The Bernini Bust

by Iain Pears

  'Why do you think it was faked?' he went on.

  'I don't; we don't know. It's a possibility. We don't know where it came from, that's all. It just turned up.'

  'Why don't you ask Hector?'

  'Because he's disappeared.'

  'Is he in trouble?'

  'Potentially. In very deep trouble if the American police ever catch up with him. There's quite a lot of people who want to ask him a question or two.'

  'Dear me. That's the story of Hector's life, I'm afraid.' Borunna paused, evidently considering a series of possibilities. Had Flavia only known what they were, she might have been able to help him make up his mind. He walked over to the mantelpiece and examined a sixteenth-century cherub for a while. The effort seemed to help him reach a decision.

  'Well,' he said. 'I'm afraid I'm not going to be of much help to you. As I say, I haven't seen Hector for years; I'm afraid we had a little argument. Years back. A misunderstanding.'

  'About forgeries?'

  He nodded reluctantly. 'Among other things.' He hesitated, and then hurried on. 'Times were changing. Getting easier. I never really approved. It was necessary, back then, but as soon as it was possible I stopped, and told him he was going to get himself into big trouble if he didn't see sense. Eventually even he and Maria fell out. But Hector - well, he was always a little reckless, and always convinced his charm would see him through. I'm afraid there was some bad blood about it, and we gradually drifted apart.

  'As for your Bernini, he did own one. Very briefly, alas, and it did him no good at all. But I very much doubt that he has sold it recently.'

  Aha, Flavia thought. A brief flicker of light at the end of what had turned out to be a long and dark tunnel. It was a pity that Borunna immediately snuffed the brief glow out again.

  'He lost it, you see,' he went on implacably.

  'Lost it?' she said incredulously. 'How on earth could you lose a Bernini?'

  A stupid question, really. Recent events seemed to demonstrate that it was the easiest thing in the world. The damn things just keep vanishing.

  'Well, lost is not perhaps the best word. I do hope you will keep this to yourself. It was a grave shock for him, and he did his best to forget it . . .'

  Flavia informed him that discretion was her middle name. Reassured, he told the story.

  'It was very simple,' the old man began. 'Hector bought a bust at a house sale; about 1950, or '51, if I remember rightly. He identified it in a job lot of miscellaneous pieces. A priest's family, I think it was. Lovely piece. And sold it to a buyer in Switzerland, who asked him to deliver it.'

  'Smuggle it out, you mean.'

  Borunna nodded. 'I fear so. It was a lot of money, and the risks of being caught were tiny. So he got hold of a car and went. It wasn't his lucky day. The border police were holding a day of spot checks looking for people taking out goods, currency, escaping fascists, and Hector got caught up in the net. They found the bust and discovered Hector could not prove ownership, had no export papers, nothing. For once his charm let him down. They arrested him and impounded the bust until it could be examined by an expert at the Borghese. That happened all the time in those days; so many works of art had gone missing during the war and there was an enormous effort to get everything back to the rightful owners.'

  'And what happened?'

  He shrugged. 'Hector never saw it again, as I say.'

  'But he must have wanted to know what had happened to it.'

  'Of course. He drove everybody crazy. The Borghese confirmed it was genuine, then went very tight-lipped about it. He was convinced they were going to keep it.'

  'They didn't. We know that.'

  Borunna dismissed the comment as though it was of no importance to him. 'Perhaps not. So what do you think happened to it?'

  'We don't know.'

  He nodded thoughtfully at this, then continued. 'Well, Hector didn't get it back, that I do know. It was a great blow; he was so excited to start off with. And, of course, he didn't have enough money to absorb a loss like that. He resented it for some time, because he reckoned he'd bought it fair and square. But there was nothing he could do about it.'

  'Why not? I mean, if it was his . . .'

  'Ah, but was it? I really don't know where he got it from. Perhaps it was at a house sale. Perhaps – well, perhaps it wasn't. But legal or not, a poor foreigner fighting something like the Borghese? He wouldn't have had a chance; if he'd persisted he might have been charged with theft, war looting, who knows what. There was a lot of that going around at the time.

  'You're too young to know anything about that, but Italy after the war was chaotic. Thousands of works of art wandering around the country, and fakes being produced at an extraordinary rate, exploiting the situation. No one knew where anything came from, or where anything had gone. The authorities were doing their best to restore order, and occasionally they were a little harsh, perhaps. Anyway, that was the situation, and Hector got caught in it. I advised him to forget it, and eventually he did. Frankly, he got off very lightly in the circumstances. I'm not sure the buyer was very happy, though. I'm not entirely certain that Hector ever gave him his deposit back.'

  'This was the Swiss man?'

  'He lived in Switzerland.'

  'You can't remember his name, can you?' Flavia asked, for form's sake.

  Borunna looked a bit bemused. 'No, not really. Foreign name. Morgan? Morland?'

  She looked at him, light dawning. 'Moresby?' she suggested hopefully.

