The Bernini Bust

by Iain Pears

  On the other hand, at the moment she was more concerned with Argyll. Now she really did want to see him. Which was fairly easy, as he was back in his hotel room. Flavia discovered him, leg propped up, sitting on the bed reading, with a glass of whisky and an ashtray by his side. Freedom.

  Had he been more mobile, he would have leapt up, raced across the room and taken her in his arms when she came in. As it was, he did the best he could, waving enthusiastically, beaming with welcome and beginning to apologise for not moving.

  He was not allowed to finish the explanation. Flavia had intended to make some sardonic remark about his carelessness before sitting down for a civil conversation about this bust. Cool and distant. She still hadn't forgiven him for planning to leave Italy.

  Somehow or other it all went wrong. She had been angry with him, worried about him and thoroughly alarmed by the news that someone had tried to kill him. The fact that she was able to walk straight through his unlocked door, that he was so dimwitted he was taking no precautions at all, simply pushed her over the edge, and she let rip with a veritable torrent of abuse which completely erased his cheerful welcome.

  Briefly summarised, she informed him that he was stupid, inconsiderate, reckless, selfish, a danger to himself and others, blind as a mouse (here her command of English idiom let her down) and thoroughly irritating. Except that she took longer to deliver her opinion, which came complete with innumerable examples stretching back over many weeks, accompanied by much wagging of the finger, elaborated with many baroque turns of phrase - Italian when the supply of English ran out - and was finally spoiled by ending with a lower lip that was beginning to tremble with relief that, after all that and despite his best efforts, he was still in one piece.

  For Argyll it was a critical moment. He had two choices; either to pick up the gauntlet and shout back, at which point the reunion he'd been looking forward to would degenerate into a slanging match; or try to calm her down, and run the risk of receiving another torrent based on the thesis that he was, in addition, pompous and condescending.

  This he knew very well, as well as he knew Flavia. A ticklish choice, and he took so long trying to make up his mind that he said nothing at all, just looked at her wistfully. Oddly, it was the right thing to do. You can stand, hand on hips, looking pugnacious, for only so long. Sooner or later you have to shift stance, and when she did, he reached out, took her hand and gave it a squeeze.

  'I'm so very glad to see you,' he said simply.

  She sat down, sniffed loudly and nodded. 'Yeah, well. Me too, I suppose,' she replied.

  Chapter Ten

  'The trouble is,' Argyll said next day when Flavia's mental faculties had returned to something approaching normal, 'that I'm a bit stuck, you see. The deal was that if I sell this Titian, I keep my job and go back to London. And I've sold it.'

  'Can't you just say you don't want to go?'

  'Not really, no. Not without resigning or being fired. Besides, Byrnes has done an awful lot for me, and he wants someone there he thinks he can trust.'

  'He trusts you?'

  'I did say thinks he can trust.'

  'Can't you say you need more experience, or something?'

  'I've just sold a Titian for a client for a handsome fee. He seems to think that indicates I'm doing quite well.'

  'Cancel the sale.'

  'But the deal's going through. I can't cancel it. How would I explain to the owner. "Sorry, but I want to stay in Italy so you'll have to accept only half the price in a year's time?" That's not the way to get ahead, you know. Besides, the real point is that Byrnes wants to draw in his horns a little. Basically, the choice is promotion in London, or unemployment in Rome. And I'm lucky to have the choice.'

  'Hmm. Do you want to go to London?'

  'Of course not. Who in their right mind would want to live in London if they could stay in Rome? I could stay on and work to commission . . .'

  'Do that, then.'

  'Yes, but you're missing the point. My big secret.'

  'What's that?'

  'Essentially,' he confided, 'I'm not a very good art dealer. Without a regular salary, I don't know that I could earn enough to survive. Not at the moment. And on top of that, you didn't seem to care one way or the other.'

  'That's not my fault,' she protested. 'Is it my fault your way of declaring undying affection is to offer someone a cup of tea?'

  Argyll brushed these details aside. 'The point is, I've now given up the lease on my flat. I will have nowhere to live and nothing to live on.'

  'But,' she said, 'what if the museum cancels the sale?'

  'They won't.'

  'They will if the museum closes. Then you can call Byrnes, say the whole thing was a flop, you're a disaster as an art dealer, and insist that your presence in his London gallery would ensure bankruptcy in a matter of months.'

  'And lose my job. Very helpful.'

  'But you could sell the Titian to someone else and keep all the commission yourself.'

  'If I could sell it. If the owner wanted me to sell it. This place is paying far more than the picture is worth and the market's in a right mess at the moment. I could be sitting on it for months. Besides, I don't know what's going to happen to the museum at all yet. Thanet's worried about Mrs. Moresby, but it's all in the hands of lawyers.'

  'Fine. So let's go and find out what the situation is.'

