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  Läufer lost no time in sending me a series of excellent shots of the castle, taken with a telephoto lens from a range of vantage points. The first thing which struck me was that the castle was actually built on the lake itself and connected to the shore by a timber bridge, over thirty feet long. The medieval builder’s scheme was an imaginative and effective one, as the lake’s waters formed a natural protective moat and the bridge could be withdrawn or destroyed when under serious assault. The stone walls were built on a hexagonal plan, and incorporated two watchtowers and four circular flanking towers, projecting outwards and pierced with pointed arrow slits, which offered archers a good field of fire. The main defensive wall was just over 39 feet high and was topped by overhanging battlements to help defend against enemy attacks using scaling ladders.

  The detailed site plans and drawings arrived a little later, because it took Läufer a while to find out the name of the architect who had been in charge of the restoration works. The castle’s basic structure and primitive military feel had not been interfered with, apart from a small swimming pool looking out onto the lake and a parking area around the old well. Most of the construction work took place inside the central keep, which was restored to its original function as the living quarters of the lord and castellan. Built on a square floor plan with solid ten-foot-thick walls, the keep had a cellar and five storeys. The ground floor housed the kitchen and the servants’ accommodation, and the next three the main living quarters, with its bedrooms, dining rooms and living rooms. There was also a library and even a private chapel. The top floor served as Hübner’s art gallery, and was reached either by a spiral staircase which wound its way up around the inside of the tower’s main wall or by a small central lift which rose up through the wooden floors.

  As for Hübner’s staff at Kunst, Läufer had identified them by finding records of their wage slips in the bank account of one of Hübner’s many corporations. Herr and Frau Seitenberg - he the butler and she the housekeeper - looked after the castle throughout the year, and had their home on the ground floor of the keep. Hübner’s nearest neighbors were two enormous Rottweilers whose doghouse was at the foot of the west wall. Every morning, an old gardener came in from the village along with the cleaning lady - as Läufer had personally verified when carrying out on-site surveillance. The assumption was that, during the three months a year that Hübner stayed at the castle, staff numbers were significantly higher, but their wages didn’t appear in the castle’s official accounts.

  It was slightly more difficult to identify the firm which installed the security system, but it eventually turned out to be the White Knight Company, an old acquaintance of mine whose outdated working methods didn’t lose me any sleep at all. A couple of days later, Läufer supplied me with the layout of the whole alarm set-up, including all its series and model reference numbers.

  The checkered history of the Krylov painting, researched by Roi, was quite a bit more interesting. From the various references and comments in specialized journals, art history books and the archives of various gallery owners and collectors that were friends of his, we knew that the painting was kept in the State Russian Museum in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) for over twenty years, until it was looted and taken to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) in October 1941, during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The Nazis had formed two special commando units to carry out the systematic looting of art treasures: the Sonderkommando Künsberg, under the command of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, and the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, controlled by Alfred Rosenberg, the Reichsminister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Both units were charged with ensuring that the works of art, including those in the museums of Leningrad and Moscow, were kept ‘out of danger’ - a rescue operation which of course required their removal to Germany.

  In the early months of 1945, when the Red Army was closing in on Königsberg in one of the bloodiest offensives of the Second World War, an expeditionary force loaded with looted treasures abandoned the threatened city and headed for Thuringia, whose governor was the much-feared Gauleiter3 Fritz Sauckel, responsible for the Weimar-Buchenwald concentration camp, and later condemned to death at the Nuremberg Trials and hanged. Shortly before his execution, this General Plenipotentiary for the Deployment of Labor claimed that these works of art appropriated in the closing stages of the war had left Weimar in April 1945, headed for Switzerland. But this was never confirmed and nothing more was ever heard of them.

