‘Why don’t you leave the odds to the experts?’ Kezman snapped.
‘How would you price a federal government guarantee?’
There was a pause.
‘Go on.’
Faulks smiled. He had his attention now.
‘An…item has come into my possession. An item of immense historical and cultural significance. I want you to buy it off me for ten million dollars.’
‘Sure. Why not make it twenty?’ Kezman gave a hollow laugh. ‘The global economy’s on its knees, but let’s not let small details like that get in the way.’
‘Then, you’re going to donate it to Verity Bruce at the Getty,’ he continued, ignoring the interruption. ‘She will value it at fifty million, its true price. This will lead the IRS…’
‘To give me a seventeen and a half million tax credit for having made a fifty-million-dollar charitable donation,’ Kezman breathed, his flippant tone vanishing.
‘Which, subtracting the ten you will have paid me, nets out at a seven and a half million profit, courtesy of Uncle Sam. Not to mention the PR value of the coverage that will be triggered by your generosity,’ Faulks added. ‘Hell, they’d probably name a wing after you, if you asked.’
‘How firm is the valuation?’
‘Do you know Verity Bruce?’ Faulks asked.
‘I had breakfast with her two weeks ago.’
‘She’s due here tomorrow to authenticate the piece. Something this rare isn’t affected by shortterm economic factors. The value will hold.’
Kezman was silent for a few moments. Faulks waited, knowing that his next question would reveal how well he’d played his hand.
‘When would you need the money?’
Blackjack.
‘A few days. A week at most.’
‘If Verity okays it, I’m in,’ Kezman confirmed. ‘You have my private number now. Just get her to call me when she’s seen it.’
‘Wait! Don’t you even want to know what it is?’ Faulks asked with a frown.
A pause.
‘Will I make any more if I do?’
‘No,’ Faulks conceded.
‘Then why should I care?’
FORTY-SIX
Via del Governo Vecchio, Rome 19th March-11.32 a.m.
The streets were dark and narrow here, the buildings seeming to arch together over Tom and Allegra’s heads like trees kissing over a country lane. It was busy too; people carefully picking their way along the narrow pavements, dodging around the occasional dog turds and an elderly woman who was furiously scrubbing her marble doorstep. The traffic, meanwhile, was backed up behind a florist’s van which had stopped to make a delivery. Alerted by the relentless sounding of impatient car horns, a few people were leaning curiously over their balconies, some observing events with a detached familiarity, others hurling insults at the van driver for his selfishness. Glancing up, he made an obscene gesture, and pulled away.
Allegra was silent, her eyes rarely lifting from her shoes. She was hurting, Tom knew, probably even blaming herself for Aurelio’s betrayal, as if his selfishness and pride was somehow her fault. He tried to think of something to say that might comfort her and relieve her imagined guilt. But he couldn’t. Not without lying. The truth was that in time the floodwaters of her anger and confusion would recede, leaving behind them the tidemark of their lost friendship. And whatever he said, that would never fade. He, of all people, bore the fears of betrayal.
‘What other Phidias pieces are there?’ he asked, stepping to one side to let a woman past holding on to five yapping dogs, the leashes stretching from her hands like tentacles.
‘There’s a torso of Athena in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris that’s been attributed to him,’ she replied without looking up. ‘And they found a cup inscribed with his name in the ruins of the workshop at Olympia where he assembled the statue of Zeus.’
‘But nothing like the mask?’
‘Not even close.’ She shook her head. ‘If Aurelio’s right, it’s priceless.’
‘Everything has a price,’ Tom smiled. ‘The trick is finding someone willing to pay it.’
‘Maybe that’s what Cavalli was doing the night he was killed,’ she said, grimacing as an ancient Vespa laboured past, its wheezing engine making the windows around them rattle under the strain. ‘Meeting a buyer. Or at least someone he thought was a buyer.’
‘It would explain why he had the Polaroid on him,’ Tom agreed. ‘And why he hid it when he realised what they really wanted.’
‘But not where he got the mask from in the first place.’ She paused, frowning, as the road brought them out on to the Piazza Ponte Sant’Angelo. ‘What are we doing here?’
‘Isn’t this where you said Cavalli was killed?’ Tom asked.
‘Yes, but…’
‘I thought we should take a look.’
A steady two-way traffic of pedestrians was streaming over the bridge’s polished cobbles, the hands and faces of the statues lining the parapet seeming strangely animated under the sun’s flickering caress, as if they were waving them forward. For Tom, at least, the wide-open vista was a welcome relief from the narrow street’s dark embrace.
‘Where did they find him?’ he asked, hands shoved deep into his coat pockets.
‘In the river. Hanging from one of the statues.’
‘Killed on the anniversary of Caesar’s murder, only for Ricci to be murdered on the site of Caesar’s assassination,’ he said thoughtfully.
‘With both Ricci’s and Argento’s deaths staged as a re-enactment of a Caravaggio painting.’ She nodded impatiently. ‘We’ve been through all this.’
‘I know.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s just that everything about these murders has been so deliberate. The dates, the locations, the arrangement of the bodies, the careful echoing of some element of the one that had preceded it. It’s almost as if…they weren’t just killings.’
‘Then what were they?’
Tom paused before answering. In the distance the glorious dome of St Peter’s rose into the sky, massive and immutable. Around it swarmed a flock of pigeons, their solid mass wheeling and circling like a shroud caught in the wind.
‘Messages,’ he said eventually. ‘Maybe someone was trying to have a conversation.’
‘If you’re right it started with Cavalli,’ she said slowly, her eyes narrowing in understanding.
‘Exactly. So why kill him here? Why this bridge? They must have chosen it for a reason.’
Allegra paused a few moments before answering, her face creased in thought.
‘It was originally built to connect the city to Hadrian’s mausoleum. Before becoming a toll road for pilgrims who wanted to reach St Peter’s. And in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, famously of course, they used to display the bodies of executed prisoners along it as a warning.’
‘A warning to who?’ Tom frowned, then nodded at the weathered shapes looming over them. ‘What about the statues? Do they mean anything?’
‘Commissioned from Bernini by Pope Clement IX. Each angel is holding an object from the Passion. Cavalli’s rope was tied to the one holding a cross.’
‘Which was then echoed by Ricci’s inverted crucifixion and Argento being found in a church.’ Tom clicked his fingers as two more small pieces of the puzzle fell into place.
