by Iain Pears
He found a taxi outside and she let him go; there was no point in following him any more, and walked across the road to a bar. Half an hour should do it, she thought, just to be safe. But first, a little humanitarianism. She rang for an ambulance.
Not the police and not the Art Squad; that would have been too obvious. Doing as good an impression as she could manage of a Roman accent, she reported an accident in the church of San Giovanni and rang off before they could ask any more questions. Seven-forty. Conscience salved. Time for a large, frothy cappuccino and a pastry, sitting down at the back. She was certain that in that bag, in that left-luggage compartment, lay the solution to her problem. She might even be on the plane home this afternoon.
At ten past eight she walked back to the station, straight over to the manager’s office.
“Bon jorno,” she said in an execrable accent. “Ho un problem. Difficulty. Understand?”’ She smiled inanely as she twittered. The man on duty, used to the occasional idiocies of tourists, sighed heavily and smiled pleasantly. He was in a good mood. One more shift and he was off on holiday. It was something he’d been planning all year, and he was eager to get going. The challenge of a lifetime.
“Yes?”’
“Baggage? Left luggage. Um, Consigno? Lost the key.” She made suitable movements with her hand to indicate someone turning a key in a lock. “Big problem.” And smiled sweetly again.
The man frowned, and bit by bit they worked out between them what was the matter, he straining to understand the verbal nonsense she spouted, she trying to avoid using the Italian words she knew all too well.
“Ah. You have lost the key to your left-luggage locker. Is that it?”’
She nodded enthusiastically, took out a piece of paper and scribbled the number to hold up to him. “C37,” she said.
“What’s in it? You have to say. Otherwise how do we know it’s yours?”’
She delayed a reasonable time about understanding this, waving what she hoped would be mistaken for a plane ticket to indicate how desperately late she was for a flight. Eventually she condescended to understand and, successfully giving the impression that she was outraged at anyone doubting her honesty in the matter, waved her hands some more.
“Bag,” she said. “Case. Sack?”’
“Sacco, si.”
“Lovely. Light brown. Shoulder strap. Zipper.”
Then she prattled away, describing spurious contents so quickly that she knew he wouldn’t have a chance of understanding a single word, until he held up his hands. “OK,” he said. “OK.”
He opened a drawer and took out a key and led her across the forecourt. Mary pointed at the box, and he opened it.
“There we are,” she said delightedly, taking possession. “Oh, thank you, signor. You’re so very kind.” She pumped his hand up and down with fervent gratitude.
“Niente,” he said. “Be more careful next time.” He was in too relaxed a mood to make the report that regulations required, but reminded himself to tell the appropriate people to dig out a new key. But not at the moment. There was too much to do. He’d get around to it later.
And Mary Verney went off to the toilet, locking herself into a cubicle and putting the bag on her knee. Journey’s end. Thank God for that. Well wrapped up, she thought as she unzipped it. Her heart was beating fast with excitement.
Then she stared inside with complete dismay and incomprehension. There was no icon. Just money, a whole lot of it. But who was interested in that?
Damnation, she thought. It’s not there. Where the hell is it?
She flipped through the piles, to see how much there was. Stack after stack of deutsche marks. Big ones, little ones, all wrapped up in elastic bands. Nothing else at all.
She counted quickly. Must be about two hundred thousand dollars’ worth, she guessed. She zipped the bag shut again, and sat and thought.
This did not make sense. Didn’t make sense at all.
Still, first things first. Better get rid of this bag. She left the toilet and walked on to the platform, then hopped on to a crammed commuter train that lumbered in a few moments later. She knew that no one in their right minds would try to collect a ticket from her, especially as it was only another five-minute run to the end of the line. So she stood there, clutching the bag with only slightly less nervousness than Burckhardt had shown, and waited patiently until the train creaked into the main terminus and disgorged her along with several hundred others.
She repeated his tactic of leaving the bag in the left luggage at the terminus then rang Mikis at his hotel. It took some time to wake him.
“We’ve got another problem,” she said quickly once she had his attention. “The icon’s gone. Someone went in there and beat the hell out of an old priest and took it.”
“I don’t know who it was,” she continued. “But a man called Burckhardt was there. Do you know him?”’
Strangely, although no great connoisseur, he did seem to know who Burckhardt was. “Yes,” she went on. “The French icon man. That’s the one. He’s in Rome and I assume he’s after the icon as well. I don’t think he attacked the priest. But he went and put something in a left-luggage compartment. Ostiense. C37.”
Another pause. “Certainly not. I am damned if I’m going to spend a day hanging around a train station. Go and ask Burckhardt. He must be in a hotel somewhere.”
“That’s your problem,” she went on. “Call his gallery in Paris and ask where he is. Even you should be able to manage that. But I can’t steal a picture if someone’s already stolen it. We’ll have to meet later on. I can’t see what else you expect me to do.”
Might work, she thought. Even he couldn’t expect miracles from her.
Then she went back to her hotel, emerging from her room ten minutes after she arrived through the back door again.
