The Immaculate Deception

by Iain Pears

  She began by trying to fit all the events into some pattern, but when that didn’t work she tried it the other way round, constructing a pattern and seeing what events might fit in.

  Some bits were easy; the date, in particular. Sabbatini had stolen the picture on the Monday, then done nothing. Now she knew he had something planned for the Friday, the 25th of May. On 25 May 1981, his sister had been killed. Her body had been dumped close to where Flavia was now sitting, and that was where Sabbatini had wanted the cameras and audience to assemble, prompted by a reluctant Bossoni.

  So far, so good. But why that picture? Any reason, or was it where Sabbatini’s limited intellect let him down, as Bossoni had hinted? It was hard to see how a landscape by Claude could possibly have any hidden significance. Cephalus and Procris. The story even had a happy ending. Maybe he simply wanted a high-profile picture, stolen in a way that advertised what he was doing. Perhaps that was all there was to it.

  But what was the point? A grand gesture to show to a bunch of old terrorists that he had not forgotten? How did that fit in with his claim to Bossoni that he would shake the country to its foundations? Then there was the ransom demand. How did that fit in? Were there two messages? Or maybe whatever Sabbatini intended was abandoned when he died and his associate – and Flavia had not ruled out the possibility that Bossoni was three million dollars richer now than he had been last week – decided to cut his losses and collect the money.

  Flavia sat on the bench next to Mrs Garibaldi, reached for a cigarette, lit it, then pulled it out of her mouth and trampled on it. Oh, God, she thought. Can’t even do that any more. And, she suddenly realized, she was deliriously happy, and burst into tears.

  All the tourists – not that there were many – looked on sympathetically.

  ‘I tried to find that report on the di Lanna kidnapping you asked for,’ Paolo said later when the four met in a restaurant to have dinner and discuss progress so far. He had begun by handing over a file of phone records, together with the apologetic remark that he hadn’t had time to go through them. Not surprising. No one liked doing that. ‘No luck, alas. A curious story, though. With a recent end.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘As you said, it was all hushed up. Or, rather, it seems to have become one of those stories that everybody knew, but no one ever mentioned in public. Nevertheless, some aspiring and trouble-making magistrate did decide to investigate, and began working on the case. Unfortunately, it was for the wrong reasons; he seems to have had leftish sympathies and was more intent on causing trouble than establishing what happened. He was told to lay off and was then investigated himself; turns out he was as corrupt as you can get and still have only two legs. Eventually, to avoid the embarrassment of acknowledging dirty dealings in the judiciary, they cut him a deal. He resigns and is left in peace. End of story.’

  Flavia smiled. ‘Thank you. What’s the recent end?’

  ‘A few months ago, the magistrate dies.’

  ‘Suddenly?’

  Paolo shook his head. ‘No. He’d been ill for some time, I think. Kidney gave up some time ago, had a transplant a year ago and it didn’t work. No surprise at all. Nothing suspicious, if that’s what you were thinking.’

  She frowned. ‘I still can’t figure any of this out,’ she said eventually. ‘Let us assume this Bossoni is right, and this is Elena Fortini and the symbolism of the act all over again. Let us assume that there is a connection between the Claude and the death of Maria di Lanna. What’s the symbol? What was he trying to prove? And why now? Was it because di Lanna came into the government a few months ago?’

  She looked around the table. Blank faces. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Suggestions?’

  Still silence.

  ‘Anything?’ She prompted.

  Another silence.

  Flavia sighed. ‘Well, thank you, anyway. That’s very helpful. Nice to know you’re all on form.’

  They finished their meal, talking of more tractable office problems. Paolo walked her home, which was kind of him, although he really wanted a private talk with her.

  ‘We had a visit this afternoon,’ he said. ‘While you were out. Dour little fellow, from intelligence, he said. He walked straight in, straight into your office, and spent an hour going through your papers and files. I kept an eye on him as much as possible, and he didn’t seem to find anything that he wanted.’

  Flavia couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘You seem to have upset some important people in some way,’ he continued thoughtfully. ‘If they want to send the spooks in, it might be reasonable to assume they haven’t finished with you yet.’

  ‘Nothing I can do about it.’

  ‘Probably not. But if you are determined to continue with this business, you should at least take sensible precautions.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as not going home,’ he said, as they turned the corner into the little square in front of Flavia’s block and he gently pulled her back into the shadows. ‘After all, there’s a spook car outside your door.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Colour, make, numberplate and little aerial sticking out the back. I have studied these things, you know. I once toyed with the idea of applying to be transferred there.’

  ‘And you didn’t?’

  ‘No. I did an interview. I’ve never come across such half-wits in my life. They wouldn’t survive a week in the police. The point is, there they are, watching you.’

  ‘And I have to go home to find Jonathan.’

  ‘Ring.’ He pulled out his phone, dialled and handed it to her. She listened to it chirrup away, and could faintly hear the telephone on the table in her bedroom also ringing in response. Just to the right of the little message Argyll had left her to say he was going to Tuscany for a day or so. The phone rang and rang, but no light was switched on, no friendly voice at the other end. Flavia didn’t know whether to be irritated or glad.

