CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
They had stepped into the bedroom, and the contrast with the apartment they had just come from could not have been more marked. It was immaculately arranged, the dark blue bedspread coordinating perfectly with the elaborate Chinese wallpaper and the cream rug on the polished wooden floor. A few framed photographs had been arranged on the bedside table and the mirrored doors that ran down the far wall opened to reveal a wardrobe of suits, shirts, shoes, and ties, all sorted by color, alongside the paraphernalia of Ranieri’s ecclesiastical dress. Clearly whatever he did, it paid well.
The bedroom led onto a large kitchen, with the front door set into the right-hand wall. An archway opposite gave onto an office with a large desk at one end. Here, the darkness was lifted by a synthetic red glow as the late-afternoon sun filtered in through the closed curtains. Tom and Jennifer stood on the threshold and peered inside.
“Here you go,” said Jennifer. She had found a switch beside the entrance and turned it on.
“Let’s see what we’ve got.”
Tom made his way to the desk and began leafing through the papers on it before moving to the drawers. There was nothing there. Invoices, faxes, orders. It seemed that Ranieri had been running some sort of wine-importing business as a cover.
In a way, he was surprised he was bothering looking at all, given his natural aversion to working with any sort of cop, especially a fed, although Jennifer was clearly not the sort of thick-skulled flatfoot that he was used to dealing with. Quite the opposite, in fact. But Tom was also the sort of person who liked a challenge. And, if truth be known, he was also rather intrigued by these coins and how they had found their way from Fort Knox into Ranieri’s hands, although he would never say as much to Jennifer.
“This is what we need,” said Jennifer, picking up an electrical cable that led from the desk to a socket in the wall. “His laptop. Maybe someone else has been here before us and taken it?”
“Maybe it’s been hidden somewhere here?”
“I’ll go and take a look in the bedroom,” she volunteered.
Tom sat down heavily in one of the chairs and let his eyes play over the room, looking for something, anything that could help. The furnishings were uncompromisingly modern. The coffee table and desk matched, smoked glass laid on a brushed steel frame. The black leather sofa and chairs were stiff and stubby, their backs set at a steep, uncomfortable angle that pushed Tom’s knees up to his chest. The walls were white and punctuated by a series of black-and-white photographs of New York landmarks. The triangular wedge of the Flatiron building, the streamlined chrome of the Chrysler building, the granite thrust of the Empire State.
Faced with the monochromatic masculinity of the room, Tom’s eyes were irresistibly drawn to the red wastepaper basket that nestled in the curve of the desk’s legs. He picked it up distractedly, noting its ragged and chipped surface that suggested an old and familiar possession, still pressed into loyal service despite its bold variance to the overall color scheme.
Reaching in, he pulled out a newspaper. Nothing strange in that. Except… maybe the date?
“When did you say Ranieri was killed?” he called through to Jennifer.
“The sixteenth. Why?” her voice echoed back through the silent apartment.
“I might have something here.”
Jennifer walked back into the room, her face expectant.
“I just found this paper. It’s dated the twentieth. That’s four days after Ranieri was killed. So someone else has been here.”
“And probably destroyed or taken anything useful,” she said, her voice disappointed.
“Except… ” Tom indicated the room around them. “Take a look at this place. It’s not been trashed like the decoy apartment, has it?”
“Meaning?”
“That whoever it was, they knew this place and didn’t need to tear it apart. They knew how to get in, where things were kept, everything.”
“Maybe he had a partner?” Jennifer grimaced at the unforgiving rigidity of the chair as she sat down opposite Tom. “Someone who’d been here before with him.”
“Someone German, perhaps?” Tom suggested, holding up the paper he had retrieved from the trash. “Our mystery guest reads the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung. In fact… ” Tom examined it more carefully. “Don’t you think it looks like he folded it open at this article in particular?”
The paper had been neatly folded into four, forming a large rectangle that opened much like a book. One article dominated the middle of the front page, while the other pages were dissected and broken by competing articles, ads, and photos.
“What does the headline say?” Jennifer got up and moved over to Tom, sitting next to him on the arm of the sofa.
“Suche geht weiter für Schiphol Flughafen-Diebe,” Tom read out. “Search continues for Schiphol Airport thieves,” he translated.
“Schiphol? Schiphol in Holland?”
“You know another?” asked Tom.
“Cute.” Jennifer made a face. She extracted her mobile phone from her purse and dialed a number. “Max Springer, please.” There was a pause. “Max, it’s Jennifer. Fine, thanks. Are you at your desk? Great. I want you to check something out for me. Can you see what you’ve got about a theft from Schiphol Airport a few weeks ago. Yes, of course Schiphol in Holland.” She winked at Tom. “You know another?”
“What are you thinking?” Tom asked. She cupped her hand over the mouthpiece.
“We get daily crime reports from Interpol. They’re filed into our databases. Whatever happened at Schiphol should be in there somewhere.” She snatched her hand away from the mouthpiece. “Yeah, hi, I’m still here. You found something, okay, great. Run me through it. Slowly.” She jotted down some notes on a scrap of paper that she grabbed from the desk. “Okay… okay. Is that it? Great. What’s that? I can’t talk to him right now.” Her eyes flicked to Tom and then back down to the ground. “Tell him I’ll call him tonight. Thanks, Max.” She hung up.
“So?”
“There was an armed robbery from the customs warehouse at Schiphol Airport on July eleventh. Three guys snatched a fortune in vintage wine and jewelry in a hijacked UPS van. Killed two guards. Then ten days later on the twenty-first, a man was stabbed in a phone booth in Amsterdam. Dutch police identified the victim as Karl Steiner.” Jennifer looked down at her scribbled notes as she spoke. “An East German with a record as long as your arm for armed robbery and handling stolen goods. When they got to his place they found several cases of vintage wine and what was left of the jewelry.”
“In other words, he pulled the airport job,” said Tom, standing up.
“It gets better. It turns out he was arrested on the fourteenth. In Paris. Apparently he’d started a fight outside a nightclub. Guess who bailed him out the next morning?”
“Ranieri?” His tone was more hopeful than questioning.
“You got it.” Jennifer smiled triumphantly.
Tom rubbed his right temple, his forehead creased in thought.
“Well, that’s it, then. You’ve been trying to work out how Ranieri got the coin, haven’t you? How this carefully constructed Fort Knox robbery went wrong. Now we know.”
“We do?”
“Amsterdam’s a major trade hub. All sorts of valuable merchandise comes through there, some of it legally, some not. Let’s say Steiner decided to help himself to a piece of the action. He knocks off the airport and steals a vanload of wine and jewels. But what if he got lucky? What if when he unpacked it all, he found the coins hidden in one of the boxes?”