“Hey, that’s much better, Ferrante. Now you sound like the sleazy con man you are. So tell me, what’s this serious problem that you got to wake me up at two o’clock in the morning for?”
“Well, it’s the mirror, Gus. I understand the temptation, believe me I do. A lovely thing, is it not? But the man I’m working for—you see, also I have to report to somebody—will be, ah, displeased when he learns—and he will learn it, I assure you—that you, ah, removed it, thereby creating considerable disorder in signorina London’s apartment, to the extent that the police became involved. It was our expectation, you see—and did not you and I discuss this in some detail?—that you would simply put the listening devices in place, nothing more. Everything would be left as you found it, so that Ms. London herself would be unaware that you had been there. But by taking the mirror, you see . . . Gus? Are you there?”
Voss sighed. “What mirror?”
This response stunned him. He’d anticipated Voss’s offering to negotiate for the mirror’s return. “I . . . you are trying to tell me you did not take the mirror?”
“I’m not trying to tell you anything. I’m telling you: One, I don’t know what the hell we’re supposed to be talking about here, and two, I didn’t see any damn mirrors—I don’t know, one in the bathroom, maybe. Look, I did exactly what I told you I did, nothing more, nothing less. There wasn’t any point in putting bugs in the walls because the weird wiring in them would have screwed everything up, but there was a landline phone in the kitchen, with two extensions in the other rooms, and I bugged them all, and then I took off. Best I could do, best anybody could do. I was in and out in twenty-five minutes. And trust me, Ferrante, no way would she know I was ever there.”
Ferrante’s headache began to build again. “Gus, please, tell me this: what did the apartment look like when you left?”
“It looked like it did when I came in, a mess. I wasn’t really looking—”
“What do you mean, a mess?”
“A mess. The whole place looked like it’d been tossed.”
Ferrante jerked his head. “‘Tossed’ . . . ‘tossed’ . . .”
“Like somebody robbed the place. Tossed. Jesus.”
When Ferrante tried to speak, the connections in his brain seemed to get crossed and he started blinking instead. “Why . . . why didn’t you . . . why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“Hey, I figured it was something you knew about, probably why you wanted the place bugged in the first place. I don’t ask a lot of questions, you ever notice that? Anyway, I’ve seen a lot worse. Look, the bugs are doing their job aren’t they?”
“Yes, they’re fine, fine—”
“Don’t give me ‘fine, fine.’ Listen, if you got some kind of problem with my—”
“No, no, Gus, they work perfectly. There is no problem at all with them.” Ferrante was doing his best to sound soothing, although it was clear to him that only one of them was in need of soothing, and it wasn’t Gus Voss. He doubted if Voss was stuttering and blinking away in America. “No problem at all. None whatsoever.”
Hardly, Ferrante thought. There was a huge problem and he was in big trouble. But the problem was him. He hadn’t listened to the damned recordings; not until half an hour ago, the minute Moscoli had left his office after telling him the mirror was gone. But it wasn’t his fault; no one could say it was his fault. At the time that the critical conversations between the two women were taking place, Ferrante had been on a morning flight to Basel for an auction, and he hadn’t gotten back until this morning, only two hours ago, upon which he’d come straight from the airport to the gallery. He simply hadn’t had a chance to listen, and as a result Moscoli had caught him totally by surprise.
Voss replied to his last comments with an unpleasant rattle in his throat. “Yeah, well.”
“Listen to me, Gus, please. You did a wonderful job, but our predicament—”
“Your predicament.”
“—is the mirror.”
“Christ, the mirror again. Okay, let me ask you something. If this mirror’s only worth twenty bucks, what are you so excited about? What’s the big deal? Hey, I know—how about if I send you the twenty bucks, will that make you go away?”
“Well, ha-ha. As I said, the piece has next to no monetary value in itself, you see, and is of no importance. What is important is its pertinence to another matter entirely, a pertinence which, should it become apparent to certain other—”
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry I asked. I should’ve known better. But I’ll tell you this one more time, and that’s all: I didn’t mess with any mirrors, okay? Anything that was in that place when I came in, it was there when I went out, right smack where it’d been, okay? I don’t know how to make it any clearer for you.”
