The Immaculate Deception ja-7

by Iain Pears

  Alas, Sabbatini was not prone to play his music loudly at two in the morning; did not trade drugs in the corridors; did not leave his rubbish out on the wrong days; did nothing, in fact, to suggest he was anything other than a quiet, respectful member of the Roman haute bourgeoisie.

  And that was exactly what he was. Flavia discovered his dark secret after five fruitless interviews, conscious all the while that nearly all the information she needed was almost certainly in the complete dossiers she had not yet been sent. Interviewee number six had a grudge of epic dimensions: the communal garage.

  Far more than politics and religion, even more than noise and dirt and indecent behavior, laying claim to someone else's parking space is just the sort of thing to let the passions rip. And Sabbatini and Alessandra Marchese had, it seemed, been locked into such a struggle for more than six months. Every time he saw it free he parked his car in her space, even though he knew it was hers; even though his was free. He did it deliberately, she said, the outrage visibly rising in her face, her hands beginning to quiver with fury. It was appalling. She had complained to the building's management but they, of course, were hopeless. Just because he was well connected, they behaved like mice . . .

  Flavia nodded sympathetically. The woman was detestably self-righteous and self-important, but a perfect treasure trove. "Perhaps you would tell me more . . . ?" she murmured.

  Half an hour later she had it all. Some details no doubt exaggerated, some even invented, but a portrait of the man in the sort of detail only pure bile could generate.

  Signora Marchese noticed him in a way neighbors do not ordinarily pay attention to those who live around them. Indeed, every time she saw him, heard him, or even smelled his cologne in the elevator, she froze, and could think of nothing else for hours afterward.

  She appeared to have spent much of her time shopping, so could not provide a perfect record, of course, but did remarkably well. Stripping out the rancor, Flavia emerged with a picture of a man who, apart from his penchant for vats of plaster and other people's parking spaces, lived a remarkably quiet, unflamboyant life He did little, it seemed, rising late and apparently not working Signora Marchese, who lived a similar existence, did not find thií odd; Flavia wondered where the money came from. When asked the signora shrugged and said, "Family." The universal explanation, which explained nothing.

  He had few friends, few callers; no girlfriends, not even any boyfriends. He'd been away for over a week, although last Wednesday somebody—presumably he—had been in the apartment. She'd heard bumping and scraping as though someone had been rearranging the furniture. If he was an artist—and the signora seemed shocked by the idea, as if she had suspected him of terrible sins but not ones of that magnitude—then he did whatever he did somewhere else. All in all, the very model of a perfectly respectable member of the idle rich, whiling away his time, dabbling in this or that, spending lavishly on whatever took his fancy and doing no harm to anyone. But.

  Corrado, meanwhile, had collected enough information to fill out more of the picture; a substantial monthly sum was paid into his bank account. A sheaf of letters from lawyers indicated that the law firm was where the regular payments came from.

  Splendid, but first things first. She sent Corrado off in a taxi to talk to the forensic brigade, and went to Sabbatini's studio herself.

  Had she been truly concerned with looking good in the eyes of her subordinates, this would have been a mistake; it is always better to spend your time talking politely to the respectable than wandering around getting your hands dirty. And the studio—little more than a lock-up garage at the back of a run-down housing development, one of those thrown up twenty years ago without any building permit and built so shoddily they were now falling down again—was a very dirty place. Lots of plaster, execrable sculptures made of old tin cans and household rubbish, bad paintings on the walls, all the bric--brac of the talentless dabbler—for Sabbatini, she decided, was utterly without merit as an artist. One thing, however, was of vital importance, and justified the trip even though it did little but confirm what she already knew.

  In a drawer in a desk was a cheap paperback copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Hardly conclusive, even Flavia realized that. But it was the origin of the story for the Claude, and was Sabbatini really the sort of person who would idle away his hours reading Ovid? Just as well he was dead and there was no chance of a prosecution, she thought.

