‘Not unless you’re having second thoughts.’
‘Should I be?’
‘You just seem a bit… distracted,’ she ventured.
‘Not really.’ His gaze flicked back to the window. ‘I guess I was just thinking about today.’
‘About your grandfather?’
‘About some of the people there. About my family, or what’s left of it. About how little I know them and they know me.’
‘You’re a difficult person to get to know, Tom,’ she said gently.
‘Even for you?’ He turned back to her with a hopeful smile.
‘Maybe especially for me,’ she shot back, an edge to her voice that was at once resigned and accusing.
He understood what she meant, although she had got closer to him than most over the years. Not that things had started well between them when they had first met, necessity strong-arming their initial instinctive mutual suspicion into a grudging and fragile working relationship. And yet from this unpromising beginning a guarded trust, of sorts, had slowly evolved which had itself, in time, built towards a burgeoning friendship. A friendship which had then briefly flowered into something more, their growing attraction for each other finding its voice in one unplanned and instinctive night together.
Since then, the intervening years and a subsequent case had given them both the opportunity at different times to try and revive those feelings and build on that night. But for whatever reason, the other person had never quite been in the same place - Tom initially unwilling to open up, Jennifer subsequently worried about getting hurt. Even so, the memory had left its mark on both of them, like an invisible shard of metal caught beneath the skin that they could both feel whenever they rubbed up against someone else.
‘How have you been?’ Tom asked, deliberately moving the focus of the conversation away from himself. Jennifer glanced over his shoulder before answering, prompting Tom to turn in his seat and follow her wary gaze. Stokes was asleep, his legs stretched out ahead of him, his head lolling on to his shoulder, two empty whisky miniatures on the table in front of him. The stewardess had retreated into the limestone-floored toilet cubicle with her make-up bag.
‘Were you annoyed I came?’ Jennifer answered with a question of her own.
‘I was disappointed you didn’t come alone,’ he admitted, almost surprising himself with his honesty.
‘This is Stokes’s case,’ she explained with an apologetic shrug. ‘I couldn’t have come without him.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
A pause.
‘You should have told me you were coming.’
‘I didn’t know I was until I was on the plane,’ he protested.
‘You could have called,’ she insisted.
‘Would you have called me if you hadn’t needed my help?’
Another, longer pause.
‘Probably not,’ she conceded.
It was strange, Tom mused. They weren’t dating, hadn’t spoken in almost a year, and yet they seemed to be locked into a lovers’ awkward conversation, both of them fumbling around what they really wanted to say, rather than risk looking stupid.
There was a long silence.
‘Why did you agree to come?’ Jennifer eventually asked him, her eyes locking with his.
‘Because you said you needed my help,’ he said with a shrug.
‘You were going to say no,’ she pointed out. ‘Then something changed.’
‘I don’t really…’
‘It was because I said I would handle the exchange myself if you didn’t, wasn’t it?’
A smile flickered across Tom’s face. He’d forgotten how annoyingly perceptive she could be.
‘What do you know about this painting?’ Tom picked up the photo from the table between them and studied it through the plastic.
‘It was one of four that Caravaggio completed in Sicily in 1609 while he was on the run for stabbing someone to death,’ she said. ‘We have it down as being worth twenty million dollars, but it would go for much more, even in today’s market.’
‘What about the theft itself?’
‘October sixteenth, 1969,’ she recited from memory. ‘The crime reports say that the thieves cut it out of its frame over the altar of the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo with razor blades and escaped in a truck. Probably a two-man team.’
‘I’d guess three,’ Tom corrected her. ‘It’s big - nearly sixty square feet. I’m not sure two men could have handled it.’
‘At the time, people blamed the Sicilian mafia?’ Her statement was framed as a question.
‘It’s always looked to me like an amateur job,’ Tom replied with a shake of his head. ‘Couple of local crooks who’d thought through everything except how they were going to sell it. If the Sicilian mafia have got it now, it’s because no one else was buying or because they decided to just take it. The Cosa Nostra don’t like people operating on their turf without permission.’
‘And no one’s ever seen it since?’
‘I’ve heard rumours over the years,’ Tom sighed. ‘That it had surfaced in Rome, or maybe even been destroyed in the Naples earthquake in 1980. Then a few years ago, a mafia informer claimed to have rolled it up inside a rug and buried it in an iron chest. When they went to dig it up, the chest was empty.’
‘What do you think?’
‘If you ask me, it’s been with the Cosa Nostra the whole time. Probably traded between capos as a gift or part payment on a deal.’
‘Which would mean that the mafia are behind the sale now?’
‘If not the mafia, then someone who has stolen it from them,’ Tom agreed. ‘Either way, they’ll be dangerous and easily spooked. If we’re lucky, they’ll just run if they smell trouble. If we’re not, they’ll start shooting.’ A pause. ‘That’s why I came.’
‘I can look after myself,’ she said pointedly; irritated, it seemed, by what he was implying. ‘I didn’t ask you here to watch my back.’
‘I’m here because I know how these people think,’ Tom insisted. ‘And the only back that will need watching is mine.’
Amalfi Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas
17th March - 9.27 p.m.
Ever since going freelance, Kyle Foster had never met or even spoken to his handler. It was safer that way. For both of them. Besides, what would have been the fucking point? All he needed was a name, a photograph and fifty per cent of his fee in his Cayman Islands account. Why complicate things with a face or a voice when he could just email the details through and save them both the trouble? Assuming the handler was a guy, of course. There was no real way of knowing. A broad in this line of business? Not unheard of, but rare. Maybe he should suggest a meet after all?
His PDA vibrated on the glass table in front of him, breaking into his thoughts. Swinging his feet to the floor he sat forward, muting the TV so he could concentrate on the message rather than the squeals