The Painted Messiah (16 page)

Despite his age and size, Rene moved with the ease of an athlete still in his prime. Unlike his employer, Rene possessed no talent for language. His native tongue

Malloy had never been able to determine. The language he spoke with the contessa was a kind of pidgin Italian, though he freely mixed German, French, and English words into it, the accent inevitably misplaced. Rene's grammar, Malloy had decided long ago, was capricious.

One thing Malloy did not doubt was Rene's loyalty to the woman he served. In her presence, his eyes stayed on the contessa with the zeal and ferocity of a trained Rottweiler. When he had approached within fifteen feet, Malloy stopped and said to the man, 'Is the contessa at home, Rene?'

As this question was no doubt absurd, Rene did not bother answering him. He simply flexed his enormous fists and walked away. Malloy went to the veranda, intending to knock at the front door, but Claudia de Medici was already waiting.

'Thomas! This is a pleasant surprise! Have you moved back to Zürich ?'

'I'm here on business for a couple of days. I found myself with a free afternoon, and I thought I'd drop by. I hope I'm not interrupting something.'

'Nothing that can't wait. Come in.' Malloy stepped into the elegantly furnished entryway. The contessa led him to the drawing room and began fixing them both a glass of Scotch.

'Are you working on a new book?'

'I have written my book. If I write another, it won't be for some time.' Her smile was almost bashful, her beauty as stunning as ever. In fact, it seemed to Malloy that she had not changed in the years since he had first met her. She was still a woman seemingly not quite forty, making her, he realized with a sudden sense of despair, over a decade younger than he was! 'And you,' she asked with a smile that suggested she had read his thoughts, 'are you still a freelance editor?' There was a bit of playfulness in this, something of an old joke between them, and Malloy smiled.

'Retired, I'm afraid.'

'Not entirely, I hope. You are far too young for something as dreadful as retirement.'

'I keep busy.'

'You are living in New York, I hear.'

'You must have good sources.'

'One of the advantages of having interesting friends.' Malloy resisted asking about her sources. The contessa was quite effective at gaining confidences, obstinate about keeping them. 'You are happy. I can see that much in your eyes.'

'I'm getting married this spring.'

'And you decide to step back into the life - in order to save yourself from your happiness?'

Malloy laughed at the jab. He had not thought about it like that, but he supposed one could see it that way. He certainly would not have been the first man to sabotage a perfect relationship. Still, he was reluctant to admit as much, even jokingly. Besides, he had never really left his profession - only fieldwork. 'If I wait any longer to get back into things, it will be too late,' he confessed.

'Perhaps it is not your destiny.'

'I believe we make our own destiny, Contessa.'

'It's my opinion that people are not thrust into hell because of their passions, Thomas. I think they jump in for the sake of them, but I'm not going to change your mind. I can see that. Why don't you tell me what brings you here? It has something to do with business, I think.'

The contessa worked as successful mind readers do. She read body language. She made grand assessments and waited for reactions. That she was sweet about it and seemed to enjoy him at some level made it less disconcerting, but the truth was her insights into his character had always left him wondering if she might really be clairvoyant.

'I thought you might be able to explain something for me.' The contessa tipped her head slightly, her expression curious. 'What do you know about twelfth century icons of Christ?'

'I know I enjoy them very much, though I would imagine I'm in the minority. What would you like to know?'

'A twelfth century Byzantine portrait of Christ - what would something like that be worth, say in mint condition?'

The contessa smiled as if dealing with a precocious child. 'That is difficult to say. Assuming it to be in excellent condition, you would have to know if it had been restored. Then there is the provenance. That would affect the price significantly. People interested in paintings of that sort value the history at least as much as, if not more than, the artistic merit. Many icons come with a portable altar. There might be a unique box or travelling case. Many of these are works of art themselves. Some are encrusted with precious jewels, which would add value beyond the particular artistic merit. A famous person might have owned it. A great deal of information about the royal family in Constantinople is available from that era. The princess Anna Comnena, who met the first Crusaders, for instance, even wrote a book detailing her impressions of the army's leaders, including the relatively unknown Baldwin of Boulogne - the man the barons would ultimately elect as the first king of Christian Jerusalem. If it were her personal icon and you could prove it with documents, such a piece would be extremely attractive to some buyers - myself included, though I am not a collector - but without a great deal more information I couldn't begin to make a guess.'

'I have a general description of it. It's on a panel of wood, maybe a quarter of an inch thick, thirteen or fourteen inches tall and eight or nine inches wide.'

'Gold? Inlaid jewels?'

He shook his head. 'Here's the thing. The people involved are paying twenty-five million dollars for it.' The contessa's expression did not change, but Malloy was certain something happened - call it a twinkling in the eye or a moment of recognition. 'When I started trying to price comparable pieces, rare as they are, the pieces go for forty or fifty thousand up to half a million. Nothing is close to what my people are paying.'

'What is your involvement, Thomas?'

'I'm moving it for them.'

'Smuggling it?'

'Just moving it.'

'If the people are lying to you about the nature of the object you have to deal with or the price they are paying, my advice is to walk away. Better yet . . .
run.
'

Malloy smiled and shook his head. 'I can't do that. This is my chance to get back to what I do best.'

'Then I don't think I can help you, except to say you might be looking at something like what happened to you in Beirut.'

Malloy felt like a man who has just had the ground under his feet taken away from him. 'How do you know about Beirut?'

'People talk, Thomas. Rather, I should say, they whisper.'

'The people who know about Beirut don't.'