  ‘He doesn’t have a phone, I suppose?’ Paolo asked.

  Flavia snorted. ‘If he had, you could be certain the batteries would be flat.’

  She scratched her head, and thought. ‘No, you’re right. I’ll go and find a hotel for the night.’

  Paolo offered to put her up, an offer Flavia refused, having met his children on too many occasions and knowing full well how little sleep she would get in a small apartment with screaming infants. She had, it seemed, only a few months of peace left to her. She did not want to waste a single night of them.

  Half an hour later, rather than fretting about the security services or Maurizio Sabbatini, she drifted off to sleep in a little room on the Piazza Farnese worrying about the general smallness of Roman living space.

  She had reasoned that, if anyone was looking for her, wanting to keep an eye on her movements, the last place they would think of looking would be a nunnery, and so, to a nunnery she had gone. The order of St Bridget of Sweden has a very agreeable convent on the Piazza Farnese, part of it converted into a bed and breakfast hostel after their numbers went down. For the price it is exemplary, the nuns sweet, the location near perfect, and they already knew Flavia quite well; on a couple of occasions in the past she had put witnesses there where they would not be noticed. Several had come back for holidays when their troubles were over, while one went completely overboard, joined the order and was last heard of doing good works in Burkina Faso.

  As she ate her breakfast, simple but fresh, she worked her way through the files and press cuttings that Paolo had provided the previous evening, then distracted herself from the ever-present craving for a cigarette by writing down notes and thinking.

  After a long period of staring into space, she realized why she was finding the whole business frustrating. She had concentrated on the symbolism of the act until it became clear that it consisted of two parts, incompatible with each other.

  Sabbatini steals the picture, then makes some sort of dramatic gesture in the Janiculum on Friday, 25th May to draw attention to
the matter of his murdered sister. All clear and straightforward.

  The second part, however, was the ransom. This would have been a better parallel, in fact. He could have contrasted the way pictures are rescued, but human beings not. But Sabbatini had not demanded the ransom.

  Let us concentrate on the Janiculum, she thought, buttering another roll. Friday; the television cameras arrive, a little bit of an audience, then Sabbatini makes his entrance. What then? Presumably some outrageous gesture. But, so what? Everybody says, how shocking; or how funny, depending on what he does. Sabbatini is arrested and bundled off. What good does that do?

  So, there must be something else. Elena Fortini, perhaps. Here she frowned, puzzled by the enormous difference between her own impression of the woman, and what the fat journalist had said. Could she be that far out? She had known some charming crooks in her time, that was certain. But Bossoni described her as being gratuitously cruel and violent. Did that really fit with the air of domesticity she had felt so strongly? Do cruel people make bread? Vicious ones iron their children’s clothes?

  And then there was Bossoni, who had intruded himself into this business quite uninvited. An old radical who had gone into journalism, like so many others, and put his past behind him. An effortless switch in direction. Why not? Nothing suspicious there, even sensible to keep up old acquaintances, just in case they become interesting again. But there was no file on him. Why not? The Italian state kept files on everybody from those days, and most were perfectly easy to get at if you asked the right people. Paolo had drawn information on Sabbatini, on Fortini, even on di Lanna, with no one raising an eyebrow. Yet there was no information on Bossoni. That was curious.

  Ordinarily, the next step would have been simple; she would have picked up the phone and asked questions. Now she was reluctant to advertise her interest. It was bad enough that Paolo had done so the evening before. So she had to fall back on other sources, and had to think hard before she came up with one that might work. Then she finished her coffee – was she even allowed coffee any more? She’d have to check. And come to think of it, weren’t her feet a little swollen? – told the nuns she would stay another night if they had room, and walked out into the bright morning sunlight to head for the Vatican.

  It took a long time to get in; even had she been willing to advertise herself by using her police identity card, the Vatican is normally quite sniffy about admitting Italian officials. It does so eventually, of course, but it is an independent state and goes through the motions of guarding its privileges jealously. So Flavia had to present herself at the main door as a private visitor, then wait in a run-down and dingy room for nearly forty minutes before Aldo Morante bounced in and gave her a most unpriestly kiss.

  She had never quite mastered the ability to keep a straight face whenever she thought of Father Aldo Morante. Even after a decade or more, he still looked like an actor pretending to be a priest, and not succeeding very well. He was just too big for the part, too exuberant, too noisy, and too obviously had trouble with the vows of chastity to be entirely convincing. A priest he was none the less, having converted straight from communism to Catholicism some fifteen years back without the usual progression through disenchantment, scepticism and convention. Why waste time? he’d once said to her. We’ll all end up on our knees again one day. Might as well get on with it now, keep ahead of the field.

