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

by Charlotte Elkins

  The only other alternative she could think of was that the panel had been stolen and cut up by others and the segment that Tiny had used for the mirror had been a throwaway, a piece of unsaleable scrap from the cutting-up process he had found somewhere. That was the possibility she liked best, but it was the one that was hardest to take seriously, an unlikely and too-convenient rationalization for a set of distasteful facts.

  One thing was for sure, she thought with a certain amount of sullen satisfaction: if it turned out that he’d really cut up that damn panel (there it was again; that “damn panel”), then he’d do better to worry more about her finding him than about whoever else was chasing him, because if she got to him first she’d wring his neck for him herself.

  Well, metaphorically.

  CHAPTER 22

  In the morning, their plans for a steak-and-eggs power breakfast were set aside and they went instead to a creperie, very popular, very sans pretensions, that Alix knew and favored, just a block down Post Street at the corner of Taylor. As always there was a line waiting to order at the counter, but things moved quickly and by eight they had gotten their meals and, thanks to a dash and a last-second twist worthy of an NFL running back by Chris, they had snared a table in the very act of being vacated. They were about halfway through their orange juice and crepes (cheddar, mushroom, and crab for Alix; apple, cinnamon, brown sugar, and whipped cream for Chris) when Alix’s phone rang. She grabbed a quick slug of the coffee and hit the Talk button.

  “Hello?”

  “News!” crowed Jamie Wozniak. “He’s from Italy, all right, and his name is Santo Mamazza, born in August 1959 in a tiny village named Pieve de Teco in the middle of nowhere.”

  “That’s incredible, Jamie. How did you come up with it so fast?” Santo Mamazza, she was thinking, trying it out in her mind, and the imaginary words forming in her throat didn’t feel right. No, she decided on the spot, however this turned out he would continue to be Beniamino, her Tio Beni. He didn’t even look like a Santo.

  “Oh, it’s all in who you know,” Jamie said airily, “and lucky for you, I know everybody.

  “Okay, here are the facts. Your friend Tiny, or rather Santo Mamazza, flew from the Genoa airport to JFK on November 30, 1987, supposedly to visit his family in New York, all perfectly legal, except that he never returned. Mr. Mamazza was described as twenty-nine years old, brown-haired, brown-eyed, weight 265 pounds, height six feet, four inches (converted from kilograms and centimeters), occupation ‘plasterer.’ Exactly four days later, ‘Beniamino Abbatista,’ physical description virtually identical, made his first recorded appearance (since his burial in 1958) when he filed for a New York State driver’s license. After that, we don’t hear anything from him until—”

  “Jamie, I’m sorry, I have to go.”

  “What—”

  “Thanks so much. I’ll call you back.”

  She’d jumped from her chair so quickly she had to grab it to keep from knocking it over. “Chris,” she said urgently, “we still have an hour before the car picks us up. Can we go back to the hotel now? I think I’m on to something.”

  “I can see that,” Chris said as she stood up. “Your face is flushed, you look like you just found, I don’t know, Aladdin’s lamp.”

  “I have, in a way.” The laughter that suddenly bubbled from her was choked off by her excitement. “Hurry.”

  “Well, tell me, already,” Chris said as they got out onto Post Street. For once, it was Chris who had to hurry to match Alix’s stride. “What are we doing? Why are we going back? What did Jamie find?”

  “Well, mainly, we now know Tiny’s real name—Santo Mamazza.”

  “I’ll be darned. That’ll take some getting used to. But I’m still a little lost. Why is that so exciting?”

  “That’s not what’s so exciting. What’s exciting is—well, I’m not a hundred percent positive yet. Look, do you have a copy of that high-resolution photo of the mirror? Can you email it to me?”

  “You already have it. I had it copied to you when it was sent to Chris Norgren.”

  “Great. All right, give me twenty minutes and then meet me down in—no, better yet, I’ll just come over to your room. Chris, I’m telling you, if I’m right about this . . . Wait’ll you see!”

  Chris shook her head. “Whatever did I do for excitement before I met you?”

