Book of Stolen Tales (31 page)

“Who is Margarete von Waldeck?” I said, still reeling from the date of the painting and the name of the artist.

Katharina's angry stance hadn't abated in the least. “How do you know Dina?” she asked shrilly.

“I met her in the course of searching for my stolen volume. How does Margarete von Waldeck fit in?” I repeated. “The likeness to Dina is unbelievable.”

I followed Katharina as she walked back toward her room. “Von Waldeck's a young woman with a sad history. Some believe her personal story became the basis for ‘Snow White.' Her father's estate bordered a village in Hessen whose poor laborers were small as a result of malnutrition and long hours spent working underground in local copper mines. Hence her association with dwarfs.”

Renwick's conviction that the old tales were based on actual events came back to me. Katharina continued, her voice brittle with anger. “Margarete's stepmother was extremely jealous of the young girl's beauty so she sent her away to the Spanish court at Brussels. The family hoped she'd gain a prominent marriage and their plan succeeded too brilliantly. The young prince, soon to be Spanish king Phillip II, fell deeply in love with her. Margarete's father wanted a match with a nobleman but never dreamed of so high a prospect. It was a dangerous alliance for the girl. The Spanish court would never allow such a marriage.”

“Was she poisoned like Snow White?”

“She died at the age of twenty-one. And yes, many think court officials poisoned her.”

“Pretty difficult to prove when so much time has passed.” “People will believe anything, though—won't they?” The implication of her words was directed more to my defense of Dina than to the poisoning of Snow White.

We'd reached her room. I shrugged on my shirt and jacket and stepped into my shoes. Katharina watched me dress in silence, her arms crossed over her chest.

“I still don't understand how a picture that's centuries old could be a mirror image of Dina,” I said.

“You have it the wrong way round. My husband became entranced with Dina
because
she resembled this picture he so loves. She wormed her way into his heart and ruined my marriage.”

“And yet Dina's terrified of him. He abused her.”

She hesitated for a moment, trying to pull herself together. “No doubt you've come under her spell as well. Dina must have wanted something from you—what was it?”

“My help to get away from him.”

Katharina allowed herself a twisted smile at hearing this. “Well, perhaps she's finally finding that my husband's obsession cramps her style.”

“I'll say. She sold the book to fund her escape from him.”

“She never had money of her own. I bought my volume anonymously, to help her on her way. Stupid girl. Of course, it was also a way to restore the book to our family.”

Quite unintentionally, I'd opened a raw wound and our pleasant interlude had blown apart with the force of a cannon shot. Katharina certainly didn't want any solace from me. She made it obvious she had no interest in prolonging the misery. The best thing I could do for both of us was bid her goodbye.

Back in my hotel room I fell into a troubled sleep, only to be jolted awake with a feeling of dread, the way I often felt in the aftermath of a nightmare. Sirens wailed outside the window. I tossed and turned for the next few hours and, finally giving up, took a long shower to shake off the uneasiness. As I trimmed my beard I noticed the marks where Alessio had pressed his cane into my neck seemed to have grown darker. That gave me a moment of worry until I figured they'd probably just been aggravated by the cascade of hot water.

I packed hurriedly, hoping to grab a coffee before I boarded the train for Brussels. Naso's bookshop was next on my list. I planned to fly from Brussels to Rome and then transfer to the Naples train.

Toxic air hit the back of my throat the minute I stepped outside. A couple of emergency vehicles swept past. Several blocks away a crowd gathered on the sidewalk. As I drew nearer, I could see puddles of water, and fire hoses curled on the wet pavement like fat black pythons. Firemen were winding the hoses back onto the trucks blocking the street.

People chattered in the low, excited tones used for calamities that did not affect them personally. They were kept at a distance by police tape and several officers, but I was tall enough to get a view of the damage. The street-level windows of Katharina's home had been punched out. Soot covered most of the first-floor stucco in an ugly black stain. The door, rocking in the breeze at a crazy angle, had been bashed in. Steam or smoke, I'm not sure which, sifted out the wrecked window and entrance. My gut twisted in dread.

I tried to ask several bystanders whether anyone had been injured but they spoke only Flemish. I was on the point of breaking through the crowd to find a cop when I felt a light hand on my shoulder.

A middle-aged woman wearing a knitted coat thrown over her dressing gown said, “You wish to know about the fire—I heard you asking.”

“Yes, can you tell me what happened?”

“It started around four this morning. We woke up with flames turning the street red outside our window. The fire trucks came and we were ordered out of our houses in case the fire spread. Flames were shooting out of Katharina's first floor. They found her inside, dead.”

When you fear something, learning that fear is real does nothing to lessen the shock.

“Did you know her then?” the woman asked sympathetically, having noticed the look of dread written all over my face.

“Briefly.” I remembered the children. “Was anyone else hurt?”

“Her houseman and the maid are safe. They got out through the garden level.”

I recalled Katharina telling me the housekeeper was taking the grandchildren back to their parents. An even greater catastrophe had been narrowly averted.

The woman turned around to chat with her neighbor.

Like a horde of wasps, press photographers swarmed a black limo as it pulled up in front of the house. The burly man with a white scar on his forehead exited the front passenger seat and tried to clear the reporters away. The back door swung open and Mancini emerged. He wore sunglasses and kept his head bowed, but his snow-white cap of hair and hawkish nose were unmistakable. The guard stared menacingly at the journalists pressing in as they shouted questions at Mancini. He batted away at them, yelling back in Italian.

I was glad of the diversion. I faded to the back of the crowd and made my way toward the Ghent railway station, feeling overcome by the horror of Katharina's death. Not for the first time that morning, I wondered what had become of her volume. Was it back in Mancini's hands?

