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

by Charlotte Elkins

  Even so, he wouldn’t have been here but for a small memory lapse. It might have been all that Prosecco and champagne at Vanni the night before, but whatever the reason, it wasn’t until thirty minutes ago that it occurred to him with a start that his passport was still in his office safe, which was why he was there now, half an hour before his self-imposed deadline and two hours before his flight to Basel.

  Finding Filomena in the gallery had been a shock. He’d thought she always came in at eight, an hour before he generally did. She was equally surprised to see him there so early, but he’d come up with some story or other and hurried up to his office. In ten minutes at most, he would be gone again.

  But, as he now knew, it had been a terrible mistake, his final one. What he should have done . . . well, never mind what he should have done. It didn’t matter anymore. You waited too long, he told himself again.

  When he heard the door to his office open, he turned from the mirror with a sigh.

  “Don Rizzolo would like to speak with you, signor Ferrante.”

  Until this moment he’d been oddly serene, philosophical, even. It was as if he were at a play, a Greek tragedy, watching the ineluctable circle of Fate come closed. It had been interesting. But now, seeing these two big, blocklike men right here in front of him, filling the vestibule of his office, it took only a few seconds for sweat to pop out on his forehead and his upper lip. His heart wrenched painfully in his chest. His head was suddenly crowded with a thousand foolish, jumbled thoughts of escape. “Yes, of course,” he said. “Just give me five minutes to finish up here, and I’ll drive directly over.”

  Their hard-eyed smiles were as good as words. You should know by now, signor Ferrante. When Don Rizzolo says he wishes to speak with you, he doesn’t mean at your convenience, he means now, always.

  Ferrante somehow summoned up a smile of his own. “Perhaps it might be better if I came at once?”

  “Perhaps it would,” said one of the hoods archly, as if he were making a joke, which in a way he was.

  “Of course. I’ll go immediately. My car is right out in back—”

  “No, that’s not necessary, signore. We will be driving you there.”

  Ferrante had the feeling that he was physically shrinking, that he was shriveling up into a little ball. His body was near to collapsing and yet his mind had to make its little jest: Yes, but will you be driving me back?

  They drove to Porto Antico, the busy, tourist-oriented strip along the Genoa waterfront where the enormous Princess and Celebrity cruise ships berthed to let loose their hordes of day-trippers. Ferrante sat in back with one of the men, the other sat directly in front of him in the front passenger seat, while a third man, who hadn’t come up to the office, drove. In front of the giant aquarium they pulled to a curbside stop in a no-parking zone. The windows were then rolled down.

  “Why are we stopping here?” Ferrante wanted to know, although, having already asked several questions that brought only silence, he didn’t really expect an answer, and he proved right. Still, he tried again. “What happens now?”

  This time he got a response from the one beside him. “You get out.”

  Ferrante’s breathing stopped. “You want me to get out?”

  The driver turned, a man with a face as scarred and leathery as an old suitcase. “Open the door,” he said, as slowly and distinctly as if he were speaking to someone having a hard time understanding the language, “and get out. Find a taxi, go to the airport, and don’t ever show up in Genoa again—ever.”

  Indeed, Ferrante was having a hard time comprehending, but it wasn’t that he didn’t understand, it was that he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. They were letting him out? Here? It made no sense. Surely they wouldn’t kill him here, right in front of the aquarium. Even at this time of the morning there were people all over the place. But surely they wouldn’t simply let him leave either. Well, would they? If so, then what was the point of the whole thing? And why let him off in the center of town, why not drive him to the airport themselves? He was too confused, too upset, and too desperate to think it through, but the farther he got from them the happier he would be. If they wanted him to go, he would go.

  He opened his door and stepped out, his neck and shoulders hunched and rigid, as if that might stop a bullet. His heart was pounding so hard each beat shuddered his frame.

  “I can just leave?” he mumbled over his shoulder. If the muzzle of a gun was six inches from the back of his head, he didn’t want to see it.

