'Big, round, middle of a field. No other cars around that I could see, so he must have trekked across the fields to get there.”
She took a sip. 'Then we had a fight.”
'Who?”
'Me and Bottando. He pulled rank on me. And appealed to my sense of fair play.”
'You're an Italian. You don't have a sense of fair play.”
'Yes I do. Anyway, he started by saying, poor little woman, it's much too dangerous.
A bit like you. And I told him to get lost. Then he said that he was still my boss, so he was ordering me to let him do the swap, and I told him to get lost again. Then he pointed out that this was his last ever official act as a policeman that was going to be worth anything.”
'Good point,' said Argyll.
'So I let him do it.”
'And?”
'And that's it. He waddled off into the darkness with a case of money, and waddled back ten minutes later with a Claude Lorrain. Unscratched, untouched. The man had been there, hiding behind some rubble, they had a brief conversation, and it was all very businesslike. No danger at all. A pleasure to do business with, in Bottando's opinion. A man of his word, Signer Sabbatini.”
'How do you know it was him?”
Flavia shrugged. 'I don't. He was wearing the regulation ski mask, Bottando said. But what he could see fitted his description. Frankly, I don't really care at the moment.
We've got the picture back. National scandal averted.”
'You are sure of that?”
'Oh yes,' she said with a smile at his ability to worry. 'I'd told Macchioli in advance and we went straight to the museum. He'd been pacing up and down as much as you, I think. He was a complete wreck by the time we arrived. He examined it very carefully and was satisfied. Not a copy slipped in in the hope we wouldn't notice or anything like that. The ultraviolet markings on the back were all still there, canvas repaired in the right places, and so on.”
'So he's happy.”
'Delirious. As was the prime minister. Well, delirious is not perhaps the word. But he did say thank you. Which is something. The only blot on the horizon is that I am under official instruction to lay off Sabbatini.”
'Why?”
She shrugged. 'Because there is nothing we can do to him without revealing that we had that picture stolen from underneath our noses. And that, the powers that be consider, is more important than putting him behind bars.”
'So he's got away with it? Lucky fellow. Or clever.”
'Isn't he. However,' she went on, 'there is nothing to say I can't make his life as miserable as possible. And if he so much as commits a parking offense, I'll pull his head off.”
She smiled happily at the prospect.
'I suppose,' Argyll said. 'And my congratulations. Now for the really important business. Did you talk to Bottando?
'What about?”
'That picture. The Immaculate Conception. Did you ask who gave it to him?”
Flavia looked puzzled. 'Oh, that,' she said eventually. 'Sorry. I forgot. My mind was on other things. I'll do it next time I see him. Now, can we go to bed? I'm so tired I feel I'm about to die ...”
For the next few days, life returned almost to normal—or not, in fact, because it was so quiet and peaceful. Argyll delivered his last lecture, began his vacation, and came close to starting serious work on his putative paper. Flavia was equally underemployed as the thieves, burglars, and other criminals of Italy had momentarily, it seemed, run out of inspiration and enthusiasm for their job. Apart from routine events easily handled by others, there was little to stop her from organizing her desk, flitting about the departmental corridors of power making useful contacts and doing a little quiet lobbying for more money.
She was still not confirmed in her post, however. That was the only cloud in an otherwise delightful spring. But she managed to put it to the back of her mind, somehow. There was little she could do about it.
And she never got around to asking Bottando about his picture, for while she sat at her desk waiting for something to happen and Argyll idled away the days, the general cleared his papers, filled out the forms, and with surprisingly little emotion or display, slipped away from the life he had led for thirty years or more. A long holiday, richly deserved, he said. Somewhere quiet.
She was disappointed. Pleased, of course, that he had so few regrets, but slightly upset as well. Was this what happened eventually? Would she, in due course, be so fed up that she could walk away from job, friends, colleagues, and life without even a moment of regret? Besides, she had always thought she had a special rapport with her old boss. Fine that he didn't miss anyone else; but she wished he regretted parting company with her. He could have said good-bye properly, rather than with just a phone call.
It was the only moment of discomfort in an otherwise quiet interlude, enjoyable because she knew it wouldn't last long. Sooner or later it would come to an end. And it did, sooner rather than later. A small cloud on the horizon to begin with, no bigger than a man's hand, but the harbinger of violent storms.
Performance artist found dead in his own exhibit. A small head line in the paper, and a report that found a place because the whoe country was consumed with the same somnolence and because it allowed the journalist concerned to give free range to his slightly tasteless sense of humor.
Maurizio Sabbatini had, it seemed, managed to drown himself in a vat of plaster he was sitting in during the creation of a work of art entitled Pompeii Revisited. Taking his cue from the casts of corpses made by archaeologists who dug up the Roman town, his show was a commentary (the program said) on death, and the coldness of a science that converts tragedy into museum exhibits. Sabbatini plunged naked into liquid plaster and sat there in the gallery that hosted his concept. Visitors passed through to see him staring blankly into space, sleeping or singing mournful Neapolitan songs to no one in particular, and were supposed to reflect on the transience of life, the permanence of art, and the discomfort of bathtubs.
Or not; the trouble was that the audience reaction was too undirected, according to another practitioner who quietly opined that it was Sabbatini's great weakness—fatal weakness, as it turned out—as an artist. His performances were so vague that no one was ever sure what he was on about. So, when he mixed too much plaster into water, sank underneath in a drunken stupor (another weakness of his), and drowned as it set hard around him, none of the small audience passing through thought it at all odd.
Indeed, no one noticed he was still there for days, by which time the embarrassment in the gallery was considerable, and the mirth of the journalist all but uncontrollable. The only thing that alerted them, he reported, evidently shaking with so much merriment he could scarcely type, was the fact that Sabbatini did not replenish the trademark supply of chocolates he always left around for visitors to eat. When someone—in fact a cleaning lady— did finally notice and the authorities were called, he had to be excavated with a pneumatic drill, at which point the journalist writing the story became so incoherent with mirth that he was unable to give basic details such as when the great artist had actually died.
Only after she had read the report twice, with some twitchings of self-righteous pleasure herself at the clear demonstration of divine vengeance, did Flavia realize that lying around somewhere might well be a great deal of money and that she'd better get a move on before someone noticed it. Not that she didn't trust her colleagues, of course, but she didn't want to have to give explanations if she could avoid it.
The happy thing about corpses is that it is so much easier to search their possessions; no question of infringing their rights or anything like that. Treading on the toes of colleagues is much trickier, the more so if you cannot explain what it is that you wish to investigate; the affair of the Claude was, after all, still under wraps. Flavia, however, was long practiced in fobbing people off with vague statements about leads and general lines of inquiry, sugaring the pill with promises of full explanations later.
Nevertheless, it took a full morning to do the groundwork, and it was well past lunchtime when she decided to take Corrado, the trainee, with her, for educational purposes.
'You remember that hypothetical case I gave you a few weeks back?' she asked, as the car drove them across the city. 'It wasn't hypothetical.”