  'Could have been. It was a long time ago, you know.'

  Borunna's wife came into the room again, and beamed at Flavia happily as she cleared away the cups. Flavia reminded her, she said, of their own daughter when she was young. Borunna agreed there was a resemblance.

  'And you have no idea at all of the movements of this bust over the past few decades.'

  Borunna looked fondly at his wife as she bustled about, then shook his head. 'I know it went into the Borghese. Hector was certain it never came out again. I'm afraid that's all the help I feel able to offer you.'

  She finished jotting down her notes, then stood up and shook them both by the hand. Come again, they said. Stay for lunch. Perhaps Alceo will persuade you to take one of his statues off our hands next time.

  With a last regretful look at the carvings all over the room, Flavia promised she'd be back, as soon as she had a free moment. Meanwhile, she had a plane to catch.

  Chapter Nine

  Argyll, still confined to his bed, was occupying himself by doing battle with the nurses, having nice shiny new plaster poured over his leg, and plotting how soon he could discharge himself. Not that he was one of these get-up-and-go types who twitch with frustration if they are immobilised; on the contrary, the idea of a few days in bed normally delighted him. But a few days in a non-smoking hospital was a bit much to bear. Morelli had kindly left some cigarettes behind him, but these were rapidly removed by the nurses, all of whom seemed to be equipped with smoke-detectors, and the symptoms of withdrawal were building up.

  On top of that, Argyll reflected, there was a lot going on out there: di Souza was dead, Moresby was dead, someone had tried to murder him, Flavia was on the way. He had heard that she had been ringing Morelli every few hours with anxious enquiries after his health and reports of her alarm did more to make him feel better than all the somewhat brusque ministrations of the nurses, whose bedpan technique was another very good reason for getting out of hospital as soon as possible.

  While Argyll spent the day hopping around evading the enema merchants, Flavia was wedged in great discomfort in seat 44H of an overstuffed 747 heading west.

  She liked her job; she liked the relative smallness of the department, the collegiality which this bred. But the department's status as a sort of investigatory annexe had its problems. And the main one, as far as she was concerned at the moment, was the size of the budget. In particular the inability of expense allowances to allow personnel to travel anything other than steerage cl
ass on aircraft.

  But the flight had some interesting moments. The secret service file on Moresby had come through and, contrary to all regulations, she'd photocopied it before sending it back. As she read, her contempt for the intelligence of Intelligence grew. The file, protected by so many rules and surrounded by the aura of omniscience, was little more than a collection of press cuttings and the occasional jotting, set down at the time that Moresby Industries was competing for a defence electronics contract. The most interesting was a cutting from Who's Who, and the fullest account of Moresby's life a clipping from a New York Times profile. Three hours in a public library and she could have dug up more herself.

  For all its amateur flimsiness, however, the file yielded some intriguing points for her to ponder.

  First of these came from the newspaper account of Moresby's career. Not a self-made man, by any stretch of the imagination, unless you are prepared to be generous and say that inheriting five million dollars from your family counts as being self-made. Something of a playboy in his youth (although from the attached photograph that seemed to be stretching it as well) but interrupted in mid-party by World War Two. Administrative duties in the safety of Kansas, then dispatched to Europe just as the fighting died down.

  There, as the profile said obliquely, he laid the foundations of his career and collection. Reading between the lines, it seemed to Flavia that he was little more than an upmarket speculator, importing scarce goods from the United States and selling them at outrageous prices to Europeans who had to pay anything to get them. So time-consuming was this business that in 1048 he left the army, and spent four years organising his trading networks from Zurich before returning to California. Having spent some years selling radios, toasters, and other electrical goods, he turned to making them as well, before branching out into television, hi-fi, and then on to computers. Moresby Industries effectively stirred into life in a little office in Zurich.

  And Zurich was in Switzerland, and that was where the original buyer of the Bernini was said to be. That confirmed old Borunna's vague recollection very nicely . . .

  Detective Joseph Morelli also spent a day hunched over files of papers, carefully, painstakingly and with much furrowing of the brow going through vast reams of documents that had been accumulating on his desk almost since the moment that he had been called on to investigate Moresby's death.

  Had he ever met Taddeo Bottando, the two men would probably have got along quite nicely. However different their outlook on life – Bottando's idea of a quiet Saturday was to spend it in a museum while Morelli preferred beer and ball games - they shared a similar approach to policing.

  Thoroughness, in a word. No stone unturned. Combined with a joint belief nurtured by years of experience that crime was a pretty shabby business with money generally to be found at the bottom of it all somewhere. The bigger the crime, the more money, so Morelli was looking for a hefty stash of it.

  Like Flavia, he had pulled favours to get his hands on papers, particularly Moresby's tax returns for the past five years. He had also borrowed a large number of files from Thanet's cabinets and persuaded Moresby's factotum, David Barclay, to hand over more.

