“It sounds quite a good idea to me,” she said, settling herself on the sofa and placing the file by her side. “Are you sure you were wrong?”
“Oh, in theory there was nothing wrong with it at all. Which just shows what’s wrong with theory. The trouble was, once I began to think about it, I realized I now had one man, who I dubbed Giotto…”
“Why?”
Bottando smiled. “Because my imaginary character was a real master at his trade, of great importance, but we knew virtually nothing about him. No personality or anything. A bit like Giotto. But, as I say, I had made this creation of mine responsible for more than two dozen thefts from at least 1963 onwards. Encompassing four different countries, in each case taking unphotographed pictures which were never seen again. Without anyone in a dozen or more specialized police units even suspecting his existence. Without a single fence or buyer ever breaking ranks and offering information. Without a single work ever being recovered.”
“Hmm.”
“And then, of course, the whole thing blew up when I came across a note from the Carabinieri saying they’d arrested someone six months previously for another job which I’d nominally pencilled in as being by Giotto’s hand. Giacomo Sandano. Remember him?”
“The world’s worst thief?”
“That’s the one. He nicked a Fra Angelico from Padua. Got caught, of course. According to my calculations, he would have been three and a half when he committed the Straga raid, and is far too stupid ever to get away with anything for long. This is why I put the whole lot in the extinct box. It was the best proof imaginable that I was wrong. So Giotto has been gathering dust for a couple of years and, in my opinion, should return there…”
“Good morning. General.”
The door opened and the voice entered before the small and compact body from which it emerged. A moment later, a man who looked surprisingly like a well-fed Siamese cat entered the room, with a look of superior amusement on his face. Bottando smiled back genially, with an expression that connoisseurs like Flavia knew to be entirely false.
“Good morning, dottore.” he said. “How nice to see you.”
Dottore Corrado Argan was one of those people that large-scale organizations periodically create for the sole purpose of making the lives of its several members virtually intolerable. He had started off as an art historian—thus giving himself somewhat dubious intellectual credentials which he played on mercilessly—then, finding the Italian and international university system far too sensible to give him a post, had gravitated into the bureaucracy, specifically the beni artistici, the amorphous body which keeps its eye on the national heritage.
After successfully creating chaos in several areas of that fine organization’s activities, he had become suffused with indignation over the way bits of the national heritage kept on going missing, and decided that what the fight against crime really needed to make it effective was the stimulus of his own powerful intellect to focus its activities.
He was not the first to imagine he might make a difference and, to give him very grudging credit, he was certainly enthusiastic. That, of course, mainly had the effect of making him more tiresome. Bottando was well-practised in dealing with periodic memoranda from outsiders demanding action, suggesting campaigns and recommending policies. Long experience had taught him the best way of agreeing profoundly with all interventions, thanking their authors and then ignoring them totally.
What he was not capable of dealing with too well was the outsider moving in, taking over office space and settling down for an extended stay to write reports based on a day-to-day monitoring of activities. Which was what the loathsome Argan had done. For six months now he had read his way through files, sat in on meetings, pipe in mouth, supercilious smile on face, making notes that no one was allowed to see and muttering things about how the department did not conceptualize its policies in a sufficiently holistic fashion.
Bottando, for once, had been rather slow off the mark in meeting the threat, and was now paying the price. Because Argan was so ludicrous, he had not taken the man seriously. Only when his secretary had undertaken a do-it-yourself espionage operation late one evening, and handed over photocopies of the innumerable reports and memoranda the man had been sending off to those in high places, did the magnitude of the problem become clear.
In brief, Argan wanted Bottando’s job, and was trying very hard to get it. His line was that, in these days of international crime, old-fashioned policing (for which read old-fashioned policemen, as personified by General Taddeo Bottando) was no longer sufficient. What was needed was an efficient organization (i.e. a cheaper one) headed up by an executive skilled in man-management and resource allocation (i.e. himself). No mention in any of this of catching criminals or recovering lost works of art.
War had broken out, in a quiet and civilized fashion. Bottando found that his tardiness had blocked off the obvious response: it was too late now to chuck the man out for fear of being accused of wanting to hide something. As much as possible, he fed him false information, so that he could be made to look a fool. Unfortunately, Argan, as an art historian, didn’t think facts were so important anyway and carried on regardless.
On his side, Bottando had the policing establishment, who quite rightly saw enthusiastic amateurs as a threat to them all. On the other. Argan had the bureaucracy, which believed firmly that the quality of an organization depended solely on how many jobs it provided for administrators. And they, as Bottando was aware, were the ones with the check books.
For the past month. Bottando’s counter-offensive had run into the sand. Argan had taken full possession of all the right words, like efficiency and results and cost-effectiveness, and Bottando had not worked out a way of opposing the man without seeming old. fusty and hidebound. He was reduced, therefore, to grumbling ferociously and hoping Argan would make a mistake. So far, patience had not been rewarded, mainly because Argan didn’t actually do anything except watch other people and say, with the benefit of hindsight, how it should have been done better.
“And how are we this morning?” said this walking insult to all the traditions of good policing. “Still solving those crimes, I hear. I couldn’t help overhearing your fascinating discourse on criminal detection.”
Bottando scowled at him. “I hope you found it instructive.”
“Very helpful, yes. An important Etruscan site robbed overnight, I see?”
That was the other trouble with him. He always had a quick look through the overnight reports so that he had this vague patina of being on top of things. Bottando had been diverted by Giotto and hadn’t got around to it yet.
“I know,” he replied steadily nonetheless. “But there’s not much we can do until we have a full report on what was stolen.” Always a safe remark, that.
“Oh, I think we should get involved a bit earlier than that. Nice case like this, looks very good. We have to keep up the department profile, after all. And the destruction of our heritage through the spoliation of sites of immense historical significance…”
And off he went, talking away as though he were instructing a class of five-year-olds. That was another problem with him, Bottando had once explained gloomily to a sympathetic colleague in Corruption one evening. Quite apart from the fact that he could never resist an opportunity to be didactic, Argan was more of a marketing executive than a policeman. He didn’t care how effective the department was as long as it looked good.