Nobody said anything. It was obvious she hadn’t finished. She was the head of the family and although in the end nothing would be done without Mike’s agreement, she was the one who would express her opinion first about what should be done. This is how it had been for decades, and this time was no exception.
She continued, “Antonio and I found ourselves once in a similar situation. This was a very long time ago and this is what Antonio said, ‘If you are a target and you don’t know from which direction they are shooting at you, you disappear.’ And this was exactly what we did; we removed ourselves; we became invisible; we stayed alive. At the time I was only sixteen years old and Antonio was seventeen, but it was a lesson I never forgot.”
There was a brief silence before Christina asked, “Did you move to another location?”
“We moved from Florence to Rome and changed our identities,” Natalie Richard replied. “I have changed my identity three times in my life; this time, it seems, is the first time that someone was able to find out about it.”
“Mum and I have become US citizens and the four of you are born Americans,” Mike contemplated. “We can disappear in New York, we can disappear in Chicago or any other big American city – or we can get out of this country and disappear somewhere else; in a European country, in South America, there is a long list of possibilities. Maybe each one of us should express an opinion. Who would like to start?”
Christina thought, He knows what his mother would prefer, for this reason he has not asked for her opinion first. He wants to sound us out, he doesn’t want everybody just to agree with his mum out of respect. He is genuine about finding out what each one of us thinks.
Mike looked around, from one to the other, without giving anybody the feeling that he or she should start.
Vanessa said, “I would be happy to come along and disappear with you wherever we decide this is going to be. New York, I think is not the best place for us to become invisible. The city is a big place and yes, lots of people here have wiped out their past, but still, if we stay in New York, the risk that we can be traced is a very real one. Any other big American city would be better, but in my opinion a big European city would be our best choice. Which European city? I don’t have a personal preference. From a business perspective, I guess big financial capitals would be good. Places like London, Berlin, Paris, Rome, just to mention a few. From a language perspective, an English or an Italian city may be a good idea.” After a second, Vanessa added, “I don’t know about you Christina, we all speak English and Italian.”
“I don’t speak Italian,” Christina replied, “but learning a new language would not worry me. Apart from that, I pretty much agree with everything you said. On a personal level, an Italian city has a lot of attraction to me.”
“You are not just saying this with the anticipation that this might please me?” Mike’s mum Natalie asked.
“No, definitely not,” Christina replied evenly and without further explanation.
“Rome,” Steven said, “I think Rome is the place to go to.”
“Why?” Natalie asked.
“You have three large houses in Rome,” Steve replied. “I have managed them through our Italian contacts for the past ten years. They can’t be traced to you. Or let’s put it this way, I can’t see how they could ever be traced to you or to any of us, provided that we are able to move there without leaving any traces here in the USA that point to Italy, preferably not even to Europe.”
“Makes sense to me,” Sarah said. “I vote in favour of Rome.”
“Okay,” Mike concluded, “Rome it is.” After a brief pause he added, “That was the easy part. The next challenge is to work out how to disappear from here and how to appear in Rome without anybody noticing a damn thing.”
33
“Will Gates is a good friend of yours,” Nancy said. “Interesting. How did you get to know him?”
“A few years ago he gave a talk at Harvard about IT stuff. I met him afterwards when he mingled with the audience. We discovered that we had common interests and met for a cup of coffee a few days later. Another six months later, when I had a bit of spare cash, I gave it to him for one of his charities,” Tony replied.
Nancy changed the subject. She liked the idea that she might meet Will Gates one day, but right now she didn’t like to talk about money and rich people. Who knows, she thought, Tony may also know Warren Buffett, George Soros and Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. These are interesting people, but I don’t want to be sucked into talking about them today. This can wait for another day. Without indicating that she was about to change the topic she said, “I think we should search for Jean.”
Without missing a beat, Tony replied, “This is exactly what I had in mind too.”
“Any idea how we should go about it?”
“We have to talk to people who know him well. Maybe they have an idea where he could be, assuming he is still alive. I also want to find out if anybody knows anything about the unknown man who visited all four painters the day before the murders took place.”
“Do you think he could be involved?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“He may be an art dealer who visited the four painters. This could be a pure coincidence,” Nancy contemplated.
“It could be,” Tony agreed, “except that there is one problem.”
“What is that?”
“I am a conman and as a rule conmen don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Is this a rule or a philosophy?”
“Whatever we want to call it, coincidental events do occur of course, but it is definitely one of my rules to accept them as such only after the genuinely coincidental nature of their occurrence has been established without doubt.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“It can be complicated, but this is one of the rules that can keep you out of jail.”
For several days Tony and Nancy visited art galleries, the studios of painters, and dozens of bistros, bars and cafes that were frequently visited by painters and other artists. Usually it took them a while to convince people that they were not from the police or a government authority and had no interest in finding out whether or not everybody had paid their taxes. Once Nancy’s identity was established and people were reminded of the court case that had taken place years earlier and had ended with a big win for Nancy and the four painters, of whom three were dead now, people were more than willing to answer Nancy and Tony’s questions.