  She could imagine the look on the investigating magistrate's face if she told him that the entire case rested on a myth. But it was enough to reassure herself that she was heading in the right direction, and to keep alive her hopes of getting back the money.

  She found it hard to suppress the idea that retrieving the money would do marvels for her chances of hanging on to her job.

  She mentally wrote the report on the way back to the office, then listened to Corrado's account of the autopsy, his first, and something that he had not greatly enjoyed.

  Nothing remarkable. Lots of alcohol, and death by drowning. No signs of foul play, but nothing to rule it out either.

  She nodded absently as she munched through a ham sandwich and Corrado looked at her with distaste. "Time of death?" she asked. "I don't suppose they know, as usual?”

  "Wednesday morning at the latest. Probably Tuesday evening.”

  She stopped eating. "What?”

  He repeated himself. "Why do you looked so shocked?" he added.

  She sent him off quickly. A trainee was the last person she was going to tell that not only had Sabbatini been dead before he collected the ransom, he'd probably even been dead before asking for one.

  10

  Trailing after Sabbatini wasn't, perhaps, quite so important if he hadn't actually stolen anything to start with, but Flavia had a dogged and thorough strain in her character that propelled her out of her office despite the discouragement and her growing conviction that her stomach was consumed with ulcers so vast in size that she might not survive them.

  So she trudged wearily to the lawyers who had been channeling generous sums of money in Sabbatini's direction for so many years, and used her authority, her powers of persuasion, and best of all, her manifest ill-humor, to prize open their lips. And what she learned suddenly made her world terribly complicated again.

  Maurizio Sabbatini was the brother-in-law of Guglio di Lanna.

  "How very interesting" was her only comment. The lawyer made no response; it was a statement of the obvious.

  She thought about it on the way back to the office, and at the same time felt a pang of regret that Bottando was no longer in place to give her his advice. Tangling with the Di Lanna family was the sort of thing that required all the help you could lay your hands on.

  Not the richest family in Italy, certainly, but currently one of the most powerful, as the do-it-yourself political party that Di Lanna had forged out of the wreckage of the past few years of political chaos was now keeping the government in office. The Party for Democratic Advance—no one knew what that meant, or even whether it was left wing or right wing—had only fourteen members in the Chamber of Deputies, but as the government as a whole had a majority of only twelve, its influence was far beyond its nominal strength.

  On top of that, Di Lanna's tentacles stretched throughout Italian industry and finance; he owned nothing, controlled little, but through a whole series of investment groups and holding companies he had a stake in almost everything. He had mastered the art of making relatively little go a very long way. He was a powerful man, but with no power base; an illusionist who had vast influence because everyone thought he was influential.

  And his brother-in-law was, it seemed, a terrorist who might, in his last days, have turned art thief.

  Di Lanna was a deputy and she finally tracked him down in the most unlikely of places, the Chamber of Deputies itself. Except for set-piece occasions when the television cameras are switched on, members of the chamber, above all important ones, rarely turn up there, so to find a man o
f his stature in the office assigned to him as the leader of a party was all but astonishing. No secretary, no aides guarding the approaches, no noise and bustle of petitioners coming to and fro to indicate the presence of an important personage within. Just a little typed sign on the glass door, taped over a more permanent, painted one announcing that this had once been an office belonging to the now-defunct Christian Democrats. It was so quiet that Flavia scarcely expected to find anyone in; she bothered to knock only because it seemed silly to go away without trying.

  But Di Lanna was not only there, he even opened the door himself, another all but unimaginable piece of behavior. Important people in Italian politics—in any politics, come to think of it—do not open doors themselves; it indicates they are not, perhaps, that important after all. Di Lanna seemed prepared to take the risk of falling in people's estimation as he waved her into the cramped little space without ceremony. Man-of-the-people act to show his left-wing credentials? Flavia thought. Or maybe a touch of American informality to indicate his orientation toward business and free market economics? She shook her head. She really must make an effort to keep it all simple.

