“No, ma’am, I do not think so; not by a long shot. Well, here we go,” he called as the Hawkbill’s engines came alive. “I’ll call you as soon as I can, babe. Thanks, you two, that was some show you guys put on.”
But the cutter was already too far away for her to reply. The two women looked at each other, and Alix smiled. “That was a pretty good show, wasn’t it?”
“Don’t ask me, I had my eyes shut the whole time. But Tiny’s safe, the bad guys are in tow, and”—she pinched her arms—“we still seem to be alive, so it must have been.” She jerked her head. “I still can’t believe you did that. You must have come within two inches of them before we swerved.”
“Yes, I’m embarrassed about that. I was shooting for four inches. I must have miscalculated.”
Chris laughed. “The amazing thing is, I believe you. Well, what now? Here we are, our job is done, our powerful engines are at the ready, and the open sea beckons.”
“Tell you the truth, Chris, this whole episode really took it out of me. I feel like a damp dishrag. I think I’d just like to go back to the hotel and rest for a while. Everything seems to be well in hand.”
Chris rolled her eyes heavenward. “Thank you for saying that. I was afraid you’d want to go scooting around some more and, let me tell you, I’ve had all the excitement I can take for one day. Maybe even for two days. And the sea’s getting a little rough, isn’t it? So turn this baby around and get us back.”
Two hours later, with Alix still fully dressed but soundly asleep atop the bedcovers, her room phone rang. With her eyes closed she groped for it with a groan and managed to pick it up.
“Hi, baby—”
Ted. Her eyes popped open and she swung her legs over the side to sit up.
“Listen,” he said, “when you suggested sitting in with Tiny before, I may have been a little, well—”
“High-handed?” she suggested archly. “Overbearing? Pompous? Prematurely dismissive?”
“Yeah, I’ll settle for that last one. The fact is, we can’t get anything out of him. Where’s the missing art? Shrug. The Palazzo Giallo robbery? He never heard of it. Is his real name Santo Mamazza? Shrug. What was his connection to Alessandro Ferrante? Never heard of him, and on and on. I’m not sure whether we’ve gotten through to him that the statutes of limitation on the theft have expired, so he can’t get in any legal trouble over any of this. He doesn’t seem to be listening real hard, though. And then just now, after not saying a word for ten minutes or so, he looked both of us straight in the eye and said flat out: ‘I don’t trust you, and I don’t trust you.’ So I was a little ticked off by then, and I said ‘Well, who the hell do you trust?’ And guess what he said.”
“I’m on my way,” Alix said, wriggling a foot into one of her shoes. “Where am I going?”
“We’re right here in the hotel, conference floor, Big Sur Room 1. I think he’d be more comfortable if it was just you, not Chris.”
“Probably so. See you shortly.”
The room, obviously used for breakout sessions during seminars and conferences, was small and relatively plain, but not intimidating. The three of them sat on folding chairs at a folding table, in the middle of which was a tray that held coffee makings for three, but only Tiny had one of the Styrofoam cups in front of him. He was wearing clothes that must have been picked up in the hotel gift shop. His red sweatshirt said “I ♥ Monterey.” There was also a plate in front of him that now held only crumbs. Across from him sat Ted and Capitano Moscoli, who greeted Alix most civilly. Tiny didn’t get up when she walked in but he smiled hugely, and the heave of his chest suggested a silent sigh of relief.
“Well, here I am,” she said to all three of them. “How do you want to proceed?”
Moscoli answered. “I think it would be good if Mr. Abbatista”—Alix noted that he went along with Tiny’s American name—“could hear from your mouth that we are not trying to put him in jail, and that he is in fact immune from prosecution in Italy. We are interested only in the missing art and we speak with him in the hope that he may have some information on it.” He stopped and waited for Alix’s response. Tiny watched her as well.
“As far as I know, that’s all so, Tiny,” she said, wishing she could have told him something a little less ambiguous.
It was good enough for Tiny, who relaxed still more. “That’s a relief,” he said.
