David Hewson - A Season for the Dead

Denney, once he had come to know the man, wondered why he’d gone to all that trouble. Emilio Neri could have sucked the life out of another human being just by looking at him. Still, the papers wrote only about Neri’s charitable activities after that.

Denney watched Neri’s big back at the window, wondering what was going through his head. There was just one thing Neri wanted now: the return of the money he had placed in Denney’s hands. If that happened, they would, once again, be on the best of terms.

The door into the room opened. Brendan Hanrahan walked in carrying a tray with coffee on it. Throwing a mint into his mouth, Neri turned to stare at him.

“Don’t they provide you with servants anymore, Michael?” Neri asked.

“Just helping out,” Hanrahan interjected. “This is a private meeting, gentlemen. None of you wants to advertise your presence, I imagine.”

“As if anything’s secret in this place these days,” Neri sniffed.

He cast a glance out of the window and then at Denney. “I’m amazed you still have one of the best views in the place. The Church is going soft.”

“Shall we get down to business, gentlemen?” Aitcheson complained.

“I want to be on the ten o’clock plane out of here.”

“Agreed,” Crespi said.

Neri sat down at the table opposite the little banker, grinning at him. “Have you managed to replace that clerk of yours yet, Crespi? The one who talked himself to death.”

The little banker went white. “My people are trustworthy. Every one of them. I stake my word on it.”

“You’re staking more than that, my friend,” Neri said. “Enough. You know my position. You know my responsibilities. You people talk. Tell me why we’re here.”

“To get ourselves out of a hole,” Hanrahan said, and passed around copies of a single printed page.

Neri scanned the document. “Doesn’t say here when I get my money back.”

“Emilio,” Denney replied with as much pleasantry as he could muster. “I can’t work magic. We all want our money back. We can all get it, I think. But it doesn’t come out of nowhere. We have to rebuild.”

Aitcheson hadn’t been listening. His eyes were fixed on the paper. “There’s this much money still left? Why didn’t I hear of this before?”

Crespi threw up his hands. “We’ve been liquidating assets for eighteen months. Quietly. Privately. Sometimes… We didn’t know if we’d get paid. I didn’t want to raise anyone’s hopes unnecessarily. This is all very complex, gentlemen. We had so many accounts. In so many places. I couldn’t tell you about all of them, my friend. I would have bored you rigid. And for what? You wanted to know what the return was. Not where it was coming from.” He stole a glance at Neri.

“That was all anyone wanted. It’s one reason we’re in this mess in the first place.”

Neri now seemed interested in the paper. “Who else knows about this money? Where is it exactly?”

“No one outside this room.” Hanrahan looked Neri in the face. “No offense but we’ve been too lax with our secrets already. Where it is, that’s my business.”

Some $3 billion had been seized by the United States authorities alone, on the basis of tax evasion and money laundering. It infuriated Denney. Had that remained undiscovered, he could have weathered the storm. Crespi’s feverish bid to liquidate what assets he could find and shift the funds into new, undiscovered accounts had, at least, offered him a lifeline. If only Aitcheson and Neri could be persuaded to grasp this.

“So we’re not paupers,” Neri said. “I walk into this room thinking this was money down the drain. Now you tell me there’s, what, sixty, seventy million dollars out there we can lay our hands on. How did this come about?”

“You don’t want to know,” Hanrahan said with a scowl.

“We have,” added Denney, “worked very hard. We’ve had to persuade people, induce them, get them to see our point of view. It’s not been easy.”

Neri sniffed into his hand. “I heard you’d been spending a lot of money. The price of a Rome whore’s gone up ten percent in the last six months, Michael. Was that your doing?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“And none of this for yourself? To get you safe passage out of this place, back to America?”

Denney’s hand stole across the table and gripped Neri’s arm. The large man stared balefully back.

“Emilio,” Michael Denney said, “I did this for us. We can be back in business. We can put some new people in place. Let them talk to the banking authorities. Let them run the risks. We just stay behind the scenes and pull the strings, as we should have done all along. This has been a learning experience for all of us. We come out of it stronger. Richer. More powerful. And in the end, yes, I can walk out of here. I can go back to America a free man because we’ll have a whole new field of people in our debt.”

Neri smiled and looked at Aitcheson. “You hear this? We’re building a new bank. And all it takes is sixty, seventy million dollars.”

“Not enough,” Aitcheson grumbled. “You know that.”

They hadn’t said no. They were interested. Denney could feel it.

They had the light of greed in their eyes. “So we raise more. We still have the contacts. They still have the need. Lombardia wasn’t brought down by us. We were the victims of the markets and laws that didn’t even exist when we first went into business. We wipe the slate clean, we start again, we stay one step ahead of the pack.”

Denney paused, to give what came next some theatrical effect. “It requires some investment on our own part. Personally I’ll throw every last cent I have into the pot. That’s a lot of money. All my money. Whatever you want to come in with, that’s your decision. We know this business, gentlemen. We’re extremely good at it. The best. We’re needed out there.”

Neri laughed, a big deep sound, and clapped Denney on the shoulder.

“You mean this, Michael? We’re back in business. What a salesman. What a guy.”

“We’re back in business,” Denney repeated.

Hanrahan’s phone rang. He answered it. His face went dark. Then he made an excuse and left the room.

“What do you think?” Denney asked the three men, unable to stop himself stealing a glance out of the window, thinking of the world beyond.

Twelve

There were two possibilities, Nic Costa decided. Falcone would either love the idea, or he would just go plain crazy—unless there were results. Given results, the severe, overdressed man he called inspector would, Nic thought, forgive almost anything.

The queue to the museum was still about fifty yards long though the place would close in an hour. Costa used his police card to work his way to the front, then put it discreetly away and paid for a ticket at the desk. He walked to the library, waved the police card at the bored attendant on the door and entered the Reading Room without waiting to be stopped.

The hard yellow light of the late afternoon streamed in from the courtyard onto a sea of empty desks. The place had a sharp antiseptic smell. Someone had been cleaning up. Costa went first to the old desk where, the day before, Hugh Fairchild’s skin had sat like the involuntary castoff from some giant lizard. He was aware that the attendant was on the phone already. The man’s low voice echoed across the spotless, vacant interior. Only one book remained out. It sat on a desk three along from the one Sara Farnese had occupied. He looked at it: something incomprehensible in medieval script. This was a place for a certain kind of human being and it was closing now, going to rest for the weekend.

Costa walked through the aisles, examining everything. Sure enough, the library was littered with security cameras: tiny dull eyes glinting back at him from discreet metal housings on the ceiling, in corners, attached to windows. He was no academic but he understood why they were there. The library was priceless. The only way to get access was by obtaining special permission, something even a longterm lecturer like Stefano Rinaldi had seemed to find difficult. This was a priceless store of irreplaceable treasures and one that loaned them to a grateful, privileged few to hold in their hands, to touch, admire and then return.