The Bernini Bust ja-3

by Iain Pears

  But that was all a long time ago. It didn't look as though Borunna had been raking in a small fortune by forging Berninis for di Souza - his home certainly showed no sign of it. To call it humble was an understatement. It was shabby, with only poor sticks of furniture, but the air of modesty was mitigated by an alluring smell of fresh cooking. And dozens of the most beautiful carvings Flavia had ever seen in her life, scattered around like diamonds in a refuse dump.

  'Maria. A distinguished guest. Coffee, please,' Borunna called as he ushered her through the heavy green door into the cool, dark interior. By the time he had found the papers, his wife had appeared, about ten years younger than her husband, a woman with an oval face, sparkling eyes that were truly lovely, and a manner of open and total welcome. She set down the tray and gave her husband the sort of embrace you normally give to someone you've not seen for years. How sweet, Flavia thought. Decades of marriage and still devoted. There's hope for us all.

  She thanked the woman profusely for the coffee, apologised for disturbing her and declined - with ever growing reluctance - the repeated invitations for lunch.

  This is all yours?' she asked, studying some of the pieces scattered around the room.

  Borunna looked up from a small mountain of papers in his desk. 'Oh, yes. Practice work, mainly. I did them to get the style before I worked on pieces that would be put on display.'

  They're extraordinary.'

  Thank you,' he said with simple, genuine pleasure. 'Please, take one you like. There are dozens, and Maria is always complaining how they collect dust. I'd be happy, and honoured, if you gave one a good home. As long as you always remember how young it really is.

  Flavia was sorely tempted, but eventually shook her head with equal parts vigour and regret. She would have loved to take one or two for her apartment. Indeed, she already could visualise a small polychromatic Saint Francis sitting on her fireplace. But Bottando, a stickler for such matters, would quite rightly have disapproved. On the other hand, if this case was sorted out fast, with Borunna as uninvolved in this affair as she hoped and increasingly expected, she could come back . . .

  'So there you are,' Borunna said when his wife had once more retreated into the aromatic kitchen. 'I knew I'd find it sooner or later. 1952; that was the last time I did any work for him. An arm and a leg. Roman, I think. Perfectly nice but not at all remarkable. It only took me a day or so. Nothing dubious, I assure you; merely patching a few cracks and chips.'

  'You have records going that far back?'

  The old man looked surprised. 'Of course. Doesn't everybody?'

  Being someone who never had the faintest idea how much she had in her bank account, Flavia was frankly astonished.

  'I take it you're looking for something in particular?'

  'That's right. A bust, purportedly by Bernini. Of Pius V, which Hector was apparently connected with in some way.'

  'In what way was this?' There was a sudden caution in his tone, which Flavia instantly noticed. There was something here after all, she thought. The difficulty was going to be getting it out of him.

  'We're not certain,' she said. 'One of several possibilities. He bought it, sold it, stole it, smuggled it or had it made. Any, or all, of the above. We just want to know, that's all. Mere interest, quite apart from the fact that the new owner has been murdered. It crossed my mind that maybe Hector . . .'

  '. . . was up to his old tricks? Is that what you think? That I forged a bust for him?'

  Flavia felt guilty even though Borunna's admissions made him a legitimate suspect. 'Well, that sort of thing. Could you have done it if he'd asked?'

  'Fake a Bernini? Oh, yes. Very simple. Well, not so simple, in fact, but perfectly possible. It's the design that's the thing. Get that right and it's simple. Pius V, you say?'

  She nodded.

  'Of course, you know there's a bronze copy in Copenhagen. So it would mainly be a copying job. Sculpting it would be straightforward, the only difficulty would be getting marble from the right quarry, and ageing it so it didn't look too new. Again, not that difficult.'

  It was curious, she thought later; he took on board the practicality of forging a Bernini with no surprise at all. Very knowledgeable, as well. Not even Alberghi's report in the Borghese had mentioned a bronze copy in Copenhagen.

  '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 t
he 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 class 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 nowhe
re 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.