  It was more than strange that, twenty years later, a canvas entitled Muzhiks, painted by a Russian painter called Ilya Krylov, suddenly reappeared in the modest catalog of artworks owned by a former Nazi bigwig who had been transformed into a more than respectable bakery magnate - a certain Helmut Hübner. Pretty incredible, right? In Thuringia, or perhaps in Switzerland, the painting had found its way through unknown channels into Hübner’s hands - although it was even more horrifying to discover that the multimillionaire manufacturer of the world’s most famous cookies, not to mention oh-so-sensitive art collector, turned out to be a sanitized ex-Nazi.

  Donna now had all the information she needed at her disposal. She set herself to work and produced a canvas which was so perfect that the rest of us could only gape in admiration. We all received two scanned photographs, completely indistinguishable, and she asked us to pick out the original. All of us failed dismally - all of us except for Läufer. But even he eventually had to admit that, far from using his impressive knowledge as a specialist in artwork authentication, he had simply flipped a coin for it after downing a good few beers.

  Donna began her career as a professional painter when she was twenty years old and, judging by the reviews of her work, was naturally blessed with magnificent skills in draftsmanship and the use of color. But she soon discovered that, in the real world, she was just one more wannabe in a whole mess of wannabes, and that she would never become one of the Old Masters. She faced up to the bitter fact that her name would not live on through the centuries draped in glory, that there were no more Sistine Chapels left to paint and no more papal art patrons like Julius II and Leo X. Even the smallest jobs attracted thousands of desperate candidates, scrapping like piranhas.

  So Donna gave her life plan a serious make-over and set off in a better-paid direction. Inspired by her idol Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, she moved into forgery. Michelangelo, wrote his good friend and biographer Giorgio Vasari, “also counterfeited drawings by various old maestros in a masterly manner; he handled them and aged them with smoke and other materials, staining them in such a way that they looked old, and making them indistinguishable from the originals.” On one well-known occasion, he sculpted a Cupid, buried it for a time to age it, and then arranged for it to be discovered during archaeological excavations. It was sold to a cardinal as an antique and Michelangelo received thirty gold ducats for it. Donna’s working methods were much less colorful: her studio was a sophisticated laboratory equipped with ultraviolet and infrared cameras, state-of-the-art microscopes and all the other instruments she used to analyze the chemical composition and physical properties of all the pigments, varnishes, canvases and gemstones that she required. But the appliance of science had also made her a whole lot richer than Michelangelo ever was.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  At the crack of dawn on Friday, September 25th, Cavalo boarded an Alitalia flight to Rome, had lunch with Donna at an elegant restaurant in the Piazza Farnese and then went straight back to Fiumicino airport - a carry tube slung over his shoulder containing a roll of assorted folios and some lithographed reproductions of Piranesi’s Views of Rome - to catch his return flight to Porto. He spent all day Saturday playing chess, a game he was just as devoted to as his father and grandfather had been. Very early on Sunday morning, he got behind the steering wheel, and set off to drive across the border with Spain at Fuentes de Oñoro and have lunch with me at the tavern in San Martos del Castañedo, in Salamanca province, roughly halfway between our two home towns
.

  Over the four long hours it took me to get there, I stayed glued to the radio news bulletins on the German general election which was taking place that day. I was really curious to see whether Kohl would be re-elected Chancellor or if the Social Democrat Schröder would manage to defeat him and form a coalition government with the Greens. ‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ I thought to myself, ‘if Germany became the first major economic power to abandon nuclear energy?’ It would rock the nuclear power industry to its foundations and maybe help the world become a cleaner place. Would the German Greens have that much influence if Schröder won? I really hoped they would.

