there and beat the hell out of an old priest and took it.”
“I don’t know who it was,” she continued. “But a man called Burckhardt was there. Do you know him?”’
Strangely, although no great connoisseur, he did seem to know who Burckhardt was. “Yes,” she went on. “The French icon man. That’s the one. He’s in Rome and I assume he’s after the icon as well. I don’t think he attacked the priest. But he went and put something in a left-luggage compartment. Ostiense. C37.”
Another pause. “Certainly not. I am damned if I’m going to spend a day hanging around a train station. Go and ask Burckhardt. He must be in a hotel somewhere.”
“That’s your problem,” she went on. “Call his gallery in Paris and ask where he is. Even you should be able to manage that. But I can’t steal a picture if someone’s already stolen it. We’ll have to meet later on. I can’t see what else you expect me to do.”
Might work, she thought. Even he couldn’t expect miracles from her.
Then she went back to her hotel, emerging from her room ten minutes after she arrived through the back door again.
She’d slept wonderfully, she told the waiter who brought her breakfast. Must be the Roman air. A day in an art gallery today, she thought. Which one did he recommend?
When Argyll had gone off to investigate the market for dinner, and Alberto returned to his paperwork—love to help, but it’s the end of the month, could you manage without me until tomorrow?-Flavia hit the beat, leaving a message for Giulia, if ever she came back from lunch, to join her. A tiresome business, knocking on doors time after time, asking the same questions and getting the same answers, but it had to be done. When Giulia finally appeared, she sent her to start at one end of the street, she took the other, and they methodically worked their way through the apartment blocks, floor by floor, occupant by occupant, until they met in the middle.
“Did you see or hear anything at about five o’clock this morning?”’
“Of course not. I was asleep.”
“No. My bedroom is at the back.”
“Pardon? You’ll have to speak up. I’m a little deaf.”
“The only thing I heard was the refuse collectors. They do it deliberately, you know, making such a noise, trying to stop respectable people from sleeping. Do you know …?”’
“What do you think I am, a Peeping Tom?”’
“Go away. I’m busy. The baby’s just thrown up on the floor.”
And so on. An entire street and, as far as Flavia could discover, the desired combination of a nosy insomniac with good hearing and a bedroom facing in the direction of the monastery did not exist.
“Complete bloody waste of time. And my feet are killing me,” Flavia said when she got home afterwards, proud at least of coming home in time for dinner and an evening pretending to be normal and civilized. She took off her shoes and waggled her toes in Argyll’s direction to show him what she meant. They looked perfectly fine to him.
“What you need is a nice quiet desk job.”
“What I need is a glass of gin. Do you know anything about icons?”’
Argyll paused as he unscrewed the bottle. “Nothing.”
“You must know something.”
“No. Zilch. Zero. Very specialist trade, icons. I couldn’t tell a medieval one from a modern one. It’s shameful to admit it, but they all look a bit the same to me.”
“You never sold any?”’
“Not likely. It’s bad enough trying to make money dealing when you do know what you’re doing. Besides, there hasn’t been much money in them in the last few years. There’s a decent market now, of course. Prices are beginning to go up again, now that the old Soviet Union has virtually been cleaned out.”
“What do you mean?”’
“Supply and demand. Icons have been a terrible drudge recently. Once Russia opened up, almost every icon in the country was pinched in a matter of months. The dealers in the west were virtually knee deep in them. Some amazing quality, as well. The sort of thing major museums would have fought over ten years back, you could scarcely give away.”
“So what sort of price are we dealing with here?”’
“Depends. How good was this?”’
“I’ve no idea. But the maximum possible? What’s the highest price you could imagine?”’
“Biggest I’ve heard of is a quarter of a million dollars.”
“I see. And was this one in the monastery in that category?”’
“Not a clue. I doubt it very much. It seemed a bit sad.”
“Sad?”’
“Hmm. Neglected. Unloved. Not the sort of thing collectors fight over. I gave it a candle.”
Flavia yawned mightily. Jonathan’s opinions were frequently a little wayward, but he had good instincts; far better than hers ever were. When people were concerned, of course, it was the other way around, but he had a sensitivity for paintings which he rarely managed for real human beings.
“A candle,” she said sleepily. “Why did you do that?”’
“It seemed appropriate. And it thanked me.”
“What?”’
“Well, not the painting, of course, but the cleaning lady. A sort of displaced thanks, if you like.”
“I see. Why did it seem lonely?”’
“Well, it was set up to have a lot of people around it,” he explained. “There was room for hundreds of candles, and enough space to have lots of people praying. As there was no one there, and no candles, it had this air of having fallen on hard times. It was obviously once considered of greater importance. Probably these legends.”
“Could you do me a favour and find out something a bit more concrete about it?”’
“You’ve heard the story?”’
“About an angel bringing it?”’
“That’s the one.”
“I have. And you may find me unduly hard-headed, but I’m a bit sceptical. Besides, when did these angels bring it?”’
“Only one angel,” Argyll said. “Only one.”
“My apologies.”
“I can go and find out if you like. Or try to. And when I can’t find anything, I’ll ask our Orthodox and Islamic man.”
“Does he know about icons?”’
“Written enough on them. How did you get on today?”’
Flavia waved her hand and yawned again. “Don’t ask. It’s been enormously frustrating. I got the address of Burckhardt’s hotel, but he’s nowhere to be seen. Oh, damnation.”
“What’s the matter?”’
“I’ve just had an idea. One of the people I talked to this afternoon said the only thing they heard early this morning was the refuse collectors.”
“So?”’
“So they might have seen something. Which means I have to go down to the central depot tomorrow morning and find the gang that did the road. I have a feeling they start early, as well.”
“You’d better get an early night, then.”
Flavia didn’t answer. She was already halfway to the bedroom, yawning so much she didn’t hear. The conversation had lasted ten minutes. Not much for an entire evening.
The depot was a bleak parking lot for sleeping trucks on the outskirts of Rome where, every morning at dawn, several hundred men gathered to go forth in the unending and frustrating attempt to keep the city moderately tidy and halfway hygienic. Every day, they drove off in a billowing cloud of exhaust fumes, only to return many hours later covered in dust and the smell of rotting vegetables, groaning with the weight of discarded paper, plastic sacks, potato peelings and old newspapers. Every day they had a few hours after they disgorged their aromatic load to rest and restore their energies, before setting out again; they had done so since before the days of
