DESCARTES SETTLED INTO A CHAIR. I’D EXPECTED HIS eyes to light up at the array of pastries and berries—Jean and Elisabeth had started doubling the portions for his sake—but he looked bleak and bleary. “I’ve been up all night,” he said, in answer to the question in my eyes. “Fishing. We have some information on all three of the fishes.”
Coffee sloshed from my cup as my hand began to shake, filling the saucer. When I set the saucer down, milky coffee sloshed onto the table and dripped through the wooden slats, splatting onto the stones of the courtyard. “Tell me.”
“The one in London is a British art dealer.”
“An art dealer?” I was surprised, though I swiftly realized I shouldn’t have been. After all, if collectors and museums prized fractured Roman pottery and gem-encrusted Aztec skulls, why wouldn’t someone covet the bones of Christ, arguably the most revered figure of all time? “What else do you know about him?”
“Not him. Her. A woman named Felicia Kensington. She’s very shady. She’s been on the watch list of New Scotland Yard and Interpol for years now.”
“What for?”
“Buying and selling black-market art. Forgeries and fakes. Stolen antiquities. Her name has come up more than once in cases like this—”
“Murder cases?”
“No, nothing violent. Cases where a valuable piece of art—a painting, a sculpture, a precious document—disappeared, or mysteriously reappeared. Sometimes with fake papers, sometimes with no papers at all. But she’s slippery. Someone else always takes the fall.”
“She’s never been convicted of anything?”
“She’s never even been arrested.”
“Sounds like she’s lucky, or smart, or both,” I said. “What’s your take?”
“My take?” He looked startled, then he frowned. “Isn’t that what you call a corrupt policeman’s bribe—his take?”
“Ah. Not quite.” No wonder he’d looked confused and unhappy. “We do say that a crooked cop is ‘on the take,’ yes. But the money that a cop gets when he’s on the take is called his ‘cut,’ I think. ‘What’s your take?’ means ‘What’s your impression, what’s your intuition?’ So, what’s your take on this shady art dealer, Felicia Kensington—could she have killed Stefan?”
He studied the biggest of the strawberries, then plucked it from the platter and bit off the lower half. “My take is, she’s a morceau de merde—a morsel of shit, you would say?”
I smiled at the translation. “Americans don’t say ‘morsel’ a lot. We tend to say ‘piece’ instead.”
“Okay, she’s a piece of shit,” he said, popping the rest of the strawberry in his mouth. “But I don’t think she’s the killer.”
“Because?”
“Because she’s a woman, for one thing. Women almost never kill. They only kill their husbands or lovers. Well, sometimes their kids, but that’s rare. Besides, this woman has an alibi. She’s been in Cairo for the past two weeks. Probably buying mummies or robbing tombs.”
“Okay, so we can probably rule her out. Who’s suspect number two?”
He crossed himself, then raised his eyebrows expectantly, waiting for some sort of response. I shook my head and shrugged. Looking disappointed that I’d not understood the clue, he said, “The pope.”
“The pope? The pope? As in the Holy Father in Rome? Holy smokes.” The inspector nodded, cheered up by my dramatic reaction. “Well, well. I’ll say this for Stefan—he might have been stupid, but he wasn’t guilty of thinking small, was he? That’s a damn big fish.”
Descartes wagged a finger of clarification. “Not the pope himself, I think. The fax number belongs to the Vatican, though. The Vatican Museum, to be precise.”
“I’ve been to the Vatican Museum,” I said. “Took me six hours to go through it, and I skipped a lot. I’m guessing it’s not a one-man operation. Any idea who Stefan was negotiating with?”
“Not yet. The wheels of the Vatican roll slowly.”
“Gosh, there’s a revelation.” He didn’t seem to get the pun.
“They have two different police forces. The Swiss Guard is there to protect the pope.”
“Like the Secret Service in the U.S.,” I said. “They protect the president.”
“Exactement. The other force is the Vatican police—they do everything else. But neither group will cooperate with me unless someone très important commands it. The Catholic Church has had too many scandals lately. They don’t want bloody hands from a murder.” His lips twitched in an ironic little smile. “En particulier a crucifixion.”
“That wouldn’t look so good,” I agreed. “But do you think it’s possible that someone at the Vatican Museum would want the bones enough to kill for them?”
He shrugged. “I’m no expert. There’s plenty of blood on the hands of the Church. The Crusades. The Inquisition. Sexual abuse and cover-ups. But would the Vatican kill to possess the bones of Christ—or to destroy them? Only God knows.”