The Trouble with Mirrors (An Alix London Mystery Book 4)

by Charlotte Elkins

  It was this wealth that had first brought them together a couple of years ago. They were a natural fit: Alix London, newly minted art consultant just getting her professional feet under her and hunting for clients, and Christine LeMay, former techie itching to put some of that lovely money to use building an art collection, and thus in need of knowledgeable consulting. Since then, Alix had provided just that, keeping her away from dubious—and in one case downright fraudulent—purchases and encouraging her in a direction that had by now resulted in a minor but credible and growing collection of early American Modern paintings and drawings by the likes of Georgia O’Keeffe and Childe Hassam. And in the process they had become close friends, wonderfully easy in each other’s company.

  “Well, I appreciate it most sincerely,” Alix said, letting herself descend into the buttery gray leather. “This is wonderful. Thank you!” After which she fell into the wandering, cobwebby daze into which six hours in the air and a three-hour time change had put her. Her internal clock was still on DC time—going on 2:00 a.m.

  This time Chris managed to go almost ten minutes in silence before she gave up again. “Alix, if you’re just going to keep mum while we drive, you might as well have something to read. Have you seen the new Art World Insider yet?”

  Alix slowly surfaced. “No. I heard it was out before I left, though.”

  “There’s a copy in the side pocket. Have yourself a look.”

  Alix took it out. “Yikes!”

  One look at the cover made her sit up as taut as a piano wire. Other than the magazine’s logo, the front cover was all Alix; a color photograph of her sitting on her red living room sofa and looking—to her own critical eye—revoltingly smug. “The Art Whisperer,” read the legend beside her. “Forgers Beware.”

  “Chris . . .” she blurted, waving the magazine at her. “The cover? How . . . ? I thought . . .”

  “I thought so too,” Chris said, grinning. “It was supposed to be an interview buried in the ‘People Going Places’ section, right? I didn’t know it was the cover story until I saw it myself. I’m guessing it’s because of that forgery bust in Miami a couple of weeks ago.”

  “But I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  “I know, but art forgery was in the air, and I guess they figured the story about you would be a winner.”

  “Sheesh,” Alix said, sinking back into the seat.

  Chris glanced over at her. “I can’t tell if you like it or you hate it.”

  “I’m not sure myself. It’s flattering, and I suppose it’ll bring me some clients, but this whole ‘art whisperer’ business . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  The term had gotten stuck to her as a result of the art world’s growing awareness of her finely honed “connoisseur’s eye”—the ability to determine, at an intuitive level, the authenticity or lack of authenticity of a disputed painting. It was what had gotten her the FBI consulting assignments, along with an increasing number of private commissions, but it had outlived its welcome a long way back. Most of the time the term was applied positively, but by now it had come to make her grind her teeth with its not so faint implication of snake oil at best, or unadulterated shysterism at worst. Any references to the hard-won expertise that grounded her gift, or the years of apprenticeship in Italy that had polished it, tended to get lost in the mix.

  “Learn to live with it,” Chris said cheerfully. “Fame is a lonely and terrible burden.”

  “Thank you so much. That’s incredibly helpful.”

  “Besides, who reads Art World Insider?”

  CHAPTER 4

  When they got to Alix’s Green Lake condominium building, Chris helped her transport her luggage to the second-floor condo. Her help was needed: in the end the big Samsonite had gotten the call. “So,” she said as Alix put the key in the lock, “I’m about to hear this big secret, right?”

  “Absolutely. Once I make the tea.”

  “Don’t tell me they finally made you an honest-to-God special agent, with a badge and a gun, and all that other cool stuff? Burberry trench coat, Gucci aviator sunglasses . . .”

  Alix smiled. “I don’t think Burberry and Gucci are on the FBI’s approved vendor list. And anyway”—the smile widened—“it’s better.”

  Chris laughed. “Better than a badge and a gun? Boy, this must really—”

  “Something’s different,” Alix said when she pushed the door open, the key still in her hand.

