Page 29 of The Collector
“Diamonds of this quality would be worth nearly four million euros on the legitimate market.”
“And at the Mount Ararat Global Diamond Exchange?”
Nazarian worked the calculator again and frowned. “I might be able to do two hundred thousand.”
“My associates in Calabria will be disappointed.”
“I’m sorry, Signore Raffaele. But I’m afraid it’s the best I can do under the circumstances.”
“Perhaps we can come to some other arrangement,” suggested Gabriel.
“What sort of arrangement?”
“I will pay you ten thousand euros in cash, and you will tell me where to find a woman I’m looking for. Mid-thirties, quite pretty, maybe German or Swiss, maybe Dutch or Scandinavian. She likes to get close to her targets and then robs them blind. She’s especially fond of fine jewelry, which you fence on her behalf. She had a big score on the Amalfi Coast recently. My associates would like their cut.”
“And if I knew this woman?” asked Nazarian after a moment. “Why would I betray her for a mere ten thousand euros?”
“Because my offer expires in exactly ten seconds.”
“And then what?”
“Things are liable to get ugly.”
Nazarian placed the loupe to his eye. “You’re right, Signore Raffaele. They are indeed.”
Gabriel turned to face the steroid abuser. “After you.”
The Israeli martial arts discipline known as Krav Maga is not known for its gracefulness, but then it was not designed with aesthetics in mind. Its sole purpose is to incapacitate or kill an adversary as quickly as possible. Nor does it value fairness. In fact, instructors encourage their students to use heavy objects in their assault, especially when confronted with an adversary of superior size and strength. David did not grapple with Goliath, they are fond of saying. David hit Goliath with a rock. And only then did he cut off his head.
The only rocks in Khoren Nazarian’s office were the diamonds, but even the twelve-carat solitaire would have bounced off the Armenian bodybuilder like a pebble hurled at a speeding truck. Gabriel wisely reached for the glass paperweight instead. It struck the Armenian in the left eye and, judging by the crunching sound of the impact, fractured one or more of the seven bones of the orbit.
Gabriel was tempted to make use of the brass message spike, but delivered a devastating kick to the shin instead, followed by a knee to the exposed testicles and a Phoenix fist to the larynx. The elbow to the temple was probably gratuitous, but it facilitated the recovery of the confiscated Beretta. Aiming the weapon at Khoren Nazarian proved unnecessary. Having just watched Gabriel pulverize a man twice his size and half his age, all in a matter of seconds, the diamond broker was suddenly quite loquacious.
Yes, he admitted, he knew the woman in question and where shemight be found. And, no, under no circumstances would he attempt to warn her that a member of the ’Ndrangheta was looking for her. He asked only that her life be spared, an assurance Signore Raffaele refused to provide. He was, after all, a thoroughly dangerous man.
With the jewelry once more in his coat pocket, he saw himself out and returned to the Sapphire House. This time the man who emerged from his suite was a respectable-looking figure of late middle age clad in hand-tailored Italian trousers, a cashmere jacket, stylish suede loafers, and a woolen overcoat. At half past four he was aboard a train bound for Hamburg, the first leg of a journey that would eventually take him to a picturesque fishing village in the far north of Denmark renowned for the quality of its light. A part of him was actually looking forward to it. If nothing else, it would give him a chance to spend a few days by the North Sea. There were, he thought, far worse ways to find the world’s most valuable stolen painting.
17
Kandestederne
It happened at 9:17 p.m. Of that, the Danish police were certain. Also beyond dispute was the number of shots fired, which was two. Both had struck the victim, sixty-four-year-old Peter Nielsen, owner of an antiquarian bookshop on Copenhagen’s Strøget, in the head. A passerby recalled seeing muzzle flashes but heard no gunshots, suggesting to police that the killer had utilized a suppressor. He had made his escape on a BMW motorcycle, which had been parked outside the victim’s apartment building. Traffic surveillance cameras indicated he entered neighboring Sweden shortly after ten o’clock. As yet, Swedish authorities had been unable to ascertain his whereabouts.
Police were perplexed by numerous aspects of the killing, beginning with the fact that it happened at all. Denmark was statistically one of the world’s safest countries, with far fewer murders each year than the United States typically saw in a single day. The motive for the killing appeared to be robbery, though investigators were at a loss to explain why the perpetrator’s weapon, a 9mm pistol of indeterminate manufacture, had been fitted with a suppressor.Ordinary street thugs rarely bothered with such niceties, at least not in Copenhagen. It was the mark, police concluded, of a professional.
But a professionalwhat, exactly? And why had he targeted a rare book dealer, of all people? Yes, there was a fair amount of mischief in the trade, but Peter Nielsen had many prominent clients and had never been the subject of a complaint to the police. Was he embroiled in a business dispute? Always a possibility. Had he happened upon a book of great value? Something for which a powerful man might have been willing to kill? An intriguing notion, though it seemed unlikely. After all, the gunman had made off with a storage device better suited to rollable objects—objects such as architectural drawings or, perhaps, a work of art.
The police were likewise confounded by their failure to locate Peter Nielsen’s mobile phone, one of several key facts they withheld from their initial statement, which they released at 7:15 a.m. on Saturday. Because it was a weekend, the Copenhagen press was slow off the mark. The tabloidB.T.had it first—beneath a sensational headline, of course—but it was nearly noon before the story finally appeared on the website of the more reputablePolitiken.
Ingrid noticed it at half past one after returning to her cottage from a three-hour training ride. The headline declared that a rare book dealer had been murdered in Nørrebro. Surely, she told herself, it was a different dealer. But the story’s second paragraph identified the street where the murder had taken place, and in the next paragraph appeared the name and age of the victim.
The remaining details were sparse. There was no mention, for example, of a leather document tube containing a long-missing painting by Johannes Vermeer. The suspect, though, was described in some detail—a man in his late thirties or early forties wearing abusiness suit and a mid-length overcoat. As it happened, Ingrid had seen a man matching that description approximately three and a half hours before Peter was murdered.
He had been sitting in Jørgens Smørrebrød Café in Vissenbjerg.
For the moment, at least, Ingrid was more alarmed by the prospect of arrest as an accessory to Peter’s murder. She was, after all, in possession of the victim’s mobile phone. Stored in its memory was GPS location data that could be used to pinpoint the device’s whereabouts at 6:00 p.m. the previous evening. But even without the phone, police would have little trouble reconstructing Peter’s movements during the final hours of his life; he had used his credit card to purchase fuel and a coffee. Surveillance video would show him meeting with a woman in her mid-thirties. A woman who had given him a leather document tube in exchange for a briefcase filled with five million euros in cash.
Unless, of course, there was no surveillance video.
