Read Online Street of the Five Moons by Elizabeth Peters - Free Book Online

terrace so thickly planted with shrubs and flowers that it looked like a descendant of one of the Hanging Gardens. The Persian carpet on the floor was fifty feet long by twenty-five wide — a glorious, time-faded blend of cream and salmon, aquamarine and topaz. The desk should have been in the museum downstairs, and the paintings on the walls were the greatest of the great masters.
    But the woman didn’t need that setting. She would have been impressive in a soup kitchen. Her black hair surely owed something to art, for the lines in her face betrayed the decades — at least four of them, if I was any judge. She had one of those splendid profiles you see on Roman coins, and I got a good look at it, because her head was turned sideways when I came in. She was looking out the window.
    The secretary’s discreet murmur made several things clearer. It was loaded with long, hissing feminine endings. “Principessa, Direttoressa….” and then the name. What else? The last of the Concinis was still hanging on in the family mansion.
    She meant to make me feel like a great overgrown clod from some barbarian country, and she succeeded. I went clumping across the floor — my feet looked and sounded like size fourteens — hating that Roman profile more every second. I reached the desk and looked in vain for a chair. She gave me thirty seconds — I counted them to myself — and then turned, very slowly. A faint smile curved her full lips. It was a closed smile, with no teeth showing, and I was reminded of the enigmatic smiles of early Greek and Etruscan statues — an expression that some critics find more sinister than gracious.
    “Doctor Bliss? It is a pleasure to welcome a young colleague. Your superior, Herr Professor Schmidt, is an old acquaintance. I hope he is well?”
    “Crazy as ever,” I said.
    I hate being tall. I had a feeling she knew that, and was deliberately forcing me to stand and tower over her. So I looked around for a chair. I spotted a delicate eighteenth-century example, with priceless needlepoint on the seat, yanked it into position beside the desk, and sat down.
    She stared at me for a moment. Then her lips parted and she laughed. It was a charming laugh, low pitched like her speaking voice, but vibrant with genuine amusement.
    “It is a pleasure,” she repeated. “You are correct; Professor Schmidt is crazy, that is why he endears himself to his friends. May I serve you in any way, my dear, or is this purely a social call?”
    I was disarmed, I admit. She had accepted my response to her challenge like a lady.
    “I wouldn’t take up your time with a purely social call, pleasant though it is,” I said. “I have a rather peculiar story to tell you, Principessa—”
    “But we are colleagues — you must call me Bianca. And you are…?”
    “Vicky. Thank you…. This is going to sound as crazy as Professor Schmidt, Prin — Bianca. But it’s the honest truth.”
    I told her the whole story — almost the whole story. She listened intently, her chin propped on one slender ringed hand, her black eyes never leaving my face. The eyes began to sparkle before I had gotten well under way, and when I had finished, her lips were twitching with amusement.
    “My dear,” she began.
    “I said it would sound crazy.”
    “It does. If your credentials were not so excellent…. But I know Professor Schmidt; I know his weakness. Confess, Vicky, is this not a story that is just to his taste?”
    I laughed ruefully. “Yes, it is. But—”
    “What real evidence have you, after all? A dead man — but dead of natural causes, you said — with a copy of one of your museum pieces. Have you any proof that criminal acts were intended? Forgive me, but it seems to me that you and Professor Schmidt have postulated a plot on very slim evidence.”
    “That might have been true two days ago,” I said. “But what about the antique shop on the Via delle Cinque Lune?”
    “A sketch, however detailed, is not evidence, my