Chapter Twenty-Four
Once Wolfie made up his mind to work with us, he sang like the canary he was. He didn’t know much about Galina’s professional life, but he told us everything he’d picked up over their few months together. Taverner kept him supplied with coffee thickened with cream and plates of food, and as long as Wolfie was eating, he was talking. He chomped his way through sandwiches of mortadella and provolone, apple turnovers, a bowl of Greek yogurt with cherry compote, and a pear tart.
“Let’s start with her associates,” I suggested. “Who does she see? Who hangs around her?”
“Tamara,” he said with a shudder. “She is the bodyguard. Very small, very mean. But I only see her once or twice. She stays outside when Galina comes to see me.”
“Anyone else?”
He waved away the idea. “Nobody. Galina is private. I never meet family or friends.”
“What do you know about her business? About her brother’s, Pasha’s, business?”
He thought for a moment as he chewed. “I heard Galina yell at him on the phone once about being too lazy, about not working hard enough. That too much was left to her. She says they must spend money to make money, but Pasha was living too well, keeping profits she wanted to put into the business.”
“But you don’t know what kind of business?” I pressed.
“No, but sometimes she changes phone numbers or hotels without warning. This is not the sign of someone who is doing legitimate business. Galina is a woman with many secrets.”
“Are you lovers?” I asked.
He shook his head so vehemently, little crumbs of pastry went flying. “No, no! I earned my role at La Fenice,” he said stoutly.
“Of course you did,” Helen told him in a soothing tone. She darted a look at me and I shrugged. She was welcome to take over.
“Has she helped other protégés like you?” Helen asked.
He shrugged. “Some. But none with as good a voice as me.” He thumped his chest for emphasis.
“How did you meet?” was Helen’s follow-up.
“I was singing at a music festival in Nürnberg,” he answered through a mouthful of mortadella. “She travels much to such places, small festivals to find undiscovered talent, she says.” His eyes welled and he stopped chewing. “She says I am the find of a lifetime.” He folded his hands in his lap and his expression was tragic. “She is so private, so careful of her little secrets. She never tells me where she travels but often she leaves for short trips a few days here and there, sometimes a week. She is so secretive, I tease her about bodies buried in the garden.” He broke off with a shudder. “I thought it was a joke.” He dropped his face into his hands and began to cry.
We let him sniffle for a few minutes before Akiko spoke to Mary Alice in a low voice. “Why don’t you just ask him where she lives? She has to have a house or favorite hotel here.”
“Because she won’t go back there,” Natalie put in. “She knows we’ve got Wolfie, so she’ll burn her connection to any place he knew about. She’ll be on the run now. All the more reason for her to kill him, actually. The sooner he’s dead, the sooner she can get her life back to normal.”
Wolfie moaned and dropped his hands. His face was a mess of tears and snot and a few streaks of dried blood I’d missed.
Taverner took a handkerchief from his pocket. He always carried a handkerchief, handy for makeshift tourniquets or bandages—or even a white flag of surrender, except Taverner had never given up on anything in his life. We usually used our own initials for cover identities, so he could have had them monogrammed, but his were stitched with a tiny oak leaf in one corner instead.
Taverner handed the handkerchief over and Wolfie mopped his face. When he looked up, he seemed a little calmer and about a thousand years older.
“Come on in the kitchen,” Taverner urged. “I’m going to put on a fresh pot of coffee. And I think there are some more cinnamon rolls.”
Wolfie shambled after him, looking dead on his feet as he followed Taverner into the kitchen, meek as a lamb. Adrenaline takes some people like that. He’d had a massive shot of it and then an even bigger crash. He would probably be out of it for a few hours which was fine by me. Wolfie might have become another target on Galina’s list, which should have made him our natural ally, but that didn’t mean I completely trusted him.
Minka, who’d been notably quiet through it all as she tapped away on her screen, gave me a narrow look. “The shooting at him, it was real? Not just a ruse for getting him here so Galina could follow and ambush you?”
I shook my head, remembering all the crying and shaking he’d done as well as the expression of abject disbelief in his eyes. “Nope. He’s not that good of an actor.”
“And it wasn’t an accident?” Natalie added.
“No. She brought a pack of mercenaries with her and the shooter had a clear line. They were after Wolfgang, and they wanted to take him out first so he couldn’t talk.”
“Excellent,” Mary Alice said briskly. “That means he knows something worth telling.”
“Exactly,” I replied, pouring a cup of coffee from the dregs of the old pot.