  “Cazzo, will you go already?” The voice was fed up and bored. “We’re doing you a favor, don’t blow it.”

  Was it really possible, then? Ferrante’s legs were trembling with the effort it took to keep from breaking into a run, but Alessandro Ferrante, even in extremis, was not about to scuttle away from a bunch of gangsters like some terrified beetle afraid of being stepped on. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said politely, and reached up to straighten his tie—

  The sensory pathways of the human nervous system seem to transmit pain instantaneously; touch a hot griddle and you know it in a hurry. But they do so far from instantaneously. A little over three hundred feet per second is about as fast as they can go. A .38 Special caliber bullet, on the other hand, leaves the muzzle of its barrel at over eight hundred feet per second. Fired into a human skull from three feet away, it will destroy the brain faster than the brain is able to tell itself about it.

  Thus, for Ferrante, there was no shock, no pain, no sense of blackness descending. There was only that hand at his tie and then nothing. No hand, no tie, no Ferrante. No more world.

  CHAPTER 27

  Having had a reasonably good bacon-and-eggs breakfast from the buffet breakfast at the Holiday Inn Express Geneva Airport (one of the few decent Geneva hotels that served an American breakfast and came in under GSA per diem limits), Ted was at the elevator, waiting to go to his room on the seventh floor, where he planned to finish packing for his flight to Ronald Reagan International Airport. He was about to press the Call button when his waist tickled; the telephone on his belt was vibrating.

  “Ted, it’s Gino Moscoli. I’m glad I caught you before you left.”

  “Just barely. How did it go with Ferrante?”

  “It didn’t go at all. Ferrante’s dead.”

  “You’re kidding me!”

  “Why would I—”

  “No, I know you’re not kidding me. It’s just an expr— I just . . . What happened, exactly? Do you know?” He stepped farther along the corridor to get himself out of range of fellow guests at the bank of elevators.

  Ted was surprised to hear what was surely a grim chuckle from Moscoli. “I’ll say we do. We know exactly when it happened, where it happened, and how it happened. We have depositions from a dozen people who witnessed it, snapshots from two, and a video from one.”

  It had been less than two hours ago. The witnesses were mostly tourists strolling along the Genoa waterfront, and what they saw was a black Maserati sedan with four men in it come to a stop outside the aquarium. A well-dressed man stepped out of a rear door, stood for a moment, and then crumpled. Some people saw a black-sleeved arm extend from the front passenger window and shoot him in the head, some did not; but everyone heard the shot. Some also heard a second shot, some didn’t. All of them were shocked at how casually it was done. The whole thing had taken only five or six seconds. Done in front of all those people, it was, in effect, a public assassination.

  “Mafia,” Ted said. “I know you have an active cell there.”

  “Oh, definitely. Neither Ferrante’s money nor his identification was taken. Even his passport was on his person.”

  “To make sure there’d be no doubt about who he was.”

  “Yes.”

  “Something to do with the Palazzo Giallo, do you think?”

  “Yes, I do think that. I’ll tell you the truth,” Moscoli said with a sigh. “I’m sorry to see him come to an end like that.”

  On the surface, it s
eemed an odd reaction from a tenacious cop. He was totally convinced the murdered man had masterminded the theft and had been unsuccessfully pressing him for almost three decades to find out what had happened to the vanished hoard. But Ted understood that over the years they had developed a not-so-grudging respect for one another, and perhaps even a mutual affection.

  “In any case,” Moscoli continued, “the investigation of the murder falls to the carabinieri general command; my focus continues to be the art.”

  “I appreciate you calling to let me know about this, Gino.”

  “Ah, but that’s not at all why I’ve called,” Moscoli said, brightening. “I’ve called to tell you that I shall be flying to Monterey on the chance that your ‘very intelligent, very resourceful’ young women really will locate Mr. Abbatista, because I would like very much to be there when they do. And I wondered if you might be able to cancel your flight to Washington and join me instead. We’ll cover your passage.”

  “Do you mean today?”