She’d slept wonderfully, she told the waiter who brought her breakfast. Must be the Roman air. A day in an art gallery today, she thought. Which one did he recommend?
When Argyll had gone off to investigate the market for dinner, and Alberto returned to his paperwork—love to help, but it’s the end of the month, could you manage without me until tomorrow?-Flavia hit the beat, leaving a message for Giulia, if ever she came back from lunch, to join her. A tiresome business, knocking on doors time after time, asking the same questions and getting the same answers, but it had to be done. When Giulia finally appeared, she sent her to start at one end of the street, she took the other, and they methodically worked their way through the apartment blocks, floor by floor, occupant by occupant, until they met in the middle.
“Did you see or hear anything at about five o’clock this morning?”’
“Of course not. I was asleep.”
“No. My bedroom is at the back.”
“Pardon? You’ll have to speak up. I’m a little deaf.”
“The only thing I heard was the refuse collectors. They do it deliberately, you know, making such a noise, trying to stop respectable people from sleeping. Do you know …?”’
“What do you think I am, a Peeping Tom?”’
“Go away. I’m busy. The baby’s just thrown up on the floor.”
And so on. An entire street and, as far as Flavia could discover, the desired combination of a nosy insomniac with good hearing and a bedroom facing in the direction of the monastery did not exist.
“Complete bloody waste of time. And my feet are killing me,” Flavia said when she got home afterwards, proud at least of coming home in time for dinner and an evening pretending to be normal and civilized. She took off her shoes and waggled her toes in Argyll’s direction to show him what she meant. They looked perfectly fine to him.
“What you need is a nice quiet desk job.”
“What I need is a glass of gin. Do you know anything about icons?”’
Argyll paused as he unscrewed the bottle. “Nothing.”
“You must know something.”
“No. Zilch. Zero. Very specialist trade, icons. I could
n’t tell a medieval one from a modern one. It’s shameful to admit it, but they all look a bit the same to me.”
“You never sold any?”’
“Not likely. It’s bad enough trying to make money dealing when you do know what you’re doing. Besides, there hasn’t been much money in them in the last few years. There’s a decent market now, of course. Prices are beginning to go up again, now that the old Soviet Union has virtually been cleaned out.”
“What do you mean?”’
“Supply and demand. Icons have been a terrible drudge recently. Once Russia opened up, almost every icon in the country was pinched in a matter of months. The dealers in the west were virtually knee deep in them. Some amazing quality, as well. The sort of thing major museums would have fought over ten years back, you could scarcely give away.”
“So what sort of price are we dealing with here?”’
“Depends. How good was this?”’
“I’ve no idea. But the maximum possible? What’s the highest price you could imagine?”’
“Biggest I’ve heard of is a quarter of a million dollars.”
“I see. And was this one in the monastery in that category?”’
“Not a clue. I doubt it very much. It seemed a bit sad.”
“Sad?”’
“Hmm. Neglected. Unloved. Not the sort of thing collectors fight over. I gave it a candle.”
Flavia yawned mightily. Jonathan’s opinions were frequently a little wayward, but he had good instincts; far better than hers ever were. When people were concerned, of course, it was the other way around, but he had a sensitivity for paintings which he rarely managed for real human beings.
“A candle,” she said sleepily. “Why did you do that?”’
“It seemed appropriate. And it thanked me.”
“What?”’
“Well, not the painting, of course, but the cleaning lady. A sort of displaced thanks, if you like.”
“I see. Why did it seem lonely?”’
“Well, it was set up to have a lot of people around it,” he explained. “There was room for hundreds of candles, and enough space to have lots of people praying. As there was no one there, and no candles, it had this air of having fallen on hard times. It was obviously once considered of greater importance. Probably these legends.”
“Could you do me a favour and find out something a bit more concrete about it?”’
“You’ve heard the story?”’
“About an angel bringing it?”’
“That’s the one.”
“I have. And you may find me unduly hard-headed, but I’m a bit sceptical. Besides, when did these angels bring it?”’
“Only one angel,” Argyll said. “Only one.”
“My apologies.”
“I can go and find out if you like. Or try to. And when I can’t find anything, I’ll ask our Orthodox and Islamic man.”
“Does he know about icons?”’
“Written enough on them. How did you get on today?”’
Flavia waved her hand and yawned again. “Don’t ask. It’s been enormously frustrating. I got the address of Burckhardt’s hotel, but he’s nowhere to be seen. Oh, damnation.”
“What’s the matter?”’
“I’ve just had an idea. One of the people I talked to this afternoon said the only thing they heard early this morning was the refuse collectors.”
“So?”’
“So they might have seen something. Which means I have to go down to the central depot tomorrow morning and find the gang that did the road. I have a feeling they start early, as well.”
“You’d better get an early night, then.”
Flavia didn’t answer. She was already halfway to the bedroom, yawning so much she didn’t hear. The conversation had lasted ten minutes. Not much for an entire evening.
