by Iain Pears
“He is not my son.”
“Who is he, then?”’
Charanis shrugged. “He was born after you and I were together. It was an accident, but in a way my own fault. Your fault. I turned a blind eye, but was not a very good father. I maintained all the properties until a few years ago, and then my patience snapped.”
“Why?”’
“He was dealing in drugs. For no reason; God knows he didn’t need money and even if he did such a thing was unconscionable. I was father enough, or stupid enough, to use my influence to have the case dropped, but I refused from then on to have anything to do with him. I am old-fashioned, perhaps; but there are some things I will not overlook. Mikis kept on pushing until he discovered what it was. He has money enough, and neither of us miss the other’s company. Since then he has become more and more evil. That is not too strong a word, believe me. He has used his money—my money, the money I made and gave to him in a fit of stupidity—to foment hatred because he sees himself as a future force in politics. And he is willing to do anything and sink to any depth to get some measure of power. I thought for a while it was just a period he would grow bored with as he’s grown bored of everything else in his life, until I began to hear of what exactly he was doing. He is doing real harm, Mary. He may have killed people. He seems to think that will show how strong he is. There is only himself; he has no sense of right or wrong at all. And I am responsible. I anyone could have made him different, I could.”
“You didn’t, even if you could have, which is doubtful. And he’s on the loose now. Why, exactly, is he doing this to me?”’
“About a year ago I had a letter from this man Burckhardt. He’s a man I know well and trust. I’ve bought many things from him in the past. He is honest and reliable. He knew that I collected icons and asked if I wanted another one. I said no; I have five hundred and won’t be able to catalogue even those by the time I die. But he said this would be the jewel of the collection. He came to see me and talk to me about it.”
“And?”’
“He said he had found the Hodigitria. You know what that is?”’
Mary shook her head.
“The holiest icon of Byzantium, and he could prove it. And he did. He showed me enough evidence to conclude that there was an reasonable chance that it was the real picture, brought by a fleeing monk after the fall of Constantinople. I told him to get it, no matter what the price.”
“Fine. But how the hell does this fit in with what’s been going on here?”’
“I initially turned him down, remember. And he touted the picture around other people. And also talked to Mikis. He didn’t know I no longer spoke to him and hoped he would persuade me to listen. When Mikis heard what it was, he decided he could make use of it himself. Turn it into a banner, a standard for his particular brew of contemptible politics. At least, I’m certain that is what happened.”
“Burckhardt was operating for you, was he? I suppose I should have guessed.”
“You should have. I gave him a draft for up to a million dollars to get the picture and told him to come back to me for more if necessary. The last I heard from him was that he had struck a deal for a quarter of that sum. Then friends tell me the Italian police are making enquiries, and that Burckhardt had been shot. So I come to find out what is going on.”
“How did you find out about me?”’
“There are ways,” he said with a wry smile. “In this case, a friend in the embassy called Fostiropoulos.”
“How did Mikis find out about me? Why didn’t he just hire some bruiser? It’s not a difficult job.”
Charanis looked up at the ceiling for a few moments, and thought. “I suspect that is his sense of revenge. It burns strongly in him.”
“What on earth for? What have I ever done to him? The last time I saw him he was only six. He could hardly remember me.”
“He seems to remember you very well. You see, he blames you for the collapse of my marriage to his mother. He has rearranged the facts so that all was a veritable garden of Eden until you appeared. Not the case, of course. Yanna’s behaviour was intolerable long before that. But we all must find reasons for things. He knew you stayed with me, and it was no secret in my family then that you supplied me with pictures. When the national museum queried the origins of one of them, he could easily have reached the right conclusion with a little work. I suspect he saw a way both of getting the icon and of visiting on your family some of the same misery you brought on his. Now tell me. Do you have the picture? If so, give it to me now, and I will sort out everything for you.”
“Thank you,” she said, meaning it. “But I don’t have it. I wish to God I did. I may have it soon.”
“Mikis mustn’t get it. It would not only be dangerous, it would be blasphemous. I will not allow it.”
“I see things differently. If I had it, I would hand it over to him now, and hang the consequences. I want Louise safe, and frankly, I wouldn’t care if the entire Balkans went up in flames as a result.”
Charanis shook his head.
“Will he harm Louise, do you think?”’ she asked, daring at last to hear the answer she most dreaded.
“That’s your granddaughter’s name? Not until he gets the icon. After that, I don’t know. It is possible. Cruelty is the one thing he is thorough about.”
Her heart was pounding now. It was her worst nightmare. A straightforward bit of force she could deal with: a contract was a contract even if terms were violent. But she was dealing with a man who was unbalanced. She saw her options shrinking, then disappearing. If she refused to give him the icon, Louise would die. If she gave it to him, she might still be killed. She had to tell him what she planned to do.
He thought a while, then sighed with bitter old age. “Then I suppose there is no choice. I think I always knew it would come to this, sooner or later.”
