'Suddenly?”
Paolo shook his head. 'No. He'd been ill for some time, I think. Kidney gave up some time ago, had a transplant a year ago, and it didn't work. No surprise at all. Nothing suspicious, if that's what you were thinking.”
She frowned. 'I still can't figure any of this out,' she said eventually. 'Let us assume this Dossoni is right, and this is Elena Fortini and the symbolism of the act all over again. Let us assume that there is a connection between the Claude and the death of Maria di Lanna. What's the symbol? What was he trying to prove? And why now?”
She looked around the table. Blank faces. 'Come on,' she said. 'Suggestions?”
Still silence.
'Anything?' she prompted.
Another silence.
Flavia sighed. 'Well, thank you, anyway. That's very helpful. Nice to know you're all on form.”
They finished their meal, talking of more tractable office problems. Paolo walked her home, which was kind of him, although he really wanted a private talk with her.
'We had a visit this afternoon,' he said. 'While you were out. Dour little fellow, from intelligence, he said. He walked straight in, straight into your office, and spent an hour going through your papers and files. I kept an eye on him as much as possible, and he didn't seem to find anything that he wanted.”
Flavia couldn't think of anything to say.
'You seem to have upset some important people in some way,' he continued thoughtfully. 'If they want to send the spooks in, it might be reasonable to assume they haven't finished with you yet.”
'Nothing I can do about it.”
'Probably not. But if you are determined to continue with this business, you should at least take sensible precautions.”
'Such as?”
'Such as not going home,' he said as they turned the corner into the little square in front of Flavia's block and he gently pulled her back into the shadows. 'After all, there is a spook car outside your door.”
'How do you know?”
'Color, make, number plate, and little aerial sticking out the back. I have studied these things, you know. I once toyed with the idea of applying to be transferred there.”
'And you didn't?”
'No. I did an interview. I've never come across such half-wits in my life. They wouldn't survive a week in the police. The point is, there they are, watching you.”
'And I have to go home to find Jonathan.”
'Ring.' He pulled out his phone, dialed, and handed it to her. She listened to it chirrup away, and could faintly hear the telephone on the table in her bedroom also ringing in response. Just to the right of the little message Argyll had left her to say he was going to Tuscany for a day or so. The phone rang and rang, but no light was switched on, no friendly voice at the other end. Flavia didn't know whether to be irritated or glad.
'He doesn't have a phone, I suppose?' Paolo asked.
Flavia snorted. 'If he had, you could be certain the batteries would be flat.”
She scratched her head, and thought. 'No, you're right. I'll go and find a hotel for the night.”
Paolo offered to put her up, an offer Flavia refused, having met his children on too many occasions and knowing full well how little sleep she would get in a small apartment with screaming infants. She had, it seemed, only a few months of peace left to her. She did not want to waste a single night of them.
Half an hour later, rather than fretting about the security services or Maurizio Sabbatini, she drifted off to sleep in a little room on the Piazza Farnese worrying about the general smallness of Roman living space.
She had reasoned that, if anyone was looking for her, wanting to keep an eye on her movements, the last place they would think of looking would be a nunnery, and so, to a nunnery she had gone. The order of St. Bridget of Sweden has a very agreeable convent on the Piazza Farnese, part of it converted into a bed-and-breakfast hostel after their numbers went down. For the price it is exemplary, the nuns sweet, the location near perfect, and they already knew Flavia quite well; on a couple of occasions in the past she had put witnesses there where they would not be noticed. Several had come back for holidays when their troubles were over, while one went completely overboard, joined the order, and was last heard of doing good works in Burkina Faso.
As she ate her breakfast, simple but fresh, she worked her way through the files and press cuttings that Paolo had provided the previous evening, then distracted herself from the ever-present craving for a cigarette by writing down notes and thinking.
After a long period of staring into space, she realized why she was finding the whole business frustrating. She had concentrated on the symbolism of the act until it became clear that the case consisted of two parts, incompatible with each other.
Sabbatini steals the picture, then makes some sort of dramatic gesture in the Janiculum on Friday, May 25, to draw attention to the matter of his murdered sister. All clear and straightforward.
The second part, however, was the ransom. This would have been a better parallel, in fact. He could have contrasted the way pictures are rescued, but human beings are not. But Sabbatini had not demanded the ransom.
Let us concentrate on the Janiculum, she thought, buttering another roll. Friday—the television cameras arrive, a little bit of an audience, then Sabbatini makes his entrance.
What then? Presumably some outrageous gesture. But, so what? Everybody says, How shocking or how funny, depending on what he does. Sabbatini is arrested and bundled off. What good does that do?
So, there must be something else. Elena Fortini, perhaps. Here she frowned, puzzled by the enormous difference between her own impression of the woman, and what the fat journalist had said. Could she be that far out? She had known some charming crooks in her time, that was certain. But Dossoni described her as being gratuitously cruel and violent. Did that really fit with the air of domesticity she had felt so strongly? Do cruel people make bread? Vicious ones iron their children's clothes?
And then there was Dossoni, who had intruded himself into this business quite uninvited. An old radical who had gone into journalism, like so many others and put his past behind him. An effortless switch in direction. Why not? Nothing suspicious there, even sensible to keep up old acquaintances, just in case they become interesting again.
But there was no file on him. Why not? The Italian state kept files on everybody from those days, and most were perfectly easy to get at if you asked the right people. Paolo had drawn information on Sabbatini, on Fortini, even on Di Lanna, with no one raising an eyebrow. Yet there was no information on Dossoni. That was curious.
Ordinarily, the next step would have been simple; she would have picked up the phone and asked questions. Now she was reluctant to advertise her interest. So she had to fall back on other sources, and had to think hard before she came up with one that might work. Then she finished her coffee—was she even allowed coffee anymore?
She'd have to check. And come to think of it, weren't her feet a little swollen? She told the nuns she would stay another night if they had room, and walked out into the bright morning sunlight to head for the Vatican.
It took a long time to get in; even had she been willing to advertise herself by using her police identity card, the Vatican is normally quite sniffy about admitting Italian officials. It does so eventually, of course, but it is an independent state and goes through the motions of guarding its privileges jealously. So Flavia had to present herself at the main door as a private visitor, then wait in a rundown and dingy room for nearly forty minutes before Aldo Morante bounced in and gave her a most unpriestly kiss.
She had never quite mastered the ability to keep a straight face whenever she thought of Father Aldo Morante. Even after a decade or more, he still looked like an actor pretending to be a priest, and not succeeding very well. He was just too big for the part, too exuberant, too noisy, and too obviously had trouble with the vows of chastity to be entirely convincing. A priest he was, nonetheless, having converted straight from communism to Catholicism some fifteen years back without the usual progression through disenchantment, skepticism, and conversion. Why waste time? he'd once said to her. We'll all end up on our knees again one day. Might as well get on with it now, keep ahead of the field.
Once upon a time, however, he'd been a firebrand of radicalism, no meeting left unattended, no pamphlet left