'A neophyte intelligence officer inherits half a dozen low-level agents who pass along outdated information. Some months later he is running a network of twenty- four agents and catches wind of an attack being planned against the US Marine base. He passes the information to his superiors and tries to discover specific details. The following day he is in a G. I. hospital with six bullet wounds. Eight of his people are dead, and the rest are evacuated. Two days after that, some two hundred and forty marines perish, and Reagan orders American troops out of Lebanon.'

Malloy tried to smile, but he didn't make much of it. 'They say we learn from our mistakes,' he said finally.

'Actually,' she answered, 'they say we
should
learn from them. The truth is that most people have a regrettable tendency to repeat them.'

'Do you know something I don't know, Contessa?'

'I know a great deal more than you do, Thomas, about a great many things. In this instance, I know that you never trusted your superiors again after Beirut and, because of it, you were so successful it caused problems that you could not even imagine. I know, too, that your skills aren't what they were. You have lost that skepticism you are so proud of, say what you will to the contrary, and you think you can handle this job without much trouble, because it looks like nothing can go wrong. You expect that once you do you will be back to your old tricks, not lying in your grave.'

Malloy felt a chill run down his spine when she mentioned his grave. 'Tell me what you know.'

'I know you are standing in a pit of vipers, but you don't see them because you are half asleep.'

Malloy wanted to argue or explain or at least to defend himself, but he resisted the impulse. A woman capable of bringing the Swiss banking system to its collective knees was not someone he cared to underestimate.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Palace of Herod Antipas, Peraea

Summer AD 26.

Although Herod the Great had been an extraordinary man, it was universally acknowledged his sons were not. They pretended otherwise, of course. They had learned pomposity at their father's knee. Philip ruled at a luxurious court in a tetrarchy to the north of Galilee. Antipas shuffled between Galilee and Perea with a great train of servants and officials of government in his procession. Each son dreamed of uniting his father's kingdom again, but in truth the time was long past when either of them might make a credible effort at it. Sejanus had made that clear to Pilate when offering him his present position. Judaea, Samaria and Idumaea belonged to the emperor because Herod's eldest son had been incompetent.

Rather than replace him with either Philip or Antipas, letting a once-prosperous kingdom perish in the process, Augustus had taken the contentious provinces as his own and restored the peace. According to Sejanus, Augustus's decision had proven the better course of action. Over the past three decades Antipas had repeatedly demonstrated the same capricious brutality as his elder brother, Archaelaus, while Philip's indolence extended to the point that he had lost his wife to his brother and did not rouse himself from his banquet couch to go and chase after her.

Pilate had been expecting to encounter a rather dull intelligence when he journeyed to Peraea to meet Antipas. Instead he discovered an urbane gentleman of sixty years, possessing a silky voice, a lively wit, and an engaging sense of humor. Antipas shared his father's less than substantial stature as well as his tendency to carry extra weight. Despite this he seemed an energetic man with lively black eyes that missed nothing inside the great banquet hall and probably nothing beyond his palace gate either, and though he did not trust the tetrarch, Pilate found, at least at the start of the evening, that he liked him very much.

Herodias, Antipas's new wife, appeared to be about half his age. She struck Pilate as a woman of obvious intellectual capacity with the imperious manner that came to women whose intelligence exceeded that of their husbands. Pilate's initial reaction to the woman was the curious thought that Antipas had not seduced her away from his brother for the sake of her beauty. He was wondering what magic potions Herodias had employed, when Antipas summoned her daughter into the hall to perform a dance. Salome was a tempting delicacy of some twelve or thirteen years, not yet ready for marriage but very close - and far prettier than her mother. Pilate enjoyed her performance but was curious enough about the family that he pulled his gaze from the dance to see how Antipas reacted to it. The tetrarch, he realized, was besotted with his stepdaughter.

Pilate's intelligence on the notorious marriage suggested that Antipas had fallen for Herodias shortly before his visit to Rome and persuaded her, through secret correspondences while he was yet abroad, to leave his brother and join him in Galilee on his return - as his wife. The role of Salome in all this had not been mentioned, but it seemed to him as he watched the newlyweds that Salome had been the critical factor, almost certainly, he thought, operating as her mother's agent. For what reason he could only guess.

It was not Pilate's business of course, but the possibilities inherent in the complex interaction of this newly forged family would interest Sejanus, and Pilate intended to make a full report once he was safely returned to Caesarea.

While Antipas almost certainly enjoyed the advantage of receiving a visit from Caesar's new prefect before bothering himself with a journey to Caesarea, he made every effort to let Pilate know he considered him his most honoured guest - at least until he had consumed so much wine that he no longer cared. Pilate and Procula reclined upon his right and left hand at the head table in a rare and somewhat unsettling mix of the two sexes at a banquet.

They were also the first to be introduced to the audience of some twenty courtiers and ladies. Antipas accorded them both lengthy speeches of praise. Procula's association with the Claudii seemed especially significant, though he was politic enough to praise her beauty above her family connections, and Pilate basked in the reflected glory of it.

The meal itself was decidedly Oriental and as ingeniously presented as anything in the court of Tiberius. During one of the latter courses Antipas became less interested in his food and more excited by the quality of the wine he served. He was the sort of alcoholic who loses none of his motor skills. Instead, as he drank, he became more animated and loquacious. On the subject of wine Antipas asked Pilate if it compared favorably to Italian vintages. It was indeed far superior to most of the wines Pilate had experienced, but he was too much of a patriot to admit it, and answered that in Rome one drank the wines of the world, which was to say,
Roman
wine.