“Buddhists believe you should act as though every daywere your last,” she replies. “Because one of these days you’re going to be right.” He doesn’t have an answer for this and she continues on. “Do you think about dying, Fermín?” She gestures towards the stacked boxes. “None of this will mean anything when you’re dead. These paintings didn’t mean anything to your grandfather after he kicked it. Or to the people he stole them from. You know they died, right? Sent to camps while people like your grandfather picked over the carcasses. He was a Nazi vulture. You must be so proud. Do you tell people about him at parties?”
Goading a mark is dangerous, but not as dangerous as standing in the crosshairs of an amateur. Bosque’s mouth thins again and he moves forward. Billie lunges to the side and forward as he pulls the trigger, the shot going wide. The noise is like a bomb going off inside the cave, reverberating painfully. Before he can squeeze the trigger again, she is on him. She wraps one hand over his, trapping his finger on the trigger as she twists sharply, breaking the finger. At the same time, her other elbow comes up hard, catching him just under the chin. He drops the gun and she kicks it aside. He is holding his wounded hand and moaning as she grabs him by the throat, forcing him backwards into the cave wall. He slams against it, knocking the breath out of his lungs. He realizes then that this is a fight to the death and the wounded animal inside him takes over.
He forgets the broken finger, the blood dripping from the back of his head. He aims his fist under her arms and up, punching her jaw with a savage undercut that snaps her headback. Momentarily stunned, she drops to the floor, blinking away the stars dancing across her field of vision. She stays there, crouched at his feet. She doesn’t react when he reaches down and picks her up by her collar. He lifts her off her feet, bringing her face close to his.
“You’re going to be sorry you did that,” he promises.
But before he can do anything else, she moves her hand once. It takes him a moment to realize he has been stabbed. There is no pain, just a dull pressure.
Until she pulls the knife out. It is a silly thing to kill a person with, covered in photographs of Tutankhamun’s burial mask. But there is something satisfying about killing Fermín Bosque with a cheap tourist souvenir. The blade isn’t long, but she knows exactly how to direct it into the femoral artery. For a moment it acts as a barrier to the blood building up behind it, but as soon as she pulls the knife out, the blood gushes, pumping a flood over Bosque’s shoes, splashing the floor of the cave.
He looks down at the spreading pool in shock.
“Femoral artery,” she tells him. “You’re not going to make it, Fermín.” He scrabbles to put compression on the gushing wound, but she shakes her head. “It won’t help. I mean, what’s your plan? You slow the bleeding and for what? It’s not like I’m going to call 911 for you. And you can’t walk out of here because the exertion will just make you bleed more.” She tips her head, assessing the accumulating blood. “From the looks of it, I’d guess you’ve got ten minutes. Maybe less. That’s enough time to make your peace with God.”
With a muffled roar, he lunges for her, bloody hands raised for her throat. He is hampered by his torn leg, and she simply steps back and watches him collapse.
But he isn’t finished. He rises again, pushing himself up to his feet. “If I’m dying, I’m taking you with me,” he says. With one last superhuman effort, he staggers forwards towards where the gun has fallen. Billie reaches for the crowbar. She doesn’t know if it’s kinder to let him think he has a chance, but decides it is better to put him out of his misery.
She raises the crowbar and aims carefully. It isn’t even a hard blow, just a perfectly placed tap to the skull right behind the ear. He crumples instantly into unconsciousness. A second tap finishes him, and she is checking his pulse when there is a noise at the entrance of the cave. She looks up.
“It’s about damned time,” she says with a grin as Natalie and Helen enter. “Where’s Mary Alice?”
“Still hanging on the edge of that damned cliff, trying to decide if she’s going to jump,” Nat tells her. She looks down at the bloody corpse and the spreading pool of blood. “Oooh, a messy one.”
“As long as the art isn’t damaged,” Helen says as she surveys the cave. “This has to be most of Danner’s hoard. I’ll let Mary Alice know she doesn’t need to make the jump. She can go back and notify the Acquisitions team that it’s clear for them to move in.”
She disappears and Billie and Natalie move to quickly survey the hoard, skimming the codes marked on the cases.