It turned out that Jean had several girlfriends who he could be hiding with, always assuming that he was still alive, but that he could also have left Paris and gone to his parents, his brother or one of his two sisters. Nobody had any contact details of his parents, brother or sisters, but from what people thought they might have heard or may remember, it seemed that Jean’s family was spread all over France. Some thought his father lived in Bordeaux, some thought he had moved to Metz after he and his wife got divorced, others were convinced that there was no divorce. One of Jean’s sisters was a teacher and seemed to have changed schools every two or three years, the other sister was supposedly mentally ill or had died a few years ago or maybe never actually existed. Jean’s brother was an adventurer and the only thing everybody agreed on was that he had an accident several years ago while climbing the North Face of the Eiger with a friend. His friend had a panic attack and in the process of rescuing him both climbers fell and were injured. Amongst the people Nancy and Tony talked to there was neither agreement on the severity of the injuries nor on the current whereabouts of Jean’s brother.
However, they were able to locate and talk to two of Jean’s girlfriends. One of them confirmed that Jean was alive. He had stayed with her for one day and two nights after the murders had taken place. He then had decided to leave her apartment because it seemed logical to both of them that the police might turn up sooner rather than later looking for him. However, the police had not turned up so far. The girl said, “They are hopeless; the moment
you have a few drugs they give you a hard time or want to sleep with you, but when they are meant to solve a triple murder case they are nowhere to be seen.”
Nancy asked her, “Why didn’t Jean go to the police?”
“Because of a recent drug story,” the girl replied. “Jean is both a very brave man and an idiot. He insists that he has the right to use drugs, which is the main reason he gets caught more often than anybody else.”
“A right to use drugs?” Tony repeated questioningly.
“He does not accept the law. He says the law is wrong. He argues with everybody about it, even with the police and not that long ago with a judge. It is below his dignity, he says, to use drugs secretly. He said it in the courtroom and before the judge knew what was going on, Jean lit a hashish cigarette and offered one to the judge.”
“What did the judge say or do?”
“The judge was actually quite cool. He had the burning cigarette and whatever other drugs Jean had in his possession taken away from him and then continued with the court case as if nothing had happened.”
“Wow! I don’t think you would find a judge like that in New York,” Nancy said.
“I don’t think there is a second one like him in Paris”, the girl commented.
“Did Jean tell you where he was going?” Tony asked.
“No,” the girl replied. “He said it would be better if I didn’t know in the event that the Police question me.”
Jean’s second girlfriend whom Nancy and Tony were able to contact told them that she had received a phone call from Jean. She lived just around the corner from his place and he asked her to water the plants in his garden every day when it was very hot and every second day when it was not too hot. They had a bit of a discussion about what constitutes very hot and not too hot. In the end they decided to let the plants decide. If they look exhausted, water them, if they look all right, don’t worry about them. As it turned out, they looked exhausted every time the girl checked them out, usually around ten o’clock in the morning.
“Did he tell you anything about where he might be hiding?” Nancy asked.
“Could be anywhere,” the girl replied. “He didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask, but he has enough money to stay in hotels for a year, which could be in Paris or anywhere in France.”
Two days later, Nancy and Tony were just about running out of ideas about where to look for him, Nancy received a phone call early in the morning at around five o’clock. The hotel’s receptionist, who put the call through, apologized when she realised that Nancy had still been asleep. The caller was very persistent, she explained, and said you definitely wouldn’t mind being woken up.
“I heard you have been looking for me,” a man said in French without first introducing himself. “How have you been going?”
It took Nancy only a second or two to realize who was talking to her. Copying Jean’s straightforward approach she replied, “How about joining me and a friend of mine for breakfast, let’s say in a couple of hours, and I’ll tell you how I have been doing and you tell me how you are going.”
“Good idea,” Jean replied. Nancy gave him the name of a café which was part of the hotel and where she and Tony had had breakfast before.
Two hours later, when Nancy and Tony entered the café, it appeared at first that Jean was not yet there. They picked a table and ordered two glasses of orange juice. It was seven o’clock, still early, and there were only four other guests in the café, men in their thirties and forties. None of them looked like Jean. None of them looked like a painter. After the orange juice was served a man from a table nearby got up and joined them. “My disguise seems to work,” he said. “I recognised you, but you didn’t pay much attention to me.”
Both Tony and Nancy looked surprised. “We expected to meet an artist, not a businessman in a suit with a conservative tie, shaven face and short hair,” Nancy replied.
“That’s the good thing about being an artist with long hair, a beard and colourful jeans; it’s not too hard to change your appearance so that even your mother can’t recognise you.”
