their best. There was no choice really. What was the point of being in Italy unless you took advantage of such things? And, for only the second time in more than a decade, as he breathed in the clean, fresh air, he thought that life in Rome was, perhaps, not so perfect after all. That there were disadvantages; that the noise, the smell, and the crowds were not so completely trumped by the pleasures of the place.
He got out of the car, nodded amiably at the waiter, discovered that there would be no food for another half hour at least, then puttered into the church, coming out twenty minutes later with his air of relaxed contentment perfectly reestablished. A lovely little thing, delightful altarpiece, and some handsome sculpture. As usual, he thought wistfully that, had he really been lucky, he would have been born a Tuscan master mason, around about 1280. The best possible job in the most civilized of all periods.
Must be nice to build a church.
A glass of cool fine wine, some homemade pasta, a little piece of veal, and two coffees erased any remaining sense of urgency. He chatted with the waiter—who had little else to do—then to the waiter's wife, who had made the pasta and cooked the meal. Then he just sat and watched and listened. A goat walked past. It was very interesting.
He didn't really fall asleep, just dozed a little, but it was formidably difficult to get up, and he did so only when the clock on the church tower struck a halfhearted two o'clock.
He looked at his watch. It was quarter past. Disaster. He went inside, found the phone and called Flavia to say he'd be late. No answer, so he left a message. Then he stretched, ambled back to his car and drove the remaining kilometer to Poggio di Amoretta.
The reasoning that brought him there was more or less sound, in theory: he had finally got hold of someone in Weller, the Norfolk village where Mary Verney lived, who had some idea where she was. Not in England; in fact, he was told that she was at her house in Tuscany. Where this house was, unfortunately, was unknown. But here he was, nevertheless, simply on the basis of Stonehouse's memory that at the time of the Buonaterra robbery she had been mainly staying in the village of Poggio di Amoretta, and on her own recent statement that she wanted to come and stay in a house she owned.
And this is where Argyll came, long shot though it was. But, as he kept on telling himself, the reasoning was not entirely stupid; it was based more on what he considered to be a profound knowledge of Mary Verney's character and common sense.
Besides which, she had to have lived somewhere before she inherited the great pile in Norfolk—prematurely, and only by murdering its previous occupant, admittedly—and her Italian was so perfect that long years of residence in the country could be assumed.
A fine, indeed an elegant, piece of reasoning of which he was inordinately proud. On top of it, of course (although he played this down in his mind so as to heighten the satisfaction produced by the contemplation of his deductive powers), was the fact that a Signora Maria Verney was listed in the phone book.
So he arrived in the village, parked, asked directions, and, as the path was steep and not really suitable for cars, walked the rest of the way. From three hundred meters he could see Mary Verney, sitting on the little terrace in a sun hat. From two hundred meters he could see that she had a visitor. Damnation.
He slowed down, stopped, and then thought carefully about what he should do; for reasons he didn't fully understand, he suddenly felt reluctant to intrude, although what exactly he would be intruding into escaped him. For a while he stood there, shifting uneasily from leg to leg, then he turned on his heel and walked back the way he had come.
Argyll had had the experience once before, and had always hoped to taste it again. It was with a painting he'd bought, a landscape with a few figures dancing in the foreground. Old, dirty, inexpensive; he'd had it cleaned and restored as inexpensively as he could manage and when it came back from the workshop he stacked it in a corner of the apartment, in a place where Flavia would not put her foot through it in a moment of absentmindedness, and all but forgot about it. Then, one morning, he spent some time staring it at, and got a prickle of excitement running down his back. He recognized the pose of one of the figures dancing merrily in the shaft of sunlight the painter had put across the canvas.
