The Immaculate Deception ja-7

by Iain Pears

  As she did not know how to react, she scarcely reacted at all. "And may I ask the reasoning behind this decision?”

  "I am afraid not," he said. "As you know, all such matters are in the strictest confidence." There was just enough of a hint of regret in his voice to make Flavia think that at least he was not enjoying himself. "The good work you have done in the past year has been noted and is greatly appreciated. Please do not think that any criticism of you or your ability is intended. However, it is thought that a figure with greater seniority is required, with, perhaps, greater willingness to adhere to policy.”

  "What do you mean, 'adhere to policy'?”

  A faint, apologetic smile was all she got in response.

  "You don't, of course, mean that I'm a woman, do you?" Flavia said.

  The second civil servant had the look of a man about to be taken to the European Court of Human Rights. "Oh, dear me, no," he said in a hurry. "That's the last thing we mean.”

  Flavia kept quiet. The two men shuffled some more in their seats and looked at each other. They'd thought of that one. It was obvious that their approach had been worked out in advance.

  "We understand that it is difficult for anybody to return to a subordinate position once they have run an organization. And we quite understand that you may consider your position untenable from now on.”

  It was worse than Flavia had ever imagined, even in her most paranoid nightmare.

  She was now paying full attention. "You want me to go away?”

  "You may consider it in your own best interest and also in the best interest of the department," the man said. "I must add that to avoid any discontinuity during the transfer period, we would like the matter resolved now.”

  "You want me to go now?" She was even more incredulous.

  There was a long pause and more fiddling on the desktop. "We can offer you two choices. The first is a transfer to a senior administrative post ...”

  "In?”

  "Ah, in Bari.”

  "Bari?" Flavia said in disgust.

  "Of course, should this not be acceptable, you might consider taking advantage of a generous severance package ...”

  "This is ridiculous," Flavia interrupted. "I have never heard of anybody being treated in such an appalling fashion. To be passed over, I suppose, is something that happens.

  Although, to be perfectly frank, I do not know of anyone who could do the job as well as I can. But to be ejected so unceremoniously, almost as though I had been caught with my hand in the till or something like that, is outrageous.”

  "I knew this was not going to be easy or pleasant for any of us," the first civil servant replied regretfully. "All I can say is that you have our considerable sympathy.

  Nonetheless, our instructions are clear.”

  "Do I understand that I have the perfect right to accept this situation and go back to my old job as it was under General Bottando?”

  "You do. In theory.”

  "And in practice?”

  In reply she received only a look. A very informative look.

  "It is rare, I think, for people to find a new regime as comfortable as the one they were used to. The new head of department may not consider you to be so very obviously his deputy in the same way that General Bottando did. Indeed, he may well bring in his own people so that you revert to your official job as a researcher. You must consider seriously whether you would find that acceptable.”

  True enough. Flavia had got used to a great deal of unofficial authority in the past few years, as well as a considerable amount of independence. It would be very hard to lose that.

  "You do realize," Flavia said, "the level of compensation and publicity I would receive if I took this to court? Dismissing a senior civil servant, which I am whether you like it or not, merely because she is expecting a baby ...”

  This was one detail that caught them on the hop. They both looked at her as though she had announced that she was the pope's daughter. Flavia could almost hear their strategy crumbling.

  "Oh.”

  She smiled. "Against the law, you know. Even worse, it looks bad. It looks terrible.”

  "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 even if my job didn't depend on it. Then he rang off. Slammed the phone down, presumably. Except that I think it was a mobile phone. How do you slam down a mobile phone? Angrily pressing the off button isn't as expressive, really."

  "I don't know. I've never thought about it. Then what?”

  Dossoni shook his head. "Then nothing. The next I hear, he's found in his vat of plaster. I assumed it was all some sort of hoax that had failed and he'd got drunk in disappointment. I must say I was heartily relieved I'd had the common sense to have nothing to do with it.”

  Dossoni's story was not much, to be sure. Hardly worth bothering about. Deliberately or not, Dossoni had told her virtually nothing of interest. And now he was pushing her to say what she knew.

