The Immaculate Deception

by Iain Pears

  ‘Ah, now, I remember that. His name was Balesto. I remember him because I read that he died about six months ago. I’m now at the age when I find obituary columns quite fascinating.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Bulovius, of course. He’s still alive. Just.’

  ‘What about the policeman?’

  Stonehouse squinted at him, his head held to one side. ‘Policeman,’ he said. ‘Can’t say I paid too much attention to him. Let’s see now.’ He made a Herculean effort to remember the trivialities of the people he had met.

  ‘No. Can’t remember,’ he said. ‘There were two of ’em. One old, fat and stupid. Trying to ingratiate himself. Wanted to be invited for dinner, I think. The other was young, gangling and hair that was much too long. I remember wondering how he got away with it.’

  ‘And the names? I don’t suppose you remember either of them?’

  Another shake of the head. ‘No. However, I believe you will find them in my father’s papers at Buonaterra. This man kindly gave some advice about protecting the villa and wrote it all down for my father to send to the insurance company. Look in there, and you’ll probably come across them. And there’ll be the report on the theft there as well.’

  Argyll had reached a dead end, and knew it. So he turned the discussion on to Stonehouse’s father, his collection, what it was like being brought up in a Tuscan villa after the war – better than an English school, it seemed, although he sort of knew that already – all the sort of subjects Stonehouse loved talking about.

  He left an hour and two bottles later, and weaved his way back to his bed. He had rather enjoyed himself.

  The next day, Argyll went back to Rome, but not before reading the insurance file and the police report it contained. A summary only, little more than the initial deposition by Stonehouse and an account of the picture being found. He also discovered from the files that the policeman who had recovered the painting was a youthful, inexperienced, tall, gangling, long-haired Taddeo Bottando.

  9

  ‘Long-haired and gangling?’ Flavia gurgled. ‘There aren’t any photographs, are there?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. But it must have been his first brush with art, more or less.’

  ‘Heavens. I must ask him about it.’

  ‘So must I. It would fill in a few details about that picture.’

  Flavia, he noted, was a wife transformed. Enthusiastic embrace, beaming smile, everything a weary husband could want on his return home after a voyage. He was most surprised.

  ‘Action at last,’ she said. ‘It was sitting around all the time that was getting to me. And this damnable stomach of mine.’

  ‘No better?’

  ‘Not really. But not at all important. The thing is, this evening I hand over the money, and get the picture back. Then I can get to work properly.’

  ‘So? Tell me.’

  ‘Midnight. Down the Appian Way. Very dramatic. Just me, although Bottando has offered to drive. Very exciting.’

  ‘Too exciting. Don’t you think it’s a bit dangerous?’

  She shrugged. ‘Not really. Not if he wants the money. And he works alone, and has no reputation for violence.’

  ‘I thought you said he was a terrorist.’

  ‘Not a real terrorist. I mean, he uses guns that play Verdi.’

  ‘What if he has one that doesn’t play Verdi?’

  Flavia shrugged.

  ‘Flavia, I’m serious.’

  ‘So am I. I want to get this over and done with. I can’t take anyone else because they’ll figure out what’s going on and talk. I can’t delay it, even if there were any point in delaying. Don’t worry, Jonathan. Bottando will protect me. He knows what he’s doing.’

  ‘He’s sixty-five,’ Argyll pointed out. ‘And horribly overweight. Not much use, in my opinion. What would he do in case of trouble? Roll on them? Please let me come with you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Flavia …’

  ‘No. Absolutely not. If you must worry, do it here.’ She picked up her coat. ‘I won’t be long,’ she said as she opened the front door. ‘Promise.’

  ‘You see,’ she said brightly four hours later as she bounced through the door. ‘I told you.’

  Considering that they had been four of the longest hours of Argyll’s life, this was almost too much. He had not only not slept – it was now nearly two in the morning – he had paced. And groaned. And imagined all sorts of terrible things.

  ‘You could have phoned.’

