Giotto's hand

by Iain Pears

  “He took a parcel with him,” she said, gesturing with her hands to indicate something less than half a meter square, then giving up as the effort was too much. “And he didn’t tell me what it was. He said it was a favour for a friend. I knew that was untrue, of course, and, foolish as I was, thought that lovers should have no secrets from each other. So, as the train went north, I opened it up. Just enough to peek inside.

  “It was a painting of Our Lady. I recognized it because I’d seen it regularly in the Palazzo Straga and thought it so pretty. Not that I knew anything about it. Anyway, I sealed it back up again, and eventually Geoffrey went out with it under his arm, and came back without it.”

  “What did he do with it?”

  “I don’t know. We went to this lovely hotel—I felt as though I was really living the high life. I was too much in love to ask questions, or wonder.”

  “And then?”

  “Then we came back to Florence, and a week or so later I told Geoffrey I was pregnant.”

  “I gather he wasn’t overjoyed?”

  She shook her head. “It was terrible,” she said. “He ranted and raved. Then he denied that it had anything to do with him. Called me all sorts of names and told me to go away. My employers heard about it and I was fired. If it hadn’t been for the kindness of one of the girls there, I don’t know what I would have done.”

  Flavia considered the story. It all fitted quite nicely; the Uccello stolen from the Palazzo had been a Madonna. It had been assumed that it had been spirited out of the country, and it had all taken place around this time. One or two details, however…

  “Tell me, what made you think it was stolen?”

  She looked puzzled for a moment, then her forehead cleared. “When I got back. Everybody knew,” she said. “All the girls at the school at various times visited the Palazzo. When it was broken into, everyone knew very quickly. I found out when I got back from Switzerland. There had been a ball at the Palazzo, you see. The signora always got her pupils invited every year. He must have taken it then.”

  “And you said nothing? You didn’t feel like getting your revenge on this man?”

  She managed an ironic and derisive look. “And that is what they would have assumed I was doing, wouldn’t they? Who would have believed me? I couldn’t say who had the picture, because I didn’t know. And I was terrified that I would be locked up as well. It would have been just like him, to do that to me. To say I was a conspirator.”

  “And did you ever see this Forster again?”

  “I left, and came to Rome to get another job. I had my baby and sent him to relations in America. It wasn’t easy, you know. Not like nowadays.”

  A touch inconsequential, this, but she seemed to be heading in the general direction of saying something, so Flavia again sat there and waited.

  “So now you write to us. Why, might I ask?”

  Signora Fancelli gestured at her wasted frame, as though that was answer enough. “The priest,” she said. “Father Michele said it might make me feel better. It does.”

  “Very well, then. We will, of course, have to check your story thoroughly. And you will have to make a statement.”

  “And will there be any trouble?”

  Flavia shook her head. “Good heavens, no. Unless you’ve made this up and have been wasting my time…”

  “For him, I mean. For Forster,” she said with a sudden hatred that Flavia found almost shocking.

  “We will investigate your statement fully. That’s all I can say. Now, perhaps we can get this down on paper…”

  “Geoffrey Arnold Forster,” Flavia told Bottando when she got back to the office, dumped her bag and was swept off to a small restaurant to discuss the matter over lunch, “was born in England on 23rd May 1938, so he’s fifty-six. Brown eyes, height about one metre eighty-five.”

  Bottando lifted a sceptical eyebrow. “You mean to tell me that she could remember all that after more than thirty years? Remarkable lady.”

  “That’s what I thought. However, it makes some sort of sense. She knew she’d have to fill out a birth certificate when the child was born, and she didn’t want the space under ‘father’ to remain blank. So she copied down the details from his passport before the row broke out between them.”

  “She must have suspected he was going to put up a fight, then,” Bottando said as he stirred sugar into his coffee and then sipped at the thick syrupy mixture that made life worthwhile.