“Well, damn, Tiny,” Ted said, “we’ve been telling you that for the last hour. Why didn’t you—”
“Because,” Tiny said coldly, “like I told you before, I don’t like you and I don’t trust you. You neither,” he added for Moscoli’s benefit.
Ted released something between a sigh and a throaty growl, but Moscoli showed no reaction. “And now,” he said, “I believe that Mr. Abbatista would be more comfortable if you would remain here with us at the table while we once again go over the questions that—”
“No, that’s not what Mr. Abbatista would like,” Tiny interrupted. “Mr. Abbatista would like you guys out of the room altogether, and Alix can ask the questions. I think she knows I’ll be honest with her.”
“I know you would, Tiny,” Alix said, “but I don’t really know what questions to ask. I’m not that familiar with the case.”
“That’s true, Tiny,” Ted put in. “We need to be here. We’ll keep our mouths shut while you’re talking, I promise.”
“Not good enough. You said I’m not under arrest, right? So I can leave anytime I want, right?” He pushed himself back from the table. “So . . .”
Alix had expected to find him demoralized and intimidated when she arrived, but he was obviously anything but. Really, she shouldn’t have been surprised. When had she ever seen him intimidated (by anybody but Geoff)?
“Let’s not rush into anything,” Moscoli said, holding out his hand, and then to Ted: “I don’t see why we can’t accede to Mr. Abbatista’s request”—he peered hard at Tiny—“as long as he understands that Ms. London will be free to pass on to us whatever information he provides.”
“I got no problem with that.”
“I have a better idea,” Ted said. “I have a digital recorder in my case. Why don’t I just put it down on the table and let it take everything down?”
“I got no problem with that either.”
Alix was getting confused. “Then what do you need me for? What’s the point of my being here at all?”
“The point is,” Tiny said pedantically, as if it should have been obvious, “that I’m not going to sit here spilling my guts while these two characters sit there eyeballing me the whole time.” He had the ability to shrug his shoulders the way a horse or a dog does, more a shiver of the skin than a shrug of the muscles beneath, and he did it now.
And so it was agreed. Ted and Moscoli got up and left, to return in half an hour, and Alix was left alone with Tiny, although before they left Ted called for fresh coffee to be brought in to them.
They sat there grinning at each other across the table until Alix got up and said, “Oh, what the heck, Tiny, give me a hug, will you?” He jumped up, came around the table, and enthusiastically obliged, lifting her half a foot off the floor, while she thought: Tiny, Geoff, Ted, and Chris . . . the only four people in the world from whom she was truly comfortable accepting an embrace. What did that say about her? Anything? Not something to worry about right now . . .
Ted had gotten the recorder going before he left, so Alix said: “What do you say we start at the beginning? Back in Italy, when you were still Santo Mamazza, when—”
“Oh, so you know about that,” he said.
“Well, yeah! We’ve been looking for you a long time, and we’ve done a lot of research.”
“What kind of long time? I took off from Seattle last week, not last year.”
“Well, it sure seems like a year.” She smiled. “But it was worth it: we found you.”
He smiled too. “Yeah, you found me. I really appreciate that you came looking, Alix. You and your friend.”
He sat back, hands loosely folded on the table, waiting for her next question.
The coffee was delivered, along with a fresh plate of Danish pastries, and they both took a pastry. “So,” Alix said, “let’s hear.”
“Okay,” he finally said. “Nineteen-eighty-seven. I was just another big, dumb kid from this little village in the mountains—Pieve di Teco. Worked on and off with the road maintenance crews when I could to earn a little money for me and for my mother.” He shook his head. “Seventy-eight years old and taking in other people’s laundry. Ah, what the hell. Anyway, I had a few scrapes with the law, just minor stuff, but I was heading absolutely nowhere. But I guess I did show some artistic ability, and so . . .”
And so his Uncle Innocenzo, his mother’s younger brother and the village butcher, had scraped together enough money to send his awkward, ungainly, unpromising nephew to the big city—all the way to Genoa, almost sixty miles—to learn a trade that might take advantage of his natural skills. He had apprenticed him to one Rafaello Della Rocca, a crabby, garrulous, old frescoist and restorer, a second-rate craftsman whose other students had all left him, but who was the only available maestro Innocenzo could afford. He was cranky and demanding, but Tiny, more out of a sense of obligation to Tio Innocenzo than anything else, had resolutely taken the abuse and stuck it out.