  Flavia looked upset. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I should have. I forgot.’

  Then she peered at Argyll. ‘Oh, Jonathan. Have you been worrying?’ And she gave him a big, apologetic hug to make matters better.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that…’ Argyll huffed.

  ‘Don’t you want to hear what happened?’

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, determined not to give way either easily or gracefully.

  ‘It was a triumph…’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘A vast success.’

  Argyll sniffed haughtily.

  ‘And a textbook example of how to do it. Almost.’

  Argyll glared at her, then relented. ‘Oh, very well,’ he said crossly, and threw himself on the sofa. ‘Go on.’

  Flavia took off her coat and sat cosily beside him. Then stood up again and poured herself a large glass of whisky, and then went to get some water for it. She liked ice in it too, but refrained for fear of damaging Argyll’s sensibilities. It was good whisky, after all.

  ‘I picked up Bottando,’ she began eventually, ‘and off we went, and arrived about ten minutes early. The Mausoleum of Herodias, do you know it?’

  Argyll nodded.

  ‘Big, round, middle of a field. No other cars around that I could see, so he must have trekked across the fields to get there.’

  She took a sip. ‘Then we had a fight.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Me and Bottando. He pulled rank on me. And appealed to my sense of fair play.’

  ‘You’re an Italian. You don’t have a sense of fair play.’

  ‘Yes I do. Anyway, he started by saying, poor little woman, it’s much too dangerous. A bit like you. And I told him to get lost. Then he said that he was still my boss, so he was ordering me to let him do the swap, and I told him to get lost again. Then he pointed out that this was his last ever official act as a policeman that was going to be worth anything.’

  ‘Good point,’ said Argyll.

  ‘So I let him do it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And that’s it. He waddled off into the darkness with a case of money, and waddled back ten minutes later with a Claude Lorraine. Unscratched, untouched. The man had been there, hiding behind some rubble, they had a brief conversation and it was all very businesslike. No danger at all. A pleasure to do business with, in Bottando’s opinion. A man of his word, Signor Sabbatini.’

  ‘How do you know it was him?’

  Flavia shrugged. ‘I don’t. He was wearing the regulation ski mask, Bottando said. But what he could see fitted the description. Frankly, I don’t really care at the moment. We’ve got the picture back. National scandal averted.’

  ‘You are sure of that?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said with a smile at his ability to worry. ‘I’d told Macchioli in advance and we went straight to the museum. He’d been pacing up and down as much as you, I think. He was a complete wreck by the time we arrived. He examined it very carefully and was satisfied. Not a copy slipped in in the hope we wouldn’t notice or anything like that. The ultraviolet markings on the back were all still there, canvas repaired in the right places, and so on.’

  ‘So he’s happy.’

  ‘Delirious. As was the prime minister. Well, delirious is not perhaps the word. But he did say thank you. Which is something. The only blot on the horizon is that I am under official instruction to lay off Sabbatini.’

  ‘Why?’

  She shrugged. ‘Because there is nothing we can do
to him without revealing that we had that picture stolen from underneath our noses. And that, the powers that be consider, is more important than putting him behind bars.’

  ‘So he’s got away with it? Lucky fellow. Or clever.’

  ‘Isn’t he. However,’ she went on, ‘there is nothing to say I can’t make his life as miserable as possible. And if he so much as commits a parking offence, I’ll pull his head off.’

  She smiled happily at the prospect.

  ‘I suppose,’ Argyll said. ‘And my congratulations. Now for the really important business. Did you talk to Bottando?’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘That picture. The Immaculate Conception. Did you ask who gave it to him?’

  Flavia looked puzzled. ‘Oh, that,’ she said eventually. ‘Sorry. I forgot. My mind was on other things. I’ll do it next time I see him. Now, can we go to bed? I’m so tired I feel I’m about to die …’

  For the next few days, life returned almost to normal – or not, in fact, because it was so quiet and peaceful. Argyll delivered his last lecture, began his vacation and came close to beginning serious work on his putative paper. Flavia was equally underemployed as the thieves, burglars and other criminals of Italy had momentarily, it seemed, run out of inspiration and enthusiasm for their job. Apart from routine events easily handled by others, there was little to stop her from organizing her desk, flitting about the departmental corridors of power making useful contacts and doing a little quiet lobbying for more money.

