'Well...”
'Tiresome, isn't it?' she said sympathetically. 'Damned women, eh?”
'Naturally, we offer you our best congratulations.”
'Thank you,' she said. 'And I'm sure you realize that, in the circumstances, a slight rethink of your position is necessary. Not to be crude about it, you want to ease me out quietly. Instead, what you will get is a public brawl. You might think it advisable to reconsider your offer—kind though it was.”
She smiled. Even in her state of tiredness and shock she derived some considerable pleasure from their discomfort. Not that she believed for a moment she had won. It had been a skirmish, no more, but great victories are merely an accumulation of lots of little triumphs; you have to start somewhere. She had gained a little time to fight back, Flavia thought as she left the building and walked back to her car.
But still, she had little relish for the fight. She wanted the job, had worked for it, was good at it, and deserved it. It had been her life for twelve years. And yet, all of a sudden, she felt detached from it. Instead of the job being part of her, it was now something she did. With a shock of comprehension, she realized she was discontented with the routine, with her colleagues, with having to get up every morning and read reports on thefts she would never solve. She was fed up with keeping people happy, and battling constantly for a mere fraction of the money she needed. She was sick to death of maneuvering her way around people like those two characters. She had fought back out of principle, she realized, no more. She would not be treated like that. But her heart wasn't in it.
It was not just the two civil servants, she realized, who were going to have to reconsider their position.
* * *
One phrase that did stick in her mind was the crack about adhering to policy.
Whatever that meant. In fact, the only policy she had not adhered to in recent months was the order to lay off the subject of Claude Lorrain. But why would anyone get so agitated about that? All she was trying to do was tidy up loose ends, keep the lid on.
She should have been thanked, surely, rather than dismissed?
First things first, and that was to summon all those who might be interested and tell them everything that had been going on. Warts and all. They wanted a fight, they were going to get one, and the best way to start was to ensure that so many people knew about the whole Claude affair that there would be no more point in squashing her to keep it quiet. A secret shared is a secret defanged; another dictum of Bottando's.
She thought she would start with three people: Paolo, who wanted her job anyway and might now get it; Corrado, the trainee; and Giulia, the head researcher. No one else was around at the moment.
'My involvement,' she concluded after a while, 'seems to have been the cause of the decision to uproot me. I am not meant to be looking any further into this; why not I do not know.”
'But it's only a picture,' said Paolo, who always maintained the attitude that merely looking for stolen works of art, while entertaining, was a little beneath his ability. He still had a hankering after murder.
She shrugged. 'True. But it is one connected to the powerful and influential.”
Paolo stretched himself. 'Well, now,' he said lazily, 'we will need all the dossiers we can lay our hands on here. On this Sabbatini, on his illustrious and dangerously powerful brother-in law. Ex-brother-in-law. Find Sabbatini's partners in crime of a decade or two ago, get the dossiers on them as well. Which just goes to prove how useful it is to do people favors. I know just the man. I'll give him a ring later on and twist an arm or two. Let's see if we can find out what all this is about, shall we? Don't pack your bags yet, eh?”
Flavia looked at him warmly. Considering that it would be very much in his own interests to sit tight and not lift a finger to help, she appreciated the gesture even more; a brief flicker of acknowledgment, and a slight shrug was his reply. Of course I want your job, it said, but not like this.
'Could you try and get phone records as well? For this journalist Dossoni as well, if possible. I'd like to know who's feeding him information. It might be a good idea to feed him a little more one day.”
Everyone smiled happily at the prospect. There are few things quite as satisfying as leaking confidential information and seeing it turn up in the papers the next day.
'One more thing,' Flavia continued. 'There must be a report on the murder of Di Lanna's wife somewhere. Not letting the press know is one thing, but there had to be some sort of official investigation. That might be worth looking at.”
They filed out, and Flavia sat for a while and looked around at her office, the bright sunny one that she had inherited from Bottando scarcely a year before. She wondered how much longer it would be hers.
She met Ettore Dossoni in a grubby little bar way past the Olympic stadium, and they went for a walk around it when the conversation finally got serious. The out-of-the-way meeting was Dossoni's idea when she'd phoned him; he disliked the idea of being close to people when talking about matters of importance. Over the years he had learned caution, he added, as well as respect for what electronic gadgetry could do. A windswept stadium would make even the most sophisticated device hard to operate, and they could guarantee being many meters away from anyone. It seemed excessively self-important to Flavia, but she was prepared to humor him. So they walked past the grim limestone statues of Mussolini's ideal men time and again, while Flavia tried to do business with him. There was not a great deal she could offer in return, this was the problem. Just a chance for him to see whatever she might find, if she considered it appropriate.
Dossoni was a fat man who somehow hadn't realized that he was no longer young, lithe, and athletic. It gave him a strangely boyish way of walking, a loping stride that made his cheeks wobble, and the sweat stand out on a neck half strangled by a collar that had ceased to fit half a decade previously.
'So?' he said, after they'd walked for a while. 'Are you going to threaten me with dire consequences if I don't reveal my sources?”
'No.”
'What do you want?”
'You knew Maurizio Sabbatini, didn't you?”
'That,' he said, 'is probably in a file somewhere. So it would be foolish to deny it.”
'Did you have as low an opinion of him as everyone else?”
Dossoni thought, then shook his head. 'No, I didn't. Oddly enough, I think I had quite a high opinion of him.”
'Why?”
'Because he was no fool. Unlike all the others. Think about it. There we were, a couple of hundred, maybe a couple of thousand students, earnestly discussing what we would do once we had overthrown world capitalism. Maurizio was the one at the back who would crease up with laughter and point out that perhaps, maybe, it wasn't going to be quite that easy, and that the most we could manage—if we were lucky—would be to make it look faintly ridiculous. We strutted about discussing revolution, he played his little jokes. None of us accomplished anything, the only difference was that he didn't expect to. He laughed at everybody.”
'And then stopped laughing.”
Dossoni nodded. 'Ah, yes. You know about that, do you? I suppose you would.”
'He disappears into Bohemian semirespectability for nearly twenty years, then all of a sudden bursts into life with a grand stunt. You were meant to provide him with the publicity, weren't you?' Dossoni thought carefully, then nodded. 'I think that was his idea, yes. He said he was going to cause a huge embarrassment, just as in the past.
Bigger, in fact. He was going to expose the hypocrisy of the state—fa la la. I had a great affection for him, but his language had scarcely changed in two decades. He still sounded like a pamphlet; more, perhaps, than he had back then.' 'But nothing appeared in print. Why not?' 'I was waiting for some solid evidence he'd done something and that his story wasn't all hot air. He told me he'd pinched a picture; I rang you up and you said you knew nothing about it. Quite a plausible liar you are, as well.' 'Thank you. I practice.”
'Then he rang again and said that if I would get him an audience at the Janiculum on Friday I'd have the story of my life.' 'Did you have any idea what he meant?”
'No. Still don't. He wanted lots of people near that great big statue of Garibaldi's wife. You know the one? The woman on the horse looking over the city. He didn't specify what the audience was going to be watching. I told him of course I wasn't going to do a damned thing for him unless he told me what he was up to. He said he couldn't, it was too dangerous. But he had all the pieces to set off an explosion that would shake the country to its foundation, Just trust him.”
Dossoni paused and shook his head. 'Trust him! Ha! I told him he had to be joking and I wouldn't trust him
