Survival Is a Dying Art Page 17

  “You don’t think I’m in danger, do you? That someone might want to come after what Larry left behind?”

  “Let’s not worry about that until we see what we’ve got, okay?”

  He led me down the hall and into Larry’s bedroom, where he had piled boxes on the bed and the floor. I saw he’d been diligent about folding clothes and packing carefully.

  He handed me a slim spiral-bound notebook about the size of a paperback novel, with a clear plastic cover stamped with the name of a pharmaceutical company. I sat on the bare mattress and skimmed through the pages until I found a strange name – Evren Kuroglu. I’d been reading so much about the refugee smuggling out of Turkey that I was able to recognize it as a Turkish name.

  I showed the page to Snyder and asked, “Larry say anything to you about this guy?”

  Snyder peered at the page. “Not a guy, a woman,” he said. “I remember once Larry’s boss was sick—some kind of leg pains or something – and Larry had to deliver a package to a client in Boca. He was pissed because it was a rainy day and the only way he had to get there was his bike.”

  He looked up. “He told me that when he got to this woman’s house, in a really fancy development, the bitch made him wait in the foyer, dripping wet, didn’t even offer him a towel. But while he waited he snooped around and he saw a bunch of watch boxes. He said that this woman had to be supplying watches for the booth at Trader Tom’s.”

  I looked at the page, where Kane had scribbled an address on a street called La Sabana Verde. You could always tell those high-end communities because they liked to use fake Spanish names.

  Beneath it Kane had written the name of a corporation, and then a big arrow that pointed to Kuroglu’s name. “Thanks for calling me about this,” I said. “It could turn out to be very important.”

  I left him to finish his packing and drove to work. As soon as I got there, I called Miriam Washington. She had a meeting, though, and told me to work on my FD302 reports.

  So it was back to paperwork. Fortunately I had kept notes of everything I did in Venice, everyone I met with who had a relationship to the case, and I was able to begin transcribing them, writing in the more formal voice used in official documents.

  Every now and then I’d look over at the painting, still in its brown paper wrapping. I knew Frank Sena was eager to see it, and I was looking forward to seeing his face when he opened up the wrapping. But my duty was also to the Bureau, and I wanted to show the painting to Venable first and see how he reacted.

  The paperwork took all morning, as I kept stopping to remember details and look up information on line, including the exact addresses of the Questura, the Carabineri headquarters, the café where I met Grassini, and his apartment. It was nearly noon by the time I was finished. I saved the document, then emailed a copy to Miriam Washington.

  I was still waiting for her to meet with me, so I turned to Larry Kane’s notebook. I read every entry, from opportunities to work with someone flipping houses to pyramid schemes and Internet opportunities that promised six-figure incomes with minimal work.

  Sometimes he’d included follow up notes, where he’d contacted someone and discovered that the opportunity wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. In many cases he had drawn big red Xs through URLs and phone numbers. Though Larry Kane was turning out to be more of a jerk or a potential criminal than I’d originally thought, I still believed he didn’t deserve to die, and I was intent on finding justice for him.

  The information on Kuroglu came late in the notebook. Larry had looked up the address on La Sabana Verde and discovered it was owned by a corporation, Turkish Time LTD. He had apparently searched for information on the company and found indications that the company manufactured watches in Turkey. That tied in to what Vito had discovered from the crash of the refugee boat in the Aegean Sea.

  I flipped the page. It looked like Larry had hand-written the draft of a letter to Kuroglu, addressed to her at the house in Boca. He said that he knew she was supplying fake watches to the booth at Trader Tom’s, and threatened to tell the police about her unless she paid him to keep quiet.

  He had written $100,000 and then crossed it out, then $50,000 and struck through that, too, finally ending with a demand for $25,000.

  I had no way of knowing if he had ever sent the letter, but it drew a clear connection between Kane and Kuroglu, and provided Kuroglu with a motive for Kane’s murder.

  I went into the FBI database and found a single reference to Kuroglu in a dossier from a Turkish informant on another case. The informant indicated that Evren Kuroglu was known to own several factories that manufactured counterfeit watches, but was shielded by several levels of corporate structure. She was a prominent figure in Turkish society, alleged to have political influence, so the informant couldn’t find anything specifically incriminating.

  Then I shifted to Google and found an article by a blogger about counterfeit watch manufacturing in Turkey that mentioned Kuroglu and Turkish Time. The article had been reprinted on a website out of Switzerland, but when I clicked on the link for the original posting I got a web error. I tried heading to the blog’s main page, but it was also a no-go.

  One more search told me that Luca Albrecht, the blogger who had researched Turkish Time and written the article, had died about three months after its publication.

  In a motorcycle accident.

  The only article I found was in German, and I had to use Google to translate it. As best I could tell, Albrecht had gone off a narrow road near his home in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a small town in the Jura mountains that was also home to the workshops of Rolex and Patek Philippe, among other fancy watch brands.

  Was it a coincidence that both Albrecht and Kane had died in motorcycle accidents? That both of them were connected at least peripherally to Evren Kuroglu?