  Chris spotted what it was before she did. She pointed at the right-hand wall of the small vestibule into which the condo opened. “Didn’t you used to have something hanging there?”

  It took a second for Alix to remember what it had been. “A poster. From the Met. For an old Caravaggio show. I bought it on sale for ten dollars. I didn’t even have it mounted. It was just stuck up there with stick pins. Why would anyone . . .”

  Chris had stepped around the corner of the vestibule into the living room and come to a stop. “Look.”

  Alix came around behind her and sagged. “Oh, boy,” she murmured.

  The red sofa, the one she’d been sitting on for the Art World Insider photo, had been pulled away from the wall and toppled forward onto the floor, its rear legs in the air. The wall itself, on which she’d hung a dozen artfully arranged pictures—the nearest thing she had to a showcase area—was now bare except for picture hooks, squares of double-sided tape, and some ugly gouges in the cream-colored surface.

  “Damn them,” she said.

  With Chris’s assistance, she turned the sofa upright, which made things better, but only marginally.

  “The pictures, were they insured?” Chris asked.

  “I’ve got some general homeowners’, but not specifically on the pictures. They’re not worth insuring. They’re certainly not worth stealing. Really, they’re just mementos that wouldn’t have any value to anyone else. Huh, some burglars.”

  “Well, maybe they got something else that is worth stealing. We’d better check the place out.”

  They went separately through the rest of the condo, with which Chris was familiar from previous visits. “Your laptop and things are still here,” she called from the den alcove.

  “I don’t see anything missing here either,” Alix called back from the bedroom. “TV . . . clothes . . .”

  “Here’s how they got in,” Chris said. She was at the rear of the condo, where two windows and a glass door opened out onto a small deck overlooking a neat, shared garden, and farther off, the lake. When Alix joined her, Chris pointed at the marred wooden frame of one of the windows. “It’s been jimmied.”

  “I see,” Alix said. “And then once they got in, they could open the door to make it easier to cart things out. But how did they get up on the deck in the first place?”

  “Are you kidding?” Chris led the way outside. “What are we here, ten feet above the ground? They could have made it with a stepstool, or even one guy getting a boost from another. Hey, you’d better call the police, don’t you think?”

  Alix nodded and went back in to the telephone. She wasn’t feeling the usual things that people are supposed to feel when they walk into their homes and find that uninvited strangers have fingered their possessions and made off with whatever they happened to like. She didn’t have a sense of having been violated, she didn’t suddenly feel unsafe or vulnerable, and she wasn’t even particularly shocked. What she was was annoyed. What a pain in the neck this was going to be: police report, insurance report, get the window fixed, repaint the wall, and tell her father about it and calm him down when he got all parentally stressed out about it. With the phone in her hand, she hesitated.

  “Chris, I don’t know if I want to make this call or not. It’s not as if anything valuable was taken, and it won’t take much to repair the damage. Honestly, I’m not sure getting the police involved is worth the hassle. You know, I don’t really think we should—”

  “The hell we shouldn’t,” Chris said, whipping out her own ph
one and dialing 911. Brushing off a few feeble protests from Alix, who knew at heart that Chris was right, she explained what had happened, was transferred to a non-emergency operator, explained again, and was told a police officer would be there shortly.

  “All right, satisfied?” Alix said. “I’ll start the tea in the meantime. Finally.” But on the way to the kitchen she couldn’t help looking at the denuded wall, and it stopped her short.

  “Oh, no . . .” she said suddenly, so softly it was almost a whisper. She dropped onto the sofa, cradling her forehead in her hand. “Oh, Chris.”

  Chris was suitably alarmed. “Alix, what is it?”

  “I just realized . . . they got . . . they took . . . Tiny’s mirror.”

  “What?” She stared at the blank wall. “Oh, my God, that’s right, it was hanging right . . . oh, Alix, I’m so sorry. I know how much that mirror means to you.”

  “A lot, yes. I—” But Alix was unable to get out any more than that. The breath had been knocked out of her as thoroughly as if she’d taken an elbow to the middle of the chest. This, she understood, was what people meant when they said “heartache,” a hurt every bit as real as a toothache, and as all-consuming.

