"I expect it was Gianni here who came up with the idea," I said. "Although the others probably encouraged him. He wrote the articles. He'd even had the first couple of them published already, hinting that he knew who was responsible for the smuggling of Etruscan antiquities out of Italy. A successful foreign businessman, wasn't it?"
"I remember them well," Lucca said. "Something, too, about the carabinieri condoning such activities. I've been meaning to discuss this with you, Gianni."
"So why didn't you tell the carabinieri that Lake had sent you for the hydria?" Gianni said belligerently, turning to me.
"Because I had given my word that I wouldn't tell anyone, and, as foreign a concept as some of you may find it, I believe in keeping my word. My plan was to find Lake and get him to step forward," I said. "If he'd refused, then I would. I found him. Or rather he found me. Then I knew there was no point in telling the carabinieri that Mr. Lake had sent me, because it was patently obvious he hadn't. So I had to look for another explanation, didn't I?"
"Let me make sure I understand this," Lake said. "While one group, the goat, was rather ineptly trying to get the hydria into Italy, the other, the lion, was plotting to stop it, by telephoning the carabinieri and reporting a stolen antiquity. Is that about right?"
I nodded.
"This is one of the dumbest ideas I have ever heard, Gino," Dottie said.
"Why would I bother to sue?" Lake said. "No one would believe such bungling."
"So, it didn't happen," Mauro said. "You can't arrest us for evil thoughts. It was a bad idea, okay, but there's no harm done. Now let's just enjoy the party, and we'll give Nicola the hydria to take back with him at the end of the day."
"Not so fast," Lake said. "I believe, if I have followed you so far, Lara, that now we come to the snake."
"The snake," I agreed.
"This is preposterous," Nicola said. "You make it sound as if all of us are under suspicion."
"You are," Lake said. "Now what is this snake about?"
"It's about this," I said, walking over to the hydria. I picked it up, raised it straight in front of me at about shoulder height, and as they all watched me, I let it go. The chimera hydria dropped like a stone and smashed into hundreds of pieces on the stone floor.
It was bedlam. People were yelling, shaking their fists. Anna fell to her hands and knees and started grabbing at the pieces, pathetically trying to fit them together. Several others rushed to help her, then stopped, realizing it was hopeless.
"What have you done?" Dottie said.
"She's destroyed a priceless antiquity," Lucca said. "I cannot believe you have done this. I am placing you under arrest."
"Relax," I said, picking up a shard and looking at it closely, relieved to find I'd been right. "It's a fake."
"How can you be sure?" Anna said.
"The weight, the balance," I said. "The feel of the surface. It didn't feel like the real one."
"We went to all this trouble for a fake?" Romano said incredulously. "Didn't you say it was authentic?" he said, turning to Nicola.
"Well, yes," Nicola replied. "But of course I didn't have a chance to have a really close look at it. I would have needed my lab equipment..."
"What do you mean when you said it didn't feel like the real one?" Lucca said. "Was this theoretical or . . ."
"There have been two chimera hydrias being passed around," I said. "One genuine, the other, this fake. The balance in the real one was absolutely perfect. Despite its shape and size, it would pour like a dream. I know, because I held it. You cannot say the same thing for this one here.
"Until this was delivered to my hotel yesterday," I said, picking up a shard, "I thought that the deaths of Antonio and Leclerc were linked to the plot to discredit Lake. It seemed obvious at first, at least to me, that all of this had to have something to do with Lake. I just couldn't figure out what. I knew some of you were linked to Lake in a way that would make you suspect. Had it not been for the reappearance of the hydria last night, I would have stuck with that theory. But I would have been wrong." They all stood, silent for a change, watching me.
"What seeing this hydria told me is that this is not about revenge for wrongs, real or imagined, any more than it has to do with saving priceless antiquities. It's about greed, about people who are addicted to collecting, who have to possess things whether they are legal or not, and who have the financial wherewithal to do so. And it's about the shadowy dealers who feed their habit.
"The key to the murder was not Mr. Lake but the chimera hydria. At first, I could not figure out why it had been stolen from the police station and then sent to me. The only reason I could think of, at the end of the day, was that somebody wanted it to arrive at its destination, and for whatever reason, I was the one who had to get it there. So that's what I did.
"The piece of the puzzle that was missing, the one that would help make everything come together in my mind, was what Dottie told us about Leclerc. Leclerc got the hydria from Dottie—"
"Just a minute," Lucca said. "Was that the real one?"
"Yes," I said.
"And he put a fake one in your car, right?"
"No, he put the genuine hydria in my car, and I carried it across the border. Then I gave it back to him."
"Why on earth would you do that?" Hank said.
"Perhaps it was because she didn't know what the plan was," Lake said. "Given you never bothered to tell her."
"Yes. Given I was not party to the discussions about how all this was supposed to work, I did something, inadvertently, that led to Leclerc's death, and possibly, much as it gives me great pain to say so, Antonio's as well. I put the hydria into Leclerc's car in the parking lot at the hotel in Volterra. The carabinieri were searching cars, I saw him arrive, and, on the assumption, a correct one, I think, that he had put the hydria in my car in the first place, I put it back in his."
"Are you sure you put it in the right car?" Dottie said to me.
"Yes, but I left immediately after that. It is possible, indeed probable, that someone else got their hands on it in the meantime. Regardless, a day or two later, it reappeared in my hotel room in Arezzo. I've thought a lot about who sent it to my hotel. For awhile, my choice was Antonio, who, I thought, was doing it in an effort to help me. But he denied it vehemently, and I believed him. Given that, I was then quite sure it was Leclerc, but now I'm not so certain."
"Surely the real question is whether or not the hydria delivered to your hotel was the real one or a fake," Lake said.
"I had the hydria for only a short time before Lola took it from me. In fact, I never got a good look at it, nor did I really have a chance to hold it, except for a second or two. I'm going to hypothesize, however, that it was a fake, and that at some point between the time I put the real hydria in Leclerc's car and the time a hydria turned up in my hotel room, someone had switched them."
"So the hydria in my carabinieri station was also a fake, in this hypothesis anyway," Lucca said.
"Almost certainly," I said. "That, in fact, was the problem for the snake. I'm using the singular, but I believe there were four people involved. The fake was never meant to end up in a police station. Someone— and it had to be someone who knew nothing of the lion's intent to intercept the hydria before it could be delivered—substituted the fake and probably killed Leclerc, who by this time had figured out way more than these people wanted him to, and given his propensity to blackmail, had let them know he knew. Then this same person put the fake hydria back on track to be delivered as usual to the Societa."