The Florentine Deception (4 page)

Just who was Richard Lister? Obviously a gem-hound. Wealthy enough to live in Malibu. Even spots in the trailer parks there cost millions. I searched for Richard's full name and in about a tenth of a second, Google delivered sixty-two different matching websites. The first hit, a back-page story in the
Los Angeles Times
, looked interesting: “Malibu Man Acquitted of Antiquities Smuggling.” It read:

“
After a sensational four-month court battle, Richard Lister, 52, of Malibu, California, has been acquitted of four smuggling charges. Last year, the retired archaeology professor and his brother, Ronald Lister, were charged with importing more than two dozen Iraqi archeological artifacts, a violation of federal law under the 1970 UNESCO Convention. The artifacts, a set of cylinder seals used to sign clay tablets, were believed to be between 4,500 to 5,500 years old, and were allegedly stolen from the Iraqi National Museum during the opening salvo of the 2003 war. Both men were found not guilty on four charges of smuggling; however Richard Lister was indicted on one count of transporting artifacts already illegally imported into the United States. Mr. Lister has been released on bail and has already filed an appeal, with his case pending hearing by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
”

The next few screens of search results were references to the same proceedings, and bore little additional information.

Next, I decided to reconnoiter Richard's email account. Consulting my notepad, I keyed “
yahoo.com
” into the browser. Just as with
Amazon.com
, Yahoo used tracking cookies to remember Richard, and welcomed him back. Unfortunately, it appeared that Richard had logged out since last reading his email, and Yahoo also requested a password to access his account. Hoping for a Daily Double, I tried Richard's “Hephaestus” password with no success, then keyed in “shazam.” This also failed. After half a dozen more guesses, Yahoo displayed a stern warning explaining the legal ramifications of hacking, and locked Richard's account. Defeated, I stood up to stretch.

The phone rang.

“Hello?” No response. “
Heeelloooo
?”

Just as I was about to nix the call, Steven started yelling. “… wait, wait, hello … my mute was on. Hello?”

He was calling from his car. I delivered a well-deserved berating, then proceeded to fill him in on my detective work.

“So neither password worked with Yahoo? Are you sure you typed them in right?”

He annoyed me sometimes. “Of course I am.”

“Hmmm. Maybe the
shazam
thing wasn't a password?”

“What else could it be?”

“Well if it was a password, how come he didn't type in a website or his username first?” Finally Steven was onto something.

“Good point. Hold on a sec.” Richard could have easily selected a website from his web browser's History list or Bookmark list and surfed to it, eliminating the need to manually type in the full web address. I clicked on the browser's History button and scrolled down the list.

“What are you doing?” inquired Steven.

“Just hold on.” Scanning the list, one web address excited me:
www.zeusmail.gr
. Perhaps Lister had two email accounts? I clicked on the link and ZeusMail's login screen greeted me; the site recognized Richard's computer and had pre-filled his email address, [email protected], in the user-name field. With some trepidation, I keyed in “shazam” and clicked the “Login” button.

“Well, what's happening?” whined Steven.

“One second!” I reprimanded. The small rotating globe at the top of the browser spun around maddeningly for a good twenty seconds. Then, as I was about to give up, the screen refreshed and displayed Richard's inbox.

“Bingo!”

Chapter 6

Thirteen minutes later, Steven was by my side panting from his sprint up the stairs.

“You waited, right?”

“What choice did I have? Ready?”

Steven sank to the floor Indian-style and motioned for me to proceed.

Richard's inbox held a single message, as yet unread, dated August 16, 2015, four days ago. I clicked. The email read:

From: Spirited One

To: Antique Collector

Subject: RE: delivery of your goods

where the hell were you? $5M isn't enough? you're a dead man.

On April 2
^nd
, Antique Collector wrote:

>Per our discussion, I will delay delivery of the

>florentine until 12am on August 16
^th

>to give you time to secure the required

>payment. Meet at the agreed-upon location.

>No more $$ excuses or I'll unload on another

>buyer. Do not attempt contact before the drop.

“Holy shit! This is getting interesting,” said Steven, rubbing his hands together. “Shady million-dollar deals, midnight drops, and dead archaeologists.”

“He must have died just after he sent the original email,” I considered out loud. A quick Google search confirmed my suspicions; the
LA Times
online obituaries noted Richard's death on Wednesday, April 7. Cause of death: heart attack. So much for the death threat. Richard's heart had beat him to the punch.

“So what's this Florentine deal?” questioned Steven. “Google it.”

I obliged. The first few results were not encouraging:

Delicious Italian Recipes:
Florentine
Cooking

www.italiancookingforall.com/florentine.html

Learn Italian recipes from the
Florentine
chef masters,
…

Florentine
Chicken Extraordinaire

www.easyitaliancooking.com/recipes/flor_chix.html

The
Florentine
Chicken dish is a favorite at Italian restaurants, but with this easy recipe, you can recreate the magic at …

Italian Dishes for the American Palette

www.atozrecipes.com/f/florentine_lasagna_recipe.html

This recipe is one that I discovered while visiting Florence during my honeymoon last year. Here's the list of ingredients …

“Worthless.” A dozen more pages turned up more recipes. “It must be a codename of some sort.”

“Maybe it's stolen property,” conjectured Steven, “a famous Italian painting, pottery from an Italian archaeological site?”

It was worth a try; I googled “stolen Florentine painting” and was rewarded with a barrage of Mona Lisa hits.

“The Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911 from the Louvre. According to the page, Mona was from Florence,” I offered. “They found it two years later when the thief tried to sell it to a Florentine art dealer. Maybe it's gone missing again.”

