The Geneva Deception (4 page)

The Getty Villa, Malibu, California 17th March - 10.52 a.m.

Verity Bruce had been looking forward to this day for a while. For nearly three years, to be precise. That’s how long it had been since she had first been shown the dog-eared Polaroid in a smoky Viennese café, first been winded by the adrenaline punch of excitement at what was on offer and chilled by the fear of possibly losing out.

She’d shaken on the deal there and then, knowing that the director would back her judgement. The trustees had taken a little more convincing, of course, but then they didn’t know the period like she did. Besides, once they’d understood the magnitude of the find, they’d bitten and bitten hard, sharing her mounting frustration at the years lost to the scientists as test upon test had heaped delay upon deferral
until she was sure they must have finished and started all over again. And then, of course, the lumbering and self-perpetuating wheels of international bureaucracy had begun to turn, a merry-go-round of sworn affidavits, authentication letters, legal contracts, bank statements, money transfer forms, export and import licences and Customs declarations that had added months to the process. Still, what was done was done. Today, finally, the waiting ended.

She positioned herself in front of the fulllength mirror she’d had bolted to the back of her office door. Had the intervening years between that first breathless, absinthe-fuelled encounter and today’s unveiling aged her? A little, perhaps, around her fern-green eyes and in the tiny fissures that had begun to fleck her top lip like faint animal tracks across the snow. Ever since she’d turned forty-five, the years seemed to weigh a little heavier on her face, as if they were invisibly swinging from grappling hooks sunk into her skin. She could have had surgery, of course - God knows everyone else her age in LA seemed to have had work done - but she hated anything fake or forced like that. Highlights in her long, coiled copper hair were one thing, but needles and knives …Sometimes, nature had to be allowed to run its course.

Besides, she reminded herself as she put the
finishing touches to her makeup, it wasn’t as if she’d lost her looks. How else to explain the fact that that gorgeous thirty-two-year-old speech writer she’d met at a White House fund-raiser the other month was pestering her to travel up to his place in Martha’s Vineyard next fall? And she still had great legs, too. Always had. Hopefully always would.

‘They’re ready for you.’

One of the Getty PR girls had edged tentatively into the room. Verity couldn’t remember her name, but then all these girls looked the same to her - blonde, smiley, skinny, jutting tits that would hold firm in a 6.1 - as if the city was ground zero in some freakish cloning experiment. Even so, the girl’s legs still weren’t as good as hers.

‘Let’s do it,’ she said, grabbing her leather jacket off the chair and slipping it over a black couture Chanel dress that she’d bought in Paris last year. It was an unlikely combination, but one deliberately chosen to further fuel the quirky image that she’d so carefully cultivated over the years. It was simple really. If you wanted to get ahead in the hushed and dusty corridors of curatorial academia without waiting to be as old as the exhibits themselves, it paid to get noticed. She certainly wasn’t about to tone things down now, despite the occasion, although she had at least upgraded from flats to a vertiginous pair of
scarlet Manolos that matched her lipstick. After all, this was a ten-million-dollar acquisition and the
Los Angeles Times
would be taking pictures.

The small group of donors, experts and journalists that she and the director had hand-picked for this private viewing to guarantee maximum pre-launch coverage was already gathered expectantly in the auditorium. The figure had been draped, rather melodramatically she thought, in a black cloth and then placed in the middle of the floor so that people had to circle, brows furrowed in speculation, around it. Snatching up a glass of Laurent-Perrier Rosé from a tray at the door, Verity swept inside and began to work the room, shaking the hands of some, kissing the cheeks of others, swapping an amusing anecdote here and clutching at a shared memory there. But she was barely aware of what she was saying or what was being said to her, her excitement slowly building as the minutes counted down until she could hear only the pregnant thud of her heart.

