“Oh, maybe a little,” he agreed, and she could hear the smile in his voice.
“I love you, Ted.”
“I love you too, babe.”
Alix laughed happily. “I think this is what Chris calls smooshie-mooshie talk.”
“And she’s right. Let’s have no more of it. Back to business, if you please. Uh-oh. Wait. Stop. Halt.” She could tell that he’d gotten up and was moving about. “I just heard that there’s a limo from the Spanish embassy waiting for me downstairs.” From the rustling sounds she could picture him shrugging into one of his sport coats. He bought them off the rack at Brooks Brothers, but they fitted him as if they’d been hand-cut for him by a bespoke Savile Row tailor. Forty-four long, she heard herself saying under her breath, relishing the idea that his jacket size was something she should be aware of.
“The paintings we captured were from a museum in Barcelona,” he went on, “and there’s a celebration or presentation or something I’m supposed to be at in twenty-five minutes and I need to get going. You can call me later if you want. Otherwise, I’ll call you soon. Oh, one more thing: This secret marriage business is getting kind of awkward. It’s almost like being undercover; I have to lie to people. We need to do something about it, and soon.”
“Such as tell Geoff, you mean. Yes, I know. And I will. Just give me a few more days to figure out how I want to do it.”
“Okay. ’Bye for now. I lo—”
“Yes, I know. I love you too.”
They were both laughing as they hung up.
She was still glowing a few minutes later as she sat in the lobby with Chris, awaiting their ride to the airport, but Chris wanted to talk about the Palazzo Giallo and all that had come from it.
“How much crazier can it get? Ferrante, the guy who called you a couple of weeks ago about the mirror—that is, about what we now know to be a piece of a sixteenth-century painting by Somebody Mazzoni—this is the very guy who stole it in Genoa thirty years ago? And probably had the piece re-stolen a few days ago from your condo?”
“That’s right.”
“But look, if he’s got all the rest of the loot—I mean, the Cellini, for Christ’s sake?—why would he even give a damn about this Mazzoni thing?”
“Chris, I do not have a clue.”
“Oh, that’s helpful. What?” she asked, seeing the pensive look on her friend’s face.
“It just occurred to me.” She turned to face Chris more squarely. “It wasn’t the panel Ferrante was so interested in at all—it was Tiny! Of course! It should have been obvious from his questions. Why did it take so long to dawn on me?”
Chris blinked. “Tiny? Why?”
“Well, maybe because he doesn’t know where the loot is himself, and he figures Tiny has to know where the Mazzoni—the rest of the Mazzoni—is. And if Tiny knows that, hances are he knows where the rest of the loot is as well, and that’s what he’s really after. Especially the Cellini pendant, that’s the big one. Does that make any sense?”
“But Ferrante’s the one who stole it. How can he not know where it is? What, he just happened to misplace it somewhere?”
“I don’t know. Though these people we’re talking about are thieves, after all. Maybe someone stole it from him.”
Chris nodded. “What you’re saying makes sense, but there’s something that doesn’t fit. If it’s the Cellini that he’s really after, why did he steal Tiny’s mirror? What good would that do him?”
“I’m beginning to think it might not have been him.”
“Oh, come on, I don’t mean Ferrante himself. I don’t think he flew over from Italy to do it, but it must have been someone he hired.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Well, who else would it have been?”
“Look, the magazine cover is where he saw the panel, right? And knew right away what it was.”
“Right.”
“And so what makes us think nobody else recognized it as well? You told me Art World Insider has a circulation of something like six thousand, worldwide, and I know it goes to a lot of libraries too, so we’re talking about a lot of people, and who’s to say there aren’t a few more with inside knowledge about the theft? Any of them could have wanted that mirror, for . . . well, I don’t know, for whatever reason they might have had. Or let’s just go back to one of the early theories: A break-in by some opportunist who saw the magazine cover and figured it had to be worth something.”
“Ah,” Chris said, waggling a finger, “but who besides Ferrante would have known you were going to be gone for a week?”
“Hm.” Alix’s index finger tapped gently against her lower lip. “I guess I did let that little cat out of the bag when he called, didn’t I? Well . . .” She shrugged. “I really don’t know. I guess neither of us has all the answers yet.”
