The Geneva Deception

‘Who gave it to you?’ Allegra asked, finally breaking the silence.

‘What?’ Tom looked round, distracted.

‘The watch? Who gave it to you?’

There was a brief pause, a pained look flickering across his face.

‘Jennifer.’

A longer, more awkward silence.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise…’

‘We didn’t have much choice,’ Tom said, sighing. ‘Besides, as long as we can get him the car, he’ll give it back.’

‘It shouldn’t be too hard,’ she reassured him. ‘Three, four guards at most.’

‘It’s worth taking a look,’ he agreed. ‘It’s that or wait until I can get him the cash tomorrow.’

‘Why does he even want it?’ She frowned, checking her mirrors as she turned on to the Lungotevere Arnaldo da Brescia.

‘He collects cars,’ Tom explained. ‘Has about forty of them in a sealed and climate-controlled private underground garage somewhere near Trajan’s Column. None of them paid for.’

They followed the river in silence, heading north against the traffic as the road flexed around the riverbank’s smooth contours, the sky now bright and clear. Tom caught Allegra glancing at herself in the mirror, her hand drifting unconsciously to her dyed and roughly chopped hair, as if she still couldn’t quite recognise herself.

‘Tell me more about the Banda della Magliana,’ he said eventually.

‘There are five major mafia organisations in Italy,’ Allegra explained, seeming to welcome the interruption. ‘The Cosa Nostra and Stidda in Sicily, the Camorra in Naples, the Sacra Corona Unita in Apulia and the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria. The Banda della Magliana was a smaller outfit based here in Rome and controlled by the De Luca family.’

‘Was?’

‘You might remember that they were linked to a series of political assassinations and bombings between the seventies and the nineties. But since then they’ve been pretty quiet.’

She leaned on her horn as she overtook a threewheeled delivery van that was skittering wildly over the worn tarmac.

‘And Ricci worked for them?’

‘Gallo said he was an enforcer,’ she nodded. ‘As far as I know the family’s still controlled by Giovanni De Luca, although no one’s seen him for years.’

‘What about the Cosa Nostra, the Banda della Magliana’s partner in the Delian League? Who heads them up?’

‘Lorenzo Moretti. Or at least that’s the rumour. It’s not the sort of thing you put on your business card.’

The car pound occupied a large, anonymously grey multi-storey building at the end of a treelined residential street. Two guards were stationed at each of the two sentry posts that flanked the entry and exit ramps. Seeing them walking up to the counter, the officers manning the entrance jumped up and tried to look busy, one of them having been watching TV inside their small office, the other sat outside reading the paper, tipped back on a faded piece of white garden furniture.

‘Buongiorno.’ Allegra flashed a broad smile and her badge in the same instant, snapping it shut before they could get a good look at her name or the picture. ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ she continued. ‘But my friend has had his car stolen.’ The two men glanced at Tom accusingly, as if this was somehow his fault.

‘It’s probably in a container halfway to Morocco by now,’ one of them suggested gloomily.

‘That’s what I told him,’ Allegra agreed. ‘Only one of his neighbours says they saw it being towed. And this is the closest pound to where he lives.’

‘If it’s been towed it will be on the database,’ one of the officers said to Tom. ‘Pay the release fee and you can have it back.’

‘He’s already looked and it’s not there,’ she said with a shrug before Tom could answer. ‘He thinks that someone might have made a mistake and entered the wrong plates.’

‘Really?’ The men eyed him like they would a glass of corked wine.

‘He’s English,’ she murmured, giving him the sort of weary look a mother might give a naughty child. The officers nodded in sudden understanding, a sympathetic look crossing their faces. ‘Is there any chance we can go up and take a quick look to see if it’s here? I’d really appreciate it.’

The two men glanced at each other and then shrugged their agreement.

‘As long as you’re quick,’ one of them said.

‘When did it go missing?’ the other asked her, ignoring Tom completely now.

‘Around the fifteenth of March.’

‘We store all the cars in the order they get brought here,’ the first officer explained, pointing at a worn map of the complex that had been crudely taped to the counter. ‘Cars for that week should be around here -in the blue quadrant on the third floor.’ He pointed at a section of the map. ‘The lift’s down there on the right.’

A few moments later the doors pinged shut behind them.

‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you?’ Tom said in a reproachful tone.

‘It could have been worse,’ she said with an amused smile. ‘I could have told them you were American.’

The lift opened on to the southern end of the third floor. It was a dark, depressing place, most of the neon tubes missing or broken, the walls encrusted with a moulding green deposit, the ceiling oozing a thick yellow mucus that hung in cancerous clumps. The floor was divided by lines of decaying concrete pillars into three long aisles, with cars parked along both sides and a spiralling up-and-down ramp at one end linking it to the other levels like a calcified umbilical cord.

They made their way over to the area pointed out by the guard, dodging around oily lakes of standing water, until they were about halfway down the left-hand aisle. Jennifer took out the keys and pressed the unlock button. Cavalli’s car eagerly identified itself with a double flash of its indicators-a souped-up Maserati Granturismo, worth almost double what Johnny was asking for. No wonder he’d pushed them into this.

‘What are you doing?’ Tom called in a low voice as Allegra opened the boot and leaned inside. ‘It must have been searched already.’

‘That doesn’t mean they found anything,’ she replied, her voice muffled.

‘Let’s just get out of here before they…’

She stood up, triumphantly holding a small piece of pottery that had been nestling in a fold in the muddy grey blanket that covered the boot floor. About the size of her hand, it featured a bearded man’s face painted in red against a black background.

‘It’s a vase fragment. Probably Apullian, which dates it to between 430 and 300 BC.’

‘Dionysius?’ Tom ventured.

‘Yes,’ she said, looking impressed. ‘I’d guess it was part of a krater, a bowl used…’

‘For mixing wine and water,’ Tom said, grinning at her obvious surprise. ‘My parents were art dealers. My mother specialised in antiquities. I guess I was a good listener.’

‘Notice anything strange?’ she asked, handing it to him with a nod.

‘The edges are sharp.’ He frowned, gingerly drawing his finger over one of them as if it was a blade.

‘Sharp and clean,’ she agreed. ‘Which means the break is recent.’

‘You mean it was done after it was dug up?’ Tom gave her a puzzled look, still holding the fragment.

‘I mean it was done on purpose,’ she shot back, Tom detecting a hint of anger in her voice. ‘See how they’ve been careful not to damage the painted area so they can restore it.’

‘You mean it’s been smashed so it can be stuck back together again?’ he asked with a disbelieving smile.

‘It makes it easier to smuggle,’ she explained with a despairing shake of her head. ‘Unfortunately, we see it all the time. The fragments are called orphans. The dealers can sometimes make more money selling them off individually than they would get for an intact piece, because they can raise the price as the collector or museum gets more and more desperate to buy all the pieces. And of course, by the time the vase is fully restored, no one can track where or who they bought each fragment from. Everyone’s protected.’

‘Then Cavalli must have been working either with or for the League,’ Tom said grimly as she dropped the boot