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Extract from The Painted Messiah
The contessa's villa sat on the side of Ax Alp overlooking
Lake Brienz. The building itself was a nineteenth
century hotel that had fallen into disrepair by the
time the contessa had bought it. After restoring
it and taking up her year-round residence, she rarely
left the property. Her sole extravagance was
her annual party. If she visited friends or attended
exclusive parties, Malloy hadn't heard about it, and
the people at her parties were terrible gossips. She
was a writer and a scholar. What she needed she
sent for, everything from books to groceries. If
she had wanted society she would not have bought such
an isolated property. The solitude of the place
was impressive, too. The building sat on a small
plot of level ground close to a thundering cascade. It
was surrounded on all sides by a dense forest that
went on for miles. From the contessa's veranda,
it was possible to see Interlaken at one end of the
lake and the town of Brienz at the other. That
was as close as she let herself get to civilization.
Her 'man', as she call him in English, Rene, stood at one of the doors to the
house watching him as Malloy came down the mountain on a rather steep and sometimes
treacherous trail next to the cascade. Another individual might have treated
Malloy with a friendly wave of his hand, but Rene simply stared. Like the
contessa, Rene's age was indeterminate. He could have been fifty or seventy. He
kept his oddly battered head shaved and even though he was dark-skinned, there
were no lines to offer any hint of his generation. He possessed hulking
shoulders and a cinderblock torso.
Despite his age and size, Rene moved with the ease of an athlete still in his
prime. Unlike his employer, Rene possessed no talent for language. His
native tongue Malloy had never been able to determine. The language he
spoke with the contessa was a kind of pidgin Italian, though he freely mixed
German, French, and English words into it, the accent inevitably misplaced. Rene's
grammar, Malloy had decided long ago, was capricious.
One thing Malloy did not doubt was Rene's loyalty to the woman he served. In
her presence, his eyes stayed on the contessa with the zeal and ferocity of a
trained Rottweiler. When he had approached within fifteen feet, Malloy
stopped and said to the man, 'Is the contessa at home, Rene?'
As this question was no doubt absurd, Rene did not bother answering him. He
simply flexed his enormous fists and walked away. Malloy went to the veranda,
intending to knock at the front door, but Claudia de Medici was already waiting.
'Thomas! This is a pleasant surprise! Have you moved back to Zürich?'
'I'm here on business for a couple of days. I found myself with a free
afternoon, and I thought I'd drop by. I hope I'm not interrupting something.'
'Nothing that can't wait. Come in.' Malloy stepped into the elegantly
furnished entryway. The contessa led him to the drawing room and began
fixing them both a glass of Scotch.
'Are you working on a new book?'
'I have written my book. If I write another, it won't be for some time.' Her
smile was almost bashful, her beauty as stunning as ever. In fact, it
seemed to Malloy that she had not changed in the years since he had first met
her. She was still a woman seemingly not quite forty, making her, he realised
with a sudden sense of despair, over a decade younger than he was! 'And
you,' she asked with a smiled that suggested she had read his thoughts, 'are
you still a freelance editor?' There was a bit of playfulness in this,
something of an old joke between them, and Malloy smiled.
'Retired, I'm afraid.'
'Not entirely, I hope. You are far too young for something as dreadful
as retirement.'
'I keep busy.'
'You are living in New York, I hear.'
'You must have good sources.'
'One of the advantages of having interesting friends.' Malloy resisted
asking about her sources. The contessa was quite effective at gaining confidences,
obstinate about keeping them. 'You are happy. I can see that
much in your eyes.'
'I'm getting married this spring.'
'And you decide to step back into the life—in order to save yourself from
your happiness?'
Malloy laughed at the jab. He had not thought about it like that, but he
supposed one could see it that way. He certainly would not have been the
first man to sabotage a perfect relationship. Still, he was reluctant
to admit as much, even jokingly. Besides, he had never really left his
profession—only fieldwork. 'If I wait any longer to get back into
things, it will be too late,' he confessed.
'Perhaps it is not your destiny.'
'I believe we make our own destiny, Contessa.'
'It's my opinion that people are not thrust into hell because of their passions,
Thomas. I think they jump in for the sake of them, but I'm not going to
change your mind. I can see that. Why don't you tell me what brings
you here? It has something to do with business, I think.'
