by Iain Pears
She had left early because she wanted some time to think, and there were always too many distractions in her office. Phones, secretaries, people popping in and out to ask her opinion, or to get her to sign something. She loved it all, most of the time, but it made it difficult to reflect and consider. That was best done looking out at the ochre-coloured buildings opposite, watching people doing their shopping, listening to the quiet murmur of a city going about its business.
Bottando’s lack of practical advice had given her more than a little to think about. She had gone through it all, backwards and forwards, considering every option and possibility in a methodical way, and come up with nothing better. However, the essence of it – keep your head down, do nothing, but avoid any involvement – appalled her. And struck her as almost as dangerous as doing something. Her head was on the block, come what may. If something, anything, went wrong, she would be the one to take the blame. Acting head. Never yet confirmed in her post, even after a year. A matter of a moment to get rid of her; no noise, no fuss. Simply an announcement that a new and permanent chief, more experienced and fitted for the job, was being drafted in over her.
But what could she do? It was certainly the case that she couldn’t do anything practical without somebody finding out quickly. Nor could she go trotting round the wealthy of Italy asking if they had a spare suitcase full of unwanted dollars lying around. Fund-raising was hardly her job. If anyone could do it, it should have been Macchioli’s task. That’s what museum curators did these days. Or were supposed to. Alas, his talents notoriously did not lie in this direction at all. Still, it might be worth while having a serious talk with him, just in case a ransom note arrived.
Argyll came home an hour later, in a relatively good mood considering he’d spent the day trying to din the rudiments of art historical knowledge into his students, and plonked himself down beside her to admire the view. Once it had been as admired as was possible, he asked about the meeting with the prime minister. She didn’t want to talk about it yet, so she fended him off.
‘How’s the paper?’ she asked mischievously to take her mind off things. This was a sore point with Argyll. He had been taken on in his current job to teach baroque art to foreign students passing a year in Rome, a task he was eminently fitted to do. Then the administration – a baroque organization itself – had decided for reasons that no one really understood that salary levels would be partly determined by academic production as well as hours put in at the coal-face. Raise the reputation of the institution. Must be taken seriously as a university, not dismissed as a finishing school for rich kids. Which, of course, it was. The essence of the edict, however, was that if you want more money, produce articles. Papers. Better still, a book or two.
Not really that easy, and Argyll was of a stubborn disposition. The idea of being forced into writing things made his hackles rise. However, a bit more money would be agreeable. He was nearly there; he had ruthlessly exploited his old footnotes and conjured up two articles of extraordinary banality for minor journals, and had also been invited to give a paper at a conference in Ferrara in a few weeks’ time, and that would put him over the required limit.
Except that he didn’t have a paper to deliver and, while he did not hesitate to produce grandiose trivia in the comforting anonymity of a journal no one read, he hesitated to stand up in front of a live audience and parrot out obvious nonsense. So, no paper; not even the glimmer of one. He was beginning to get worried. Flavia did her best to sympathize when she was informed, again, that he still couldn’t think of anything, and eventually Argyll shifted to another topic, as dwelling on the matter risked ruining an otherwise pleasant evening.
‘I had a phone call today.’
‘Oh?’
‘From Mary Verney.’
She put down her drink and looked at him. Not today, she thought. It’s been bad enough already without her. She was retired, Flavia knew; she had said so last time they almost arrested her for theft on a grand scale. But she’d said that the time before last as well.
‘She asked me to ask you if you’d mind if she came back to Italy.’
‘What?’
Argyll said it again. ‘She has a house somewhere in Tuscany, it seems. She hasn’t felt comfortable going there for the last few years, what with you so keen to lock her up. So she simply wanted to know whether you had any outstanding business with her. If you do, she’ll stay away and sell the house, but if you don’t she wouldn’t mind coming and seeing if it still has a roof. I said I’d ask. Don’t look at me like that,’ he concluded mildly. ‘I’m the messenger. You know, the one you don’t shoot.’
Flavia huffed. ‘I really do have better things to do, you know, than reassuring ageing thieves.’
‘So it seems.’
‘What does that mean?’ she snapped.
‘You weren’t really listening to my fascinating anecdote about the coffee-machine in the staff room. My little joke about the tourist being taken to hospital when a piece of the Pantheon fell on his head didn’t make you smile at all, even though it was quite a clever play on words and would normally have produced at least a flicker of amusement. And you have twice dipped your olive into the sugar bowl and eaten it without even noticing.’
So she had. Now she thought about it, it had tasted odd. So she heaved a sigh and told him about more serious matters. By the time she finished, Argyll was dipping his olives in the sugar bowl as well. He, in contrast, found them quite tasty. He could see that it did really put the antics of the departmental coffee-machine in the shade.
Oddly, the more important matter was swiftly dealt with. Flavia didn’t want Argyll’s advice on this one, but got it anyway. It just wasn’t very good. ‘Your stomach,’ he said. ‘It’s been playing you up for days now. How about if we got Giulio downstairs to have you admitted to hospital for a week? Urgent tests? Suspected ulcer? Gastro-enteritis? You could blame my cooking. He’d be happy to oblige. Then you could sit it out in peace and security.’