  “Do you always tidy up your own bed in the morning, or is this because you knew you’d be having company?” Alix asked.

  “The latter. Strictly for show. I hope you appreciate it.”

  Chris’s room was a near mirror-image of Alix’s, simple but elegant, with a gas-log fireplace, and new-looking, unfussy furniture done in complementary red and beige fabrics. They sat down at the coffee table, Chris in a corner of the beige sofa, Alix in the red armchair next to it.

  “Now, then,” Alix said, producing a few sheets of paper she’d brought in with her. “I had these photos printed up for us at the desk.”

  “This is gonna be good,” Chris said. “I can feel the vibes.”

  Alix put one of the sheets on the table. “You recognize this, of course.”

  “Well, sure. That’s the bottom part of your mirror, the part below the glass. It’s the same enlargement Chris Norgren put up on the screen. What’d you do, blow it up from the magazine cover?”

  “Yes, from the hi-res photo you sent.” She laid a second sheet beside the first. “And what about this one?”

  Chris picked them both up, looked from one to the other, and scowled. “Alix, you have to admit I’ve been very patient. But if it’s all the same to you, do you suppose you could dispense with the trick questions and just get to the damn point?”

  “This is the point. It’s the same photograph, wouldn’t you say? Well, except it’s in black and white. Right?”

  Chris sighed. “Right.”

  Alix shook her head. “Wrong. It’s an enlargement I made from . . . this photograph.”

  The third and last sheet was laid on the table. It was a religious painting, in the center of which a saintly, hooded female figure was standing among clouds and surrounded by what appeared to be other saints, male and bearded, all of them backlit by an explosion of rays from the sun. Other than this center, the rest of the picture was sparingly painted, consisting of dreary clouds and a few wispy, wraithlike, vaguely creepy Mannerist cherubs.

  “Which I got from the Art Loss Register,” Alix continued.

  “So it’s a stolen painting?” Chris asked. “Or missing, at any rate.” The Art Loss Register was the world’s main repository for documentation and photographs of stolen and missing art.

  “Stolen, in this case. Chris, did you ever hear of the Palazzo Giallo theft?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Uh-uh, no.”

  “Happened in Genoa, in the 1980s. It was pretty famous at the time—”

  “Oh, wait, is that the Cellini one? The, what was it, the famous pendant he made for King What’s-his-name of France?”

  “Right, for Francis I; the Odysseus pendant.”

  “And, if I remember, it’s never been seen or heard of again, correct?”

  “Correct. Which is strange to begin with, because in Italy, the ransom demand usually comes about five minutes after the stuff has been taken, but not this time. Anyway, the loot also included a few less well-known items, three sixteenth-century paintings—one of which is this one, the Assumption of the Virgin by Giulio Mazzoni.”

  “Mazzoni. Didn’t Norgren tell us he was one of the artists who might have painted the panel your mirror was on?”

  “He did, and he was right. Observe.” With a mechanical pencil she drew a rectangle around the lower right quarter of the image, the full painting. “This little part here, as you see, is—”

  “—the same as the enlarged area we were looking at at the Legion this afternoon—from your mirror.”

  “From my mirror. And that little orange-haired cherub looking up and to the left? You can barely see him, and o
nly you know what you’re looking for, but at least now we can see what he was looking at: that glowing Madonna in the center.”

  “Yes.” She took the pencil from Alix and put a small oval in the center of Alix’s rectangle. “And here’s where Tiny put your mirror . . . covering nothing very important.”

  “That’s right. This whole segment has nothing important on it, which is why I think it was a piece of scrap left over from cutting out the saleable parts.”

  “Do you . . . do you think the whole painting was cut up and sold in pieces?”

  “It’s a reasonable guess. Unfortunately.”

  “And probably everything else too,” Chris put forward solemnly. “And the pendant—that was probably melted down. And that’s why nothing was ever heard of again.”

  Alix shuddered. “Let’s not go there right now.”

  Chris dropped the pencil on the table and stared disbelievingly at the photo of the entire painting. “Alix, this is really incredible. Your mirror’s panel was cut from this painting. All these years, you’ve had a part of the Palazzo Giallo theft right up on your wall in plain sight. It’s a wonder nobody ever stole it before.”