They shook hands and Nancy introduced Tony. “My friends described you well,” Jean said as he and Tony shook hands. “You two left a trail through half of Paris which I couldn’t miss.”
“We were hoping for that,” Tony answered. “It wasn’t very hard of course. Half of Paris seems to know you. We only had to tell everybody our names and the name of the hotel where we are staying.”
They ordered breakfast and for the next two hours talked about what had happened at Jean’s place. Jean assumed that, until his escape, the same had happened at the houses of each of the other three painters. It had been around nine pm when the bell rang and over the intercom a male voice apologized for being so late. The man said it was his last day in Paris and he would like to look at Jean’s paintings with the intention of buying one. He had an American accent and Jean let him in. This was not that unusual. People, especially tourists, came at all hours to look at his paintings. They were hoping for cheap copies of old masters, but there was nothing under 50,000 euros in Jean’s studio.
Two men arrived and Jean felt almost immediately that something was wrong. They looked like people who had dressed up as business people; they didn’t look like real business people; they didn’t look like tourists; they didn’t look or behave like anybody Jean would have been able to categorize. Instead of focusing on him, greeting him and maybe apologizing once more, they only glanced at him. They looked at everything, but not like people who were looking for works of art, but more like people who were measuring and evaluating things.
Jean asked them what kind of paintings they were interested in. He received an evasive answer: nothing in particular; we are happy to look at whatever you have. Jean then had the feeling that one of the two men was trying to move behind him. He prevented this from happening by staying close to the wall. He now had one man to his right and one to his left and neither of them really seemed interested in paintings. At this point one of the men realized that Jean didn’t trust them.
He pulled a pistol and said, “Nothing will happen if you give us the pages with the recipe for eternal life.”
Jean who is a tall and strong man reacted the way he would have reacted if a screenwriter had written this part for him. He grabbed the man on his other side and yanked him with one massive pull between himself and the man with the pistol and then gave him an equally massive push. The fake “businessmen” collided and lost their balance. By the sound of it one of them crashed to the floor, but Jean didn’t bother to look, he was already out of his studio and running through his little apartment towards the staircase and the exit. Outside the building one man followed him for a few hundred yards, but gave up when he realized that Jean was by far the better runner.
Nancy and Tony listened to Jean’s story. “What did he mean by recipe for eternal life?” Nancy asked. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“Oh yes!” Jean replied. “That’s serious stuff. Someone else gave me a lot of money for that eternal life stuff only a day earlier.”
“Someone gave you a lot of money … eternal life stuff … Sorry Jean,” Nancy said, “I think you lost us. Maybe if you could just step back in time a bit further and start this story again.”
Nancy could see that Jean was working out in his mind where to start his story – recipe for eternal life – but then, before he could open his mouth, Tony pushed him off his chair. Tony’s push was not just an ordinary and a unexpected push, it was a strong push that not only threw Jean onto the floor, but made him also slide along the floor for a yard or two. He ended up in the path of a beautiful young waitress.
Confused and desperate Jean grabbed the young lady’s legs and tried to pull himself up. He is a strong, tall and heavy man and instead of pulling himself up he pulled the waitress down to him onto the floor; right on top of him, to be exact. The tray in the waitress’s hands was loaded with coffee and other breakfast items and it flew throug
h the air before landing on a nearby table and in the process splashed food, coffee and crockery over four of the hotel’s guests.
Parallel (or in quick sequence, hard to say) two other events took place. A pistol was fired and a bullet hissed harmlessly through the air where only a second earlier Jean’s body had been located. This, the firing of the pistol and the journey of the bullet, counts as one event since it is inextricably linked. The second event was initiated by Tony. He took hold of his half empty breakfast plate and threw it like a discus towards the man who had fired the pistol. The plate was a heavy piece of fine china, just as you would expect to find on the breakfast tables in a five star hotel. It hit the man about an inch below his chin at the centre of his throat. The man, instead of re-aiming his pistol for a second shot at Jean, as doubtlessly he had intended, dropped his pistol and then himself onto the floor. His face showed severe agony; he couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t scream. He soon passed out and if a doctor in the room hadn’t stuck one of her fingers first and then a spoon deep into the man’s throat, the man may not have survived Tony’s “discus throw”.
34
At the time of Tony’s “discus throw” in Paris most people in New York were still asleep in their beds.
Six hours later, when it was breakfast time in New York, Mike, Christina, Mike’s mother Natalie, Sarah, Vanessa and Steven found themselves in a five star hotel too. However, they didn’t eat their first meal of the day in a public space; they were in the process of leaving New York and America unnoticed – people with modified faces and new identities. They had their breakfast served in the privacy of Mike and Christina’s suite. In the background the TV was on with CNN News.
An Almighty Conspiracy – A novel, a thriller, four people doing the unexpected Page 13
