False Impression Read online

  When Anna passed the Tavern on the Green, she once again checked her watch. She would need to pick up her pace if she still hoped to be back at Artisans’ Gate in under twelve minutes. As she sprinted down the hill, she reflected on the fact that she shouldn’t allow her personal feelings for a client to cloud her judgment, but frankly Victoria needed all the help she could get. When Anna passed through Artisans’ Gate, she pressed the stop button on her watch: twelve minutes and four seconds. Damn.

  Anna jogged slowly off in the direction of her apartment, unaware that she was being closely watched by the man in the emerald green T-shirt.

  6

  JACK DELANEY STILL wasn’t sure if Anna Petrescu was a criminal.

  The FBI agent watched her as she disappeared into the crowd on her way back to Thornton House. Once she was out of sight, Jack resumed jogging through Sheep Meadow toward the lake. He thought about the woman he’d been investigating for the past six weeks, an inquiry that was hampered by the fact that he didn’t need Anna to find out that the Bureau was also investigating her boss, who Jack had no doubt was a criminal.

  It was nearly a year since Richard W. Macy, Jack’s supervising special agent, had called him into his office and allocated him a team of eight agents to cover a new assignment. Jack was to investigate three vicious murders on three different continents that had one thing in common: each of the victims had been killed at a time when they also had large outstanding loans with Fenston Finance. Jack quickly concluded that the murders had been planned and were the work of a professional killer.

  Jack cut through Shakespeare Garden as he headed back toward his small apartment on the West Side. He had just about completed his file on Fenston’s most recent recruit, although he still couldn’t make up his mind if she was a willing accomplice or a naïve innocent.

  Jack had begun with Anna’s upbringing and discovered that her uncle, George Petrescu, had emigrated from Romania in 1972 to settle in Danville, Illinois. Within weeks of Ceauşescu appointing himself president, George had written to his brother imploring him to join him in America. When Ceauşescu declared Romania a socialist republic and made his wife, Elena, his deputy, George wrote to his brother renewing his invitation, which included his young niece, Anna.

  Although Anna’s parents refused to leave their homeland, they did allow their seventeen-year-old daughter to be smuggled out of Bucharest in 1987 and shipped off to America to stay with her uncle, promising her that she could return the moment Ceauşescu had been overthrown. Anna never returned. She wrote home regularly, begging her mother to join them in the States, but she rarely received a response. Two years later she learned that her father had been killed in a border skirmish while attempting to oust the dictator. Her mother also repeated that she would never leave her native land, her excuse now being, “Who would tend to your father’s grave?”

  That much, one of Jack’s squad members had been able to discover from an essay Anna had written for her high school magazine. One of her classmates had also written about the gentle girl with long fair plaits and blue eyes who came from somewhere called Bucharest and knew so few words of English that she couldn’t even recite the Pledge of Allegiance at morning assembly. By the end of her second year, Anna was editing the magazine, from which Jack had gathered so much of his information.

  From high school, Anna won a scholarship to Williams University in Massachusetts to study art history. A local newspaper recorded that she also won the intervarsity mile against Cornell in a time of four minutes forty-eight seconds. Jack followed Anna’s progress to the University of Pennsylvania, where she continued her studies for a Ph.D., her chosen thesis subject the Fauve Movement. Jack had to look up the word in Webster’s. It referred to a group of artists led by Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck who wished to break away from the influence of Impressionism and move toward the use of bright and dissonant color. He also learned how the young Picasso had left Spain to join the group in Paris, where he shocked the public with paintings that Paris Match described as “of no lasting importance”; “sanity will return,” they assured their readers. It only made Jack want to read more about Vuillard, Luce, and Camois—artists he’d never heard of. But that would have to wait for an off-duty moment, unless it became evidence that would nail Fenston.

  After Penn, Dr. Petrescu joined Sotheby’s as a graduate trainee. Here Jack’s information became somewhat sketchy, as he could allow his agents only limited contact with Anna’s former colleagues. However, he did learn of her photographic memory, her rigorous scholarship, and the fact that she was liked by everyone from the porters to the chairman. But no one would discuss in detail what “under a cloud” meant, although he did discover that she would not be welcome back at Sotheby’s under the present management. And Jack couldn’t fathom out why, despite her dismissal, she considered joining Fenston Finance. For that part of his inquiry, he had to rely on speculation, because he couldn’t risk approaching anyone she worked with at the bank, although it was clear that Tina Forster, the chairman’s secretary, had become a close friend.

  In the short time Anna had worked at Fenston Finance, she had visited several new clients who had recently taken out large loans, all of whom were in possession of major art collections. Jack feared that it could only be a matter of time before one of them suffered the same fate as Fenston’s three previous victims.

  Jack ran onto West Eighty-sixth Street. Three questions still needed answering. One, how long had Fenston known Petrescu before she joined the bank? Two, had they, or their families, known each other in Romania? And three, was she the hired assassin?

  Fenston scrawled his signature across the breakfast bill, rose from his place, and, without waiting for Leapman to finish his coffee, marched out of the restaurant. He stepped into an open elevator, but waited for Leapman to press the button for the eighty-third floor. A group of Japanese men in dark blue suits and plain silk ties joined them, having also had breakfast at Windows on the World. Fenston never discussed business matters while in an elevator, well aware that several of his rivals occupied the floors above and below him.

  When the elevator opened on the eighty-third floor, Leapman followed his master out, but then turned the other way and headed straight for Petrescu’s office. He opened her door without knocking to find Anna’s assistant, Rebecca, preparing the files Anna would need for her meeting with the chairman. Leapman barked out a set of instructions that didn’t invite questions. Rebecca immediately placed the files on Anna’s desk and went in search of a large cardboard box.

  Leapman walked back down the corridor and joined the chairman in his office. They began to go over tactics for their showdown with Petrescu. Although they had been through the same procedure three times in the past eight years, Leapman warned the chairman that it could be different this time.

  “What do you mean?” demanded Fenston.

  “I don’t think Petrescu will leave without putting up a fight,” he said. “After all, she isn’t going to find it easy to get another job.”

  “She certainly won’t if I have anything to do with it,” said Fenston, rubbing his hands.

  “But perhaps in the circumstances, Chairman, it might be wise if I—”

  A knock on the door interrupted their exchange. Fenston looked up to see Barry Steadman, the bank’s head of security, standing in the doorway.

  “Sorry to bother you, Chairman, but there’s a FedEx courier out here, says he has a package for you and no one else can sign for it.”

  Fenston waved the courier in and, without a word, penned his signature in the little oblong box opposite his name. Leapman looked on, but neither of them spoke until the courier had departed and Barry had closed the door behind him.

  “Is that what I think it is?” asked Leapman quietly.

  “We’re about to find out,” said Fenston, as he ripped open the package and emptied its contents onto the desk.

  They both stared down at Victoria Wentworth’s left ear.

  “See t