“I . . . I believe you, of course, but, well, what am I to think, that someone else broke in and took the mirror? I mean to say, two break-ins by two different parties within the space of a few days? No, I simply cannot believe it.”
A weary exhalation from Voss. “You believe what you want, Ferrante. I put in the bugs, they work, you paid me, end of story. You got any more jobs like this, call somebody else. I don’t need this aggravation.”
“Gus, you don’t understand who we are dealing with here—”
“Ooh, I’m so scared. I told you, Ferrante, don’t call me no more.”
Click.
But Ferrante did understand with whom they were dealing, and he was scared to death. Without his willing it, his eyes drifted to the liquor cabinet.
CHAPTER 13
A few minutes later, steadied and calmed by another Vecchia Romagna, he was seeing things in a different light. You can get away with failing a capo, he told himself. Hadn’t he already done it? It was when the two morons that he’d hired in Seattle had lost that fellow “Tiny” after coming so very close to getting him. But the way the Mafia looked at such things, it was Ferrante, as the man who had hired them, who was ultimately responsible. He had immediately telephoned Don Rizzolo, or rather Fausto Martucci, his chief lieutenant. (One did not telephone Don Rizzolo directly without being invited to do so.) As fearful as he was, Ferrante had told Fausto everything, and to his immense relief, there were no recriminations, only a single casually uttered piece of advice:
“Next time, hire Italians.”
From Rizzolo himself, nothing. But here Ferrante was, still in one piece after almost a week had passed. Why? he asked himself now. Because, he answered, failing a capo is not an unforgivable crime. No, what you cannot do—absolutely cannot do—is deceive one. And that meant that Rizzolo had to be told about the theft of the mirror, that it had to be Ferrante who told him, and that it had to be done now, before anyone else did it. The capo’s reaction to this second mishap on Ferrante’s part would not be pleasant, but allowing him to find out on his own that it had been stolen and that Ferrante had hidden the fact from the don would mean death for certain.
He picked up his phone and dialed Martucci’s number. At the first ring he suddenly lost his courage and very nearly hit “End” before realizing that Martucci’s phone would already have recorded his number. Clumsily, he reached across his desk and for the first time in his adult life gulped liquor directly from the mouth of a bottle. He promptly went into a coughing fit. For once he was glad that he was not among the Chosen, whose calls were to be answered immediately, because by the time Martucci answered on the fourth ring, his spluttering had died down.
“Pronto.” Hello.
“Ah, Fausto, yes, this is Alessandro Ferrante,” he got out quickly, before his nerve deserted him again. “There has been a problem with the mirror, not a major problem, all things considered, but a small problem, yes . . .”
Things were different this time. Martucci listened quietly for no more than thirty seconds. “This is not good, Ferrante.” Martucci was a small man and slight, but when he was displeased his voice could be every bit as wintry and forbidding as that of the don himself.
“No
, no, of course it’s not good, Fausto, I didn’t mean to say it was good, but . . .” Breathlessly, Ferrante jumped ahead, explaining that Voss had done them some good, after all. It was from the telephone bugs he had planted in the London woman’s apartment that Ferrante had learned that she was on her way to San Francisco with a friend, close on the track of this “Tiny.” And so Ferrante, on his own initiative and at his own expense, had already hired a San Francisco detective agency that would have a man at the airport when the women arrived, and would stay with them for as long as it might take. Thus, when Alix found him, they would find him too. And of course, once they had him—
“The name of this detective agency,” Martucci said.
“Di Stefano Investigations,” replied Ferrrante with a painfully fabricated laugh. “You see, I took your advice.”
No response from Martucci.
“Fausto, if there’s anything else I can do—”
“Continue to do what you’re doing. Let me know immediately if something turns up.”
