‘I knew you’d be back,’ gloated Donatella. ‘All those pretty clothes. Men like you are too cheap to leave behind pretty clothes.’
‘Men like me?’ asked Cesco.
‘Frauds. Conmen.’ Holding her shotgun in one hand, she reached into the pocket of her dressing gown for her phone. ‘Thieves.’
‘Please don’t.’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘You won’t get the rest of your money if you do.’
‘The rest!’ she scoffed.
‘It’s on the table,’ he said, blessing his sudden attack of conscience. Rarely if ever could scruples have been rewarded so quickly. ‘It’s not everything I owe but it’s all I can afford right now.’
She squinted at him for several seconds, expecting him to back down. When he didn’t, she gestured him aside then went across. Her shotgun barely wavered as she set down her phone to open the flap of the envelope and fan out the banknotes with her thumb. ‘You stole from others too,’ she said grudgingly.
‘I’ll get to them in time.’
‘What happened?’ she mocked. ‘Did you meet a girl?’
‘I’m sick of my life, that’s all.’
‘No one forced you to it. You chose it all by yourself.’
‘Yes.’
Her lower lip trembled. ‘Get out,’ she said.
He nodded towards his bedroom. ‘And my things?’
‘I’ll be keeping those,’ she told him, ‘until I get the rest.’
‘But I—’
She picked up her phone again. ‘Out,’ she said. ‘Before I change my mind.’
Dov woke early, as he always did on missions. He turned off his alarm before it could sound, then showered, shaved and groomed himself in the mirror, gelling his hair and spiking it just so. Then he stood beside the bed and gazed down at Zara. She’d put on a baggy sweatshirt and cheesecloth trousers before getting into bed with him last night, protecting her virtue with shapelessness. Then she’d turned onto her side to show him her back. Irritation flared. She should be so lucky. In fact, just for the hell of it, he decided there and then that he’d have her before the job was done. He took hold of the white duvet and tugged it back in a single sharp movement. She woke in confusion and grabbed it and pulled it back over herself. ‘What?’ she asked.
He held up his phone. ‘Your login.’
‘My what?’
‘You can’t go hunting this Nero woman yourself. She’s too likely to spot you. Fuck that up and the mission will be over before it starts. So I’ll find her, then I’ll call you and direct you where to go. For that, I need to know where she’s staying, what she looks like, what plans she makes. That means access to your discussion board.’
‘I’ll do it myself. I’ll send you everything you need.’
‘We’re here for our country, Zara. That might not mean anything to you. It does to me. So change your fucking password later, if you must. But give it to me now.’ She glared defiantly at him for several seconds, but then she gave in. He tapped in her details then nodded in satisfaction. ‘I’ll be off, then,’ he said, pocketing the car keys. ‘Wait here for my call.’
Carmen woke to the happy discovery that she no longer cared about Cesco. Unfortunately, that was largely because she was too worried about her upcoming appointment with the police sketch artist to have room for anything else. Yesterday’s hot fury with the kidnappers had burned itself out, as she’d known it would, leaving behind only the chilling memory of Cemetery Teeth sawing through the throats of Vittorio and Giulia, and the perverse, soft-spoken civility of Famine Eyes as he’d crouched beside her to explain the deal he was offering, the consequences of breach. Giving the police their descriptions would mean breaching that deal in a major way.
Yet she meant to do it all the same.
She put coffee on to brew then went down to the cafe for croissants. A man with spiked black hair was leaving as she went in, coffee in one hand, a pastry in the other. She stood back and held the door open for him, but he didn’t acknowledge her with so much as a glance, simply turned his back on her instead. A copy of the local paper was lying on the counter, its front page a huge splash of Baldassare, Alessandra and Bettina hugged tearfully together. She bought her croissants then went next door for a copy of the paper to browse over breakfast. Her spoken Italian might be wretched but she could read it well enough.
An article on an inside page caught her eye. A curator from a town called Ginosa had seen pictures of Vittorio’s hoard on the news, and had recognised them instantly, for they’d all been stolen from his private museum five years before, after being bequeathed by a local farmer. Carmen gave a groan of laughter and dismay. After all that, Vittorio hadn’t even found his key pieces here. He’d stolen them instead, presumably to convince his increasingly sceptical investors that Alaric truly was nearby. That was why he’d never tried to sell them, not even when desperate for cash. To have done so would have been to invite discovery. He’d been a fraud from the outset. Except that that wasn’t quite fair. A true believer, rather, so convinced of his case that he’d fabricated the evidence to support it. Not the first to fall into that trap. Nor the last either.
She checked her watch. Time to leave. She was at the door when a thought struck her. She hurried back to check. Yes, it was as she’d thought. Ginosa was in Puglia, heel of the Italian boot. There was no record of Alaric ever visiting it. How, then, had his ring got there? How, then, those brooches? Another thing: the stolen artefacts had apparently been part of a larger bequest. Was it possible that that larger bequest contained other important pieces? Pieces that might say something new and interesting about the Visigoths in Italy, and which would give her thesis its missing punch?
She checked the time again. It was leave now or be late. But she needed to know. There were two museums in Ginosa, it transpired. The bequest had been left to the smaller of the two, a privately owned ethnographic affair with a useless website – a single page with a brief description of the town and its history, a photograph of its façade, a thumbnail map, hours of opening and contact details. Her Italian wasn’t up to calling and asking. Besides, could she really trust some museum volunteer to decide for her what was Visigothic and what was not? No. She needed to pay it a visit. Her driving licence was back in Rome and a taxi would bust her budget, so she checked trains instead. The lack of connections meant that, even if she were to leave right now, she couldn’t reach it before it shut. It was closed all day tomorrow too. Wednesday, then. If she left Cosenza on the 7.05, she could have a good two hours at the museum and still be back in Rome by nightfall.
Next door, church bells began to toll. She grabbed the paper and her purse then hurried for the door.