'I also mentioned that I—we—could quite possibly recover the painting without paying any ransom, given a moderate bit of good fortune. But I was very firmly told to do nothing of the sort, as you were as well. Pay the money, get the picture back, and forget it. It was made clear that any attempts to prosecute would probably be squashed in that devious way that the state has sometimes. I imagine that the reasoning is that there could be no trial without publicity. And publicity is just what they want to avoid.”
'Hmm.”
'Hmm is as good a reaction as any,' Bottando commented.
'I assume that this man Sabbatini has vanished?”
'Of course. You'd hardly expect him to be at home.”
Flavia shook her head in disbelief. 'You really could have told me all this ...”
Bottando looked properly shamefaced. 'Of course I should have. You're quite right, my dear. Quite right. I should have. But has it made any difference?”
She paused. 'I suppose not. It's just that I always seem to be the last to know anything these days.' She tried, but failed, to make her objection sound as though it was more than mere pique.
'So now we have to bring this thing to a conclusion. Which means we need the money, and some routine for swapping it.”
She sighed heavily, and told him about her morning.
'You have three million dollars in a suitcase in your office?”
'In the safe. And it's in a cardboard box, not a suitcase.”
'Whose money is it?”
'How should I know? Someone close to the prime minister, obviously. Apart from that, I've not a clue.”
'Any arrangements made for the swap?”
'In the next couple of days.”
'I'd better do that, I think.”
Flavia began to protest.
'Orders, Flavia, orders. And probably better in any case. If something goes wrong, I get blamed, not you. I think Friday would be best.”
'Why Friday?”
'Because my retirement starts officially on Friday. Caution, you know. Too late to take my rather reduced pension away, even if it is a complete fiasco.”
8
While all this was going on, Argyll was doing his best to live the life of a country gentleman, absorbing the quiet and peaceful atmosphere of the Tuscan countryside at its most beautiful.
Then he reluctantly puttered into the muniments room, where the superefficient librarian had already got out the Stonehouse dossiers for him and put them on a table by the open doors, and sat down to read.
He did quite well, in the circumstances, these being the growing warmth of the air, the lazy buzzing of the early bees, and the chirruping of the birds as they flew around making their nests in preparation for the summer of endeavor that lay ahead. It would have been so much easier to sit back in his chair and watch them at it, to have let his mind drift while he monitored the thin wispy clouds passing in a leisurely fashion across the sky.
And in truth he did a fair amount of that; several of the clouds received more attention than they strictly deserved. But he did at least drag his mind away for long enough to make a dent in the dreary buff-colored files that lay in front of him. Long enough, indeed, to garner everything he needed for his paper, thanks to the librarian and her photocopying machine. While she was busy, he turned his attention to searching for information on the little painting of the Virgin.
A painting of the Immaculate Conception: late fifteenth century, oil on wood, with no previous history; it simply popped into visibility as an indeterminate Madonna in 1940
when Stonehouse bought it in London after he'd fled back there at the start of the war.
Not even the name of a dealer to help out. There was nothing odd about that: only a privileged few paintings can be traced back very far, and the reluctance of auctioneers to help out makes matters worse. Stone-house bought it for forty guineas; hardly vast riches, even for the period.
He then took it back to his villa in Tuscany, had it cleaned—a bill for 125 lire was attached—and hung it in a bedroom on the second floor where it stayed until it was moved to London and put up for sale with most of the other Stonehouse pictures in 1966. This, according to the papers, was something of a scandal, which was good; there is nothing like a bit of naughtiness for putting up value. The newspaper clippings demonstrated the impact the auction had made; not because the sale was so valuable but because the collection was the biggest example of wholesale smuggling in recent Italian history.
To take a painting out of the country without permission was one thing; to take 124
of them without so much as a by-your-leave was quite another. The younger Stonehouse had maintained (rightly) that nearly all the pictures had been bought in London in the first place and he was merely taking them home. The Italians maintained (also rightly) that they were still Italian pictures and export permission was required.
Sorting it all out took six months and a vast amount of correspondence, none of which, fortunately, was necessary for Argyll's case.
Unfortunately, it seemed ever more likely that the picture, however old, was no great masterpiece. He was disappointed, but not surprised. In the listing of the Stonehouse collection the attribution was the same as the one in the auction catalog, and the picture hadn't even been on general display; rather, it had been consigned to a lesser bedroom where it had as company a pastel portrait of the collector's grandmother by one of the more unmemorable Scottish painters of the Edwardian era on its left and a French revolutionary print depicting the execution of Marie Antoinette on its right. What could you make of that? Did Stonehouse see granny as a cross between the Virgin Mary and the Queen of France?
There was one simple and obvious answer. Go and have a short walk in the park and a nap for the rest of the afternoon before drinks with Stonehouse Junior. Then a good night's sleep, and back home the next day. One of the rare advantages of art history is that, when you do find yourself with time on your hands, you are often in an excellent position to make the most of it. There have to be some compensations for the salary, after all.
This plan he followed without deviation, apart from briefly postponing his nap by five minutes to phone Flavia, failing to reach her. Thus, at six o'clock sharp, he was to be found walking slowly up the path to Robert Stonehouse's cottage. Or what Stone-house called a cottage. He may have come down in the world, but not to the level occupied by most of mankind; the house was still impressively large, with a huge and opulently decorated entrance hall, the black-and-white—patterned marble of the floor already doing its job of damping down the heat of the day and rendering the interior pleasantly cool.
Stonehouse was all hospitality and apology, both for his incivility of the morning and for his inability to offer him anything more than a drink or two.
'I do not cook myself,' he said with no regret at all. 'I know I should and that it demonstrates how I live in the past. It is just that I find the past a more pleasant place.
I would rather live there with bread and cheese than in the present by a stove.”
'You must eat more than that.”
'Five days a week someone from the village comes to look after me. Today is not one of her days. She is old, unfortunately. If she dies on me I will be faced with a choice. Modern life or starvation. Which do you think is best?”
Argyll, who rather prided himself on his skills with pot and pan—largely without justification, although his abilities were superior to those of his wife—acknowledged that it was a difficult choice, but suggested that some people found that cooking gave considerable pleasure. Stonehouse was not convinced.
'Wear a pinny, have your fingers smelling of garlic or fish? No; I see the pleasure in eating, just as there is delight in the appreciation of art. But the idea that cooks, or painters for that matter, are anything but vulgar artisans I find unacceptable. Have you ever met a pleasant, intelligent painter? One you would be happy to have in your house? Of course not.”
'I imagine you must have been brought up with painters in the house.”
'Good heavens, no. My father once made the mistake of inviting that Modigliani fellow, but threw him out. Damn man tried to seduce my mother. That was before I was born, of course.”