Giulio was the doctor who lived on the grander first floor of their block. And Flavia was sure he would oblige. He was an obliging fellow. And her stomach – in fact, her entire internal system – was misbehaving shockingly, although it was better now, probably thanks to the wine. But this was one she could not duck out of, and Argyll knew it as well as she did.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘If you want to be useful, you can tell me about this Claude.’
‘What’s to tell? It’s a landscape. Not one of his huge ones, which is no doubt why it’s so popular with the thieves.’
‘What about the subject, though? Cephalis and Procris.’
Argyll waved his hand dismissively. ‘Wouldn’t worry about that. They’re just figures wandering around the canvas and put in to give it respectability. Claude couldn’t do people for toffee. Arms and legs too long. Bums in the wrong place. But he had to do them to be taken seriously.’
‘Still. What’s the story?’
‘No idea.’
And Flavia clearly wanted to say no more, so he switched the topic. ‘Tell me about Bottando. You’ll miss him, won’t you?’
‘Terribly. Father figure, you know. It gives you a shock when permanent fixtures are suddenly not so permanent. Also, he’s not happy about it, either. It’s not a good way to end after all this time.’
‘We should get him a present.’
She nodded. ‘Can you think of anything?’
‘No.’
‘Nor me.’
They paused. ‘What shall I do about Mary Verney?’
She sighed. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I suppose there are so many thieves in the country, one more won’t make any difference. At least we can be certain she didn’t steal the Claude.’
4
Argyll was reluctant to criticize his dear wife, especially as she had been such for only a short time and it seemed premature to begin carping, but he found it hard to suppress a certain amount of irritation at the way she wouldn’t listen to reason –
his reason – about this Claude. It was not that he didn’t see that it was her job to recover pictures, nor did he blame her for being worried. Normally it was her calm that amazed him. He knew quite well that he would have been incapable of doing what she did without being in a permanent state of panic. The omnipresent possibility of disaster that she seemed to live with was not the sort of thing that gave him pleasure; in his own line of work, now that being an art dealer was more of a hobby than an occupation, the worst that could happen was that he might lose his lecture notes. Getting rid of his remaining stock of pictures and covering his costs was more than enough stress to have in your life, in his opinion.
There were only about two dozen left now, ranging in quality from the moderately decent to the embarrassing; the rest he had either got rid of to a couple of clients, unloaded on to dealers, or decided to keep for himself. This last batch, in a fit of impatience, he had decided to sell at an auction and, as none were particularly valuable, he had arranged for them to go into a sale in London; they were not subject to any export restrictions and would get a better price there. They were, however, subject to a monumental amount of paperwork, which he had been sweating over for months. It was nearly all done now, most of the pictures were safely boxed and ready to go, but there still remained an alarming number of forms to fill in.
So he didn’t blame Flavia for being alarmed; the Italian state in one of its full-blown moods of cranky irrationality is an alarming thing. But she had a sort of absent-minded calm about her which was really quite unwise.
It was not that Flavia was ungrateful that made her dismiss his counsel with a touch of impatience, merely that she was preoccupied. Since being summoned to the prime minister’s office, she had been totally taken up with the Claude while also having to put on an air of not having a care in the world. A long, early morning phone call with the prime minister to try and extract more specific instructions produced nothing except a convoluted statement which gave the impression that he was unaware of anything to do with ransoms; after it was over, Flavia convinced herself that the call had been taped and would be used in evidence against her if need be. That started her day off badly, but even worse was the lack of any movement; the kidnapper did not follow up with any more details about how much money he wanted or how it was to be paid. Assuming that’s what he wanted. Time was short, after all; Flavia found the desultory approach quite surprising. Even the dimmest thief – and this character clearly was not dim – must realize that the longer he waited, the greater the risk of something going wrong, and that if the news came out then the price would go down dramatically.
At least it gave her time to do something, even though she had no great hopes of anything useful resulting. She could not send anyone out to ask questions, but at least she could comb through the records to see if any obvious candidates presented themselves. Again, she was hampered by not being able to say exactly what she wanted, but fortunately the department had been assigned another trainee who was, for once, unusually bright and keen. He had, she told him sternly when he came in, spent far too much time on the streets recently.
The trainee’s face fell so far Flavia thought she might have to help him pick it off the floor. ‘It’s all very well rushing about in flash cars kicking people’s doors down, Corrado, and don’t think I’m criticizing. You kick them down very well. But the essence of policing these days is intelligence. Forward planning. That sort of thing. Very interesting,’ she added encouragingly. ‘So I’ve constructed a little exercise for you.’
‘An exercise?’ he said in a scarcely concealed tone of disgust. ‘You mean, not even a real case?’
‘It might be one day. Got your notebook? Good. Take this down. Let’s see now. Armed robbery at a museum. Lone operator. Painting stolen.’