  “Is that what they were after?” Chris was musing. “Did they see it on the Art World cover and think, what with you being the famous Art Whisperer and all, it had to be worth a lot of money? And the rest of the things they took, they were just cover, to make it look like a routine smash-and-grab, a kind of drive-by—”

  She stopped when she saw Alix, who’d seemed to be nodding rhythmically along with her as if in agreement, was in reality somewhere far away. Gently, Chris squeezed her shoulder. “I’ll take care of the tea,” she said quietly, going toward the kitchen. “I know where everything is.”

  Alix continued her vague nodding.

  Tiny’s mirror.

  It was her oldest possession. She’d had it well over half her life, ever since Tiny—she had still called him “Uncle Beni” in those days—had crafted it himself for her twelfth birthday, at a time when she still adored angels. It was one of the very few possessions she’d kept with her when she went through what she thought of as the Dismal Time in her early twenties.

  Tiny—more properly Beniamino Guglielmi Abbatista—had found an old oval hand mirror somewhere, evocatively time-flecked with spots and veins of gray and rust. He had set it in the center of a rectangular wooden panel and painted the wood surrounding the glass with fat little cherubs with tiny wings, frolicking among pink-tinged clouds. He was a superb craftsman of great delicacy despite his lumbering three-hundred-plus pounds and a set of fingers like a clump of knockwurst, he had done a wonderful job making it look like something you might see on a wall in the background of a fifteenth-century portrait of some elegant Florentine lady, by Botticelli, say, or Ghirlandaio.

  Tiny, in fact, could brilliantly imitate just about any artist of any era you chose to name, and it had gotten him in a great deal of trouble in his younger days, when he’d pursued a career as an art forger. Not being over-endowed with smarts, however, he had wound up serving three terms in jail, almost a decade altogether. But that was something Alix hadn’t learned until much later, and it hadn’t changed her feelings toward the lovable lug, who had always returned all of her affection and then some. One of her earliest memories was of sitting on his knee when she was three or four and listening, enchanted, while he sang old Italian songs to her in a surprisingly soft, sweet falsetto.

  Chris came back with the tea and set the cups on the corner table between the sofa and an armchair. “I put some sugar in it. Don’t argue, you can use it.”

  “It was so beautiful . . . he’d done such a wonderful job on it . . . oh, I feel so, so . . .”

  Alix took her first sip of the hot tea. Chris was right; the shot of energy and general uplift from the sugar were welcome. A second and third swallow got her thinking a little straighter too. Things weren’t as bad as all that. Yes, the mirror meant a great deal to her, and no, she didn’t expect ever to see it again, but on the bright side, she knew Tiny well enough to know he’d insist on reproducing it for her, and with his astonishing skills, in a few weeks the new one would be up on her wall, with even Alix hard-pressed to tell the difference.

  She smiled. So, after twenty years Tiny was going to have two commissions for his “one-of-a-kind” mirrors. Nice that at least one of them would be paying him, and apparently paying him well. Hadn’t signor Ferrante implied that his client . . . his client . . . Suddenly she jerked her head. “Wait a minute!”

  It made Chris jump, jiggling her cup and splashing tea on her slacks. “Jeez, Alix! You practically—What is it?”

  “It was the mirror. Of course it was!” Alix exclaimed. “That smooth, greasy bastard who called me—that’s what he was interested in, the mirror! He didn’t want another one, he wanted this one. He was just trolling for information.” She slapped her forehead, like an actor in a silent movie. “And I gave it to him! I practically told him I was going to be away—I did tell him I was going to be away. Damn, a phone call about it one day—the only phone call I’ve ever gotten about it—and then, inside of a week—it’s gone. If that’s a coincidence, then I’m, I’m—”

  “If I sit here long enough,” Chris said to a nearby wall as she dabbed at the tea stain on her thigh, “I wonder if she’ll eventually notice me and tell me what the hell she’s talking about.”

