City of War (46 page)

I went on. “There are different kinds of savants, functioning at different levels, in different disciplines. Music, mathematics, languages, even design. One of the most remarkable is a Brit named Stephen Wiltshire who can take a helicopter ride around a city, then later draw it in panorama in perfect detail.”

“Cool, but I’m not making the connection,” said Eddie.

“Think about it. He sees Rome once then draws it from memory. So his brain is operating as three separate cameras—wide-angle, zoom and portrait. Simultaneously. Except that he doesn’t have to change lenses or focus. At exactly the same time, each camera’s view is recorded with such accuracy that later, another area of his brain can guide his eye to reproduce them.”

I could see it beginning to dawn on him. “Fuck, that’s why it took York so many trips. The Hyena had all the pho
tographs, but his brother could only paint one picture at a time.”

“Bingo,” I said. “And if Tiziano is like most savants, the process wears him out. So he had to rest between sessions. But that was okay because the copies had to be artificially aged anyway.”

“And if they ran into a glitch, the general controlled the timetable, so who gave a shit,” said Eddie.

I nodded. “But Bruzzi stayed on schedule, and once a month Truman picked up a painting, flew to Washington, collected the original and headed to Cairo. There, the fake went to Russia and the original to Serbin’s private collection.”

“But wouldn’t somebody eventually notice?”

“Based on what Julien says, probably not. But even if somebody did become suspicious, who was he going to complain to? Serbin? The police?”

“I don’t know these things you’re speaking of,” said Julien, “but part of it sounds like Elmyr de Hory.”

“I don’t think Elmyr was a savant, but the concept is the same, yes?”

“Elmer who?” asked Eddie.

“El-MEER,” corrected Julien, “the greatest art forger in history. His pieces are still bought and sold by respected collectors. Many hang in museums. But no one works very hard at uncovering them. Too much embarrassment…too much money at stake.”

“And the scam went on even after York took a powder,” said Eddie.

“Why not, it was like printing money. Dr. Cesarotti chose the paintings, and Serbin’s people tracked down canvasses and paint formulas of the right era for Bruzzi. Then, with fake in hand, the general advised the appropriate country’s government that he’d found one of their masterpieces, and the repatriation process began. Excitement would be at fever pitch, and everyone would want to believe the work was authentic, so the De Hory Effect took over.

“And for a few million in payoffs, Konstantin Serbin accumulated a billion dollars in art—not counting the passion premium. In those cases, we have to go back to Archer’s question, Is there a word for beyond priceless?”

“How can I help you?” asked Julien.

“I thought you wanted to get as far from us as possible,” I said.

He stared at me, and I could see him framing his answer. “When you said it was personal, it meant you intend to kill Gaetano Bruzzi.”

It was the observation of a man who had been trained to hunt other men. I didn’t need to answer, and I didn’t.

“Then,” he continued, “I already know too much. And I have my own reasons for wanting you to succeed.”

I waited, but he didn’t continue right away. He looked out the window toward the sea. “Do you know what they used to say about de Gaulle? That his fondest wish was to die in his own arms. This is not only true of peacocks. It is also true of men who murder for power. And it is time to give M. Bruzzi the opportunity.”

I was suddenly very tired. “Julien, take the Citroën. Go home and get some sleep. Tomorrow we’ll take a drive into the mountains. Since we seem to have forgotten our fly rods, perhaps we’ll look for some land to buy. Maybe even see a winery or two.”

38

Mountain Roads and Dead Pets

A sunny morning on the Med is pretty much as good as it gets. Julien had arranged for a local grocer to make a food run up the hill, and the guy had brought a truckload. I hoped we weren’t going to be there long enough to need it, but in the meantime, the three of us sat outside and ate with abandon.

A little after nine, with Julien at the wheel of his car, a four-door BMW, we drove back to the coast road and turned north. Our guide had brought along notebooks, a camera and a pair of binoculars. Tools of the trade for land speculators, he told us. The camera was a top-of-the-line Minolta, and the binoculars military, well-worn and without markings. My guess was that the Legion was missing a pair just like them.

