The Bernini Bust

Which was fairly easy, as he was back in his hotel room. Flavia discovered him, leg propped up, sitting on the bed reading, with a glass of whisky and an ashtray by his side. Freedom.

Had he been more mobile, he would have leapt up, raced across the room and taken her in his arms when she came in. As it was, he did the best he could, waving enthusiastically, beaming with welcome and beginning to apologise for not moving.

He was not allowed to finish the explanation. Flavia had intended to make some sardonic remark about his carelessness before sitting down for a civil conversation about this bust. Cool and distant. She still hadn't forgiven him for planning to leave Italy.

Somehow or other it all went wrong. She had been angry with him, worried about him and thoroughly alarmed by the news that someone had tried to kill him. The fact that she was able to walk straight through his unlocked door, that he was so dimwitted he was taking no precautions at all, simply pushed her over the edge, and she let rip with a veritable torrent of abuse which completely erased his cheerful welcome.

Briefly summarised, she informed him that he was stupid, inconsiderate, reckless, selfish, a danger to himself and others, blind as a mouse (here her command of English idiom let her down) and thoroughly irritating. Except that she took longer to deliver her opinion, which came complete with innumerable examples stretching back over many weeks, accompanied by much wagging of the finger, elaborated with many baroque turns of phrase - Italian when the supply of English ran out - and was finally spoiled by ending with a lower lip that was beginning to tremble with relief that, after all that and despite his best efforts, he was still in one piece.

For Argyll it was a critical moment. He had two choices; either to pick up the gauntlet and shout back, at which point the reunion he'd been looking forward to would degenerate into a slanging match; or try to calm her down, and run the risk of receiving another torrent based on the thesis that he was, in addition, pompous and condescending.

This he knew very well, as well as he knew Flavia. A ticklish choice, and he took so long trying to make up his mind that he said nothing at all, just looked at her wistfully. Oddly, it was the right thing to do. You can stand, hand on hips, looking pugnacious, for only so long. Sooner or later you have to shift stance, and when she did, he reached out, took her hand and gave it a squeeze.

'I'm so very glad to see you,' he said simply.

She sat down, sniffed loudly and nodded. 'Yeah, well. Me too, I suppose,' she replied.

Chapter Ten

'The trouble is,' Argyll said next day when Flavia's mental faculties had returned to something approaching normal, 'that I'm a bit stuck, you see. The deal was that if I sell this Titian, I keep my job and go back to London. And I've sold it.'

'Can't you just say you don't want to go?'

'Not really, no. Not without resigning or being fired. Besides, Byrnes has done an awful lot for me, and he wants someone there he thinks he can trust.'

'He trusts you?'

'I did say thinks he can trust.'

'Can't you say you need more experience, or something?'

'I've just sold a Titian for a client for a handsome fee. He seems to think that indicates I'm doing quite well.'

'Cancel the sale.'

'But the deal's going through. I can't cancel it. How would I explain to the owner. 'Sorry, but I want to stay in Italy so you'll have to accept only half the price in a year's time?' That's not the way to get ahead, you know. Besides, the real point is that Byrnes wants to draw in his horns a little. Basically, the choice is promotion in London, or unemployment in Rome. And I'm lucky to have the choice.'

'Hmm. Do you want to go to London?'

'Of course not. Who in their right mind would want to live in London if they could stay in Rome? I could stay on and work to commission . . .'

'Do that, then.'

'Yes, but you're missing the point. My big secret.'

'What's that?'

'Essentially,' he confided, 'I'm not a very good art dealer. Without a regular salary, I don't know that I could earn enough to survive. Not at the moment. And on top of that, you didn't seem to care one way or the other.'

'That's not my fault,' she protested. 'Is it my fault your way of declaring undying affection is to offer someone a cup of tea?'

Argyll brushed these details aside. 'The point is, I've now given up the lease on my flat. I will have nowhere to live and nothing to live on.'

'But,' she said, 'what if the museum cancels the sale?'

'They won't.'

'They will if the museum closes. Then you can call Byrnes, say the whole thing was a flop, you're a disaster as an art dealer, and insist that your presence in his London gallery would ensure bankruptcy in a matter of months.'

'And lose my job. Very helpful.'

'But you could sell the Titian to someone else and keep all the commission yourself.'

'If I could sell it. If the owner wanted me to sell it. This place is paying far more than the picture is worth and the market's in a right mess at the moment. I could be sitting on it for months. Besides, I don't know what's going to happen to the museum at all yet. Thanet's worried about Mrs. Moresby, but it's all in the hands of lawyers.'

'Fine. So let's go and find out what the situation is.'

The Moresby seaside retreat, one of the many homes where the happy and united family spent the summer months, was not at all what Argyll had imagined, and certainly far from Flavia's experience. But almost everything in Los Angeles was far from her experience. She had a very traditional notion of cities; cathedral, museum, town hall and railway station telling you where the centre was, historic district, modern suburbs wrapped around separating town from country. Los Angeles is not like that and from the moment she arrived to the moment she left she had not a clue where she was. Only by keeping the Pacific Ocean in view could she tell if she was going north or south, east or west. And it was unexpectedly difficult to tell where the ocean was. Flavia associated beaches with public access but Californians, in this as much else, evidently did things differently. As far as she could see, most of the Pacific had been commandeered for private use, with houses built along the coast specifically to obscure the view for everyone else.

At first sight, chez Moresby was not much to look at. That at least was Flavia's excuse for driving past the first time; turning round and coming back again was not easy, so it was doubly unfortunate that she overshot again heading south. From the road, the place could have been the back end of a seedy restaurant, and the site straight on to the road was not what either of them would have associated with enormous wealth.

Convinced that they were in the wrong place, they walked cautiously round to the front, and changed their minds. It was an extraordinary house, if you like twentieth-century architecture, plate glass windows thirty foot long with uninterrupted views of the Pacific Ocean, and a hand-carved beechwood sundeck about the size of a tennis court.

Of course, it would have helped if the architect had provided an easily findable door, so they could have knocked on it, but fortunately they didn't need one. A man, evidently a servant of some sort, emerged from somewhere and shouted at them. Argyll cupped his hand over his ear and tried to understand what he was saying.

'He's telling us to go away,' Flavia said.

'How do you know that? I can't understand a word he's saying.'

'That's because he's speaking Spanish,' she said, and bellowed back a stream of verbiage in his direction.

He came over, eyed them suspiciously and a lengthy conversation ensued. Argyll was impressed. He didn't know Flavia spoke Spanish. Very irritating; she could do things like that. He had laboured long and hard to acquire his smatterings of language, and had sweated blood over the most regular of imperfect subjunctives. Flavia, in contrast, seemed to pick up the most abstruse grammatical points as casually as someone buying a bar of