With Tiny’s assistance, Della Rocca continued his long-running project of repairing the moldering murals in the decrepit, seventeenth-century church of San Carlo Borromeo. Unknown to Tiny at the time, the rear of this church abutted the rear of the Palazzo Giallo, while the fronts opened on different streets. Adjoining doorways in the backs of the two buildings had been constructed in the early nineteenth century to make passage to and from the church easier for the pious count who lived in the palazzo at the time.
There were two other important things that Tiny didn’t know: First, that the passageway was a key element in the theft that was to come, and second, that his master, Della Rocca, had a sideline, at which he was known to art theft rings in Milan and Genoa as a man proficient at “altering” ill-gotten paintings in such a way as to maximize their potential profits while minimizing the risk that they could be traced to their source. In plainer language, he was skilled at cutting them up into frameable, saleable chunks, and doing it economically, that is, with minimal waste. It was through Ferrante’s good offices, including a sizable donation (actually funded by the Mafia) to the Genoan diocese, that hired Della Rocca had been hired for the church work. It had been, as a matter of fact, the first step in Ferrante’s elaborate, year-long preparations for the heist; both the old man and the proximity of the church were to figure importantly in its execution. And they did. Within minutes the loot had been hustled through the abutting doors and down into the church’s dim, cobwebbed basement, all but abandoned except for stray cats and the occasional rodent that managed to elude them (never for very long). The atmosphere was thick with mold, musk, and the acrid smell of decades—maybe centuries—of ashy, dried-up feces. Here, in a dusty workroom behind a heavy, iron-studded oak door, Della Rocca had at once begun to plot the lines of his intended cuts, working through the night.
On the following morning, Tiny found himself troubled by the eighty-year-old Della Rocca’s vagueness and shakiness, his more-than-usual crankiness, and his frequent absences from the moisture-damaged Virgin and Child they were close to completing. At one point, after Della Rocca had been gone from the scaffold for forty minutes, Tiny went in search of him. Earlier, he had seen the maestro, furtively come up the stone steps from the basement, and it was there that he went. The place alone was enough to give him the creeps, but they were greatly magnified when he heard Della Rocca’s voice. Somewhere nearby, the old man was talking to himself, crooning to himself. He would ask a question—“Here, Rafaello?”—and answer it: “No, Rafaello, here, ha-ha, yes, precisely.”
The hairs on the back of Tiny’s neck stood up. “Maestro?” he called gently.
No answer, but the crooning stopped. Tiny, standing roughly in the middle of the basement, turned slowly around, and along the far wall he saw a sliver of light coming from under a closed wooden door. He went to it and knocked.
“Maestro?”
“Go away.”
“Maestro, it’s Santo. Are you all right?”
“Go away! Stupid boy, do your job. Do you need me with you every second?”
Half an hour later, Della Rocca, without a word about any of this, was back on the scaffold six feet off the floor, touching up the fresco. He was shakier than ever and at one point he gesticulated too vigorously while berating Tiny for insufficiently thinning a newly prepared pail of lime. After a wild few seconds of windmilling arms and teetering body, he was forced to surrender to gravity and tumbled from the scaffold. Tiny rushed to break his fall but couldn’t reach him in time.
The old man lay on his back on the stone floor, dazed and mumbling. Tiny called 118 and in ten minutes an ambulance was there. At the hospital he was diagnosed with a hairline-fractured radius, shock, and concussion, for all of which he was treated. But they had missed a ruptured brain aneurysm, and at a little before one o’clock in the afternoon, without issuing another coherent sentence, he quietly expired.
In the meantime Tiny, not sure what else to do, had continued working on the Virgin, putting in some of his own touches and even daring to redo some of Della Rocca’s work. By now, he had learned of the previous night’s next-door theft and couldn’t put aside the thought that Della Rocca’s strange behavior was in some way connected to it. When word came of the maestro’s unexpected death, he put down his tools and returned to the basement. Two huge old locks now guarded the door to the room. He went back upstairs for the wrecking bar they used to break up old plaster walls, came back, and in another minute, was able to wrench the door open.