  I took the information down to Vito’s office. “I found something weird,” I said, as I slid into the chair across from him. I explained about the connection both dead men had to Kuroglu.

  Vito turned to his computer and started typing. After a while he turned back to me. “I can’t find anything about this Albrecht guy’s death. So either it’s not connected to Kuroglu or nobody has figured that out yet.”

  I showed him the handwritten letter in Kane’s notebook. “I think it’s possible that Kane sent this letter, and that Kuroglu had Larry Kane killed.”

  “This is a good start, but that you need more than the draft of this letter. Keep digging.”

  I agreed that I would, and walked back to my office, jumping to catch the phone as it rang. “Give me about fifteen minutes to go through the material you just sent, and then come to my office,” Miriam said.

  Frank Sena had emailed me, asking when he could see the painting. I responded that I had to hold onto it for a day or two as evidence against Jesse Venable, but I’d get it to him as soon as I could. “You won’t be disappointed when you see it,” I added. “It’s beautiful and certainly worth everything we’ve gone through to get it back.”

  I caught up on a few other work-related emails, then walked to Miriam’s office, carrying the painting in its wrapping. “Let’s see what this painting looks like,” she said, and I laid it on her desk. She helped me slide it out of the wrapping carefully.

  “Beautiful,” she said, after a moment. “You can really see the immediacy of the brushstrokes, and Fabre’s classical training comes through in the positioning of the figures.”

  She didn’t have a word to say about the dicks.

  26 – Spintria

  I pointed to the back of the frame. “My brother Danny noticed that this looks like much newer wood,” I said. “And when you hold it up, the frame seems heavier on that side. Could there be something inside there?”

  Miriam picked up the picture and hefted it in her hands. “You’re right, it does seem a lot heavier in this corner where the wood was replaced. The wood could be newer, or a different species that’s harder and heavier.” She looked at me. “Or there co
uld be something inside there.”

  “Can we take a look?”

  Miriam hesitated. “Technically, we don’t have any authority to pry into this painting. It belongs to your friend Mr. Sena, and we don’t have an open case against either Jesse Venable or Remigio Grassini that would give us authority to potentially damage the work.”

  “What if I call Frank and get his permission?”

  “If you can do that.”

  I had to go back to my office to get my cell phone with Frank’s number, and I made the call from there. “I’m glad I got hold of you, Frank,” I said.

  “Are you ready to bring me the painting?”

  “Not quite. There’s something unusual about the frame, and I’d like your permission to open it up.”

  “You aren’t going to damage the picture, are you?”

  “Not at all. Just the frame.”

  “I don’t like that frame anyway—I was planning to have it reframed. So do what you need to do.” He hesitated a moment. “But I really want to see it, Angus.”

  “I know, Frank, and I’ll get it to you as soon as I can.”

  I returned to Miriam’s office, and told her we had Frank’s permission to pry open the frame. She opened her desk drawer and pulled out one of those all-in-one handyman tools. “I’ll try to do as little damage as possible,” she said.

  Very carefully, she inserted one of the tool’s many blades into the border between the different colored woods, and sliced along the edge. Then she chose a different blade, put it under one edge, and began to pry.

  With a pop, the different piece of wood came lose. I could see where someone had tried to paint over the new wood to match the old—it was a different, lighter color underneath.

  With the piece of wood out, we saw what had been concealed within: sixteen small rounds wrapped in cotton. Miriam went back into her drawer for a pair of the blue latex gloves we used to handle evidence.

  I watched in fascination as she lifted one of the rounds out and placed it on her desk. She unwrapped the cotton swathing and the first thing I noticed was the glint of gold. Wow. Did each one of those packages contain a gold coin?

  Then I noticed the image on the front – a naked man on a table, face down, another reared up behind him ready to enter his butt.

  Miriam gave a low whistle. “This is a spintria,” she said, lifting the coin. “Plural spintriae. The museum where I worked in Boston had a display of them, so my knowledge is limited to what I learned there.”

  She flipped the coin over. The Roman numeral X was engraved on the rear, with what appeared to be a date below it.

  “The Greek historian Suetonius used the word spintria for a young male prostitute—same root as the word sphincter, so you can figure out why. These coins are alleged to have been used as tokens in Roman brothels, though none of the literature actually supports this.”

  She hefted it in her hand. “I understood that they were usually found in bronze or brass, and I can tell you without even getting it assayed that this is gold. The date here is from the first century AD, which makes this about twenty-three karat.”

  “How much is it worth?” I asked.

  “The gold coin used by the Romans at this time was called a solidus, and depending on condition, a solidus can be worth anywhere from its value based on the amount of gold, up to thousands of dollars.”

  She placed the coin down on the cotton cloth and began to open the second round, then continued, “But if these are what I think they are, they’re much more valuable to a collector or a museum because they’re so unusual.”

  She got a magnifying glass from her drawer as well as a pair of gloves for me, and I helped her unwrap each coin and lay it out on her desk. I peered closely at the collection. Each featured scenes of sexual intercourse between two people. Some showed two women, some two men, others a man and a woman.

  “These are amazing,” Miriam said. “Nearly perfect condition—no wear on the face or the edges, as we usually see with very old coins that have been in use for centuries.”