‘What painting?’
‘Doesn’t matter what painting,’ she said. ‘It never does in real life either.’
‘Oh.’
‘Ransom demand. Pay up or else. Right?’
Corrado nodded.
‘Good. Now assume this has all just happened. It’s your job to head into the records and construct a list of potential people who might have been involved. Do you know how to do that?’
‘Start with the computer, then go to the files, look for possibles for the theft itself, compare that with lists of people who are thought to have done kidnappings, etcetera.’ He sounded bored and annoyed. Flavia felt slightly sorry for him, but if she had just told him a pack of lies at least one part was true. Sitting on your rear end reading files really was now the stuff of policing.
‘Quite,’ she said brightly. ‘And I know you are going to grumble and moan about it. So the sooner you are done, and done properly, the sooner you can get back to the outside world. Off you go,’ she concluded in her best schoolmistressly tone, giving him an encouraging smile as he sloped out of her office.
That was all very well, and even cheered her up a bit, but the improving mood went into a sharp reverse shortly after she had finished her sandwich. As she brushed the crumbs carefully from her blotting pad into the wastepaper bin, her secretary – it was amazing how quickly you can get used to having a secretary – announced that a journalist was on the phone from Il Mattino. Common enough, quite a few checked in regularly to see if there was anything going on, and Flavia was very much pleasanter to them than Bottando had ever been. Ettore Bossoni was a new one to her, however; she vaguely knew the name, but he had never, as far as she was aware, had anything to do with art or theft before.
‘I was thinking,’ he said in a tone which had just a touch of insinuation about it, ‘about writing a story on security.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Yes. You know. Museums. Especially when pictures move around.’
‘You mean for exhibitions, things like that?’ Flavia asked drily.
‘Just that sort of thing. You know. Look at insurance, the way they are guarded, what might happen if anything went wrong and a picture was lost …’
‘Very good idea,’ Flavia said encouragingly. ‘Although I can’t give you chapter and verse on anything. We haven’t lost one that way for ages …’
‘Of course not,’ Bossoni said in an oily fashion. Flavia was beginning to dislike him. ‘But you must have plans about what you’d do if something like that happened.’
‘We’d run around and try to find it,’ Flavia said. ‘Same as usual. No story in that.’
‘But if there was a ransom, say.’
‘Paying ransoms’, Flavia pointed out severely, ‘is against the law.’
‘You mean you wouldn’t pay one?’
‘Me? Me personally? How could I? That’s not my department. All I would do in those circumstances is pass on the request to a higher authority. As quickly as possible, I might add, although if you quoted me on that I would strangle you. Your guess is as good as mine about how they’d react. As I say, it’s against the law.’
She got him off the phone as soon as possible, then leant back in her chair, a worried frown on her brow. He was clearly fishing. Someone had said something, but not enough for him to know what to do with it. Three possible sources: someone from the museum, someone from the prime minister’s office, or someone involved in the theft itself. Not much point speculating about which. She picked up the phone and talked to some contacts about having his phone tapped. Ten minutes later, she had the response.
No.
That was the trouble with being new at the job. She had no clout yet. No one would have refused Bottando. Although, come to think of it, no one had ever refused her before either. It put her in a bad mood which lay simmering inside her until Argyll once more proffered his well-meaning, and quite possibly sound, advice.
While she was thus unemployed, Argyll was left at home, feeling terribly left out, abandoned and slighted. On the whole he hit it off well with Flavia’s work; they had cohabited nicely for years and tolerated each other with only a few hiccups along the way. He endured the frequent absences, the
preoccupations and the occasional flashes of ill-humour that it generated in her, and her work, in return, had provided him with a fairly constant diet of entertainment. He had even, so he prided himself and Flavia readily acknowledged, given material assistance on a few occasions. The three-way relationship had become a little more complex when the great promotion arrived, not least because Flavia spent more time on the drudgery of policing and less time looking for stolen works of art. She had also become more like Bottando in office, more prone to calculate risks, see dangers and watch for hidden traps. This occasionally gave her a furtive, not to say suspicious, air, and Argyll was interested to note that Bottando, relieved of his position, had become more like her – full of bright, if not always respectable, ideas.
He had been prepared for this and usually it was only an occasional problem. With this particular case, however, domestic life swiftly became all but unendurable. Information had to be winkled out of her, her usual good humour had vanished, she would not talk over, as she habitually did, even the outlines of what was going on. Quite apart from the fact that she was, in his opinion, taking an appallingly silly risk in having anything to do with it. The fact that it was her job, and that she had been brought in by the prime minister, seemed insufficient reason, in his opinion, for not ducking and diving for all she was worth.
So, while he waited for his wife to recover herself, he lay on the sofa, considering which of his own tasks he should tackle first. This used up a great deal of time which the more censorious might have considered better spent on actually doing one of them, but Argyll was particular on the matter and wanted to get it right. So his mind wandered from topic to topic. Papers. Export regulations. The weekly shopping. Back again.
