The Da Vinci Deception (35 page)

“It's beautiful, Curtis. Even now when the lake is going to sleep and all around the lights are going on as if everything else is just waking up.”

“I've never thought of a lake going to sleep. That's a notion I haven't considered. But it's very beautiful, the way you describe it. I've watched the lights come on at night, and I've wondered who turns them on and what they have done that day.” He turned to her and smiled. “Is that a postman over there? Or did a bank teller turn that light on?”

“I like that, too,” Ellie said softly. “Each light has its own little story. Some happy, others sad. At night when you turn on the lights . . . are you happy?”

“I don't let myself think about it. I spent too much time chasing happiness away from me, then wondered who I was and why had I done that. Now I take it a day at a time and so far it's okay.”

“You were in prison. Why?”

“How did you know?”

“I hope that's not important. Were you?”

“It is important. Who told you?”

“I'm sorry, it's really none of my business. Please forget I asked.”

“Look over there! That hillside came to life as if someone hollered, ‘Hey, hit the switches!'” He laughed and Eleanor joined in. Then silence. Without turning to face him, she asked about his years in prison. He had worked up the courage to tell her. But she knew. Who told her?

“It was six years ago,” he began. “I was trying to be an illustrator and was good at drawing the inside of machines, but those jobs didn't pay much. When I was in art school, I had a part-time job in a brokerage
company. I guess that's where I got the crazy notion about making bonds. Bearer bonds that I could sell easily. I taught myself how to make engravings and began selling bonds. Then I got cocky and figured I could make more money faster if I made my own money.”

Eleanor laughed. “You make it sound so easy. You were a counterfeiter?”

“I tried to be. I was just beginning when the feds closed in on my bond business.”

“That explains why Jonas hired you. I'm sorry about the other . . . prison, I mean.” She looked up at Stiehl. “You know, I've been in Italy six months and until a week ago I felt I was involved in something terribly important. Now it all seems so crazy. This old place, the isolation, Tony and that awful boat. Why the hush-hush over making copies of the Windsor drawings? You can do that in New York.”

“Jonas likes to be dramatic,” Stiehl replied. He knew she must not know the truth.

“Curtis, I want to see your drawings.” She spoke in a firm voice, as if she would not be denied.

“Of skulls and bones and muscles of the lower leg? There's nothing to see.”

“I don't care. I want to see the drawings.”

“Ellie.” He put his fingers under her chin and lifted her face to his. “There's nothing to see.” He kissed her forehead. “It's late, and you said you wanted to go to bed.”

“I think you just gave me the kiss-off. You're hiding something and I want to know what it is.”

“And I said you must be very tired.”

“Then I'll ask Giorgio.”

“Come on, let's get some sleep.”

The speakers went silent. Jonas ran up the volume but all he generated was a loud hum. Tony returned.

“They've gone to their rooms. You heard? Princess Eleanor is asking questions.”

“She's a bright woman. I expected it.”

“We don't need her curiosity.”

“What do you suggest we do about it?”

“Pay her off before she knows too much. Send her back to Washington, or—”

“Put her in a car headed for a steep cliff?”

“You won't lay a finger on her, right? What will she say when you tell the world you found the missing Leonardos? She'll blow her mouth off about you and where she spent the last six bloody months. What she can't figure out she'll pull out of Stiehl.”

“Eleanor is my problem, as is Curtis. You'll have enough to handle in taking care of Giorgio.”

“I thought you needed him.”

“Only so long as he holds on to his original drawings. After we have all of them, then we might say that he is at your disposal.”

Tony broke into one of his rare fits of laughter. “Find where he's hidden them in one of a thousand piles of old stone? It's a crazy notion.”

“Not so crazy. On Monday we visit Giorgio for a taste of his wife's celebrated cooking. I suspect the drawings are not far from where he sleeps.”

“I doubt he would keep them in his home.”

Jonas set his empty glass down. “That is precisely the difference between your deep-rooted suspicions and Giorgio's naive innocence. The drawings are where he lives, not buried behind stone ten miles away.”

Tony swigged the last drops directly from the bottle. “You always have an answer. Give me one on Deats. He's here. Your precious princess led the way.”

“Superintendent Deats shall be taken care of in proper order. After all, he's just arrived and needs time to get oriented.”

“Oriented? Perhaps I should send him a map with a circle around
Il Diodario.
The bastard's come after me . . . and no disguise will stop him.”

“Tony, I'll remind you that Leonardo said impatience is the mother of stupidity. What is needed is a rational approach in dealing with the superintendent. If he was led to Lake Como, then we shall find a way to lead him away.”