“And?” Alix urged, restraining herself from shouting it when Tiny stopped to thoughtfully swirl the few ounces of coffee that remained in his cup.
“And I guess that’s when all the trouble started.”
“Half hour’s up,” Ted said from the doorway, having entered with Moscoli. “Okay?”
“Sure, come on in, what the hell,” said Tiny. Clearly, talking things out with Alix had improved his disposition. “But I’m not gonna go through it all again. You can listen on the tape recorder or whatever it is. I was just getting to the good part, the part everybody’s so interested in, anyway.”
“What happened to the loot,” Moscoli said.
“Bingo. Have a seat.”
“Wait a minute, Tiny,” Ted said. “Before you get into that, answer one question for me, will you? When you jumped into the water . . . why’d you do that?”
“What do you mean, ‘why’? I was trying to get away from those two goons, that’s why. So I jumped out the opposite side of the boat.”
“But what were you going to do? You can’t outswim a speedboat.”
“I know that, come on. I was heading for that buoy.”
“Well, what for? What was your plan? Long-range, I mean. After you reached the buoy.”
Tiny fidgeted and shuffled his feet. “Well, I’m not too great with long-range plans,” he said, and Alix smiled, knowing how true that was. “It just seemed like a good idea at the time, okay?”
“A good idea at the time,” Ted repeated, as though to himself.
“Can we get back to the loot now?” Moscoli suggested.
“Yeah,” Tiny said, “but first I want to hear it from your mouth one more time. I can’t be prosecuted for what happened, right? Nothing I say can, be, like, held against me.”
“Absolutely,” Moscoli said. “I can show you the statute. I’ll put it in writing if you want.”
“You bet I do.”
Tiny and Moscoli locked eyes.
“And you need it right now, before we proceed?” Moscoli said.
Tiny regarded him narrowly for a long moment, then shrugged. “I’ll trust you.”
“Well, that’s a
n improvement,” Moscoli grumbled.
Tiny took a deep breath and went on. “Well, I walk into the room where Della Rocca was before and I turn on the lantern, and there they are, all three of the paintings, lined up on the floor along the wall.”
“And the pendant?” Moscoli asked with evident anxiety. “The Cellini?”
“Yeah, the pendant too. That was just sitting there on a rickety old shelf. The pictures had these lines drawn on them; that’s what Della Rocca was doing in there. Even back then, I knew what that meant, and, well, it shocked the hell out of me. I mean, Della Rocca was no prize, but chopping up four-hundred-year-old paintings? I couldn’t believe it.”
“Only the lines?” Moscoli asked quietly. “Then where did Alix’s panel come from? Who cut up the Mazzoni?”
Tiny understood what he was really asking and took offense. “Well, not me!” he declared, and Alix silently cheered him on. You tell him, Tiny! “Della Rocca had already cut it away, just that one piece, the lower right corner, just waste. It was in the garbage can and I took it out and kept it. That’s what I made the mirror from.”
“Yes, but that was later, Tiny,” Ted said reasonably. “You didn’t know Alix then, so that couldn’t have been the reason.”
“No, I kept it because if I ever did tell the story—what I’m telling you now?—I wanted to have proof. Then later . . . well, I thought she’d like it.”
“I loved it,” Alix said. “Losing it was like losing . . . well, it really hurt.” She smiled. “I was kind of hoping you’d make me another one sometime.”
Tiny threw back his head and laughed. “I don’t have to. I’ll just give that one back to you.”
“You have it?” Ted asked.
“I took it,” Tiny said.
“You took it?” Alix said. “Why—?”
Tiny was still laughing. “Well, hell, after that magazine came out and these two guys started following me around I was afraid they’d come after you too, and I wanted to . . . well, you know, I wanted to . . .”
The Trouble with Mirrors (An Alix London Mystery Book 4) Page 23
