Goodbye Again (19 page)

SEVENTEEN

I wasn’t sure what else to do with him. Truss him up with all the rope about? Leave him on the mountaintop? No, I had to take him back with me to Carrara and hand him over to the police. While I was thinking, he’d been thinking, too. And now he was talking fast.

‘The police will be up here any minute, Ben. They’ll have heard the explosion all over the valley. If we leave now in the truck we’ll both get clear away, no questions asked.’

‘You’ve got it wrong again, O’Higgins. I’m not one of you. Come on back to the car to Carrara and the police.’

‘You’re not one of us?’ He laughed. ‘Oh yes you are. You came back here to Carrara to get the stuff in that cave and you knew it was booby-trapped, so we’d go down first and you’d get us out of the way. You’re in this up to your neck, like your father, both of you crooks – and the Italian police certainly won’t believe otherwise. So you come on with me – now, while we have the chance.’

O’Higgins was right about my father. It was clear now that he was a criminal, and worse. The explosion had finally proved that he
had hidden the rest of the art in the cave. Finally I had confirmation of all my worst fears about my father, the father I had loved. But I wasn’t going to argue with O’Higgins. I said, ‘I’ll take my chances with the police. And so will you.’

He changed tack now, became petulant. ‘All right, be like that. I’ll take my chances alone.’ He turned and ran, down the other side of the mountain, as fast as his fat little legs would carry him, which wasn’t far. Unable to slow down, he slipped on the loose scree and started to roll down the hill, on and on, like a child playing a roly-poly game down a meadow slope, until he was lost to sight over a ridge.

I moved down carefully to the edge. It wasn’t a steep fall, and he lay amidst some rocks, about twenty yards beneath me, spread-eagled, motionless. I got down to him. He was semi-conscious, bleeding from a head wound. I took the red hanky from the breast pocket of his torn and soiled linen suit, and staunched the wound on his bald pate. Embarrassed again, he tried to cover his head with a hand, but couldn’t move his arm, wincing in pain. It was probably broken. He looked up, seeming to appeal to me with his watery eyes, and I pitied him a moment, and said, ‘My God, O’Higgins, why didn’t you stick to conning old ladies out of their heirlooms in Foxrock?’

There was a faint, rictus smile. He didn’t speak. I covered his head with the hanky, making a sort of tight turban with it over his head, so that the blood was staunched. He fainted. I loosened his tie, opened his collar, propped him up against a rock, letting the blood run to his feet, and waited.

I’d already heard a siren down in the valley, and now I heard an engine groaning up the mountain track. Another few minutes and the carabinieri jeep appeared, stopping at the end of the track where they’d parked the Toyota. Two carabinieri got out and came up towards us. Of course there remained one vital problem – the
other minder was still holding Elsa prisoner back in her hotel bedroom.

As O’Higgins had said, the carabinieri, like the superintendent at Ulm, were not inclined to believe what I told them on the way back down the mountain. They took O’Higgins straight to the new hospital in the upper town, then returned with me to the carabinieri headquarters in Carrara, a fine classical building opposite the Academia delle Arte. I spoke to the carabinieri chief, a tall, dark-haired man with a luxuriant moustache. A nameplate above his breast pocket read ‘Chief Superintendent Giorgio Marello’.

‘You have to believe me.’ I spoke in Italian, in his airless office looking over the Academia. ‘What do you think they were doing abseiling down that mountain? Did it look like a climbing holiday? They’re all crooks. And the proof of that is back at the Hotel Michelangelo right now, where one of them is holding my friend in her bedroom. Elsa Bergen – we have to get her out without his harming her.’

The chief turned to a colleague, a younger man. ‘Get a plain-clothes man down to the hotel and talk to Carlo, the manager – see if what he says is true.’

‘Why would I bother to lie?’ I was annoyed, exhausted, alarmed about Elsa.

‘We have to check, Signor Contini. It’s a difficult story to believe.’ He brushed his moustache. ‘Your father, Luchino Contini, hiding a vast store of paintings, Italian masterpieces, looted by the Nazis, up in that quarry.’

