by Lyn Hamilton
"You lost your job at the newspaper," Lake responded, "not because you wrote about me. I have something written about me almost every day, and I assure you, I take little, if any, notice. No, you lost your job because, as you have just irrefutably demonstrated by being a part of this group, you have complete contempt for the truth. I had nothing to do with your dismissal, but I heartily endorsed it when it happened."
"And what are you going to say to me, Crawford?" Anna said.
"Careful, Anna," Eugenia said.
"I will not be careful," she said. "I accuse Crawford Lake of killing—murdering—my nephew, Anastasios Karagiannis. Taso was supposed to marry Crawford's sister, Brandy, but he died in a terrible car crash just before the wedding. Some people think Lake tampered with the brakes on Taso's car. I'm one of them. So sue me. I would relish the chance to have my say publicly."
Lake sighed deeply. "Of all those here, Anna, you are the only one with a legitimate reason for hating me. But I have to tell you, whether you believe me or not, that I did not kill your nephew Taso, at least not in the way you think. I rather liked the young man. What I did do was tell him something I believed he needed to know about the woman he was about to marry and her family. If he chose to drink himself into oblivion when he heard it, and then either accidentally or willfully drive his car off the road, then that is something I have to live with."
"I don't believe you," Anna said.
Lake turned to me. "I think you know what it is I felt I had to tell Taso. Was I right to tell him when my sister absolutely refused to do so?"
I thought of life above the tomb, the sun shimmering on Orvieto, the clouds scuttling across the sky, the feel of the warm air on my face. And then I thought of Brandy Lake trapped in her upstairs room in the big old house in the Aran Islands, Maire's fears of the prejudice Brandy would encounter if anyone knew of her disease, of Crawford Lake unable to enjoy the fruits of his obviously brilliant mind and business acumen.
"Yes, you were," I said.
"What did he tell him?" Anna demanded.
"I believe I threatened you last time we met," Lake said before I could reply. "I regret that very much. I suppose so far from much human contact, I have become rather eccentric and suspicious of everyone. This is not something about myself that I like. I hope that you will hold what you know about me and my family confidential, but if you do not, if you have some reason, perhaps to help your friend, that you feel you must reveal it, then nothing will happen to you, I promise."
"So far no one here has done anything that would make me feel I wanted to share secrets with them," I said.
A slight smile crept across his face. "No, perhaps not. But you seem to be up to the challenge. Now, how was the toothless lion proposing to hurt me?"
"I was supposed to be caught red-handed with the hydria," I said. "Once the word got back here that I had the hydria, someone had what they thought was a brilliant idea. Getting the hydria for the Societa would be nice. Getting you, Mr. Lake, would be even better. I was supposed to be apprehended with the hydria, at which point I was expected to tell the police that Crawford Lake had asked me to get it for him. That would be all it would take."
"I expect it was Gianni here who came up with the idea," I said. "Although the others probably encouraged him. He wrote the articles. He'd even had the first couple of them published already, hinting that he knew who was responsible for the smuggling of Etruscan antiquities out of Italy. A successful foreign businessman, wasn't it?"
"I remember them well," Lucca said. "Something, too, about the carabinieri condoning such activities. I've been meaning to discuss this with you, Gianni."
"So why didn't you tell the carabinieri that Lake had sent you for the hydria?" Gianni said belligerently, turning to me.
"Because I had given my word that I wouldn't tell anyone, and, as foreign a concept as some of you may find it, I believe in keeping my word. My plan was to find Lake and get him to step forward," I said. "If he'd refused, then I would. I found him. Or rather he found me. Then I knew there was no point in telling the carabinieri that Mr. Lake had sent me, because it was patently obvious he hadn't. So I had to look for another explanation, didn't I?"
"Let me make sure I understand this," Lake said. "While one group, the goat, was rather ineptly trying to get the hydria into Italy, the other, the lion, was plotting to stop it, by telephoning the carabinieri and reporting a stolen antiquity. Is that about right?"
I nodded.
"This is one of the dumbest ideas I have ever heard, Gino," Dottie said.
"Why would I bother to sue?" Lake said. "No one would believe such bungling."
"So, it didn't happen," Mauro said. "You can't arrest us for evil thoughts. It was a bad idea, okay, but there's no harm done. Now let's just enjoy the party, and we'll give Nicola the hydria to take back with him at the end of the day."
"Not so fast," Lake said. "I believe, if I have followed you so far, Lara, that now we come to the snake."
"The snake," I agreed.
"This is preposterous," Nicola said. "You make it sound as if all of us are under suspicion."
"You are," Lake said. "Now what is this snake about?"
"It's about this," I said, walking over to the hydria. I picked it up, raised it straight in front of me at about shoulder height, and as they all watched me, I let it go. The chimera hydria dropped like a stone and smashed into hundreds of pieces on the stone floor.
