The Geneva Deception (16 page)

Via Principesa Clotilde, Rome 19th March—8.35 a.m.

Ten minutes later and they were skirting the eastern rim of the Piazza del Popolo, Tom catching a glimpse of the Pincio through a gap in the buildings.

‘Who gave it to you?’ Allegra asked, finally breaking the silence.

‘What?’ Tom looked round, distracted.

‘The watch? Who gave it to you?’

There was a brief pause, a pained look flickering across his face.

‘Jennifer.’

A longer, more awkward silence.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise…’

‘We didn’t have much choice,’ Tom said, sighing. ‘Besides, as long as we can get him the car, he’ll give it back.’

‘It shouldn’t be too hard,’ she reassured him. ‘Three, four guards at most.’

‘It’s worth taking a look,’ he agreed. ‘It’s that or wait until I can get him the cash tomorrow.’

‘Why does he even want it?’ She frowned, checking her mirrors as she turned on to the Lungotevere Arnaldo da Brescia.

‘He collects cars,’ Tom explained. ‘Has about forty of them in a sealed and climate-controlled private underground garage somewhere near Trajan’s Column. None of them paid for.’

They followed the river in silence, heading north against the traffic as the road flexed around the riverbank’s smooth contours, the sky now bright and clear. Tom caught Allegra glancing at herself in the mirror, her hand drifting unconsciously to her dyed and roughly chopped hair, as if she still couldn’t quite recognise herself.

‘Tell me more about the Banda della Magliana,’ he said eventually.

‘There are five major mafia organisations in Italy,’ Allegra explained, seeming to welcome the interruption. ‘The Cosa Nostra and Stidda in Sicily, the Camorra in Naples, the Sacra Corona Unita in Apulia and the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria. The Banda della Magliana was a smaller outfit based here in Rome and controlled by the De Luca family.’

‘Was?’

‘You might remember that they were linked to a series of political assassinations and bombings
between the seventies and the nineties. But since then they’ve been pretty quiet.’

She leaned on her horn as she overtook a threewheeled delivery van that was skittering wildly over the worn tarmac.

‘And Ricci worked for them?’

‘Gallo said he was an enforcer,’ she nodded. ‘As far as I know the family’s still controlled by Giovanni De Luca, although no one’s seen him for years.’

‘What about the Cosa Nostra, the Banda della Magliana’s partner in the Delian League? Who heads them up?’

‘Lorenzo Moretti. Or at least that’s the rumour. It’s not the sort of thing you put on your business card.’

The car pound occupied a large, anonymously grey multi-storey building at the end of a treelined residential street. Two guards were stationed at each of the two sentry posts that flanked the entry and exit ramps. Seeing them walking up to the counter, the officers manning the entrance jumped up and tried to look busy, one of them having been watching TV inside their small office, the other sat outside reading the paper, tipped back on a faded piece of white garden furniture.

‘
Buongiorno
.’ Allegra flashed a broad smile and her badge in the same instant, snapping it shut before they could get a good look at her name or the picture. ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ she continued.
‘But my friend has had his car stolen.’ The two men glanced at Tom accusingly, as if this was somehow his fault.

‘It’s probably in a container halfway to Morocco by now,’ one of them suggested gloomily.

‘That’s what I told him,’ Allegra agreed. ‘Only one of his neighbours says they saw it being towed. And this is the closest pound to where he lives.’

‘If it’s been towed it will be on the database,’ one of the officers said to Tom. ‘Pay the release fee and you can have it back.’

‘He’s already looked and it’s not there,’ she said with a shrug before Tom could answer. ‘He thinks that someone might have made a mistake and entered the wrong plates.’

‘Really?’ The men eyed him like they would a glass of corked wine.

‘He’s English,’ she murmured, giving him the sort of weary look a mother might give a naughty child. The officers nodded in sudden understanding, a sympathetic look crossing their faces. ‘Is there any chance we can go up and take a quick look to see if it’s here? I’d really appreciate it.’

The two men glanced at each other and then shrugged their agreement.

‘As long as you’re quick,’ one of them said.

‘When did it go missing?’ the other asked her, ignoring Tom completely now.

‘Around the fifteenth of March.’

‘We store all the cars in the order they get
brought here,’ the first officer explained, pointing at a worn map of the complex that had been crudely taped to the counter. ‘Cars for that week should be around here —in the blue quadrant on the third floor.’ He pointed at a section of the map. ‘The lift’s down there on the right.’

A few moments later the doors pinged shut behind them.

‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you?’ Tom said in a reproachful tone.

‘It could have been worse,’ she said with an amused smile. ‘I could have told them you were American.’

The lift opened on to the southern end of the third floor. It was a dark, depressing place, most of the neon tubes missing or broken, the walls encrusted with a moulding green deposit, the ceiling oozing a thick yellow mucus that hung in cancerous clumps. The floor was divided by lines of decaying concrete pillars into three long aisles, with cars parked along both sides and a spiralling up-and-down ramp at one end linking it to the other levels like a calcified umbilical cord.

