husband and be independent of him. She could pursue her dream, un fettered, for the rest of her life. This was when Leo confided in Gabriella the secret of the Dark Medusa. He gave her the map showing the location of its hiding place. He was convinced that the troubles that had descended on his country would soon pass, and that she would be able to travel there and retrieve the treasure with no danger to herself. After her tryst with the prince . . . this is the right word, “tryst”?’
Ben nodded. ‘Go on.’
‘Afterwards, she hurried home with the precious map hidden in her clothing. I let her into the house before the count could catch her. We ran together to her secret room, looking desperately for somewhere to hide the map. It was I who had the idea for a hiding place nobody would ever discover. We opened up the frame of her Goya copy. And we hid the map inside, between the picture and the back of the frame.’
‘What happened to Borowsky?’ Darcey asked.
‘At dawn that day, he and the count met at the appointed place outside Rome. From forty paces, each fired a single shot. Leo’s ball missed. Count De Crescenzo’s struck the prince in the shoulder.’ Mimi gave a shrug. ‘Honour was done.’
‘So Leo survived?’
‘In the days before antibiotics, such a wound could turn fatal. He lasted three days. Gabriella was by his side until the end.’ The old woman’s voice was hoarse from talking. She took another long sip from her drink. ‘When Gabriella returned from the hospital, heartbroken and weeping bitterly, clutching a dagger in the folds of her dress and vowing to use it to avenge her lover, she found the count gone and her trunk packed outside the gate. That terrible man Ugo had been ordered not to allow her into the house.
‘And that was when I found her,’ Mimi said sadly. ‘Sitting alone in the gardens, inconsolable. She embraced me. We both wept when she told me she must leave, that she would never see me again. I replied that I would leave too, and come with her. She said to me, “Are you mad, girl? You have employment here. I can offer you little. The only money I will have are the few coins I can get by pawning this necklace and these rings.” But I insisted I wanted to stay with her. “And the map,” I said to her. “With the map, you could be rich again.” Gabriella seemed uninterested. “I have lost my Leo,” she said. “But Leo wanted you to have it,” I replied. “Let me run to the secret room and fetch it.”’
Mimi’s voice drifted off. She turned her head slowly and gazed out at the darkening sea for a long moment. When she turned back to face Ben, he saw that her wrinkled old eyes had welled up with tears that spilled down her cheeks.
‘I betrayed her,’ she whispered.
Ben frowned, but said nothing.
‘I went back to the secret room,’ Mimi said. ‘Gabriella’s paintings were stacked against the wall. I found the Goya. I opened the back of the frame, the way I had learned. And then I did something that I have regretted for twenty years, since my Lord Jesus came into my life and I repented of my sins.’
‘You took the map for yourself,’ Ben said.
Mimi wiped her eyes. ‘I was frightened. I was just a child. I suppose I could have simply taken it, hidden it and left. But I was terrified that somehow Gabriella would find out what I had done. There were papers and crayons on a table. I made a copy of the map before replacing the original inside the back of the frame. Then I ran back to Gabriella in the gardens, crying and telling her that Ugo had come and seen me before I could get to the secret room. It was a lie, but the next moment, we heard the dogs barking. Now Ugo really had spotted us. We had to run. We fled to the city.
‘Pawning the few belongings that remained to her, Gabriella was able to rent cheap lodgings for us in a very poor quarter of Rome. We took work where we could find it. We cleaned. We mended clothes. By night, Gabriella would paint, driving herself to exhaustion in the hope that one day soon, she would find some small success as an artist. She never dreamed that she would become so successful – or that it would take so many years of hardship before she was able to sell her work. The art world was as ruthless and narrow-minded as it is today, and in Italy it was hard for a woman.’
Mimi gazed into space for a moment, as if reliving the memories. ‘She did not find true success until the middle of the 1970s, when she was in her sixties. By that time, I had long since left her. We had lived together as friends for almost thirty years,’ she added regretfully, hanging her head. ‘And in all that time, I never told her that I had made a copy of Leo’s map.’
‘When did you go back for the Dark Medusa?’ Ben said.
The old woman looked up at him sharply, then let out a long sigh. ‘You have understood, Mr Hope.’
‘All this didn’t come from nowhere,’ Ben said.
‘I schemed for many years behind Gabriella’s back. I learned much about Russia, its history and its politics, even studied some of the language. I knew that the country was impenetrable. Joseph Stalin held Russia in a ring of steel, making it too dangerous for a woman on her own to attempt to smuggle out such a treasure. I would certainly have been caught and sent to die in the Siberian labour camps. So I waited.
‘Then, in 1953, I heard the news that Stalin had died. The same year, I took a job in a factory where I met Eduardo. He was three years older than me, a union representative and a member of the Italian Communist Party, which was very strong at that time and had particular links with Soviet Russia. I began to go to political meetings with him, and it was through those connections that the chance arose for the two of us to visit Russia on a special visa. My time had come at last. We travelled to the location shown on the map. In the graveyard of a ruined church near St Petersburg, inside the grave of a man called Andrei Bezukhov, just as Leo had said, it was there waiting for me. It was mine. It was beautiful.’ Mimi’s voice trailed away to a croak.
‘You didn’t keep it long, did you?’ Ben said.
‘We had to be careful. We found a dealer who valued the egg for us, and for a very high commission agreed to be discreet. This took many months. The man who eventually bought it was from Arabia, a sheikh who had made billions from oil. We met in a suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris on 27 July, 1955, surrounded by his bodyguards and lawyers and the experts he had brought with him to verify the egg was genuine. I can still remember the sheikh’s face as he held the Dark Medusa for the first time. The money was in two suitcases. Nine million US dollars in one, eight million dollars in the other. Ten minutes later it was ours.’
‘I’m betting the Italian Communist Party never saw a penny in donations,’ Darcey said.
Mimi ignored her. ‘Eduardo and I never even returned to Italy. The possessions we had left behind were not worth going back for. Instead we moved here, to the Principality of Monaco where we knew our money would be safe from tax collectors.’
‘And the two of you lived happily ever after,’ Darcey said.
Mimi sighed. ‘It seemed like a dream at first. We had been poor all our lives, and now this. Life became just one big party. We had no real friends, but we did not care, as we could buy all the false friends we needed to make ourselves feel contented. Eduardo began collecting fast cars, Ferraris, Bugattis. He bought a yacht.’ She prodded her chest. ‘By the time two years had gone by, this little Italian woman in her mid-forties was no longer enough to satisfy him. He began to stray. Then when he realised that these beautiful young French girls were only interested in him for his money – that they laughed about him behind his back and called him an old
There was silence on the balcony for a few moments. Darcey was sitting with her arms folded across her chest and little sympathy showing on her face. Mimi’s eyes were downcast as she clutched her rosary beads tightly in her frail, liver-spotted fists, rocking slightly in her chair. Ben looked at her and all he could see was a desperate old woman consumed with shame. Her conscience had caught up with her late in life, but it was hitting hard. It was eating her alive that she couldn’t go back and repair the things she’d done wrong in her past.
And there was a part of Ben that understood that feeling very well.
‘I betrayed the only true friend I ever had,’ Mimi sobbed. ‘When I had wealth and she had none, what did I do to help her? Nothing. And then, thanks to my deception, in 1986, those men came to her home. And they killed her to find the egg. It was my fault that she died alone and in fear. If we had gone to Russia together to find the Dark Medusa, if it had been sold openly as it should have been . . .’ Mimi shook her head in sorrow.
‘I believe the men who broke into Gabriella’s home were the same that robbed the gallery,’ Ben said. ‘I think they found something in her house that night. Something containing clues that led them, all these years later, to the
