know the consequences of breaking our word.”
She stood up. He did the same, and held out his hand. She ignored it, and walked out.
She left his office and the building, breath coming in short sharp gasps once more, her head swimming with the effects of nausea, running to get through the main entrance of the chamber and into the sunshine beyond. She didn't even remember that Argyll, who ran up to her with an anxious look on his face, having been searching the streets for her for hours, should still have been in Tuscany.
Instead, she threw up on his shoes before he could say anything.
20
If the size of the Flavia's severance package was any indication of Di Lanna's willingness to keep to his side of the bargain, then they were safe indeed. Breaths were sucked in, lips puckered, clouds of envy wafted swiftly over the faces of colleagues like scudding clouds in the autumn sky. Even Flavia was taken aback by it all, but felt no pleasure in the fact that she would now be paid slightly more for doing nothing than she had been for working flat out for years. What she had had to do to reach this state weighed on her, and the fact that nothing whatsoever could have been done to change the situation made it no better.
She packed up her office, and then she and Argyll packed up their apartment after a short search to find a quiet house about thirty kilometers outside Florence, a little way out of a lovely village that still had some Italians living in it. There, as the months passed, and she waddled more and her feet swelled up, the contentment returned, little by little. She painted her new kitchen. Chose curtains. Cooked and canned and froze.
Sat quietly and dozed in the shade for longer and longer.
Argyll did his own form of nesting. He irritated Flavia mightily by fussing over her quite unnecessarily, giving her long scolding looks if she walked more than a hundred meters without taking a rest. He took to studying passing infants in strollers to see what they were like, receiving little in return except screams from the infants and suspicious looks from their mothers. He resigned from his job just in time to avoid having to give his fatuous paper on collecting, and, finally, waved good-bye to his pictures on the truck taking them to London. Then he followed them so that he could attend the sale. In between he revisited Bottando's picture, and sweet-talked Flavia's friend Aldo into letting him into the secret collection of the Vatican. When he saw it, he almost laughed, until he realized how all these pictures must have got there. Perfectly obvious, it was, when they were seen together. Add that to the drawing in the Uffizi, and he didn't even need Bulovius's notes.
The sale was a splendid success. Thanks to Mary Verney bidding frequently through several intermediaries and paying cash afterward, the four separate auctions in which Argyll's pictures came up established a minor legend in the art trade. At the same time, Argyll's stock soared as a man evidently cleverer than he seemed. Each picture shot through the estimate and climbed to dizzying heights. A pencil sketch by Rossini: estimate ?200, sold for ?3,500. A small oil on panel, Descent from the Cross, by Cantarini: estimate ?1,500, sold for ?14,500.
On it went. Seventy-three lots, and by the time the last was sold, an acceptable portion of the ransom money had been washed, cleaned, and ironed through the auction houses' financial departments, and transferred into Argyll's bank account. Mary Verney was substantially poorer and in possession of several dozen minor pictures for which she had no room whatsoever.
And while he was in London for an exhibition opening party at Edward Byrnes's gallery, Argyll mentioned that he and Flavia, with Bottando as well, maybe, were thinking of setting up in business for themselves, looking for missing pictures in a discreet fashion for those nervous about calling in the police.
'Really?' said one old man, a collector of prints who lived in the far north of Italy, near the Austrian Alps. Argyll had known him vaguely for years and had long liked him.
'In that case, perhaps I might consult you over a delicate matter that has been bothering me for some time ...”
Argyll hesitated, then smiled. 'Well, ' he said. 'We'll have to see. I'll let you know.
First of all I have some business with the Vatican.”
'Really?' the old man said again.
'Yes. A little matter of a triptych. Quite an important one.”
'Really? Who by?”
Argyll smiled, considered, then whispered in his ear. The old man looked shocked, and recoiled.
'Good Lord,' he said. 'Really?”
