“Did you see or hear anything at about five o’clock this morning?”
“Of course not. I was asleep.”
“No. My bedroom is at the back.”
“Pardon? You’ll have to speak up. I’m a little deaf.”
“The only thing I heard was the refuse collectors. They do it deliberately, you know, making such a noise, trying to stop respectable people from sleeping. Do you know …?”
“What do you think I am, a Peeping Tom?”
“Go away. I’m busy. The baby’s just thrown up on the floor.”
And so on. An entire street and, as far as Flavia could discover, the desired combination of a nosy insomniac with good hearing and a bedroom facing in the direction of the monastery did not exist.
“Complete bloody waste of time. And my feet are killing me,” Flavia said when she got home afterwards, proud at least of coming home in time for dinner and an evening pretending to be normal and civilized. She took off her shoes and waggled her toes in Argyll’s direction to show him what she meant. They looked perfectly fine to him.
“What you need is a nice quiet desk job.”
“What I need is a glass of gin. Do you know anything about icons?”
Argyll paused as he unscrewed the bottle. “Nothing.”
“You must know something.”
“No. Zilch. Zero. Very specialist trade, icons. I couldn’t tell a medieval one from a modern one. It’s shameful to admit it, but they all look a bit the same to me.”
“You never sold any?”
“Not likely. It’s bad enough trying to make money dealing when you do know what you’re doing. Besides, there hasn’t been much money in them in the last few years. There’s a decent market now, of course. Prices are beginning to go up again, now that the old Soviet Union has virtually been cleaned out.”
“What do you mean?”
“Supply and demand. Icons have been a terrible drudge recently. Once Russia opened up, almost every icon in the country was pinched in a matter of months. The dealers in the west were virtually knee deep in them. Some amazing quality, as well. The sort of thing major museums would have fought over ten years back, you could scarcely give away.”
“So what sort of price are we dealing with here?”
“Depends. How good was this?”
“I’ve no idea. But the maximum possible? What’s the highest price you could imagine?”
“Biggest I’ve heard of is a quarter of a million dollars.”
“I see. And was this one in the monastery in that category?”
“Not a clue. I doubt it very much. It seemed a bit sad.”
“Sad?”
“Hmm. Neglected. Unloved. Not the sort of thing collectors fight over. I gave it a candle.”
Flavia yawned mightily. Jonathan’s opinions were frequently a little wayward, but he had good instincts; far better than hers ever were. When people were concerned, of course, it was the other way around, but he had a sensitivity for paintings which he rarely managed for real human beings.
“A candle,” she said sleepily. “Why did you do that?”
“It seemed appropriate. And it thanked me.”
“What?”
“Well, not the painting, of course, but the cleaning lady. A sort of displaced thanks, if you like.”
“I see. Why did it seem lonely?”
“Well, it was set up to have a lot of people around it,” he explained. “There was room for hundreds of candles, and enough space to have lots of people praying. As there was no one there, and no candles, it had this air of having fallen on hard times. It was obviously once considered of greater importance. Probably these legends.”
“Could you do me a favour and find out something a bit more concrete about it?”
“You’ve heard the story?”
“About an angel bringing it?”
“That’s the one.”
“I have. And you may find me unduly hard-headed, but I’m a bit sceptical. Besides, when did these angels bring it?”
“Only one angel,” Argyll said. “Only one.”
“My apologies.”
“I can go and find out if you like. Or try to. And when I can’t find anything, I’ll ask our Orthodox and Islamic man.”
“Does he know about icons?”
“Written enough on them. How did you get on today?”
Flavia waved her hand and yawned again. “Don’t ask. It’s been enormously frustrating. I got the address of Burckhardt’s hotel, but he’s nowhere to be seen. Oh, damnation.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’ve just had an idea. One of the people I talked to this afternoon said the only thing they heard early this morning was the refuse collectors.”
“So?”
“So they might have seen something. Which means I have to go down to the central depot tomorrow morning and find the gang that did the road. I have a feeling they start early, as well.”
“You’d better get an early night, then.”
Flavia didn’t answer. She was already halfway to the bedroom, yawning so much she didn’t hear. The conversation had lasted ten minutes. Not much for an entire evening.
The depot was a bleak parking lot for sleeping trucks on the outskirts of Rome where, every morning at dawn, several hundred men gathered to go forth in the unending and frustrating attempt to keep the city moderately tidy and halfway hygienic. Every day, they drove off in a billowing cloud of exhaust fumes, only to return many hours later covered in dust and the smell of rotting vegetables, groaning with the weight of discarded paper, plastic sacks, potato peelings and old newspapers. Every day they had a few hours after they disgorged their aromatic load to rest and restore their energies, before setting out again; they had done so since before the days of Augustus, and would do so until the Second Coming. Maybe beyond as well.
The depot was dimly lit by floodlights, most of which were out of action, and Flavia dimly saw dozens upon dozens of men, standing round like tank crews before going into battle, chatting away, smoking and taking the occasional sip of alcohol to fortify themselves for the day’s battle against the forces of chaos. She picked out a man who looked as though he might be in charge of something, and asked for information.
Not a talkative man. He squinted at her identification, then pointed her in the direction of a small and grubby bar, outside and on the other side of the road. It presumably lived off the refuse as well, feeding up the crews before they went off, and watering them down again when they came back. Certainly, there was nothing else around to provide it with any business.
Flavia went in, looked at the crowd of men in blue overalls crammed against the bar, and picked one at random.
“Aventino three,” she said.
Another point. Not a talkative lot, she thought, but who is at this time of day?
She ended up with a small, thin little man who looked as though he could barely carry a shopping bag, let alone the hefty weight of one of the huge, apartment-size bins that the city provides for collective cleanliness.
“Aventino three?” she asked again.
He didn’t say no, so she continued. “Did you collect in the via San Giovanni yesterday?”
He looked at her suspiciously, as though she might be a city official about to relay a complaint from a resident about noise or leaving piles of rubbish in the street.
“Maybe we did,” he said.
She again pulled out her identification. “There was a robbery with violence there, probably before seven,” she said.
“Oh, yes?”
“In the monastery. The superior had his head cracked.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And a painting was stolen. Did you see anything?”
He thought for a moment, his lined brow puckering with concentration. Suddenly, enlightenment dawned.