Chris laughed. “If that isn’t the mother of all understatements, I don’t know what is. But we’re getting there, slowly but surely.”
“Ms. LeMay,” said a desk clerk who had come up to them, “your driver is here. If you’re ready to go, I’ll have your bags taken out.”
“Thanks, Les. We’ll be right out.” She jumped up, extended a hand, and pulled Alix out of her chair too. “Okay, now let’s go to Monterey, do some digging, get hold of Tiny and find out what’s going on with him. That’s the most important thing.”
“So it is,” Alix agreed. “What’s going on with Tiny.”
Damn it, what was going on with Tiny?
CHAPTER 23
When he wasn’t on the job, Capitano Gino Moscoli lived the simple, not unpleasant existence of an aging, self-sufficient widower who asked little more from life than that tomorrow be no worse than today and that no unexpected visitors, or events, or catastrophes disturb the comfortable routines he had established for himself over the years. Among these pleasant routines was a relaxed dinner in the Trattoria da Giovanni, which was conveniently located on the street level of the nineteenth-century apartment building in which he lived. Despite its fusty, shabby interior, this largely blue-collar café was, in fact, a prime reason he had settled, after the death of his wife, on this building as his home. Living here, his dinner was but a flight of stairs away. Moreover, since the restaurant had been right there since 1888, he’d reasoned, it was highly likely to outlast him, so that he wouldn’t be troubled, ten years from now, in his advanced old age, to have to find another, less convenient café.
On this particular morning, he was, as usual, among the day’s first customers, waiting in the entryway when the establishment unlocked its door at 6:45 p.m. so that he could take his usual table for one in the niche next to the fireplace, close enough to feel the dry, sunlight-like warmth on his cheeks from the gas logs in the wintertime. This being September, the fireplace would be cold, but still, this was his seat, and this was where he sat.
“As always, signor Moscoli?” asked the waiter.
“As always, Ettore,” said Moscoli. That was another thing about the Giovanni. Here, wearing presentable but comfortable old clothes, he was not Capitano Moscoli, whose very presence in the same room, even drinking a cup of coffee, made people nervous; he was plain signor Moscoli, just a civil, nicely spoken old gent—a retired dentist or accountant, maybe—who lived upstairs, who was there virtually every evening of the year, who ordered the same thing every day, who kept to himself and made no trouble; a valued customer to be treated with courtesy and consideration.
“Minestrone, spaghetti alla carbonara, calamari alla griglia,” recited Ettore. Soup of the day, pasta of the day, main course of the day. Moscoli even had a standard, discounted price for this: €14, which he paid weekly.
“That sounds very nice,” said Moscoli, as always.
He never ordered dessert, but every second day he would order a thin, black Toscano cigar, which the counterman would cut in two and then put the unused half aside for Moscoli’s use the following morning, the way an attentive steward might hold a half-bottle of fine Barolo for the next day�
�s dinner. It was a service no other customer received or would think of asking for. After finishing his meal he would light up his half-cigar, and sit back to half an hour of reading either newspapers from the rack, or magazines that he brought with him.
Finally, at his signal, there would be a cup of hot chocolate to finish—an idiosyncrasy of which Ettore patently disapproved (hot chocolate was not something which an Italian gentleman would be expected to order, and especially not after dinner) but which, out of deference, was uncomplainingly provided.
When the cigar was down to its last inch on this evening, his telephone rang. His face darkened. Telephone calls at eight o’clock at night were unlikely to be anything good.
“Gino, it’s Ted. Hope I’m not bothering you at dinner.”
“Not at all, Teo,” he said truthfully. “What can I do for you? Have you finished your case?”
“Yes, that’s done, and I have some good news for you—I hope you’re sitting down—on the loot from the Palazzo Giallo.”
“You’ve recovered it?” Moscoli’s stomach clenched. He didn’t know whether the prospect delighted him (found—at long last!) or dismayed him (yes, found—but by somebody else!).
“No, nothing quite as good as that—”
Moscoli’s stomach relaxed.