  “Sorry, Chris.” Alix explained about Alessandro Ferrante (if that was really his name) and his phone call.

  When she’d finished, Chris thought it over. “You’re right, that’s got to be it. Way too much of a coincidence. I can’t see him coming over from Genoa to burgle your place himself, but how hard would it be to get some of our delightful homegrown thugs to do it?”

  “It’s completely my fault. I did it to myself,” Alix said wretchedly, “with my big mouth. Dumb, dumb, dumb—”

  “Please—don’t whack yourself again!” Chris said when she saw Alix’s hand on its way up. “That last one probably cost you a couple thousand brain cells. Anyway, if you’re looking for somebody to blame . . .” She raised her hand, like a kid in class. “Hello.”

  “You? How do you figure that?”

  Chris rummaged in her bag. “This,” she said, pulling out another copy of Art World Insider and slapping it onto the table. “Look at that cover one more time.”

  Alix looked. There she was, bright and sassy (and smug), sitting where she sat now. Behind her was the wall that was behind her now, but it was covered with art prints, ten all together—Dürer, Turner, Renoir, other favorites of hers—and with Tiny’s mirror in pride of place, smack in the center. “I’m the genius who set this interview thing up and then talked you into it, remember?” Chris said unhappily. “If not for me there wouldn’t have been any photo, and without the photo there wouldn’t have been any Ferrante, and without Ferrante there wouldn’t have been any stupid break-in.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Chris. You were doing me a favor. If I didn’t want to do it, all I had to do was say no.”

  There was a crisp double tap at the door and Alix got up. “The police?”

  She had expected a uniformed cop, but instead it was a man in a sport coat and tie, a grizzled veteran in his fifties, who brought with him a reassuring aura of competence and command. But Detective Ernest Durando was friendly too, accepting the offered cup of coffee (Alix knew he wouldn’t be a tea-drinker) and joining them in the grouping of living room chairs.

  He was efficient and sympathetic with his questions, but they could see his prioritizing of the case shift from high (when he saw that Alix’s picture was on the cover of the magazine that lay on the sofa beside him) to moderate (when the details of what had happened became clear to him) to the absolute bottom of the list (when Alix gave him her estimate of the probable market value of the stolen objects: five hundred dollars, of which the mirror probably accounted for four hundred and seventy-five. And that was no more than a gu
ess at what it was likely to bring on eBay. If anybody was interested).

  He did show interest when she told him about the phone call, bringing out his iPhone and punching in the number Ferrante had left with her. The result obviously surprised him. “What do you know, it’s a real number. And a real art gallery: Galleria Ferrante, proprietor A. Ferrante.”

  He slipped the phone into his shirt pocket. “Now, you understand, we can’t pursue anything over there ourselves, but we can contact the Italian police—what do you call them, the carabinieri—and see if they’ll look into this guy for us. That’s always an iffy proposition, though. Sometimes a request like that works out, sometimes it just falls through the cracks and gets lost. They’ve got plenty of their own stuff to keep them busy. So I can’t promise anything.”

  “You know, I might have a better way of doing that,” Alix offered. “I’m a consultant for the FBI’s art squad in Washington, DC. That’s where I was when this happened. If I mention this to them, I’m sure they’d have some good contacts there.”

  “That’d be fine. All donations willingly accepted. You’ll let me know what they turn up?”

  “Of course.”

  “All right, then. There’s one thing about all this that’s got me wondering, though, Ms. London. Why would this art dealer character have wanted a five-hundred-dollar mirror enough to set up a break-in to get it? If his client—if there was a client—was ready to pay big-time because he loved it so much, why wouldn’t Ferrante just go to some crafts guy in Italy, show him the picture, and have him make one? No law-breaking required, and probably less expensive too. But no, he had to have the real thing. How do you explain that?”

  “I don’t know, Detective. Are you getting at something?”

  “I am, yes.” He was looking down at his cup and revolving it in slow circles on its coaster. “I was wondering,” he said, looking up, “if that mirror might bring a whole lot more than that five hundred bucks you think it’s worth.”