It was bedlam. People were yelling, shaking their fists. Anna fell to her hands and knees and started grabbing at the pieces, pathetically trying to fit them together. Several others rushed to help her, then stopped, realizing it was hopeless.
"What have you done?" Dottie said.
"She's destroyed a priceless antiquity," Lucca said. "I cannot believe you have done this. I am placing you under arrest."
"Relax," I said, picking up a shard and looking at it closely, relieved to find I'd been right. "It's a fake."
"How can you be sure?" Anna said.
"The weight, the balance," I said. "The feel of the surface. It didn't feel like the real one."
"We went to all this trouble for a fake?" Romano said incredulously. "Didn't you say it was authentic?" he said, turning to Nicola.
"Well, yes," Nicola replied. "But of course I didn't have a chance to have a really close look at it. I would have needed my lab equipment..."
"What do you mean when you said it didn't feel like the real one?" Lucca said. "Was this theoretical or . . ."
"There have been two chimera hydrias being passed around," I said. "One genuine, the other, this fake. The balance in the real one was absolutely perfect. Despite its shape and size, it would pour like a dream. I know, because I held it. You cannot say the same thing for this one here.
"Until this was delivered to my hotel yesterday," I said, picking up a shard, "I thought that the deaths of Antonio and Leclerc were linked to the plot to discredit Lake. It seemed obvious at first, at least to me, that all of this had to have something to do with Lake. I just couldn't figure out what. I knew some of you were linked to Lake in a way that would make you suspect. Had it not been for the reappearance of the hydria last night, I would have stuck with that theory. But I would have been wrong." They all stood, silent for a change, watching me.
"What seeing this hydria told me is that this is not about revenge for wrongs, real or imagined, any more than it has to do with saving priceless antiquities. It's about greed, about people who are addicted to collecting, who have to possess things whether they are legal or not, and who have the financial wherewithal to do so. And it's about the shadowy dealers who feed their habit.
"The key to the murder was not Mr. Lake but the chimera hydria. At first, I could not figure out why it had been stolen from the police station and then sent to me. The only reason I could think of, at the end of the day, was that somebody wanted it to arrive at its destination, and for whatever reason, I was the one who had to get it there. So that's what I did.
"The piece of the puzzle that was missing, the one that would help make everything come together in my mind, was what Dottie told us about Leclerc. Leclerc got the hydria from Dottie—"
"Just a minute," Lucca said. "Was that the real one?"
"Yes," I said.
"And he put a fake one in your car, right?"
"No, he put the genuine hydria in my car, and I carried it across the border. Then I gave it back to him."
"Why on earth would you do that?" Hank said.
"Perhaps it was because she didn't know what the plan was," Lake said. "Given you never bothered to tell her."
"Yes. Given I was not party to the discussions about how all this was supposed to work, I did something, inadvertently, that led to Leclerc's death, and possibly, much as it gives me great pain to say so, Antonio's as well. I put the hydria into Leclerc's car in the parking lot at the hotel in Volterra. The carabinieri were searching cars, I saw him arrive, and, on the assumption, a correct one, I think, that he had put the hydria in my car in the first place, I put it back in his."
"Are you sure you put it in the right car?" Dottie said to me.
"Yes, but I left immediately after that. It is possible, indeed probable, that someone else got their hands on it in the meantime. Regardless, a day or two later, it reappeared in my hotel room in Arezzo. I've thought a lot about who sent it to my hotel. For awhile, my choice was Antonio, who, I thought, was doing it in an effort to help me. But he denied it vehemently, and I believed him. Given that, I was then quite sure it was Leclerc, but now I'm not so certain."
"Surely the real question is whether or not the hydria delivered to your hotel was the real one or a fake," Lake said.
"I had the hydria for only a short time before Lola took it from me. In fact, I never got a good look at it, nor did I really have a chance to hold it, except for a second or two. I'm going to hypothesize, however, that it was a fake, and that at some point between the time I put the real hydria in Leclerc's car and the time a hydria turned up in my hotel room, someone had switched them."
"So the hydria in my carabinieri station was also a fake, in this hypothesis anyway," Lucca said.
"Almost certainly," I said. "That, in fact, was the problem for the snake. I'm using the singular, but I believe there were four people involved. The fake was never meant to end up in a police station. Someone— and it had to be someone who knew nothing of the lion's intent to intercept the hydria before it could be delivered—substituted the fake and probably killed Leclerc, who by this time had figured out way more than these people wanted him to, and given his propensity to blackmail, had let them know he knew. Then this same person put the fake hydria back on track to be delivered as usual to the Societa."
"This snake group, then, wants a hydria—I emphasize a, rather than the—to arrive here today," Lucca said. "But why?"