‘Ladies and gentlemen…’ The director had stepped into the middle of the room. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention please,’ he called, ushering the audience closer. The lights dimmed. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, today marks the culmination of a remarkable journey,’ he began, reading from a small card and then
pausing for effect. ‘It is a journey that began over 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece. And it is a journey that ends, here, in Malibu. Because today, I am delighted to unveil the Getty Villa’s latest acquisition and, in my opinion, one of the most important works of art to enter the United States since the Second World War.’

With a flourish, the cloth slipped to the floor. Under a lone spotlight stood a seven foot tall marble sculpture of a young boy, his left foot forward, arms at his sides, head and eyes looking straight ahead. There was a ripple of appreciative, even shocked recognition. Verity stepped forward.

‘This uniquely preserved example of a Greek kouros has been dated to around 540 BC,’ Verity began, standing on the other side of the statue to the director and speaking without notes. ‘As many of you will undoubtedly know, although inspired by the god Apollo, a kouros was not intended to represent any one individual youth but the
idea
of youth itself, and was used in Ancient Greece both as a dedication to the gods in sanctuaries and as a funerary monument. Our tests show that this example has been hewn from dolomite marble from the ancient Cape Vathy quarry on the island of Thassos.’

Talking in her usual measured and authoritative style, she continued her description of the statue, enjoying herself more and more as she
got into her stride: its provenance from the private collection of a Swiss physician whose grandfather had bought it in Athens in the late 1800s; the exhaustive scientific tests that had revealed a thin film of calcite coating its surface resulting from hundreds, if not thousands of years of natural lichen growth; the stylistic features linking it to the Anavysos Youth in the National Museum in Athens. In short, a masterpiece that was yet further evidence of the Getty’s determination to build the pre-eminent American collection of classical antiquities.

Her speech drew to a close. Acknowledging the applause with a nod, she retreated to allow people forward for a closer look, anxiously watching over the figure like a parent supervising a child in a busy playground.

At first all went well, a few people nodding appreciatively at the sculpture’s elegant lines, others seeking her out to offer muted words of congratulations. But then, without warning, she sensed the mood darkening, a few of the guests eyeing the statue with a strange look and whispering excitedly to each other.

Thierry Normand from the Ecole Française d’Athène was the first to break ranks.

‘Doesn’t the use of Thassian marble strike you as rather… anomalous?’

‘And what about the absence of paint?’ Eleanor Grant from the University of Chicago
immediately added. ‘As far as I know, all other kouroi, with the possible exception of the Melos kouros, show traces of paint?’

‘Well, of course we considered…’ Verity began with a weak smile, forcing herself not to sound defensive even though she could hardly not feel insulted by what they were implying.

‘I’m sorry, Verity,’ Sir John Sykes, the highly respected Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford University interrupted with an apologetic cough. ‘It just isn’t right. The hair is pure early sixth-century BC, as you say, but the face and abdomen are clearly much later. And while you can find similarly muscular thighs in Corinth, I’ve only seen feet and a base like that in Boeotia. The science can only tell you so much. You have to rely on the aesthetics, on what you can see. To me, this is almost verging on the pastiche.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, Sir John, but we couldn’t disagree more…’ Verity began angrily, looking to the director for support but seeing that he appeared to have retreated to the periphery of the group.

‘Actually, Sir John, the word I’d use,’ Professor Vivienne Foyle of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University added, pausing to make sure everyone was listening, ‘is
fresh
.’

The loaded meaning of the word was clear. Foyle was suggesting that the statue was in fact
a forgery, that it had been knocked up in some backstreet workshop and never been in the ground at all. Verity was reeling, but the mood in the room was now such that she knew she had no chance of sensibly arguing her case.

The interrogation continued. Why didn’t the plinth have a lead attachment like other kouroi? Couldn’t the degradation of the stone have been caused deliberately by oxalic acid? How was it that such an exceptional piece had only surfaced now? What due diligence had been carried out on it’s provenance?