“—but we have found a piece of it, a piece of the Mazzoni. Well, we haven’t exactly found it, in fact we’ve lost it, but we—”
“Teo, I’m in a restaurant. It’s a little noisy. Let me go upstairs to my apartment. Can you hold or shall I call you back?”
“I can hold. Take your time.”
Filled with anticipation now, even shaking a little with it, Moscoli made for the rear stairway to the upper floors.
Ettore goggled at him. “Niente cioccolata calda, signore?” He had every reason to be astonished. If this were really so, it would be the first time in living memory. Moscoli never heard him. He climbed the flight of stairs like an automaton, his mind far, far away, in time if not in place.
November 1987. The theft from the privately owned Palazzo Giallo, so called because of its mustard-colored facade, had been dubbed the art crime of the century, but that dubious title had lasted only three years, until 1990, when the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston had been robbed of three Rembrandts, five Degas, a Vermeer, and a Manet. Even the priceless Cellini pendant—one of the artist’s very few works in gold that hadn’t been melted down over the intervening centuries—couldn’t hold its own against that stellar bunch. Interestingly, neither “crime of the century” had ever been solved.
The palazzo’s owner, a flagrantly corrupt politician but a careless one (the palazzo, along with his other assets, had soon afterward been seized by the government and turned into a State museum), had never even bothered to insure his art.
The theft had been meticulously executed by a lone, ski-masked “gentleman robber” who had solicitously placed the frightened elderly caretaker into a closet, reassured him that he would not be harmed, and then gone efficiently about his business. The gentleman robber—Alessandro Ferrante, Moscoli was sure—had run a flawless operation, leaving not a single physical clue. Moreover, none of the stolen art had ever been heard of again. There had been no threats to destroy it, no ransom demands, no taunting letters to the police, no anything. The current prevailing theory was that it had gone straight to a Swiss bank, where it had been used by Ferrante’s Mafia friends ever since, as collateral for one nefarious enterprise after another. Either that, or—as happened all too often—the tremendous publicity and attention from law enforcement had made the pendant unsaleable, even on the black market, and the Mafia had destroyed it or had it melted down for the gold rather than risk being caught with it.
Over the years, as new cases piled up, the Palazzo Giallo theft had necessarily dropped below the carabinieri’s radar, but Moscoli himself had never been able to let it go, had pursued every so-called lead no matter how tenuous, all of them eventually proving fruitless. Moscoli’s theory of what had happened to the loot differed from the conventional ones. He had come to believe that it had never left Genoa at all, but was still hidden away somewhere in the city for reasons he couldn’t fathom. It was a theory that he kept to himself because he had little to support it other than the fact that, in all these years, there had not been a word, not even any minimally credible gossip, about shadowy international buyers, or of its passing through other hands in other places. Beyond that, he had nothing to go on besides gut instinct. Old cop that he was, though, he knew that gut instincts, while not to be considered as anything approaching evidence, were not to be dismissed either.
“Teo, are you still there? Teo? Teo!” He was on the telephone in his apartment with no memory of climbing the stairs or opening the door.
“Relax, Gino, I’m still here. Okay, I have a lot to tell you.”
But he was only a few minutes into it when a palpably agitated Moscoli cut in. “This ‘Tiny’ person, this so-called Abbatista—he left Genoa on November 30, but under a different name, an Italian name?”
“Yes, I told you. Two days after the Giallo robbery, which makes us think—”
“His Italian name—you have it?” Even over the telephone, Ted could tell that he was holding his breath.
“Sure. Umm . . .” Ted had made a note of it but he didn’t have his notebook with him. “Santo Something . . . Manini . . . no, Mammano? I’m sorry Gino, I have it at the hotel. I’ll—”
“Mamazza!” shouted—shrieked—Moscoli. “It’s Mamazza, Santo Mamazza!”
Ted heard a slap; Moscoli had whacked something in his exhilaration. “That’s right, but how did—”
“Listen to me, hear me out.” Moscoli lowered his voice now, down to a rapid, urgent whisper. “After the theft, among the few people who might conceivably have had some access to or knowledge of it at the time, there was one, and one only, who dropped completely out of sight.”