  She was still not confirmed in her post, however. That was the only cloud in an otherwise delightful spring. But she managed to put it to the back of her mind, somehow. There was little she could do about it.

  And she never got around to asking Bottando about his picture, for while she sat at her desk waiting for something to happen and Argyll idled away the days, the general cleared his papers, filled out the forms and, with surprisingly little emotion or display, slipped away from the life he had led for thirty years or more. A long holiday, richly deserved, he said. Somewhere quiet.

  She was disappointed. Pleased, of course, that he had so few regrets, but slightly upset as well. Was this what happened eventually? Would she, in due course, be so fed up that she could walk away from job, friends, colleagues and life without even a moment of regret? Besides, she had always thought she had a special rapport with her old boss. Fine that he didn’t miss anyone else; but she wished he regretted parting company with her. He could have said goodbye properly, rather than just a phone call.

  It was the only moment of discomfort in an otherwise quiet interlude, enjoyable because she knew it wouldn’t last long. Sooner or later it would come to an end. And it did, sooner rather than later. A small cloud on the horizon to begin with, no bigger than a man’s hand, but the harbinger of violent storms.

  Performance artist found dead in his own exhibit. A small headline in the paper, and a report which found a place because the whole country was consumed with the same somnolence and because it allowed the journalist concerned to give free range to his slightly tasteless sense of humour.

  Maurizio Sabbatini had, it seemed, managed to drown himself in a vat of plaster he was sitting in during the creation of a work of art entitled ‘Pompeii Revisited’. Taking his cue from the casts of corpses made by archaeologists who dug up the Roman town, his show was a commentary (the programme said) on death, and the coldness of a science which converts tragedy into museum exhibits. Sabbatini plunged naked into liquid plaster and sat there in the gallery which hosted his concept. Visitors passed through to see him staring blankly into space, sleeping or singing mournful Neapolitan songs to no one in particular, and were supposed to reflect on the transience of life, the permanence of art, and the discomfort of bathtubs.

  Or not; the trouble was that the audience reaction was too undirected, according to another practitioner who quietly opined that it was Sabbatini’s great weakness – fatal weakness, as it turned out – as an artist. His performances were so vague that no one was ever sure what he was on about. So, when he mixed too much plaster into the water, sank underneath in a drunken stupor (another weakness of his) and drowned as it set hard around him, none of the small audience passing through thought it at all odd. Indeed, no one noticed he was still there for days, by which time the embarrassment in the gallery was considerable, and the mirth of the journalist all but uncontrollable. The only thing which alerted them, he reported, evidently shaking with so much merriment he could scarcely type, was the fact that Sabbatini did not replenish the trademark supply of chocolates he always left around for visitors to eat. When someone – in fact a cleaning lady – did finally notice and the authorities were called, he had to be excavated with a pneumatic drill, at which point the journalist writing the story became so incoherent with mirth that he was unable to give basic details such as when the great artist had actually died.

  Only after she had read the report twice, with some twitchings of self-righteous pleasure herself at the clear demonstration of divine vengeance, did Flavia realize that lying around somewhere might well be a great deal of money and that she’d better get a move on before someone noticed it. Not that she didn’t trust her colleagues, of course, but she didn’t want to have to give explanations if she could avoid it.

  The happy thing about corpses is that it is so much easier to search their possessions; no question of infringing their rights, or anything like that. Treading on the toes of colleagues is much trickier, the more so if you cannot explain what it is that you wish to investigate; the affair of the Claude was, after all, still under wraps. Flavia, however, was long practised in fobbing people off with vague statements about leads and general lines of inquiry, to sugaring the pill with promises of full explanations later. Nevertheless, it took a full morning to do the groundwork, and it was well past lunchtime when she decided to take Corrado the trainee with her, for educational purposes.