As far as he was concerned, no more was necessary: he was as sure of the authorship as if he'd seen the man paint it himself. It was, most certainly, a Salvator Rosa; not great, not brilliant, no masterpiece to set the world alight, and, indeed, even when he'd finally pinned it down, the picture scarcely made him any money once all the costs had been taken into account. In the eyes of the auctioneers and the collectors who insist on bits of paper, there was always that element of doubt, enough to refuse the little work a solid name and title. No matter; it was the pleasure of certainty which Argyll had enjoyed, the fact that instinct told him where to look, and eventually led him to a sketch for the dancing woman, hand held high, head slightly angled to one side, her blue dress billowing as she danced to the music of the lyre.
He had hoped to experience the same sensation with the little picture now on Bottando's wall, but nothing except a prickle of interest had come when he'd first seen it, and he hadn't been able to have another look. To experience that tingle of excitement unexpectedly now, seeing a sixty-year-old woman two hundred meters away on her terrace, turning her head to greet her visitor, was so unexpected he found it shocking. Perhaps it was again the turn of the head, the way her arm momentarily echoed the roll of the hillside beyond— the sort of trick Rosa himself might have pulled off. Maybe again it was the dappled effect of the light, which gave a timeless, almost impressionistic glimpse of other people's contentment that almost took his breath away.
About a mile farther on, halfway up a hill, he saw a little chapel, standing at the edge of what seemed like a reasonable track, one of those places built long ago for reasons which no one can now remember. He started walking up to it. The air and the exercise might, he thought vaguely, make him think more clearly. It would at least gain him some time. So, hands in pockets, head down, off he walked, taking his time.
As he walked, his imagination went into overdrive; he scarcely noticed the path and when he came back down again he had no idea whether he'd been walking for twenty minutes or two hours. Much of what he imagined had no facts to support it. It didn't matter, nor was it important if the details had happened differently. His imagination painted the scene, filled in the details, elaborated on what he knew, suspected, and guessed. What Stonehouse had said, Bulovius, the police report. What he knew of Mary Verney and of Bottando, what was reasonable and what was possible. He could now see those long-ago events in a black and white that was slightly grainy; Argyll's imagination had been formed by too many Italian neo-realist films to imagine Tuscany, 1962, in any other way. The painting had vanished from the Villa Buonaterra and, after some little delay during which all present had looked for it, the police had been summoned. The meeting was an inauspicious one, even as he replayed it in his mind.
The little police car, some sort of Fiat, he decided, old, gray, and battered, with smoke pouring out of its rear end, chugs noisily and with little dignity up to the grand entranceway, lurching to a halt and shuddering into quiet with an alarming death rattle that shakes the bones of the two occupants. One of these, the older, dressed in civilian clothes that show considerable wear, leads the way to the door. The other, much younger and in a tight- fitting uniform, which makes him look even less comfortable than he feels, follows obediently. They do not talk; position has to be maintained. Instead, the senior figure stands aside and nods at the bell. His subordinate steps forward to ring it, an impassive face showing neither resentment nor the contempt he feels so keenly. It is already desperately hot; the police report didn't mention it, but it is July and Tuscany. Of course it is hot.
The servant opens the door and, though the two are expected, he goes through the formality of asking them their business, showing them into a small room that exists solely for accommodating new arrivals whose precise status is uncertain, and goes off to announce their presence to the owner, who has in fact, seen the car arrive perfectly clearly from the window of his study.
Commissario Tarento fidgets, or at least Argyll imagines he fidgets, in the way a small-town policeman would under such circumstances. He is more used to bicycle thieves than art thieves. Both crime and victim are far beyond him. So he tries to seem brusque and impatient. The natural, uncontrollable deference that flows through his veins like lifeblood, which took him into the police in the first place, wells up in him; a combination of pride, envy, and respect for those richer and more comfortable than himself is part of his nature, even part of his generation. Foreign grandees of unimaginable wealth bring it out in full force; he can only imagine—and does so, frequently—the life of elegance and leisure they lead.
Oddly, his subordinate seems more at ease now there is more than the commissario to take his attention. Why this is so Tarento cannot imagine. For he knows Bottando's background well: a poor family from a village north of Naples—respectable but with an uncle who is a communist. Bottando had gone into the army, then into the