Walter Deats stumbled onto the Albergo Caramazza in Moltrazzio, a hill-hugging village north of Cernobbio. A lane led to the small hotel, dead-ending in a miniature parking area so narrow that to turn a car
around it was necessary to drive onto a rotating platform, then push it a hundred and eighty degrees.

He took a room overlooking the town and the lake. His view was north of the bluff from where he had seen the speedboat literally fly over the water. He desperately needed a pair of high-magnification binoculars.

He learned that Eduardo Caramazza, owner of the inn, had served as civilian adjutant in Mussolini's Department of Defense and had carefully chosen his spoils from the war. Prized among his possessions was a Leitz 22X60 Compofortit binoculars.

“They are nearly fifty years old and heavy,” Caramazza said proudly, “but when set on the tripod, they perform with great precision. You can count the cars on a ferry crossing over to Bellagio and that is a long distance from here.”

Caramazza joined Deats with the familiarity of an old friend. He was slightly built, but there was strength in his face and voice. The hotel and the town and dozens of relatives living on the lake were his life, all intermingling with the business of the day and the social life at night. Caramazza was the town historian, but with interests ranging far beyond Moltrassio. His knowledge of the lake and its people could be invaluable. Deats became an eager listener.

Deats trained the binoculars on the gray villa Caramazza identified as the Vescovo mansion, “now owned by a fat American.”

Through the glasses he discovered two men with rifles slung over their shoulders. Each wore fatigues, the colors blending into the dense shrubbery surrounding the villa. One patrolled along the tree line above the boathouse, the other ranged from the solarium to the north, then would disappear into the trees as if headed up the steep hill behind
Il Diodario,
only to reappear on the other side of the mansion, where he met the other guard returning from his patrol. They would confer for several minutes, then repeat their patrol.

He spotted the white speedboat moored in the boathouse nearest the villa. There were pink-and-lime-striped umbrellas over tables in the patio. The man Deats identified as Anthony Waters took the boat out on the lake, patrolling in ever-widening circles. A blimplike body attired in khaki shorts lay on a plastic cushion. A divinely shaped young woman dove into the water, swam away from the gray stones, then returned and sat on the steps until her deep red hair dried.

A man appeared in the window in an upper floor. He waved to the swimmer, then slipped out of view.

Colorful sails dotted the deep blue lake, and the sky had been ordered up by a photographer taking postcard pictures. The same photograph, perhaps, that Deats saw in the gallery in Jonas Kalem's New York gallery. It all looked so normal. So peaceful.

D
eats steadied the heavy binoculars on the white speedboat, following it until the bow dropped and it moved out of sight behind a spit of land near the Villa d'Este Hotel.

Throughout the weekend Deats observed the speedboat leisurely plying back and forth in front of the gray villa. When another craft entered the same waters, the boat encircled it, sending up white geysers and forcing the smaller boat to bob violently in the heavy turbulence. Deats assumed that Waters was searching for him, and if he was found on the water, he and his boat would be sliced in two. It would be “an unfortunate boating accident.”

He left his perch to find Eduardo Caramazza.

“I'm interested in the white boat that comes from the gray mansion you said was owned by the American. I watched it disappear behind a piece of land below the hotel.”

“Perhaps going to Cernobbio. The shops there are more convenient than those in Como.”

“Do you have a boat?”

“Not one that matches the white terror, but it's reliable.” Caramazza smiled. “To live on the lake without a boat is like a meal without wine.”

“I'd like to hire it, but I'm still hobbled by this damned hand.”

“You are my guest. Let me run you along the shore and find where the witch from
Il Diodario
has been moored. Is that what you want to learn?”

“Indeed yes.” Deats smiled appreciatively.

“Signore Deats, you are here for a special reason, and if I have the time to help you, I shall. I'm afraid that with only one good hand, you may have an accident and we shall both be very sorry. I know the boat, and I know the tricks of the lake and where all the coves and rocks in the shallow waters are hidden.”

Caramazza's help could be invaluable. Deats turned to his new friend. “I accept your offer. Let's see where they've landed.”

Caramazza smiled.
“Andiamo!”

Giorgio Burri's villa was set well back from the water. Between the dock and the pale yellow house was a green garden with high walls running the length of the property on each side. Above the dock was a white-latticed gazebo; it was here that Giorgio waited for his guests to appear. He climbed down to the dock, calling out instructions to tie up alongside his wide-beamed fishing boat.

Jonas might have been more easily extricated with a crane, but the lumbering giant finally managed the few feet from the boat to the dock. Tony leaped nimbly to his side, a leather briefcase under his arm.