Flavia called a conference of spare or underemployed troops late that evening. There was a lot to do, and she realized as well that nothing could be allowed to go wrong. And there was so little time. If they lost Mary Verney; if Charanis escaped them, the number of people who would protest would be enormous. It would not look good. She realized she was already thinking like the head of the department; she didn’t want to give anyone in the ministry a reason for deciding she was too inexperienced, and shoe-horning in some outsider to take over.
She had thought about it long and hard, and come up with nothing better than the proposal she had already set in motion. A pity Bottando was not around; his advice at this stage would have been useful. He had disappeared to tramp the corridors of power, and there was no one else she could ask.
“Now,” she said to her assembled troops, “this is going to be quite difficult. The essence of the problem is to make sure that Mary Verney never gets out of our sight. She wants that icon badly, and I have told her it was in the apartment of Dan Menzies. I assume she will try to take it. Whatever you do, do not stop her. And I will repeat that as often as it takes. Let her take it. And please, please don’t let her see you.
“When she has it, let me know, and again stick to her like glue. If you don’t, if you lose her, then we will blow the whole thing. I want to see her with the icon, I want to see her hand it to Charanis, and I want to see him take it.”
“Will she give it to him directly?”’
“I doubt it. If she goes into any building and comes out, wait till she emerges. One person follow her, the other should go in and find out what she’s been doing. She’ll probably put it in a safe place for him to collect. She will assume she’s being followed, so be ready. I want to use her to lure Charanis into the open, then I want him arrested. Simple enough. But he is a dangerous man. The carabinieri will have an eight-man team of their flat-foot thugs on call in their little blue trucks waiting for the call once we know where he is. They want him more than we do, and will make the arrest. Our job is to find him. Got that?”’
They nodded. “Good. Now, Mary Verney is in her hotel r
oom. You, Giulia, will watch the lobby, and Paolo will back you up on the street outside. All of you take mobile phones and let us pray to God the things work. I’ll want you two”—she gestured at the only other two people she’d been able to rustle up-“to stay at either end of the via Barberini. If she gets out, one of you must see her. Please.”
They all nodded with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Giulia was still young enough to be eager; the rest merely saw a long boring night ahead of them.
Then Flavia walked to the via di Montoro and Menzies’s apartment, where she found the American hard at work and Argyll slumbering on the floor. It was more comfortable than the sofa.
The icon, the Hodigitria, rested on an easel angled so that it caught the light. It was a small work, as Argyll had described, so dark that she had to peer at it to make out the slightly imperious face as it gazed distantly out of the old, worm-eaten block of wood it was painted on. Even though she knew it was a fake, she was strangely impressed, and could imagine the effect of the real thing in a darkened church, in its gold and jewelled frame and surrounded by banks of candles lit by devotees.
Something about the size, she thought. Small and understated, which is always more impressive than the vast and overblown.
But represented by a copy in a state of undress, so to speak, without frame or altar or smell of incense, it scarcely looked worth the trouble it was causing. And wouldn’t have done, even if parts weren’t missing, and even if the wet paint on the rest hadn’t brilliantly reflected the evening sun.
“Oh, God,” she said. “It’ll never be ready.”
Menzies was not pleased by the remark, and scowled at her. “If I may point out, I’ve only been working on it for four hours. I’m doing bloody well, thank you. And it will be ready in time. So you do your business and leave me to mine. Look.”
He took it off the easel and turned it round delicately. “Old oak, an eighth of an inch thick. Filthy, and covered in dust. I had to cut it myself from a piece of the stalls in San Giovanni; which meant going there and finding something suitable. Only fifteenth century, but it’ll have to do. Then the cut edges had to be dirtied up and darkened, and that took a long time. Then I had to paint the thing from memory. The painting used some form of tar as a base, and it was bubbling up and showing through the paint; getting that effect—”’
“All right, all right,” she said. “I’m just worrying. Will it be done?”’
“How long do I have?”’
“Until about eight tomorrow morning, I guess.”
He grimaced, calculated, then said: “It’ll be done. Could well be my finest work. Certainly my fastest.”
“Pity no one will ever know.”
“The greatest artists were anonymous ones. No one knew who painted the original, either. Anyway, if you’ll keep quiet …”
He worked again in silence for a while, as Flavia paced around the room, peering at the panel every few minutes, until Menzies’s patience snapped.
“Look, go away. You’re not helping my concentration at all. Go and get a coffee; read a newspaper, or something. And take your friend with you. His snoring disturbs me.”
“What a nerve,” Argyll said a few minutes later. “I helped him at the monastery, wielding his saw and collecting dust from behind the organ pipes; I’ve mixed paints and pounded powders and stuck my head up the chimney to get wood soot and brewed it up in ethanol for the backing. I’ve hardly had a moment’s rest since I got there.”
He drank a coffee down in one gulp and ordered another. “Great fun, though, I must say. Being a forger must be very rewarding. How did you persuade him to be so cooperative? Are you sure it will work?”’
