“It’s my own fault. However, this time I am being totally reliable. That I can guarantee.”
So they spent the rest of the morning shopping, Mary Verney buying a coat, with which she pronounced herself delighted, a pair of shoes which she didn’t need but couldn’t resist because they were so comfortable, and a leather handbag which was absurdly expensive but so awfully pretty. Then she led the way to a restaurant where they had a slow but (Flavia had to admit) very enjoyable lunch and she had a small brandy while Flavia went out to phone for a replacement. This wasn’t quite the discreet surveillance she’d had in mind, but it was too late to do anything about that now. So she thought she might as well avoid making her manning problems worse, and removed Giulia from report writing.
“Oh, don’t bother about that,” she said wearily when Giulia asked where she should pick up the trail. “We’re in Also Moro. Just come straight in.”
Then she went back to the table to find Mary Verney looking impish. She’d paid the bill for both of them.
“Look, do you want me to be had up for corruption or something? We’ve had the spooks all over us recently. I told you …”
“It’s just a bill. But rather a big one. Don’t worry. Your name isn’t on anything. My treat.”
“I don’t want treats.”
“But you deserve one. You have just spent three hours taking me shopping, after all …”
“It was a pleasure.”
“Shall we go?”
“No. We have to wait for Giulia. She will be your escort for the afternoon.”
“How lovely! This is the way to travel. I should have thought of this years ago.”
“We don’t make a habit of it. Ah, here’s Giulia,” she went on as the trainee arrived and crept cautiously up to their table, a worried frown of uncertainty on her face.
“I fear I owe you an apology, Giulia. Flavia was very cross with me for the inconsiderate way I behaved last night.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said the surprised, but well-brought-up, trainee.
“Splendid. Now, you go back to work, Flavia. And Giulia and I will have a lovely afternoon together. I thought I might visit some old art-dealing friends of mine. Some of them are a bit … perhaps, Giulia, you wouldn’t mind being my niece for the afternoon? We don’t want to frighten anybody, do we?”
Flavia just about managed to suppress a smile at the disconcerted and uncomfortable look on Giulia’s face. “Enjoy yourselves.”
“We will,” Mary Verney said. Giulia looked more doubtful.
Having nothing better to do that morning, Argyll walked across town to the monastery of San Giovanni to visit Dan Menzies and the Caravaggio. It wasn’t in the slightest bit necessary, although it was in the back of his mind that perhaps, just perhaps, he might sniff around and see if he could find out something about this picture. Then he could write it up—and it didn’t matter whether it was by Caravaggio or not—and get a little publication out of it. It also provided an opportunity to mess around with Flavia’s case. Not that he should, of course, but the prospect offered a bit of variety. Teaching and marking things was all very well, but no one could say that it made the adrenaline run through the veins at high speed. Unless, of course, you found yourself in a lecture room with seventy students and then discovered you’d forgotten to bring your notes. Even then, it wasn’t certain anyone would notice.
And it was a lovely day. The sun was shining and the bus routes were sufficiently complicated to make it not worthwhile waiting in the polluted street for one to come along. It was a decent stroll and put him into a sunny frame of mind. He crossed the river at the island, then did a slight detour through the prettier parts of the Aventino before climbing the hill and getting into the evermore out-of-the-way streets and alleys, one of which contained the surprisingly modest entrance to the monastery of San Giovanni. The baroque style is not normally associated with spiritual humility, but somehow the architect had pulled the trick off. The gateway, all peeling terracotta, had the regulation curls and swirls and twists, but it was all done on a small and almost domestic scale, as though it was the entrance to a private, and not very grand, house. The door itself, however, was well defended to keep the corruptions of the material world outside. Solid, sun-bleached oak was covered in a regular pattern of large metal studs for extra strength, and the little porter’s hole was protected by a thick grid of iron bars. The only modern touch was a little doorbell drilled into the stucco, into which someone had stuck a postcard. The Order of St John the Pietist, it said in several languages, so Argyll pressed it.
He had half hoped for a shuffling of feet and a creak as the porthole opened to reveal a bent-over old monk, tonsured and muttering. But no such picturesque details were forthcoming: what he got instead was a buzz and a click from the gate as the electric lock opened up. The modern world, he thought as he pushed and went inside. No romance.
It is one of the great delights of Rome that not even a long-term, assiduous resident is safe from surprise. Any street in the city, no matter where and no matter how seedy or shabby it looks at first glance, is capable of containing some little gem tucked away in an obscure corner, passed by nearly all the time and waiting to astonish. Sometimes it is a toy-box-sized Renaissance chapel, around which a twentieth-century developer has squeezed a vast, lumbering block of flats, or which has been accidentally turned into a traffic roundabout. Or the remains of a Roman palace nestling between a truck stop and a railway line. Or it is a Renaissance pile, converted into flats and hammered incessantly by fumes and the noise of traffic, but which still has its delicate, colonnaded courtyard, with moss on the cobbles and a sculpted fountain of nymphs and goddesses tinkling away to welcome home the weary commuters in the evening.
The headquarters of the Giovannisti (as such they were known, Argyll had learnt from a guidebook) was one such building. The street which contained it was not noisy, but it was unremarkable. A block or two of flats and empty, weed-covered waste ground awaiting the bulldozers and archaeologists on one side. The sort of street which contains nothing of interest to anyone.
Except for what was perhaps one of the prettiest collection of buildings that Argyll had ever seen. It was almost a perfect little miniature version of a monastery, with the chapel—much earlier in date, it seemed—on one side topped by a short tower that wanted to point to the heavens but was a bit too timid to presume; a range for the living quarters flanking it, but two storeys only, giving the effect of a row of country cottages, complete down to the green and orange of the old, rippling tiles on the roof, and then, slightly set aside, what was presumably the public building, with the library and the meeting rooms and the offices. Being on an uneven piece of ground helped, as the architect had so arranged his work that he fitted it into the terrain rather than the other way around; the result was an informality helped by the bits of classical statuary, evidently found when the garden was dug, stacked in one corner, and a bed of carefully tended summer flowers in another. Argyll breathed deeply and smiled in contentment.
“Good morning. Can I help you?”
Argyll was startled. Far from the shuffling old monk with matchstick legs and leather slippers he’d expected, he was confronted with the looming figure of possibly the most handsome man he had ever set eyes on. Nearly seven feet tall, powerfully built and nothing but muscle and bone, the sort of finely chiselled face a good draughtsman would long to have in his studio for a month or so, and a deep black skin which positively radiated health. He was dressed all in white—linen shirt, linen trousers and even linen shoes which made him all the more striking, and wore a small gold cross around his neck. That was the only indication at all that he was an inmate. Argyll felt pale and scruffy in comparison, which was largely because he was.