“Just think what a comeback you could have,” Gunther said, waxing enthusiastic, “now that you’re a bona fide specialist in antiquities. You have the contacts and the brains. You can talk the talk and walk the walk. Nobody else out there can do that, Jeff. You’d be unique! Have you any idea what some of these wealthy private collectors are willing to pay? These are people who are used to buying whatever they want: homes, planes, yachts, diamonds, lovers, influence. It incenses them when they covet objects that simply aren’t for sale. Unique pieces of history. Objects that only you can track down and acquire.”
Jeff allowed the appeal of the idea to wash over him for a moment.
“You could name your price,” said Gunther. “What do you want, Jeff? What do you really want?”
The only thing I want is Tracy back, thought Jeff. I’m just like Gunther’s collectors. I can have it all. But the one thing I really want, no one can give me.
Gunther watched Jeff’s face begin to fall. Realizing he was losing him, that the moment was passing, he made his move.
“It just so happens I have exactly the job to get you started,” he said, clapping his bony hands tightly onto Jeff’s shoulders. “How would you like a lovely little jaunt to Rome?”
CHAPTER 6
ROBERTO KLIMT STEPPED OUT onto the balcony of his sumptuous apartment on the Via Veneto and watched the sun setting over his beautiful city.
Roberto Klimt considered himself a lover of beauty in all its forms. Tonight’s wine-red sun, bleeding into the Rome skyline. The Basquiat portrait hanging above his bed, showing two simian faces in a riot of yellow and red and blue. The perfect curve of the rent boy’s buttocks awaiting him in bed at his country house in Sabina, forty minutes outside the city. Roberto Klimt enjoyed and savored and delighted in them all.
I have them because I deserve them. Because I am a true artist.
Only true artists should be rewarded with true beauty.
Fifty years old and breathtakingly vain, with thick, dyed blond hair, a full-lipped, cruel, sensual mouth and the amber-yellow eyes of a snake, Roberto Klimt was an art dealer, businessman and pedophile, although not necessarily in that order. He made his first ten million in crooked real estate deals, cutting in the corrupt local police on a piece of the action from day one. The next ninety million came from art, a business for which Roberto Klimt had a uniquely brilliant commercial eye.
Roberto Klimt knew what beauty was, but he also knew how to sell it. As a result, he lived like a latter-day Roman emperor—rich beyond his wildest dreams, debauched, corrupt and answerable to no one.
A late-summer breeze chilled him slightly. Frowning, he withdrew from the balcony into his palatial drawing room, closing the tall sash windows behind him.
“Bring me a blanket!” he commanded, to no one in particular. Roberto Klimt kept a fleet of servants in all his homes. He was never quite sure what any one of them did, but he found that if one had enough milling around, one’s desires were always promptly catered to. “And bring me the bowl. I want to look at the damned bowl.”
Moments later, a pretty, dark-haired boy with long eyelashes and an adorably dimpled chin presented his master with a saffron-yellow cashmere throw from Loro Piana—with fall approaching, Roberto Klimt only tolerated an autumnal palette in his soft furnishings—and a locked, Plexiglas case containing a small, solid gold bowl.
Roberto Klimt unlocked the case with a key he kept on a platinum chain around his neck and cupped the bowl lovingly in his hands, the way a mother might cradle a newborn child.
No bigger than a modern-day dessert bowl, and entirely unadorned by any carving or decoration, the bowl was an object lesson in simplicity. Burnished and dazzling, its sides worn thin and smooth by two thousand years’ worth of hands caressing it, it seemed to Roberto to glow with some sort of magical power.
“This belonged to the Emperor Nero, you know?” he purred to the boy who’d delivered it. “His lips would have touched it just here. Right where mine are now.”
Roberto Klimt pressed his wet, fleshy mouth against the metal, leaving a glistening trail of saliva in its wake.
“Would you like to try?”
“No, thank you, sir. I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”
“TRY!” Roberto Klimt commanded.
Blushing, the boy did as he was asked.
“You see?” Klimt smiled, satisfied. “You’ve just touched greatness. How does it feel?”
The boy stammered helplessly.
