Portrait of an Unknown Woman (Gabriel Allon #22) (111)

“Magdalena who?” replied Gabriel as the headlamps illuminated the enormous horned goat standing in the center of the track near the three ancient olive trees owned by Don Casabianca.

Christopher applied the brakes, and the car slowed gently to a stop.

“Would you mind awfully if I had a cigarette?” asked Sarah. “I feel one coming on.”

“That makes two of us,” murmured Gabriel.

Irene and Raphael, somnambulant a moment earlier, were suddenly alert and excited about the prospect of yet another adventure. Christopher sat with his hands upon the wheel, his powerful shoulders slumped, a picture of misery.

His eyes met Gabriel’s in the rearview mirror. “I would prefer if your children didn’t watch.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Why do you think I sailed all the way to Corsica?”

“We’ve had a rough couple of weeks,” explained Sarah. “Last night . . .”

“Last night what?” probed Irene.

“I’d rather not say.”

Christopher said it for her. “He got a clean shot at me. It was like being hit with a pile driver.”

“You must have provoked the poor thing,” said Chiara.

“As far as that creature is concerned, my very existence is a provocation.”

Christopher tapped the horn and with a cordial movement of his hand invited the goat to step aside. Receiving no response, he lifted his foot from the brake and inched the car forward. The goat lowered his head and drove it into the grille.

“I told you,” said Sarah. “He’s incorrigible.”

“That’s no way to talk about Christopher,” interjected Gabriel.

“What does incorrigible mean?” asked Raphael.

“Incapable of being corrected. Depraved and inveterate. A hopeless reprobate.”

“Reprobate,” repeated Irene, and giggled.

Christopher opened his door, igniting the interior dome light. Sarah appeared stricken. “Perhaps we should all check into a hotel. Or better yet, let’s spend the night on that beautiful boat of yours.”

“Yes, let’s,” agreed Chiara as the car shuddered with the impact of another blow. Then she looked at Gabriel and said quietly, “Do something, darling.”

“My hand is killing me.”

“Let me,” said Irene.

“Not a chance.”

“Don’t listen to your father,” said Chiara. “Go right ahead, sweetheart.”

Gabriel opened his door and looked at his beautiful wife. “If anything happens to her, let it be on your head.”

Irene clambered across Gabriel’s lap and leapt out of the car. Fearlessly she approached the goat and, stroking his red beard, explained that she and her family were sailing back to Venice tomorrow morning and needed a good night’s sleep. The goat clearly found the story implausible. Nevertheless, he withdrew from the track without further contest, and the situation was resolved peaceably.

Irene squeezed into the backseat and rested her head against her father’s shoulder as they resumed their progress toward Christopher’s villa.

“Reprobate,” whispered the child, and laughed hysterically.





73

Bar Dogale




Against all better judgment, Gabriel agreed to remain in Corsica through the weekend. He insisted, however, on spending Sunday night aboard the Bavaria, and by the time Chiara and the children awakened on Monday morning, he had put Ajaccio behind them. With the maestral at his back and his spinnaker flying, he reached the southern tip of Sardinia at sunset on Tuesday, and by late Thursday afternoon they were back in Messina.

That evening, while dining at I Ruggeri, one of the city’s finer restaurants, Gabriel read with relief that prosecutors in New York’s Suffolk County had dropped all charges against Lindsay Somerset in the death of her husband. Locked out of her homes, her bank accounts seized or frozen, she faced an uncertain future. There was speculation in a Long Island weekly that she intended to open a fitness studio in Montauk and settle permanently in the East End. The largely favorable local reaction suggested that Lindsay, with her act of madness at the airport, had emerged from the scandal untarnished by Phillip’s fraud.

Three nights later, in Bari, Gabriel read that Kenny Vaughan, Phillip’s fugitive chief investment officer, had been found dead of an apparent drug overdose in a New Orleans hotel room. Still unaccounted for was the money that Phillip had drained from the firm’s cash reserves during the final hours of his life. According to the New York Times, any attempt to sell off the hedge fund’s inventory of paintings would likely prove disappointing, as collectors and museums were skittish about acquiring anything Phillip had touched. A team of experts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art had conducted a survey of the warehouse on East Ninety-First Street in an attempt to definitively determine which of the 789 paintings were forgeries and which were authentic. Consensus had proven impossible.

Accompanying the article was a photograph of the last painting Phillip acquired before his death: Dana? and the Shower of Gold, purportedly by Orazio Gentileschi. The FBI had determined that it was shipped to New York from the Tuscan city of Florence, doubtless in violation of Italy’s strict cultural patrimony laws. Whether it was a forgery or a genuine lost masterpiece the connoisseurs could not say—not without rigorous scientific testing of the sort conducted by Aiden Gallagher of Equus Analytics. Nevertheless, US authorities had acceded to an Italian demand that the painting be returned immediately.