  Once upon a time, however, he’d been a firebrand of radicalism, no meeting left unattended, no pamphlet left unread, and all speeches delivered at the top of his voice, preferably with a megaphone. Even though he was a decade older than she was, Flavia knew him because their mothers were friends and he had always had a benevolent affection for her which even survived her entering the police. Her total lack of interest in politics was forgiven her, as family and connections have always, quite rightly, been considered of far more importance than transitory ideologies. So Flavia had watched Aldo metamorphose over the years from youthful choirboy, through political revolutionary, and round again to earnest churchgoer. She had kept a distant eye on him as he started life in a parish, found the work tedious, then worked his way into a job at the Vatican where he was now an ambitious undersecretary of some small importance in the church’s equivalent of the foreign ministry.

  Slight ostentation had always been his trademark, so Flavia knew perfectly well that when he escorted her to his office by putting his arm around her waist it was purely and simply so that the people in the corridors who passed them would notice. For all the play-acting, however, he was someone who had never wasted time with chatter.

  ‘What do you want, then?’ he said, the moment the door of the little office was closed.

  ‘Help. Urgently,’ she replied. There is nothing like childhood to relieve you of the necessity for diplomacy.

  ‘Go on, then. Let’s have it.’

  So he got it; from the theft of the Claude, right through to the security men camped outside her door.

  ‘Now,’ he said, when she’d finished, ‘if I read you correctly, you suspect Ettore Bossoni of horrendous duplicity simply because this other woman spotted you were going to have a baby before you knew yourself.’

  Flavia opened her mouth to make a sharp reply, then considered. ‘That’s partly right,’ she said after a brief hesitation. ‘I suppose. Also because he said that he talked to Sabbatini on the phone and none of Sabbatini’s phone records show any signs of it. I checked this morning. Not that that is proof, of course.’

  ‘Congratulations, by the way,’ Aldo went on. ‘You’ll be a very good mother. I trust it will be the first of at least half a dozen. I will baptize them all myself. I need a bit of practice. Now, Bossoni. I remember him. There was always a bit of a smell about him, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘There still is.’

  ‘I don’t mean his hygiene; that was fashionable. Everybody smelled. You were just too naïve to realize that deodorant was a capitalist plot. I mean, there was always a whiff of something slightly unsavoury about him. Everybody had their doubts about him.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Now, you’re expecting me to speak ill of people. Which I cannot do, being a priest, and having to think worthy thoughts all the time. So, I’ll get the book on him.’

  ‘What book?’

  ‘This is the Vatican, child. We know everything. You must remember, the church was in cahoots with the government back then, and our foreign intelligence was second to none. We swapped what we knew about foreign lands with what the Italian government knew about goings on here. There, I should say. And annotated what we were given with our own sources.’

  ‘Can you get hold of this stuff?’

  ‘I am a senior official, you know. Should be monsignor by next year.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Hmm. Fancy a red hat, though. Crimson has always suited me. Now, I can’t of course show you the files themselves; they are terribly confidential. What I will do is read them and answer questions about them. Silly, I know, but there we are. Rules are rules. Why don’t you look at some pictures while you wait. It might take some time.’

  ‘I’ve seen them,’ Flavia said crossly. ‘Many times.’

  Aldo waved a hand. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘not those pictures; I didn’t mean the museum. I mean the good ones; the ones the public doesn’t see.’

  And to keep her occupied while he hunted, Aldo led Flavia through back corridors into rooms which looked older and older, until he came to a door. ‘Through there,’ he said. ‘Off you go. I’ll come and get you when I’m done.’

  He wafted off and Flavia thought idly how curious it would be to see Aldo as a cardinal. And why stop there? How would he look in white? Then she opened the door and forgot such trivia. She spent the next hour looking open-mouthed at a collection of paintings that made the Vatican museum itself look second-rate.

  It is amazing how fast time passes when you are astonished; the only conscious thought Flavia had in the entire period was that she wish
ed Argyll had been there, although he would have been in such a delirium it might have been days before she got a coherent remark from him.

  And she especially wanted Argyll there when she came to one particular picture. It was a Dormition, the last sleep of the Virgin. She wasn’t as good as Argyll, nowhere near, but she knew the picture; or rather, she knew a face. It was the same face as the one possessed by the Madonna above Bottando’s fireplace. Same size panel, more or less, same reds in the clothing. She was no expert, couldn’t swear to anything, but under Argyll’s tutelage she had spent a long time looking at pictures as well as looking for them. And this one was just too similar. Must have been part of a triptych, the only difference being this one still had a proper frame, complete with the little iron hinges which would have linked it to the bigger, central panel. That, presumably, would have been another scene from the life of the Virgin. But what was it? She looked, but there was no notice, no useful little plaque. Damnation. She began to understand how Argyll felt.

  ‘Enjoy it?’ Aldo remarked as he breezed back in, although whether it was an hour or two later Flavia could not tell. ‘I thought you might.’

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked, pointing at the little panel.

  He shrugged. ‘No idea. Not my area. I do foreign policy, not pictures.’

  ‘Who does know?’

  He shrugged without any interest at all.

  ‘Where did these come from?’ she asked.

  He shrugged once more. ‘Oh, here and there. And most should not, strictly speaking, be here. That’s why they’re kept hidden.’