“Yes, certainly, without fa—”
“And remain available. It may be that the don will wish to speak to you about this in the next few days.”
“Of course. Thank you. Shall I—” But Martucci was no longer there.
Ferrante’s heart would have plummeted if it weren’t already in his shoes.
CHAPTER 14
Conversation in the 7:15 a.m. limo to the airport was constrained, to say the least. As far as Alix was concerned, it wasn’t that early. Like her father, she was an early riser and had gotten a couple of work-related emails out of the way before the gleaming burgundy Lincoln had ever shown up. But Chris, cocooned and grumpy in the far corner of the back seat, was anything but a morning person. She resented being awakened by an alarm, or, really, by anything other than the morning sun (and she wasn’t too keen on that), and she had no reluctance about letting people know it. As a result, Alix quit after just one stab at chatting (Alix: “Looks like it’ll be a beautiful flight.” Chris: “I’m trying to sleep, here.”).
A stop for lattes and oat fudge breakfast bars at the first Starbucks they came to at Sea-Tac perked Chris up a little, but other than the few minutes she spent on her iPhone, she obviously remained in no mood for talking, an attitude that continued for their two-hour flight.
Alix didn’t really mind. It was only a two-hour trip, she did have the window seat, and a beautiful flight it was. It was a rare, relaxing pleasure to gaze down at clouds that looked like the tufts of cotton wool you pulled from the top of a pill bottle, and leave her mind free to wander, although it didn’t wander far from simply going over and over the wonderment, the happy astonishment, of being married . . . to Ted!
It was only during the limo ride into San Francisco to their hotel that anything got underway that might reasonably be called conversation, helped no doubt by the coffee service to be found in the elegant little teakwood bar at their knees. Chris set her porcelain cup and saucer down on top of it. “I,” she announced, “have been thinking.”
“I’m happy to hear it,” Alix said abstractedly, still half-absorbed in happy daydreams. They were on Highway 101, a few miles north of the airport, just passing the dry, brown hillside with the giant white letters, much like the famous HOLLYWOOD sign, but even larger, only not with quite the same panache: SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, THE INDUSTRIAL.
“About psychology,” Chris went on. “You ever hear of Leon Festinger?”
“Mm, I don’t think so.”
“Came up with the theory of cognitive dissonance?”
“Oh, yes, something about the stress of having two conflicting perceptions in your mind at the same time. Is that the one?”
“Right, and because it’s so stressful, people are prone to making dumb decisions, even irrational ones, so that they don’t conflict anymore—either trying to pretend the situation doesn’t exist, or making up dim-witted theories that explain it away. Back in the fifties, I think it was, he investigated this cult that believed Earth was going to be destroyed on December something, and everyone would be killed—except for them, because these aliens were going to come and take them away on a spaceship. So they sold their homes, said goodbye to their friends, and all the rest of it. You following this? You look like your mind’s a million miles away.”
“Just a few thousand, but yes, not only am I following you, but I can’t wait to hear what happened. Was the Earth destroyed?”
“No, the Earth was not destroyed.”
“Whew.”
Chris lifted an eyebrow. “Alix, I do have a point to make. Kindly treat this seriously.”
“Sorry, go ahead. Really, I’ll be good.”
“Well, what Festinger was looking at was how they reacted when December something came and went and the Earth was still there. And what he found was that instead of losing confidence in the cult, they wound up having more faith in it. And the reason for that was what he labeled cognitive dissonance. That is, they’d trusted in the cult with all their hearts and their minds, but they could see with their own eyes that the disaster hadn’t really happened. How could they possibly have been that stupid? That was the dissonance, and they couldn’t live with it. Well, what they did was revise their thinking so it fit more comfortably with the facts. It wasn’t long before they ‘realized’ that it was their devotion to the cult that had done the trick. The God of Earth had been so moved by it that he’d spared the planet after all—thanks to them. Cognitive dissonance in action. Now, then—”
“Chris, I see where you’re going with this. You think that all the evidence—well, the simple fact of Tiny’s mirror being stolen, to start with—indicates that it must be really valuable, but that would mean that I’ve been pretty dumb about it all these years. And that’s a perception I can’t deal with, so I’m just obstinately, stupidly refusing see what’s in front of my eyes.”
