The Medici Conspiracy by Peter Watson Read Free Book Online

police.
    Conforti now saw his chance—an opportunity that might never come again. Within an hour his men had contacted a magistrate in Santa Maria di Capua Vetere and obtained a search warrant, in Italian a decreto di perquisizione , which entitled them to raid and search Camera’s apartment in Rome.
    Naples to Rome is normally a two-hour drive. That night, owing to traffic, they didn’t reach Camera’s apartment in the San Lorenzo district in northeast Rome until 9:00 PM. They had stopped to pick up the equipment that would enable them to break down the front door. In the event, however, a neighbor saw them as they huddled around the entrance, and when he understood who they were, he offered a key to the apartment. Even so, under Italian law the Carabinieri weren’t allowed to search the premises until a relative had been contacted and given the chance to be present. The helpful neighbor had the phone number for Camera’s mother in Naples.
    It was an awkward call to make: Only hours after her son had been killed, the police were asking the old woman to be a witness, in a search of her dead son’s apartment. Camera’s brother-in-law agreed to drive up from Naples, and only after he had arrived could the search go ahead. It was by then after 11:00 PM.
    It was a big apartment, located between the Piazza Bologna and La Sapienza, Rome’s oldest university, an area with a mix of old and new buildings. The apartment, in a relatively new building, had a squareshaped sitting room, a large study leading off it, and a balcony running along the south side that looked down on streets crowded with students. Any one of the Carabinieri would have given his eyeteeth to be able to
afford such an apartment. The furniture was a little on the flamboyant side, with the decoration—wallpaper, curtains, lampshades—in pastel shades. Beyond that, however, the contents of the second-floor apartment were incredibly untidy—papers were strewn all over, uneaten food was turning moldy, dirty laundry appeared to have been dropped anywhere. Eight men took part in the raid, and their first aim was to put order into the chaos. There were hundreds of photographs, Polaroids mainly, and pages and pages of documentation, together with scores of antiquities, some of which were genuine but many of which were obviously fake.
    The investigators spent a few hours that night sifting through the contents of the apartment and then sealed the door. They called Conforti, who was at home but still awake. He is one of those people who needs little sleep, and they knew he would be anxious for news.
    Over the next few days, as they assessed the material they had seized, they made a number of discoveries. First, they found phone bills for five different cell phones. These bills showed that they were all registered in the name of a certain Wanda d’Agata. Second, utility bills and mortgage payments further showed that the apartment was also registered in the same name, Wanda d’Agata. It didn’t take the investigators long to deduce that Wanda was a convenient “front” for Camera. As he moved around, buying and selling looted or stolen antiquities, he and his contacts used only the cell phones registered to her. All that ever showed up on the official records, therefore, was that Wanda was calling herself. This is why Camera didn’t appear to be using his own phone very much—he was using one of Wanda’s. The apartment was in her name to keep him off the radar of all official bodies. This was a highly suspicious—and highly effective—modus operandi.
    What really pushed the investigation forward and confirmed Camera’s importance and involvement in trafficking antiquities were the photographs of the archaeological objects that had been found in the glove compartment of his Renault. They arrived at the investigator’s offices a day after the raid on the Rome apartment. There were