She barely heard them, her ears filled with the dull pulse of her mounting rage. Her face white and cold as marble, she nodded and smiled and shrugged at what seemed opportune moments, not trusting herself to open her mouth without swearing. A further ten minutes of this torture had to be endured before the director, perhaps sensing that she might be about to erupt, finally saw fit to bring an end to her ordeal.

‘Fresh? I’ll give that senile old bitch fresh,’ she muttered angrily as she stalked back to her office. ‘Sonya?’

‘I’m Cynthia,’ the PR girl chirped, skipping to keep up with her.

‘Whatever. Get me Faulks on the phone.’

‘Who?’

‘Earl Faulks. F-A-U-L-K-S, pronounced like
folks. I don’t care where he is. I don’t care what he’s doing. Just get him for me. In fact, I don’t want just to speak to him. I want to see him. Here. Tomorrow.’

Over Nebraska 17th March - 8.43 p.m.

Normally used to scoop whales into the casino’s deep-throated net, Kezman’s private jet was a potent introduction to the Vegas experience: snowwhite leather seats with a gilded letter ‘A’ embroidered into the head-rests, leopard-skin carpets, polished mahogany panelling running the length of the cabin like the interior of a pre-war steamer, a small glass bar lit with blue neon. At the front, over the cockpit door, hung a photo of Kezman, all teeth and tan, gazing down on them benevolently like the dictator of some oil-rich African state.

Tom, lost in thought, had immediately settled back into his seat, politely declining the offer of a drink from the attentive stewardess whose skirt seemed to have been hitched almost as high as her top was pulled low. Head turned to the
window, gaze fixed on some distant point on the horizon, he barely noticed the plane take off, let alone Jennifer move to the seat opposite him.

‘You’re still wearing it then?’ she asked, head tilted to one side so that her curling mass of black hair covered the top of her right shoulder.

He glanced down at the 1934 stainless steel ‘Brancard’ Rolex Prince on his wrist. It had been a gift from the FBI for Tom’s help on the first case he’d worked on with Jennifer, although Tom suspected that the decision to offer it to him, and the choice of watch, had been all hers.

‘Why?’ He turned to face her with a smile. ‘Do you want it back?’

Five feet nine, slim with milky brown skin, she had a lustrous pair of hazel eyes and was wearing her usual office camouflage of black trouser suit and cream silk blouse. Her ‘Fuck You’ clothes, as she’d once described them, as opposed to the ‘Fuck Me’ outfits that some of the other female agents favoured, only to wonder why they got asked out all the time but never promoted. The truth was that the odds of a woman succeeding in the Bureau, let alone a black woman, were stacked so heavily against her, that she had to load the dice any way she could just to be given a fair spin of the wheel. Then again, from what he’d seen, Jennifer knew what it took to play the game, having risen from lowly field agent in the Bureau’s Atlanta Division to one of the most senior members
of its Art Crime Team. That didn’t happen by accident.

‘Not unless you’re having second thoughts.’

‘Should I be?’

‘You just seem a bit… distracted,’ she ventured.

‘Not really.’ His gaze flicked back to the window. ‘I guess I was just thinking about today.’

‘About your grandfather?’

‘About some of the people there. About my family, or what’s left of it. About how little I know them and they know me.’

‘You’re a difficult person to get to know, Tom,’ she said gently.

‘Even for you?’ He turned back to her with a hopeful smile.

‘Maybe especially for me,’ she shot back, an edge to her voice that was at once resigned and accusing.

He understood what she meant, although she had got closer to him than most over the years. Not that things had started well between them when they had first met, necessity strong-arming their initial instinctive mutual suspicion into a grudging and fragile working relationship. And yet from this unpromising beginning a guarded trust, of sorts, had slowly evolved which had itself, in time, built towards a burgeoning friendship. A friendship which had then briefly flowered into something more, their growing attraction for each other finding its voice in one unplanned and instinctive night together.