  “Could they have come from a collection at a museum?” I asked. “Or maybe some grave robber dug them up at an archaeological dig?”

  “If they were stolen, Interpol might have a file on them.” She moved around behind her desk, took off the gloves and began to type. As she worked, I picked up the first coin, of the naked man about to be entered. The magnifying glass revealed remarkable detail, obviously the work of a fine craftsman. Because of the lack of body hair, and the slimness of the figure, I could tell the man on the table was younger, perhaps a teenager, while the other man’s body was larger, fleshier and hairier.

  The second coin featured a man and a woman, with the same level of detail, from the woman’s stiff nipples to the suggestion of hair at her crotch. The naked man beside her flaunted a prodigious penis. They made them big back then, I thought.

  “You’re right,” Miriam said, and for a moment I worried I’d said that out loud.

  “Interpol lists a set of these as stolen from an architectural site in Sicily. I’ll email you the details.”

  “Jesse Venable has called me three times since I landed,” I said. “He wants me to bring the picture over to him, and then he’ll deliver it to Frank Sena. He says Frank owes him a commission for helping locate the painting. Maybe he knows about these brothel tokens. He has a pretty extensive collection of male nude art, and I could see him wanting a couple of these. And since he’s also a gold dealer and a pawnbroker, he’d have the contacts to dispose of the rest of the tokens.”

  “That is assuming that he himself is the private buyer for the coins that Grassini wanted to sell,” Miriam said. “Let’s not jump to any conclusions right now. I want you to learn everything you can about these – where they came from, how they got into this painting, and who they were intended for.”

  “I’ll do my best.” I left Miriam’s office, and suddenly made the connection that had been at the back of my mind. Son of a bitch. Had Vito been holding out on me? He had been investigating Venable for the theft of those gold coins from the Atocha, and maybe he knew that Venable was still in that business. Had Vito set me up to bring stolen goods into the country without my knowledge, just to trap Venable?

  I was in a fit of righteous anger by the time I reached Vito’s office, but before I knocked on his door I forced myself to stop and calm down. There was no way Vito could have known that Grassini was smuggling coins in the picture frame—hell, I had brought the case to him.

  He should have warned me, though. He was my boss and it was his responsibility to tell me everything I needed to know about an operation. Suppose I had been stopped at Customs with that painting, if someone there had been savvy enough to feel the weight of the frame and require it to be X-rayed.

  I knocked on Vito’s door. “Come,” he called.

  Vito was as surprised as I was to learn that there were gold coins in the picture frame. “Be careful with this, Angus,” he said. “If Venable knows about those coins, then he’s going to be determined to get them before you can pass the picture on to your friend.”

  “He asked me to bring the painting to him first,” I said. “That must mean he knows about the tokens.”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself, rookie. What did Miriam tell you to do?”

  I repeated that she’d asked me to research the tokens. “Then you go back to your office and do that,” he said. “I’ll talk to Miriam.”

  I felt left out of the loop yet again, but I was pretty sure that whatever happened, I was going to be the one to deliver the painting to Venable, so I’d have to learn what was going on between Vito and Miriam eventually.

  I comforted myself with that knowledge as I jumped into my research. According to the Interpol case notes, the tokens had been discovered at an archaeological dig at a villa in eastern Sicily, and gone missing soon after being put on display at a local museum. The archaeologists had speculated that the tokens had been commissioned by the wealthy landown
er as gifts to his favorite mistress, who lived on the property.

  They were unique because while most such tokens were made of bronze, brass or gold plate on pewter, these were solid gold, and rather than being pressed at a mint, they’d been created by a talented goldsmith, and were particularly valuable because of the high quality of the workmanship.

  I did a quick Google search and found an article, written in Italian but translated for me by Google, which detailed the theft. The villa, built in the fourth century AD, was known for its well-preserved mosaics, particularly one of women athletes competing in bikinis.

  The article quoted a dealer in antiquities who put a value of a hundred thousand euros on the collection. I whistled. That was an awful lot of money for some very old porn.

  I started to put the timetable together in my head. The tokens were stolen in Sicily, and Interpol police suspected Mafia involvement. The man Remigio Grassini had killed, Gianluca Bianchi, was a Mafioso from Sicily. Did Bianchi know about the tokens? Was he the one who had provided them to Grassini to smuggle into the United States? Or had Grassini stolen them from Bianchi, who wanted them back? If that was the case, then it was a good thing Bianchi hadn’t known the coins were in the frame of the painting.

  I checked the clock. It was six hours later in Venice, so I hoped that Leonardo Foa would still be at work. I sent an email to him asked him to see if Grassini knew anything about the stolen tokens.

  About a half hour later, I heard back from him. “I give great credit to Commissario Affogato,” he wrote. “She has pursued the death of Gianluca Bianchi like a dog on a scent, and has uncovered much of interest. I spoke with her as soon as I received your message and she agreed to ask Grassini about the coins you mentioned. She has just responded to me that this information helped her break through to Grassini.”

  Well, that was great. But would she be able to supply anything that would help us arrest Jesse Venable?