Flavia shrugged. Faking a painting in under twelve hours was not difficult; especially as Charanis had only a hazy idea of what it looked like, had never seen it out of its frame and because it was dirty almost beyond recognition. But it was too much to hope that he could ever fool an expert, or indeed fool anyone for very long, though she hoped that wouldn’t be necessary. A few minutes would be enough. Subtleties, like getting exactly the right style, or trying to achieve the serenity of the original, were unnecessary for Charanis. But he wasn’t the person who had to be fooled. Mary Verney would be more difficult.
And it was a pity they couldn’t have used a professional, rather than Menzies. Someone like Bruno Mascholino, for example, would have been delighted to help, in exchange for a month or two off his sentence, and would have done a much better job. But he didn’t know what to paint; only Menzies had studied the thing with any amount of care, when he was thinking about his restoration job. So, despite the disadvantages, he was the only person who could help. And even persuading him had been hard work.
“I told him I would issue a statement totally exonerating him from any involvement in this business; criticize the press for being vindictive and use all Bottando’s influence with the Beni Artistici to get him the Farnesina contract.”
“Not a bad bargain. Is he the right person for the job?”’
“He can make that ceiling look like Walt Disney for all I care at the moment. I don’t even know if he’s the right person for this job. But he is the only one. What do you think?”’
Argyll scratched his chin and pondered for a moment. “It might work,” he said cautiously. “As he says, his great advantage is the dirt. And the fact that no one involved has ever seen it out of its frame, and that Mary Verney will assume it’s just been restored by a total philistine. I’m coming to think he’s not quite such a slash and burn man as they say. He’s got a delicate touch. In fact, I’ve quite grown to like him. He’s an awkward sod, but not nearly as repellent as he seems. We had quite a nice long chat, in between the pounding and the sawing.”
“Good,” Flavia said sarcastically. “I’m glad you managed to squeeze in a bit of the old male bonding. But will he finish in time? That’s the only thing that concerns me at the moment.”
Argyll thought, then nodded. “I think so. It’s become a challenge. There might be a few rough edges, but he’ll finish. I hope.”
Mikis rang the next morning, and Mary followed instructions dutifully, and with some trepidation. The usual phone call from Louise had not come through and she was sick with worry. But she wasn’t going to let him know that. Instead, she calmly put the receiver down, walked out of her room and went to the nearest public phone.
“What about my grandchild?”’
“All in good time.”
“Now is a very good time.”
“She is perfectly safe, of course, and has been moved closer to her home. You will get a call immediately after this if everything is well. Now, do you have that icon?”’
She took a deep breath, “Yes,” she said. “That is, I will have it in an hour.”
“Where is it?”’
“That’s none of your business. Trade secrets.”
“Don’t play games with me, Mrs Verney. I want to know where it is.”
“And I am telling you that it is none of your business. I will pick it up in an hour and give it to you later today. That’s all you need to know. I’m not having you killing someone else. What did you do that for? It was stupid and unnecessary. All it did was stir the police up.”
There was a snort from the other end. “I thought he had the picture and was lying when he told me he didn’t. I wanted to teach him a lesson.”
“And I suppose you’ll finish off with me?”’
Charanis chuckled. “Oh, dear me, no. We are partners, don’t you remember? I’d never do that to a partner. Besides, who knows when you might come in useful again. A woman of your talents. And such an unlikely person as well. Who would ever suspect you?”’
“The Rome police, for one.”
“Ah, yes. So they do. What happened?”’
“They pulled me in. Quite right too. This has been such a disaster I might as well have begged them to arrest me. Fortunately, all they have is strong suspicion. But I want this over and done with before
they get anything more. So let’s get on with it. If you want the icon, you have to keep to the deal. Let Louise go.”
“I have to see it first.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“Oh, yes, it is. You will show me the picture. From a sufficient distance, if you wish.”
She thought fast. “Very well. In an hour and a half you should be by the Ponte Umberto on the Lungotevere Marzio side. By the bus stop. I will come there and show you the picture. Then you will release Louise. When I have confirmation from her mother that she is free and unharmed, I will tell you where to get it.”
There was a long pause from the other end.
“One hour, then,” he said.
Mary Verney put down the phone, her heart beating hard. Now came the difficult bit.
“There we are. What do you think? Of course, it’s a bit rough.”
Dan Menzies stood back nervously, and allowed Flavia to pick up the icon and turn it over in her hands.
“The face isn’t right,” he went on nervously, like a chef fishing for compliments on his work.
Flavia studied the face carefully.
“And some of the scratches and scraped bits aren’t perfect,” he added. Flavia switched her attention to these as well.
“But I’m quite pleased with the back. Quite pleased. Although with a bit more time …”
Flavia put it down, stood back and nodded. “I think you’ve done a great job,” she said eventually. “Better than I could have hoped for.”
“Do you? Do you really?”’ Menzies said gratefully. “Of course, it is pretty good. Not many people could have done that, not in the time. Someone like d’Onofrio, you know. He’d still be picking the wood.”
“We chose well,” Flavia said reassuringly. “I’m delighted. There is one thing, though. It still smells of paint, a bit. Is there anything you can do about that? I hope it won’t matter, but you never know. We have some latitude as Mary Verney will think you’ve been restoring it, but I reckon she will spot it if there is too much.”
“How long have we got?”’