So policemen patrolled regularly, and the camera, once installed, was perhaps too expensive to take down again. It was Alberto who pointed this out to her, and suggested she came round immediately for a video show.
She got there in fifteen minutes, and was treated to the most encouraging sight she had seen for days. A terrible picture, taken at long range, and certainly not good enough for use in a court, should it ever come to that. But enough to give them an idea, to identify the type of car used, and three letters of a registration number.
“Let’s see it again,” Flavia said, and they sat and watched as once more Peter Burckhardt and a man several inches taller than him came down the street from the direction of the hotel and got into a Lancia.
“Doesn’t look under great duress. No gun pointed at him. Nothing like that.”
“No.”
“Got the car?”’
“Still checking. It should be here any moment. Have you made any progress?”’
“Not really. That is, I have someone I’m desperately interested in, but I can’t find any way in to her.”
“Her?”’
“An Englishwoman. Who is more interested in art than she should be. The trouble is, I’m fairly certain she didn’t steal the picture.”
“I thought we’d established Burckhardt did.”
“Have we? I’m not so sure. He didn’t break into the place, after all. Someone opened that door from the inside for him. What’s more, I’m not sure he hit Father Xavier, either.”
Flavia didn’t want to go into any more details, and didn’t have to, as she was interrupted by the arrival of a computer print-out. “Bingo,” Alberto said. “A run of luck for once.”
“What do you mean?”’
“It’s a rented car. Picked up at the airport last Friday by one M. K. Charanis. Greek passport, staying at the Hassler.”
“Better go and get him then. Can you rustle up some manpower?”’
Flavia got home at ten, more tired than she could believe, starving to death andwitha blinding headache. Argyll took one look at her, suppressed a desire to mutter about how late it was, and instead ran a bath and fetched some food. She was so exhausted she could barely eat but, after he had given her a broadside of tender loving care, she began to lose the feeling that her neck muscles were tied in knots. The bath helped too.
“We were close,” she said after telling Argyll about the hunt for Charanis, waving a sponge in the air for emphasis. “if we’d only had a little bit of luck …”
It had been gruelling. The result would have been the same whatever they’d done but, while spotting this man showed the carabinieri at their best, trying to arrest him brought out all their worst characteristics. Too many anti-terrorist training courses, that was the problem. Rather than Flavia and Alberto, with a couple of supporters, going round and knocking on the door of his hotel room, someone, somewhere—and Flavia suspected Alberto’s immediate superior, who was a man with a flair for the unnecessarily melodramatic-decided now was the time to give their Los Angeles-style rapid response unit a whirl.
The result had been total chaos which—quite apart from enraging the management of one of the most expensive hotels in the country and creating a very bad impression among a large number of its guests—probably served only to warn Charanis that he had been noticed, assuming he watched the news on the television station which sent along a crew to film an entertaining display of official muscle. At least Flavia persuaded Alberto to put out some vague story about drug smugglers to try and keep them away, although she doubted it would do much good.
As for the rest of it, she had watched appalled as truck after truck of heavily armed idiots ran around waving guns, shouting into radios, getting into position so that they could interdict, negativize or otherwise arrest and render harmless a man who had, in fact, checked out of the hotel the previous evening and was nowhere to be seen.
And all they had to do was ask in the first place. May the Good Lord defend us from such imbecilities.
“That’s a pity,” Argyll said when she finished and he offered her a towel.
“You can say that again.”
“Is he a regular customer?”’
She shook her head. “Not that I know of, no. Never heard of him before. We’ve put out enquiries to the Greek police, to see if they know anything about him. God only knows how long that will take. Last time we asked them anything the man we were interested in died of old age before we got a reply.”
“Sort of makes the case for Bottando’s international bureau, doesn’t it?”’
“Sort of makes the case for people answering enquiries. I don’t think you need set up huge expensive organizations.”
“What do you do now?”’
“Go to bed, I think.”
“I mean about this icon.”
“Sit and wait. The carabinieri can look for this Charanis character; I can’t do much with Mary Verney at the moment. Apart from talking to Father Xavier tomorrow there’s not a lot to do.”
She dried herself, with Argyll helping, and breathed a sigh of relief. “Human again,” she said. “You didn’t find anything interesting, did you?”’
“Depends.”
“Depends on what?”’
“On what you think is interesting, of course. Hang on.”
He walked out of the bathroom, letting a draught of cool night air blow in as he went, and came back a few minutes later.
“Look.” He held up a Xerox, then flicked it over to show a mass of scribbling on the other side which indicated how hard he’d been working on her behalf.
“Spirits,” he said. “Visitations by. Anthropological study of. Structure and meaning in the magical appearance of gifts. It’s an article Burckhardt published three years ago.”
“So?”’
“That icon was brought by angels, remember?”’
“What does it say?”’
“According to this, it’s a common enough story. Angels seem to have worked overtime as delivery boys in the Middle Ages. Forever running around with paintings and statues, even whole houses in the case of Loretto, and leaving them in unlikely places. The general argument is that it is often enough a folk memory with some substantial foundation.”
“Such as what?”’
“The example he quotes here is a church in Spain, near the Pyrenees, which has a miraculous statue. Also delivered by an angel, according to the legend. He reckons it was donated by a generous benefactor who distributed money to the poor to mark the occasion. This got confused as the generations passed and the gift of the statue became associated with the money, then it was thought that it was the statue which gave the money, so naturally it became a miracle. And the person who gave it turned into a delivering angel.”
“San Giovanni is associated with a cure for the plague.”
He nodded. “Better food, more resistance to disease. I suppose it fits.”
“Does it say that?”’
“No. That’s me making it up. However, there is one reference to San Giovanni; nothing relevant, but he was obviously in the archive there once. That’s interesting, don’t you think?”’
She nodded dubiously. “Not much to go on, though.”
“I’m doing my best. There’s a lot of stuff to digest here, you know. It’s hard when you’re starting from scratch.”
“And I can’t think of anyone better to scratch away. Would you mind keeping on going? See if you can dig up anything more specific?”’
He nodded. “All right. But only for one reason.”
“What’s that?”’
He grinned at her. “I quite enjoy it.”
