Maestra (33 page)

I expected to cringe at the first cut but it turned out that I’d seen worse when I worked at the Chinese takeaway. With the shower running, the eight pints of blood contained in the human body streamed tidily enough down the drain in a few minutes. The neck gave a froglike belch as I hit the carotid artery, but there were no spouts of gore, just puddles and ooze and a surprisingly clean layer of whitish fat, like a ham sandwich. I left the head under the water while I dragged in the extra packing case I’d ordered. I cut off the blood-soaked clothes with another of the Japanese knives and chucked them into the bath. I unrolled a towel and shoved the body onto it, then spent some time drying it off with my hairdryer. I didn’t want the box to leak. Two rubbish bags, top and tail, then a padded holder from the dry cleaner’s, special jumbo size. The kind used to preserve wedding dresses. I padded back to the front door and collected Moncada’s wallet and briefcase, laid them on the bottom of the packing case and rolled the body in sideways, braced myself against the sink with my hands under the lip of the case and hauled it upright. I turned Mozart up loud while I hammered down the lid. Finally I gaffer-taped all the seams several times, and attached some of the helpful stickers the moving company had given me – ‘Heavy’, ‘This way up’. Renaud was ready to go to Vincennes. What was left of him, anyway.

First, I wrapped the head in clingfilm, then popped it in a Casino supermarket bag, tied the handles together, then put that into a snap-close Decathlon sports carrier, along with Moncada’s gun and the manky Nikes Renaud had used to plod after me round the Luxembourg. I gave it an exploratory kick – no tell-tale drippage. I cleaned my way around the flat once more, using a toothbrush dipped in bleach for the inside of the taps and the bathplug, bundling the plastic sheeting together with our clothes and stuffing all that in another bag, backtracking to the shower to sluice myself down. Then I sat wetly on the floor and lit a fag. In front of me was a black bin liner of bloodied rubbish, the leather getaway holdall, the sports carrier and the black case containing the Richter. I could put the clothes and tools down the incinerator chute behind the concierge’s broom cupboard off the courtyard. I packed the bag containing the head like a grisly picnic into the straw basket Renaud and I used to take to the market. I took track pants, sports bra, trainers and a sweatshirt from the holdall, shoved on a cashmere beanie and trotted out into the night. I made it to the river in under ten minutes, pretty good, tracing the same route as the one when I’d played cat and mouse with Renaud.

Like most portentous moments in life, our goodbye descended into bathos. I had given some thought to our final farewell, the Pont Neuf, the lovers’ bridge to Ile de la Cité, but even at this hour there were couples entwined in the bays, watching the lumen-drenched currents of the Seine. I took the stone staircase down to the scraggy garden at the tip of the island, freezing as two patrolling
gendarmes
paused at the foot to allow me past. They said ‘
Bonsoir
’ politely, but I could feel them watching me as I walked over to the statue of Henri IV, the basket cradled under my arm. I didn’t dare risk a splash, so after a while I passed them again and crossed over to the
quai
, keeping my eye out for sleeping tramps. I sat with my feet dangling towards the icy water and lowered the bag by the handles until it was submerged, the current tugging at my fingers. Gently, I let it go.

*

When I was finished, finally, it was dawn. I thought that was the time I’d remember Paris best, in the end, the littoral moments between night and day when the city shifts on its axis, between the stripped-retina shame of the party’s end and the clean-aproned bustle of the morning. The white time, the negative space, the gap between desire and lack. Renaud had always slept through the dawn, with a tiny bit of help, of course. All those cosy suppers, none lacking my special secret ingredient. Nothing heavy, just something to take the edge off, just to make sure he was out for the hour or so after we’d made love when I could retrieve the spare laptop I kept hidden behind the bookshelf and go hunting.

Exceeding the mark can sometimes be just as much a mistake as missing it. I’d been fooled, I admit, by Cameron Fitzpatrick’s knack with the blarney, but one word had shown me that Renaud was not what he said.
Certo
. Of course. The roll of the ‘r’ too precise, the tiny lifted inflection at the end of the word. The real thing. That and the
osso buco
.