  Then he set to work, and a dull and painful business it was. He thought his taxes were complicated. The only potentially useful piece of information a couple of hours furrowed brow produced was a note, in Barclay's hand, authorising the release of two million dollars to pay for the bust. That he found curious, in a passing fashion.

  Then innumerable lists of where people were and what they were doing at the critical moment. Thanet, at the party, confirmed by the evidence of the camera. Langton outside having a smoke, also confirmed. Streeter nowhere to be seen but claimed to be in the toilet, seeing to his piles. That had a ring of truth, somehow, but he put a little asterisk by his name anyway. Barclay got a big asterisk, di Souza an asterisk and a question mark. Anne Moresby was in her car going home, confirmed by the chauffeur. Jack Moresby was telephoned at home by Langton about ten minutes after the murder was discovered, and that let him out.

  The confirmation that the pistol found near di Souza matched the bullet in his brain distracted him only briefly; he'd expected that. He'd also expected that it would prove to be the gun that killed Moresby. He did not expect the information that the gun was registered in the name of Anne Moresby. That made him think about her with renewed interest. And he added another asterisk to the name of David Barclay.

  It was a major tribute to American notions of hospitality, the importance of the case and Morelli's inherent helpfulness, despite his worsening dental crisis and resultant hostility to just about everyone, that he was at the airport at one o'clock in the morning to meet Flavia staggering off the plane.

  The past few days had not been pleasant for him, after all. Quite apart from the built-in problems of dealing with a case that was remarkably hard to get at, his attention was constantly distracted by other unfinished cases, the anxious enquiries of supervisors and the silly speculations of newspaper reporters. And his gums were killing him.

  He was working long hours, his wife was starting to protest and, although he was rapidly accumulating masses of pieces of information, until this afternoon he had made little progress in fitting them together. The fact that they were now slotting together made him feel no less tired. And however much he welcomed international co-operation, he could not really see how the arrival of Flavia di Stefano was going to help. She would undoubtedly use up more of his precious time, and contribute little in return.

  On the other hand, as those further up the greasy pole had pointed out, it was something to throw to the press as a way of distracting their attention for a while. The arrival of this woman had already sent the reptiles into paroxysms of speculation. The prospect of a connection with Europe (a place indelibly associated in all right-thinking West Coast minds with deviousness and decadence) was a useful red herring. Mention the word Italy in connection with a crime and by morning half a dozen pundits will be intoning gravely about the Mafia.

  While they chewed on that, and Moresby's possible links with organised crime, Morelli and his comrades could get on quietly with their business.

  He saw her first, wandering around in a daze heading for the enquiries desk. Even at that time in the morning he could feel a touch of envy for Argyll. Being of Italian descent, Morelli still had a patriotic preference for women from the Old Country. Bashed and battered though she was from the flight, she was still pretty beautiful, and the fair dishevelled hair and rumpled clothes somehow made her look more so. Nor, he thought as she wandered in his direction, was she just a pretty face. There was something which gave an impression of sturdy competence.

  'Signorina di Stefano?' he asked as she gave another enormous yawn and rubbed her eyes.

  She looked at him suspiciously, slowly worked out who he was and gave a smile.

  'Detective Morelli,' she replied, thrusting out her hand. 'It's very good of you to meet me here,' she added as he shook it.

  She spoke good English, with a heavy accent that Morelli found so unbearably appealing he could hardly stand listening to it, and gave him an account of the flight as they walked to Morelli's car. Miserable. What else?

  'I've booked you into the same hotel as Argyll. I hope that's OK. It's near the museum, and is pretty comfortable.'

  'I suppose it's too late to go and see Jonathan?' she asked. 'I've spoken to the hospital a couple of times, but I've never got through to him direct.'

  'You'd be wasting your time,' he said, pulling out on to the freeway and heading north. 'He discharged himself this afternoon.'

  'Was that wise?'

  'Not according to the doctors, no. But doctors are like that. I don't suppose it matters really. He apparently said that if he stayed in the hospital he'd die of boredom and he was going home. So he called a taxi and hopped out. I haven't heard from him since.'

  'Oh, dear, and he's so careless.'

  'So it seems. He's only been here five days
and he's nearly been run over, had a major car crash, destroyed a shop, broken his leg and been the cause of a brawl in the hospital. People like that are dangerous to be around. Besides, I wanted to give him protection, until the case is properly wrapped up. But as I don't know where he is . . .'

  'What do you mean, "protection"? What for?'

  'In case someone tries to kill him again.'

  All news to Flavia. Until then, she'd been assuming that Argyll's mishap was one of the inevitable and normal parts of his life-cycle. Morelli's account of loosened brake leads, of the party, of something he must know but couldn't remember, was the first she'd heard of any of it. She was also a little bit irritated by the American's confident explanation of how the noose was, metaphorically speaking, tightening around David Barclay and Anne Moresby. What was the point of her coming all this way if the case was going to be all over in a matter of hours?