  Flavia shrugged. “It seems a reasonable precaution to me. She was poor, uneducated, pregnant and nearly ten years older than him. Anyway, that is how we have such detail. The question is, what do we do with it? Going to Parioli for a thirty-year-old crime is one thing. Going all the way to England and involving all sorts of international requests is quite another. Quite apart from the possibility that the man could even be dead.”

  Bottando thought it over, then nodded. “No. You’re right. It’s a waste of time. Too much trouble. If it was easy to find out who Forster was, then we might go through the motions, I suppose. But as the chances of actually recovering the picture are zero, there doesn’t really seem much point.”

  “I’ll check through the beastie book to see if Forster’s a regular customer. Just to be on the safe side.”

  The General nodded. “Yes. And I suppose a modest report just to tidy things away. Mark it not to be followed up. Did you get a proper statement?”

  “Yes. She was too frail to come in herself, so I took it all down and got her to sign it. She’s going out fast, poor old thing. Although she’s still incredibly bitter about Forster. She reckons he destroyed her life, and she’s never forgiven him.”

  “If she’s telling the truth, then she’s probably right.”

  “Tell you what,” she went on, a thought passing through her mind. “Jonathan’s going off to England tomorrow. I could get him to ask around. Just to see if anyone’s ever heard of this man. And while he’s doing that, I could go and see if this woman’s story checks out in Florence. If there’s anybody at all left alive to tell me.”

  Bottando thought about it, then shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not worth it. A waste of time.”

  “Oh,” she said, slightly disappointed. “All right. If you say so. But talking of time wasting,” she said as the bill came, “how’s friend Argan?”

  Bottando frowned. “Don’t try and manipulate me by bringing him into it. This has got nothing to do with him.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Besides, he’s being awfully nice—at the moment.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Yes. He’s in his office and hasn’t stuck his nose in anything all day. Sweet as pie.”

  “So you’ve decided he’s OK?”

  “Certainly not. I’ve decided he’s up to something. So I don’t want to make a false move until I discover what it is.”

  “I see.”

  “So if you have an opportunity to find out what’s putting him in a good mood…”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  3

  Argyll’s reintroduction to his native country the following day took the form of a valiant battle with the antique state of the London underground system. He was in a bad mood, and had been ever since he’d arrived at the passport section at Heathrow airport to discover that most of the globe had touched down a few minutes ahead of him. Then it took an age to recover his luggage and, on top of that, the tube trains into London were all delayed by what a scratchy announcer said, with not the slightest apology in his voice, were technical problems. “Welcome to England. You are now entering the third world,” he muttered to himself half an hour later as he hung desperately from an overhead support in the train which rattled and squeaked out of the station, so crammed full of jet-lagged travellers it was difficult to see how anyone else could possibly squeeze in. But they did at the next station, only to have the thing stop dead for fifteen minutes a few hundred yards down the tunnel.

  About an hour later he em
erged at Piccadilly Circus, feeling like Livingstone after cutting his way through a particularly dense piece of jungle, and went into a cafe to restore himself.

  Mistake, he realized the moment the coffee was delivered; a grey, weak solution with a smell which, whatever it was, had nothing to do with coffee. Dear God, he thought when he discovered that it tasted as bad as it looked, what’s happening to this country of mine?

  He gave up after a while and wandered back out into the street, walked down Piccadilly then turned up into Bond Street. A few hundred yards up was his destination. He shivered. Moving from Rome to England in July can be something of a shock to the system: the skies were dark grey and leaden, he was under-dressed and had forgotten to bring an umbrella. He had a feeling already that he was merely wasting time and money for no other reason than to sidestep decision-making for a few days.

  “Jonathan, dear boy. Good trip?” Edward Byrnes said as Argyll walked into the empty gallery and found his former employer carrying what looked like a painting by Pannini from one side of the room to another.

  “No,” he said.

  “Oh.” Byrnes put the painting down, looked at it for a few seconds, then called an assistant from the back and told him to hang it just there while he was out. “No matter,” he went on when this was done. “Let’s go straight out for lunch. That might restore your flagging spirits a bit.”

