James Twining - The Geneva Deception

‘Are you sure it’s marble?’ Tom frowned. ‘It looks pretty thin. Almost like some sort of mask.’

‘You’re right,’ she said, peering at the image. ‘Strange. To be honest, I’ve never really seen anything like it before.’

‘Then we need to find someone who has. The photo was pushed too far down that seat to have fallen there accidentally. Cavalli must have hidden it for a reason.’

‘Well the obvious person is…’ Allegra began, breaking off as she realised what she was saying.

‘Your friend, the professor?’ Tom guessed.

‘I wasn’t thinking.’ She shook her head. ‘There’s no way I’m-’

‘You won’t have to, I’ll do the talking,’ Tom reassured her. ‘Where can I find him?’

‘Forget it,’ she sighed impatiently. ‘Gallo will have someone watching his apartment.’

‘He must go out?’

‘Not if he can avoid it,’ she said with a shake of her head. ‘Bad hip and a completely irrational fear of weeds.’

‘Weeds?’

‘He’s old. It’s a long story.’

Tom noticed that, for the briefest of moments, she allowed herself to smile. Then, just as quickly, her face clouded over again.

‘Then I’ll have to find a way in. There must be-’

‘What time is it?’ she interrupted, gripping Tom’s arm.

‘What?’

‘The time?’

He glanced up at the pizza-inspired clock tethered to the wall over the toilet.

‘Just after ten. Why?’ Tom asked as she excitedly stuffed the photograph into her pocket.

‘He’s giving a lecture this morning,’ she exclaimed, sidling along the bench so that she could stand up. ‘I saw his notes yesterday. Eleven o’clock at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj.’

Tom jumped up, throwing a handful of change down.

‘That doesn’t give us much time.’

Hotel Ritz, Madrid, Spain 19th March-9.48 a.m.

‘Oh. It’s you.’

Director Bury’s face fell, either too jet-lagged or annoyed to conceal his disappointment. It was hard to tell.

‘Yes, sir.’ Verity Bruce nodded, trying to sound like she hadn’t noticed. ‘It’s me.’

There was a long pause, and he looked at her hopefully, as if she might suddenly remember that she needed to be somewhere else, or that she had accidentally knocked on the wrong door. But she said nothing, playing instead with the silver locket around her neck in the knowledge that it would draw his eyes towards the bronzed curve of her breasts.

‘Yes, well,’ Bury coughed nervously, his eyes flicking to his feet and then to a point about three inches above her head. ‘You’d better come in.’

To say that he had been deliberately avoiding her since the unveiling of the kouros would have been going too far. They’d both had lunch with someone from the mayor’s office the previous day, for example, both sat in the first-class cabin together on the flight over and both been guests at that morning’s cultural exchange breakfast at the embassy. But to say that he had been avoiding being alone with her would have been entirely accurate. He had sought safety in numbers, inventing a reason to leave the lunch early so they wouldn’t have to share a taxi back to the museum, arriving at the breakfast late to avoid getting trapped over muffins and orange juice. That’s why she’d followed him back to his hotel suite now. She’d known he would be alone and out of excuses.

He walked over to the desk and perched on its edge, indicating that she should sit in one of the low armchairs opposite. She recognised this as one of his usual tricks; a clumsy attempt, no doubt picked up from some assertiveness training course, to gain the psychological advantage by physically dominating the conversation.

‘I’ll stand, if that’s all right,’ she said, enjoying his small flicker of anxiety.

‘Good idea.’ He jumped up, clearly not wanting to get caught out at his own game. ‘Too much sitting around in this job.’

‘Dominic, I thought it was time we talked. Alone.’

‘Yes, yes.’ Bury seemed strangely pleased that she’d said this, like someone who was desperate to break up with their partner, but too chicken to bring it up first. He gave a nervous laugh. ‘Drink?’

The offer appeared to be directed more at himself than her. She shook her head, her eyebrows raised in surprise.

‘It’s a little early, isn’t it?’

‘Not in Europe,’ he said quickly. ‘When in Rome and all that, hey?’

There was another strained silence as he busied himself over a bottle of scotch and some ice, the neck of the bottle chiming against the glass’s rim as his hand trembled while he poured.

‘Cheers!’ he said, with a rather forced enthusiasm.

‘About the other day…’ she began.

‘Very unfortunate,’ he immediately agreed, refilling his glass. ‘All those people, all those questions…’ He knocked back another mouthful, swallowing it before it had touched the back of his throat. ‘It doesn’t look good, you understand.’

‘The kouros is genuine,’ she insisted. ‘You saw the forensic tests.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Only sometimes it’s easier for people to attack us than it is for them to accept that their fixed views on the evolution of Greek sculpture might be wrong,’ she said, paraphrasing Faulks’s rather more eloquent argument from the previous day.

‘I know, I know.’ Bury sat down wearily, momentarily forgetting his usual mind games, it seemed. ‘But the trustees…’ he said the word as if they were a local street gang who he suspected of vandalising his car. ‘They get nervous.’

‘Building a collection like ours isn’t risk free,’ she observed dryly. ‘Their canapés and cocktails come with some strings attached.’

‘They don’t understand the art world,’ he agreed. ‘They don’t understand what it takes to play catch-up with the Europeans and the Met.’

‘They’re out of their depth,’ she nodded. ‘And they’re dragging us under with them.’

He shrugged and gave a weak smile, not disagreeing with her, she noted.

‘They just want to wake up to the right sort of headlines.’

‘Then I have just the thing for them,’ she jumped in, sensing her moment. ‘A unique piece. Impeccable provenance. I’m flying to Geneva tomorrow to see it.’

‘Verity-’ he stood up again, as if he sensed a negotiation looming and therefore the need to physically reassert himself once more ‘- I have to tell you that it’s going to be a while before the trustees, or me, for that matter…’

She thrust the Polaroid Faulks had entrusted her with towards him. He sat down again heavily, his face pale. ‘That’s…’

‘Impossible? Wait until I tell you who I think carved it.’

Piazza del Collegio Romano, Rome 19th March-10.49 a.m.

This was Aurelio’s Eco’s favourite art gallery. Quite an accolade, when you considered the competition. Yes, the Capitoline Museum was richer, the Vatican Museum bigger, the Galleria Borghese more beautiful. But their fatal flaw was to have been crudely sewn together from larger collections by different patrons over time, leaving ugly and unnatural scars where they joined and overlapped.

The Doria Pamphilj, on the other hand, had been carefully built over the centuries by a single family. In Aurelio’s eyes this gave it a completely unique integrity of vision and purpose that stretched unbroken, like a golden thread, back through time. It was a sacred flame, carefully tended by each passing generation and then handed on to the next custodian to nurture. Even today, the family still lived in the palazzo’s private apartments, still owned the fabulous gallery that sheltered within its thick walls. He rather liked this-it appealed to his sense of the past and the present and the future and how they were inexorably wedded through history.