  "You're early," he said.

  "Am I?" she replied, a little surprised.

  "Yes. You're not due until four, I think. No matter. Let's get on with it. Don't expect me to say anything interesting, though.”

  "I wouldn't dream of it," she said before she could stop herself. To her surprise, Di Lanna threw back his head and laughed. "Sit down, sit down. What's your name, by the way?”

  He sat himself and looked at her carefully, a slightly impish air of curiosity about him.

  Thinking about it later, Flavia decided it was his eyes that made up her mind; no one not fundamentally sound, she thought quite unreasonably, had eyes that twinkled in such a mischievous fashion. Di Lanna was one of those people she instantly liked. It took some time to figure out why he confused her, though. He dressed a little tweedily, an old establishment indicator, aping a supposed English style evoking images of land and country values. But everything else suggested the new left—the haircut, the way of sitting, the hand movements. A deliberately confusing onslaught of associations, which had the effect of always slightly catching unawares those he talked to.

  "Who do you think I am?”

  "You're yet another journalist, aren't you? Come here to wonder when I'm going to stab the prime minister in the back?”

  She handed over her identity card. Di Lanna did not look surprised. "Might I ask," she went on, "if your office is entirely safe for conversation?”

  He paused for a second, "Every Wednesday morning, someone places a bug or two in here; every Wednesday afternoon I have it taken out again. They know this, but keep on doing it. It's to serve notice I'm under surveillance, not because they expect to hear anything of interest. At the moment, we should be quite safe.”

  "And who are they?”

  He shrugged. "Whoever. The dark hand of the state. You know. Perhaps you should tell me why the art theft police is here to see me?”

  She hesitated only a second. "Because you may be related to an art thief. As you know quite well, as I assume it was you who provided three million dollars for a ransom payment last week.”

  Di Lanna pouted in the sort of way that indicates that losing three million dollars is a matter of the utmost triviality. As, indeed it probably was for him.

  'Ah," he said. "I was told it would be handled discreetly. And that there would be no investigation. I must say, I am disappointed.”

  "You needn't be. All I am doing is tying up a few loose ends. The whole business has become a little more complicated since your brother-in-law's death.”

  She noticed that mentioning Sabbatini produced not even a conventional look of dismay or regret on the politician's face. If anything, there seemed to be a shadow of satisfaction on his closely controlled features.

  "I would have thought it would have simplified things for you. That has been the effect on me.”

  "Quite the opposite, in my case," she replied. "It now seems that he was dead before the ransom was either asked for or collected. Which means that either he was working with someone else—who knows all about the whole embarrassing business and has the money—or someone was deliberately using his style of playacting to confuse us.”

  Di Lanna looked curious.

  "I am presumably not the only person to know about your relationship to him," she went on. "We must consider the possibility that this whole stunt was aimed at you, rather than anything else.”

  He swung in his chair—another Americanism—then put his hands together, fingertips on his lips, priestly fashion. An old Christian Democrat habit. "Seems unlikely, surely?

  The only point to that would be if everyone knew about it. In that case—you're right—it would be damaging.”

  "My point is that it still might be. The money is out there, and someone knows the full story of the theft, the ransom, and—as he has the money—he also has the convincing evidence to prove it. I suspect there is little we can do; whoever this character is, he can't be touched without there being some risk of everybody discovering that the Italian state managed to lose a picture it promised to guard with its life. Nor that it, and you, connived in an illegal act to get it back again. Which, I assume, you do not wish to happen.”

  "Not really, no.”

  "So I shall be very careful. But I do think it is important to find out if possible who this other person is. Then there will be less chance of a nasty surprise one morning when you open the papers.”

  Di Lanna considered, then nodded. "Perhaps wise. I always knew that little shit would cause more trouble sooner or later.”

  "Might I ask what contact you had with him?”