“Umm . . . yeah, that’s the general idea. That’s what our detective friend Durando thought right away, remember? That it was some valuable piece of art from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. And I’ve come around to thinking maybe he had something. First of all—”
“First of all, forget it. I already told you: Geoff was there when Tiny painted it.”
“I suppose,” Chris said ambiguously, staring pensively out her window. They were passing AT&T Park, the Giants’ home park, on the right, ten minutes or so from downtown. “Still . . .”
“Come on, Chris, get it out. What are you thinking? Do you think he was lying when he told me that?”
“Now don’t get your hackles up, but isn’t it possible?”
“That he would lie about it like that? No. My father might have his faults, he might prevaricate a little, maybe, or omit a minor detail or two, but outright lying? No, that isn’t his style.”
“Oh, right, Geoffrey London, Mr. I-Cannot-Tell-a-Lie.”
Alix wasn’t sure what hackles were or where they were located, but something certainly prickled on the back of her neck. “And what exactly is that supposed to mean?”
Chris, being Chris, answered bluntly. “When he was bilking all those collectors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars with his forgeries, he didn’t lie to them? And he didn’t lie to you about his doing it? Or was that just omitting a minor detail or two?”
“Chris—”
Chris put her hand on Alix’s wrist. “Alix, listen to me. I love your father almost as much as you do. He’s my second favorite man in the entire world. But you have to admit, his morals are a little on the, shall we say, stretchy side . . . yes?”
Alix’s hackles subsided. “A little, yes,” she allowed.
“What if he thought he was protecting Tiny in some way, or possibly protecting you, by keeping alive the idea that the mirror is just a worthless little trinket that Tiny tossed off in a day or two for a little girl he loved—wouldn’t he do it? Wouldn’t you, in his place, if you thought the same thing—that you were protecting him? I know I would.”
“I suppos
e so,” Alix said reluctantly. “But the idea that he’d lie to my face as baldly as that, after all the trust I thought we’d built up these last couple of years . . . it’s a really painful feeling.”
“It’s also a pretty common kind of feeling. There’s even a name for it.”
“A name?”
Chris smiled. “Cognitive dissonance.”
It took a couple of beats, but Alix returned the smile. “You know, you’re right, and, obviously, my preferred way of dealing with it is to pretend the situation doesn’t exist. Which I would like to continue to do, if it’s all the same to you, so could we just drop the subject, at least for now? We have plenty of other things to do.”
“Well, sure, but would you have any objection if I go ahead and keep pursuing a few avenues of my own on the mirror? Nothing that would create any problems for Geoff.”
“Of course not, Chris. Go to it.”
“We’re here, ladies,” the driver said. “Your hotel.”
On Chris’s recommendation, they were staying at the Inn at Union Square on Post Street, in the bustling heart of San Francisco’s glitziest shopping, dining, and hotel district. The Inn was an exception, an older, relatively modest (by San Francisco standards) hotel, an island of cozy in a sea of glitzy. Chris claimed it was her favorite place to stay in the city, as good a combination as could be had of being in the middle of things and yet having a pleasant, truly quiet room to work and sleep in. Alix wondered if it might have been more out of consideration for Alix’s pocketbook, but when they checked in, she saw that Chris was indeed a familiar figure there. She had asked for rooms 406 and 408 and they were ready for the two of them despite the relatively early hour.
The fourth floor rooms were at the rear of the building, looking out on the backs of restaurants and shops that fronted Sutter Street, so they had nothing that anyone would call a view, but they were indeed remarkably quiet, considering where they were. Since neither of them had any interest in working or sleeping in their rooms at the moment, they left their bags unopened, quickly freshened up, and met again in the lobby five minutes later.
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