Arcadia Burns (10 page)

“What’s more, we’re talking about twelve statues,” the
treasure hunter went on, “and we can now say for certain that at least seven were removed from their plinths by the same high-precision methods. In the photos you gave us, the statues were all of panthers and snakes. Some of them were in pieces, or badly damaged. But even those remains must have been salvaged to the very last fragment, all but the plinths. Whoever did it was very thorough, and also treated his find with great respect. Those people didn’t make it easy for themselves. And we have to assume that they could afford to work without any financial restrictions.”

Rosa nodded to Alessandro. She silently formed the word
TABULA
with her lips.

Campbell tapped his keyboard, and the underwater picture disappeared. He half turned and spoke to one of the women at the instruments. “Give me number thirty-four on seven, Ruth, please.”

The gray-blue surface of the sea came on-screen, obviously a photo taken at a steep angle from a great height.

“What you see here,” Campbell told Rosa and Alessandro, “is secret material that I…well, let’s say I borrowed it.”

“Looks like Google Earth,” Rosa commented.

“Almost. And that’s why I mention it, so that you won’t be surprised, later, about certain items I’ll be charging you for.” The treasure hunter paused and then went on. “The Mediterranean between North Africa and southern Italy is a part of the world under more surveillance than most. And around Sicily the security network is biggest of all.” He added, with an ironic undertone, “There must be a great many people in
these parts earning their money through illegal activities.”

“With stolen military photographs?” Rosa suggested.

“I’m about to show you an enlargement of our mysterious picture. If the water was as transparent as everyone thinks, we’d be able to see the twelve statues now.”

“Or their plinths,” said Alessandro.

“No,” the professor contradicted him, “because this picture was taken before the statues were salvaged. As you’ll see.”

“When was that?” asked Rosa.

“On January seventeenth, just under a month ago. Of course there was no nonstop filming of every square sea mile, but photographs were taken at regular intervals. Every yard of the Mediterranean has some satellite camera or other turned on it about every forty-five minutes. All we had to do was get hold of the material we wanted and evaluate it.”

“So?”

“Here, forty-seven minutes later.” The picture changed, and this time a boat could be clearly seen at its center. “And again three-quarters of an hour later.” No change; the vessel was still in the same place. “There they are,” said Campbell.

Alessandro narrowed his eyes. “Who?”

“Not the army, that at least is certain. And the boat we’re looking at here is obviously smaller than the
Colony
. It has no crane, just a set of cable winches along the rail. Obviously the statues were dragged away underwater, then brought to the surface and unloaded somewhere else.”

He zoomed in closer to the vessel, but now the picture was so pixelated that he withdrew again with a grunt. “Ruth, how
the hell do I get that filter on-screen?”

The woman behind them at the console told him a sequence of keys. When Campbell entered the code, his face brightened again. This time the picture was much sharper. Once again he tapped his ballpoint on the glass surface. “Here, and here, and here…those are the divers they sent down.”

The three figures were still not clearly visible, only pale outlines at the rail.

“Looks like they’re not wearing diving suits,” said Alessandro.

“Strange, isn’t it?”

“Do you mean they went down there without any diving equipment?”

Campbell nodded. “No suits. No oxygen flasks. Not even flippers, for God’s sake!”

Alessandro shook his head, baffled. “What exactly are we looking at, please?”

Campbell cleared his throat. “Four pictures farther on, they’re coming up from the water again.” He brought up a new picture on the screen: the boat, the sea—and the three pale outlines, two of them still in the water, the other on a ladder outside the hull. “About three hours later. Not nearly enough time for three of them to cut seven of those statues away from their plinths and collect the leftover fragments.”

“Maybe they went down again later,” said Rosa.

“We’ve checked all the pictures from the day when you two were there to the day when we began our investigations. Nothing. The boat was there only on January seventeenth,
and for less than four hours. And as far as we can work it out, only those three divers went into the water during that time. Without any equipment apart from a few tools that were probably cutters of some kind.”

Campbell paused, to let his words sink in. Rosa and Alessandro said nothing.

“But that’s not all,” he finally said. “The vessel set off again a little later. It’s not in the next photograph. However, we did succeed in tracing its route.” He was going to give Ruth instructions over his shoulder, but she was already ahead of him.

“Got it,” she called. Rosa heard her fingers tapping the keys.

Several satellite pictures appeared on the screen in quick succession, but this time the coordinates at the edge changed with each photo. “They’re on their way south,” Campbell explained. “They go south for about an hour. Then they come to this.”

Rosa narrowed her eyes as if she could see the picture more clearly that way. Alessandro whistled through his teeth.