We stopped several times, got out and went through the charade of Julien’s pointing things out while we nodded, made notes and occasionally used the binoculars or snapped a picture. I didn’t think anyone was following us, but with so little traffic on the island, we were going to be noticed, and looking like foreigners being shown around by a local real
estate agent was as good a cover as we were going to get.

As the coastline dropped farther below, it became a postcard. As dazzling as Amalfi, but without the crowds. It was a shame that so few outsiders ever get to see it.

A couple of hours later, we turned inland and met the rugged interior of Corsica. Here, the mountainous spine merged with a steep forest broken by bare rock outcroppings and an occasional towering waterfall thundering into an abyss. When the land would flatten, pristine streams would emerge stalked by hawks and tiger heron. But if there were human inhabitants, there was no indication.

We reached a stretch where a fast-moving river had slashed a deep gorge through the granite mountain, leaving passage possible only along a winding, narrow road cut into the rock. At its widest points, possibly two small cars could squeeze by each other, but otherwise, you had to wait for one of the engineered turnouts that appeared every mile or so. It was so treacherous that even the normally steel-nerved Eddie gripped the back of my seat.

“Not many people up here,” said Julien, attempting to break the tension. “And the ones who are stay out of sight.”

The place had a feeling of total isolation, and I couldn’t imagine trying to haul somebody out who didn’t want to go.

“It’s also something of a Corsican tradition to romanticize our outlaws.”

No sooner had Julien finished the sentence than two bright red trucks with aerial ladders mounted on their roofs appeared behind us. I’d seen them before—coming toward us on the coast road when we’d turned inland.

“Probably lost and trying to make up time,” Eddie said.

“Well, they’re stuck with our pace for the moment,” said Julien.

“Jesus Christ!” roared Eddie.

I turned and looked out the rear window. It was filled with a grille I was intimately familiar with. Pinzgauer II, a six-wheel-drive British-made vehicle rarely seen outside a military installation. We’d used them in Delta because their
narrow track and superb traction could take us places nothing else on wheels was capable of. In the right hands, they can climb almost anything, and the way these guys were driving, the hands were right. Regardless, it was way too much iron, way too close.

“Can you see who’s inside?”

Eddie craned his neck upward. “Near as I can tell, a couple of lobotomy patients.” He leaned out the window and shouted at them to back off. Their response was to accelerate and tap our bumper.

Eddie pulled his head back inside. “What’s Corsican for ‘motherfucker’?”

“Either of them wearing a headband?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Nope.”

Julien gave the BMW a hit of gas, then had to back off when we came to a bend. That’s when the Pinz hit us again—this time hard enough that we all flew forward.

We were swearing in multiple languages, and Eddie was giving the finger out his window. The next turnout was ahead on the left, and the BMW slowed as Julien braked and put on his blinker. But instead of easing off, the truck banged us again, and our left rear wheel hit the edge and hung out in space for a couple of seconds until our forward momentum pulled it back.

We skidded to a stop against the low stone wall of the turnout and were out of the car almost before dust billowed up. But the trucks were already past and accelerating away, their roof-top ladder assemblies banging as they whipped into the next bend. It was the white lettering on their tail-gates that made the event even more surreal.

Eddie wanted to go after them, but that was like a dog chasing a bus. So you catch them, then what? The BMW had only minor damage, and I told Julien I’d take care of it. So after we silently contemplated the several-hundred-foot free
fall we’d narrowly avoided, we climbed back in the car. Like the tailgating record producer in the red Lamborghini, the world is full of assholes with driver’s licenses. Sometimes the right ones died.

Half an hour later, we rounded a final bend and the Fortress of Apollonica rose into the cloudless sky like Kane’s Xanadu. Turreted walls ran along a perimeter steep enough to stop an antelope, enclosing a spired, seven-story edifice that was almost a mirror image of the Abbey at Mont St-Michel. It was something out of a time when audacious engineering on high ground served notice to lesser folk not to fuck with the occupant.

“Power abhors understatement,” I said.

“It was built during the French papacy. As a refuge for the Holy Father,” said Julien.

“In case the natives got restless.”

