IT WAS A BRISK, professional operation. In the space of four minutes they ascertained the house was empty, removed the front door, and were inside, wandering the big, airy rooms, admiring a residence that was surely beyond the scope of most senior police officers. Randazzo liked paintings. That surprised Nic Costa, though he couldn’t help but wonder if it was really the commissario’s wife’s taste they were seeing here in the selection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century canvases, a handful of old religious icons and set upon set of antique Japanese prints.
Luca Zecchini walked around examining what was there with a professional eye, taking photos, referring from time to time to some visual database he kept on a little palmtop computer in his jacket pocket. He didn’t say a thing. He didn’t look happy. Peroni was shooting Costa concerned glances. This wasn’t their only opening, but it was, the two men had assumed, their best.
“Luca,” Costa said when they’d been around every room on the ground floor, with the Carabinieri man shaking his head constantly. “What have we got?”
“I don’t know,” he muttered. “Maybe something. Maybe not. If I’m going to pull this guy in today, I need something positive. I can’t just do it on suspicion. Even if this is illegal, it’s minor stuff, the kind of things you’d buy from an antiques fair. Nothing terribly valuable. If we try to nail the bastard on this alone, he’ll just feign ignorance. Say he bought it at some sale somewhere. It’s going to be hard to prove otherwise.”
“What about the icons?” Costa asked. “Don’t you think they’re Serbian?”
“Sure. But what does that tell us? Without positive identification, without proof of provenance, all we’ve got are suspicions. There’s nothing here that raises any flags. When I get back to Verona, maybe. But that’s going to take time. Don’t get me wrong. I can work on the paintings. I just . . .” He was trying to soften the blow. “I can’t give you anything straightaway. Sorry.”
Peroni was scratching his head. “It wasn’t just paintings,” the big cop objected. “That may be all you saw two days ago, Nic. But there was more. Weird stuff.”
Plenty of weird stuff, Costa thought, when he looked at the shelves. Oriental ceramics. Cloisonné vases and screens. Randazzo’s home was a mishmash of styles, regions and eras that denoted a couple of uncertain tastes.
“The weirdest,” Peroni said, “was in there.”
He was pointing to a glass cabinet hidden in a corner near the fireplace, something Costa had never noticed.
Peroni walked over, opened the doors and returned with a small, very old statue. A squat, grinning figure in worn stone, seated cross-legged with a beaded necklace and an expression halfway between a Buddha’s and a satyr’s.
“It sort of stuck in my mind,” Peroni explained, pointing to the huge erection which rose between the creature’s legs.
Luca Zecchini took the object from him, turning it in his hands. Then the Carabinieri major gave the statue back to Peroni, pulled the palmtop out of his pocket and began to punch the buttons. In just a couple of seconds he stopped, grinned at both of them, then turned the little screen round for them to see. It was a photo of something that looked very like Randazzo’s object.
“Babylonian,” he said. “Seen a few like this since Iraq fell.”
“It’s the one in the picture?” Peroni asked.
“No. But it’s close enough.”
“Valuable?”
Zecchini nodded. “In a roundabout way. These things are what passes for hard currency in the drug trade. We’re doing pretty well working on cross-border money laundering. It’s not easy to move big amounts of cash around the world anymore. You get asked awkward questions when you try to bank it.”
“So you ship valuable antiques instead,” Costa said. “They’re easier to smuggle. And when they get to the other end, someone turns them into money and pays off the debt.”
“Exactly,” Zecchini agreed, seemingly impressed by Costa’s knowledge. “These things were household gods. Every worthwhile specimen was either in a private collection or Iraq’s museums. There’s so much stuff leaking out of Baghdad, all of it through criminal channels, we’re under strict instructions to report every last piece we come across.”
One of those little planes interrupted the conversation, buzzing low overhead. They had to wait for it to go away before anyone could speak.
“So it’s good?” Peroni asked.
Zecchini pulled out his mobile phone. “It’s a start. Commissario Randazzo and I need to meet. Are you coming along?”
Costa shook his head, then glanced at his partner. “Gianni, you go. I’ve something to do.”
Peroni didn’t look too pleased. “Anyone I know? I don’t like being kept in the dark.”
“Just a couple of ghosts,” Costa replied, nodding towards the window and the blue sky beyond. “And maybe not even that.”
AS THE CARABINIERI WENT THROUGH COMMISSARIO Randazzo’s personal belongings in a mansion too big for a policeman, Emily Deacon sat on the deck of Hugo Massiter’s launch, picking at the remains of a late breakfast, shielded from the gaze of the tourists on the waterfront behind thick, smoked glass. She had waited for this opportunity. Massiter had left the vessel to revisit his lawyers, and declared he wouldn’t be returning until the afternoon. She could, he said, drop by if she wanted. It was an invitation she left open. There was work to do. The Croatian gangsters seemed to have departed en masse too. Now it was just her and the three Filipino women who cleaned and cooked and served, then retired to their quarters to await orders.
Evidence.
That was what Nic needed, needed it desperately. In any form she could find.
She stood up, brushed the crumbs of the morning cornetto off her tee-shirt, then rang for one of the Filipinos to come to clear up.
It was the youngest who arrived from the galley, dressed in white, dark hair tied back in a bun. A girl who looked no more than eighteen. Emily watched her with the unconcerned disdain she imagined was expected in the circumstances.
“What’s your name?” she asked in Italian.
The girl’s eyes flickered, fearful. Emily repeated the question in English.
“Flora,” she replied, still nervous.
“It doesn’t matter that you don’t speak Italian.”
“Supposed to.”
She didn’t like talking. Massiter preferred his female servants to keep quiet.
“Says who?”
The girl glanced backwards, to where the men would normally be. “Them.”
Emily wondered what the Croatians were like when they were on their own with these women. It wasn’t hard to guess.
“I could teach you some words. If you like.”
“Not right.”
The girl knew her place. And this was, Emily realised, the wrong tack, not that she relished the only alternative.
“Mr. Massiter’s not happy with the state of his office,” she said severely.
The girl looked shocked. “I cleaned it! Last night!”
“I don’t care. He’s not happy. If he fires you here . . .”
Flora put down the plates. She was trembling so much she was close to dropping them.
“You won’t get home, will you?” Emily continued. “You’d just be destitute there. No money. No friends. What happens to girls like that, do you think, Flora? Can you imagine?”
“I . . . keep trying.”
She was close to tears. Emily hated this.
“Come with me,” she ordered. “Maybe we can get you a second chance.”
They went downstairs, three short flights, until they came to the secure metal door of Massiter’s lair.