The depot was a bleak parking lot for sleeping trucks on the outskirts of Rome where, every morning at dawn, several hundred men gathered to go forth in the unending and frustrating attempt to keep the city moderately tidy and halfway hygienic. Every day, they drove off in a billowing cloud of exhaust fumes, only to return many hours later covered in dust and the smell of rotting vegetables, groaning with the weight of discarded paper, plastic sacks, potato peelings and old newspapers. Every day they had a few hours after they disgorged their aromatic load to rest and restore their energies, before setting out again; they had done so since before the days of Augustus, and would do so until the Second Coming. Maybe beyond as well.
The depot was dimly lit by floodlights, most of which were out of action, and Flavia dimly saw dozens upon dozens of men, standing round like tank crews before going into battle, chatting away, smoking and taking the occasional sip of alcohol to fortify themselves for the day’s battle against the forces of chaos. She picked out a man who looked as though he might be in charge of something, and asked for information.
Not a talkative man. He squinted at her identification, then pointed her in the direction of a small and grubby bar, outside and on the other side of the road. It presumably lived off the refuse as well, feeding up the crews before they went off, and watering them down again when they came back. Certainly, there was nothing else around to provide it with any business.
Flavia went in, looked at the crowd of men in blue overalls crammed against the bar, and picked one at random.
“Aventino three,” she said.
Another point. Not a talkative lot, she thought, but who is at this time of day?
She ended up with a small, thin little man who looked as though he could barely carry a shopping bag, let alone the hefty weight of one of the huge, apartment-size bins that the city provides for collective cleanliness.
“Aventino three?”’ she asked again.
He didn’t say no, so she continued. “Did you collect in the via San Giovanni yesterday?”’
He looked at her suspiciously, as though she might be a city official about to relay a complaint from a resident about noise or leaving piles of rubbish in the street.
“Maybe we did,” he said.
She again pulled out her identification. “There was a robbery with violence there, probably before seven,” she said.
“Oh, yes?”’
“In the monastery. The superior had his head cracked.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And a painting was stolen. Did you see anything?”’
He thought for a moment, his lined brow puckering with concentration. Suddenly, enlightenment dawned.
“No,” he said.
Flavia sighed. “Are you sure? You didn’t see anyone coming out of San Giovanni? Going in? Did you hear anything?”’
He shook his head, and walked off to the bar. Flavia cursed silently to herself. She might as well have stayed in bed. Then she yawned, and realized that the early rise, the coffee on an empty stomach and the faint air of rotting vegetables that came off the clothes of everyone in the place was making her feel slightly sick. No, she thought. Make that very sick.
“He did it.”
She tried briefly to keep her stomach under control and saw that the little man had come back, this time with another figure, as big as he was short, and as powerful as he seemed weak.
“What?”’
“Giacomo did that end of the street. Yesterday.”
She concentrated hard, and managed a faint smile at Giacomo. He grinned, nervously and foolishly, back at her, showing his stained teeth. She caught a whiff of stale alcohol and cigarette on his breath, mingled with rot, and hoped desperately she could keep upright for long enough to question him.
“Did you see anything? At six? Or thereabouts?”’
“Nothing in particular,” he said. He had a slow, stupid voice.
“No unusual noises?”’
“No.” Every time she asked a question, Giacomo paused, and looked up at the ceiling, and thought hard. Hurry it up, she thought. I’m not asking you to perform calculus. He shook his head slowly, as though that gave add
ed weight to his words.
“Did you see anyone in the monastery?”’
“No.”
“Nothing?”’
“No.”
She paused and thought. Waste of time.
“I saw a man come out of the church.”
She looked up at him urgently. “When?”’
“I don’t know. Six-thirty? Something like that. No. I tell a lie. It must have been before, because we stopped for a break a bit after. We always stop at six-thirty.”
“Wonderful,” Flavia said heartily and insincerely. “Now, what did you see?”’
“Like I say, a man came out of the church.”
“And?”’
“And nothing. I only noticed because the door is always locked. I’ve never seen it open. So I thought, hello, the door’s open.”
“Yes,” she said patiently. “Now, this man, was he holding anything? A package?”’
He shook his head, slowly, from side to side, then thought some more. “No.”
“You’re sure?”’
“Yes. He had a bag, though.”
“A bag?”’
“That’s right.” He held out his hands to show the size. “I noticed because he dropped it.”
“Did it make a noise? Did he seem worried that he dropped it?”’
He shook his head. “He just picked it up by the shoulder strap, and hurried away.”
“Hurried?”’
“Oh, yes. That’s why I noticed. Another reason, you see, apart from the door being open, that is. He ran down the steps very fast, dropped the bag, then walked off very fast.”
“I see. Now,” she said urgently, partly because she wanted to know and partly because she knew her stomach was running out of time, “What did he look like?”’
There followed an adequate description of a short, mild-looking man. Flavia took out the photographs that Giulia had taken that first afternoon when she’d been put on to the task of watching the monastery. Menzies leading someone out of the church, bidding him a fond farewell. So it seemed.
Giacomo peered at it carefully, and sucked his dentures in careful thought. “Oh, yes,” he said. “That’s the one.”
“You’re sure? The man on the right is the man you saw coming out of the church yesterday morning?”’