“The what?”’
“A European affair, funded entirely from Brussels, but the minister has managed to establish that it will be headed by an Italian. You, in fact.”
“And sit around writing memoranda which no one will ever read.”
“That depends on yourself. Obviously you will encounter resistance. You would have resisted it fervently yourself. It will be your job to turn this initiative into something.”
“Does this mean lots of foreigners?”’ he asked dubiously.
They both shrugged. “It will be up to you to decide what it is you want to do. Then to get the budget to pay for the staff to do it. Naturally, the staffing structure will have to be balanced.”
“It does mean foreigners.”
“Yes.”
“And where will this fine example of Euro-nonsense be located?”’
“Ah, there now. Obviously, the most sensible place would be in Brussels. However …”
“In that case I’m not going,” Bottando began. “The rain, you know …”
“However,” the civil servant continued, “other factors come into operation here.”
“Such as?”’
“Such as the fact that money spent in Brussels benefits Belgium; money spent in Italy benefits us. And, of course, we are the greatest centre for art. And, come to think of it, for art theft. So we are lobbying hard for it to be located here.”
“And what about my department?”’
“You continue in charge, of course, but you will obviously have to delegate day-to-day operations, which will run in parallel, with some interchange of personnel.”
Bottando sat back in his chair, his good mood dissolving as the full implications dawned on him.
“What choice do I have about this?”’
“None. It is too important for personal preference. It is a matter of national honour. You accept, or someone else gets your job. And you will have to go to Brussels in a week to explain how you will run this organization. So you have a lot of work to do.”
Not knowing whether to be pleased or irritated, Bottando went back to his office to try and figure out all the subtleties and, as was his habit, ended up sleeping on it.
It was not the best time for an anonymous tip-off to come in, warning about an imminent raid to steal one of the city’s works of art.
Jonathan Argyll walked home across Rome at half past six in the evening, taking some, but not a great deal, of pleasure in the bustle of a city anxious to get home for its dinner. He was tired. It had been a long day, what with one thing and another. A lecture in the morning, which was becoming routine now that his stage fright had left him and he had gauged the low expectations of the audience, followed by two hours of sitting in the little broom cupboard officially called his office, fending off students in various levels of distress who came to waste his time. Could they be late on this? Could he photocopy that to spare them the trouble of actually sitting in a library themselves?
No, and no. Much to his great surprise, his random career change nine months previously from art dealer to temporary lecturer in baroque studies had brought out a hitherto unsuspected authoritarian side to his character. Combined with a tendency to grumble about what students were like in his day, he had managed to institute a reign of terror for all who were lured into the great mistake of signing up for his course on Roman art and architecture, 1600 to 1750.
The Baroque. The Counter-Reformation. Bernini and Borromini and Maderno and Pozzo. Good lads, all of them. No need for slides or illustrated lectures in this of all cities; just send the idle good-for-nothings on walking tours. On their own on a Monday, escorted by him on a Wednesday. Mens sana in corpore sano. Health and knowledge, all in one package. Cheap at the not inconsiderable price the besotted parents of the little urchins coughed up to add a patina of cultivation to their offspring.
Even more surprisingly, he was quite good at it. His boundless enthusiasm for the more obscure and impenetrable aspects of baroque iconography slowly transferred itself to some of his students. Not many, admittedly; half a dozen out of thirty or so, but this was held by his colleagues to be pretty good going considering the motley collection of raw material they had to work on.
And the great virtue of it all was that he didn’t really have to prepare anything: his only problem was deciding what to leave out. And marking. That was depressing, of course.
“Medieval monks scourged themselves with birch rods; we do the same thing with essays,” the head of his department, a Renaissance man himself, explained in a philosophic vein. “It comes to the same thing in the end. Painful and humiliating, but part of the job. And purifying, in its way: it makes you see the futility of your existence.”
There was, however, a snag. Lurking ambition, somnolent or at least beaten into submission, had been awoken once more by the transition. Old habits and pleasures came back to haunt him. Having taken the job as a temporary measure because of the flaccid state of the art market, Argyll found himself rather liking the business, despite the students. He had even taken out his doctorate, long since forgotten and mouldering on the shelves while he tried to make a living as a dealer, and dusted it off. The itch was upon him once more: the desire to see his name in print. Nothing grand. A little article, with a decent array of footnotes on some minor topic, to get him back into the mood. An excuse for ambling around in the archives. Everybody else was at it; and it was a bit awkward to have lunch with a colleague. What are you working on? It was an inevitable question. It would be pleasant to be able to answer.
What indeed, though? He had been flailing around, trying to come up with something for a couple of months. Nothing, so far, had struck his fancy. Too big, too small or done already. The universal chorus of modern academia. It occupied his mind mightily these days.
Except when there was marking. That was the little nagging detail in the back of his mind which stopped him enjoying the view of Isola Tiburtina as he trudged through the thick fumes of evening carbon monoxide and across the Ponte Garibaldi on his way home. Fifteen essays on Jesuit building programmes. Could have been worse; they might all have managed to pull themselves together and produce something. And judging by the look of it, some of the offerings were going to be a touch thin. In abstract, he loved the conscientious students who worked hard and tried. When he had to mark the result, he loathed the little swots for the reams of paper they produced. But there was nothing to be done about it; a couple of hours of his evening were going to be devoted to reading their efforts, and trying to stay calm when, as was inevitable, one of them informed him that Raphael had been a pope, or that Bernini taught Michelangelo everything he knew about sculpture.
When what he really needed was a nice quiet evening with Flavia, who had promised faithfully to be home early and cook dinner for the first time in weeks. Now that they had, tentatively, decided to recognize reality and get as married in law as they seemed to be in practice, and Argyll had settled into his new job and was no longer fretting continually about his career, life had become as blissful as it could possibly be when you were proposing to link your life’s fortunes to a woman who never knew when her job would allow her to come home.
Not her fault; police work was like that, and she did her best. But it was galling, occasionally, to be so obviously pushed into second place by a purloined chalice, however much a marvel of sixteenth-century Tuscan workmanship it undoubtedly was. All very well, once in a while. But these things kept on vanishing. The thieves never rested. Did they not feel the need for a quiet evening with their feet up now and then like everyone else?
This time, Flavia would be home; she had left a message to that effect not half an hour ago, and Argyll was looking forward to it; he had even done his duty and got all the shopping on the way home so they could have a properly civilized meal together. He was so much looking forward to it that he felt a little anticipatory skip as he turned into the vicolo di Cedro, and began the last stage of the journey home.
And met Flavia coming down the street. She gave him a quick kiss, and looked apologetic.
“You’re going back to the office, aren’t you?”’ he said accusingly. “I know that look.”
“‘Fraid so. Just for a while. I won’t be long.”
“Oh, Flavia. You promised …”
“Don’t worry. I won’t be long.”
“Yes, you will be.”
