Page 60 of Conning the Billionaire
Each one of them seemed imbued with new meaning. The paintings in the receptionist room weren’t Old Masters or even Italian as far as Kylie knew.
But they were probably something.
Over a dozen historically significant pieces had been stolen in Uzbekistan.
Over three hundred stolen from Turkey’s Museum.
And where else had Micah said? Spain. More art had been stolen from Spanish museums.
And Russia. There had been widespread looting of Russian museums since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin’s Russian organized-crime kleptocracy.
On the wall in Salvatore Grande’s waiting room, a painting of a bowl of fruit lit with glowing amber sunlight might have been worth millions of dollars and missing from the world for years.
Or it might have been painted a few years ago by Salvatore’s great-niece Maria Francesca, who’d gone to art school in New York City.
A tiny bronze statue, not even two inches tall, standing in a glass bell jar on an end table beside her looked like rough melted rods topped with the head of an Easter Island moai. Was that a cultural treasure that had been stolen from its rightful place in a museum exhibit?
A closed-circuit TV camera in the back corner watched this room, too. Its wires must have led to some other monitor with some other person watching.
Salvatore Grande must have a lot of people watching all the time, and then more people watching them.
Maria Pia glanced up at Kylie. “Mr. Grande is done with this phone call. You can go in now.”
Kylie walked into his office, pushing the heavy door open and letting it swing shut behind her with a soft thud. She held the envelope that was becoming damp in her hands. “Good morning, Mr. Grande.”
Salvatore Grande’s spidery fingers rested on the fine leather blotter on his magnificently carved desk. Sunlight passing through the chicken wire-fused window glass shone on his scalp, visible through his thinning hair.
Salvatore Grande had been the Mafia Don of Philadelphia for eight years, a made man for thirty, and an enforcer for twenty years before that, performing his first assassination when he was fifteen. At seventy-three, every murder he ordered made him harder, more wizened, and sharpened the evil glint in his dark eyes.
Salvatore Grande said, “Good morning, Chiarina. I’ve been hoping you’d come to see me.”
Uh-oh.
Kylie placed the envelope stuffed with money on his desk and stepped backward, her hands folded in front of her. “Yes, Mr. Grande?”
“That little incident the weekend before last caused a commotion.”
The Borgata. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Grande.”
Behind his desk, two square paintings hung on the wall, neither larger than two feet across.
One was a chaotic ball of warring humanity, the people on the bottom being trampled and dying by those murdering each other above them.
The other was a rainbow-winged angel speaking to a woman, the Annunciation by Lorenzo di Credi, the stolen painting he’d taken in payment for another crime.
Salvatore Grande said, “Some of my associates were upset that the hotel lost a week’s revenue for a very expensive suite and quite a bit of money in the theft of poker chips and diamond earrings. Do you know how much they lost?”
“Eighty thousand dollars, Mr. Grande,” Kylie said.
“Yes, Chiarina, eighty thousand dollars. You can see why they’re upset.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What should I tell them?”
“That I—I’ll pay it back?”
Salvatore Grande sat back in his chair and wove his fingers together over his trim stomach. “But it would take you so long to pay them back, Chiarina. With what little you make as a waitress and your other pursuits, it would take years, if not decades, to pay off your debt. And it wasn’t just the eighty large that I gave them on your behalf. It embarrassed me that someone under my protection did that to my fellow men of honor.” He touched his black necktie over his chest. “It hurt me.”