  I parked my BMW in the town square and cut through a narrow alleyway which took me straight to the tavern. The old sixteenth-century building, its facade covered in scaffolding and still only half-restored, had always seemed to me to have a self-consciously beat-up look about it. The inside was fixed up from top to bottom in modern country style: beech and pinewood beams and furniture, wrought iron everywhere, stacks of clay pottery, bunches of dried flowers and linen and cotton fabric on all sides. I pushed open the heavy door and pulled up short to avoid bumping right into a scruffy character who just stood there, staring at me with the eyes of a religious fanatic. From previous experience, I knew that he wouldn’t utter a single word and that it was down to me to break the silence. So I gave him a friendly greeting and asked him to lead me to Señor José da Costa-Reis. He continued to stare at me for a good while, without even blinking or moving a muscle until, all of a sudden, he stepped aside so that I could see through into the restaurant. José was there at one of the back tables with a big smile on his face, chatting with a girl who was around twelve or thirteen years old, very dark, very skinny and with very big teeth. I guessed that it had to be the daughter that he always talked about whenever we met up in the tavern before a job. I groaned to myself in disappointment at our unexpected lunch companion, and then headed towards them down the three steps which separated the entrance hall from the small dining area.

  I always enjoyed seeing Cavalo again. For me, he was one of those calm and wonderfully considerate men whose mere presence made you feel that everything made sense, even when it didn’t. His deep, dark eyes had a smile in them, he was tall and fit, always well-shaven and well-groomed with thick grey hair. I found him a very attractive man, but the Group’s rules put him strictly off-limits to me.

  ‘You’re looking wonderful, Ana,’ he told me in his musical Portuguese accent with those typical rounded vowel sounds, and kissed me on each cheek in greeting.

  ‘You too, José.’

  A lovely open smile lit up his face as he put his hands on one of the two free chairs and pulled it back to offer me a seat. His daughter could not keep her eyes off me.

  ‘This is Amália, the most beautiful and intelligent girl in the whole world,’ he declared, brimming over with unconditional fatherly pride. ‘Amália, this is Ana - Ana Galdeano.’

  ‘Hello, Amália,’ I mumbled enthusiastically.

  ‘Hello,’ she replied, examining me as if she had X-ray eyes.

  José had separated from his wife not long after the birth of their daughter. Seeing as divorce did not exist in Portugal at the time, they reached a civilized agreement together to make sure that their girl grew up without losing touch with her father. The days which Amália spent with José were so sacrosanct to him that he was perfectly capable of cancelling a meeting with me or even postponing a Group operation so as not to lose even a minute of the time he was scheduled to spend with Amália. This time, on the other hand, he had brought her with him without any warning at all.

  ‘So how’s the German business going?’ he asked me as he sat down.

  My face froze into what I’m sure was the dumbest and most moronic smile of all time. What the hell was he doing, asking me this kind of question in front of his daughter? I took a deep breath and pulled myself together before answering.

  ‘I’ve got everything ready. Once you give me the … design, I’ll go home and pack my bags.’

  ‘Right, the design!’ he exclaimed. ‘Of course! We left it in the car, didn’t we, Amália?’

  ‘Yes, Papá.’

  ‘It’s just that we were chatting the whole time and … I’ll give it to you later, before we leave. The fact of the matter is that Donna has done a really outstanding job. There’s also a bag in the carry tube with two numbered nails in it.’

  ‘Wow, great!’ I replied, completely unable to wipe the shocked expression off my face. Would it stay like that from now until the hour of my death, all because of Cavalo’s repeated indiscretions? As soon as I got home to Ávila, I was going to have to have a serious word with Roi.

  ‘So - how are you going to do it?’ he asked me, as he lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out through his nose and mouth at the same time. Why was he so damn good-looking? And why the hell did he keep asking me such indiscreet questions?

  ‘With my usual methods,’ I answered, swallowing a bit of toast and pâté. ‘The shortest, safest and most sensible route. It has always given me good results, as you know.’

  ‘Well, you really know your job, that’s for sure. But you seem a bit tired to me,’ he commented, looking me over with a worried expression on his face. ‘Haven’t you recovered from your Russian trip?’

  ‘I do find all the … negotiations very tiring, but Ezequiela’s stews usually get me back on my feet pretty quickly. It’s just that I haven’t had any time off since Russia. This one’s such a rush job.’

  ‘That’s for sure,’ he agreed, shaking his head regretfully.