Thirty-One

November 27, 2003

Ghent, Belgium

S
haheen slouched against a stand of multicolored pillars at the Gent-Sint-Pieters railway terminal main entrance. He'd been waiting for almost half an hour. The noon train was due to depart soon. John Madison would be on it and Shaheen intended to intercept him. Shaheen's location gave him a panoramic view of the area in front of the station. Directly across from him was a drop-off point for cars, beyond that a busy tramway and a heavily treed plaza crowded with hundreds of commuters' bikes.

No one paid him any heed and that was how Shaheen liked it. Just another out-of-work migrant, a scrounger hanging around to milk commuters and tourists. He fit right in with a local thug standing nearby, sporting a big belly that swelled like Niagara over his belt. The guy wore oversized hip-huggers and a hoodie. Universal uniform of hip-hop. The man's appearance was made all the more repulsive by the fact that his top barely covered his stomach; he stretched out surprisingly delicate white hands to the commuters for money.

Shaheen had spent a couple of productive days in London. He'd interviewed Renwick's solicitor and the business partner, Tye Norris. After a request from DCI Wilson, Norris turned over all of Renwick's notes and bills. Described by Norris as a fastidious man, Renwick was anything but when it came to his personal papers. Shaheen had unearthed a jumble of scribblings on torn-offpaper scraps, disordered bills, bank charges skewered on an old paper spike, looseleaf notebooks started and never finished, all dumped helter-skelter into large drawers. Renwick kept no private diary so it took two days of pawing through the heap of material to discern what was relevant.

Among the jumble, a few gems turned up.

One notebook entry confirmed Renwick was convinced the source of his childhood disease could be tracked to a specific archaeological site in Iraq associated with a famous fairy tale—unnamed—a story originating with the Mesopotamians.

The second find concerned a piece of lined foolscap paper with a photocopy of a picture stapled to it showing a youthful dark-haired woman and an older man. On the lined paper Renwick had written
Talia, August 18, 2000, in the company of Lorenzo Mancini. Shot photo unobserved as pair emerged from services at Cathedral of San Gennaro. Mancini family believed to have originally possessed complete copy of
The Tale of Tales
. No response from Mancini
.

Shaheen recognized Mancini from the picture because he'd done a check on the Italian aristocrat after Wilson identified him as the stolen book's owner. Somehow, perhaps through a patient search of historical source material, Renwick learned the Mancini family owned a copy of the book. Shaheen thought Mancini merited a close look.

Renwick's papers were interesting but shed little light on his visit to Iraq and subsequent disappearance. Despite mounting circumstantial evidence, there was still no definitive proof that Renwick's interest in the book and time in Iraq were related to Shaheen's mission.

Shaheen sifted through the rest of the material, hoping to find a description of an Iraqi site where Renwick may have led the scientists, or notes about his conversations with Loretti and Hill. He was disappointed. What he did know for sure was that Renwick arrived at the al-Rasheed hotel in the Green Zone last summer, late on the afternoon of August 12, and met the two scientists at the bar that evening. He paid for their drinks. Renwick also made numerous references to a circular stone weight, apparently some family heirloom. Probably the same one listed in the police file on the burglary at the publishing house.

The London office agent Shaheen conscripted to watch Madison failed miserably. He lost him somewhere in Naples. He'd tracked Madison to a Naples nightclub and then back to his hotel room. After that, Madison vanished. No one saw him leave his hotel. No credit card charges or phone calls to his contacts in New York showed up to help pin down where he'd gone. Madison had been clever but he'd slipped up now by using his credit card to purchase a train ticket out of Ghent. And he was booked on a Swiss International flight leaving from Brussels. They had him in their sights once more.

Shaheen checked his watch. It was almost noon. Where was Madison? A second man, posted on the departure platform, waited in case Madison entered the station without using the main entrance. Shaheen got out his phone to check but the other agent hadn't spotted Madison yet either.

Shaheen swept his glance around the street, paying close attention to anyone who disembarked from trams shuttling in and out across from him. He couldn't be absolutely sure Madison would show up at this time, but his flight left Brussels at 3:30 p.m., so if he took a later train he'd be cutting it pretty close.

When he looked around again a figure caught his attention in the plaza. An older man in black sat on a bench, the hem of his long coat dragging on the pavement. He wore a formal top hat. His gloved hands rested on the handle of a white cane. It was a gloomy, cool day in Ghent, the sun entirely obscured by clouds, but strangely, the old man seemed to be sitting in a pool of deep shadow.

Trams whirred into the station, disgorged passengers moving on again after a few moments. The black-coated man remained sitting under the leafless trees of the plaza. Like a flickering early motion picture, the trams blocked sight of him when they pulled in and revealed him when they pulled out. If this wasn't the thief Madison described, it certainly was his double.

Shaheen pushed himself away from the pillar and began to walk toward him as the old man abruptly stood and gazed southward along Koning Albertlaan. Shaheen turned to see what he was looking at.

Madison was heading their way.

He no longer resembled the sharp-looking guy dressed in an expensive jacket and tailored pants at the police interview in London but walked with a dejected air, as if he'd just lost his best friend. He had on a bulky jacket and jeans, a pack thrown over his shoulder.

The black-clad man moved forward haltingly. For a minute it looked as though he was going to step right off the curb into the oncoming trams. He turned his head in the direction of the station and nodded. Toward whom?

Shaheen followed his line of sight and saw the big-bellied guy move on a direct trajectory for Madison. The man held his right arm stiffly, his hand plunged into a side pocket of his loose trousers. Certain sign of a concealed weapon.