  ‘You remember that hypothetical case I gave you a few weeks back?’ she asked, as the car drove them across the city. ‘It wasn’t hypothetical.’

  ‘I did wonder,’ the over-sophisticated young man replied.

  ‘No. Real painting, real theft. And a real thief. We’re going to visit his apartment.’

  ‘Will he be there?’

  Flavia explained something of the circumstances. Corrado displayed a degree of restraint lacking in all others who had heard of it so far. ‘Poor man,’ he said. ‘What was the picture?’

  ‘That is the one thing which remains classified.’

  ‘That important?’

  ‘No comment. It doesn’t matter, anyway. I got it back.’

  This produced genuine admiration and surprise, which Flavia, though she tried to resist, rather enjoyed.

  ‘Now, this man. What we will be looking for is the usual sort of thing, I imagine. Notes, diaries, phone bills, anything like that. He was once upon a time involved in the hard left, so I imagine he’d be too experienced to provide us with anything, but you never know your luck. He must have been as poor as a church mouse. He seems to have lived hand-to-mouth for the past couple of decades; sitting in bathfuls of plaster can’t have been that lucrative.’

  At which comment the car drew up outside one of the most expensive apartment blocks in the Parioli district. Flavia avoided the trainee’s look of scepticism at her deductive powers.

  ‘Are you sure we’re at the right address?’ she asked the driver crossly.

  ‘Course I am,’ came the less than respectful reply. She didn’t mind; he talked like that to everyone. Always had.

  The apartment in which the mouse-like, poverty-stricken, anti-materialist former revolutionary lived was even more opulent. Extremely modern, but filled with the most expensive furniture and paintings – even what looked like a real Chagall. Closer inspection revealed wardrobes full of clothes from the most prized designers, a refrigerator stuffed with enough champagne to inebriate most of the world’s terrorists at a sitting, and floors covered with exquisite silk
Persian carpets.

  ‘More lucrative than it seems, perhaps,’ Corrado said quietly. ‘How much was the ransom?’

  ‘Who said anything about a ransom?’

  ‘Oh. Sorry … I assumed …’

  She shook her head. ‘No, you’re quite right. But he can’t have bought this with the ransom.’ She didn’t bother him with the details of how she was so sure.

  ‘Maybe he made a habit of it?’

  She stood looking at an autographed Warhol soup can, feeling bewildered, then laughed. ‘A fine example, young man,’ she said, ‘of the dangers of jumping to conclusions. Let this be a lesson to you.’

  He grinned back, acknowledging her grace in admitting having made a slight fool of herself. It was the sort of openness which had already won her a following in the department. It was hard to replace Bottando and be anything but his successor, but she was making more progress than she realized.

  ‘Right,’ she said, feeling better already. ‘Go through his drawers, find any papers, and any photographs. I’ll go and knock on a few neighbours’ doors and see if I can get a handle on this man.’

  What you need in such circumstances is someone who thoroughly disliked the man you are investigating. Faced with questions from the police about people you like, there is a natural tendency to be vague, even among the wealthy of Rome, a group which perhaps has less sense of fellowship with the rest of mankind than any other on the planet. The phrase, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t know anything about that,’ to avoid saying something impolite about a neighbour, has derailed many an otherwise promising investigation. Neighbourly tension, on the other hand, is a great loosener of tongues.

  Alas, Sabbatini was not prone to play his music loudly at two in the morning; did not trade drugs in the corridors; did not leave his rubbish out on the wrong days; did nothing, in fact, to suggest he was anything other than a quiet, respectful member of the Roman haute bourgeoisie.

  And that was exactly what he was. Flavia discovered his dark secret after five fruitless interviews, conscious all the while that nearly all the information she needed was almost certainly in the complete dossiers she had not yet been sent. Interviewee number six had a grudge of epic dimensions: the communal garage.