to go to Gubbio first. But I thought you ought to pop off and recover this bust yourself. Get you out of the office for a bit.'
She gave him a suspicious look, and he smiled sweetly and innocently back at her.
Flavia directed her third taxi of the day to an apartment block in a street off the via Veneto. No missing art dealers were in residence, and the apartment was as well defended as the American Embassy down the street.
But the caretaker had a set of keys, and it didn't take long to persuade him to hand them over, even though he was not at all impressed by the warrant Flavia had written out for herself in the back of the taxi. She also relieved him of the mail, to give herself something interesting to read in the elevator.
Di Souza's letters were not enlightening. Flavia learnt only that he was in danger of having his electricity cut off for non-payment, was being asked to tear his American Express card in two and send both halves back to the organisation, and had unaccountably failed to settle an outstanding bill with a tailor.
When she finally got through the formidable array of locks and metal plating on the door, she began to search. Initially not knowing where to start, she employed the impressionistic method, flitting about and inspecting whatever took her fancy, particularly satisfying her curiosity about what lay under the bed. Not even fluff. A tidy man, she decided. The cavity under her own bed resembled a fullblown dust storm.
Then she settled down to a more methodical approach, beginning at the inlaid Empire writing desk, moving on to the filing cabinet before the more whimsical business of investigating down the sides of gilt Venetian sofas or peering behind baroque history pieces on the walls.
Neither fancy nor professionalism produced much to justify her diligence. The only thing Flavia was sure of at the end was that Hector di Souza was no businessman. His accounting procedure was more than a little quaint. Notes of purchases were written on the back of cigarette packets which were then crushed and filed. Most of his assets - except for those which were used for sitting on or hung on walls - seemed to be in a moderately sized bundle of bank notes stuffed in a drawer. His bank statement revealed wild and inexplicable fluctuations, but nothing so grand as to suggest that several million dollars had recently come his way. That, indeed, tallied with the checks Bottando had instituted with assorted banks. He had found no trace of surreptitious Swiss accounts and the bank manager in Rome, asked if di Souza had recently made an enormous deposit, guffawed heartily. Any deposit at all, he indicated, would have been a bit of a novelty. Apart from that, there was a small file labelled 'Stock' but it contained no note of a Bernini. Not even an Algardi.
So, what did the apartment tell her? Di Souza was not in the big league of dealers. The apartment was fairly small and the furniture not of the highest quality. You can tell an art dealer by the chairs he sits on. Argyll's, she remembered, had the stuffing coming out of them. Di Souza made a reasonable income, assuming that most of it was hidden and never appeared in his account books. No one could live off the tiny sums entered officially for taxation purposes. A purveyor of middle-ranking stuff to middle-ranking collectors. In all, not the sort of man you'd expect to find selling major works of art to places like the Moresby. No more than Argyll was, really.
But there they both were, selling stuff to the place. Was this relevant? Probably not, or at least, not yet. But it was a coincidence, as Bottando had noted. She put the thought to the back of her mind, in case it came in handy later on.
Chapter Seven
Jonathan Argyll woke up with a splitting headache and spent some fifteen minutes staring at the ceiling and wondering where he was. It took a long time to retrieve his thoughts, put them all in the correct order and reach a satisfactory conclusion to explain why he wasn't tucked up in bed in his apartment in Rome.
He proceeded by association. First he remembered his Titian, then the imminent return to England that it implied. The search for the cause of this brought back the memory of the Moresby, which led straight on to di Souza, the theft and the murder.
His head punished him for the gruelling early morning exercise with a sudden stab of pain, and he groaned quietly.
'You OK?' asked a voice, out of his field of vision, somewhere to the right. He thought about it for a while, trying to place it. No, he decided, he didn't recognise it.
So he grunted, vaguely, in response.
'Nasty crash you had,' the voice went on. 'You must be pretty mad about it.'
He thought about that as well. A crash, eh? No, in fact, he wasn't pretty mad about it. Or at least, he wouldn't be if his headache went. So he murmured he was fine, thanks for asking.
The voice tut-tutted disapprovingly, and said that was the post traumatic shock syndrome talking. When he woke up a bit more, he really would be mad. Argyll, who rarely managed to get even slightly upset about anything, didn't bother to contradict him.
'And then,' continued the voice, 'I bet you'll want to do something about it.'
'No,' he murmured. 'Why should I?'
'It's your public duty,' the voice explained.
'Oh,' he said.
'Cars like that on the road. It shouldn't be allowed. These people have to be stopped, or they'll kill us all. It's a disgrace, and you can help make California a safer place. I'd be happy to help.'
'That's very kind of you,' Argyll said, wondering where he could get coffee, aspirin and cigarettes.
'It'll be a privilege,' said the voice.
'Say, who are you?' came another voice, from the left this time. It was slightly more familiar. Argyll considered opening his eyes and turning his head to see, but decided it was much too ambitious.
There was a restful muttering of voices, and he considered going back to sleep again. Splendid stuff, sleep, he thought as the voices began to increase in both pitch and volume.
One voice, he noted - voice two, so to speak - was protesting, and accusing voice one of being a vulture. Voice one identified itself as Josiah Ansty, attorney at law, specialist in auto damage claims, and said it was looking after the interests of injured citizens. If voice two hadn't rented out badly maintained vehicles, it wouldn't be sued. He was going to have to pay for this.
This gave Argyll a lot to think about. Voice two he identified as the man called Chuck who rented him his nice 1971 Cadillac, which, he now remembered, had gone through the window of that shop. The other point was the bit about suing. Whoever said anything about that?
The conversation was continuing, meanwhile, over his prostrate body. The voice of Josiah Ansty, attorney, was saying that the brake cable had been badly maintained.
Chuck interrupted here, and said that was a pile of crap. He himself had serviced the car only last week. That brake cable was screwed on tight with a double screw. No way could it have come loose. No way.
Ansty said that merely proved how culpably incompetent he was, and went on to request that he not be poked in the chest like that.
Chuck then called Ansty a little creep, and there drifted into Argyll's slumbering consciousness the vague sound of grunts and scuffling followed by a shout from a long way away saying to stop that immediately and that this was a hospital not a place for a barroom brawl.
Oh, he thought, as a loud cry of pain accompanied that tinkling sound that results when a shelf of surgical equipment crashes to the ground, that's where I am. In hospital.
That's all right, then, he thought, as he drifted off to sleep to the sound of people calling for the police. Now I know.
'You OK?' came a voice as Argyll surfaced again, hours later.
Oh, God, not again, he thought.
'Hear you've been causing a bit of excitement.'
This time he placed the voice. Detective Morelli. For the first time his eyes opened, more or less focused, and turned his head without regretting it.
'Me?'
'People fighting over your body all morning. A lawyer and a car rental man; nearly wrecked the place. Didn't you notice?'
'Vaguely. I remember something. What was a lawyer doing here?'
'Oh, them. Jackals. They turn up everywhere. How are you doing?'
'Fine, I think. Let's see.' He quickly checked to see that everything was where it ought to be.
