The Mistress(62)

“I can’t. This is the best I’ve got. But it’s solid, I can swear that to you. Are you going to let him get away with it, because everyone is too chicken to give me a warrant?”

“That’s how it is,” he said stubbornly. “Get me more. No judge is going to give us a warrant with what you’ve got.”

She argued with him for three days and got nowhere. And by then, Vladimir was back from London, and the chief purser had told him about Athena’s visit, and Vladimir asked Natasha about it at dinner the night he got back. He had told Natasha he’d seen their new Monet in London and it was spectacular.

“What did she want to know?” he questioned her about Athena. He watched Natasha carefully as he asked her.

“She wanted to know about the portrait and the painting you bought and if we know the Lucas, and I said we didn’t, we just saw them at the restaurant. I told her about the pirates off Croatia, and she said it could have been very dangerous for us. And she said they don’t have any clues about the art theft yet. She said sometimes paintings like that just disappear.” He nodded, and seemed satisfied with her answer. Natasha looked as innocent as ever, and far more concerned about the pirates than the art.

“Did she ask anything else?”

“Not really. She seems smart. Maybe she’ll find the paintings and who took them.”

“She is smart,” he confirmed. He didn’t like that she had visited Natasha while he was away. “You don’t have to see her if she shows up again.”

Natasha nodded obediently. “She asked to see you. She only asked to see me because you weren’t here. And I thought I had to, because she’s the police.” She sounded childlike as she said it.

“You don’t,” he informed her. “We don’t know anything about it. She’s been here twice. That’s enough. We have nothing to tell her. She’s just fishing, and she wants to say she’s been to the boat. You know how people are.” Natasha nodded again, and played with her food. She wasn’t hungry. It had been three days since Athena’s visit, and nothing had happened. She wondered what they were going to do. She had been a nervous wreck since then. She said she had a headache that night and went to bed, but she couldn’t sleep. Vladimir was in his office, working, and she heard one of the tenders leave after midnight, which was unusual. She wondered who was going ashore, probably some of the crew, although it was late for them too, or maybe they were picking some of them up from shore. But she never heard the tender come back, and she was asleep when Vladimir came to bed. He didn’t wake her to make love to her. He just kissed her, and she smiled in her sleep.





Chapter 12


Theo was asleep when the police called him at seven A.M. He was used to being woken up now. There was always something, some problem, some crisis, some question. He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in a month, and hadn’t set foot in his studio for as long. He ran a restaurant now, he didn’t paint.

The call was from the chief inspector, who asked him to come to the restaurant immediately and wouldn’t say more. Theo was panicked that there had been another robbery, and they’d lost more paintings. He drove to Da Lorenzo as fast as the deux chevaux would go.

The chief inspector was waiting for him outside the restaurant and got right to the point. He told Theo that both security guards had been shot with tranquilizer guns and tasered the night before, and had been unconscious for several hours but were unharmed. They had called the police when they woke up and were being tended to by paramedics in an ambulance parked outside. Theo braced himself for what he was going to hear next, that the rest of the paintings were gone. He followed the inspector inside, and stared at the walls in disbelief. The stolen paintings were back, in their right places, bolted to the wall. Everything was immaculate. None of them were damaged when he examined them. It was as though they had never left.

“Do they look like forgeries or the real deal?” the inspector asked him, and Theo looked at them closely. He hadn’t even thought of that. They could have been stolen to be replaced by forgeries, but they weren’t. He was sure of it.

“They’re my father’s,” he said quietly. “What does this mean?”

“Technically, it makes the whole art theft a prank. As far as the police are concerned, it’s over. What really happened and why, we’ll never know. No one’s talking. One of our inspectors got a tip that Stanislas had them onboard, but we couldn’t get a warrant based on that, and we can’t prove it. I think it was a bogus tip. Whoever took them may have figured the whole thing was too hot and got scared, so they put them back. I think you got lucky, Mr. Luca,” he said seriously.

“So do I,” Theo said, smiling broadly, shook the inspector’s hand, and thanked him for their hard work. An army of people had been working on it. And now the paintings had been returned. It seemed like a miracle to him, and he knew it would to his mother.

He called her and told her the good news, and an hour later Athena got a call too.

“You don’t need a warrant,” the inspector told her.

“The hell I don’t. They’re on the boat.”

“Not anymore, if they ever were. All twelve of them are in their right places at the restaurant. Someone tasered and drugged the two guards, and put everything back sometime last night. Same MO—they disabled the alarm and the cameras. But all’s well that ends well. We’re done. Good work.” She couldn’t tell if he meant it or was making fun of her, and she was shocked. What the hell did it mean? She wondered if Stanislas suspected Natasha had talked, or decided that prison wasn’t worth it, if he got caught. She hoped that Natasha hadn’t said anything, and confessed, and put herself at risk. But Athena had no way of contacting her safely, and knew better than to try.