“But he just said he didn’t,” Akiko pointed out.
Helen gave her a kind look. “No, dear. He doesn’t think he does. And that’s a different thing altogether.”
“So what now?” Akiko asked.
It was Natalie who answered. “Now we get to practice our interrogation skills.”
And she looked a little too pleased at the prospect.
“Do you travel with a torture kit?” Mary Alice asked pleasantly.
“No, but it would be easy enough to put one together out of random things lying around. The kitchen is full of useful tools.”
“Like what?” Akiko demanded. I hoped for Mary Alice’s sake she wasn’t taking notes.
Natalie shrugged. “Off the top of my head? Meat mallet, corkscrew, cheese wire. You can do some pretty messed-up shit with a melon baller, come to think of it.”
“Natalie,” Mary Alice cut in sharply. “We are not going to torture an innocent man for information.”
Nat rolled her eyes. “Of course not. We’re just going to make him think we are.”
“Hold off on the psy ops,” I told her. “I think this is a flies-and-honey situation. He’s still in shock from being shot. Any more pressure and he may crack entirely.”
Just then Taverner emerged from the kitchen.
“How’s our guest?” I asked him.
“Much calmer now. In fact, he remembered that Galina told him she was taking over for her brother on a very important deal, something about Montenegro. She was getting ready to travel.”
I remembered what Grigory had drunkenly sniveled about not trusting Montenegrins. “Anything else?”
He shrugged. “Apparently she was involved in the deal from the start. Lots of meetings and phone calls with someone. He said it was Pasha’s baby, but since his death, she has to finish it. Galina never told Wolfie details, but she used the phrase ‘pick up,’ so something must be changing hands.”
“Is she collecting it personally?” Helen asked.
Taverner nodded. “She gave Wolfie the impression she was more upset about traveling to the Balkans again than she was about her brother dying. He said she seemed nervous about it.”
“If Galina is so secretive, how does Wolfie know so much about the deal?” Mary Alice asked.
“They had tickets to the opera— Don Giovanni in Paris—but she had to cancel. Reading between the lines, he threw a bit of a strop and she had to explain why it was necessary for her to be away.”
I gave him a tip of an imaginary hat. “Good job getting that much out of him.”
“Nothing to it,” he said. “He seemed inclined to talk. I do have one question. What’s a ‘stern brunch daddy’?”
Natalie gave a short howl of laughter and Taverner looked at me in puzzlement.
“It means I think I know why he and Galina aren’t lovers,” I told him with a grin.
He might have been past sixty and a career assassin who practiced naked tai chi in the garden, but he blushed forty shades of red. “Well, it’s nice to be appreciated,” he murmured. He turned to head back to the kitchen but stopped, fishing in the pocket of his apron. “Oh, I almost forgot. I had him jot down Galina’s email address and a few other details. Hope it helps.”
He dropped the slip of paper in my lap. “Thanks.”
I looked up to where he was still standing. “You’ve got your guilty face on. What did you do?”
“I’m going to tell you something and you’re going to want to get mad. Instead, all I want to hear is ‘Thank you, Taverner.’ Is that clear?”
“As the proverbial crystal. Spill it.”
“I tailed Galina from the scala this morning.”
“God dammit ,” I started. He folded his arms over his chest, and waited. I clapped my mouth shut. “Go on,” I said through tight lips.
“She went to the train station. Just her and another woman. Shorter with a black bob. They left Venice.”
“They left ?” Mary Alice was incredulous.
“They left,” Taverner confirmed.
“Maybe it was a blind,” Nat suggested. “Maybe they knew they were being followed and went to the train station to lay a false trail.”
“Not likely,” I said flatly. I might have been pissed, but I could still admit that Taverner was the best tracker I’d ever met. His idea of a fun day out was to choose someone at random and follow them for hours without being detected. He was a ghost.
Helen shook her head. “I don’t get it. Why would they just leave without finishing the job? They know we’re here and Venice is a small city. With the proper resources, they could find us.”
The $64,000 question. Why would Galina abandon the chance to settle a blood feud with the women who killed her father and brother? It didn’t make sense. Unless—
“She had to,” I said suddenly. “The only reason she’d leave is if she didn’t have a choice. The Balkan deal.” I turned to Taverner. “Did you see which train she got on?”
“Slow train to Trieste,” he said. He paused, giving me an expectant look.