  “Time waits for no man.”

  “Sure, I’m game if it’ll be of any help, you know that. So I assume you are now counting on Tiny as the best lead we have to the loot.”

  “The only lead.” Pause. “The only living lead.”

  “Yes, but shouldn’t we be talking—”

  “No time for talk now. I’ve already talked too long. You should get going.”

  “All right,” said Ted. “I’ll cancel my flight to DC right now. But how do I arrange to connect with you?”

  “Happily,” Moscoli said with a touch of smugness, “the Comando Carabinieri per la Tutela del Patrimonio Culturale has already made provisions. I am at this moment sitting in solitary splendor in the luxurious cabin of our newest Gulfstream intercontinental jet, which is now beginning to roll down the runway and which will then proceed northwest toward Geneva at nine hundred kilometers an hour, and which will arrive at Geneva Airport to pick you up at ten o’clock. If you go to the Alitalia check-in desk in Terminal One, someone will be waiting to escort you through Security and take you to the plane. The direct flight to Monterey is expected to take nine hours, so with the nine-hour time difference, we’ll arrive there at 10:00 a.m. their time.”

  “Wait, wait, wait. I’m supposed to be there by ten? That’s not even an hour from now.”

  “Then you’d better get moving, hadn’t you?” Moscoli said tranquilly.

  CHAPTER 28

  In the morning, Chris told Alix that getting to the surprise she had waiting for her required a walk of a mile because it couldn’t be moved, so what about stopping first for a couple of breakfast burritos at Papa Chevo’s Taco Shop just down the block from the Monterey Plaza?

  Alix was all for it. After the previous night’s tapas-style dinner, she was hungry for something more solid and burritos sounded good.

  “So what are you frowning about?” Chris asked as they stood at the counter to order.

  “I’m trying to figure out what you just said. It can’t be moved?”

  “That’s right. Well, not by me, anyway.”

  Alix was itching with curiosity—Chris’s “surprises” could be pretty extravagant—but because they’d soon be seeing this one, she let it go. Instead, their breakfast conversation again went back to Tiny and how to find him, and again the results were dispiriting. It had occurred to Alix that when Tiny told Waldo that he would be working in Monterey, he might have been referring to the Monterey Peninsula as a whole—not only the city of Monterey itself, but Carmel, Seaside, Pacific Grove, Pebble Beach, and whatever else there was. Chris immediately whipped out her phone, and, using the fingers of just one hand (the other continuing to operate her fork) she came up with a new seafood-restaurant total before either of them was halfway through her chorizo-and-egg burrito: sixty-two restaurants in all.

  “Of which we’ve already been to forty-two.”

  “Right,” said Chris, “leaving just twenty more. Piece of cake.”

  “Except these are scattered all over a pretty big area. I can’t say I’m looking forward to getting to them all, but . . . Chris, frankly, I’m starting to lose heart. What makes us think they’re even telling us the truth? Maybe we already hit the right one but didn’t get told.”

  Chris popped the last of her refried beans into her mouth. “You know what I think?”

  “No, what do you think?”

  “I think we should go see my surprise.”

  Monterey has two large public wharves. Old Fisherman’s Wharf, the smaller of them, is crammed with restaurants and tourist attractions, is in every tourist guide (and on the cover of most of them), and is the closest thing to a mandatory destination for every visitor who sets foot in the city. Half a mile to the east lies the less romantically named Municipal Wharf Number 2, which is also known as the Commercial Wharf. Understandably, it appears in no tourist guide and is thus visited by few tourists. Alix herself, who had been to Monterey once before, hadn’t even known it existed, so she was puzzled when Chris led her onto it.

  “What—” she began, but stopped when her phone made its unobtrusive, almost embarrassed signal. “Just let me see if I need to take this,” she said. “Oh, it’s Ted—”

  “Then you need to take it,” Chris said. “And you need to give him his own ringtone so you know when it’s him, is what you need.”

  “You’re absolutely right. You need to show me how.”

