The home was her father’s inheritance to her. All of it. And her father was the man she had loved unequivocally her entire life and who had loved her the same way in return. Pictures of him with Maria’s mother adorned every room of her home. In his honor she still supported Atlético, the soccer team that was the perennial underdog to the much more famous Real Madrid. She had gone to the games with him when she was a small child, sitting on his knee when she was small enough, in much the same way that he had taken her to the bullfights
She still went to the bullfights at Las Ventas from time to time. She felt very much at home sitting in the pie-slice shape of the arena where her father sat along with all the real aficionados, compared to the tourists in the more expensive sections. Actually, more than the bullfights themselves, she liked walking back along the Calle de Alcalá, with its lively scene of people enjoying the bustle of the boulevard, leading up to the Puerta de Alcalá, the three-hundred-year-old neoclassical arch that remains Madrid’s grandest monument.
Men in her life? From time to time. But she no longer wished to be tied down. And one of the last things in Spain that would change, she thought, would be the machismo aspect of the male dominated Spanish society. No, she had her daughter, a job that gave her some independence, and the little pleasures of life.
Men were a mixed lot, anyway. Except for her father, who had accepted her behavior and her pregnancy, saying “Los tiempos cambian.” Times change.
Times had changed.
A lot of the change had been very visible and in her lifetime, the last few decades, the final part of her father’s life and the first part of hers. Much of the change had come thanks to Felipe González and the PSOE, the Socialist Party that came into power in 1982 and completed the transformation from the stodgy, repressive Franco era to the vibrant Spain of the present day.
She remembered the latter years of the movida, the time when frozen morals were thawing and repressed creativity in everything from the arts to fashion to cinema was blossoming everywhere. She remembered dancing late into the night as a young girl sans chaperone, something that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. She had even gotten pregnant by a man she barely knew, and though she hadn’t married the father, she was proud of her twelve-year-old daughter, who was now an outstanding student in school.
For a woman in her thirties with minimal formal education and no husband, things were going very well.
FIFTEEN
MADRID, SEPTEMBER 7, 12:47 P.M.
As Alex was closing her laptop, Gian Antonio Rizzo moved to a position beside her. “When did you arrive in Madrid?” he asked, switching into Italian.
“Yesterday. By train from Barcelona.”
“I noticed your tan,” he said. “Very nice. Your legs look spectacular. Spent some time turning heads on the beach, did you?”
“Yes, thank you. Are you flirting with me already?”
“I hope so,” he answered good naturedly. “I need to do something to make this otherwise-useless trip worthwhile. We’re never going to find this filthy figurine, you know. Might just as well go to the flea market on Saturday and get them a piece of junk there to replace it. So let’s talk about your skin hue, and the unending beauty of it, instead.”
Alex smiled. “I’m not sure I’ll be having much more time to work on the tan,” she said, packing her PC into an equally new carrying case. “Seriously, this looks like a full plate.”
“When art is gone, it’s gone,” he said. “Poof. Arrivederci. Hasta la vista, baby!”
“We’ll see.”
“But you’re feeling better?” he asked. “Better than I saw you last in Paris.”
“Molto meglio, grazie.”
“Where are you staying?”
“The Ritz,” she said. “Down the Calle Filipe IV from here.”
“I didn’t know America’s balance of payments was so healthy they could put your investigators in a place like that,” he said.
“It’s not,” she said, packing up her things. “The dollar is still in shambles worldwide, but the average bubba who votes doesn’t know that yet. So they waste money, anyway. Like all governments. At least some of it gets thrown in my direction. If I objected, they’d probably have me investigated.”
“How many dollars is that a night, the hotel?”
“Maybe six hundred,” she said. “I haven’t looked. But the marble bathrooms are wonderful, as is the balcony and the view. I’m on the fifth floor overlooking the Prado. What’s not to like?”
“It’s always helpful to understand that staying at a five-star hotel in Europe is quite a different experience than staying at one in Asia, or even in America for that matter. You’ll never get the service of the Oriental in Bangkok or the amenities of the St. Regis in New York. But what you do get is a heavy dose of old-world charm. And yes, sometimes that does come in the form of a beautiful hand-loomed carpet that is a bit stained or a breakfast buffet with indifferent food. That is what I love about hotels like the Ritz. You have to take a portfolio view of the experience and not focus too hard on any one aspect. Is that your experience?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Then invite me up to your room sometime.”
“Not a chance,” she said with a laugh. “So far I’ve focused on the fresh fruit that arrives each day. Today it was yellow plums. Yesterday it was Haifa oranges.”
“Don’t tell your taxpayers,” he said.
“Sometimes being a government slave has its perks. This is one, I guess. And what the heck, I’m a prima donna, anyway, and tend to injure easily.”
He laughed again. “Of that I have no doubt,” he said. “Unfortunately, I come from a small backward country with an outstanding football team but a third-world economy.”
“Oh, knock it off.” They both moved toward the door. “You make Italy sound like Tunisia.”
“Sometimes the similarity is vague,” he said.
By then it had become a conversation in motion, Essen of Interpol tightly latching a computer case and talking to Fitzgerald of Scotland Yard in hushed tones, while LeMaitre, the Frenchman, picked through his pockets for a pack of cigarettes.
The two Spaniards in uniform stood at their places and waited in case anyone felt like asking them anything further. They looked disappointed when no one did.
Floyd Connelly of US Customs came over. His face was puffy up close, little red veins visible around the eyes that suggested a more than passing acquaintance with booze over several decades. He had the confused look of a man playing out the final few months before retirement, not really on top of anything any more, and torn between saying something smart and making a fool of himself.
“A lot of bull, this whole thing,” he said in English. “I don’t know why I was even included here.”
“I don’t either,” Rizzo said.
“I had to fly in for this,” he muttered. “I missed a golf weekend in Maryland and an Orioles-Yankees game. I thought the peet-a was a big rock in Rome, and now this guy’s telling us it’s a little thing that got stolen from here.”
“This is one of the tinier ones,” Rizzo said, switching smoothly to English. “Which is why it walked off.”
“How you supposed to keep track of them if there’s two things by the same name?” Connelly asked.
Rizzo blinked. “There are actually several,” Rizzo added. He and Alex looked at him in the same way, wondering if he was that dumb or joking.
“Well, carry on,” Connelly said, ignoring Rizzo and looking at Alex. “If you need anything, give me a holler.” He handed her a business card. On it he had written the name of his hotel in Madrid and a phone number.