Deceptions by Anna Porter (fox in socks read aloud TXT) 📗

But once you develop a taste for owning stuff, can it ever be enough? When in doubt, my dear, I follow the money.”

“Do you know anything about Magoci?”

“A little. He was an expert in making dirty money disappear and re-emerging unencumbered by its history. In his spare time, he worked for some of the boys from my own country. They sought his advice on how to seem legitimate.”

“Including you?”

“Not me. I am my own most trusted advisor.” He chuckled. “As for you, my dear Helena, you have skills that even I envy. You could, if you wished, tell me now whether Vaszary’s painting is the real thing. You’d get paid no matter what you said. And if I had your word for it, I would gladly double your fee. Whatever it is. So long as Grigoriev doesn’t find out ahead of me. I can’t stomach that guy. I would like him to fill that giant mausoleum he calls his villa, near Sochi, with a hundred forgeries so everyone knows he is an idiot.”

Helena wondered whether the pretty Corot fake had ended up in the villa near Sochi. He had wanted something yellow for a gift for his newest wife, no doubt to distract her from her well-founded suspicions that he had found a new, even younger mistress.

“Have I told you he has about six hundred acres?” Vladimir asked. “And a life-size replica of a Spanish galleon, complete with gold bars made to look like they had been stolen from the Inca?”

“That sounds more like your old friend Viktor Yanukovych with his estate in the middle of Kiev. Didn’t you give him one of his vintage cars? Or was it the Tibetan Mastiff? There was a time you couldn’t do enough to ingratiate yourself with him and his many hangers-on.”

Vladimir smiled. “We live in a new era now, trying to wean ourselves off bribes. Have you seen Servant of the People, starring our new president, Volodymyr Zelensky? He has different ideas.”

She had barely touched her glass of Puligny-Montrachet (“Nothing but the best for the young lady,” Vladimir had said to the waiter) when one of her phones rang. It was Attila telling her what she already knew about Berkowitz, that he often worked for Magyar and Nagy on undefined contracts. He was described on official stationery as a “consultant.” He was ex-army, occasional bodyguard for visiting celebrities, a fitness geek, frequent marathoner, and, according to his police profile, a crack shot. His hobby: archery.

“Why,” Helena asked once she had walked away from Azarov’s table, “would these fine upstanding citizens of your strange little country want to have a Strasbourg lawyer killed?”

“That’s what I plan to find out,” Attila said. He put the emphasis on I. “Soon as I can stop worrying about you and . . . where are you?”

She told him that she would be flying back to Strasbourg the next day.

She had pulled on Maria Steinbrunner’s jacket and just left the Four Seasons without her wig when the phone rang again. It was Louise, confirming that Andrea would meet her at eight o’clock.

Chapter Twenty-Two

When Helena arrived at Café Gerbeaud, Andrea was already waiting. She wore a chocolate-coloured jacket, open to the ruffled neck of an off-white silk blouse that revealed her lightly tanned throat and the string of pearls that rested just an inch under the ruffles. Her cuffs extended a centimetre beyond the jacket’s sleeves. She seemed to have dressed for a special occasion.

She had taken a table at the back of the dining room, close to the lush burgundy drapes that obscured the photo gallery of the Gerbeaud’s history and the sign for the location of its toilets. Although the Gerbeaud had once been the best café and confectionery in Budapest, it had been so overrun by tourists that it no longer appealed to the locals. The last time Helena had been here, it was to meet Attila during the last day of their time together, and he had confessed that he still loved the old place. As a child, he had been overwhelmed by its grand decor, its nineteenth century charm, the chandeliers, the mahogany, the brocade, the long art deco tables where the patisseries were displayed behind curved glass, not to be touched by human hands until you plunged your finger or your fork into one of them. Attila had charmed the waitresses into giving him one of the prized tables by the windows. Although the occasion itself was sad, the last day of a romantic interlude, she remembered the café with sufficient fondness to have recommended it to Andrea as the place that serves the best chestnut purée in Europe, a fact confirmed by Andrea the last time she had visited Budapest.

A bottle of wine was already open on the table, and Andrea was eating goose liver on a thin slice of brown toast. “Exactly as I remember it,” she said. “So warm and so Habsburg. I even ordered a local wine. It’s not terrific, but it suits the place.”

Helena handed her coat to the waiter and, rather than taking the chair across from her, settled into the surprisingly comfortable chair next to Andrea. It was not only because she needed to have her back to the wall, but also because she was aware of people at other tables who had watched her progression down the long red runner carpet that led to the dining area of the Gerbeaud. A good number of them could have been Russians, and any one of them could have been connected with Grigoriev.

“Lovely to see you, too, Andrea,” Helena said. “Lovely but surprising. You never mentioned you were coming to Budapest.”

“I didn’t know that I would need to come. Tell me,” she said, leaning closer to Helena, “have you made any decisions about the painting?”

“Decisions?”

“Have you concluded if it was painted by Artemisia Gentileschi?”

“The paints, as you already know, are definitely from her period. It is not an eighteenth century copy. It is not