“Thank you, Taverner,” I said with exaggerated sweetness. He grinned and went back to the kitchen. The slip of paper was still lying in my lap. I skimmed it before handing it over to Minka. “Can you do anything with this?”
She gave me a pitying look. “Please. I am the queen of the rodeo.”
Mary Alice cocked her head. “Queen of the rodeo?”
“She heard the phrase ‘not my first rodeo’ and decided she has been around long enough and knows so much she must be the queen,” I explained. I turned back to Minka. “Just get us her emails, please.”
“Not my circus, not my monkeys,” she said airily.
“That isn’t how you use that one,” I reminded her.
She shrugged. “Whatever.”
I turned back to the others. “What other threads can we pull to get to Galina?”
“I still say I can torture him. Gently,” Nat suggested.
“Let’s call that Plan B, dear,” Helen told her.
“I’m on it,” I said with a sigh. I punched in Naomi’s number, prepared to eat a little crow considering how I’d hung up on her the last time. I wasn’t expecting her to pick up and immediately break the connection. I redialed, and she answered, sounding harried.
“Naomi, how nice to hear your voice. I hope you’re not holding a grudge and that’s why you just hung up on me,” I said, slowing my Texas drawl to cold-molasses speed.
I heard a sigh puffing down the line. “Sorry about that. I am in the office, juggling three phones and somehow managed to change my calendar to Arabic, which I can’t read, so I’m having a bitch of a time figuring out how to change it back.”
“Where’s Lyndsay?” No woman could have it all, but Naomi came damned close thanks to her husband’s efforts at home and Lyndsay’s at the office. One of them wiped baby butt and braided hair, the other one took dictation and kept her calendar in order. I just hoped they never got mixed up.
“Vacation,” she said shortly. “Her sister’s getting married and she’s the maid of honor. Seafoam green taffeta,” she added before I could ask.
“For a bridesmaid’s dress? That’s a hate crime. I won’t keep you, but I need to know—the other information that was accessed besides the Lazarov file. What was the job?”
She told me and I listened, then asked a follow-up question or two. I thanked her, and just before I hung up, I asked another. “You don’t think there’s any possibility that Lyndsay could be your mole, do you?”
There was a taut silence on the line. “I don’t like that question.”
“I don’t like asking it, but you have to at least consider the possibility.”
“Good-bye, Billie.” The phone went dead.
I turned to the others. “The security breach in Provenance that Naomi was investigating—whoever did it accessed the Lazarov file and one other. An assassination that happened two months ago.”
Mary Alice looked alert. “Whose?”
“She said it was some nasty piece of work, an art collector named Jovan Muri?.”
Helen raised her brows. “That was us?”
I nodded. I’d seen a brief mention in the newspapers about the death. Muri?’s car had rolled down a mountainside and exploded into a fireball. There hadn’t been any hint of foul play which meant the killer was good—really good if they were one of ours.
“That was us. But I don’t think this is about the hit itself. Pasha was working a deal in Montenegro—a deal that Galina now has to finish. And Jovan Muri? was Montenegrin.”
“Shiiiiiiit,” Nat said under her breath. Helen was nodding slowly while Mary Alice just looked grim.
Akiko glanced around. “What did I just miss? Why would the Museum kill an art collector?”
I turned to her. “Because he wasn’t just an art collector. That was a front for his real job as an arms dealer. Muri? was indiscriminate. He sold to the highest bidder, everything from handguns to rocket launchers.”
Mary Alice picked up the thread. “The implication is that somewhere in the Museum is a mole, accessing information from secured files they shouldn’t be looking at. And then it seems this source in the Museum sold information to the Lazarovs—information about the mission that took out their father so they could exact a little revenge.”
“Starting with Lilian Flanders,” Nat put in.
“Starting with Lilian Flanders,” Mary Alice agreed.
“Why would the Lazarovs also buy information about Muri?? Is it so they could avenge him too?” Akiko asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. As far as Provenance can tell, there’s no previous connection between the Lazarovs and Muri?, no reason for them to be out to settle any scores on his account.” I paused, thinking. “The point of Muri?’s art dealing was that it provided a cover for moving paintings around without attracting undue attention.”
“Why is that important?”
“In the underworld, lots of money changes hands, only it isn’t always in the form of cash. You can leverage a deal with drugs, guns, jewels. And art. Anything that has intrinsic value. And accepting a painting as collateral has one huge advantage over a shipment of heroin or handguns—it’s not criminal. You can hang it on your wall if you want. If it’s too hot for that, too well-known, you wrap it up and put it in a storage locker or under the bed. Nobody would think twice about it.”
