'I did wonder,' the oversophisticated young man replied.
'No. Real painting, real theft. And a real thief. We're going to visit his apartment.”
'Will he be there?”
Flavia explained something of the circumstances. Corrado displayed a degree of restraint lacking in all others who had heard of it so far. 'Poor man,' he said. 'What was the picture?”
'That is the one thing that remains classified.”
'That important?”
'No comment. It doesn't matter, anyway, I got it back.”
This produced genuine admiration and surprise, which Flavia, though she tried to resist, rather enjoyed.
'Now, this man. What we will be looking for is the usual sort of thing, I imagine.
Notes, diaries, phone bills, anything like that. He was once upon a time involved in the hard left, so I imagine he'd be too experienced to provide us with anything, but you never know your luck. He must have been as poor as a church mouse. He seems to have lived hand-to-mouth for the past couple of decades; sitting in bathfuls of plaster can't have been that lucrative.”
At which comment the car drew up outside one of the most expensive apartment blocks in the Parioli district. Flavia avoided the trainee's look of skepticism at her deductive powers.
'Are you sure we're at the right address?' she asked the driver crossly.
' 'Course I am' came the less than respectful reply. She didn't mind; he talked like that to everyone. Always had.
The apartment in which the mouselike, poverty-stricken, anti-materialist former revolutionary lived was even more opulent. Extremely modern, but filled with the most expensive furniture and paintings—even what looked like a real Chagall. Closer inspection revealed wardrobes full of clothes from the most prized designers, a refrigerator stuffed with enough champagne to inebriate most of the world's terrorists at a sitting, and floors covered with exquisite silk Persian carpets.
'More lucrative than it seems, perhaps,' Corrado said quietly. 'How much was the ransom?”
'Who said anything about a ransom?”
'Oh. Sorry ... I assumed . . .”
She shook her head. 'No, you're quite right. But he can't have bought this with the ransom.' She didn't bother him with the details of how she was so sure.
'Maybe he made a habit of it?”
She stood looking at an autographed Warhol soup can, feeling bewildered, then laughed. 'A fine example, young man,' she said, 'of the dangers of jumping to conclusions. Let this be a lesson to you.”
He grinned back, acknowledging her grace in admitting having made a slight fool of herself. It was the sort of openness that had already won her a following in the department. It was hard to replace Bottando and be anything but his successor, but she was making more progress than she realized.
'Right,' she said, feeling better already. 'Go through his drawers, find any papers, and any photographs. I'll go and knock on a few neighbors' doors and see if I can get a handle on this man.”
What you need in such circumstances is someone who thoroughly disliked the man you are investigating. Faced with questions from the police about people you like, there is a natural tendency to be vague, even among the wealthy of Rome, a group that perhaps has less sense of fellowship with the rest of mankind than any other on the planet. The phrase 'Oh, I wouldn't know anything about that' to avoid saying something impolite about a neighbor has derailed many an otherwise promising investigation. Neighborly tension, on the other hand, is a great loosener of tongues.
Alas, Sabbatini was not prone to play his music loudly at two in the morning; did not trade drugs in the corridors; did not leave his rubbish out on the wrong days; did nothing, in fact, to suggest he was anything other than a quiet, respectful member of the Roman haute bourgeoisie.
And that was exactly what he was. Flavia discovered his dark secret after five fruitless interviews, conscious all the while that nearly all the information she needed was almost certainly in the complete dossiers she had not yet been sent. Interviewee number six had a grudge of epic dimensions: the communal garage.
Far more than politics and religion, even more than noise and dirt and indecent behavior, laying claim to someone else's parking space is just the sort of thing to let the passions rip. And Sabbatini and Alessandra Marchese had, it seemed, been locked into such a struggle for more than six months. Every time he saw it free he parked his car in her space, even though he knew it was hers; even though his was free. He did it deliberately, she said, the outrage visibly rising in her face, her hands beginning to quiver with fury. It was appalling. She had complained to the building's management but they, of course, were hopeless. Just because he was well connected, they behaved like mice . . .
Flavia nodded sympathetically. The woman was detestably self-righteous and self-important, but a perfect treasure trove. 'Perhaps you would tell me more . . . ?' she murmured.
Half an hour later she had it all. Some details no doubt exaggerated, some even invented, but a portrait of the man in the sort of detail only pure bile could generate.
Signora Marchese noticed him in a way neighbors do not ordinarily pay attention to those who live around them. Indeed, every time she saw him, heard him, or even smelled his cologne in the elevator, she froze, and could think of nothing else for hours afterward.
She appeared to have spent much of her time shopping, so could not provide a perfect record, of course, but did remarkably well. Stripping out the rancor, Flavia emerged with a picture of a man who, apart from his penchant for vats of plaster and other people's parking spaces, lived a remarkably quiet, unflamboyant life He did little, it seemed, rising late and apparently not working Signora Marchese, who lived a similar existence, did not find thii odd; Flavia wondered where the money came from. When asked the signora shrugged and said, 'Family.' The universal explanation, which explained nothing.
He had few friends, few callers; no girlfriends, not even any boyfriends. He'd been away for over a week, although last Wednesday somebody—presumably he—had been in the apartment. She'd heard bumping and scraping as though someone had been rearranging the furniture. If he was an artist—and the signora seemed shocked by the idea, as if she had suspected him of terrible sins but not ones of that magnitude—then he did whatever he did somewhere else. All in all, the very model of a perfectly respectable member of the idle rich, whiling away his time, dabbling in this or that, spending lavishly on whatever took his fancy and doing no harm to anyone. But.
Corrado, meanwhile, had collected enough information to fill out more of the picture; a substantial monthly sum was paid into his bank account. A sheaf of letters from lawyers indicated that the law firm was where the regular payments came from.
Splendid, but first things first. She sent Corrado off in a taxi to talk to the forensic brigade, and went to Sabbatini's studio herself.
Had she been truly concerned with looking good in the eyes of her subordinates, this would have been a mistake; it is always better to spend your time talking politely to the respectable than wandering around getting your hands dirty. And the studio—little more than a lock-up garage at the back of a run-down housing development, one of those thrown up twenty years ago without any building permit and built so shoddily they were now falling down again—was a very dirty place. Lots of plaster, execrable sculptures made of old tin cans and household rubbish, bad paintings on the walls, all the bric-?-brac of the talentless dabbler—for Sabbatini, she decided, was utterly without merit as an artist. One thing, however, was of vital importance, and justified the trip even though it did little but confirm what she already knew.
In a drawer in a desk was a cheap paperback copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Hardly conclusive, even Flavia realized that. But it was the origin of the story for the Claude, and was Sabbatini really the sort of person who would idle away his hours reading Ovid? Just as well he was dead and there was no chance of a prosecution, she thought.
She could imagine the look on the investigating magistrate's face if she told him that the entire case rested on a myth. But it was enough to reassure herself that she was heading in the right direction, and to keep alive her hopes of getting back the money.
She found it hard to suppress the idea that retrieving the money would do marvels for her chances of hanging on to her job.
She mentally wrote the report on the way back to the office, then listened to Corrado's account of the