“Oh my god, the Dürer is here!” Natalie squeals. “Andthe Botticelli. And look at all the Egyptological stuff—papyri, jewelry. Everything Marilyn told us he’d taken. It’s all here.”
“Not all of it,” Billie says, her mouth suddenly dry. “I can’t find her.”
“Her who?” Nat doesn’t look up as she reaches for a crate with a shout of joy. “Oh my god—it’s the Leonardo!”
“Where’s the Raphael?” Billie asks. “Leda and the Swan?”
Nat pauses and looks around. “I haven’t seen her.”
“Because she isn’t here,” Billie says flatly.
“Bosque must have moved her when he took the Rubens,” Nat replies. She turns back to the cache.
Billie feels suddenly deflated. She has tailed the mark, executed the mission, and secured a hoard of Nazi-looted art that will be restored to its owners. This job will be celebrated by the Museum, and she will receive a considerable bonus as well as a commendation. It has been a success.
She reminds herself of this as she carefully wipes her hands and steps out of the cave and back into the sunshine.
They have only a few minutes before the Acquisitions team arrives. The team will remove every trace of Bosque’s find, hauling it out under the protection of the Egyptian government. In exchange for the return of their antiquities, the authorities will look the other way when the paintings are shipped back to Europe. And they will say nothing of the dead man in the cave. They will leave him for the jackals, and then the beetles will come. And whatever’s left, only the desert will know.
Chapter Twenty-Six
In the end, it tooka lot more than a train to get where we needed to be. First, we had to reach Podgorica in a hurry which meant flying, and that was an eight-hour trip with two changes. The phrase “you can’t get there from here” was invented for Podgorica. As capitals go, it’s a rough little jewel. It’s tucked into a valley at the foothills of the mountains which give the country its name. It has a tiny pink palace and a miniature Niagara Falls, but it also has a modern millennium bridge and a contemporary art center. You have to love a place that blends the old with the new, and Montenegro was giving it a go—at least in Podgorica. The port in the bay at Kotor was home to superyachts and nightclubs catering to the 1 percent, but the countryside was exactly what you think of when you hear the word “Balkan.” Mountains, hills, escarpments, promontories—and anything else your thesaurus suggests for “mountain.” And when you weren’t looking? They added afew more mountains just for fun. Villages dotted the hillsides up and down, each paved with steep stone streets, but beyond this was countryside that seemed like it hadn’t been touched for centuries. Occasionally, a farmhouse or cottage betrayed its existence by a thread of smoke rising above the pine forests, but mostly it was just trees, crowded so close to the rail line, the branches brushed the windows, leaving tiny trails of pine resin on the glass.
The train station in Podgorica is exactly what you’d expect from former Yugoslavia. It’s long and low, and not even definitive enough in its style to be Brutalist. It’s serviceable and so nondescript it might be any kind of structure built after WWII in just about any town. But a little bar served the most delicious grilled sausages I’d ever had, and it was just busy enough to keep us in a crowd.
Galina and her little henchwoman, Tamara, could be anywhere, in any disguise. We had the photo I’d stolen from Aunt Evgenia and the quick glimpse I’d had of the both of them at the Scala Contarini del Bovolo but not much more. Minka had been able to dig up two other photos, grainy shots from opera events where Galina was just a blurry background figure, but we had nothing on Tamara. Taverner had pressed Wolfie for details but whatever useful information he got could have been jotted on a postcard. While we were in the air somewhere between Venice and Vienna, he dropped a message into the Menopaws app which related that Galina had blue eyes, was five foot four inches tall with a slender build. Her hair was brown, and her favorite snack was mushroom and sour cream potato chips.
“She should be killed for that alone,” I muttered as I clicked out of the app. Hair and eye color were useless, they were far too easy to change. Height was harder to disguise, but it could be done. Lifts, crutches, wheelchairs, platform shoes—any of those could give an impression of a few inches gained or lost. Tamara was forty, brown eyes, black hair, and five feet even which scared the bejesus out of me. I’d learned the hard way over the years—the smaller the dog, the bigger the bite.