“There are more advantages than that,” Helen put in. “Art theft is a hugely underinvestigated crime. Nobody but insurance companies really care about it. The FBI didn’t even have a team dedicated to it until 2004. Interpol is trying to make up for lost time, but there are thousands and thousands of pieces missing thanks to various wars and thefts with little to no hope of recovery.”
“Interpol has an app now,” Minka added. “I can show you later.”
Akiko looked at me. “What do you think is happening?”
“I think,” I said slowly, “that there was something in that file that the Lazarovs wanted—information that would help them level up in the underworld. In our briefing materials, it said they deal mostly in club drugs. They’re not big-time players. They have money, but it’s not oligarch money. And if Pasha dumped a few Russian gangsters out of his windows in Mayfair, he may well have burned his bridges there. From what Wolfie told us, Galina was ambitious, pushing Pasha to do more. Intercepting something of Muri?’s and selling it to the right buyer might just put them in that category. And I think that’s why Galina is on a train to Trieste. It’s on the way to Montenegro.”
The others fell to arguing about how likely that was, with Mary Alice siding with me while Helen and Nat thought otherwise. Akiko kept batting back and forth like a tennis ball, agreeing with whoever was talking, usually her wife. Minka gave a whoop of triumph from behind her laptop.
“What are you doing, Minka?”
“Being ace investigator and cracking this case wide open,” she said as she tapped.
“Minka, have you been watching Humphrey Bogart movies again?”
“William Powell,” she corrected. “ Thin Man . I like Myrna Loy’s clothes.”
A few more taps and she shared her screen with the TV.
“What are we looking at? I don’t even know what language that is.” Helen peered through her bifocals at the website Minka had pulled up.
“A variation on Serbo-Croatian,” I told her. “Specifically, Montenegrin, I’m guessing.”
Minka nodded. “It is the Montenegrin national rail site. I got into Galina’s email and there was a forwarded confirmation from Pasha, confirming he had a ticket booked for the day after tomorrow from Podgorica to Athens via Belgrade and Thessaloniki.” She pulled up a map with the route highlighted. Montenegro was small, tucked along the Adriatic coast between Bosnia and Herzegovina to the north and Albania to the south. Podgorica was located in the south, only a bit of countryside and Lake Shkod?r separating it from the Albanian border. It would have been more direct to go south across Albania to get to Greece instead of looping northeast to Belgrade, but the little red line showing passenger routes stopped dead in the middle of Albania.
“There are no passenger trains between Tirana, Albania, and Greece,” Minka said when I asked. “This is the most direct route.”
“And he was booked through to Athens?” Mary Alice asked.
“He was.”
“Can you see the start of the trip?” I asked. “How long was he supposed to be in Podgorica?” His planned time in the capital might give us a hint as to how far from the station he meant to travel to collect whatever he was supposed to move.
Minka clicked around. “Ten minutes. That is how long the train stops in Podgorica. He was booked straight through with no delays.”
“ Ten minutes? ” Nat protested. “That’s impossible. He couldn’t get off the train to collect anything.”
“Unless he intended to pick it up on the train,” I said. “There could be a planned rendezvous with whoever has it.”
“Or it could be cargo,” Mary Alice suggested. “Maybe it is being loaded in Podgorica and he was supposed to supervise it being hauled to Athens.”
“There is cargo on that line,” Minka said. “It is possible.”
“Maybe,” I said with a shrug. “The trouble is, we don’t know what it is. Could be as small as a microdot or big as a missile.”
“And whatever it is, Galina clearly has a buyer lined up in Athens,” Helen finished.
“Unless we get to her first.” I turned to Minka. “How long until that train boards in Montenegro?”
She pulled up the train schedule. “Thirty-six hours.”
I looked at the others. “Well?”
“Galina’s not after us now,” Helen pointed out.
“She will be,” Nat countered. “She probably only took a break from hounding us to finish this deal that Pasha set up. What do you think is going to happen when that’s over? She’ll come right back to us.”
“With more resources,” Mary Alice said quietly. “Whatever she’s selling, it has to be worth a lot if Jovan Muri? owned it and Pasha wanted it.”
“And it has to be worth a lot if she’s willing to chase it instead of finishing us,” I added.
Helen smiled. “I don’t even know why I bother. Of course we’re going. Minka, book the tickets. We’ve got a train to catch.”