The boat looked tiny now. It was lying alongside a much larger ship at least ten times its length. The huge vessel was snow white, with complex superstructures, many decks, and several helicopter landing pads.

The next picture came up. The smaller boat beside the gigantic white vessel had disappeared.

“It doesn’t reappear anywhere in this area,” said Campbell. “They must have taken it on board. Including what was hanging beneath the surface from the cable winches. It all seems
to have happened very fast. I’d say they were pros—except that even professionals would need some kind of breathing apparatus and diving suits. As it is, I can only say I haven’t the faintest idea who they were. Not the army. And not any treasure hunters that I’ve ever heard of. Experts, for sure—but not from the same planet as mine.”

Still baffled, Alessandro shook his head. “That’s a cruise ship.”

Campbell nodded. His fingers moved nimbly over the keyboard, and he zoomed in on the picture.

The view centered on one of the landing pads, indicated on-screen by a letter
H
inside a circle. Rosa held her breath.

Something was inscribed on the deck in big black letters, easily visible to pilots flying that way.

Stabat Mater
.

“T
HANASSIS
,” she exclaimed.

Alessandro and Professor Campbell looked away from the monitor in surprise. “You know the vessel?” asked the treasure hunter.

“Only by name. It belongs to a Greek shipowner called Thanassis.”

“I thought he was dead,” said Alessandro.

“There were reports in the media a few years back that he was very sick,” replied the professor. “But there was never any official announcement of his death, only all kinds of rumors and assumptions. It’s a fact that he hasn’t been seen in public since.”

“And now he’s developed a taste for underwater archaeology?” asked Rosa. But she was really thinking of something very different. The Dream Room. Danai Thanassis dancing in her hoop skirt, protected by her bodyguards. Her dreamy, almost ecstatic expression.

Campbell shrugged his shoulders. “All we could find out in a hurry was that the
Stabat Mater
has been sailing between Europe and North America for years. She never seems to stay in any harbor for long, usually just for a few days. Clearly it’s impossible to book a passage on board. Either the cruises
are reserved for very exclusive customers, or she crosses the Atlantic as good as empty. A kind of ghost ship.” He grinned, but Rosa didn’t feel like laughing. There was something wraith-like about Danai Thanassis, yes, but she was certainly no ghost.

“Do you think old Thanassis is on board?” asked Alessandro. “And that’s why no one sees him these days?”

“Possibly. We got these photos only yesterday evening, so we’ve hardly had time to research more than the most essential features.”

“The shipowner’s daughter lives on the
Stabat Mater
,” said Rosa. “I think.”

Alessandro looked at her in surprise. “How do you know all this?”

She searched her mind for a way to evade the question, but then said, straight out, “From Michele.”

He stared at her.

“Let’s talk about it later,” she suggested.

Campbell looked over his shoulder again. “Ruth, did you find out anything about the route after that?”

The woman in overalls shook her head. “No, nothing. Access is barred, even to our contact.”

Alessandro didn’t take his eyes off Rosa. “You talked to Michele?”

“Not now.” Although everything in her urged her to tell him the truth—and ask what he knew about it himself—she was saving all that until they were alone. She was already annoyed with herself for mentioning Thanassis at all.

Clearly Campbell could sense the tension between them. “Looks like we won’t get anything more on the later route of the
Stabat Mater
. We know that she left the Strait of Messina going southwest, but after that her trail is lost in the open Mediterranean. We can’t find any more satellite pictures of her. Obviously they were all deleted after my contact got us that first series of photos.”

“The Thanassis family has deeper pockets than ours,” said Alessandro. There was unconcealed belligerence in his voice. Rosa had always liked that about him, but at the moment it made her furious. Why did he think he could blame her? Because she’d gone against his wishes by getting in touch with the New York Carnevares? She was the one who’d almost been torn to pieces in Central Park. She didn’t need him playing the role of her protector in hindsight.

Campbell rose from his swivel chair and looked at the two of them, his eyebrows raised. “How about leaving us to get on with our work now? And there seems to be plenty that you two want to discuss.”

Reluctantly, Rosa stopped staring at Alessandro and left the control room.

“Keep me up to date,” she heard him say behind her, and then she hurried over the gangplank to the
Gaia
and waited for him to join her on the upper deck.

“You knew!” she cried into the wind. “As soon as I told you about the party in the Village, you knew!”

She was standing by the rail, both hands clutching the cool
iron, staring out at the horizon. Where the sky and the sea met, she could see the blur of a brownish-gray line. Sicily.