Since then, the intervening years and a subsequent case had given them both the opportunity at different times to try and revive those feelings and build on that night. But for whatever reason, the other person had never quite been in the same place - Tom initially unwilling to open up, Jennifer subsequently worried about getting hurt. Even so, the memory had left its mark on both of them, like an invisible shard of metal caught beneath the skin that they could both feel whenever they rubbed up against someone else.

‘How have you been?’ Tom asked, deliberately moving the focus of the conversation away from himself. Jennifer glanced over his shoulder before answering, prompting Tom to turn in his seat and follow her wary gaze. Stokes was asleep, his legs stretched out ahead of him, his head lolling on to his shoulder, two empty whisky miniatures on the table in front of him. The stewardess had retreated into the limestone-floored toilet cubicle with her make-up bag.

‘Were you annoyed I came?’ Jennifer answered with a question of her own.

‘I was disappointed you didn’t come alone,’ he admitted, almost surprising himself with his honesty.

‘This is Stokes’s case,’ she explained with an apologetic shrug. ‘I couldn’t have come without him.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

A pause.

‘You should have told me you were coming.’

‘I didn’t know I was until I was on the plane,’ he protested.

‘You could have called,’ she insisted.

‘Would you have called me if you hadn’t needed my help?’

Another, longer pause.

‘Probably not,’ she conceded.

It was strange, Tom mused. They weren’t dating, hadn’t spoken in almost a year, and yet they seemed to be locked into a lovers’ awkward conversation, both of them fumbling around what they really wanted to say, rather than risk looking stupid.

There was a long silence.

‘Why did you agree to come?’ Jennifer eventually asked him, her eyes locking with his.

‘Because you said you needed my help,’ he said with a shrug.

‘You were going to say no,’ she pointed out. ‘Then something changed.’

‘I don’t really…’

‘It was because I said I would handle the exchange myself if you didn’t, wasn’t it?’

A smile flickered across Tom’s face. He’d forgotten how annoyingly perceptive she could be.

‘What do you know about this painting?’ Tom picked up the photo from the table between them and studied it through the plastic.

‘It was one of four that Caravaggio completed in Sicily in 1609 while he was on the run for stabbing someone to death,’ she said. ‘We have it down as being worth twenty million dollars, but it would go for much more, even in today’s market.’

‘What about the theft itself?’

‘October sixteenth, 1969,’ she recited from memory. ‘The crime reports say that the thieves cut it out of its frame over the altar of the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo with razor blades and escaped in a truck. Probably a two-man team.’

‘I’d guess three,’ Tom corrected her. ‘It’s big - nearly sixty square feet. I’m not sure two men could have handled it.’

‘At the time, people blamed the Sicilian mafia?’ Her statement was framed as a question.

‘It’s always looked to me like an amateur job,’ Tom replied with a shake of his head. ‘Couple of local crooks who’d thought through everything except how they were going to sell it. If the Sicilian mafia have got it now, it’s because no one else was buying or because they decided to just take it. The Cosa Nostra don’t like people operating on their turf without permission.’

‘And no one’s ever seen it since?’

‘I’ve heard rumours over the years,’ Tom sighed. ‘That it had surfaced in Rome, or maybe even been destroyed in the Naples earthquake in 1980. Then a few years ago, a mafia informer claimed to have rolled it up inside a rug and buried it in
an iron chest. When they went to dig it up, the chest was empty.’

‘What do you think?’

‘If you ask me, it’s been with the Cosa Nostra the whole time. Probably traded between
capos
as a gift or part payment on a deal.’

‘Which would mean that the mafia are behind the sale now?’

‘If not the mafia, then someone who has stolen it from them,’ Tom agreed. ‘Either way, they’ll be dangerous and easily spooked. If we’re lucky, they’ll just run if they smell trouble. If we’re not, they’ll start shooting.’ A pause. ‘That’s why I came.’

‘I can look after myself,’ she said pointedly; irritated, it seemed, by what he was implying. ‘I didn’t ask you here to watch my back.’

‘I’m here because I know how these people think,’ Tom insisted. ‘And the only back that will need watching is mine.’