Plus, the casual drop of da Silva’s name. The car in which da Silva had arrived last summer in Como to begin his investigation was a
Guardia di Finanza
vehicle. The Italian police force is split into many divisions, and, oddly, Mafia investigations are not dealt with by the
carabinieri
, the sexy poster boys in their tight uniforms who set the gap-year girls’ hearts a-flutter, but by the more prosaically titled Financial Guards. I had guessed Moncada was Mafia in Rome, known it when I saw the car.

Da Silva. Facebook friends never
had
been my style, but they were certainly Signora da Silva’s. Franci, short for Francesca, couldn’t seem to throw a pot of spaghetti on the stove without uploading the latest detail of her thrilling life. With over 800 friends, I figured one more random acquaintance wouldn’t make a difference to Franci, and a random snap culled from a local paper, with a suitable name amalgamated from the Roman phone directory, made me a new friend. I eagerly posted a picture of my new sofa, and a cute little Kinder hippopotamus with coconut frosting – ‘Naughty!’ – and then sat back to scroll through the details of Franci’s existence in a Roman suburb. Christmas, Easter, a Prada purse her husband had given her for her birthday, a family holiday in Sardinia, a new dishwasher. Franci was certainly living the dream. The da Silvas had two children, Giulia, four, and baby Giovanni, who must have been photographed more than the Beckham brats. And there, in the corner of a shot, next to the proud mamma trying to disguise her baby weight in an unfortunate red suit with a peplum, and
Papà
, neat and fit in suit and tie, was a familiar soft swell of paunch, and on the paunch, when I’d magnified it and spun it, and looked again and again, a monogram. R.C. Renato, Ronaldo? It didn’t matter. A simple online search found a Chiotasso,
Sarto
, listed in the business section of the Italian phone book in the same suburb where Franci da Silva filmed the ongoing documentary of her life.
Sarto
– tailor. He’d told me that his father was a tailor, still carrying on the business in that doughty Italian way, and the initials fit. So they’d grown up together, Renaud and da Silva, stayed true to the old neighbourhood. They were friends, not professional acquaintances. A real pair of wiseguys.

I took the final gift Dave had sent me from the holdall and laid it on the floor. The latest
catalogue raisonné
of Rothko, produced for the Tate Modern exhibit in 2009. It had taken a lot of emails to New York gallerists from Gentileschi, who were looking out for a Rothko for a private client, but I’d been able to trace the sales of nearly all the pictures that had passed through private hands in the last three years and none matched Renaud’s details. He had been too confident, naming the bank, Goldman Sachs.

Still, that wasn’t enough to confirm it. That Renaud had lied about who he was didn’t necessarily make him a cop. Yet the ease with which he’d taken care of Leanne, the sirens appearing in the wake of Moncada’s death? I don’t think he fully understood the power of Google. In a programme for the proceedings of a conference entitled ‘Cultural Methods of Money Laundering’ at the University of Reggio Calabria, I found a scheduled talk by one Ispettore Chiotasso, R. on the use of artworks as ‘capital covers’ for illegal funds. He and da Silva were colleagues, after all. Renaud had spoken at the conference at 3 p.m. I could imagine him, shirt damp under the arms, in some dusty southern classroom, the delegates nodding after a heavy lunch. So he did chase money, after a fashion. It was only when I read the abstract of the talk that I’d had an inkling of what Renaud might have planned for Moncada. He wanted revenge.

In the early Nineties, a magistrate named Borsellino was murdered in Sicily by the Mafia. It was an easy name to remember, because it happened to be the same as my favourite Milanese hat-maker. The killing shocked Italy, and in its aftermath, police squads were drafted into Sicily from different regions of the country in an attempt to break the pattern of collusion between official forces and the Mafia. The Direzione Investigativa Antimafia was made up of combined teams from across Italy, amongst them several divisions of Financial Guards from Rome, including one Chiotasso, R. The Sicilian case twenty years later, where the police investigating the fake Greek artifacts got a lot more than froth with their coffee, had involved Renaud’s colleagues. The culprits were never arrested, but they were believed to have been connected with the established international art scene.

Renaud must have known that Moncada was involved in the bombing that killed Renaud’s fellow police officers. Sure, he and da Silva
were
investigating Mafia art fraud, but, as I had learned from my research, Mafia cases could drag on for decades, a few gains here, a few losses there. Cracking the money laundering ring hadn’t been Renaud’s real motive. Revenge, and a warning to Moncada’s employers in the true Sicilian style. That’s why I hadn’t stiffed him sooner; I liked him enough to want him to have his moment of triumph. His story had been pretty damn good, all told. And I had to admit, I’d been amused by the game.