"Good grief," Lake said. "Does everything have to be spelled out for you? Because, as Lara said, this is all about trafficking in antiquities. The snake's plan is to steal the real hydria, is that not correct?" I nodded. "No one is to know because the fake will be put in the Rosati Collection. Also correct?"
"Yes," I said.
"Poor Cesar," Dottie said. "Isn't that awful!"
"Could you hold your comments until the end, please, madame," Lake said irritably. "So the snake gets, probably buys, the real hydria back from Leclerc, and does what with it?"
"Sells it," Lucca said. "Probably someone with an order in for it already. It's in another country by now, I'm certain. Leclerc figures that out and tries to blackmail them. As we've already heard, he did have a tendency in that direction. The snake agrees to meet him at the Tanella di Pitagora. Leclerc is murdered on the spot. The fake has already been substituted and sent on its way. But unbeknownst to the snake, the lion enters the picture, and the fake hydria ends up in the police station."
"But why steal it from the station?" Eugenia said. "It's a fake."
"So no one will know the original has been stolen, of course," Lucca said. "It's a disaster that it's in the police station because someone, another expert, is going to take a good look at it during Signora Lola's trial, and they're going to figure out it's a fake. Correct, no?"
"Correct, yes," I said. "They have to get it out of the station before it is tested by someone else."
"Then you're saying one of us stole the fake from the carabinieri station," Hank said.
"I have this picture in my mind of Nicola," Lucca said. "Now that I think about it. In my carabinieri station, holding a large sports bag. Big enough to hold an Etruscan hydria, is what I'm thinking."
"That's ridiculous," Nicola said.
"Was this a one-off?" Lake said to me. "Or something more organized?"
"My guess is it's organized," I said.
"Then they got a little ahead of themselves this time," Lucca said. "Probably an impatient buyer, or merely an opportunity that presented itself, thanks to that fellow Leclerc. Normally, the fake would be substituted after it got to the Rosati Collection, would it not?"
"I think so. There's one way to find out."
"Have another look at our previous finds, the nenfro sphinx and that bronze warrior, you mean," Lucca said.
"What would be wrong with them?" Dottie said.
"Fakes, too," Lucca said.
"But the Bearded Sphinx kylix was stolen. Did someone steal a fake?"
"I'd say the snake stole it for the same reason the hydria was taken from the police station," I said. "The kylix was destined to go to another museum, where it would have been subjected to the same authentication procedures as the chimera hydria would in court."
"So the logical people to be involved in this are Rosati and Mondragon," Lake said. "They are the dealers in the group."
"That is balderdash," Mondragon said.
"I know nothing about this!" Cesar exclaimed. "I just have an art collection, that's all. I wanted to show the world beautiful things."
"How did you manage to make your money, Cesar, after Lake ran you out of business?" Hank said. "That's what I want to know. By selling the stuff we went to a lot of trouble and expense to bring back to Italy? Good deal, isn't it? You pay a one-thirteenth portion of the buying price and sell it for the full price, maybe even a higher one."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Cesar said. "I am as much a dupe in all of this as the rest of you. Nicola has betrayed my trust."
"Just a minute here," Nicola said.
"Did you say the hydria was in another country?" Gianni said. "We bring it back into the country, and then they send it out again? How is that done?"
"I believe Alfred Mondragon is the expert in that," I said. "Indeed, Pierre Leclerc already caught him at it once before. According to Alfred's partner Ryan, Leclerc tried to blackmail him for it."
"I made a mistake, that's all," Mondragon said.
"And what about the insurance?" Gino said. "I'll wager you did even better than Hank thinks you did. Did you sell the kylix and collect insurance on the fake?"
"Didn't you insure that kylix?" Eugenia said to Palladini. "You said you had to pay out a fortune on it."
Palladini swallowed. "Yes, I did. That's terrible. I had no idea."
"Did you not say you thought there were four members of this committee?" Eugenia said to me.
I nodded.
"And didn't you say you'd inherited money from your mother, Vittorio?" Eugenia said. "Didn't you tell me the apartment in Rome was hers?"
"It wasn't," I said. "He bought it a couple of years ago, just about the time the kylix went missing."
"Oh, dear," Dottie said. "Poor Eugenia. Us girls are learning more than we ever wanted to know. Where'd they get the fakes?"
"That would require an accomplished artist. Almost as good as the Micali painter, wouldn't you say, Nicola?"
Nicola started to say something but stopped.
"I brought your painting to show everyone," I said. "It's in my bag. I'm sure if an expert took a look at
both the hydria and the painting, we'd know one way or the other."
"Hey, I'm thinking here," Gino said. "Didn't Nicola authenticate the hydria in the police station?"
"He did," Lucca said. "Quite definitely."
"Naturally, I wouldn't take the kinds of risks that Lara here did, breaking the hydria," Nicola said.
"Oh, right," Gino said.
"But you were talking about murder," Anna said. "Not forgery, and not insurance fraud."