“Never mind.” Klimt dismissed him with a curt wave. “Philistine,” he muttered under his breath. This was the cross that Roberto Klimt had to bear, to be surrounded constantly by lesser mortals, people incapable of grasping the true nature of beauty.
Still, he consoled himself, it was the cross borne by all great artists. A noble suffering.
Tomorrow, Roberto Klimt would leave Rome for his country house. Nero’s bowl would follow a few days later. Klimt employed an elite private security team to protect his treasures. The head of this team had informed Roberto a few days ago about a rumored plot to rob the Via Veneto apartment.
“It’s nothing concrete. Just rumors and whispers. Some hotshot foreign thief’s in town apparently. He likes the sound of your collection.”
“I’ll bet he does!” Roberto Klimt laughed. A thief would have a better chance of infiltrating Fort Knox than of circumventing his state-of-the-art security. Even so, he’d been guided by his expert’s advice and agreed to move Nero’s bowl and a couple more of his rarest pieces to Sabina. The only private residence in Italy better protected than Roberto Klimt’s Rome apartment was Roberto Klimt’s country estate. He would be there himself to oversee the bowl’s installation in his newly redesigned “Treasures Room,” and would enjoy the rent boy’s body while he awaited its arrival.
The boy was eighteen and had been paid handsomely in advance for his services. Roberto Klimt preferred them younger, and unwilling—feigned submission was a poor substitute for the real thing. But after the unfortunate incident with the two Roma Gypsy boys who’d gone and jumped off a building after an alleged encounter with the art dealer, Roberto Klimt had been forced to become more cautious.
Damned Gypsies. Human vermin, the lot of them.
There were those in Rome’s high society who made apologies for them. Liberals, who excused their ugliness and filth and thievery on the grounds that they were poor. Roberto Klimt despised such people. Roberto had been poor himself once and considered it a grave stain on his reputation and good name.
He would rather die than go back to that life.
JEFF STEVENS CHECKED IN to the Hotel de Russie under the name Anthony Duval. Gunther gave him the brief.
“Anthony Duval, dual French/American citizenship, thirty-six years old. Lectures at the Sorbonne and acts as an art consultant to numerous wealthy collectors in Paris and New York. He’s in Rome to make some acquisitions.”
“I hope Anthony likes the good things in life?” asked Jeff.
“Naturally.”
“How does he feel about the Hotel de Russie?”
“He only ever books the Nijinsky Suite.”
“I like him already.”
The girl at the check-in desk was a knockout, dark and voluptuous, like a 1950s Italian film star. “Your suite is ready for you, Mr. Duval. Would you like some help with your luggage? Or . . . anything else?”
For a split second Jeff considered the promising possibilities implied by “anything else.” But he restrained himself. The job Gunther had sent him on was complicated and dangerous. He couldn’t afford any distractions.
“No thank you. Just the key.”
The Nijinsky Suite was spectacular. On the top floor of the hotel, it boasted an enormous king-size bed and flat-screen TV, a marble, mosaic-tiled bathroom with a sunken bathtub, a living room and office area stuffed with priceless antiques, and a terrace with breathtaking views of the Pincio and the rooftops of Rome. Jeff showered, changed into linen trousers and a duck-egg-blue shirt that perfectly complemented his gray eyes and headed for the Russie’s famous “secret garden.”
“Will you be dining with us tonight, Mr. Duval?”
“Not tonight.”
Jeff ordered a double gin and tonic and strolled through the garden. The man he was waiting for sat quietly beneath the bougainvillea, reading La Repubblica newspaper. He wore a handlebar mustache and sideburns, and even sitting down, he was, Jeff could see, unusually tall. Not exactly the gray man in the crowd he’d been hoping for.
“Marco?”
“Mr. Duval. A pleasure.”
Jeff sat down. “You’re here alone? I was expecting two of you.”
“Ah, yes. My partner experienced an unexpected delay. We will meet him tomorrow at the foot of the Spanish Steps at ten, if that’s convenient?”
It wasn’t convenient. It was irritating. Jeff disliked working with other people. With the exception of Tracy, he lived by the rule that you could never trust a con artist and preferred jobs that he could pull off alone. Unfortunately, robbing Roberto Klimt of the Emperor Nero’s bowl, the centerpiece of one of the most closely guarded private collections in the world, did not fit into that category.