‘You’re kidding me,’ Ben chuckled.
‘I look up,’ Boonzie went on tenderly, ‘and there’s this fuckin’ apparition standing there in the kitchen doorway, still in her apron. Never seen a woman so wild. And I thought, Boonzie, that’s the one you’ve been looking for. Three days later, we were engaged and I’d put in my resignation. Hitched by the end of the month. I haven’t been back to Blighty since. And I dinnae miss it, either.’
‘I can see that. You picked a perfect spot, Boonzie.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘How did Mirella take to country life after Naples? She doesn’t feel too isolated out here?’
Boonzie used the back of his shovel to spread wet cement over the footings of the greenhouse. ‘When she first saw the place she was a wee bit worried about intruders and the like. Some friends of hers got burgled down in Ríccia.’ He grinned up at Ben, and his eye sparkled. ‘But she’s got no worries with me, Ben. I have my peace of mind, if you know what I mean.’
Ben did. He didn’t need to ask.
‘What about you?’ Boonzie said.
‘Me?’
‘Aye, did you ever settle down?’
‘I lived in Ireland for a while. Live in France now.’
‘What about a woman?’
Ben hesitated. The face that instantly flashed up in his mind’s eye belonged to a woman called Brooke. He held the image there for a long moment, seeing her warm smile, the auburn curls falling across her eyes as she laughed. He could almost smell her perfume, almost feel his hands stroking her skin. ‘Yeah, there’s someone,’ he said, and then went quiet.
Silence for a beat, and then Boonzie asked, ‘So are you going to tell me what you’ve come all this way for?’
‘It’s not important now.’
‘Ben, you’re like a son to me. Don’t force me to beat it out of you with this shovel.’
Ben gave a shrug. ‘OK. I came here to offer you a job.’
Georgia
Grigori Shikov’s private study was a place few people were allowed to visit. For some it was a privilege; for others a summons to the luxurious boathouse in the villa’s sprawling grounds, escorted by silent men in dark suits, spelled doom.
The dark-panelled room was filled with the treasures Shikov had assiduously collected over forty or more years. The vast antique sideboard behind him was dominated by a magnificent lapis lazuli bust of Frederick the Great. On an eighteenth-century gilt-bronze rococo commode by André-Charles Boulle stood a globe that had once belonged to Adolf Hitler; but it was the extensive collection of artefacts from Imperial Russia, dating between 1721 and 1917, reflecting Shikov’s lifelong passion for what he proudly regarded as his homeland’s golden era, that had earned him the nickname ‘the Tsar’. And it fitted him perfectly.
Of all the historic objects in Shikov’s study, the most physically impressive and intimidating was the immaculate 1910 Maxim water-cooled heavy machine gun, complete with its original wheeled carriage. It occupied the corner of the room, its snout aimed directly towards whomever might be sitting across from him at his massive desk. Between the fixed stare of the machine gun muzzle and the hard glower of the grizzled old mob boss, nobody could fail to be shrivelled to a pulp.
Nobody except Anatoly, Shikov’s only son, who at this moment was lounging in the plush chair as the old man leaned heavily on his desk and outlined the job he wanted done for him.
The third man present at the meeting was Yuri Maisky, Shikov’s nephew. He stood by the desk with his hands clasped behind his back, keeping quiet as his uncle did the talking. Forty-seven years old, small and wiry, Maisky secretly attributed his thinning hair and the deep worry lines on his brow to the strain of working for Shikov’s organisation for most of his adult life. He loved his uncle, but he also feared him.
There weren’t many men whom Maisky feared more than his boss. One was the boss’s son. When the old man looked at Anatoly all he saw was his beloved only child, his pride and joy; Maisky saw a thirty-four-year-old psychopath with a blond ponytail. The face was long and lean and chiselled, the eyes were quick and dangerous. Maisky’s belief that Anatoly Shikov was clinically insane was one he kept closely to himself.
Shikov could sense the tension emanating from his nephew. He knew that most of his associates and employees lived in dread and loathing of Anatoly. That just made him prouder of his only child, although he would never have shown it. Outwardly, he acted gruff and commanding.
‘Are you paying attention?’ Shikov snapped at Anatoly, interrupting himself.
‘Sure.’
‘Have you been drinking?’
‘Of course not,’ Anatoly lied. The Tsar abhorred alcohol. Anatoly did not. He shifted in the chair and glanced down to admire the hand-tooled perfection of his latest purchase, the alligator-skin boots he’d been trying to show off all day by turning up the legs of his Armani jeans. But not even Anatoly would have dared to put his feet up on the old man’s desk. ‘I’m listening. Go on.’
Anatoly had done plenty of jobs for his father, and it was something he enjoyed being called upon to do. Most guys he’d known who had worked for their dads had to go to the office, wear a suit and tie, attend meetings and conferences, sell shit of one kind or another. Not him. He felt highly privileged to be a valued member of the family firm. He and his old buddy Spartak Gourko had once kept a snitch alive for seventeen days under hard torture to extract a list of names of traitors in their organisation. Another time, Anatoly had spread-eagled a man between four posts in the ground, chains around his wrists and ankles, and lit a cigarette as Gourko drove a pickaxe through the guy’s sternum. When old Spartak got going, he was something to behold.
Anatoly enjoyed his work. He never asked questions about his father’s business, partly because you just didn’t ask the Tsar questions about his business, and partly because Anatoly didn’t really give a damn why things got done the way they did. The only questions he generally asked in life were ‘Can I own it?’; ‘Can I fuck it?’; ‘Can I kill it?’. If the answer to any of the above was negative, he quickly lost interest.
This new job sounded like fun, though.
‘Our sources tell us that the piece of artwork in question will definitely be part of the exhibition,’ Maisky said.
‘And I want it,’ Shikov finished in his gravel voice. ‘I will have it.’
The sheaf of papers spread out across the desk was the report on the gallery’s security system, put together by one of the many experts on Shikov’s payroll, a usefully corruptible Moscow security tech engineer who had leaned on contacts in Milan to get the information they needed. The seventeen-page document contained the technical data on the bespoke alarm system recently installed into the gallery building whose photographs, taken with a powerful telephoto lens from a variety of angles just days before, were clipped together in a file next to the report.
Anatoly hadn’t heard the old man doing this much talking in years. Half-listening as his father went on, he flicked through the series of photos. The location in Italy was printed at the bottom. He could see that the gallery was an extension