  There was that to be said about the trip. Byrnes had always been something of a bon viveur, and liked a good lunch. At the very least, Argyll was going to spend the rest of the day feeling well fed. Byrnes led the way out of the gallery door, leaving his minion in charge of the Pannini and with strict instructions about what to do in the unlikely event of a client coming in, then walked at a brisk pace into increasingly narrow streets then, finally, down a set of shabby steps into a basement.

  “Nice, don’t you think?” Byrnes said complacently as they emerged into what was presumably a restaurant at the bottom.

  “Where are we?”

  “Ah, it’s a dining club. Set up by a group of art dealers who were getting fed up with the vastly inflated prices that all restaurants charge round here. The sort of place you can bring the more potentially lucrative client without having to double the price of their purchase to pay for their entertainment. Marvellous idea. We get good food and wine, partly own a new business and have somewhere civilized to sit. Splendid, eh?”

  For his part, Argyll preferred not to have to associate too closely with colleagues all the time; the idea of having to eat with them, as well as attend auctions with them, didn’t strike him as such a good idea. On the other hand, he could see the attractions for an incorrigible gossip like Byrnes. The idea of having a large chunk of the art market under his eye at the same time as a plate of food lay on his table was, probably, as close to paradise as he could envisage.

  “Come, dear boy,” he said with mounting enthusiasm as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, “I’m starving.”

  They sat down, ordered drinks and Byrnes beamed at him for a few seconds before curiosity got the better of him and his gaze wandered off to survey the surrounding tables.

  “Hmm,” he said meditatively as he spotted a smooth, moon-faced young man attentively pouring a glass of wine for an elderly lady with an elongated nose.

  “Ah,” he continued, moving on to a group of three men, their heads conspiratorially close together.

  “Well, well,” he mused thoughtfully at the sight of another pair, one wearing a fine piece of Italian tailoring for the well-to-do male, the other in slacks and sports jacket.

  “Are you going to fill me in on any of this? Or just keep it to yourself?” Argyll asked in a tone that just avoided a slight touch of pique.

  “I am sorry, I thought you didn’t approve of gossip.”

  “I don’t,” Argyll replied. “That doesn’t mean I don’t like to hear it, though. Come on. A few names and faces. That foppish character over there? The one talking to the old witch in the comer?”

  “Ah, that’s young Wilson. Keen as mustard and the IQ of a sunflower seed. Thinks that charm will get him anywhere. If that is his latest client, I imagine he will shortly be learning the lesson of his life.”

  “What about the three musketeers in the comer?”

  “I know two of them,” Byrnes said, treasuring the sight with all the appreciation of a true connoisseur. “One is Sebastian Bradley, a man of high ambition and limited morals who has worked hard in the last few years to relieve Eastern Europe of its most precious treasures.”

  “Legally?”

  “Shouldn’t think so for a minute. The person next to him is called Dimitri. I don’t know his other name but he supplies Sebastian with works of art—paintings, furniture, statuary, just about anything as long as it’s fallen off the back of a lorry. His ethereal friend I don’t know.”

  “Nor do I.”

  Byrnes sighed. “You really don’t pull your weight, you know.”

  “Sorry. What about the other pair? The smoothy talking to the shaven-headed gent by the pillar?”

  “Jonathan, really. I sometimes despair of you. The smoothy—I admire your perception, by the way—is the appalling Winterton, who, as he would be the first to tell you, is the most famous and distinguished dealer in the world. If not the known universe.”

  “Oh,” said Argyll humbly. He had heard of Winterton: Byrnes’s only serious rival for the title of the best-connected dealer in London. Naturally, they disliked each other intensely.

  “And the other one is Andrew Wallace, chief buyer for…”

  “Oh, yes. I know. I wonder if he wants a Guido Reni sketch I bought six months back…”

  “Oh, I don’t think you’d want to sell anything to him, you know. It’s really not worth it. Just kill yourself; it’s pleasanter and cheaper in the long run.”