The wind tasted salty on her lips and stung her eyes. But she didn’t want to turn around. He was standing behind her on the deck, and had listened in silence as she told him everything, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at him. She wished she could be somewhere else. Alone with her anger and grief and her unanswered questions.

“I wanted to find out the truth,” he said gloomily. “Until you told me on the phone, I had no idea it had happened at that party. You have to believe me. And after that…right after that I began asking questions. There are people very close to Michele who owe me. I get information from them.” He added, more quietly, “About that, too.”

“And when were you planning to tell me the truth? That it was Tano? And Michele.”

He said nothing for some time, and she heard him take a step toward her. Maybe he was thinking of touching her, but then he stopped. “Michele will pay for that,” he said. “He won’t get away this time.”

She closed her eyes, blinking the tears away. “I only wanted to
know
. To hear the truth. You should have left the way I went about it up to me.” She slowly shook her head, got swirling strands of hair in her mouth, and brushed them back from her face. “All I wanted was for you to be honest with me.”

He moved closer; she could feel him now, but she tried to suppress the feverish tingling that he set off when he came near her. Not now.

“I didn’t want to keep it secret from you,” he defended. “But what did you expect? For me to call you in New York and tell you over the phone that it was Tano, of all people—” His voice was hoarse; he paused, then went on hesitantly. “That it was that bastard and Michele…that they were behind it?”

She thought again how exhausted and drained he looked. Maybe discussions until late into the night weren’t the only reason for that.

Slowly, she turned to him. “I have to be able to trust you. Trust you entirely and forever. I don’t want any secrets between us, or at least no secrets that have to do with
both
of us.”

He didn’t avoid her eyes, but she could see from looking at him that he would have liked to. “I wondered how to tell you. And when the best time would be. But there’s never a good moment to say: By the way, the bastard who raped you was my cousin.”

She gently touched his cheek with her hand, ran it over his unruly hair. “So now Michele simply gets away with it.”

“Michele is going to be sorry he ever set eyes on you,” he told her. “And Tano is dead.”

“But not because of
that
,” she said. “Only because he wanted to do it again. Because he was a perverted asshole…” This would have been the time to rage and scream or do something else dramatic. But she didn’t feel like any of that. She still didn’t remember anything much of that night, not even pain—those hours might have been deleted from her mind. Now, though, she wondered whether the way she blacked them out was really blindness. Weakness. A failing in her.

“Tano is dead,” she said, repeating his words. “So now I can’t even wish for him to die. Or suffer. He was dead before he even knew what was happening to him. And maybe you think it’s terrible for me to say that I’d have liked it to take a long time and hurt him. Hurt him badly. Because he deserved it. Because even in his fucking grave he still deserves all the pain I can imagine.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. “There’s something else. I don’t know if it makes any difference, but…”

She looked questioningly at him as he searched for words.

“Michele was there, but he didn’t rape you. Or so my informant says. There were four of them, and Michele certainly told all the others what to do. But Tano was the only one who touched you.”

“It makes no difference who just watched and who was—” She stopped when she realized what he was telling her. “Tano is Nathaniel’s father,” she whispered tonelessly.

Alessandro said nothing. He just looked at her. She was grateful for that. Pity was the last thing she wanted.

Dazed, she shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Michele will pay for it—for everything.” She was as keenly aware of his eyes as she was of his hands when he took her fingers in them.

“I don’t want to lose you as well,” she said. “Revenge isn’t worth that. Definitely not.”

“Are we supposed to act like nothing happened?”

“No.” She leaned against the rail and drew him closer to her. “That girl, her name was Jessie…he was carrying her in
his mouth like a trophy. That’s what he cares about. To prove who he is and what he’s capable of. That’s why he has those hunting parties. And
that’s
why he deserves to die.”

“He’s a bloodthirsty bastard. Tano idolized him.”

She felt the rail cold against her back, but everything inside her was numb. “What else did you find out?”

“That business about Michele’s brother and the others—that’s the truth. Someone is killing the Carnevares closest to Michele, and I’d feel better if I knew who and why.”

“He suspects you.”

Alessandro smiled grimly. “Me!”

“You know what he did. And he knows about the two of us. If he’s even slightly acquainted with you, he must realize that you won’t give him any peace.”

He bent his head, and she noticed the surprise in his bright, cat-like eyes. “Do
you
believe that? That I’ve already started taking revenge on him? That I’m in the process of wiping out his family?”

“Not if you tell me it isn’t true.”

He was silent for a long time. “I have nothing at all to do with it,” he said at last.

Then she was the one to smile, and she had never felt so much like an Alcantara.

“That’s too bad,” she said, and when she kissed him, she sensed his shiver.