They made their way over to the area pointed out by the guard, dodging around oily lakes of standing water, until they were about halfway down the left-hand aisle. Jennifer took out the keys and pressed the unlock button. Cavalli’s car eagerly identified itself with a double flash of its indicators—a souped-up Maserati Granturismo,
worth almost double what Johnny was asking for. No wonder he’d pushed them into this.

‘What are you doing?’ Tom called in a low voice as Allegra opened the boot and leaned inside. ‘It must have been searched already.’

‘That doesn’t mean they found anything,’ she replied, her voice muffled.

‘Let’s just get out of here before they…’

She stood up, triumphantly holding a small piece of pottery that had been nestling in a fold in the muddy grey blanket that covered the boot floor. About the size of her hand, it featured a bearded man’s face painted in red against a black background.

‘It’s a vase fragment. Probably Apullian, which dates it to between 430 and 300 BC.’

‘Dionysius?’ Tom ventured.

‘Yes,’ she said, looking impressed. ‘I’d guess it was part of a
krater
, a bowl used…’

‘For mixing wine and water,’ Tom said, grinning at her obvious surprise. ‘My parents were art dealers. My mother specialised in antiquities. I guess I was a good listener.’

‘Notice anything strange?’ she asked, handing it to him with a nod.

‘The edges are sharp.’ He frowned, gingerly drawing his finger over one of them as if it was a blade.

‘Sharp and clean,’ she agreed. ‘Which means the break is recent.’

‘You mean it was done after it was dug up?’ Tom gave her a puzzled look, still holding the fragment.

‘I mean it was done on purpose,’ she shot back, Tom detecting a hint of anger in her voice. ‘See how they’ve been careful not to damage the painted area so they can restore it.’

‘You mean it’s been smashed so it can be stuck back together again?’ he asked with a disbelieving smile.

‘It makes it easier to smuggle,’ she explained with a despairing shake of her head. ‘Unfortunately, we see it all the time. The fragments are called orphans. The dealers can sometimes make more money selling them off individually than they would get for an intact piece, because they can raise the price as the collector or museum gets more and more desperate to buy all the pieces. And of course, by the time the vase is fully restored, no one can track where or who they bought each fragment from. Everyone’s protected.’

‘Then Cavalli must have been working either with or for the League,’ Tom said grimly as she dropped the boot lid. ‘Perhaps they found out that the FBI had his name and killed him before he could talk?’

The noise of an engine starting echoed up to them from one of the lower floors, and drew a worried glance from Tom towards the exit.

‘We should go.’ He opened the passenger door
to get in, but then immediately staggered back, coughing as a choking chemical smell clawed at his throat.

‘You okay?’ Allegra called out in concern.

‘It’s been sprayed with a fire extinguisher,’ he croaked, pointing at the downy white skin which covered most of the car’s interior, apart from where it had been disturbed by the police search. ‘Old trick. The foam destroys any fingerprint or DNA evidence.’

‘Which Cavalli’s killers would only have done if they’d been in the car,’ Allegra said thoughtfully, opening the driver’s side door and standing back to let the fumes clear.

‘Where did they find the car keys?’ He asked, rubbing his streaming eyes.

‘In his pocket, why?’

‘I’m just wondering if he was driving. Based on that I’d guess he was.’

‘How do you work that out?’

‘Because I doubt his killers drove him out to wherever the car was dumped and then planted the keys on him before killing him.’ Tom shrugged.

“What does it matter either way?’

Taking a deep breath, Tom disappeared inside the car. Leaning over the passenger seat, he plunged his hand down the back of the driver’s seat, wisps of foam fluttering like ash caught by the wind. Feeling around with his fingertips, he pulled out first some loose change, then a pack of
matches, and finally, pushed right down, a folded Polaroid. He stood up, brushing the sticky white paste from his clothes.

‘If Cavalli was driving, that’s about the only place he would have been able to hide something once he realised what was going on,’ he explained, enjoying the look on Allegra’s face. ‘Here.’ He leant over the roof and handed the photo to her. ‘Any ideas?’

‘Some sort of statue fragment,’ she said slowly. ‘Greek, I’d guess, although—’

She was interrupted by a shout.

‘
Rimanga dove siete
!’ Stay where you are!

19th March—8.51 a.m.

Spinning round, Allegra immediately recognised the two officers they had talked their way past downstairs. One was hunched over the wheel of the blue Fiat squad car that had ghosted up the ramp behind them, its headlights now blazing through the darkness. The other was standing next to it, his voice echoing off the car park’s low ceilings, gun drawn.

‘We found the car after all,’ Allegra stepped towards him with a smile, switching back into Italian. ‘My friend just needs to pay…’

‘I said stay where you are,’ the officer barked again, his trigger finger twitching.