  The Moresby seaside retreat, one of the many homes where the happy and united family spent the summer months, was not at all what Argyll had imagined, and certainly far from Flavia's experience. But almost everything in Los Angeles was far from her experience. She had a very traditional notion of cities; cathedral, museum, town hall and railway station telling you where the centre was, historic district, modern suburbs wrapped around separating town from country. Los Angeles is not like that and from the moment she arrived to the moment she left she had not a clue where she was. Only by keeping the Pacific Ocean in view could she tell if she was going north or south, east or west. And it was unexpectedly difficult to tell where the ocean was. Flavia associated beaches with public access but Californians, in this as much else, evidently did things differently. As far as she could see, most of the Pacific had been commandeered for private use, with houses built along the coast specifically to obscure the view for everyone else.

  At first sight, chez Moresby was not much to look at. That at least was Flavia's excuse for driving past the first time; turning round and coming back again was not easy, so it was doubly unfortunate that she overshot again heading south. From the road, the place could have been the back end of a seedy restaurant, and the site straight on to the road was not what either of them would have associated with enormous wealth.

  Convinced that they were in the wrong place, they walked cautiously round to the front, and changed their minds. It was an extraordinary house, if you like twentieth-century architecture, plate glass windows thirty foot long with uninterrupted views of the Pacific Ocean, and a hand-carved beechwood sundeck about the size of a tennis court.

  Of course, it would have helped if the architect had provided an easily findable door, so they could have knocked on it, but fortunately they didn't need one. A man, evidently a servant of some sort, emerged from somewhere and shouted at them. Argyll cupped his hand over his ear and tried to understand what he was saying.

  'He's telling us to go away,' Flavia said.

  'How do you know that? I can't understand a word he's saying.'

  'That's because he's speaking Spanish,' she said, and bellowed back a stream of verbiage in his direction.

  He came over, eyed them suspiciously and a lengthy conversation ensued. Argyll was impressed. He didn't know Flavia spoke Spanish. Very irritating; she could do things like that. He had laboured long and hard to acquire his smatterings of language, and had sweated blood over the most regular of imperfect subjunctives. Flavia, in contrast, seemed to pick up the most abstruse grammatical points as casually as someone buying a bar of chocolate. She di
dn't put any effort into it at all, as far as he could see. There's no justice in life.

  'What are you talking about, then?' he asked as the conversation petered out into mutual smiles.

  'I've been winning his confidence,' she said. 'He has orders from Mrs. Moresby not to let anyone into the house and, because I am such a particularly nice person, he is going to make an exception on our part. He's from Nicaragua, and doesn't have any work permit, and the Moresby's pay him virtually nothing and threaten to have him deported if he complains. He has to clean the house, do the shopping and the cooking, act as a chauffeur and doesn't like working here at all. The only compensation is that they have lots of houses and aren't here very often. On the other hand, the awful son uses the place occasionally when they are away and he has to clean up his empty bottles. He is certain that Mrs. Moresby is having an affair, he doesn't know who with and, very regrettably, he is her alibi for the time of the murder. He wishes he wasn't.'

  'And how is his family doing back in Nicaragua? Or didn't you have time to get to that stage?'

  'Wasn't necessary. Let's go in.'

  They advanced into the house before Alfredo could change his mind, as he was clearly beginning to do. The inside was disappointing, as Moresby had filled it, most incongruously, with eighteenth-century French furniture, which looked as out of place as a tubular steel sofa would in the Palazzo Farnese. Not only that, there was an awful lot of it, and the dozens of chairs, sofas, pictures, prints, busts, and miscellaneous knick-knacks seemed to have been chosen more or less at random. Occasionally the junk-shop approach to home decorating works and produces a pleasing confusion, but not here. Arthur Moresby's beach house, designed for clean, uncluttered, fresh-air modernism, looked as though it had been furnished by an unusually acquisitive magpie.

  But despite that, the decor was effective in conveying the impression that the owners were not short of ready money. Even the ashtrays were of baccarat crystal. Argyll suspected the toilet rolls would turn out to be of the finest water-pressed Venetian paper. All the commodes, bureaux, Louis Seize sofas, Chippendale tables had been restored, revarnished, reupholstered and regilded. It looked like the lobby of an international hotel.

  Argyll was only halfway through a mental inventory and estimation of the furniture and fittings - an occupational hazard of art dealing that Flavia found profoundly irritating - when Anne Moresby came in. If she was grief-stricken she disguised it well. Nor had trauma softened her vocabulary.

  'Bullshit,' she said after Argyll had performed the introductions, explained why his leg was in plaster, and Flavia got things rolling by muttering something about condolences.

  'I beg your pardon?' Flavia replied a little taken aback. Seeing through one's little ploy was one thing; mentioning it quite another.

  On the other hand, vocabulary was vocabulary, and Mrs. Moresby looked like proving a rich vein.

  'You're snooping. You have no authority, so I don't have to tell you anything. In fact I could just throw you out. Right?'

  'On the nail,' said Argyll cheerfully. 'No fooling you. But we would still be grateful for a brief talk. After all, you were upset about that bust, and so are we. If the museum has been indulging in any illegal activities, we want to know. Then Flavia here can take appropriate action. Against those responsible, if you see what I mean.'

  What this speech did, quite neatly to Flavia's way of thinking as she considered it afterwards, was offer a little alliance. You want to put the knife into the museum - so Argyll implied - why not let us help you? Rather acute, for him.