‘Well, get up there and see for yourself. The explosion may have burst open the cave behind.’

He nodded. ‘We’ll do that.’

‘Good. It’s your affair now, Chief Superintendent.’

He stood up, moved about the room, went to the window. Turning, he said, ‘Your father Signor Luchino Contini, he and his
family owned those two quarries up there beneath the twin peaks. They were a very well-known family round these parts.’

‘Yes, but they were Jews, all murdered except my father.’

‘That’s true. You see, my father worked for the Contini Marble Enterprise here. Not in the quarries, but down at the main office at the marina. He was an accountant, chief clerk to the quarry manager who lived up here in Carrara.’

‘The manager?’

‘Yes. A Signor Roberto Battaglia. He ran everything here, your father lived abroad, only came here once or twice a year.’

I became alert now because, as I had thought, my father surely had an accomplice: this manager must have collaborated with him all along, until the late sixties when my father, with his friend Joseph Bergen in Dublin – with their fill of the loot, and not wanting to take any more risks in getting the stuff out – had sold the quarries.

‘This Signor Battaglia … is he still alive?’

‘No. He died about ten years ago.’

‘And your father?’

‘Also dead.’ I said, ‘You see the implications? The cave was booby-trapped. And Battaglia must have had a hand in helping my father get the paintings out. My father couldn’t have done all that on his own. The two of them were in it together, the manager getting a fat cut of the proceeds.’

‘Yes, that makes sense.’ The chief went to the window again, turned. ‘My father always thought there was something suspicious about Battaglia. He knew exactly what his salary was from the Contini enterprise. And I remember in the sixties, when I was a teenager, Battaglia bought an old palazzo here, did it up expensively, and got a big cruiser down at the marina. Took us all out on it. I remember that. He’d clearly come into a large amount of money.’

‘Pity he’s dead. Could have picked him up. Was he married, had a family?’

‘Married, but no children. His wife is still alive, very old. Lives in an old people’s home, run by the nuns, just outside Carrara.’

‘Maybe I could talk to her. She might tell me something.’

The phone rang. He came back from the window, spoke for a minute, then said. ‘Yes, there is a woman up in her room at the hotel, a Signorina Bergen.’

‘That’s her.’

‘Unwell apparently, being looked after by a man who comes down and brings her food up.’

‘That’s him. The minder. But how can you get her out? He’ll be armed.’

‘Have to see.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Lunchtime. Maybe take him when he comes downstairs to get her food.’

‘Thanks, Chief Superintendent. You believe me now.’

‘Yes. Apart from anything else, what you told me fits exactly with Battaglia’s sudden wealth. Right, let’s see about your friend at the hotel.’ We moved to the door. He stopped. ‘You might go and see Battaglia’s wife. She must have known your father, may have something to add to it all, which she wouldn’t tell me. Signora Emelia Battaglia – she lives just outside town, top of the hill.’

We were halfway out of the door before I stopped abruptly.

‘Signora Emelia Battaglia?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Emelia-Amedeo-Amore’. The inscription hidden on the turnover of the Modigliani painting.

The chief, out of his uniform, was casually dressed. There were four or five other carabinieri in plain clothes in the hotel lobby – by the reception desk, at the small bar having coffee, in the breakfast room or interesting themselves in magazines at a table beside the lift and the stairs, where we expected the minder to emerge to
pick up food for the two of them upstairs. The minder would have recognized me, so I was hidden in the manager’s office, to the side of the reception desk, where, with a mirror on a pillar opposite the lift door, I had a view over part of the lobby. Carlo, the manager, was at the reception desk, fiddling with accounts, chewing his wet cheroot, head down as if nothing interesting was afoot. He was a good actor.

Waiting. It was after one o’clock, a quarter past, twenty past. The reception phone went. Carlo spoke for a half a minute, put the phone down, spoke to the chief.

‘Ordered two pizzas and a beer. Said he’d pick the food up in ten minutes.’

‘What floor is he on?’