“The natives they could handle. It was the guys with armies that kept them awake. But as far as anyone can tell, no pope ever spent a night here.”

Eddie had his own axe to grind. “That shit’s why I left the church. Fuckin’ high-and-mighty assholes spending other people’s money.”

“I’ll put that down as Reason Number 133.”

We laughed, but you couldn’t help but wonder how many peasants had died hauling all that stone up there. But as Benny Joe—and maybe a pope or two—might have said, that’s why we have peasants.

“When did Bruzzi buy it?” I asked.

“About twenty years ago. But what everyone thought was going to be an economic blessing didn’t happen. Some of the nicknames he’s acquired don’t translate, but my favorite is a Corsican play on words that means ‘Sicilian Who Sits in Eagle Shit.’”

It was hard not to like that.

The village of Apollonica fit neatly into a shallow gash in
the sheep-dotted mountainside directly under Gaetano’s citadel. Julien turned left and crossed the gorge on an ancient limestone bridge probably built by the Romans.
Apollonica
sounded more Greek than anything else, and since this part of the world had been cross-pollinated for millennia, there was a good chance it was. Maybe the legion commander had been from Athens.

Halfway across, I looked down, and there, ten stories below us on a narrow access road along the water’s edge, were the red Pinzgauers. They had their aerial ladders extended, and two men were up thirty feet or so, working on something along the rockface. Their partners stood watching.

“Stop the fuckin’ car!” yelled Eddie. “I want to piss on those cocksuckers.”

“It’d just blow back in your face,” I said.

“They almost killed us.”

“How many times has another boater thrown you the finger because you couldn’t go by him slow?”

Eddie didn’t answer.

“Let it go,” I said.

Julien looked down. “I should have realized earlier. They’re the fireworks crew for The Festival of the Return.”

“Whose return?” asked Eddie.

“Napoleon’s.”

The town occupied only a small footprint of land, but its multistoried structures rose imposingly out of the hills. Everything, even the miniature streets, were straight up and straight down. Centuries of constructing dwellings one on top of the other and cantilevering others over them had created a skyline that from a distance looked like Tolkien but up close was a tall Hanoi.

“Not much wealth on the island,” said Julien, “and the farther you get from the coast, the poorer it is.”

“Kind of a shithole,” observed Eddie, and he was right. The lower parts of the buildings were stone, but each succes
sive generation of additions was framed in wood with walls that looked as thin as paper. The only paint in evidence was a pinkish-brown wash. Up close, Apollonica wasn’t a travel poster.

The cobblestone square tilted with the mountain, but in contrast to the otherwise monochromatic backdrop, the facades of the buildings facing it were festooned with dozens of black-and-white Corsican flags and red, white and blue banners proclaiming “
Vivé Le Empereur
.” In the center of the square, amid this unexpected splash of color, was a small grass island containing a thick Ionic pedestal carved out of stone. Fresh violets were strewn around its base, and a large, intricate wreath of violets and olive leaves lay on top.

“Every village has its own Napoleon tribute,” Julien explained. “They say it’s to attract tourists, but the real reason is that he’s still the only uniting force on the island.”

“I still don’t get it,” Eddie said.

“They’re honoring the return of his corpse from St. Helena. In 1840. The craftsman who carved his coffin, Octave LeDucq, came from Apollonica, and as far as the locals are concerned, the general’s internment in Paris is only temporary.”

What was it Jackie had said?
“My, but we are a stubborn people.”
He was right, but without the Jewish exclusivity.

Julien continued. “At sundown Saturday, a funeral barge will come upriver carrying a replica of Napoleon’s bier. It’ll be brought here and placed on the pedestal.”

“Then the party will begin,” I said.

“Just until everybody gets drunk. Then the grudges will come out.”

Julien parked next to an ornate, bone-dry fountain, and we got out. I stood and looked around the square at the flags, each depicting a black Moor’s head adorned with a white
tortil.
I saw Eddie doing the same.

“Fuckers,” he said.

“Eddie, get a grip,” I said.

He shrugged. “Okay, but I’m adding fireworks guys to my list.”