  "None whatsoever. I haven't seen or spoken to him in any way for nearly twenty years. As far as I was concerned, he didn't exist. He betrayed everyone he ever came into contact with.”

  "But you still gave him money.”

  Di Lanna looked inquiringly.

  "I talked to the lawyer who paid him a monthly allowance.”

  "That was money from his father, held in trust. Had I been able to stop it entirely, I would have done so. I spent a fortune on legal bills to try and get him excluded, and largely succeeded. But I couldn't manage it all. What he was left with was enough to make me wonder why he did this when I heard about it. His one good quality—his only one, perhaps—was that he genuinely did not care a hoot about money. If he had it, he spent it. If he didn't have it, he didn't care.”

  "He seems to have changed his ways, then.”

  Dí Lanna shrugged.

  "Can you tell me anything about him? Friends, associates, that sort of thing?”

  Di Lanna shook his head. "I think the voluminous police files would be more use. As I say, I refused even to talk to him.”

  "Was he that bad?”

  "Yes. The damage he did was incalculable and unforgivable.”

  "He didn't do much, though. Apart from rob a bank.”

  "You are very forgiving for a member of the police, signora. However, I was not thinking of his politics, or his self-indulgent antics. I was referring to his murder of my wife. His sister.”

  Flavia paused to take stock. "I'm sorry," she said after a while. "I'm not with you.”

  "Maurizio fooled around with these people, and being him couldn't help bragging about his family connections—he was happy to play revolutionary, but never wanted it forgotten that he came from a rich and powerful family. Maybe it was his way of rebelling against his father, who was a formidable man. Very powerful, determined, and insistent on getting his own way. He doted on his daughter, and had no time for his son. I don't know, and I don't care.

  "These people had no more loyalty to Maurizio than he had to them. For them he was a joker, a source of money, no more. And when they wanted to pull off a really big coup, they exploited him mercilessly. He told them all about his family and their houses.

  He told them all about
his sister, what shops she liked, what restaurants she frequented. My wife, signora. I loved her more than anyone I have ever loved, before or since. We'd been married for eighteen months, that's all.

  "The rest is simple, if painful. They took her, then made their demands. I got the money ready—I would have paid twice as much—but the police were unusually effective for once and found the house where they thought she was being held. There was a siege, which ended in shooting.

  "It went terribly wrong. There were terrorists inside and they were all killed. But Maria was not there. And the response was immediate and savage. She was found the next day, dumped behind a bush in the Janiculum near a statue. She was twenty-four.

  They had shot her in the head. It killed her father, and nearly sent me mad with grief.

  May twenty-fifth, nineteen eighty-one. The day my life ended.”

  Flavia sat back in her chair and thought. She had no memory of the tragedy.

  "No," he said. "It was one of the many things that were hushed up, as much as possible. It would have been an enormous propaganda coup for them and we felt that at the least we could deny them that. Her body was collected before the press could get there, and we put out the story she had died in a car crash. It pained me, not to have the reason for my loss known, so people would understand, but it was the right thing to do. I thought so then, and I still do.”

  He shrugged helplessly. The look of pain on his face was all too real and immediate.

  "I've never really got over it, I think. And I have certainly never forgiven him. So don't ask me about him now.”

  "I'm sorry. I didn't realize . . .”

  "How could you?" He paused, and thought, swinging in his chair once more, but gently and without affectation this time. "Prime Minister Sabauda was interior minister at the time; he broke the news to me himself. Stayed with me, comforted me.”

  Di Lanna smiled, very slightly. "I am always asked when I am going to bring him down, pull out of the coalition, and try to increase my own power at his expense. The answer that I can never give is that I am not. I owe him gratitude for the way he helped me through those dark times. I can never say that, of course; my credibility as a politician, such as it is, would be destroyed if it became known that I was acting out of motives like loyalty and gratitude. So I have to talk about unity and stability instead.