The Cassandra Sanction. Scott Mariani

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СКАЧАТЬ her have it,’ Ben said.

      ‘No way she’s getting it back. It’s Catalina’s.’

      ‘You can’t steal it from her. She’s telling the truth. For Christ’s sake, look at her. She’s scared to death.’ Ben held out his hand. Reluctantly, after a beat, Raul dropped the pendant into his palm. Ben returned it to the woman. ‘There. Everything’s fine. Please sit down and finish your tea. We’re leaving.’ He repeated it more loudly for the rest of the room to hear. ‘Okay? No problems here. We’re going now.’ He pulled a few euros from his pocket to pay for their drinks and left them on an empty table as they retreated towards the door. Then they spilled back out into the rainy street and ran for the car before the police arrived.

      ‘This is getting to be a habit since I met you,’ Ben said as he accelerated the Kia up the street.

       Chapter Twelve

      Around the corner, Ben squealed the car sharply into the kerbside and punched the address the woman had given him into the on-board satnav.

      ‘I was right,’ Raul was saying over and over. ‘I was right. Something happened to her.’

      ‘Let’s take this one step at a time, okay?’ Ben said.

      Raul turned to face him with liquid eyes. ‘You see I was right, don’t you?’

      ‘About the diamonds,’ Ben said. ‘That’s all we know for now. Stay calm.’

      ‘How can I stay calm, damn it? A pawnshop. Can’t you see? It proves she was kidnapped. Whoever took her sold the jewels for some quick cash. Bastards!’ Raul punched the dash so hard that he cracked the plastic and left a smear of blood.

      ‘Don’t wreck the car,’ Ben said.

      The address was just a few blocks away. If the woman lived in the area, it increased the chances of her frequenting both the shop and the café. Which meant it wasn’t the impossible coincidence Ben had first thought. How Catalina Fuentes’ pendant had ended up there, and what this turn of events signified, were questions still to be answered.

      As they pulled up outside ten minutes later, Ben could see why a respectable middle-class denizen of Munich might not readily admit to shopping in the place. He’d seen shabbier pawnshops, but he really couldn’t remember when.

      ‘Are you coming in?’ he said to Raul.

      ‘Are you joking with me?’

      ‘Fine. Then try not to beat the guy up, all right? I’ll handle it.’

      A bell tinkled as Ben pushed open the door, and a hanging sign saying GEÖFFNET slapped against the glass. There were no other customers. The pawnshop smelled stuffy inside, and there was so much clutter in the windows that it blocked much of what little light the grey sky was throwing down. Ben wondered if the murky ambiance was also meant to camouflage the crappy quality of most of what was on sale in the place. The usual assortment of golf clubs and hockey sticks and electric guitars and saxophones and exercise machines and dinner sets and racks of clothing and air rifles and a thousand other dingy-looking items traded for ready cash by their former owners stood, hung or were stuffed inside crowded shelves around the walls. A closed office door marked PRIVÄT lay behind the counter, which housed a glass-topped display cabinet that constituted the pawnshop’s jewellery wares not displayed in the window, consisting mainly of watches, along with a few brooches and earrings, bracelets and strings of fake pearls nestling in velvety little presentation boxes.

      Whoever Catalina Fuentes’ ex-boyfriend Austin J. Keller was, Ben thought, he’d have to be pretty seriously rich to be able to afford a bobby dazzler like the spiral galaxy pendant. All the weirder, then, that it should have ended up in a dump like this, sitting among a pile of third-rate trinkets. Either Catalina must have hated the guy so much after they split up that she didn’t give a damn, or else she had to be desperate. Desperation oozed from every crack of this place.

      Ben was gazing at the jewellery when the office door opened and a squat man with a scrappy beard, a flowery shirt and a pronounced leg length discrepancy limped through it.

      Ben decided to skip the preliminaries. ‘Sprechen Sie Englisch?’

      The guy shrugged, like saying, ‘So-so.’

      Switching from German, Ben asked him, ‘Are you the owner?’

      The guy’s eyes narrowed to slits. ‘I am the proprietor. What is this concerning?’

      ‘We’re here to inquire about an item of jewellery you sold about three weeks ago. A pendant made of diamonds, shaped in a spiral, blue at the centre, about so big, with a silver mount. Very distinctive. I think you know the one I mean.’

      The guy made a big deal of trying to remember, but Ben could tell he knew exactly what piece he was talking about. ‘Ja. What about it?’

      ‘We’d like to know who sold it to you.’

      ‘Are you cops?’

      Ben shook his head.

      The guy pulled a face. He probably would have spat on the floor if he hadn’t been in his own premises. ‘Then is none of your fucking business who sold it to me. I do not remember anyway. Now I have business to run. You are not here to buy, the door is that way.’

      Ben nodded. ‘Fine,’ he said. He turned and walked towards the door.

      Raul stared at him. ‘Just like that?’

      Ben said nothing. He reached the door, flipped the open sign around so that it read GESCHLOSSEN, then popped the latch. Then he walked back to the counter and said, ‘Your business is now closed until we say it isn’t. Ist das klar, mein dicker Freund?’

      Three shades paler, the pawnshop owner raised his hands. ‘I want no trouble.’

      ‘That’s good,’ Ben said. ‘Because my associate here has a tendency to get extremely violent when people piss him off. Once he starts, I can’t stop him. The last person who pissed him off, he—’

      ‘Okay, okay.’ The guy glanced nervously at Raul, suddenly all eager to help.

      ‘What’s your name?’ Ben asked.

      ‘Mattias. Mattias Braunschweiger.’

      ‘Okay, Mattias. Now let’s rack our brains and see if we can’t remember who sold us that diamond cluster. I don’t believe pieces like that come your way every week.’

      ‘A woman sold it to me.’

      Raul and Ben exchanged looks.

      ‘Description,’ Ben said.

      ‘Very beautiful woman. Dark. She looked familiar to me. I think afterwards, she is a movie star. Or singer.’

      Ben smiled. The pawnshop had ‘haunt of the rich and famous’ written all over it. ‘Would you remember her face?’

      ‘You would not forget her,’ Braunschweiger said, showing yellow and grey СКАЧАТЬ