The Geneva Deception by James Twining Page A

by a red-and-white keffiyeh purchased during an exchange posting to Jordan. His dusty office was full of such mementoes - photographs of him at various digs over the decades, framed maps and faded prints, prayer beads and inlaid boxes picked up in dusty Middle-Eastern souks, fragments of inscribed Roman tablets, shards of Etruscan pottery, carved remnants of Greek statues. At times it seemed to Allegra that his entire life was held in this small room, each piece invested with aparticular meaning or memory that he only had to glance at or hold to live all over again.
    And yet this primitive mental filing system was as chaotic as it was effective, pictures hanging askew, books stacked any which way on the shelves with dirty cups and glasses squeezed into the gaps, the floor covered in a confetti trail of newspaper cuttings and half-read books left facedown, alongside a stack of index cards inscribed with notes for a forthcoming lecture. And while a favoured few of his artefacts had been placed in a glass display cabinet, the rest were scattered indiscriminately around the room, some squeezed on to his desk and the marble mantelpiece, others lining the edges of the bookshelves like paratroopers waiting for the order to jump.
    Despite his cheerfulness on the intercom, Aurelio now seemed to have sunk into what Allegra could only describe as a sulk, his bottom lip jutting out, brows furrowed. Funny, she thought, how old age seemed to have given him an almost childlike ability to flit between moods on a whim.
    ‘Maybe you shouldn’t come any more,’ he sighed. ‘Spend time with your real friends, instead, people your own age.’
    ‘Don’t start that again,’ she sighed. ‘I’ve told you, I’m too busy to have any friends. Besides, I like old things.’ She winked. ‘They smell more interesting.’
    Approaching seventy, Aurelio had no family left now, apart from a distant cousin who only seemed to show up when he needed a handout. As they had got to know each other, therefore, Allegra had taken it upon herself to look in on him whenever she knew she would be in the area. And sometimes, like today, when she knew she wouldn’t.
    ‘But you said you’d be here for lunch,’ he continued in a hurt tone, although she could sense that her reply had pleased him. ‘You’re late.’
    ‘And whose fault is that?’
    He grinned, his sulk vanishing as quickly as she suspected it had appeared. He had a kindly face, with large light brown eyes, a beaked nose and leathered skin that spoke of too many long summers spent hunched over an excavation trench. He was dressed in an open-necked shirt and a yellow silk cravat, another hangover from his Oxford days. As ever, he was wearing a motheaten grey cardigan for warmth, his refusal to pay the ‘ extortionate’ prices demanded by ‘ piratical ’ energy companies condemning his apartment to a Siberian permafrost for at least three months of the year.
    ‘So they did call you?’ he crowed.
    ‘I knew it!’ she remonstrated angrily. ‘Who did you speak to? What did you tell them?’
    ‘The GICO wanted an antiquities expert. They called the university. The university put them onto me. I told them I’d retired and recommended you instead.’
    ‘Did they tell you what they wanted?’
    ‘Of course not. It’s the GICO. They never tell you anything.’ He paused, suddenly concerned. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’
    With a deep breath, Allegra recounted the events of the past twenty-three hours. The inverted crucifixion at the site of Julius Caesar’s assassination. The carefully staged beheading in the Pantheon. The apparent link to two Caravaggio masterpieces. Aurelio listened intently, shaking his head at some of the more gruesome details, but otherwise remaining silent until she had finished.
    ‘So the man they found in the Pantheon…?’
    ‘Was Annibale Argento’s twin brother, Gio.’
    ‘ Merda ,’ he swore, for what could well have been the first time since she’d