The contessa worked as successful mind readers do. She read body language. She
made grand assessments and waited for reactions. That she was sweet about
it and seemed to enjoy him at some level made it less disconcerting, but the
truth was her insights into his character had always left him wondering if she
might really be clairvoyant.
'I thought you might be able to explain something for me.' The contessa
tipped her head slightly, her expression curious. 'What do you know about
twelfth century icons of Christ?'
'I know I enjoy them very much, though I would imagine I'm in the minority. What
would you like to know?'
'A twelfth century Byzantine portrait of Christ—what would something like
that be worth, say in mint condition?'
The contessa smiled as if dealing with a precocious child. 'That is difficult
to say. Assuming it to be in excellent condition, you would have to know
if it had been restored. Then there is the provenance. That would
affect the price significantly. People interested in paintings of that
sort value the history at least as much as, if not more than, the artistic merit. Many
icons come with a portable altar. There might be a unique box or travelling
case. Many of these are works of art themselves. Some are encrusted
with precious jewels, which would add value beyond the particular artistic merit. A
famous person might have owned it. A great deal of information about the
royal family in Constantinople is available from that era. The princess
Anna Comnena, who met the first Crusaders, for instance, even wrote a book detailing
her impressions of the army's leaders, including the relatively unknown Baldwin
of Boulogne—the man the barons would ultimately elect as the first king
of Christian Jerusalem. If it were her personal icon and you could prove
it with documents, such a piece would be extremely attractive to some buyers—myself
included, though I am not a collector—but without a great deal more information
I couldn't begin to make a guess.'
'I have a general description of it. It's on a panel of wood, maybe a quarter
of an inch thick, thirteen or fourteen inches tall and eight or nine inches wide.'
'Gold? Inlaid jewels?'
He shook his head. 'Here's the thing. The people involved are paying twenty-five
million dollars for it.' The contessa's expression did not change, but
Malloy was certain something happened—call it a twinkling in the eye or
a moment of recognition. 'When I started trying to price comparable pieces,
rare as they are, the pieces go for forty or fifty thousand up to half a million. Nothing
is close to what my people are paying.'
'What is your involvement, Thomas?'
'I'm moving it for them.'
'Smuggling it?'
'Just moving it.'
'If the people are lying to you about the nature of the object you have to deal
with or the price they are paying, my advice is to walk away. Better yet… run.'
Malloy smiled and shook his head. 'I can't do that. This is my chance
to get back to what I do best.'
'Then I don't think I can help you, except to say you might be looking at something
like what happened to you in Beirut.'
Malloy felt like a man who has just had the ground under his feet taken away
from him. 'How do you know about Beirut?'
'People talk, Thomas. Rather, I should say, they whisper.'
'The people who know about Beirut don't.'
'A neophyte intelligence officer inherits half a dozen low-level agents who pass
along outdated information. Some months later he is running a network of
twenty-four agents and catches wind of an attack being planned against the US
Marine base. He passes the information to his superiors and tries to discover
specific details. The following day he is in a GI hospital with six bullet
wounds. Eight of his people are dead, and the rest are evacuated. Two
days after that, some two hundred and forty marines perish, and Reagan orders
American troops from the Lebanon.'
Malloy tried to smile, but he didn't make much of it. 'They say we learn
from our mistakes,' he said finally.
'Actually,' she answered, 'they say we should learn from them. The
truth is that most people have a regrettable tendency to repeat them.'
'Do you know something I don't know, Contessa?'
'I know a great deal more than you do, Thomas, about a great many things. In
this instance, I know that you never trusted your superiors again after Beirut
and, because of it, you were so successful it caused problems that you could
not even imagine. I know, too, that your skills aren't what they were. You
have lost that scepticism you are so proud of, say what you will to the contrary,
and you think you can handle this job without much trouble, because it looks
like nothing can go wrong. You expect that once you do you will be back
to your old tricks, not lying in your grave.'
Malloy felt a chill run down his spine when she mentioned his grave. 'Tell
me what you know.'
'I know you are standing in a pit of vipers, but you don't see them because you
are half asleep.'
Malloy wanted to argue or explain or at least to defend himself, but he resisted
the impulse. A woman capable of bringing the Swiss banking system to its
collective knees was not someone he cared to underestimate.
©Copyright Craig Smith
2006 |
The
Painted Messiah