2
At about eight that evening, Flavia di Stefano sighed, dumped the remainder of her work, finished and unfinished, in the ‘out’ basket and walked briskly out of the office. It had been a busy day, and not a particularly satisfying one.
After the visit to Santa Barbara, the rest of her day had been taken up with routine enquiries about the Mantini, all of them frustrating for someone who loved finding corruption in high places. Everything about the transaction was entirely legal. The owner had wanted to sell, the buyer had taken the picture to England and had been scrupulous about informing everybody of his intentions. All the forms had been filled in properly, and every legal obstacle with the arts ministry, the treasury and the customs surmounted by the rulebook.
A model of a respectable art dealer in operation. Except that Sir Edward Byrnes, prince of London art dealers, might have been taking a Raphael out rather than some piece of junk. But an afternoon spent combing through the penal code had produced nothing which gave them a case. If Byrnes had painted over the Raphael and concealed the fact, a clear crime. If he had smuggled it out, ditto. If he had stolen it, no trouble. In all those cases they could probably have recovered the picture. But, as far as she could tell, there was nothing against taking out a Raphael covered with a Mantini, if you were not the one who’d put the Mantini over it in the first place. And Byrnes would say he didn’t know there was anything special about the picture at all. He’d be lying through his teeth, of course, but nothing could be done about it.
It was annoying. Doubly annoying, in fact. Flavia took it for granted that all art dealers were crooked at some level. Their business, after all, consisted of buying things that they knew the sellers could get more for elsewhere. Byrnes, however, was an absolute model of propriety. Utterly fluent in Italian, he often donated works to Italian museums and lent other pieces for exhibitions. His services in other matters had been rewarded with honours in Italy and France, as well as with his knighthood. By reputation a distinguished and learned man, there was not a trace of his ever having even bent the rules, let alone broken them. It was infuriating and, to Flavia, merely demonstrated that he was too clever to get caught.
It was also annoying because the Italian woman, in this if not much else, was patriotic. For hundreds of years the rest of the world had picked over Italy and removed its greatest art treasures. Nowhere in Italy now was there a museum that compared with the National Galleries in London or Washington, or the Louvre in Paris. Many paintings only remained in Italy because they were stuck on to the walls, though she had even heard that one American millionaire in the twenties had offered to buy the church in Assisi so that the Giotto frescos decorating it could be shipped back to Arizona. For Italians to lose a Raphael was dreadful, even if they had not even known they had it.
Grumbling thus to herself, Flavia walked quickly along the streets, heading towards the Piazza Navona. She had agreed to meet her erstwhile prisoner for dinner, so she could go over some of the details of his story in an atmosphere that might make him more forthcoming. Not that she thought Argyll had been lying. But an interrogation by the police after a night in the cells often makes people forget little details.
The hurry was because she had almost forgotten. As she walked, she checked her handbag; the strap around her neck, Roman fashion, to guard against pickpockets. There was enough to pay for dinner for two. She had a feeling that her fellow-diner was short of funds, and taking men out to dinner always gave her an agreeable feeling. Her mother would never have gone out with a man on her own. Although she was a liberal sort of mother and countenanced such behaviour in her youngest, the idea of her daughter paying would still have shocked her greatly.
She had arranged to meet her guest at a nearby trattoria. It was not a particularly special one, but near to her apartment, and reliable. Like most Roman eating establishments, it served wonderful pasta, magnificent antipasti and dreadful main courses. Unlike Turin, which really knew what meat was, Romans seemed satisfied with any sort of boot leather. No matter: she was used to it now. But Roman food was still about the only thing that made her nostalgic for her home town.
Argyll was sitting at a table in the corner and waved cautiously at her as she entered. Ordinarily he would have been good-enough looking, in an English sort of way, not that that sort of thing normally appealed much to her. Tallish, fair-haired, conservatively and not very well-dressed by Italian standards. Most remarkable of all, perhaps, were his hands, which were long and delicate. He had wrung them together incessantly during the formal interview. They looked as though they would have been better employed playing the violin, or something. At least, he didn’t now seem to be twitching and fiddling so much.
Being freed from temporary incarceration indeed seemed to have done him good, and Flavia remarked on the fact.
‘For someone who has just mislaid a Raphael you seem remarkably cheerful,’ she said.
He beamed at her. ‘I suppose so. By rights I ought to be dreadfully depressed. On the other hand, of course, the whole business proves I’m right, even though it wasn’t quite the type of public acclaim I’d had in mind. Besides which, being arrested by the police is quite interesting, in an odd sort of way.’
‘They didn’t treat you badly, then?’
‘Not at all. Charming people. They even let me go out for lunch, as long as I promised to be back in my cell in three hours. I can’t see the boys in blue in London operating in quite such a free and easy fashion.’
‘I imagine that by then they’d decided you weren’t a public menace. Didn’t the whole business upset you at all, though?’
‘Well, yes, it did,’ Argyll replied, tucking in to his plate of pasta. ‘It wasn’t what I’d imagined at all. I rather saw myself uncovering the picture and making a grand announcement — after warning the parish priest — in some suitably scholarly magazine. Great sensation. Career made, one happy parish priest and the whole world one Raphael the richer.’
He was speaking in Italian, which he spoke with some fluency. Not perfect by any means, and heavily accented, but more than acceptable. Flavia always believed in speaking Italian to foreigners if possible. Not many of them could, and those who tried could usually only manage phrases culled from guidebooks and street signs, but she felt she should make them practise. She herself had spent years learning English, and saw no reason why others shouldn’t make a similar effort.
‘But now we have one very unhappy parish priest, an even more unhappy Vatican, Byrnes with the picture, and your career very far from made,’ she pointed out. ‘You’re sure that there’s something under it?’
‘I wasn’t at all sure, that’s why I wasted so much money to come here and check. It took me months to get enough to buy the ticket. And I couldn’t check it because it wasn’t there any more. I was just standing around wondering what to do next. And before I could make up my mind, those flatfooted policemen of yours saw the door was open and collared me. But,’ he added, ‘I’m sure there is now. Someone like Byrnes wouldn’t pull off a stunt like this unless he knew it was worthwhile.’
‘What I don’t understand is why you didn’t just write to the priest months ago, tell him your idea, and get permission to have the painting examined. Then he wouldn’t have sold it until it had all been cleared up.’
‘Oh, that’s simple. I’m an idiot. And an apprentice academic as well, which is worse.’ Argyll looked gloomy, put his fork down, the idea clearly having made him lose his appetite. ‘Art history, as you probably know, is a nasty, vicious profession. I reckoned that if I said a word to anyone in Italy, some big shot in the Museo Nazionale would get there first and take the credit. That’s happened before, and who could resist the temptation? It would’ve been the greatest find for years.’