‘I don’t think he’s buying it any more,’ Tom whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Get in!’

Diving through the open doors, she jammed the key in the ignition, fired up the engine and
selected reverse. Tom jumped in alongside her, the crack of a gun shot whistling overhead. The car leapt backwards and swung out, swiping the rear wing of the car parked next to them and setting off the harsh shriek of its two-tone alarm.

‘You’re facing the wrong way,’ Tom shouted, their windscreen now engulfed by the glare of the squad car’s headlights as it accelerated, wheelsspinning, towards them.

‘Don’t tell me how to drive,’ she retorted indignantly, turning to look back over her shoulder. ‘If I’d tried to reverse out the other way I’d have wrapped it around the pillar.’

She stamped on the pedal, the car springing backwards and then yawing wildly as she fought to keep it straight, traces of foam making the wheel slick in her hands. Tyres screaming, they rounded the corner and then doubled back on themselves, the engine protesting with an angry whine as they sped down the central aisle, the revs climbing steeply.

Another shot rang out. They both flinched. One of their headlights exploded.

‘Head down a floor,’ Tom suggested. ‘Try and get far enough ahead of them to flip it around.’

She cannoned the wrong way on to the upramp, the gloom suddenly lit by a blaze of sparks as she glanced off the concrete and used the ramp’s curved walls to guide herself down to the second level.

‘Someone’s coming up the other way,’ Tom warned her as a second squad car, siren pulsing, stormed up the ramp towards them, the sweep of its headlights circling beneath them as it rose, like a shark closing in on a seal.

She steered them off the ramp on to the flat, the floorpan slapping the concrete with a heavy bang. From behind them came the angry squeal of brakes as the squad car chasing them fishtailed to avoid colliding with the second police car coming up the other way. Allegra sensed her opportunity. Leaning on the clutch, she yanked on the handbrake and jerked the wheel hard to spin them round so that they were facing forward, then shoved the car into gear and accelerated away along the left-hand aisle, tyres smoking.

‘You’ve got one right behind, one to the right,’ Tom shouted over the engine noise, pointing to where the second car was now speeding down the central aisle, roughly parallel to them.

‘They’re going to try and cut us off at the end,’ she guessed, before glancing down at her lap. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

Tom had leant forward and was feeling under the dashboard between her knees.

‘Looking for something,’ he said, straining to reach.

‘I can see that,’ she hissed through gritted teeth, his head almost resting on her lap.

‘There—’ he sat up, ‘the front air-bag switch. They put it down there in case you want to disable them.’

She nodded in immediate understanding.

‘Hold on.’

Checking in her mirror to see how close the car behind her was, she stamped on the brake. The ABS kicked in, the car juddering to a halt and forcing their pursuers to run into the back of them, the impact knocking them five or six feet forward and wrenching their boot open, so that it was flapping around like a half-opened tin can. What damage they had sustained was as nothing compared to the Fiat, however, which had, unsurprisingly, come off second best with both front tyres burst, the engine block almost in the front seat, and the bonnet concertinaed back on itself.

Allegra glanced across at Tom with a satisfied grin, but he was pointing at the second police car, which was already at the far end of the second aisle and rounding the corner towards them.

‘Here comes the cavalry.’

Dropping the Maserati into gear, she pulled forward and cut through a gap in the parked cars to her right to reach the central aisle and then spun round, so that she was facing back towards the exit ramp.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked with a frown.

‘Enjoying myself,’ she breathed.

Gunning the motor hard, she took off, glancing across at the squad car racing down the adjacent aisle to make sure she was far enough ahead, its surging shape strobing across her eyes as she caught glimpses of it through gaps between the cars and the concrete pillars.

‘Now!’ Tom called, pulling his seat belt tight across himself and hanging on to the grab handle.

She steered away from the line of cars to her right and then carved back in, ramming an Alfa square on. It jumped forward as if it had been fired from a cannon, colliding with the front of the VW parked only a few inches opposite it, which in turn T-boned the squad car as it came past, sending it ploughing into the line of parked cars on the far side of the aisle.

There was an abrupt, empty moment of calm, the squad car’s blue light pulsing weakly in the gloom. Then a jarring chorus of car alarms kicked in, each singing in a different key and to a different tempo, roused by the force of the crash.

‘Where did you learn to drive like that?’ Tom asked with an approving nod.

‘Rush hour in Rome.’ She smiled, breathing hard.

‘Do you think Johnny will notice the damage?’

She glanced in the mirror and saw the boot lid flapping around behind them like a loose sail, then looked along the crumpled bonnet at the cloud of steam rising from the cracked radiator.

‘It’ll polish out.’ She grinned.

Reversing out, the steering pulling heavily to the right, she nursed the car down the exit ramp and then made her way out on to the street.