  Chris stepped a few yards away to give her some privacy, leaned on a railing, and looked out at a small marina that was nestled at the foot of the wharf and filled with boats. Alix hit the Talk button.

  “Ted, darling!” Alix said. “Where are you calling from? Are you still in Switzerland?”

  “No, as a matter of fact,” he said, with a happy laugh that thrilled her, “I’m practically in Monterey. We’re forty minutes out and I can see the Peninsula from here. Hey, is that you, in the red pullover?”

  “No, green. Ted, this is wonderful! Are you coming to see me?”

  “Well, between us, that was a considerable inducement, but no, the official reason is that we—Gino and I—would really like to talk to Tiny about the Giallo thing, and we figure you two are our best bet for getting hold of him.” He paused. “Ah, I sense a chill in the air.”

  “I didn’t think it would carry forty miles, but obviously it did. Ted, you know I respect what you’re doing, but you can’t expect me to just lead you to him. I owe him a lot. I’d certainly try to convince him to talk to you, but I’m not going to help you get your hands on him if he doesn’t want it to happen. I’m sorry, I just can’t.”

  “Alix, we don’t want to ‘get our hands on him’ at all. Tiny is the only link we have now to the theft. We need his help, and right now you and Chris are our best bet to reach him.”

  “The FBI is after Benny Abbatista because they need his help? Well, that’s a switch.”

  “Look, Tiny doesn’t have anything to fear from the US government, and Gino told me the Italian statutes of limitation ran out a long time ago and they have no interest in charging him with anything at all.”

  “Oh, I’m glad to hear that, but what do you mean he’s your only link? What about Ferrante? What did he have to say to Gino?”

  “Nothing. Ferrante’s dead.”

  “. . . He’s dead?”

  “Yes, killed, murdered.”

  “Oh, my,” she said, abruptly sobered. “This is getting kind of serious, isn’t it?”

  “You bet it is. Some interesting developments have come to light in the last few hours, baby, but look, I’ll fill you in when we get there. Hey, Gino’s making all these extravagant Italian gestures at me. I think they mean he needs to talk to me. I’ll call you when we’ve landed. Bye, honey.”

  “What’s up?” Chris asked when Alix came up to her. “You look . . . I don’t know what you look. Funny.”

  Alix quickly summarized what Ted had told her.

  She’d been looking interestedly out over the marina as she spoke. “Chris, I
thought this was a commercial wharf. Those aren’t fishing boats.”

  “No they’re not. The Monterey Yacht Club keeps its boats here. It’s not technically part of the wharf.”

  “Oh. Ohmigosh, will you look at that!”

  “At what?”

  “Right down there on the left. See the big one with the red, white, and blue sails? Look at the boat alongside it.”

  “The white one, the catamaran?”

  “No, the other side, the sleek black and gray one. With the blue and red stripe up the middle?”

  “Oh, yes. Ooh, very nice.”

  “I’ll say it is! That’s a Lancia Powerboat!”

  “Mm. Hey, isn’t that the kind you got to drive while you were on that cruise in the Med? You liked it, as I recall.”

  “I loved it. It was the most thrilling ride I ever had.” Alix smiled. “Well, maybe not quite as thrilling as that time in the Lamborghini, but—”

  “I should hope not,” Chris said. “I wound up in the hospital in Española, New Mexico, if you remember. And that gorgeous car practically got totaled.”

  “Yes, but that wasn’t my fault and you know it. You don’t have a lot of options when you’re on a narrow road with a cliff wall on one side and a giant truck is doing its best to scrunch you into it from the other side. There’s not much you can do about it when things like that happen, and they do happen.”

  “To you they maybe happen. To normal people, no. Except when you’re with them.”

  “Oh, come on, be fair. You were the one who rented that car, you were the one who asked me to drive, and you were most definitely the one who wanted to see how fast it could go.”

  Chris glanced at Alix from under lowered eyebrows. “Oh, right,” she said archly, “and you didn’t?”