  Well, why not? She was no longer in the business of keeping other people's secrets.

  "Okay, then. This is the summary. Picture stolen. I hand over a ransom five days later and get it back ...”

  "How?”

  "Direct exchange. With a man thought at the time to be Sabbatini, wearing a silly mask.”

  "Who was not Sabbatini.”

  "So it seems.”

  "Curious," Dossoni said. "Most curious.”

  "Do you know someone called Elena Fortini?”

  Dossoni gave what seemed almost a shudder. Flavia looked at him inquiringly.

  "Do you know her?" he asked back.

  "Yes. I met her a couple of days ago.”

  "And your impressions?”

  "I quite liked her. She seemed . . . sensitive, kind.”

  Dossoni threw back his head and laughed. "No wonder so few paintings are ever recovered," he said, "if the police are so perceptive.”

  "I beg your pardon?”

  "I have heard Elena called many things, but not sensitive or kind," he went on.

  "Cruel, brutal. Not sensitive.”

  "She didn't strike me like that.”

  "She is the most violent person I have ever met," he went on. "An example. When one of her comrades was arrested on Good Friday, she suggested the appropriate response would be to bomb Saint Peter's during High Mass on Easter Sunday. Someone pointed out that hundreds of people might die, and she said, how appropriate. Christian sacrifice. The more the better. She was always into symbolic gestures. The symbol of the act. Remember that phrase? She was a great advocate of nail bombs. You know, the ones that tear off people's legs.”

  "None of this is in her file.”

  "She was wonderful at keeping in the background. And people were much too frightened of her to say anything, even when they were picked up. She was very much cleverer than anyone else. Poor old Maurizio was her puppet; she designed all his little actions for him; he was quite incapable of doing anything himself. But with her in charge everything had so many hidden messages it became surreal. She was an artist in violence. No one else could touch her. Did you ever see any of Maurizío's art, so-

  called, in the last few years?”

  "Some. In his studio.”

  "Not very good, is it?”

  "No.”

  "Confused, clumsy, incoherent. It was all he could manage, poor soul.”

  "Stealing this picture was a return to
form, then," Flavia commented. "Very straightforward, that.”

  "Yes, but what does it mean? What's the interpretation, eh? That was the trouble with him. At the crucial juncture he became incoherent, meaningless. No intellectual depth, and what there was was supplied by Elena Fortini; she was much better educated, much smarter.”

  Unlike Dossoni, Flavia did not find the atmosphere of the Olympic stadium agreeable, or conducive to thought. Instead she went for a long walk.

  Normally she did this with Argyll; they had spent years pounding the streets and hills of Rome together, amiably and in companionable harmony. Such jaunts were infinitely refreshing, but not the sort of thing that aids concentration. Argyll's boundless enthusiasm for bits of ancient Roman masonry sticking out from walls, or crumbling statues or patterns in cobblestones, was too distracting for that. He was forever shooting off with a gurgle of pleasure to look more closely at something or other, coming back when his curiosity was sated to pick up the conversation where it had been abruptly abandoned. "Oh, look, isn't that lovely," he was always saying, pointing out to Flavia something she might have passed a dozen times before without noticing.

  But this day she had no appetite for architecture or sculpture or the oddities of town planning. She paced the streets, hands in the pockets of her jacket, frown on her face, eyes down, walking quickly across the town, over the river, and up the hill called the Janiculum to the statue of Garibaldi's wife on her horse in all her grandeur. To where the body of Maria di Lanna had been found nearly two decades ago, and where Sabbatini had told the journalist he wanted to stage his coup that would shake—what, exactly? There she sat for an hour thinking about the symbolism of Sabbatini's act. The phrase so enthusiastically taken up and put into action by the likes of Sabbatini. Odd how it had such an old-fashioned sound to it now, like some dead and buried artistic fad.

  She began by trying to fit all the events into some pattern, but when that didn't work she tried it the other way around, constructing a pattern and seeing what events might fit in.