  “Well, remember, this particular piece isn’t all that valuable. It’s the Cellini pendant everybody’s interested in. Besides, nobody who might have known what that panel was ever had any idea I had it until—”

  “Until they saw it on the cover of an international art magazine,” Chris acknowledged, “thanks to yours truly.”

  “Not your fault, Chris. Besides, it’s been . . . interesting.”

  “Interesting,” Chris echoed with a one-note laugh. “Let’s just hope it doesn’t get any more interesting. But Alix, I don’t get it. Yesterday, when we were talking to Norgren—hell, half an hour ago, when you were talking to me—you didn’t know what was going on. Now, suddenly, you know exactly what painting it came from, and where and when it was stolen? What . . . how . . . ?”

  “It was Chris Norgren that got the wheels turning, I think. As you said, he mentioned Mazzoni as one of the candidates who might have painted the panel and I knew even then there was something familiar about the name, but I couldn’t think what. And then this morning, Jamie told me about how Santo Mamazza disappeared from Genoa on November 30, 1987, and Beniamino Abbatista made his first American appearance on December 4. Well, the Palazzo Giallo theft was November 28, 1987, not even a week earlier—I did have to look that part up—and so it all came together.”

  “What came together?”

  “Mazzoni, Genoa, the theft, the dates—Tiny running to America just two days after the theft. It was pretty hard to miss, actually.”

  “Yeah, for you, maybe. Good job, pal. Hey, we’ve got to get ready to go.”

  Alix checked her watch. “Car won’t be here for almost thirty minutes. Gives me time to call Jamie and pass this on to her. I’ll meet you in the lobby after.”

  Alix suspected that it was no more lost on Chris than it was on her that there was now a new issue that neither of them had chosen to touch.

  It was virtually certain now that Tiny had something to do with the Palazzo Giallo theft. What was it?

  Alix called Jamie and was told that Ted had concluded his assignment and she could call him on his regular cell phone if she liked, which thrilled her. But her room, with its unmade bed and pulled-out drawers and stuffed wastebasket, struck her as too disheveled for a conversation with her new husband, so she went downstairs and across Powell Street, to Union Square, which was fairly quiet at this time of the morning, especially because the day was misty, and San Franciscans, unlike Seattleites, stayed inside when it got wet. She sat on the broad rim of one of the concrete planters that held a cluster of the square’s famed palm trees and made the call.

  “Ted? It’s Alix. Jamie said—”

  “—it was okay to call me now, and it is. She told me you and Chris were—”

  “—on our way to Monterey, yes. We have a flight—”

  “—at 10:30 this morning. As for me, I’m still in Geneva, but—”

  “The assignment’s over! I know! When can we—”

  A burst of laughter from Ted cut her short. “Hey, isn’t it supposed to take more than a week before married couples start finishing each other’s—”

  “—sentences for them?” Alix said, laughing along with him. “Just think, in a year or two we won’t have to talk at all. We’ll know what each other is thinking before anything gets said.”

  An open-sided red and tan “San Francisco Highlights” sightseeing bus, tricked out to resemble a trolley car despite its rubber-tired wheels, rolled by, filled with glum, wary-looking Asian girls in school uniforms, while an accompanying guide up front gestured at nearby buildings and rattled enthusiastically on. The passengers looked so low, and hearing Ted’s voice had made her so joyful herself, that she gave them a wave and a smile. A few of the girls waved gingerly back with giggles and shy smiles of their own, but most continued to stare morosely ahead.

  “Perish the idea,” Ted said warmly.

  “I’ll second that. Listen, sweetheart, I don’t have much time and I have some new developments to tell you about.” She launched excitedly into them, and managed to cover more or less everything in five minutes, hardly pausing to breathe: Tiny’s real identity, the identification of her mirror’s panel as being a piece of the Mazzoni, and the inclusion of the thirty-year-old Palazzo Giallo theft in the mix.

  “Good God,” said Ted. “That’s incredible. How did you come up with all that?”