  Conversation ceased awhile as they studied the menu and Byrnes got over the shock of having to dine in the same room as Winterton. Then he recovered himself and beamed at Argyll once more. “Now then, how’s business?” he asked.

  Argyll shrugged. “All right, I suppose,” he said grudgingly. “The Moresby Museum still sends my monthly retainer for services I rarely provide, and that pays the bills. And I’ve sold some drawings recently for a reasonable amount. But that’s it. The rest of the time I hang around listening to the clock tick. I’m getting really sick of it.”

  They sighed in sympathetic unison. “I know. I know,” Byrnes said nostalgically. “Ah, the glory days of the 1980s. When greed, selfishness and vulgar ostentation swept all before them. The Holy Trinity of the Fine Arts. When will these underrated virtues ever return, eh?”

  They mournfully considered the sudden outbreak of frugality in the world and tutted over the retrograde and inconsiderate desire of people to live within their incomes. A lengthy complaint by Byrnes about his virtual bankruptcy ended with his recommending the foie gras with truffles to start. Quite acceptable, he said. For the time of year.

  “So,” Byrnes went on, when he noticed that Argyll’s glumness was more than his habitual tendency to professional pessimism. “What can I do for you?”

  “You can give me advice, if you want. I’m not selling anything, and I’ve got this job offer. If you were me, what would you do? I can’t sit around for the rest of my life hoping something will turn up.”

  “Ah, no. Indeed not,” the older man said. “It can be very depressing if you hit a slow patch. I speak from experience. Especially if you don’t have much in the way of reserves. What you need is a backer, of course. Either that or a magnificent discovery of unparalleled importance. A hundred thousand or so would set you up nicely.”

  Argyll snorted. “Both discoveries and backers are even rarer than customers at the moment. Besides, I don’t have much of a track record. Why would anyone think that investing in me would be a good bet?”

  “Now, now,” Byrnes said reassuringly. “Gloom is one thing, despair another. You’ve sold one or two very nice things.”
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  “One or two, yes,” said the unrepentantly pessimistic Argyll. For some reason, talking to the vastly successful Byrnes was not yet making him feel much better. “One or two is not a career, though.”

  “What do you want, exactly?”

  “I want to sell paintings. There’s not much point being a dealer otherwise. That’s about it. I mean, I don’t particularly want to make untold millions or anything like that. But I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

  “You’re not doing anything wrong,” Byrnes said kindly. “No one is selling anything at the moment. Not for a profit, anyway. Of course, that may be the trouble.”

  “What?”

  “Not doing anything wrong. Honesty is a great virtue normally, but a bit of a handicap in the art trade. And I do think that sometimes you take the upright posture too far. Remember that Chardin?”

  Byrnes was referring to a small painting that Argyll had bought in a sale a year or so previously. He thought, but wasn’t sure, that it was a Chardin, and persuaded a buyer to take it for a considerable amount of money. The following week he had discovered it was not by Chardin at all, and had been painted by someone very much less reputable.

  “It was a clean, honest deal,” Byrnes said disapprovingly. “And you went straight round, presented the man with the evidence that he would never have found for himself, proved it wasn’t by Chardin and took it back, giving a full refund. Now, frankly, I admire your integrity. But not your acumen.”

  But I thought it was a good idea,” Argyll protested. “He was an important collector and I was building up his trust. He would have bought more from me…”

  “Had he not himself been arrested for corruption and links with organized crime three weeks later,” Byrnes pointed out gravely. “You were being scrupulous with his money. Splendid. Except for the tiny little fact that it wasn’t his money to start off with.”

  “I know, I know,” Argyll said glumly. “But I just don’t like that part of the business,” he confessed. “I know I should shave as many comers as possible. But when an opportunity to be cunning or a bit sharp presents itself, my conscience mans the barricades. And there’s no point your telling me all this. You’re exactly the same yourself.”