Luciano Masini had the haunted demeanor and puffy complexion of an insomniac. I'd picked him as a man who'd begun to ask himself, around two a.m. nightly, if his twenty-year-old wife really had found the lover of her dreams in an industrialist three times her age--however witty, however erudite, however wealthy. I hadn't followed his career in any detail, but his most famous move had been to buy the entire superconducting cables division of Pirelli, when the parent company was dismembered in '09. He was impeccably dressed in a gray silk suit, the cut precisely old-fashioned enough to be stylish, and he looked like he'd once been strikingly handsome. A perfect candidate, I decided, for vain self-delusion and belated second thoughts.
I was wrong. What he said was: "I want you to locate a package for me."
"A package?" I did my best to sound fascinated--although if adultery was stultifying, lost property was worse. "Missing en route from--?"
"Zürich."
"To Milan?"
"Of course!" Masini almost flinched, as if the idea that he might have been shipping his precious cargo elsewhere, intentionally, caused him physical pain.
I said carefully, "Nothing is ever really lost. You might find that a strongly-worded letter from your lawyers to the courier is enough to work miracles."
Masini smiled humourlessly. "I don't think so. The courier is dead."
Afternoon light filled the room; the window faced east, away from the sun, but the sky itself was dazzling. I suffered a moment of strange clarity, a compelling sense of having just shaken off a lingering drowsiness, as if I'd begun the conversation half asleep and only now fully woken. Masini let the copper orrery on the wall behind me beat twice, each tick a soft, complicated meshing of a thousand tiny gears. Then he said, "She was found in a hotel room in Vienna, three days ago. She'd been shot in the head at close range. And no, she was not meant to take any such detour."
"What was in the package?"
"A small icon." He indicated a height of some thirty centimeters. "An eighteenth-century depiction of the Madonna. Originally from the Ukraine."
"The Ukraine? Do you know how it came to be in Zürich?" I'd heard that the Ukrainian government had recently launched a renewed campaign to persuade certain countries to get serious about the return of stolen artwork. Crateloads had been smuggled out during the turmoil and corruption of the eighties and nineties.
"It was part of the estate of a well-known collector, a man with an impeccable reputation. My own art dealer examined all the paperwork, the bills of sale, the export licenses, before giving his blessing to the deal."
"Paperwork can be forged."
Masini struggled visibly to control his impatience. "Anything can be forged. What do you want me to say? I have no reason to suspect that this was stolen property. I'm not a criminal, Signor Fabrizio."
"I'm not suggesting that you are. So ... money and goods changed hands in Zürich? The icon was yours when it was stolen?"
"Yes."
"May I ask how much you paid for it?"
"Five million Swiss francs."
I let that pass without comment, although for a moment I wondered if I'd heard correctly. I was no expert, but I did know that Orthodox icons were usually painted by anonymous artists, and were intended to be as far from unique as individual copies of the Bible. There were exceptions, of course--a few treasured, definitive examples of each type--but they were a great deal older than eighteenth-century. However fine the craftsmanship, however well-preserved, five million sounded far too high.
I said, "Surely you insured--?"
"Of course! And in a year or two, I may even get my money back. But I'd much prefer to have the icon. That's why I purchased it in the first place."
"And your insurers will agree. They'll be doing their best to find it." If another investigator had a head start on me, I didn't want to waste my time--least of all if I'd be competing against a Swiss insurance firm on their home ground.
Masini fixed his bloodshot eyes on me. "Their best is not good enough! Yes, they'll want to save themselves the money, and they'll treat this potential loss with great seriousness ... like the accountants they are. And the Austrian police will try very hard to find the murderer, no doubt. Neither are moved by any sense of urgency. Neither would be greatly troubled if nothing were resolved for months. Or years."
If I'd been wrong about Masini's nocturnal visions of adultery, I'd been right about one thing: there was a passion, an obsession, driving him which ran as deep as jealousy, as deep as pride, as deep as sex. He leaned forward across the desk, restraining himself from seizing my shirtfront, but commanding and imploring me with as much arrogance and pathos as if he had.
"Two weeks! I'll give you two weeks--and you can name your fee! Deliver the icon to me within a fortnight ... and everything I have is yours for the asking!"
)
