I Am Pilgrim(148)

A few months before that particular summer season started, a local realtor received a call from someone who said it was time the mansion earned its keep: it was available for vacation rentals at two hundred thousand US dollars a week.

The men smiled at the amazing figure and did the shrug.

‘Who was she, the woman who built it?’ I asked in the silence, thinking about the swastikas.

They shook their heads: it was a mystery. The manager looked at his watch and told the men they had better finish loading up if the mirrors were going to make it to the airport on time. The team recorked their bottles, got to their feet and headed back to the terrace.

I turned and walked down the garden. Halfway, I stopped and looked back at the house. It was certainly sinister, and my impression had been right when I had first seen it from the driveway: it had been built for privacy. But the Waiting Room – why call it that? And what of the people who came and stayed briefly all those years ago? Who were they?

I don’t know why I thought of it – maybe it was the sweep of the sea, perhaps it was the sight of a freighter on the horizon – but I have learned to trust my intuition. A ship, I thought. That was what they were waiting for: a ship.

The manager was on the terrace, waving to get my attention. ‘The loadings of the mirror are all system go and finished,’ he called. ‘We only need now the person of you.’

I smiled and headed up to join the convoy to Milas airport.





Chapter Twenty-seven


I FLEW INTO florence at dusk, not a cloud in the sky, the great Renaissance city laid out below in all its haunting beauty. I was in the cockpit of a FedEx plane that had been diverted from Istanbul to pick up two large crates as a special favour to the FBI.

The pilots, a pair of cowboys – one English and the other Australian – invited me to sit in the spare seat up front. Had I known they would spend the entire flight arguing about cricket, I would have stayed in the back.

A truck from the Uffizi headed on to the apron to meet us and, between the gallery’s three storemen and the two cricket-lovers, the large crates were craned out of the belly of the plane and into the back of the truck in a matter of minutes. As much as any city on earth, Florence itself is a work of art, but seeing it again brought me little joy. The last time I had walked its streets had been with Bill and, once again, I found myself overcome with regret about the way I had treated him.

We entered the city in the twilight, travelled down narrow side streets little changed in five hundred years and stopped outside a pair of huge oak doors I dimly remembered. The workshop was located in a separate complex to the museum – a group of old cellars and warehouses, their stone walls six feet thick – which had once housed the Medicis’ vast stores of grain and wine.

Cameras checked every inch of the street before the oak doors swung back and the truck entered a huge security area. I climbed out of the cab and looked at the hi-tech consoles, squads of armed guards, racks of CCTV monitors and massive steel doors that barred further entry into the facility. The place bore little resemblance to the one I had visited so many years ago, and I wasn’t surprised – the Uffizi had been bombed by terrorists in the early nineties, and the museum obviously wasn’t taking any chances.

Two guards approached and fingerprinted the storemen and driver with handheld scanners. Even though the men had known each other for years, the guards had to wait for the central database to validate the men’s identities before the steel doors could be opened. As the truck and its cargo disappeared inside, I was left behind. A guy in a suit appeared, arranged to have me photographed for a security pass and told me the director and his team were waiting.

With the pass pinned to my coat, a guard strapped a copper wire trailing to the floor around my ankle: any static electricity generated by my clothes or shoes would be carried away by the wire and sent to ground, avoiding any risk of a spark. After robbery and terrorism, a tiny flash igniting the volatile chemicals used in art restoration was what facilities like the workshop feared most.

The Uffizi specialized in repairing large canvases and frescoes and, though there had been many changes since my previous visit, the director had told me on the phone that they still had the huge photographic plates and chemical baths necessary for that work. It was those that would very soon determine the future of my mission.

The man in the suit led me to an elevator, we went down six floors and I stepped into what looked like a conference room: four opaque glass walls, a long table and, on one side, two technicians sitting at computer screens connected to a huge array of hard drives.

Three women and half a dozen men stood up to greet me. One of them extended his hand and introduced himself as the director. He was surprisingly young, but his long hair was completely grey and I guessed that the risk of ruining priceless works of art must have taken its toll. He said that, in the few hours since we had first spoken, the people gathered in the room had put together a strategy to try to recover an image from the mirrors. None of them, he said, held out much hope.