Daniel Silva - The Heist

Gabriel slipped the car into gear and eased slowly down the steep drive, toward the home of a man whose life had been summarized in a single hollow line. A fine officer … He was certain of only one thing, that Jack Bradshaw, retired diplomat, consultant to firms doing business in the Middle East, collector of Italian art, had been a liar by trade. He knew this because he was a liar as well. Therefore, as he stepped from his car, he felt a certain kinship with the man whose life he was about to ransack. He came not as an enemy but as a friend, the perfect implement for an unpleasant job. In death there are no secrets, he thought, crossing the forecourt. And if there was a secret hidden in the beautiful villa by the lake, he was going to find it.

A Carabinieri officer in plain clothes waited in the entrance. He introduced himself as Lucca—no last name or rank, just Lucca—and offered Gabriel nothing but a pair of rubber gloves and plastic shoe covers. Gabriel was more than happy to put them on. The last thing he needed at this stage of his life was to leave his DNA at yet another Italian crime scene.

“You have one hour,” the Carabinieri man said. “And I’ll be coming with you.”

“I’ll take as long as I need,” replied Gabriel. “And you’re staying right here.”

When the officer offered no response, Gabriel pulled on the gloves and shoe covers and entered the villa. The first thing he noticed was the blood. It was hard not to; the entire stone floor of the entrance foyer was black with it. He wondered why the murder had occurred here rather than in a more secluded section of the house. It was possible Bradshaw had confronted his killers after they broke into the residence, but there was no evidence of forcible entry on the door or at the gate. The more logical explanation was that Bradshaw had admitted his assailants. He had known them, thought Gabriel. And, foolishly, he had trusted them enough to let them into his home.

From the entrance hall, Gabriel moved into the great room. It was elegantly furnished in silk-covered couches and chairs, and adorned with expensive tables, lamps, and trinkets of every kind. One wall was given over entirely to large windows that overlooked the lake; the others were hung with Italian Old Master paintings. Most were minor devotional pieces or portraits churned out by journeymen or followers of well-known painters from Venice and Florence. One, however, was a Roman architectural capriccio that clearly was the work of Giovanni Paolo Panini. Gabriel licked his gloved fingertip and dragged it across the surface. The Panini, like the other paintings displayed in the room, was sorely in need of a good cleaning.

Gabriel wiped the surface grime onto the leg of his jeans and walked over to an antique writing desk. On it were two silver-framed photographs of Jack Bradshaw in happier times. In the first he was posed before the Great Pyramid of Giza, a boyish forelock falling across a face that was full of hope and promise. In the second the backdrop was the ancient city of Petra in Jordan. It had been snapped, Gabriel supposed, when Bradshaw was serving at the British embassy in Amman. He looked older, harder, perhaps wiser. The Middle East was like that. It turned hope to despair, idealists into Machiavellians.

Gabriel opened the drawer of the writing table, found nothing of interest, then scrolled through the directory of missed calls on the telephone. One number, 6215845, appeared seven times—five times before Bradshaw’s death, and twice after. Gabriel lifted the receiver, pressed the autodial, and a few seconds later heard the distant tone of a telephone. After several rings came a series of clicks and rattles indicating that the person at the other end of the line had picked up the call and quickly hung up. Gabriel dialed the number again with the same result. But when he tried the number a third time, a male voice came on the line and in Italian said, “This is Father Marco. How can I help you?”

Gabriel gently replaced the receiver without speaking. Next to the phone was a message pad. He tore away the top page, jotted the phone number on the adjoining page, and slipped both into his coat pocket. Then he headed upstairs.

Paintings lined the wide central corridor and covered the walls of two otherwise empty bedrooms. Bradshaw had used a third bedroom for storage. Several dozen paintings, some in frames, some on their stretchers, leaned against the walls like folding chairs after a catered affair. Most of the paintings were Italian in origin, but there were several works by German, Flemish, and Dutch artists as well. One, a genre painting of Dutch washerwomen working in a courtyard, probably by an imitator of Willem Kalf, appeared as though it had recently been restored. Gabriel wondered why Bradshaw had decided to have the painting cleaned while others in his collection, some more valuable, languished beneath coats of yellowed varnish—and why, having done so, he had left it leaning against a wall in a storage room.

On the opposite side of the center hall were Bradshaw’s bedroom and office. Gabriel quickly searched them with the thoroughness of a man who knew how to hide things. In the bedroom, concealed beneath a Gatsbyesque pile of colorful shirts, he found a wrinkled manila envelope stuffed with several thousand euros that had somehow escaped the attention of General Ferrari’s men. In the office, he found file folders swollen with business papers, along with an impressive collection of monographs and catalogues. He also discovered documentation suggesting that Meridian Global Consulting had rented a vault in the Geneva Freeport. He wondered whether the documents had escaped the attention of the general’s men, too.

Gabriel slipped the Freeport documentation into his coat pocket and crossed the hallway to the room Bradshaw had used for storage. The three Dutch washerwomen were still toiling away in their cobblestone courtyard, oblivious to his presence. He crouched before the canvas and examined the brushwork carefully. It was quite obviously the work of an imitator, for it lacked any trace of confidence or spontaneity. Indeed, in Gabriel’s learned opinion, it had a paint-by-numbers quality to it, as if the artist had been staring at the original while he worked. Perhaps he had been.

Gabriel headed downstairs and, under the watchful gaze of the Carabinieri man, retrieved a handheld ultraviolet lamp from his overnight bag. When trained on an Old Master canvas in a darkened room, the lamp would reveal the extent of the last restoration by making the retouching appear as black blotches. Typically, a Dutch Old Master painting from that period had suffered minor to moderate losses, which meant the retouching—or inpainting, as it was known in the trade—would appear as speckles of black.

Gabriel returned to the room on the second floor of the villa, closed the door, and drew the blinds tightly. Then he switched on the ultraviolet lamp and pointed it toward the painting. The three Dutch washerwomen were no longer visible. The entire canvas was black as pitch.

AT A CHEMICAL SUPPLY COMPANY in an industrial quarter of Como, Gabriel purchased acetone, alcohol, distilled water, goggles, a glass beaker, and a protective mask. Next he stopped at an arts-and-crafts shop in the center of town where he picked up wooden dowels and a packet of cotton wool. Returning to the villa by the lake, he found the Carabinieri man waiting in the entrance with fresh gloves and shoe covers. This time, the Italian didn’t make any noises about a one-hour limit. He could see Gabriel was going to be a while.

“You’re not going to contaminate anything, are you?”