently believes it’s only a copy—and that sale might still be legal. The point is, the real owner often can’t do a damned thing about it, especially if he doesn’t figure out where it went until years later.”

  “You think he’s going to sell the real painting?” I asked.“I thought he’d keep it. I think the plan was to steal the original and replace it with a copy in the garage, and nobody could prove that the copy wasn’t the one that Aunt Penelope owned and Denby saw.”

  “Sooner or later he’ll sell it,” Jeremy said. “If it’s worth a lot, he won’t be able to resist. He obviously has contacts over there who are ready, willing and able.”

  “Sure. That guy who phoned him. The one I heard while I was under the bed.”

  “Let’s get this straight: there will be no more hiding under the bed for you,” Jeremy said.

  “Gee, what a shame,” I said sarcastically. “I do so love doing that.”

  “Hoo, hoo,” Jeremy said. “What else did Rollo say on the phone?”


  “Just what I told you. That his pals in Antibes screwed up, that we can’t prove a thing, so long as this guy he talked to ‘does his job,’ which is to give him that fake, the copy. I’ll bet he’s going to pick it up right now,” I added. “Yessir. I could tell there was definitely a deal going down.”

  “You’re talking like a gendarme again,” Jeremy said.

  “I believe you mean ‘carabiniere’ now,” I replied.

  It was eerie, going past the border. The old customs booths and lanes were still there, like a ghost town.You just floated through them, feeling slightly guilty. At least, I felt like I was sneaking in. I’m incurable. I feel guilty even when I’m not the one with a stolen painting in my clutches.

  The immediate effect of crossing into the first town in Italy was a huge traffic jam because of an outdoor music festival drawing in the tourists and locals alike. The cars barely crawled along, and motorcycles swarmed around us like big noisy bees. I could see Rollo, at one point, throwing up his hands in frustration. It was hot and dusty, and the smell of car exhaust filled the air. Finally, mercifully, we made it out of the clogged little town and up onto the main highway. I expected things to pick up speed and become difficult at this point, but Rollo had other problems. He had to pull into a gas station and fill his tank. We pulled over to a section where the campers and families stopped to park and stretch their legs.

  It was a self-service station, and Rollo grimaced, apparently finding this distasteful and difficult. Right in front of our eyes he yanked on some gloves.

  “Ho-lee cow,” I breathed. “It was him who busted into the apartment.” We watched, spellbound, as he stuck the nozzle in the fuel tank.When he was done, he yanked off his gloves, climbed back in his car, started it up . . . and pulled off into a parking space near the men’s rooms, where all the weary camper dads were bringing their tired little boys . . . just a scant few yards away from us.We froze.