“And that was Santo Mamazza?”
“Yes! He was a young apprentice frescoist at the church next door. Simply vanished, gone for good by the very next day. He was not a suspect because he had no criminal record. He was only newly down from the mountain villages, and he had no known connection to the criminal world. We assumed the whole affair had frightened him back to the mountains. Later, we did make some attempts to find him to see if he could provide any useful information, but we had no luck. So after a while we—well, we more or less forgot about him. But now everything has been turned on its head. Teo, if there is anybody in this world who can tell us where that loot is, or what has happened to it, it’s this man Abbatista . . . Mamazza.”
“You’re probably right, Gino. And at our end, I think Alix and her friend are getting close to finding him, and when they do, I promise, you’ll be the first to know. They’ve tracked him to Monterey—Monterey, California, not Monterrey, Mexico. They’re on the way down there now.”
“What do you think of their chances?”
Ted hesitated, but only for a moment. “I think they’re good, Gino. Alix knows him about as well as anybody does, and these are a couple of very intelligent, very resourceful young women. Yes, if he’s there, I think they’ll turn him up.”
Now it was Moscoli who held back. “Ah, Teo, I hope this is not an indelicate question—you appear to be on familiar terms with signorina London—but, well, considering her close association, her intimate association, with both her famous father and with Abbatista, and taking into account that the panel had been in her possession for so many years, isn’t it possible that she herself might have played some . . . some unsavory role, or should I say some questionable role in the—”
“What, when she was two years old? Because that’s about how old she would have been in 1987.”
“No, no, of course not, but the art is still out there somewhere, and now there is this mysterious ‘theft’ from her flat, and I can’t help speculating that she might—”
“Well, don’t,” Ted snapped. “Alix is so s
traight-arrow we did our best to get her to work full-time at the Bureau. She turned us down, but we still use her on a consulting basis. She’s been about as vetted as anybody could be. We trust her implicitly, and for damn good reason, so don’t even think—”
He stopped, brought to a halt by a stab of remorse. It was the first time he’d ever spoken like that to his respected and much senior colleague, and now, ashamed and embarrassed, he emitted a sheepish little laugh. “Gino, forgive me, I had no right to talk to you like that. You had every reason in the world to—”
Moscoli was equally taken aback. “I didn’t . . . I meant no offense. It’s only that I know next to nothing about the lady. I had no idea that she was in such good standing with the FBI.”
“And with me. Personally,” Ted said, then sighed. “She’s not a signorina, Gino, she’s a signora. She’s my wife. Maybe I should have mentioned that before.”
Moscoli laughed. “Maybe you should have.”
“Yeah, I know, but, well, you see, we just got married a week ago and Alix wants us to keep it to ourselves until she figures out how to put it gently to her father that her new husband’s one of the cops that got him convicted, and I guess trying to keep it a secret has given me kind of a short fuse, so that when you, when you—”
“Say no more, my friend. I understand.” And then, with great formality: “Congratulazioni. Tanti auguri per una vita felice insieme!”
“Thank you, Gino.”
“And that is the last I will ever say on the subject, until, and if, permission is granted. All right now, I hope you will tell the two excellent ladies that I wish them well. And at my end, I believe it is time for me to have another little session with Alessandro Ferrante in the morning, but this time it will be in my office. I will telephone you afterward. Goodbye, goodnight, buona notte, thank you!”
Ted couldn’t help smiling. He had never heard the old cop more animated. Not that Ted wasn’t excited himself; if all this led to the recovery of the Palazzo Giallo loot, it would be the art retrieval of the year, of the decade. But his excitement was mixed with unease. It was now obvious that Benny Abbatista had been involved in the famous theft, and unless some Italian statute of limitations applied, this then was probably going to end with his going to prison. On Abbatista’s account he had no concerns, but how would Alix take it? Ted had already had a part in the conviction and jailing of her father. Now was he going to do the same thing to Tiny, her beloved Zio Beni? Oh, boy, he thought, good thing her mother was dead.
The Trouble with Mirrors (An Alix London Mystery Book 4) Page 17