  Amália had been following our whole conversation with rapt attention, switching her gaze from José to me and back again. We carried on chatting all the way through the meal, but it was all pretty banal and superficial, given that there was no way we could talk about serious stuff with the girl there. I had never met a man more besotted with his daughter than Cavalo. On second thought, my father was in exactly the same division: he often took me along to meetings with Roi, where they talked about things which I didn’t get at all. My father behaved with me just like José did with Amália.

  After we finished lunch, we left the tavern and went for a quiet stroll around the village, which was completely deserted - as tends to happen in Spain in the early afternoon. We looked like a small family out on a weekend trip. José had sensibly taken the precaution of parking his car well away from prying eyes, in a deserted part of town just by a small Roman bridge. As soon as we arrived, he opened the trunk, took out the carry tube and placed it in my hands as gently as a new-born baby. We exchanged a telling look, and I slung it over my shoulder - exactly where it would be when I carried out the job.

  ‘Amália and I need to ask you for a small favor, Ana,’ Cavalo said to me, a bit sheepishly.

  ‘You and Amália? Fine, fine - out with it then,’ I answered with a quick smile.

  ‘Would you mind picking up a small package for us when you’re in Germany? It’s something very special that I asked Heinz to get hold of,’ Heinz being Heinz Kemmler, which was our beloved Läufer’s real name and who I was going to see in just a few days’ time.

  ‘No problem at all,’ I blurted out enthusiastically - and began to regret it the second the words had left my mouth. What if it turned out to be really heavy? What if it attracted unwanted attention? José read my thoughts.

  ‘It’s a tiny little gadget, hardly weighs a thing and really won’t be a hassle for you. Amália and I are huge fans of vintage mechanical contraptions. We have a fantastic collection of mechanical toys: ballerinas, Ferris wheels, clowns and animals. Don’t we, honey?’

  ‘We sure do, Papá.’

  ‘An 1890 Märklin came up for auction in Bonn a few weeks ago and I asked Heinz to get it for us. It’s absolutely wonderful. You just couldn’t put a price on it! It’s a small hand-painted tinplate figure, which slides along a snow-covered track. Just beautiful.’

  Like every good watchmaker-jeweler, José had a passion
for complex mechanisms and automata which he had inherited from his father and grandfather. As far as I knew, one of his favorite pastimes - apart from chess, of course - was restoring clocks and watches. Just imagining him working away with total concentration on a mechanism which relied on the faultless operation of hundreds of minuscule components in perfect synchronization put my hormones into overdrive. He was one of the most intelligent guys I had ever met.

  Amália mumbled something in Portuguese.

  ‘What is she saying?’ I asked José, caught off-balance.

  ‘She just said that it’s spring-operated.’

  Well, that was clear confirmation that Amália had inherited the family obsession, and probably the technical precision of three generations of renowned watchmakers that went with it too. I was beginning to understand why her father had said that she was the smartest girl in the world.

  José turned towards his daughter with a stern expression on his face.

  ‘Amália, I already told you that you have to speak in Spanish when we’re with Ana.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled, reluctantly.

  ‘She speaks perfect Spanish, but she gets embarrassed.’

  ‘Fine - no problem,’ I said. ‘Listen, I’ll bring your toy back from Germany in mint condition, I promise. Then you can tell me how you want me to get it to you, José.’

  ‘Thanks, Ana. I owe you one. The best of luck to you. Seriously. And don’t forget to say hi for me to our crazy Heinz,’ he said to me with a smile, by way of a goodbye. This guy who could have been the man of my life. Suppressing a sigh, I put my hand on Amália’s shoulder and helped her into the car. All of a sudden I began to feel bitter and over the hill.

  ‘You’re putting us in unnecessary danger, Ana,’ Prince Philibert had pointed out to me years before, on his last visit to my finca. ‘Stop flirting with Cavalo every time we go on IRC. He’s not the only man in the world. The less contact we have with each other, the safer for all of us.’ He had given me such a fright that I could still picture his furious grey eyes glaring at me from under his frankly scary spiky salt-and-pepper eyebrows.