  Mrs. Moresby was no fool. Her eyes narrowed as she thought of it, weighed the pros and cons. Then she gave him a quick and surprisingly charming half-smile and said: 'Oh, all right. Makes a change from the police. Come and have a drink; then we can talk this over.'

  She walked over to the fireplace - what possible function it served in this climate Flavia could not imagine - opened a delicate ivory box and took out a packet of cigarettes; then lit one. Took a deep breath and the pair of them saw a look of extraordinary satisfaction come over her face.

  'It's an ill-wind,' she said. 'Do you realise I can now smoke in this house for the first time since I got married twelve years ago?'

  'Your husband disapproved?'

  'Disapproved? He threatened to divorce me. Even had it written into the marriage contract that any divorce settlement would be void if I was caught smoking in his presence.'

  'Just a joke, though,' Argyll suggested.

  She gave him a stern look. 'Arthur Moresby did not joke. Never. Any more than he forgave, forgot or oozed the milk of human kindness. When the good Lord made him there was a temporary shortage of humour; so he was sent forth with an extra dose of self-righteousness instead. Didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't do anything except accumulate. Used to, of course, but when he stopped enjoying himself he wanted everybody else to do the same.' Here she waved her hand around the room to indicate what she had in mind. She may have had a point. 'Do you realise that for the last twelve years I've been married to the most boring man ever to walk the face of the earth?'

  'Liked art, though.'

  She snorted. 'You must be kidding. He bought it because he thought that's what multi-millionaires did.'

  'You weren't keen on his museum project?'

  'Damn right I wasn't. It was all right to start off with, when it was just a straight tax write-off. Then he got the immortality bug and Thanet got his hooks into him.'

  'Tax write-off?' Flavia asked. Really, this woman was a walking dictionary of idiom.

  'You know, the IRS.'

  She shook her head blankly, and Anne Moresby gave her a stupid-foreigner look she rather resented.

  'Internal Revenue Service,' she went on. 'A sort of Spanish Inquisition redesigned for the consumer society. Trying to put one over on it is a national sport rivalling baseball. Arthur regarded it as a civic duty to try and pay as little tax as possible.'

  'What's the museum got to do with it?'

  'Simple. Buy a picture and hang it in your house, and you get no tax relief. Hang it in a museum and you become a public benefactor, entitled to deduct a huge chunk of the price off your income tax.'

  'So what changed?'

  'The little creep had a heart attack.'

  'Who?'

  'Arthur. It started him thinking about the future, or lack of it. Arthur's great weakness was a desire to be remembered. It's a fault with a lot of egomaniacs, so I'm told. Once upon a time, people built almshouses or had monks say Mass for them. In the US they found museums. I'm not sure which is the more stupid. The more money, the bigger the ego, the larger the museum. Getty, Hammer, Mellon, you name it. Arthur caught the bug.

  'He was getting old. Thanet and his crew were beginning to convince him that a small museum was nowhere near enough for a man of his stature. They were touting plans for a museum the size of a football stadium and Arthur was getting hooked.'

  'And Thanet knew all about this tax relief scheme?'

  'Of course; nothing wrong with it. Not as far as I've been able to find out, anyway, and believe me I've looked. And even if there was, that slimy ball of fat would do anything to keep on Arthur's right side.'

  'When I met you briefly before the party you described your husband as a sweet old man,' Argyll reminded her. 'That doesn't fit too well with all this.'

  'So, sometimes I exaggerate, for appearances' sake. He was a mean old bastard. Please don't get me wrong; I'm sorry he's dead. But I can't deny that life will be much more pleasant without him. And that goes for everyone who worked for him or was related to him. Not just me.'

  'So what happens to the museum now? I mean, if I understand rightly, your husband died before transferring most of his money to the museum trust and you inherit the entire estate.'

  She gave a stiff little smile. It seemed pretty obvious what was going to happen to the museum, if she had her way.

  'I hope you don't mind me asking, but if the transfer had gone ahead, you wouldn't
have been left penniless, would you? Not like your stepson.'

  Anne Moresby seemed to think this a bizarre question, one which she had never considered before.

  'No, not penniless,' she replied reflectively. 'No, not at all. I gather that I would have inherited the residue of the estate. About five hundred million.'

  'That's quite enough to make ends meet, isn't it?'

  Evidently, she didn't follow Flavia's line of reasoning. 'Well, yes. So what?'

  'So why battle for all the rest?'

  'Oh. Because it's mine. As the woman who put up with him and his meanness for all these years. You're right - it's far more money than I can spend. But that's not the point. If the museum continues, it'll enshrine his name in perpetuity. The great art lover, the great philanthropist. The great man. Phooey. And all those leeches, hanging around him, just to get their hands on his wallet, to aggrandise themselves. Phooey again. All conceit and fraud and dishonesty. That's why I want to stop it. Because, dammit, I married that man because I loved him, once upon a time. And nobody believed me. Not Arthur, or his son, or Thanet, or Langton. I hated them all for that. And eventually I stopped believing it myself. If they insisted I married him for money, then so be it. But in that case, I want it all, and I'm damn well going to get it.'