A Renaissance desk with a Florentine throne chair would never have handled Lombardi’s considerable girth, and the Venetian mirrored chests of drawers would have reflected his discontent and glutted boredom every time he opened a drawer. Drapes across the floor-to-ceiling windows are crimson velvet with intricate gold and silver embroidery, and when I push a panel to one side the lining is gold silk, heavy and lush against my hand. I look out at the view of his bloated world where everything had a price and probably meant nothing, paid for with the blood and suffering of whoever he could squeeze the smallest commodity from, whether it was sex, murder, or money for designer drugs that will make you insane and dead.
The unlit connected walkways are barely etched in the foggy dark early night and there are no lights on in the spa building, and I notice for the first time that the back of the office building has no windows. Lamps along the winding drive are smudges of yellow light and beyond are the voids of the paddock and the pond, and then the gambrel barn. It hulks against a black horizon, a hint of light seeping through spaces in the wide sliding door and shuttered windows that are barred, and I wonder who’s in there besides the horses. The staff who heard and saw nothing have made their exodus, and Marino would be waiting for us but I doubt he can. He’s NEMLEC, he’s nothing, and Granby’s henchmen will have told him he’s nonessential and to leave. I continue to glance at windows and doors and to look for lights and listen for sounds, wondering when the same thing will happen to us.
I walk over to the bed stand, with its alabaster lamp, a cut-crystal carafe, and water tumbler, and I slide open the drawer. Inside are a pistol with a satin nickel finish, a.50 caliber Desert Eagle with enough rounds to wipe out everyone on the property and on neighboring farms and then some. Lombardi didn’t bother to arm himself when he picked up Haley Swanson at the commuter rail station and sat down with some drugged, sugar-craving acquaintance or connection who might have fancied himself an assassin or a hero.
I close the drawer and move to a mirrored bookcase to the right of the bed, its reflective shelves arranged with framed photographs of Lombardi during different eras of his violently ended life. A young boy sitting on the front steps of a row house in what appears to be a rough neighborhood, probably in the fifties based on the cars lining the city street, and he was sandy-haired and cute but already hard looking. There are plenty of pictures of him with women, a few of them famous, in nightclubs and bars, and then sitting at a wrought-iron table with a handsome dark woman who I suspect is his wife, surrounded by a lush tropical garden on the edge of a magnificent stone pool.
Then another photo of the two of them and in the background is a magnificent villa that looks very old and reminds me of Sicily. And there are photographs of the couple and possibly their three children, a boy and two girls in their late teens or early twenties, on a white yacht, cruising turquoise waters near dark green mountains and red-roofed villages that could be the Ionian Islands, and Lombardi is older now and grossly overweight. His puffy face and small, squinting eyes look discontented and bored as he poses on the teak deck in the midst of beauty and luxury that should have seemed beyond the wildest dreams of the boy sitting on the steps in a poor neighborhood, assuming Lombardi remembered that boy. But I doubt he thought of him anymore or dreamed.
A photograph that doesn’t fit with any of them is the one I pick up and look at carefully, a big gray elephant that dwarfs the young man giving him a bath, holding a running hose and a scrub brush. I move the photo in the lamplight and study the small but strong-looking shirtless figure in baggy camouflage shorts, tightly muscled with dark hair and an empty, icy stare as he grins boldly into the camera.
I feel the hair prickle on my scalp as I notice his shoes, black running gloves, his powerful tan legs ending in what look like black rubber feet. The photograph was taken in a grassy area with coconut palms surrounded by a chain-link fence and beyond are deep blue waters, a speedboat going by, and beyond it white cruise ships are moored at what I recognize as the Port of Miami.
“Who is this?” I ask Benton.
He steps close to look, and then he steps away to give me space as I continue seeing what there is to see for myself.
“I don’t know,” he says, “but we should try to find out.”
“The Cirque d’Orleans is based in South Florida.” I return the photograph to its mirrored shelf. “And at the first of this month it was in this area and the train was parked at Grand Junction for several days. Right in the middle of MIT.”
“I suppose it’s possible Lombardi owns a circus, too. That would be a good venue for distributing drugs, also a way to launder money, faking ticket sales, and who knows what. Maybe he dealt with the black market selling of exotic animals. Who the hell knows?”
I take several photographs, angling the camera to avoid reflection and glare as best I can, and I ask Benton about Dominic Lombardi’s family.
“He has the second wife in the Virgin Islands, according to Lucy, possibly the woman in a number of these photographs,” I say. “What about children? Has Lucy mentioned anything about that?”
“I’ll ask her.” He types a text on his phone.
Benton waits in front of a standing cheval mirror carved with cherubs playing music and I see him front and back, facing me and reflected in the glass.
I look at a Luca Giordano painting of blacksmiths and next to it an André Derain seated woman before an abstract background of reds and greens. Pierre Bonnard, Cézanne, and Picasso are arranged unimaginatively on one wall and I ask right off if they might be expert forgeries.
“I’m sure that’s what he told anybody who might have seen them,” Benton says. “What do you think?”
“I feel like I’m in an art gallery or a vulgar palace, I’m not sure which. I guess the answer is both. I don’t know if they’re real or not but they’re magical and he probably didn’t even notice them beyond what they’re worth.”
“The Maurice de Vlaminck you’re standing in front of, stolen in Geneva in the 1960s. Valued at around twenty million.” Benton’s eyes follow me.
“And the others?”
“The Picasso was last in a private collection here in Boston in the 1950s. It would go at auction for around fifteen million except for the minor problem that it’s hard to sell stolen art unless the buyer doesn’t mind and there are plenty who don’t. Masterpieces like these end up in private homes. They hang in yachts and Boeing business jets. They make the rounds until they surface like these will now. Someone dies. Someone gets caught. Someone realizes what he’s looking at is genuine. In this case all of the above.”
“You know this off the top of your head.”
“When I was growing up we had a Miró in the living room and one day it was replaced by a Modigliani, and after that a Renoir, and at some point there was a Pissarro, a snow scene with a man on a road.”
Benton moves away from the mirror to look at the Vlaminck, a painting of the Seine in intense colors that are mesmerizing.
“We had the Pissarro the longest and I was very unhappy when I came home from college and it was gone. There was this space above the fireplace where the art rotated. My father bought and sold it often, never really got attached to it. To me each one was like a cat or a dog I grew to love, or not love, but I missed every one of them when they were gone the same way you miss your friend or most boring teacher or even the bully in school. It’s hard to explain.”