There were many things I could never know. Had da Silva’s apparent belief in my innocence back in Como been an act, too? Either way, Renaud had obviously convinced him at some point not to haul me in, because it suited the long game with Moncada. They’d assumed they’d have me in the end. I was the bait for a little old-school justice.

How much da Silva knew of the way Renaud worked the sting wasn’t my business, and I guessed since he was a family man, he didn’t want to know more than he had to. It might have upset Franci. Nor did he look like the sort of guy who would cheerfully fuck his suspects. Renaud was the maverick cop, working the case on his own terms, regretfully bringing the
femme fatale
to justice. The awful clothes had been a nice touch, though. Quite a sacrifice, I guessed, for an Italian. So, Renaud planned to deliver his warning to Moncada’s associates, da Silva would plausibly smooth over the killing as an officer’s self-defence and I’d be stopped at the airport with a murdered girl’s passport.

I thought about sleeping, but I didn’t want to miss the post office opening, so I went out for a walk, circling the perimeter of the Luxembourg to keep warm until seven, when I found a
café-tabac
that was open and bought myself a
noisette
and an elderly postcard of a Parisian panorama. I borrowed a pen from the waiter, his day’s scowl already in place, and wrote out the address of my white knight in Finsbury, then added:

D
,

This is not a gift. You owe me £1. I’m sure Rupert will handle the sale with pleasure
.

J xxx

Capital gains, after all. The money I’d pocketed from Moncada was unofficial: by selling the Richter to Dave for a quid, I’d got my original investment back, plus the profit, and let myself in for 28p in tax. At least I’d learned something in the department.

After that, it was eight, and the Richter and I were the first in line at
la poste
.

28

I gave the concierge a garish potted carnation and a Rykiel print scarf I’d never much liked. The sleepless night and the endless cigarettes had left me with a tinny ache in my ears and a twitch in my hands, but behind my eyes my mind was as shiny as the bathroom in the flat. The purple shadow of my eye sockets was also useful when I handed her a neat cardboard carton containing Renaud’s few clothes (minus the plastic wallet in which he’d taped up my passport and credit cards) and asked, as a great favour, if she could look after it in the lodge in case monsieur ever came back for his things. Feckless lovers doing a moonlight flit were standard fare in the
telenovele
, and despite her voluble commiserations I managed to imply that it was just too painful to talk about. I reminded her that the movers would be arriving later that day and explained that a friend was giving me a lift to the airport, thanked her in between agreeing that No Man Was To Be Trusted and lugged the holdall to the end of the street, waiting at the bus stop where I had once watched Renaud waiting for me. The bus was crowded with passengers on their way to work, I had to stand clutching the rail with my bag wedged between my knees as we swayed across the city. How long since I had been on a bus? How long until the mysterious friend at the
préfecture
realised that ‘Leanne’ wasn’t turning up at the airport? I had a day or two, I reckoned, before they came to question the concierge. At least she’d enjoy that. I’d miss my things, but I could always buy more. It was time for a new look, anyway.

By the time the bus had waddled through the commuter traffic to the depot behind Sacré-Cœur I was the only occupant. I trailed behind a tourist coach staggering up to the church, then flopped down on the steps amongst the early-morning backpackers. Someone was playing the bongos and I could already smell weed. I rooted in the holdall and pulled out Renaud’s wallet. Empty, as I thought, except for a couple of notes, the ‘fake’ police badge he’d used on the Goutte d’Or and a postal slip, a receipt for a special delivery to be collected from Amsterdam. It had been a convincing touch, the fake passport. And the Amsterdam address would be useful, as I’d be needing another new one imminently. Next was Renaud’s crappy old-school Nokia, the same model as the one I’d used on Balensky’s boat. I assumed he must have had something more up to date somewhere, but he hadn’t been taking any chance on having it near me. Bless. I didn’t expect to find much, that would have been too neat, and the log lists and inbox were wiped clean, except for an offer from France Telecom that morning. The only call registered was the one he’d made to me while I was in the hotel room with Moncada.