‘Fourth floor, number 42.’

‘He’ll come down in the lift then?’

‘Yes. Almost certainly.’

‘We’ll take him getting out of the lift as the door opens.’ The chief moved away, directing two of his men flat against the wall to either side of the lift door. Ten minutes later we heard the rumble of the lift coming down. The two men braced themselves, ready to pounce. The door slid open and in the hall mirror I saw Elsa and the minder behind her – with a gun in her back.

They stood where they were, the lift door open. ‘Move!’ he said, in harsh Italian. ‘The two of you hiding either outside the lift. Move, or this’ll be the end of the woman.’ He put the gun to Elsa’s head. The chief, over the far side of the lobby, gestured to the two men, and they moved away from the lift.

‘And the rest of you,’ the minder continued, ‘get over there, by the bar. All of you.’ He pushed Elsa out of the lift, holding her with her wrist twisted behind her back, gesturing with his gun to the others as they moved to the bar. I’d ducked down behind the reception desk, so that the minder wouldn’t see me. I heard
him speak to Carlo. ‘And you as well. Out of there and over to the bar.’ Carlo left the reception office. I was on my own. And then, beneath the reception desk, I saw the hotel fire alarm panel, a lot of bedroom numbers, switches – and a big red button, with the word TEST above it.

I stabbed it. Immediately a high-pitched siren, an ear-piercing wail, like the torments of the damned, flooded the lobby.

I put my head up over the reception desk. The minder, on his way out of the hotel but stunned now by the noise, had stopped with Elsa in the middle of the lobby, looking wildly around him, his back towards me. I was up and out of the reception office and running for him. He heard me, turning with his gun before I crashed into him with one of my old rugby tackles. At the same moment there was a sharp crack, and I felt a painless thud on the fleshy part of my bicep, and then a stinging pain as I landed on top of him on the floor.

The chief and the other carabinieri by the bar were on us in a flash, pinning the minder down. I reached a hand up to my shoulder, and saw the blood seeping through my fingers. And I saw Elsa above me in her T-shirt and shorts, silhouetted against the bright sunlight from the lobby window, the light illuminating the fine hair on her legs.

I said, ‘Great legs. I really want to paint you.’ I looked at my left arm, dripping with blood. ‘Right arm’s okay. I can paint you.’ My eyes clouded, closed and my head lolled back into darkness.

I lay on the hospital bed. The bullet had gone through the inside edge of my bicep. Blood loss; shock. Shoulder and upper arm bandaged, the forearm held in a sling. Elsa sat on a chair beside the bed.

‘What else was I to do?’ I asked.

‘Where that bullet went, you were just a few inches from dying, you idiot.’

‘We’ve been a few inches from that quite often this last month or so.’

‘Why did you do it?’

‘Had to. A bit of lateral thinking, to get us out of that mess. It wasn’t just for your great legs.’

That evening we were back in the Michelangelo. Carlo had moved us to one of the suites reserved for visiting Saudis, and had sent a vase of flowers, a bottle of Asti Gancia in an ice bucket, grapes, chocolates and some antipasti titbits. Most of the traditional bedside trimmings for the ill. Propped up, lying out on the big double bed, I realized I actually was a bit poorly and needed attention. How nice.

And there was the Modi nude on a chair by the window, with Katie’s journal beneath it. I looked at the nude, the peachy flesh colours, the yellows, shadows of lemon on her thighs, the darker ochre of the curtain behind her, the attempted privacy, a hand crossed over her breasts, the lowered face of a woman who had loved and lost.

But she was mine again now and I loved her once more. And the hell with Katie’s journal. I didn’t need it. I had Emelia. And better still, I had Elsa. My arm stung sharply and I groaned. The painkiller was wearing off.

‘Oh dear me,’ I gasped, holding my arm.

Elsa came and sat by the bed, took my good arm and held my hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I know what you’re thinking. But I’m not going to run away.’

‘No.’

‘And when you’re better you can paint me. I’ll come back with you to your Cotswold barn before I go on to New York.’