All those years of black bag work for CIA and the final place I ever hit was also the nicest, even if I didn’t ever confirm the rumoured Vermeer. That job was a villa outside Rome, and it was really more of a palace. The analyst’s report had hinted at the Vermeer, but a man like that might have a half dozen safes littered around the house, not to mention vaults in a few freeports around the globe, so he had plenty of other places to stash his art. The safe we were after was in his office, so admittedly I only stole a few brief peeks at the living quarters. That was fine. We weren’t there for the art.
Forgive the cliché, but what I saw made me think of the old-school popes, the ones with girlfriends. The ceiling was covered in gold leaf; there were two marble statues of horses, each maybe 10 feet tall; there were piddling fountains with little cherubs doing their eternal piss; the air smelled like oranges and lavender and there were tracks of vineyard visible out the massive windows, rolling downslope into a valley. You could’ve fit a few basketball courts in that single vaulted room. No Vermeer, but there was art everywhere, and it was mostly Old Masters. I said that to Benson in the van after the job, and he just laughed, like how would I know. But Cath is an art freak so I knew.
Not a stretch to say that Benson and I went out in style. I mean, by that point we’d been breaking into filthy rich guys’ houses and offices for 18 years and I’d never seen one that looked like that palace in Rome. A lot of rich guys are cheap, plenty don’t have any class or taste, and I suppose some just don’t like to advertise what they got. Job before Rome was in Jeddah. Eighth-richest guy in Saudi, they said, and his cracked leather couches could have been yanked from a frat house. If we’d used the black light on them, well, you can imagine. But Rome? That was a first cabin place.