“No way,” said Steven, “if someone had stolen the Mona Lisa, it'd be front-page news. And even if it had been stolen, no one's going to sell it for five mil.”

He had a point.

I broadened my search to “stolen Florentine,” and this time we hit pay dirt.

The Florentine Diamond

www.famouslostdiamonds.com/florentine_diamond.html

The diamond had been in her family since the end of World War I (the
Florentine
was stolen in 1918). She reminisced that the diamond was of a very unusual shape …

I waggled my finger at the result.

“You think it's a diamond?” he asked incredulously.

“Fits the profile.” I pushed my notepad to Steven and pointed to Lister's most recent Amazon purchases.

Clicking on the link, we learned more:

“
According to legend, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, wore the 137-carat Florentine Diamond into battle in 1467. After Charles's death, a foot soldier discovered the gem on the battlefield, and taking it for a worthless piece of glass, sold it for a florin. In 1657, the stone again surfaced, this time in Austria within the coffers of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. After the fall of the Austrian Empire during World War I, the Florentine was spirited away by the imperial family to Switzerland, where it remained until its theft in 1918.
”

Midway through my reading, Steven smeared his index finger on the LCD display and read: “The diamond hasn't been seen since, although rumors have been circulating for nearly ninety years of its demise,” then continued, “your Mister Lister had a one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-carat diamond. And now he's dead. The question is: did the bad guy ever get the diamond?”

“I don't think so.” I considered. “I'll bet it's still missing. Whoever sent that email didn't know that Richard had already died. He didn't know where the gem was or he wouldn't have made the threat.”

Steven became quiet. I think we were thinking the same thing, or at least I hoped so. For the first time in a long time, I'd actually enjoyed myself; I'd found the day's hours of sleuthing intellectually mesmerizing. And the prospect of a treasure—buried or not—titillated me. A prepackaged adventure had been dropped in my lap, reviving my childhood treasure-hunting obsession. I could already see myself crawling through musty passages in abandoned mines, hunting for the diamond.

Back to reality.

I punched Richard's Latigo Canyon address into Google to get a map. To my surprise, Google responded with a “house for sale” webpage at the top of the search results.

“His place is for sale,” I said. Steven was still zoning out.

“Steven?” I roused him from his stupor. “Richard's house is for sale. And no one knows about the diamond except us and our mysterious emailer-slash-jewel collector-slash-psychopath.”

“Okay, and?”

“And I think it's at least worth some investigating. What do you say we take a midnight visit to Richard's house?”

Steven looked up.

“You're crazy, fool! You want to break into the guy's house?”

“Not break in, just walk around outside. Get a feel for the place. C'mon, we'll do a little detective work. The place is for sale and the guy is dead. It's got to be empty. We'll just take a look through the windows. I'll give you ten percent if we eventually find it, just for joining me for a walk.”

“That's called trespassing, Alex. Last I heard it's illegal. Plus Hillary would kill me.”

“Nothing bad's going to happen.”

“That's what you said senior year in the Boelter basement.” Steven was referring to our near-calamitous excavation of UCLA's Boelter Hall basement in search of a supposedly buried copy of computer legend Alan Turing's PhD dissertation. We ended up empty-handed, and, had it not been for some fast-talking by my Computer Science mentor, Amir Taheri, we would have been charged with felony vandalism.

“That was the adventure of a lifetime and you know it. Plus it all turned out fine.”

“Only because Amir played bridge with the campus police chief.” He shook his head. “Look, it's one thing to do that when you're in college. It's another thing for two guys in their mid-twenties to go skulking around on private property, in the middle of the night, because of random emails.” He shook his head again. “I don't know.”

“A, we're not going to get caught. And B, we're not going to do anything wrong. We're just going to look around a for-sale house. Thirty percent?”

Another headshake, but I could tell I was getting closer.

“Forty?”

“Fifty-fifty or I'm staying here and playing Minecraft. And I'm not going into any house. I'm not going farther than the front door.”

“Sold!”

Riding on the excitement, I bounded over to the closet and threw on a navy UCLA t-shirt. The jeans I was wearing were fine. I glanced at Steven; he was wearing a bright orange Jethro Tull shirt and a pair of wrinkled beige shorts. I threw him a black t-shirt.

“Camouflage. Put it on.”

“Uh huh,” he said. “Where are the walkie-talkies, Nancy Drew?”

“Good point! Our cell phones might not work in the hills.”

I slid open my mirrored closet and pulled out a dusty shoebox. Inside were a pair of one-mile-range walkie-talkies and an unopened package of AA batteries. I threw them to Steven on the futon and began searching my nightstand.

“Pepper spray.” I beamed, holding up a small bottle.

Steven rolled his eyes. “Make sure to set the radios to the same channel.”

Chapter 7

Tallinn, Estonia

Six months earlier

Richard Lister was no stranger to paranoia—as a smuggler, distrust was table stakes—but today, his sense of danger was off the chart. Glancing once more over his shoulder, he nervously inserted his left hand inside his slacks pocket and wrapped his fingers around his Walther PPK. No taking any chances.

The lead had come to him through a contact he'd made in Iraq during a smuggling operation in the first Gulf War, and while the object was way outside his area of expertise, and the seller way too jumpy, if he understood correctly—and he thought he did—the opportunity was just too good to pass up.

Lister took a deep drag from his dwindling cigarette, letting the smoke warm his body against the early morning chill, then tossed it on the ground and knocked on the door.

The keyhole darkened.

“
Kmo
m
o?
” Who is it? The voice was shaky, anxious.