“The unholy trinity,” observed Veronica. Then, with a wry smile, she added, “It’s a shame no one’s listening in on their conversation.”
The waiter delivered the prosecco.
“What should we drink to?” asked Rossetti.
“How about to us?”
“Is there any chance our relationship can become something more than physical?”
“I’m afraid not. You see, Luca, I’m hopelessly in love with someone else.”
“Really? Who?”
Veronica smiled sadly. “I’ll never tell.”
47
Ristorante Pipero
It became apparent, even before the waiter dared to approach their table, that they had been deceived on a grand scale. But determining how it had happened and who was to blame took a bit of doing. It was beyond dispute that someone had managed to exchange the real Leonardo for a perfect copy—a copy that Franco Tedeschi had sold to the Russian oligarch Alexander “Proko” Prokhorov for the record-setting sum of $500 million. Tedeschi suspected that the swap had taken place at the airport in Nice. And he was all but certain the cabin attendant on his bank’s private jet, a Danish woman who called herself Rikke Jorgensen, had been in on the heist.
But who had made the perfect copy of the Leonardo? And how had General Ferrari of the Art Squad learned that the painting had been stolen in the first place? Tedeschi was confident the general hadn’t been tipped off by the young British art conservator; a gentleman from Naples had taken care of that problem up in Venice. And the same gentleman from Naples had made quick work of Giorgio Montefiore a few weeks later in Florence when greed got the better of him.
“Who else could it have been?” asked Cardinal Bertoli.
“It had to be someone inside the Vatican.”
“Surely you’re not suggesting that I had something to do with it.”
“Of course not, Eminence.”
“Who then?”
Tedeschi jotted a name on the back of one of his business cards and slid it across the table. Bertoli looked down briefly, then turned the card over.
“I thought your associates put the fear of God in him.”
“Not the fear of God, Eminence. The fear of the Camorra. God forgives, but the Camorra never forgets.”
“Truly inspiring, Franco.” Bertoli pushed the business card across the tablecloth. “Words to live by.”
The proprietor appeared and with considerable fanfare welcomed the three men to his establishment. By all appearances they were a distinguished group—two prosperous financiers and a powerful Vatican prelate. But the two financiers were in the business of laundering money for Don Lorenzo Di Falco, leader of the Camorra’s richest and most powerful clan. And the Vatican prelate, through his own actions, had made the Roman Catholic Church an unwitting partner in the enterprise.
When they were alone again, Cardinal Bertoli asked, “But how did the police know that you were the one who had the painting?”
“In order to sell it, we had to show it to potential buyers.”
“It was my understanding they were required to sign a nondisclosure agreement.”
“They were. But someone must have managed to trace the painting to the bank.”
“And the five hundred million dollars the Russian oligarch paid for it?”
“It was transferred to an account at Oschadbank in Kyiv.”
“By whom?”
“A hacker who somehow managed to penetrate our computer network.”