  “Well, Jamie helped a lot.”

  “I’m sure she did, but I’m impressed all the same. Very.” He paused, probably giving her a chance to bask in the praise, which she did. “Alix, did I ever mention Gino Moscoli to you?”

  “Yes, your friend in Genoa, the art squad captain.”

  “That’s right, the man I asked to interview Alessandro Ferrante after your place was broken into, and a really nice guy. Believe it or not, Gino headed up the team investigating the Palazzo Giallo theft, and it’s stuck in his craw all these years.”

  “That was almost thirty years ago. He must have been awfully young.”

  “He was. But now he’s old, and he’s never given up on it. I think it’s practically an obsession with him and probably the only reason he won’t retire—he’s got some health problems now. Oh, and something else? He’s convinced—been convinced for years—that your Ferrante’s the man who carried out the robbery, and he did it on commission for the Mafia, although Moscoli’s never been able to prove it. They’ve been playing cat and mouse for decades. They’re almost friends by now, at least as Gino tells it.”

  “Ferrante stole those things all those years ago,” Alix said, mostly to herself, “and now he’s interested in the mirror. Which just happens to go missing.”

  “Yes, raises a lot of questions, doesn’t it? But”—he paused again, but this time it was a pause of hesitation, not an intermission—“what you’ve learned brings up some questions about Tiny too. I know he’s a sensitive subject to you, but I have to ask.”

  Even though Alix had known this was coming, she felt a wall of defensiveness form around her. Hackle-raising time. “Ask, then,” she said curtly.

  She heard him take a breath. He wasn’t enjoying this either. “Alix, nobody knows the guy better than you do. The obvious question is, how did he come by that piece of the panel? We now know, thanks to you and Jamie, that he arrived in the States—from Genoa—just a few days after the theft, which does suggest . . . Well, do you have any indication at all, anything he might ever have said, that suggests he might have been involved in the robbery?”

  “No.”

  “Ah.”

  “Ted, I’m not saying he wasn’t. Maybe he was, I don’t know. I didn’t know him then. But I do know that if he did, he’s a very different kind of man now. And anyway, who knows what the circumstances were?”

  “True, but his circumstances hardly—”

  “What I am say
ing is that it’s not possible that he cut that chunk, or any other chunk, out of that painting or any other painting. One of the things that you don’t understand about the man is how much he loves art—reveres it—especially from the time of the Old Masters.”

  “Well, for a man who loves art so much—”

  Again, she talked right over him. “The idea that he would ever have cut up a precious sixteenth-century painting to sell the pieces separately is . . . is . . . as likely as me cutting one up. Or you, for that matter. You can just absolutely, unconditionally forget that as a possibility, damn it!”

  She hadn’t intended to sound off like that, and at first she was taken aback by her own heat, her bellicosity, but she quickly grasped that it wasn’t Ted she was bawling out but herself. Those doubts about Tiny with which she’d tormented herself the previous night, they had been—what, some kind of stupid intellectual exercise to prove to herself that she was capable of not letting her feelings, her deep affection for the man, get in the way of looking hard-eyed at the facts and what they implied?

  But now, in the misty, jeweled San Francisco morning, things were clearer than they’d been last night. All right, he had been in Genoa at the time of the theft and had left—and never gone back—very shortly after. Maybe he had had something to do with the robbery, that she could envision. But beyond that, she had nothing else to go on but her feelings, her intuitions, grounded as they were in the two decades she’d known him. And those feelings told her exactly what she’d told Ted: Tiny would never—never—mutilate a work of art, let alone one that had existed for four centuries.

  Her little tirade had apparently startled Ted into a momentary silence. For a couple of seconds there was nothing from his end. Then, in a tentative, extremely un-Tedlike tone, he offered: “Umm . . . I think maybe I hit a nerve there?”

  It made her burst out laughing, and the apology that followed was effusive, heartfelt, and thoroughly muddled. “Ted, I’m so sorry! I was so . . . I mean, that was totally uncalled-for . . . honestly, I can feel myself blushing with shame. You know, Tiny means so much to me . . . I guess I just got carried away.”