Page 11 of The Collector
“Buongiorno, Signore Delvecchio,” she sang as Gabriel switched on a portable space heater. It was the cover identity he had used during much of his previous life—Mario Delvecchio, the standoffish, temperamental genius who had served his apprenticeship in Venice with the great Umberto Conti and restored many of the city’s most famous paintings. Adrianna, a renowned cleaner of altars and statuary, had worked with Mario on several major projects. When not trying to seduce him, she had loathed him with a particular intensity. “I was beginning to worry about you,” she said. “You’re always the first to arrive.”
“Late night,” he replied, and scrutinized his work trolley. The telltales he had left behind the previous afternoon remained undisturbed. Still, one never knew. “You didn’t touch anything, did you?”
“Everything, Mario. I put my grubby little fingers all over your precious flasks and solvents.”
“You really have to stop calling me that, you know.”
“A part of me misses him.”
“I’m sure he feels the same about you.”
“And what if Ihadtouched your things?” she asked. “Would the world have come to an end?”
“It might well have, yes.” He removed his coat. “To what shall we listen, Signora Zinetti?”
“Amy Winehouse.”
“How about Schubert instead?”
“Not the string quartets again. If I have to listen toDeath and the Maidenone more time, I’ll jump.”
Gabriel inserted a disc into his paint-smudged CD player—Maurizio Pollini’s classic recording of Schubert’s late piano sonatas—and then wound a swatch of cotton wool around the end of a wooden dowel. Next he dipped the swab into a carefully calibrated mixture of acetone, methyl proxitol, and mineral spirits, and twirled it gently over the surface of the altarpiece. The solvent was strong enough to remove the yellowed varnish, but not Pordenone’s original work. The acrid smell invaded Adrianna’s workspace.
“You really should wear a mask,” she admonished him. “In all the years we’ve worked together, I’ve never once seen you put one on. I can’t imagine how many brain cells you’ve killed off.”
“My missing brain cells are the least of my problems.”
“Name one problem you have, Mario.”
“An altar cleaner who insists on talking while I’m trying to work.”
Gabriel’s swab had turned the color of nicotine. He discarded it and prepared another. A fortnight into the restoration, he had cleaned nearly the entire lower third of the painting. The losseswere extensive but hardly catastrophic. It was Gabriel’s ambition to complete the final stage of the restoration, the retouching, in four months’ time, at which point he would turn his attention to the remaining works adorning the nave.
Antonio Politi, a longtime employee of the Tiepolo Restoration Company, had already begun work on one of the canvases,The Virgin in Glory with Saintsby Palma il Giovane. It was nearly half past ten when he sauntered into the church.
“Buongiorno, Signore Delvecchio,” he called out.
From atop the high altar came the sound of laughter. Gabriel removed the disk from his CD player and inserted a recording of Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor. Then he pulled on his oilskin coat and, smiling, went into the damp morning.
6
Bar al Ponte
The parcel that arrived at the Naples office of the Carabinieri on a stifling August morning in 1988 was by all outward appearances harmless, which was not the case. It contained a small but powerful bomb assembled by a member of the Calabrian criminal organization known as the Camorra. The addressee, General Cesare Ferrari, had been targeted several times before, most recently after the arrest of one of the Camorra’s highest-ranking figures. The mail room attendant nevertheless delivered the package to the general’s office. Ferrari would survive the explosion but lose his right eye and two fingers from his right hand. A year later he personally escorted the camorrista responsible for the attack into Poggioreale prison and bade him a not-so-fond farewell.
There were some who considered him ill suited for his next assignment, and perhaps a touch too brash, but General Ferrari thought otherwise. Brazenness, he insisted, was precisely what the Art Squad required. Known formally as the Division for the Defense of Cultural Patrimony, it was the first of its kind—a police unit dedicated exclusively to combating the lucrative trade in stolen art and antiquities.The first two decades of its existence had produced thousands of arrests and a string of high-profile recoveries, but by the mid-1990s, institutional paralysis had set in. Manpower had dwindled to a few retirement-age officers, most of whom knew little or nothing about art. It was said by the unit’s legion of detractors, not without some justification, that they spent more time debating where to have lunch than searching for the museum’s worth of paintings that went missing in Italy each year.
Within days of assuming command of the Art Squad, General Ferrari fired half the staff and replaced them with aggressive young officers who knew a thing or two about the objects they were attempting to find. He also sought authority to tap the phones of known criminal operatives and opened offices in the parts of the country where the thieves actually stole art, especially in the south. Most important, he adopted many of the techniques he had used against the Mafia during his days in Naples, targeting big fish rather than merely street-level hoods who dabbled in art theft. His approach quickly paid dividends. Under General Ferrari’s leadership, the Division for the Defense of Cultural Patrimony had regained its lost luster. Even the art sleuths of the French Police Nationale were the first to admit that their Italian brethren were the best in the business.
They were headquartered in an ornate yellow-and-white palazzo in Rome’s Piazza di Sant’Ignazio, but three officers were based in Venice. When not searching for stolen works of art, they kept a close eye on the director of the paintings department at the Tiepolo Restoration Company. Lately, he had been taking his midmorning coffee break at Bar al Ponte, so named because of its proximity to one of Murano’s busiest bridges. He arrived there to find General Ferrari, in his blue-and-gold Carabinieri finery, occupying a table in the back corner of the room.
He smiled at Gabriel over that morning’s edition ofIlGazzettino. “You’ve become a creature of habit.”
“My wife tells me the same thing,” replied Gabriel, and sat down.
“She made quite an impression at last evening’s gala.” The general laid the newspaper flat on the table and pointed to a photograph in the Cultura section. “But who’s that out-of-focus chap standing next to her?”
“An afterthought.”
